The increased salience of environmental concerns, first and foremost global warming, is one of the key developments of contemporary Western European politics. Still, the effects of global warming issues on electoral outcomes, party competition and polarization remain poorly understood. Our article shows how the construction of wind turbines fuels conflict between its key proponents and opponents, Green and populist radical right parties. Contention over the issue contributes to the electoral success of both sides and therefore reinforces the new central divide between them. Drawing on a novel dataset, we investigate the impact of the construction of wind turbines on Alternative für Deutschland and Green party electoral success in Germany. We employ a two‐way fixed effects model, where the construction of wind turbines functions as the independent variable. We show that the construction of wind turbines boosts the electoral support of both their biggest supporters and their biggest opponents. Our results have important implications for understanding contemporary political conflict in Western Europe such as the electoral rise of the Greens and the populist radical right, the importance of issue salience and the polarization of party systems.

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies has presented contradicting evidence on the role of political veto institutions and parliamentary polarization on the formation of cabinet types. Institutional rules may either provide significant leeway for political parties or seriously constrain them when forming sustainable coalitions. In contrast to previous studies we argue that the effect of political institutions is conditional on the degree of polarization in parliament. We test our hypotheses using original data on 842 cabinet formations in 33 advanced democracies between 1945–2018. In line with previous research, we find that the institutional rules have a pronounced effect on the type of cabinet formed, but that institutional rules moderate the effect of party system polarization. Thus, our findings provide important new insights on cabinet formation which are particularly relevant for today's increasingly polarized parliaments.

As political polarization increases across many of the world's established democracies, many citizens are unwilling to appreciate and consider the viewpoints of those who disagree with them. Previous research shows that this lack of reflection can undermine democratic accountability. The purpose of this paper is to study whether empathy for the other can motivate people to reason reflectively about politics. Extant studies have largely studied trait‐level differences in the ability and inclination of individuals to engage in reflection. Most of these studies focus on observational moderators, which makes it difficult to make strong claims about the effects of being in a reflective state on political decision making. We extend this research by using a survey experiment with a large and heterogeneous sample of UK citizens (N = 2014) to investigate whether a simple empathy intervention can induce people to consider opposing viewpoints and incorporate those views in their opinion about a pressing political issue. We find that actively imagining the feelings and thoughts of someone one disagrees with prompts more reflection in the way that people reason about political issues as well as elicits empathic feelings of concern towards those with opposing viewpoints. We further examine whether empathy facilitates openness to attitude change in the counter‐attitudinal direction and find that exposure to an opposing perspective (without its empathy component) per se is enough to prompt attitude change. Our study paints a more nuanced picture of the relationship between empathy, reflection and policy attitudes.

Building on research on cultural threat‐induced polarization, we investigate the effect of the individual‐level salience of cultural threats on polarization between social liberals and conservatives. In a unique survey experiment conducted with 129,000 respondents nested in 208 regions in 27 European Union (EU) member states, we manipulate the presence of two cultural threats, women's rights, and refugee immigration, to test their polarizing effects on social liberals’ and social conservatives’ support for traditional values. We find that priming the threat of refugee immigration polarizes conservatives and liberals equally. Yet, introducing the salience of women's rights leads to lower preferences for traditional values, particularly among more liberal respondents. Our findings demonstrate: 1) the study of backlash should distinguish individuals by their predisposition to backlash, rather than studying the population as a whole; and 2) social conservatives’ backlash should be studied conjointly with social liberals’ counter‐reactions to backlash. Future research may investigate why different cultural threats provoke different reactions.

Why have some territories performed better than others in the fight against COVID‐19? This paper uses a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 165 European regions to explore the role of social and political divisions in the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. First, we investigate whether regions characterized by a low social and political trust witnessed a higher excess mortality. Second, we argue that it is not only levels, but also polarization in trust among citizens – in particular, between government supporters and non‐supporters – that matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro‐healthy behaviour. Third, we explore the partisan make‐up of regional parliaments and the relationship between political division – or what we refer to as ‘uncooperative politics’. We hypothesize that the ideological positioning – in particular those that lean more populist – and ideological polarization among political parties is also linked to higher mortality. Accounting for a host of potential confounders, we find robust support that regions with lower levels of both social and political trust are associated with higher excess mortality, along with citizen polarization in institutional trust in some models. On the ideological make‐up of regional parliaments, we find that, ceteris paribus, those that lean more ‘tan’ on the ‘GAL‐TAN’ spectrum yielded higher excess mortality. Moreover, although we find limited evidence of elite polarization driving excess deaths on the left‐right or GAL‐TAN spectrums, partisan differences on the attitudes towards the European Union demonstrated significantly higher deaths, which we argue proxies for (anti)populism. Overall, we find that both lower citizen‐level trust and populist elite‐level ideological characteristics of regional parliaments are associated with higher excess mortality in European regions during the first wave of the pandemic.

Can territorial disputes within countries be a basis for affective polarization? If so, how does it vary across territories? A burgeoning literature on affective polarization has largely focused on partisan divisions; we argue that contentious political issues such as those relating to territorial integrity can also be a basis for such affective polarization, where citizens feel concord with those sharing such policy preferences and animus for those who do not. We specify hypotheses about territorial‐policy‐based affective polarization and bring comparative survey evidence from three European regions with salient and contentious territorial claims: Scotland, Catalonia and Northern Ireland. While these three cases encompass different outcomes of territorial disputes, our results show strikingly similar levels of affective polarization.

The literature on democratization uses measures of either ethnic fractionalization or polarization in empirical analyses on the causes of democratic regress; some authors have argued that either of the two complicates democratization. This article detects a conceptual puzzle in this use of the two concepts: when we shift the attention from fractionalization to polarization we are not simply moving along a continuum but rather making an epistemic leap from facts to normative problems. But to treat the relation between a descriptive account of a state of affairs and a normative status as a continuum is a fallacy that remains unaddressed in this literature. This article exposes the limits of analyses that remove normative considerations from the big picture of dynamics of democratization and that narrow their focus to case histories of democratic development. It pleas for a return to normative insight and interdisciplinary dialogue.

This study investigates the extent to which newspapers are polarized in representing civil society organizations in Turkey. In examining the news in 15 printed newspapers and 2 online newspapers in 2017, we found that (1) 1499 associations and 499 foundations were mentioned but not equally distributed across the newspapers, (2) Turkish newspapers’ coverage of associations/foundations was affected by the type of association/foundation (religious/conservative vs. secular) and newspaper (pro-government vs. anti-government), (3) when news about an association/foundation appeared in pro-government newspapers, it did not appear in anti-government newspapers, and vice versa, and (4) secular associations/foundations were covered more often by anti-government newspapers than by pro-government newspapers. We therefore argue that in countries such as Turkey, where civil society organizations have historically been closely allied with state or political ideologies, newspapers’ political stances affect the media coverage of civil society organizations.

This article introduces the Special Issue examining the growing dissensus over liberal democracy in the EU. While the early twenty-first century appeared to herald democratic triumph following the Cold War and the democratization waves of the 1980s and 1990s, recent decades have witnessed an increasing contestation of liberal democracy. The Special Issue explores this phenomenon and aims to understand the nature of the current dissensus over liberal democracy, the roles of different actors, and its implications for EU policies and instruments. Dissensus is defined as a conflict between different types of actors, either about the fundamental principles of liberal democracy and rights or their implementation through specific policies, or both. This article explains the puzzle and situates the concept of dissensus in the literature. It then discusses how dissensus can be studied as the dependent and independent variable and provides an overview of how the contributions in this issue address these questions. The Special Issue examines how this dissensus shapes both policies and polity in the EU context, particularly as it coincides with the growing success of radical and populist parties at the national level and increasing centralization of powers among executives at the EU level.

The relationship between party system fragmentation and voter turnout is a long-standing phenomenon, the form of which has not yet been precisely defined. Using data from the Round 10 of European Social Survey (2020–2022), this article attempts to investigate the relationship across European democracies. Consistently with previous research, association between party system fragmentation as well as increase in number of parties between elections and turnout seems to be negative but rather weak. However, as could be expected based on a rational choice theory and cognitive overload, the effect depends on several individual and context level characteristics. The results suggest that negative effect of fragmentation may be attenuated by a high degree of partisanship. On the other hand, it may be strengthened in the context of an unanchored party system, as demonstrated in the case of Eastern and Central Europe compared to Western Europe, or by lower levels of political polarization.

Jean Blondel made many lasting contributions toward comparative politics, not least in his classification of party systems in Western democracies. Yet during the 5 decades since Blondel’s original contribution, party competition has been transformed by multiple developments, including changes in the grassroots electorate, as intermediary organizations connecting citizens and the state, and at the apex in legislatures and government. Does Blondel’s typology of party systems remain relevant today—or does it require substantial revision? And, does party system fragmentation predict ideological polarization? Part I sets out the theoretical framework. Part II compares trends from 1960 to 2020 in party system fragmentation in a wide range of democracies, measured by the effective number of parties in the electorate and in parliament. Not surprisingly, the effective number of electoral parties (ENEP) has generally grown in each country across Western democracies. This does not imply, however, that party systems are necessarily more polarized ideologically. Part III examines polarization in party systems across Western democracies, measured by standard deviations around the mean of several ideological values and issue positions in each country. The findings suggest that party system fractionalization and polarization should be treated as two distinct and unrelated dimensions of party competition. The conclusion reflects on the broader implications of the findings for understanding party polarization and threats of backsliding in democratic states.

The democratic backsliding literature sees reactionary shifts among the electorates of mature democracies as a reason for the rise of right-wing populism (RWP)—shifts that supposedly fuel citizens’ distrust in democratic institutions and their readiness to support RWP in its efforts to cut back on democracy’s liberal principles. However, the assumptions underlying this democracy falling narrative are more often stated than tested. Filling this void, we analyze data from the European Values Study/World Values Surveys in a cross-national longitudinal design amended by multilevel evidence, covering all EU countries surveyed at two distant timepoints over the past twenty to twenty-five years. We test whether reactionary shifts among socio-economically vulnerable electoral segments increased polarization over four ideological cleavages: right-vs-left on economic issues, nativism-vs-cosmopolitanism on immigration issues, patriarchy-vs-emancipation on sexuality issues, and economy-vs-environment on sustainability issues. Specifically, we examine whether those population segments at the reactionary end of these cleavages lost trust in democracies’ political institutions and their liberal principles in ways that increase voters’ readiness to support RWP parties. Our results provide no confirmation that polarizing shifts in the population account for RWP’s electoral rise. We conclude that the problems explaining RWP success do not originate in reactionary public opinion shifts. Instead, we propose further research into potential representation gaps with respect to nonvoter camps that grew larger during the pre-RWP era and are now mobilized by RWP parties—a game change presumably triggered by the rise of social media.

In multiparty systems, parties signal conflict through communication, yet standard approaches to measuring partisan conflict in communication consider only the verbal dimension. We expand the study of partisan conflict to the nonverbal dimension by developing a measure of conflict signaling based on variation in a speaker’s expressed emotional arousal, as indicated by changes in vocal pitch. We demonstrate our approach using comprehensive audio data from parliamentary debates in Denmark spanning more than two decades. We find that arousal reflects prevailing patterns of partisan polarization and predicts subsequent legislative behavior. Moreover, we show that consistent with a strategic model of behavior, arousal tracks the electoral and policy incentives faced by legislators. All results persist when we account for the verbal content of speech. By documenting a novel dimension of elite communication of partisan conflict and providing evidence for the strategic use of nonverbal signals, our findings deepen our understanding of the nature of elite partisan communication.

The Dogmatism Paradox begins with the claim that I know some proposition p and uses apparently good reasoning to draw a seemingly irrational dogmatic conclusion: that I should therefore dismiss any new evidence against p. A standard solution to this paradox is to note that when I acquire new evidence against p, that evidence defeats my justification for believing p. As a result, I no longer know that p, and so the reasoning used to generate the paradox begins with a false premise.

By appealing to recent work in social epistemology by Endre Begby and C. Thi Nguyen, I develop a new, stronger version of the Dogmatism Paradox that is immune to this standard solution. This version of the Dogmatism Paradox has significant consequences for contemporary polarized political disagreements, in which subjects on both sides of the disagreement have reason to distrust new evidence against their beliefs. So, unless the paradox can be solved, many political disagreements in sufficiently polarized communities will turn out to be rationally intractable in the sense that agreement can only be reached by one side irrationally revising their beliefs.

Political polarization is a group phenomenon in which opposing factions, often of unequal size, exhibit asymmetrical influence and behavioral patterns. Within these groups, elites and masses operate under different motivations and levels of influence, challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet, existing methods for measuring polarization in social networks typically reduce it to a single value, assuming homogeneity in polarization across the entire system. While such approaches confirm the rise of political polarization in many social contexts, they overlook structural complexities that could explain its underlying mechanisms. We propose a method that decomposes existing polarization and alignment measures into distinct components. These components separately capture polarization processes involving elites and masses from opposing groups. Applying this method to Twitter discussions surrounding the 2019 and 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections, we find that (1) opposing groups rarely have a balanced contribution to observed polarization, and (2) while elites strongly contribute to structural polarization and consistently display greater alignment across various topics, the masses, too, have recently experienced a surge in alignment. Our method provides an improved analytical lens through which to view polarization, explicitly recognizing the complexity of and need to account for elite-mass dynamics in polarized environments.

How do voters react to new political actors? Recent research suggests that radical right party success can provoke electoral backlash. We argue that such backlash is not exclusive to the radical right but can emerge whenever new political actors disrupt the status quo. With very distinct policy positions and behaviour, Green parties were early disruptors of post-war party systems in Europe. Using first-difference and difference-in-differences designs with voting records from Germany, we show that Green party success provoked a conservative backlash. After the Greens entered state parliaments, the Christian Democrats gained support. Using additional evidence from election surveys, we find that Green party success reinforces feelings of animosity among conservatives, mainly driven by disapproval of the Greens’ behaviour. These results highlight a broader pattern of backlash against new disruptive political actors. Our findings are especially relevant as polarization and party system fragmentation intensify across many established democracies.

The vast presence of populism in contemporary political discourse has introduced a narrative steeped in nostalgia, evoking images of a revered national past and delineating a stark division between the ‘authentic us’ and the ‘alien them’. While these messages resonate with a substantial portion of citizens, they concurrently foster identity-driven animosity and derogation. In a pre-registered experiment in the Netherlands (with data collected between January and March 2023), we distinguish the influence of nostalgic narratives and scapegoating on societal sentiments, revealing their pivotal role in exacerbating current levels of polarization. Our findings underscore the potential of nostalgic narratives to shape affective sentiments towards ideological and social in-groups, while also influencing sentiments towards out-groups. Messages featuring scapegoats were found to intensify positive sentiment towards in-groups, while simultaneously diminishing positive sentiment towards out-groups. This research underscores a crucial mechanism underpinning the ebb and flow of identity-based sentiments. The results indicate that nostalgic discourse, particularly when intertwined with scapegoating, can serve as a catalyst for the intensification of in-group affinity and the exacerbation of out-group aversion. In essence, our study underscores the far-reaching implications of nostalgic narratives in perpetuating societal animosity and polarization and sheds light on a critical facet of contemporary political discourse.