The past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of scholarship on perceptions of political corruption and their determinants. Yet despite recent advances in understanding these perceptions and their importance to political life, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of how the public understands political corruption. We address this gap by reconstructing the conventional conception of political corruption and by presenting a new empirical tool designed to measure the conceptualizations and conceptions of political corruption held by a given population. We present preliminary findings and explore the relevance of the new tool for elucidating the public’s understanding of political corruption.

This article examines postwar government policy in Britain, as reflected in annual budget speeches. Like previous research, it aims to content‐analyse these speeches to derive estimates of actual, as opposed to intended, government policy stances. Unlike previous research, it also aims to capture and measure the gap between intentions (as represented in electoral manifestos) and actual policy. This gap cannot be assessed from the final output of the Wordscores content analysis programme (in either the original version or the Martin‐Vanberg variation), but it can be teased out of the raw output. This teasing‐out process reveals the gap to be very small: there is no evidence that British governments either moderate or amplify their left‐right stances when in office. This new measurement of government position is then used to cast further light on policy representation in Britain. The findings show that policy positions respond significantly to changes in public opinion as well as to electoral turnover, but do not exhibit or even approach the ideological congruence anticipated by the ‘median mandate’ interpretation of representative democracy.

What does Brexit really mean? We examine what people expect from the Brexit deal, highlighting three key findings. First, while trade is the key policy priority among the British electorate, opinion is divided on whether the UK should leave the customs union. Second, the public is split on the potential trade-off between remaining in the European single market and the ability to control free movement of people across the borders. Third, Britons are opposed to sharing welfare benefits with others, but tend to support EU citizens living, working and doing business in the UK. However, they expect greater access to welfare for UK citizens in European countries compared to EU citizens in the UK.

The rise of populist radical right parties (PRRP) in Europe has led to an unprecedented number of publications focused on this phenomenon. While many of these studies analyse the causes of this rise, much less attention has been paid to its effects. Previous research has shown the success of their xenophobic arguments in conditioning the public debate. However, to what degree public opinion has normalised this discourse remains unclear. This study aims to address whether the electoral success of the PRRP leads to changes in anti-immigration attitudes across twenty-one European countries. Although the previous analysis confirms that the presence of these parties has increased significantly, examining data from European Social Survey (ESS), the results reveal two key findings: a shift towards a more favourable perception of immigration among some sectors of the population and a limited effect of the contextual factors, including the presence of the PRRP.

This article identifies previously ignored determinants of public support for the European Union's security and defence ambitions. In contrast to public opinion vis‐à‐vis the EU in general, the literature on attitudes towards a putative European army or the existing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) suggests that the explanatory power of sociodemographic and economic variables is weak, and focuses instead on national identity as the main determinant of one's support. This article explores the possible impact of strategic culture, and argues that preferences vis‐à‐vis the EU's security and defence ambitions are formed in part through pre‐existing social representations of security. To test this proposition, ‘national’ strategic cultures are disaggregated and a typology is produced that contains four strategic postures: pacifism, traditionalism, humanitarianism and globalism. Applying regression analysis on individual‐level Eurobarometer survey data, it is found that strategic postures help explain both the general level of support for CSDP and support for specific Petersberg tasks.

The war in Ukraine has exposed fundamental Russian narratives and historically based propaganda issues in Turkish internal and foreign policy. Besides, Turkey's own foreign policy visions and goals of its Russian propaganda has also contributed to the anti-Ukrainian and anti-American discourse. This research was conducted to explore how Russia has used its propaganda in media and information campaigns in the Turkish Republic to influence public opinion and pursue its foreign policy goals related to the war in Ukraine. This article argues that widespread pro-Kremlin messages in the Turkish political environment and media are deeply connected to historical, ideological, and media discourses. The arguments are presented in specific subchapters: historical background of the bilateral relations of Russia and Turkey, the domestic political and economic context, ideological views of political forces, media and disinformation.

In the face of the discourse about the democratic deficit and declining public support for the European Union (EU), institutionalist scholars have examined the roles of institutions in EU decision making and in particular the implications of the empowered European Parliament. Almost in isolation from this literature, prior research on public attitudes toward the EU has largely adopted utilitarian, identity and informational accounts that focus on individual‐level attributes. By combining the insights from the institutional and behavioural literature, this article reports on a novel cross‐national conjoint experiment designed to investigate multidimensionality of public attitudes by taking into account the specific roles of institutions and distinct stages in EU decision making. Analysing data from a large‐scale experimental survey in 13 EU member states, the findings demonstrate how and to what extent the institutional design of EU decision making shapes public support. In particular, the study finds a general pattern of public consensus about preferred institutional reform regarding powers of proposal, adoption and voting among European citizens in different countries, but notable dissent about sanctioning powers. The results show that utilitarian and partisan considerations matter primarily for the sanctioning dimension in which many respondents in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Sweden prefer national courts to the Court of Justice of the EU.

Despite much research on age and attitudes, it remains unclear whether age reflects accumulated life experience or conditions prevailing during an individual's formative years – that is, a life‐cycle effect or a cohort effect. In respect to attitudes towards the European Union (EU), the issue is particularly important. Although many analyses indicate a correlation between age and support, the relationship has not been adequately theorised and extant analyses have generated contradictory results. In this article, theoretical expectations for both life‐cycle and cohort effects on support for the EU are developed and tested using a cross random effects model. This not only identifies the nature of an age‐support relationship, but also highlights substantial generational differences in attitudes towards European integration and explains the inconsistencies in extant empirical analyses.

A strong link between citizen preferences and public policy is one of the key goals and criteria of democratic governance. Yet, our knowledge about the extent to which public policies on specific issues are in line with citizen preferences in Europe is limited. This article reports on the first study of the link between public opinion and public policy that covers a large and diverse sample of concrete public policy issues in 31 European democracies. The findings demonstrate a strong positive relationship and a substantial degree of congruence between public opinion and the state of public policy. Also examined is whether political institutions, including electoral systems and the horizontal and vertical division of powers, influence the opinion‐policy link. The evidence for such effects is very limited, which suggests that the same institutions might affect policy representation in countervailing ways through different mechanisms.

While Carmines and Stimson's work on issue evolutions has prompted research showing the dynamics and effects of new party alignments on abortion, religion, gender and cultural issues, this research has all centred on the United States. This article examines issue evolution in Britain. Using evidence on the timing of changes in elite positions from Comparative Manifestos Group data, and survey data on public attitudes to the European Union with a longer historical sweep than heretofore, the article finds strong evidence that the European issue has followed an issue evolution path, though with distinct dynamics contingent on the pace of elite re‐positioning. Thus, this article extends the theory of issue evolution to a parliamentary political system and demonstrates the responsiveness of the public to elite cues, while also providing additional insights from a unique case in which elites have staked out distinct positions not once, but twice.

New divisions have emerged within the European Union over the handling of the recent migration crisis. While both frontline and favoured destination countries are called upon to deal with the number of migrants looking for international protection and better living conditions, no consensus has been reached yet on the quota‐based mechanisms for the relocation of refugees and financial help to exposed countries proposed by the EU. Such mechanisms pose a trade‐off for member states: the EU's response to the crisis offers help to countries under pressure, but it inevitably requires burden‐sharing among all EU members and a limitation of their national sovereignty. Within this scenario, the article compares how public opinion and political elites in ten different EU countries view a common EU migration policy grounded on solidarity and burden‐sharing. By tracing both within‐ and cross‐national patterns of convergence (and divergence), the article shows that contextual factors influence policy preferences, with support for solidarity measures being stronger in countries with higher shares of illegal migrants and asylum seekers. While individuals’ predispositions, identity and ideological orientations account for both masses’ and elites’ attitudes towards burden‐sharing measures, subjective evaluations and beliefs concerning the severity of the crisis provide additional and alternative explanations when looking at the public's preferences. In particular, it is found that concern about the flow of migrants to Europe consolidates the impact of contextual factors, whereas the overestimation of the immigrant population fosters hostility against solidarity measures, with both effects more pronounced as the country's exposure to the crisis increases. In the light of these results, the main implication of this study is that EU institutions have to primarily address entrenched beliefs and misperceptions about immigrants to enhance public support for a joint approach to migration.

The EJPR article ‘A rising generation of Europeans?’ provided systematic evidence for the existence of generational differences in attitudes towards the European Union (EU). In this research note, it is argued that identifying generational differences in specifically affective orientations is the crucial issue for the future of the EU. Drawing on and extending the earlier work expectations in respect to generational and life‐cycle differences in affective orientations are developed and tested, highlighting the existence of the former, their consistency across a range of indicators, and the absence of the latter. The results are an important counterpoint to the growth in ambivalence in attitudes towards the EU.

Different publics have been asked for their opinion about corruption through a variety of survey questions over the past five decades. Notwithstanding their relevance, these items have been developed with different (research) objectives in mind. This article introduces and discusses a new database on corruption surveys. The DATACORR database consists of national and cross-national survey items on perceptions, attitudes, and experiences of corruption and covers 3,050 items from 321 survey rounds, developed by 110 research projects of 83 different institutions around the world, from 1976 to 2019. Two public opinion-centred corruption research approaches have been identified: (a) one addressing conceptualisations of corruption and (b) another focusing on the evaluations individuals make of the impacts of corruption. Our study reveals that survey questions on corruption tend to be more generic and sociotropic. Although there have been attempts to move towards survey items capturing egotropic and specific aspects of corruption until the 2000s, this tendency has reversed more recently, making room for debate on how to advance knowledge in the field.

This study explores the polarised nature of climate change politics in the USA. First, it describes the opposing stances on climate change taken by Republican and Democratic leaders. It then uses survey data to show that Republican and Democratic citizens hold widely differing views on climate change and that these differences are greatest among the most educated. Partisan polarisation poses a challenge to those seeking to build support for new policy efforts on climate change.

Are political attitudes a stable feature of individuals or a rational response to changing circumstances and contexts? This question has long been a feature of political science and underpins our theories of how political attitudes are formed and what their consequences might be. In this paper, we explore this perennial question with a focus on the case of political trust, a fundamental indicator of democratic legitimacy and a long‐standing topic of debate. Theoretically, we devise a framework that highlights how different theories of political trust assume different levels of stability or volatility and the implications that this has for those theories and their normative consequences. Empirically, we study within‐individual stability of political trust using six panel studies that cover five countries between 1965 and 2020. Our results consistently point to trust being stable in the long term, with potential for short‐term volatility in response to changing political contexts, and for substantial changes between people's formative years and their adulthood. Even over a period of 19 years, most people's responses to trust questions are remarkably similar between surveys and significant life events such as unemployment and going to University do not significantly influence trust. Changes in the political environment, like incumbent government turnover, have larger effects but these appear to return to equilibrium in a few years. The exception to this general finding is individuals who are first surveyed when they are under the age of 18, who appear much more likely to change their trust levels in subsequent waves. Overall, our results complement previous research on attitude stability, indicating that trust is approximately as stable as other attitudes, such as towards immigration and redistribution. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust and attitude formation more broadly.

This article shows the outcomes of the first project in Spain aiming to measure the quality of its democracy. The research, led by the Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC), is based on a survey allowing citizens to evaluate the performance of their democracy. The analysis is based on eight dimensions of democratic quality, following the normative framework proposed by Morlino (2009): rule of law, electoral accountability, inter-institutional accountability, participation, competition, liberty, equality and sensitivity (or responsiveness).