Rune Stubager
Biographic Data
| ID | 333348 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rune Stubager |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rune |
| FAMILY NAME | Stubager |
| SIGNATURE | STUBAGER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5473-6799 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1069 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Reference groups and electoral behavior
Recent scholarship devotes considerable attention to how social identities influence vote choice. However, group sympathies or group affect constitute another, often overlooked subjective component of the relationship between social groups and vote choice. Based on reference group theory and drawing on ANES data as well as recent Danish and Austrian election surveys, we examine how voters’ sympathies with a range of groups are related to party ch…
Still Going Strong? The Social and Political Relevance of Class Identification Over Time in Four Countries
According to influential theories of modernization and individualization, social class has ceased to be relevant to citizens and their political behaviour in Western countries; class has been proclaimed ‘dead’. The argument is particularly strong at the subjective level where people are thought to no longer identify with social classes let alone relate this identification to politics. Using time-series election study data covering many decades co…
How group appeals shape candidate support
Recent research draws attention to parties’ reliance on group appeals. Such group appeals are a tool that parties and candidates use to strengthen the association between voters’ social group membership and their electoral support. However, what we know about the effects of such appeals on voters is mostly limited to class appeals. Using two survey experimental studies among British voters ( N =1,500; N =3,200), we shed light on the generalizabil…
How Are Social Groups Linked to the Vote? Social Group Perceptions and Party Choice
Interest in the influence of subjective perceptions of social groups on political behaviour is increasing. While most extant work has focused on voters’ social identities and their related, expressive considerations about the social bases of parties, this article directs attention to two other considerations that may also influence the vote: voters’ evaluations of social groups, as suggested by reference group theory, and their instrumental consi…
How do voters interpret social class appeals? Lessons from open-ended responses
Recent research has shown that parties’ group appeals, particularly working class appeals, can raise electoral support. But how do such effects come about? This article explores the mechanisms underlying group appeals by content analysing voters’ open-ended responses to working class and upper middle class appeals in a survey experiment in Denmark. The results show that voters generally connect class-based rhetoric from candidates to issues of in…
The conditional politics of class identity
The sources, meaning and political implications of class identity are conditional on national context, reflecting the relative importance of cultural (status-related) versus economic (resource-related) influences on class identification. Unlike Danes, the majority of Britons continue to identify as working class. This difference between the two societies is robust across the span of 50 years of survey data analysed. It is unrelated to national va…
Dimensions of class identification? On the roots and effects of class identity
Throughout the 20th century, objective class position was a strong predictor of both class identity, political preferences and party choice, but since the 1980s, the relationship between objective and subjective dimensions of class has supposedly vanished-according to some as the result of a fundamental blurring of class relations. However, others suggest that this result may be partly due to the use of outdated class schemes. Although still basi…
Does Class-Based Campaigning Work? How Working Class Appeals Attract and Polarize Voters
Recent elections have featured various politicians directly appealing to the working class, yet we know little about how citizens react to class appeals from candidates. We investigate this question using survey experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. We show that symbolic class rhetoric substantially influences candidate evaluations and ultimately polarizes these evaluations across class lines. We also unpack how class appeals wo…
Old wine in new bottles? Reassessing the effects of globalisation on political preferences in Western Europe
In both public and scholarly debates, globalisation has recently been accredited with a massive impact on the political preferences and electoral behaviour of Western citizens. Some go as far as to declare a new cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation, driven, for example, by individuals’ exposure to international competition and their degree of national as opposed to cosmopolitan identification. Extant tests of this argument have, h…
Reactions to Terror Attacks
What are the signature features of the reactions of mass publics to terrorist attacks? We argue that the available empirical evidence suggests a general pattern of reactions: The peaks of mass reactions to terrorist attacks are limited in size and duration and their end states marked by a return to baselines values of tolerance. We label this perturbation effects. In this article, we review the available evidence for perturbation effects, build a…
What is Issue Ownership and How Should We Measure It
The class pictures in citizens' minds
Social class has traditionally played a key role in explaining social behaviour and cognition. However, recent analyses have been dominated by the view that the relevance of class for behaviour has dwindled in advanced industrial societies. We contest this view by focusing on the subjective components of class consciousness. Using a national survey of Danish citizens, we show that individuals continue to hold meaningful conceptions of classes, to…
One size doesn't fit all
In the eye of the beholder
Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define class…
Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions
A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major…
Measuring Issue Ownership
Issue ownership, or the idea that some parties are considered by the public to be better able or more committed to dealing with specific issues, is increasingly used in studies of electoral choice. Yet, various scholars have argued that if measures of issue ownership are confounded with party choice, this raises concerns regarding their usability to predict electoral choice. This research note examines to what extent various measures of issue own…
What can a party say? How parties' communication can influence voters' issue ownership perceptions
Inequality in the ‘Conflict of Conflicts’? The Impact of Citizen Sophistication on Agenda-setting Effects
Influence upon the societal agenda is an important power resource in modern democracies. Consequently, inequalities in such influence across different segments of the public have important democratic implications. Using time-series methods on a unique Danish dataset, this article investigates the existence of inequalities in agenda power across groups with different levels of political sophistication and finds that the most sophisticated members …
Scope conditions of economic voting
On the (In)Compatibility of Attitudes Toward Peace and War
Although attitudes toward peace and war are usually treated as two opposite poles of one dimension, in this article we argue that they may represent two distinct dimensions. To investigate this idea, we developed and tested a new balanced measure, the Attitudes Toward Peace and War (APW) Scale, in three studies (N = 4,742) in the United States and Denmark. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that attitudes toward peace and war for…
What Are the Sources of Political Parties’ Issue Ownership? Testing Four Explanations at the Individual Level
The Changing Basis of Party Competition
The role of social structure as a determinant of electoral behaviour has been debated across Western countries, with one side in the debate arguing that the rise of the electoral conflict between authoritarian–libertarian values reflects the diminishing importance of socio-structural factors. In contrast, this article shows, using a unique representative sample from Denmark, how this conflict has its roots in an opposition between high- and low-e…
Reaching for profit in the welfare state
The Kramer problem
The parliamentary election in Denmark, September 2011
Deservingness versus values in public opinion on welfare
Public attitudes towards welfare policy are often explained by political values and perceptions of deservingness of welfare recipients. This article addresses how the impact of values and perceptions varies depending on the contextual information that citizens have available when forming welfare opinions. It is argued that whenever citizens face deservingness-relevant cues in public debate or the media, a psychological 'deservingness heuristic' i…
Education effects on authoritarian-libertarian values
Over the past decades an authoritarian-libertarian value dimension has become increasingly important to electoral behaviour across western countries. Previous analyses have shown that education is the most important social antecedent of individuals' positions on this value dimension; high education groups tend towards the libertarian pole and low education groups tend towards the authoritarian pole. It remains an open question, however, what aspe…
The Development of the Education Cleavage
Over recent decades scholars have documented the increasing electoral salience across Western Europe of a new post-materialist or libertarian–authoritarian dimension. The theoretical status of this new dimension and its relation to extant cleavage structures – notably the class cleavage – has, however, been debated. This paper demonstrates that the dimension reflects a new education-based cleavage that has come into existence since the mid 1980s.…
The Political Conditionality of Mass Media Influence
Claims regarding the power of the mass media in contemporary politics are much more frequent than research actually analysing the influence of mass media on politics. Building upon the notion of issue ownership, this article argues that the capacity of the mass media to influence the respective agendas of political parties is conditioned upon the interests of the political parties. Media attention to an issue generates attention from political pa…
Education‐based group identity and consciousness in the authoritarian‐libertarian value conflict
The increasing importance of New Politics or authoritarian‐libertarian values to electoral behaviour in advanced Western industrial democracies and the previously documented strong link between such values and educational attainment indicates that, contrary to the claims of some New Politics theorists, the ideological conflict is anchored in the social structure – in particular in educational groups. For this interpretation to be warranted, howev…
What Are the Sources of Political Parties’ Issue Ownership? Testing Four Explanations at the Individual Level
Freedom for All? The Strength and Limits of Political Tolerance
Most research on political tolerance relying on the ‘least-liked’ group approach has painted a bleak picture of low and feeble levels of tolerance. An alternative approach, permitting an evaluation of the breadth of tolerance, is combined with the use of survey experiments to demonstrate that tolerance varies considerably across target groups. Specifically, the formation of tolerance judgements is shown to differ depending on a group’s associatio…
The Changing Basis of Party Competition
The role of social structure as a determinant of electoral behaviour has been debated across Western countries, with one side in the debate arguing that the rise of the electoral conflict between authoritarian–libertarian values reflects the diminishing importance of socio-structural factors. In contrast, this article shows, using a unique representative sample from Denmark, how this conflict has its roots in an opposition between high- and low-e…
Does Class-Based Campaigning Work? How Working Class Appeals Attract and Polarize Voters
Recent elections have featured various politicians directly appealing to the working class, yet we know little about how citizens react to class appeals from candidates. We investigate this question using survey experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. We show that symbolic class rhetoric substantially influences candidate evaluations and ultimately polarizes these evaluations across class lines. We also unpack how class appeals wo…
What is Issue Ownership and How Should We Measure It
Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions
A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major…
Old wine in new bottles? Reassessing the effects of globalisation on political preferences in Western Europe
In both public and scholarly debates, globalisation has recently been accredited with a massive impact on the political preferences and electoral behaviour of Western citizens. Some go as far as to declare a new cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation, driven, for example, by individuals’ exposure to international competition and their degree of national as opposed to cosmopolitan identification. Extant tests of this argument have, h…
The conditional politics of class identity
The sources, meaning and political implications of class identity are conditional on national context, reflecting the relative importance of cultural (status-related) versus economic (resource-related) influences on class identification. Unlike Danes, the majority of Britons continue to identify as working class. This difference between the two societies is robust across the span of 50 years of survey data analysed. It is unrelated to national va…
The class pictures in citizens' minds
Social class has traditionally played a key role in explaining social behaviour and cognition. However, recent analyses have been dominated by the view that the relevance of class for behaviour has dwindled in advanced industrial societies. We contest this view by focusing on the subjective components of class consciousness. Using a national survey of Danish citizens, we show that individuals continue to hold meaningful conceptions of classes, to…
What can a party say? How parties' communication can influence voters' issue ownership perceptions
Reaching for profit in the welfare state
One size doesn't fit all
The Kramer problem
Reactions to Terror Attacks
What are the signature features of the reactions of mass publics to terrorist attacks? We argue that the available empirical evidence suggests a general pattern of reactions: The peaks of mass reactions to terrorist attacks are limited in size and duration and their end states marked by a return to baselines values of tolerance. We label this perturbation effects. In this article, we review the available evidence for perturbation effects, build a…
On the (In)Compatibility of Attitudes Toward Peace and War
Although attitudes toward peace and war are usually treated as two opposite poles of one dimension, in this article we argue that they may represent two distinct dimensions. To investigate this idea, we developed and tested a new balanced measure, the Attitudes Toward Peace and War (APW) Scale, in three studies (N = 4,742) in the United States and Denmark. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that attitudes toward peace and war for…
Measuring Issue Ownership
Issue ownership, or the idea that some parties are considered by the public to be better able or more committed to dealing with specific issues, is increasingly used in studies of electoral choice. Yet, various scholars have argued that if measures of issue ownership are confounded with party choice, this raises concerns regarding their usability to predict electoral choice. This research note examines to what extent various measures of issue own…
In the eye of the beholder
Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define class…
Scope conditions of economic voting
The parliamentary election in Denmark, September 2011
How do voters interpret social class appeals? Lessons from open-ended responses
Recent research has shown that parties’ group appeals, particularly working class appeals, can raise electoral support. But how do such effects come about? This article explores the mechanisms underlying group appeals by content analysing voters’ open-ended responses to working class and upper middle class appeals in a survey experiment in Denmark. The results show that voters generally connect class-based rhetoric from candidates to issues of in…
Preference-Shaping
According to Downs, parties are forced to accommodate the preferences of the voters in order to win elections. However, Dunleavy and Ward argue that it is also possible for a party to use preference-shaping strategies to bring the preferences of the voters in line with the party's position. Using structural equation modelling, preference-shaping theory is tested in relation to the effect of sales of council houses and shares in privatised compani…
Education effects on authoritarian-libertarian values
Over the past decades an authoritarian-libertarian value dimension has become increasingly important to electoral behaviour across western countries. Previous analyses have shown that education is the most important social antecedent of individuals' positions on this value dimension; high education groups tend towards the libertarian pole and low education groups tend towards the authoritarian pole. It remains an open question, however, what aspe…
Farewell to the leftist working class
Education‐based group identity and consciousness in the authoritarian‐libertarian value conflict
The increasing importance of New Politics or authoritarian‐libertarian values to electoral behaviour in advanced Western industrial democracies and the previously documented strong link between such values and educational attainment indicates that, contrary to the claims of some New Politics theorists, the ideological conflict is anchored in the social structure – in particular in educational groups. For this interpretation to be warranted, howev…
Deservingness versus values in public opinion on welfare
Public attitudes towards welfare policy are often explained by political values and perceptions of deservingness of welfare recipients. This article addresses how the impact of values and perceptions varies depending on the contextual information that citizens have available when forming welfare opinions. It is argued that whenever citizens face deservingness-relevant cues in public debate or the media, a psychological 'deservingness heuristic' i…
The Development of the Education Cleavage
Over recent decades scholars have documented the increasing electoral salience across Western Europe of a new post-materialist or libertarian–authoritarian dimension. The theoretical status of this new dimension and its relation to extant cleavage structures – notably the class cleavage – has, however, been debated. This paper demonstrates that the dimension reflects a new education-based cleavage that has come into existence since the mid 1980s.…
The Political Conditionality of Mass Media Influence
Claims regarding the power of the mass media in contemporary politics are much more frequent than research actually analysing the influence of mass media on politics. Building upon the notion of issue ownership, this article argues that the capacity of the mass media to influence the respective agendas of political parties is conditioned upon the interests of the political parties. Media attention to an issue generates attention from political pa…
Social representational correlates of attitudes toward peace and war
This research aimed at examining the possibility that certain social representations of peace and war are, more than others, (in)compatible with support for warfare. It also aimed at investigating the weight of political culture on the realization of this possibility. Using the framework of social representations theory (Moscovici, 1961=2008), this study surveyed undergraduate students from 3 universities located in 2 countries: the United States…
Freedom for All? The Strength and Limits of Political Tolerance
Most research on political tolerance relying on the ‘least-liked’ group approach has painted a bleak picture of low and feeble levels of tolerance. An alternative approach, permitting an evaluation of the breadth of tolerance, is combined with the use of survey experiments to demonstrate that tolerance varies considerably across target groups. Specifically, the formation of tolerance judgements is shown to differ depending on a group’s associatio…
The parliamentary election in Denmark, September 2011
On the (In)Compatibility of Attitudes Toward Peace and War
Although attitudes toward peace and war are usually treated as two opposite poles of one dimension, in this article we argue that they may represent two distinct dimensions. To investigate this idea, we developed and tested a new balanced measure, the Attitudes Toward Peace and War (APW) Scale, in three studies (N = 4,742) in the United States and Denmark. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that attitudes toward peace and war for…
What Are the Sources of Political Parties’ Issue Ownership? Testing Four Explanations at the Individual Level
The Changing Basis of Party Competition
The role of social structure as a determinant of electoral behaviour has been debated across Western countries, with one side in the debate arguing that the rise of the electoral conflict between authoritarian–libertarian values reflects the diminishing importance of socio-structural factors. In contrast, this article shows, using a unique representative sample from Denmark, how this conflict has its roots in an opposition between high- and low-e…
Reaching for profit in the welfare state
The Kramer problem
Scope conditions of economic voting
Inequality in the ‘Conflict of Conflicts’? The Impact of Citizen Sophistication on Agenda-setting Effects
Influence upon the societal agenda is an important power resource in modern democracies. Consequently, inequalities in such influence across different segments of the public have important democratic implications. Using time-series methods on a unique Danish dataset, this article investigates the existence of inequalities in agenda power across groups with different levels of political sophistication and finds that the most sophisticated members …
What can a party say? How parties' communication can influence voters' issue ownership perceptions
Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions
A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major…
Measuring Issue Ownership
Issue ownership, or the idea that some parties are considered by the public to be better able or more committed to dealing with specific issues, is increasingly used in studies of electoral choice. Yet, various scholars have argued that if measures of issue ownership are confounded with party choice, this raises concerns regarding their usability to predict electoral choice. This research note examines to what extent various measures of issue own…
What is Issue Ownership and How Should We Measure It
The class pictures in citizens' minds
Social class has traditionally played a key role in explaining social behaviour and cognition. However, recent analyses have been dominated by the view that the relevance of class for behaviour has dwindled in advanced industrial societies. We contest this view by focusing on the subjective components of class consciousness. Using a national survey of Danish citizens, we show that individuals continue to hold meaningful conceptions of classes, to…
One size doesn't fit all
In the eye of the beholder
Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define class…
Old wine in new bottles? Reassessing the effects of globalisation on political preferences in Western Europe
In both public and scholarly debates, globalisation has recently been accredited with a massive impact on the political preferences and electoral behaviour of Western citizens. Some go as far as to declare a new cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation, driven, for example, by individuals’ exposure to international competition and their degree of national as opposed to cosmopolitan identification. Extant tests of this argument have, h…
Political science (28 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (20 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (12 works)