Robert A Huber
Biographic Data
| ID | 1616352 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert A Huber |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert A |
| FAMILY NAME | Huber |
| SIGNATURE | HUBER R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Salzburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6536-9392 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 552 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Business versus citizens: Legislators’ responsiveness in trade policy
Legislators may consider the preferences of both business actors and citizens when making trade policy decisions. But when business and citizen preferences diverge, what makes legislators more responsive to one side or the other? We argue that when levels of political engagement are kept constant, legislators are more responsive to citizens than business. This effect should be particularly large for left-leaning legislators and legislators who co…
Compensating the losers: The (limited) elite–public gap in trade politics
Compensatory policies for the losers of trade are a key feature of the liberal economic order established after the Second World War. Legislators have a variety of policy options to choose. But do political elites and the public have the same attitudes toward compensatory policies? We expect an elite–public gap with the public relatively less supportive of spending policies and more supportive of tax cuts and trade restrictions than political eli…
Globalization in Latin America: The Law, Politics and Economics of Preferential Trade Agreements
The approach of Latin American countries to preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is a fascinating topic. There is a rich history of policymakers using PTAs to pursue different economic and political models of integration. What really stands out is the diversity of approaches and attitudes to the use of PTAs. While some countries have been rule-makers and have made innovative attempts to introduce new issues, others have been reluctant to use PTAs…
Left–right political orientation fails to explain environmental attitudes of Europeans outside Western Europe: Exploring the Moderating Role of Party Positions and Issue Salience
While conventional wisdom holds that right-wing individuals tend to present more negative attitudes toward environmental protection, McCright and colleagues find no clear relationship between political ideology and environmental attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe. The reason for this finding remains speculative. Our study expands on this phenomenon by exploring how party competition and, thereby, parties’ focus on a specific issue moderate t…
How populist citizens see the people and their place in representative democracy
Dimensions of Participation and Populism in Times of Discontent: A Theory- and Data-Driven Approach
We know that populism influences turnout and vote choice. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how populism drives broader participation patterns. In this study, we argue that populist citizens are more likely to participate in politics beyond the electoral arena because they hold specific political grievances. Extant literature highlights the multidimensionality of participation but remains ambiguous about how many or what dimensions it entail…
The state of populism: Introducing the 2023 wave of the Populism and political parties expert survey
To understand the evolution of party-based populism, reliable and valid measurement is essential. This article presents the second wave of the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey, capturing populism with a continuous, five-item multidimensional latent construct in 312 political parties across 31 European countries in 2023. We validate the approach through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Item Resp…
The anatomy of populist ideology: How political parties define ‘the people’ and ‘the elite
Populist ideology centres around a supposed clash between the ‘honest and upright people’ and the ‘evil and corrupted elite’. Yet, which groups are perceived to constitute ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ likely varies across parties. This research note investigates which factors explain how inclusive or exclusive the conceptions of these two core groups are. Why do some parties define the people in cultural terms, whereas others rely on economic con…
Populism and Democracy on the Individual Level: Building on, Yet Moving Beyond the Supply Side
The connection between populism and democracy is widely researched. Most of the literature focuses on populist actors (e.g., parties, leaders, and governments) as it examines the intricacies of this relationship. Some of the resulting takeaways have become embedded firmly in scholarship and are currently considered accepted knowledge across the discipline. Scholars have only recently started focusing on the individual-level relationship between p…
Procedural inclusiveness can mitigate trust challenges in environmental policymaking
Trade Competitiveness, Constituency Interests, and Legislators' Attitudes Towards Trade Agreements
We argue that legislators’ trade attitudes reflect constituents’ economic interests. Concretely, we expect that legislators from districts that are highly competitive in international trade should be more supportive of trade agreements than legislators from noncompetitive districts. The strength of this relationship should be lower in multimember districts and for right‐wing legislators. Data based on surveys with 3,576 legislators from 16 Latin …
It's trade, stupid! How changes in trade competitiveness affect incumbents' electoral success
The consequences of economic globalization on electoral outcomes have recently become a prominent topic of research. We complement the emerging literature on this topic by studying whether changes in a subnational region's trade competitiveness affect the incumbent's vote share in that region. Using a novel dataset that relates subnational trade competitiveness to election results in 29 countries over a 20‐year period, we show that this is indeed…
Populist attitudes towards politics and science: How do they differ
While populist citizens’ opposition to political elites has been intensively researched, populist criticism of other societal institutions, such as science, has only recently attracted public and scholarly attention. Political and science populism can both be understood as a set of ideas that revolve around an antagonism between a virtuous common people and an evil elite. However, political populism focuses on political power claims and challenge…
Who wants Covid-19 vaccination to be compulsory? The impact of party cues, left-right ideology, and populism
Vaccine hesitancy is one of the major obstacles for successfully combating the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve a sufficiently high vaccination rate, calls for compulsory vaccinations have been discussed controversially. This study analyses what drives citizens’ attitudes towards compulsory vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we are interested in the impact of party- and expert cues on public attitudes. We further expect …
When Correlation Is Not Enough: Validating Populism Scores from Supervised Machine-Learning Models
Despite the ongoing success of populist parties in many parts of the world, we lack comprehensive information about parties’ level of populism over time. A recent contribution to Political Analysis by Di Cocco and Monechi (DCM) suggests that this research gap can be closed by predicting parties’ populism scores from their election manifestos using supervised machine learning. In this paper, we provide a detailed discussion of the suggested approa…
Populist parties and the two‐dimensional policy space
How are parties' ideological positions and levels of populism connected? Existing research either advocates for a U‐shaped relationship between parties' left‐right position and their degree of populism or uses specific dimensions of a two‐dimensional policy space to describe right‐wing populist parties. We provide an integrated perspective to describe parties' degree of populism by arguing that populism is higher when parties put strong emphasis …
Interest group preferences towards trade agreements: Institutional design matters
Interest groups play a key role in the political economy of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Their support for or opposition to a planned PTA tends to be crucial in determining the fate of PTAs. But which PTAs receive support from (which) interest groups? Clearly, the design of a PTA, that is, which types of provisions are (not) included in the agreement, is essential in that respect. We argue that trade and trade-related provisions, such as…
Parliament, People or Technocrats? Explaining Mass Public Preferences on Delegation of Policymaking Authority
While delegation of policymaking authority from citizens to parliament is the most defining characteristic of representative democracy, public demand for delegating such authority away from legislature/government to technocrats or back to citizens appears to have increased. Drawing on spatial models of voting, we argue that the distance between individuals’ ideal policy points, the status quo, experts’ policy positions and aggregated societal pol…
How Open Lists Undermine the Electoral Support of Cohesive Parties
How does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally d…
From populism to climate scepticism: The Role of Institutional Trust and Attitudes Towards Science
Why do populist citizens oppose climate change? Thus far, data constraints limited the ability to test different theoretical mechanisms against each other. We argue that populist attitudes affect climate attitudes through two distinct channels, namely institutional trust and attitudes towards science. The former argument focuses on political institutions as the central actors in implementing climate policy. Individuals who distrust these institut…
From populism to the “plandemic”: Why populists believe in Covid-19 conspiracies
Why are COVID-19 conspiracy theories so prevalent? Particularly, why would some citizens ignore scientific evidence and common logic but, instead, be convinced that COVID-19 was a military experiment or spread by 5G signals? Why would they believe that Bill Gates had anything to do with it? In this contribution, we argue that populism is at the centre of these beliefs, as the complex nature of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it an ideal playground fo…
What explains citizen support for transport policy? the roles of policy design, trust in government and proximity among Swiss citizens
Conventional wisdom holds that climate policies imposing substantial costs on individuals only receive little public support. Policymakers are thus reluctant to implement such policies because they fear a political backlash. However, the specific mechanisms driving low support levels are widely understudied, and experimental evidence is scarce. We argue that support for policies depends on three mechanisms: (i) the policy instrument design, (ii) …
Environmental Impacts and Public Opinion About International Trade: Experimental Evidence from Six OECD Countries
Do environmental implications of international trade influence public support for economic globalization? And under what conditions do environmental considerations shape individuals’ trade attitudes and policy preferences? In this study, we examine the microfoundations of the trade–environment nexus based on survey-embedded experiments in six OECD countries. Our empirical findings demonstrate that environmental implications have a substantial cau…
Is populism a challenge to European energy and climate policy? Empirical evidence across varieties of populism
Despite the burgeoning literature, evidence on how right-wing populists frame and act on energy and climate issues is limited and even more scarce for other types of populist parties. We address this gap by exploring the policy discourses, positions and actions of six European populist parties from Austria, Czechia, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain belonging to different types of populism. We argue that there is substantial and largely neglected v…
Love at first sight? Populist attitudes and support for direct democracy
Do citizens who strongly exhibit populist attitudes support direct democracy? Existing studies tend to claim that populists support direct democracy because of their stealth-democratic orientation or argue that stealth democrats want direct democracy due to the populist nature of stealth-democratic attitudes. Yet, albeit both populists and stealth democrats reject elite rule, they prefer direct democracy for different reasons. Populists support d…
Love at first sight? Populist attitudes and support for direct democracy
Do citizens who strongly exhibit populist attitudes support direct democracy? Existing studies tend to claim that populists support direct democracy because of their stealth-democratic orientation or argue that stealth democrats want direct democracy due to the populist nature of stealth-democratic attitudes. Yet, albeit both populists and stealth democrats reject elite rule, they prefer direct democracy for different reasons. Populists support d…
On the Distinct Effects of Left-Wing and Right-Wing Populism on Democratic Quality
This study examines the differences and commonalities of how populist parties of the left and right relate to democracy. The focus is narrowed to the relationship between these parties and two aspects of democratic quality, minority rights and mutual constraints. Our argument is twofold: first, we contend that populist parties can exert distinct influences on minority rights, depending on whether they are left-wing or right-wing populist parties.…
Mind the Gap! Populism, Participation and Representation in Europe
This article assesses the influence of populist parties on two central aspects of democracy – participation and representation. In line with traditional theories on populism and democracy, we argue that populist parties have a positive effect on electoral turnout and the equality of participation. This effect, however, is moderated by the party's role in government or opposition as well as their host‐ideology, i.e. left, centre or right. We argue…
The role of populist attitudes in explaining climate change skepticism and support for environmental protection
Conventional wisdom holds that partisanship and political ideology, writ large, are some of the most powerful explanations of attitudes towards climate change and environmental politics. While compelling, most studies focus on a narrow definition of political ideology in the US. This study adds to the literature by assessing the relationship between populism, climate skepticism, and support for environmental protection. Populism offers an orthogo…
Friend or Foe? Testing the Influence of Populism on Democratic Quality in Latin America
This article examines the influence of populism on democratic quality in Latin America. It draws on findings of qualitative work on this question as well as a theoretical framework by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser to test whether the assumptions and results of both are applicable in a comparative study. It is expected that populist actors have a negative impact on democratic quality when they are in government, but that they positivel…
Is populism a challenge to European energy and climate policy? Empirical evidence across varieties of populism
Despite the burgeoning literature, evidence on how right-wing populists frame and act on energy and climate issues is limited and even more scarce for other types of populist parties. We address this gap by exploring the policy discourses, positions and actions of six European populist parties from Austria, Czechia, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain belonging to different types of populism. We argue that there is substantial and largely neglected v…
From populism to climate scepticism: The Role of Institutional Trust and Attitudes Towards Science
Why do populist citizens oppose climate change? Thus far, data constraints limited the ability to test different theoretical mechanisms against each other. We argue that populist attitudes affect climate attitudes through two distinct channels, namely institutional trust and attitudes towards science. The former argument focuses on political institutions as the central actors in implementing climate policy. Individuals who distrust these institut…
Public support for environmental policy depends on beliefs concerning effectiveness, intrusiveness, and fairness
In industrialised countries, emissions from fossil-fuelled vehicles show little sign of abatement, with citizens’ opposition to policy interventions arguably the key reason. To better understand the sources of public opinion towards particular types of policy instruments designed to reduce vehicle emissions, we focus on the perceived consequences of such instruments, notably the extent to which they are regarded as effective, fair, and unintrusiv…
Parliament, People or Technocrats? Explaining Mass Public Preferences on Delegation of Policymaking Authority
While delegation of policymaking authority from citizens to parliament is the most defining characteristic of representative democracy, public demand for delegating such authority away from legislature/government to technocrats or back to citizens appears to have increased. Drawing on spatial models of voting, we argue that the distance between individuals’ ideal policy points, the status quo, experts’ policy positions and aggregated societal pol…
In‐group solidarity or out‐group hostility in response to terrorism in France? Evidence from a regression discontinuity design
Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism has a wide‐ranging impact on a polity. At the same time, a complementary, yet less extensive body of research discusses the impact of terrorism on the crux of representative democracy, namely its citizens. In contribution to that literature, and to further explore how external shocks affect public opinions, we propose a two‐dimensional analytical framework to examine the effects of the November 2015 terror…
Can policy-packaging increase public support for costly policies? Insights from a choice experiment on policies against vehicle emissions
Public support is usually a precondition for the adoption and successful implementation of costly policies. We argue that such support is easier to achieve with policy-packages that incorporate primary and ancillary measures. We specifically distinguish command-and-control and market-based measures as primary measures and argue that the former will usually garner more public support than the latter given the low-visibility tendency of costs assoc…
Who wants Covid-19 vaccination to be compulsory? The impact of party cues, left-right ideology, and populism
Vaccine hesitancy is one of the major obstacles for successfully combating the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve a sufficiently high vaccination rate, calls for compulsory vaccinations have been discussed controversially. This study analyses what drives citizens’ attitudes towards compulsory vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we are interested in the impact of party- and expert cues on public attitudes. We further expect …
What explains citizen support for transport policy? the roles of policy design, trust in government and proximity among Swiss citizens
Conventional wisdom holds that climate policies imposing substantial costs on individuals only receive little public support. Policymakers are thus reluctant to implement such policies because they fear a political backlash. However, the specific mechanisms driving low support levels are widely understudied, and experimental evidence is scarce. We argue that support for policies depends on three mechanisms: (i) the policy instrument design, (ii) …
Can social norm interventions promote voluntary pro environmental action
Populist parties and the two‐dimensional policy space
How are parties' ideological positions and levels of populism connected? Existing research either advocates for a U‐shaped relationship between parties' left‐right position and their degree of populism or uses specific dimensions of a two‐dimensional policy space to describe right‐wing populist parties. We provide an integrated perspective to describe parties' degree of populism by arguing that populism is higher when parties put strong emphasis …
When Correlation Is Not Enough: Validating Populism Scores from Supervised Machine-Learning Models
Despite the ongoing success of populist parties in many parts of the world, we lack comprehensive information about parties’ level of populism over time. A recent contribution to Political Analysis by Di Cocco and Monechi (DCM) suggests that this research gap can be closed by predicting parties’ populism scores from their election manifestos using supervised machine learning. In this paper, we provide a detailed discussion of the suggested approa…
How Open Lists Undermine the Electoral Support of Cohesive Parties
How does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally d…
Trade Competitiveness, Constituency Interests, and Legislators' Attitudes Towards Trade Agreements
We argue that legislators’ trade attitudes reflect constituents’ economic interests. Concretely, we expect that legislators from districts that are highly competitive in international trade should be more supportive of trade agreements than legislators from noncompetitive districts. The strength of this relationship should be lower in multimember districts and for right‐wing legislators. Data based on surveys with 3,576 legislators from 16 Latin …
Populist attitudes towards politics and science: How do they differ
While populist citizens’ opposition to political elites has been intensively researched, populist criticism of other societal institutions, such as science, has only recently attracted public and scholarly attention. Political and science populism can both be understood as a set of ideas that revolve around an antagonism between a virtuous common people and an evil elite. However, political populism focuses on political power claims and challenge…
Dimensions of Participation and Populism in Times of Discontent: A Theory- and Data-Driven Approach
We know that populism influences turnout and vote choice. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how populism drives broader participation patterns. In this study, we argue that populist citizens are more likely to participate in politics beyond the electoral arena because they hold specific political grievances. Extant literature highlights the multidimensionality of participation but remains ambiguous about how many or what dimensions it entail…
Environmental Impacts and Public Opinion About International Trade: Experimental Evidence from Six OECD Countries
Do environmental implications of international trade influence public support for economic globalization? And under what conditions do environmental considerations shape individuals’ trade attitudes and policy preferences? In this study, we examine the microfoundations of the trade–environment nexus based on survey-embedded experiments in six OECD countries. Our empirical findings demonstrate that environmental implications have a substantial cau…
The anatomy of populist ideology: How political parties define ‘the people’ and ‘the elite
Populist ideology centres around a supposed clash between the ‘honest and upright people’ and the ‘evil and corrupted elite’. Yet, which groups are perceived to constitute ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ likely varies across parties. This research note investigates which factors explain how inclusive or exclusive the conceptions of these two core groups are. Why do some parties define the people in cultural terms, whereas others rely on economic con…
Populism and Democracy on the Individual Level: Building on, Yet Moving Beyond the Supply Side
The connection between populism and democracy is widely researched. Most of the literature focuses on populist actors (e.g., parties, leaders, and governments) as it examines the intricacies of this relationship. Some of the resulting takeaways have become embedded firmly in scholarship and are currently considered accepted knowledge across the discipline. Scholars have only recently started focusing on the individual-level relationship between p…
It's trade, stupid! How changes in trade competitiveness affect incumbents' electoral success
The consequences of economic globalization on electoral outcomes have recently become a prominent topic of research. We complement the emerging literature on this topic by studying whether changes in a subnational region's trade competitiveness affect the incumbent's vote share in that region. Using a novel dataset that relates subnational trade competitiveness to election results in 29 countries over a 20‐year period, we show that this is indeed…
Interest group preferences towards trade agreements: Institutional design matters
Interest groups play a key role in the political economy of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Their support for or opposition to a planned PTA tends to be crucial in determining the fate of PTAs. But which PTAs receive support from (which) interest groups? Clearly, the design of a PTA, that is, which types of provisions are (not) included in the agreement, is essential in that respect. We argue that trade and trade-related provisions, such as…
As Moscow Sees Us: American Politics and Society in the Soviet Mindset
WTO agreement on agriculture: Potential consequences for agricultural production and land- use patterns in the Swiss lowlands
Geografisk Tidsskrift—Danish Journal of Geography 109(2):131–145, 2009 A strong link exists between agricultural production and landscape. Globalisation (more open agricultural markets) will change agricultural production and thus landscape will change as well. In this paper, we address the following questions: (a) what economic effects can be expected with respect to agricultural production structures in a high cost production region such as the…
A drunken guest in Europe: The influence of populist radical right parties on democratic quality
Friend or Foe? Testing the Influence of Populism on Democratic Quality in Latin America
This article examines the influence of populism on democratic quality in Latin America. It draws on findings of qualitative work on this question as well as a theoretical framework by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser to test whether the assumptions and results of both are applicable in a comparative study. It is expected that populist actors have a negative impact on democratic quality when they are in government, but that they positivel…
On the Distinct Effects of Left-Wing and Right-Wing Populism on Democratic Quality
This study examines the differences and commonalities of how populist parties of the left and right relate to democracy. The focus is narrowed to the relationship between these parties and two aspects of democratic quality, minority rights and mutual constraints. Our argument is twofold: first, we contend that populist parties can exert distinct influences on minority rights, depending on whether they are left-wing or right-wing populist parties.…
Mind the Gap! Populism, Participation and Representation in Europe
This article assesses the influence of populist parties on two central aspects of democracy – participation and representation. In line with traditional theories on populism and democracy, we argue that populist parties have a positive effect on electoral turnout and the equality of participation. This effect, however, is moderated by the party's role in government or opposition as well as their host‐ideology, i.e. left, centre or right. We argue…
Can social norm interventions promote voluntary pro environmental action
In‐group solidarity or out‐group hostility in response to terrorism in France? Evidence from a regression discontinuity design
Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism has a wide‐ranging impact on a polity. At the same time, a complementary, yet less extensive body of research discusses the impact of terrorism on the crux of representative democracy, namely its citizens. In contribution to that literature, and to further explore how external shocks affect public opinions, we propose a two‐dimensional analytical framework to examine the effects of the November 2015 terror…
Can policy-packaging increase public support for costly policies? Insights from a choice experiment on policies against vehicle emissions
Public support is usually a precondition for the adoption and successful implementation of costly policies. We argue that such support is easier to achieve with policy-packages that incorporate primary and ancillary measures. We specifically distinguish command-and-control and market-based measures as primary measures and argue that the former will usually garner more public support than the latter given the low-visibility tendency of costs assoc…
The role of populist attitudes in explaining climate change skepticism and support for environmental protection
Conventional wisdom holds that partisanship and political ideology, writ large, are some of the most powerful explanations of attitudes towards climate change and environmental politics. While compelling, most studies focus on a narrow definition of political ideology in the US. This study adds to the literature by assessing the relationship between populism, climate skepticism, and support for environmental protection. Populism offers an orthogo…
Public support for environmental policy depends on beliefs concerning effectiveness, intrusiveness, and fairness
In industrialised countries, emissions from fossil-fuelled vehicles show little sign of abatement, with citizens’ opposition to policy interventions arguably the key reason. To better understand the sources of public opinion towards particular types of policy instruments designed to reduce vehicle emissions, we focus on the perceived consequences of such instruments, notably the extent to which they are regarded as effective, fair, and unintrusiv…
From populism to the “plandemic”: Why populists believe in Covid-19 conspiracies
Why are COVID-19 conspiracy theories so prevalent? Particularly, why would some citizens ignore scientific evidence and common logic but, instead, be convinced that COVID-19 was a military experiment or spread by 5G signals? Why would they believe that Bill Gates had anything to do with it? In this contribution, we argue that populism is at the centre of these beliefs, as the complex nature of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it an ideal playground fo…
What explains citizen support for transport policy? the roles of policy design, trust in government and proximity among Swiss citizens
Conventional wisdom holds that climate policies imposing substantial costs on individuals only receive little public support. Policymakers are thus reluctant to implement such policies because they fear a political backlash. However, the specific mechanisms driving low support levels are widely understudied, and experimental evidence is scarce. We argue that support for policies depends on three mechanisms: (i) the policy instrument design, (ii) …
Environmental Impacts and Public Opinion About International Trade: Experimental Evidence from Six OECD Countries
Do environmental implications of international trade influence public support for economic globalization? And under what conditions do environmental considerations shape individuals’ trade attitudes and policy preferences? In this study, we examine the microfoundations of the trade–environment nexus based on survey-embedded experiments in six OECD countries. Our empirical findings demonstrate that environmental implications have a substantial cau…
Is populism a challenge to European energy and climate policy? Empirical evidence across varieties of populism
Despite the burgeoning literature, evidence on how right-wing populists frame and act on energy and climate issues is limited and even more scarce for other types of populist parties. We address this gap by exploring the policy discourses, positions and actions of six European populist parties from Austria, Czechia, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain belonging to different types of populism. We argue that there is substantial and largely neglected v…
Love at first sight? Populist attitudes and support for direct democracy
Do citizens who strongly exhibit populist attitudes support direct democracy? Existing studies tend to claim that populists support direct democracy because of their stealth-democratic orientation or argue that stealth democrats want direct democracy due to the populist nature of stealth-democratic attitudes. Yet, albeit both populists and stealth democrats reject elite rule, they prefer direct democracy for different reasons. Populists support d…
Interest group preferences towards trade agreements: Institutional design matters
Interest groups play a key role in the political economy of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Their support for or opposition to a planned PTA tends to be crucial in determining the fate of PTAs. But which PTAs receive support from (which) interest groups? Clearly, the design of a PTA, that is, which types of provisions are (not) included in the agreement, is essential in that respect. We argue that trade and trade-related provisions, such as…
Parliament, People or Technocrats? Explaining Mass Public Preferences on Delegation of Policymaking Authority
While delegation of policymaking authority from citizens to parliament is the most defining characteristic of representative democracy, public demand for delegating such authority away from legislature/government to technocrats or back to citizens appears to have increased. Drawing on spatial models of voting, we argue that the distance between individuals’ ideal policy points, the status quo, experts’ policy positions and aggregated societal pol…
How Open Lists Undermine the Electoral Support of Cohesive Parties
How does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally d…
From populism to climate scepticism: The Role of Institutional Trust and Attitudes Towards Science
Why do populist citizens oppose climate change? Thus far, data constraints limited the ability to test different theoretical mechanisms against each other. We argue that populist attitudes affect climate attitudes through two distinct channels, namely institutional trust and attitudes towards science. The former argument focuses on political institutions as the central actors in implementing climate policy. Individuals who distrust these institut…
Populist attitudes towards politics and science: How do they differ
While populist citizens’ opposition to political elites has been intensively researched, populist criticism of other societal institutions, such as science, has only recently attracted public and scholarly attention. Political and science populism can both be understood as a set of ideas that revolve around an antagonism between a virtuous common people and an evil elite. However, political populism focuses on political power claims and challenge…
Who wants Covid-19 vaccination to be compulsory? The impact of party cues, left-right ideology, and populism
Vaccine hesitancy is one of the major obstacles for successfully combating the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve a sufficiently high vaccination rate, calls for compulsory vaccinations have been discussed controversially. This study analyses what drives citizens’ attitudes towards compulsory vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we are interested in the impact of party- and expert cues on public attitudes. We further expect …
When Correlation Is Not Enough: Validating Populism Scores from Supervised Machine-Learning Models
Despite the ongoing success of populist parties in many parts of the world, we lack comprehensive information about parties’ level of populism over time. A recent contribution to Political Analysis by Di Cocco and Monechi (DCM) suggests that this research gap can be closed by predicting parties’ populism scores from their election manifestos using supervised machine learning. In this paper, we provide a detailed discussion of the suggested approa…
Populist parties and the two‐dimensional policy space
How are parties' ideological positions and levels of populism connected? Existing research either advocates for a U‐shaped relationship between parties' left‐right position and their degree of populism or uses specific dimensions of a two‐dimensional policy space to describe right‐wing populist parties. We provide an integrated perspective to describe parties' degree of populism by arguing that populism is higher when parties put strong emphasis …
Procedural inclusiveness can mitigate trust challenges in environmental policymaking
Political science (31 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (26 works) · Economics (21 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Populism (16 works) · Populism, Right-Wing Movements (16 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works)