Erik Gahner Larsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 253241 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erik Gahner Larsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erik Gahner |
| FAMILY NAME | Larsen |
| SIGNATURE | LARSEN E G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3579-8457 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 203 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Blurred positions: The ideological ambiguity of valence populist parties
While the diversity of populism has received considerable attention, surprisingly little is known about populist parties that defy clear-cut left-right categorization. We show that valence populist parties are non-positional and substantially different from both left-wing and right-wing populist parties. First, we demonstrate that valence populist parties deliberately take blurry positions on both the economic and socio-cultural dimensions of com…
Dynamic Political Interest: How Personality Differences and the Political Environment Shape Political Interest
In order to explain differences in political interest, two strands of literature point to the relevance of either dispositional or situational factors. I remedy this and show how political interest is shaped by the interplay between personality differences and the political environment. Specifically, I demonstrate that people with a stable motivation for engaging with new ideas are more interested in politics when exposed to new political events,…
Asymmetric realignment: Immigration and right party voting
The second decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a significant 'rightward drift' as populists in the West scored striking electoral gains. We argue that this reflects a shift in the power of electoral cleavages that is asymmetric in nature. Specifically, voters for whom immigration is salient are more likely to switch to conservative and national populist parties than to liberal or left-wing parties. We leverage data from three prominent c…
Reporting on one's behavior: A survey experiment on the nonvalidity of self-reported Covid-19 hygiene-relevant routine behaviors
Surveys based on self-reported hygiene-relevant routine behaviors have played a crucial role in policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, using anchoring to test validity in a randomized controlled survey experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we demonstrate that asking people to self-report on the frequency of routine behaviors are prone to significant measurement error and systematic bias. Specifically, we find that particip…
Populist parties in European Parliament elections: A new dataset on left, right and valence populism from 1979 to 2019
Longevity returns to political office
Does political office cause worse or better longevity prospects? Two perspectives in the literature offer contradicting answers. First, increased income, social status, and political connections obtained through holding office can increase longevity. Second, increased stress and working hours associated with holding office can have detrimental effects on longevity. To provide causal evidence, we exploit a regression discontinuity design with uniq…
Party activism in the populist radical right: The case of the UK Independence Party
Recent decades have seen an upsurge of interest in populist radical right (PRR) parties. Yet despite a large body of research on PRR voters, there are few studies of the internal life of these parties. In particular, there is a dearth of research about why people are active in them. This article uses data from a unique large-scale survey of United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) members to investigate if drivers of voting support for these part…
Personal politics? Healthcare policies, personal experiences and government attitudes
Do personal experiences matter for public attitudes towards the role of the government? In the domain of healthcare, I argue that policies change the salience of personal experiences for government attitudes. Specifically, I expect that personal experiences matter less for government attitudes when healthcare is publicly financed, that is, when there is less emphasis on financing healthcare via market-based choices. Empirically, I link subjective…
Just as Weird? Personality traits and political attitudes among immigrant minorities
Do terrorist attacks feed populist Eurosceptics? Evidence from two comparative quasi‐experiments
Over recent years, Europe has experienced a series of Islamic terrorist attacks. In this article, conflicting theoretical expectations are derived on whether such attacks increase populist Euroscepticism in the form of anti‐immigration, anti‐refugee and anti‐European Union sentiment. Empirically, plausible exogenous variation in the exposure to the 2016 Berlin attack is exploited in two nationally representative surveys covering multiple European…
Policy Feedback Effects on Mass Publics: A Quantitative Review
There has been an impressive stride in the research on policy feedback effects on mass publics over recent years. However, we lack systematic evidence on how large such policy feedback effects are in the literature. This article provides a review of 65 published studies and quantifies the findings and key themes in the policy feedback literature. The results show a great degree of heterogeneity in the domains and outcomes being studied and in the…
Transforming Stability into Change: How the Media Select and Report Opinion Polls
Although political polls show stability over short periods of time, most media coverage of polls highlights recurrent changes in the political competition. We present evidence for a snowball effect where small and insignificant changes in polls end up in the media coverage as stories about changes. To demonstrate this process, we rely on the full population of political polls in Denmark and a combination of human coding and supervised machine lea…
Bailout or bust? Government evaluations in the wake of a bailout
Governments are often punished for negative events such as economic downturns and financial shocks. However, governments can address such shocks with salient policy responses that might mitigate public punishment. We use three high-quality nationally representative surveys collected around a key event in the history of the Dutch economy, namely the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, to examine how voters responded to a salient government b…
Justify your alpha
Welfare Retrenchments and Government Support: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
A large body of literature has provided mixed results on the impact of welfare retrenchments on government support. This article examines whether the impact of welfare retrenchments can be explained by proximity, i.e. whether or not the retrenched policy is related to people's everyday lives. To overcome limitations in previous studies, the empirical approach utilizes a natural experiment with data from the European Social Survey collected concur…
Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party
This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the bas…
Media Content and Political Behavior in Observational Research: A Critical Assessment
This article discusses possible issues of how media content and exposure were linked in previous research. It argues that the original conclusions of the article ‘Who's Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News’ do not hold due to the chosen operationalization. It also demonstrates that using the proposed methodology, both exposure to conflictual and non-conflictual news yield the same substantive conclusion. …
Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party
This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the bas…
Populist parties in European Parliament elections: A new dataset on left, right and valence populism from 1979 to 2019
Blurred positions: The ideological ambiguity of valence populist parties
While the diversity of populism has received considerable attention, surprisingly little is known about populist parties that defy clear-cut left-right categorization. We show that valence populist parties are non-positional and substantially different from both left-wing and right-wing populist parties. First, we demonstrate that valence populist parties deliberately take blurry positions on both the economic and socio-cultural dimensions of com…
Do terrorist attacks feed populist Eurosceptics? Evidence from two comparative quasi‐experiments
Over recent years, Europe has experienced a series of Islamic terrorist attacks. In this article, conflicting theoretical expectations are derived on whether such attacks increase populist Euroscepticism in the form of anti‐immigration, anti‐refugee and anti‐European Union sentiment. Empirically, plausible exogenous variation in the exposure to the 2016 Berlin attack is exploited in two nationally representative surveys covering multiple European…
Justify your alpha
Party activism in the populist radical right: The case of the UK Independence Party
Recent decades have seen an upsurge of interest in populist radical right (PRR) parties. Yet despite a large body of research on PRR voters, there are few studies of the internal life of these parties. In particular, there is a dearth of research about why people are active in them. This article uses data from a unique large-scale survey of United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) members to investigate if drivers of voting support for these part…
Media Content and Political Behavior in Observational Research: A Critical Assessment
This article discusses possible issues of how media content and exposure were linked in previous research. It argues that the original conclusions of the article ‘Who's Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News’ do not hold due to the chosen operationalization. It also demonstrates that using the proposed methodology, both exposure to conflictual and non-conflictual news yield the same substantive conclusion. …
Welfare Retrenchments and Government Support: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
A large body of literature has provided mixed results on the impact of welfare retrenchments on government support. This article examines whether the impact of welfare retrenchments can be explained by proximity, i.e. whether or not the retrenched policy is related to people's everyday lives. To overcome limitations in previous studies, the empirical approach utilizes a natural experiment with data from the European Social Survey collected concur…
Dynamic Political Interest: How Personality Differences and the Political Environment Shape Political Interest
In order to explain differences in political interest, two strands of literature point to the relevance of either dispositional or situational factors. I remedy this and show how political interest is shaped by the interplay between personality differences and the political environment. Specifically, I demonstrate that people with a stable motivation for engaging with new ideas are more interested in politics when exposed to new political events,…
Reporting on one's behavior: A survey experiment on the nonvalidity of self-reported Covid-19 hygiene-relevant routine behaviors
Surveys based on self-reported hygiene-relevant routine behaviors have played a crucial role in policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, using anchoring to test validity in a randomized controlled survey experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we demonstrate that asking people to self-report on the frequency of routine behaviors are prone to significant measurement error and systematic bias. Specifically, we find that particip…
Asymmetric realignment: Immigration and right party voting
The second decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a significant 'rightward drift' as populists in the West scored striking electoral gains. We argue that this reflects a shift in the power of electoral cleavages that is asymmetric in nature. Specifically, voters for whom immigration is salient are more likely to switch to conservative and national populist parties than to liberal or left-wing parties. We leverage data from three prominent c…
Transforming Stability into Change: How the Media Select and Report Opinion Polls
Although political polls show stability over short periods of time, most media coverage of polls highlights recurrent changes in the political competition. We present evidence for a snowball effect where small and insignificant changes in polls end up in the media coverage as stories about changes. To demonstrate this process, we rely on the full population of political polls in Denmark and a combination of human coding and supervised machine lea…
Personal politics? Healthcare policies, personal experiences and government attitudes
Do personal experiences matter for public attitudes towards the role of the government? In the domain of healthcare, I argue that policies change the salience of personal experiences for government attitudes. Specifically, I expect that personal experiences matter less for government attitudes when healthcare is publicly financed, that is, when there is less emphasis on financing healthcare via market-based choices. Empirically, I link subjective…
Bailout or bust? Government evaluations in the wake of a bailout
Governments are often punished for negative events such as economic downturns and financial shocks. However, governments can address such shocks with salient policy responses that might mitigate public punishment. We use three high-quality nationally representative surveys collected around a key event in the history of the Dutch economy, namely the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, to examine how voters responded to a salient government b…
Longevity returns to political office
Does political office cause worse or better longevity prospects? Two perspectives in the literature offer contradicting answers. First, increased income, social status, and political connections obtained through holding office can increase longevity. Second, increased stress and working hours associated with holding office can have detrimental effects on longevity. To provide causal evidence, we exploit a regression discontinuity design with uniq…
Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party
This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the bas…
Media Content and Political Behavior in Observational Research: A Critical Assessment
This article discusses possible issues of how media content and exposure were linked in previous research. It argues that the original conclusions of the article ‘Who's Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News’ do not hold due to the chosen operationalization. It also demonstrates that using the proposed methodology, both exposure to conflictual and non-conflictual news yield the same substantive conclusion. …
Justify your alpha
Welfare Retrenchments and Government Support: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
A large body of literature has provided mixed results on the impact of welfare retrenchments on government support. This article examines whether the impact of welfare retrenchments can be explained by proximity, i.e. whether or not the retrenched policy is related to people's everyday lives. To overcome limitations in previous studies, the empirical approach utilizes a natural experiment with data from the European Social Survey collected concur…
Policy Feedback Effects on Mass Publics: A Quantitative Review
There has been an impressive stride in the research on policy feedback effects on mass publics over recent years. However, we lack systematic evidence on how large such policy feedback effects are in the literature. This article provides a review of 65 published studies and quantifies the findings and key themes in the policy feedback literature. The results show a great degree of heterogeneity in the domains and outcomes being studied and in the…
Transforming Stability into Change: How the Media Select and Report Opinion Polls
Although political polls show stability over short periods of time, most media coverage of polls highlights recurrent changes in the political competition. We present evidence for a snowball effect where small and insignificant changes in polls end up in the media coverage as stories about changes. To demonstrate this process, we rely on the full population of political polls in Denmark and a combination of human coding and supervised machine lea…
Bailout or bust? Government evaluations in the wake of a bailout
Governments are often punished for negative events such as economic downturns and financial shocks. However, governments can address such shocks with salient policy responses that might mitigate public punishment. We use three high-quality nationally representative surveys collected around a key event in the history of the Dutch economy, namely the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, to examine how voters responded to a salient government b…
Personal politics? Healthcare policies, personal experiences and government attitudes
Do personal experiences matter for public attitudes towards the role of the government? In the domain of healthcare, I argue that policies change the salience of personal experiences for government attitudes. Specifically, I expect that personal experiences matter less for government attitudes when healthcare is publicly financed, that is, when there is less emphasis on financing healthcare via market-based choices. Empirically, I link subjective…
Just as Weird? Personality traits and political attitudes among immigrant minorities
Do terrorist attacks feed populist Eurosceptics? Evidence from two comparative quasi‐experiments
Over recent years, Europe has experienced a series of Islamic terrorist attacks. In this article, conflicting theoretical expectations are derived on whether such attacks increase populist Euroscepticism in the form of anti‐immigration, anti‐refugee and anti‐European Union sentiment. Empirically, plausible exogenous variation in the exposure to the 2016 Berlin attack is exploited in two nationally representative surveys covering multiple European…
Reporting on one's behavior: A survey experiment on the nonvalidity of self-reported Covid-19 hygiene-relevant routine behaviors
Surveys based on self-reported hygiene-relevant routine behaviors have played a crucial role in policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, using anchoring to test validity in a randomized controlled survey experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we demonstrate that asking people to self-report on the frequency of routine behaviors are prone to significant measurement error and systematic bias. Specifically, we find that particip…
Populist parties in European Parliament elections: A new dataset on left, right and valence populism from 1979 to 2019
Longevity returns to political office
Does political office cause worse or better longevity prospects? Two perspectives in the literature offer contradicting answers. First, increased income, social status, and political connections obtained through holding office can increase longevity. Second, increased stress and working hours associated with holding office can have detrimental effects on longevity. To provide causal evidence, we exploit a regression discontinuity design with uniq…
Party activism in the populist radical right: The case of the UK Independence Party
Recent decades have seen an upsurge of interest in populist radical right (PRR) parties. Yet despite a large body of research on PRR voters, there are few studies of the internal life of these parties. In particular, there is a dearth of research about why people are active in them. This article uses data from a unique large-scale survey of United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) members to investigate if drivers of voting support for these part…
Dynamic Political Interest: How Personality Differences and the Political Environment Shape Political Interest
In order to explain differences in political interest, two strands of literature point to the relevance of either dispositional or situational factors. I remedy this and show how political interest is shaped by the interplay between personality differences and the political environment. Specifically, I demonstrate that people with a stable motivation for engaging with new ideas are more interested in politics when exposed to new political events,…
Asymmetric realignment: Immigration and right party voting
The second decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a significant 'rightward drift' as populists in the West scored striking electoral gains. We argue that this reflects a shift in the power of electoral cleavages that is asymmetric in nature. Specifically, voters for whom immigration is salient are more likely to switch to conservative and national populist parties than to liberal or left-wing parties. We leverage data from three prominent c…
Blurred positions: The ideological ambiguity of valence populist parties
While the diversity of populism has received considerable attention, surprisingly little is known about populist parties that defy clear-cut left-right categorization. We show that valence populist parties are non-positional and substantially different from both left-wing and right-wing populist parties. First, we demonstrate that valence populist parties deliberately take blurry positions on both the economic and socio-cultural dimensions of com…
Political science (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (9 works) · Political economy (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Media Influence and Politics (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)