Helene Helboe Pedersen
Biographic Data
| ID | 260401 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Helene Helboe Pedersen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Helene Helboe |
| FAMILY NAME | Pedersen |
| SIGNATURE | PEDERSEN H H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2630-4518 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 751 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Legislator or Representative? Politicians’ Tasks According to Voters
Political representation is challenged by social acceleration, the rise of populism, and electoral volatility. Politicians’ need for prioritizing time and energy is acute and consequential for democracy. Voters’ preferences constitute one democratically relevant standard for guiding such priorities. However, current research mainly focuses on voters’ preferences for representatives’ personality traits or policy outcomes, which are hard for an ind…
Using Social Media to Respond to Negative Polls: Politicians’ Issue Responsiveness on Facebook
Virtuous party linkages: Developing a data‐based analytical model to explain voters’ attitudes towards political parties
Voters show ambivalent attitudes towards political parties: They agree that parties are necessary, but they neither like nor trust them. Existing theories fall short of explaining this paradox because they pay little attention to public opinion research. In this paper, we develop a different argument using qualitative methods. We first integrate the literature on political parties and public opinion to sketch the contours of our theory before ref…
Party soldiers on personal platforms? Politicians’ personalized use of social media
Social media are seen as a catalyst for personalized politics, and social media activity has, therefore, been used as an indicator of personalized representation. However, this may lead to an overestimation because politicians can behave as party soldiers even on their personal social media platforms. This article proposes that we need to examine the content of politicians’ social media communication to evaluate levels of personalized representat…
Closed shutters or revolving doors? Elite career track similarity and elite sector transfers in Denmark
A crucial aspect of elite dominance in modern democracies concerns the degree to which different political elites share similar career paths and shifts between different elite positions. Similarity in career paths and transfers across elite positions are crucial aspects of elite dominance in modern democracies. This paper argues that there are limits to elite career similarity and sector transfer because of varying recruitment criteria and reputa…
The legislative cost of ruling: Voter punishment of governing parties fuels legislator party dissent
Political parties in office generally incur a cost of ruling among the electorate. This article considers the broader implications of this phenomenon for democratic governance. We argue that the electoral cost a party incurs in office entails that its individual legislators become more inclined to vote against the party line as a way to distance themselves from the deteriorating party brand. We test and support several observable implications of …
How institutions do (not) contain personalized politics: Centralized Personalization in a Decentralized Electoral System
The Danish general election in 2022 appeared to foster a paradox: the campaign was remarkably personalized, while voters were less likely to vote for an individual candidate compared to the last five elections. Personalization in the campaign did not seem to spill over to voting behaviour. The study argues and shows using register and survey data that institutional barriers limited the direct expression of personalized electoral behaviour, but vo…
Should we conduct correspondence study field experiments with political elites
Correspondence study field experiments with political elites are a recent addition to legislative studies research, in which unsolicited emails are sent to elites to gauge their responsiveness. In this article, we discuss their ethical implications. We advance from the viewpoint that correspondence study field experiments involve trade-offs between costs and benefits that need to be carefully weighted. We elaborate this argument with two contribu…
Ethics Audits in Cross-National Research: Experiences from Correspondence Study Field Experiments with National Politicians in Four European Democracies
This essay contemplates experiences from four national ethics audits designed to facilitate correspondence study field experiments with national politicians in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom. The experimental study aims to reveal possible biases in legislators’ responsiveness to distinct types of constituents such as non-partisans, lower-class constituents, ethnic minorities, and women, and to unveil possible unsubstanti…
Mismatched Preferences for Responsiveness: Danish Voters and Politicians
Responsiveness is key in democratic systems and can be perceived as a continuous interaction between voters and politicians. However, only limited research has studied the alignment or potential mismatch between voter and politician preferences regarding responsiveness. This article examines how voters' and politicians' preferences for responsiveness differ and suggests reasons for the identified differences. It proposes two factors leading to di…
Fighting Covid-19 on Democratic Terms. Parliamentary Functioning in Italy and Denmark during the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged parliamentary decisionmaking, which is normally based on time-consuming deliberation and scrutiny. We ask how national parliaments met this challenge during the first wave in the spring 2020, and we argue that institutional powers of the executive designed to handle crises just like a pandemic, paradoxically, increase challenges to democratic decision-making because the parliament misses opportunities to negotiate…
Which personality fits personalized representation
In this article, we propose an individual-level explanation for variation in personalized representation, and ask which personality fits personalized representation. Building on political psychology literature, we derive hypotheses about how fundamental personality traits such as extraversion and agreeableness correlate with politicians’ preferences for personalized representation. We investigate these expectations using new survey data collected…
Political personalization and personalized politics within and beyond the behavioural arena
Our aim is to propose guidelines for the analysis of political personalization and personalized politics in general and for behavioural personalization in particular. The first guideline is based on our understanding that personalization comes at the cost of party politics. It suggests that in order to classify politics as more or less personalized, we must compare it to an alternative party-oriented politics. Based on a synthesis of existing the…
Mapping interest group access to politics: A Presentation of the Interarena Research Project
Studies of the political role of interest groups rely on mapping their presence in politics. This article presents the INTERARENA research project which mapped interest group access to the administration, parliament and the news media across several countries. The project departed from a definition of access that emphasized the role of gatekeepers in different political arenas. The article discusses the ambitions of the research project and the s…
From Policy Interest to Media Appearance: Interest Group Activity and Media Bias
Media attention is a scarce, yet attractive, resource for interest groups. Existing studies show that media attention is concentrated on a relatively small number of well-resourced groups, often representing economic interests. However, the literature still struggles to disentangle the reasons behind this bias in media attention. Is it explained by media selection practices or uneven interest group activity? We cannot separate these two possible …
Pre-parliamentary party career and political representation
Members of parliament are accountable to both their district and party. Consequently, they have to balance their responsiveness to these competing principals when their preferences diverge. Existing research on this representational dilemma focuses mostly on the role of political institutions, whereas this article offers a new individual-level explanation: pre-parliamentary party careers. Using sequence analysis, three ideal-typical pre-parliamen…
Voter reaction to legislator dissent across political systems
The lobbying success of citizen and economic groups in Denmark and the UK
The political influence of interest groups manifests in different ways. Interest groups may affect which political problems attract attention as well as the political decisions aimed at solving these problems. Crucially, different types of groups may be successful in respect to these different dimensions of influence. Economic groups have been described as engaging more in “insider” politics affecting public policy decisions, whereas citizen grou…
Balancing Costs of Legislative Party Switching in the Danish Parliament 1953–2015
When elected politicians switch party, it disturbs the electoral connection to voters. Party switching is thus described as a betrayal of democratic representation (Heller and Mershon, 2009, Political Parties and Legislative Party Switching, p. 5). In this article, we argue that party switching results from intra-party conflicts in which individual legislators weigh costs of switching against costs of staying. These costs depend on the legislator…
Two strategies for building a personal vote: Personalized representation in the UK and Denmark
Across parliamentary democracies, elected representatives constitute the link between citizens and government. MPs can connect with voters via the party label, or through personalized forms of representation, which is seen to be increasing in importance. However, scholars disagree on what explains variation in MPs' use of personalized representation strategies. In this article, we argue that politicians use different strategies to personalize the…
Symbolic Class Struggles and the Intersection of Socioeconomic, Cultural and Moral Categorisations
The symbolic categorisation of social groups has become prominent in studies of social class. This article addresses a tension in this research regarding the relationship between different symbolic categories. We argue that the potential of moral categorisations to change or oppose the order of socioeconomic or cultural categorisations depends on whether moral categories are subordinate in a hierarchy or co-exist in a heterarchy of multiple symbo…
Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation
This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on …
Class categories and the subjective dimension of class: The case of Denmark
Class relations have been proven to affect various aspects of social life, even in modern individualized societies. However, following claims on individualization and the so-called 'death of class' thesis, studying the subjective dimension of class - that is, the way individuals perceive of class relations and their own position within them - has gone out of style. We argue that even in equalized societies, subjective class perceptions may still …
What Is Access? A Discussion of the Definition and Measurement of Interest Group Access
Interest group research has focused extensively on political access. While access does not guarantee influence, it is customarily seen as a crucial step towards gaining political influence. It is argued that groups with access are, all else equal, more likely to be influential than groups without access. Biased access may thus result in biased influence. On the basis of a review of this literature, the article shows how the concept of access rest…
The Rise of Citizen Groups? The Mobilization and Representation of Danish Interest Groups, 1975–2010
Over the last several decades, a number of societal changes can be expected to have led to the increased mobilization of interest groups representing citizen interests. For this mobilization to be effective, citizen groups need to win access to relevant political arenas. This article investigates the development of the Danish interest group system and the representation of interest groups in political arenas. While replicating findings of increas…
Interest Group Access to the Bureaucracy, Parliament, and the Media
A key issue for interest groups and policymakers is the ways through which organized interests voice their interests and influence public policy. This article combines two perspectives on interest group representation to explain patterns of interest group access to different political arenas. From a resource exchange perspective, it argues that access to different political arenas is discrete as it is determined by the match between the supply an…
Political personalization and personalized politics within and beyond the behavioural arena
Our aim is to propose guidelines for the analysis of political personalization and personalized politics in general and for behavioural personalization in particular. The first guideline is based on our understanding that personalization comes at the cost of party politics. It suggests that in order to classify politics as more or less personalized, we must compare it to an alternative party-oriented politics. Based on a synthesis of existing the…
Who Gives Evidence to Parliamentary Committees? A Comparative Investigation of Parliamentary Committees and their Constituencies
This article focuses on the interaction between parliamentary committees and external \nactors. How is the interaction organised, and how does it influence which interests are \nvoiced? The authors show that institutional variation in procedures for calling witnesses \nand variation in committee agendas influence both the composition of actors and the concentration \nof evidence. By composition of actors, they refer to the set of different actor …
What Is Access? A Discussion of the Definition and Measurement of Interest Group Access
Interest group research has focused extensively on political access. While access does not guarantee influence, it is customarily seen as a crucial step towards gaining political influence. It is argued that groups with access are, all else equal, more likely to be influential than groups without access. Biased access may thus result in biased influence. On the basis of a review of this literature, the article shows how the concept of access rest…
Minority coalition governance in Denmark
Coalition governance is a challenge for political parties because it involves cooperation and compromises between parties that have different political goals and are competitors in political elections. Coalition coordination is crucial for the intra-coalitional cooperation of the governing parties. A key element in coalition coordination is coalition agreements, which to a varying degree constrain the behaviour of the coalition partners. This art…
What do Parties Want? Policy versus Office
What parties want – policy, office or votes - is important to how they represent their voters, how they make strategic decisions and how they respond to external changes in society. What parties strive to accomplish is simply important to what they do. Moreover, our knowledge of what parties want is important to what we expect them to do. For instance, coalition theory assumes that parties have homogeneous goals, and hence are equally likely to j…
How intra-party power relations affect the coalition behaviour of political parties
This article examines the impact of intra-party politics on the coalition behaviour of political parties. The policy-seeking model of party behaviour is refined by differentiating between policy purity and policy influence, arguing that the distribution of power within political parties affects how inclined they are to abandon policy ideals to participate in coalitions and thereby gain influence on policy. Three contradictory hypotheses are teste…
Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation
This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on …
Is measuring interest group influence a mission impossible? The case of interest group influence in the Danish parliament
Pre-parliamentary party career and political representation
Members of parliament are accountable to both their district and party. Consequently, they have to balance their responsiveness to these competing principals when their preferences diverge. Existing research on this representational dilemma focuses mostly on the role of political institutions, whereas this article offers a new individual-level explanation: pre-parliamentary party careers. Using sequence analysis, three ideal-typical pre-parliamen…
The lobbying success of citizen and economic groups in Denmark and the UK
The political influence of interest groups manifests in different ways. Interest groups may affect which political problems attract attention as well as the political decisions aimed at solving these problems. Crucially, different types of groups may be successful in respect to these different dimensions of influence. Economic groups have been described as engaging more in “insider” politics affecting public policy decisions, whereas citizen grou…
Lobbying Across Arenas: Interest Group Involvement in the Legislative Process in Denmark
Interest groups may approach political decision makers in two phases of the legislative process: the pre‐parliamentary, administrative phase, in which bills are prepared by bureaucrats; and the parliamentary phase, in which bills are discussed and possibly revised by parliamentary committees. The article investigates the factors that lead groups to engage in these phases based on group proceedings for 225 bills presented to the Danish parliament …
Class categories and the subjective dimension of class: The case of Denmark
Class relations have been proven to affect various aspects of social life, even in modern individualized societies. However, following claims on individualization and the so-called 'death of class' thesis, studying the subjective dimension of class - that is, the way individuals perceive of class relations and their own position within them - has gone out of style. We argue that even in equalized societies, subjective class perceptions may still …
Policy-seeking parties in multiparty systems: Influence or purity
According to the standard policy-seeking model of party behaviour, a party should always want to join a coalition if its inclusion would decrease the policy distance between the party and the winning coalition. However, in multiparty systems where no party has a majority, policy influence always comes at a cost to the party’s preferred policy. A party has to moderate its own policy principles in order to join winning coalitions and influence publ…
Differences and Changes in Danish Party Organisations: Central Party Organisation versus Parliamentary Party Group Power
The subject of this article is the relationship between the central party organisation and the parliamentary party group. The article investigates whether Danish political parties are changing into parties dominated by their parliamentary party groups, as has been hypothesised. In contrast to most of the literature on party change, which is based on ideas of convergence caused by external changes, this article argues that party organisation is ba…
Two strategies for building a personal vote: Personalized representation in the UK and Denmark
Across parliamentary democracies, elected representatives constitute the link between citizens and government. MPs can connect with voters via the party label, or through personalized forms of representation, which is seen to be increasing in importance. However, scholars disagree on what explains variation in MPs' use of personalized representation strategies. In this article, we argue that politicians use different strategies to personalize the…
Mapping interest group access to politics: A Presentation of the Interarena Research Project
Studies of the political role of interest groups rely on mapping their presence in politics. This article presents the INTERARENA research project which mapped interest group access to the administration, parliament and the news media across several countries. The project departed from a definition of access that emphasized the role of gatekeepers in different political arenas. The article discusses the ambitions of the research project and the s…
Balancing Costs of Legislative Party Switching in the Danish Parliament 1953–2015
When elected politicians switch party, it disturbs the electoral connection to voters. Party switching is thus described as a betrayal of democratic representation (Heller and Mershon, 2009, Political Parties and Legislative Party Switching, p. 5). In this article, we argue that party switching results from intra-party conflicts in which individual legislators weigh costs of switching against costs of staying. These costs depend on the legislator…
Should we conduct correspondence study field experiments with political elites
Correspondence study field experiments with political elites are a recent addition to legislative studies research, in which unsolicited emails are sent to elites to gauge their responsiveness. In this article, we discuss their ethical implications. We advance from the viewpoint that correspondence study field experiments involve trade-offs between costs and benefits that need to be carefully weighted. We elaborate this argument with two contribu…
The Rise of Citizen Groups? The Mobilization and Representation of Danish Interest Groups, 1975–2010
Over the last several decades, a number of societal changes can be expected to have led to the increased mobilization of interest groups representing citizen interests. For this mobilization to be effective, citizen groups need to win access to relevant political arenas. This article investigates the development of the Danish interest group system and the representation of interest groups in political arenas. While replicating findings of increas…
Party soldiers on personal platforms? Politicians’ personalized use of social media
Social media are seen as a catalyst for personalized politics, and social media activity has, therefore, been used as an indicator of personalized representation. However, this may lead to an overestimation because politicians can behave as party soldiers even on their personal social media platforms. This article proposes that we need to examine the content of politicians’ social media communication to evaluate levels of personalized representat…
Fighting Covid-19 on Democratic Terms. Parliamentary Functioning in Italy and Denmark during the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged parliamentary decisionmaking, which is normally based on time-consuming deliberation and scrutiny. We ask how national parliaments met this challenge during the first wave in the spring 2020, and we argue that institutional powers of the executive designed to handle crises just like a pandemic, paradoxically, increase challenges to democratic decision-making because the parliament misses opportunities to negotiate…
Voter reaction to legislator dissent across political systems
Which personality fits personalized representation
In this article, we propose an individual-level explanation for variation in personalized representation, and ask which personality fits personalized representation. Building on political psychology literature, we derive hypotheses about how fundamental personality traits such as extraversion and agreeableness correlate with politicians’ preferences for personalized representation. We investigate these expectations using new survey data collected…
From Policy Interest to Media Appearance: Interest Group Activity and Media Bias
Media attention is a scarce, yet attractive, resource for interest groups. Existing studies show that media attention is concentrated on a relatively small number of well-resourced groups, often representing economic interests. However, the literature still struggles to disentangle the reasons behind this bias in media attention. Is it explained by media selection practices or uneven interest group activity? We cannot separate these two possible …
How intra-party power relations affect the coalition behaviour of political parties
This article examines the impact of intra-party politics on the coalition behaviour of political parties. The policy-seeking model of party behaviour is refined by differentiating between policy purity and policy influence, arguing that the distribution of power within political parties affects how inclined they are to abandon policy ideals to participate in coalitions and thereby gain influence on policy. Three contradictory hypotheses are teste…
Differences and Changes in Danish Party Organisations: Central Party Organisation versus Parliamentary Party Group Power
The subject of this article is the relationship between the central party organisation and the parliamentary party group. The article investigates whether Danish political parties are changing into parties dominated by their parliamentary party groups, as has been hypothesised. In contrast to most of the literature on party change, which is based on ideas of convergence caused by external changes, this article argues that party organisation is ba…
What do Parties Want? Policy versus Office
What parties want – policy, office or votes - is important to how they represent their voters, how they make strategic decisions and how they respond to external changes in society. What parties strive to accomplish is simply important to what they do. Moreover, our knowledge of what parties want is important to what we expect them to do. For instance, coalition theory assumes that parties have homogeneous goals, and hence are equally likely to j…
Policy-seeking parties in multiparty systems: Influence or purity
According to the standard policy-seeking model of party behaviour, a party should always want to join a coalition if its inclusion would decrease the policy distance between the party and the winning coalition. However, in multiparty systems where no party has a majority, policy influence always comes at a cost to the party’s preferred policy. A party has to moderate its own policy principles in order to join winning coalitions and influence publ…
Is measuring interest group influence a mission impossible? The case of interest group influence in the Danish parliament
Catherine Moury, Coalition Government and Party Mandate: How Coalition Agreements Constrain Ministerial Action, reviewed by Helene Helboe Pedersen
Minority coalition governance in Denmark
Coalition governance is a challenge for political parties because it involves cooperation and compromises between parties that have different political goals and are competitors in political elections. Coalition coordination is crucial for the intra-coalitional cooperation of the governing parties. A key element in coalition coordination is coalition agreements, which to a varying degree constrain the behaviour of the coalition partners. This art…
Lobbying Across Arenas: Interest Group Involvement in the Legislative Process in Denmark
Interest groups may approach political decision makers in two phases of the legislative process: the pre‐parliamentary, administrative phase, in which bills are prepared by bureaucrats; and the parliamentary phase, in which bills are discussed and possibly revised by parliamentary committees. The article investigates the factors that lead groups to engage in these phases based on group proceedings for 225 bills presented to the Danish parliament …
Who Gives Evidence to Parliamentary Committees? A Comparative Investigation of Parliamentary Committees and their Constituencies
This article focuses on the interaction between parliamentary committees and external \nactors. How is the interaction organised, and how does it influence which interests are \nvoiced? The authors show that institutional variation in procedures for calling witnesses \nand variation in committee agendas influence both the composition of actors and the concentration \nof evidence. By composition of actors, they refer to the set of different actor …
Interest Group Access to the Bureaucracy, Parliament, and the Media
A key issue for interest groups and policymakers is the ways through which organized interests voice their interests and influence public policy. This article combines two perspectives on interest group representation to explain patterns of interest group access to different political arenas. From a resource exchange perspective, it argues that access to different political arenas is discrete as it is determined by the match between the supply an…
What Is Access? A Discussion of the Definition and Measurement of Interest Group Access
Interest group research has focused extensively on political access. While access does not guarantee influence, it is customarily seen as a crucial step towards gaining political influence. It is argued that groups with access are, all else equal, more likely to be influential than groups without access. Biased access may thus result in biased influence. On the basis of a review of this literature, the article shows how the concept of access rest…
The Rise of Citizen Groups? The Mobilization and Representation of Danish Interest Groups, 1975–2010
Over the last several decades, a number of societal changes can be expected to have led to the increased mobilization of interest groups representing citizen interests. For this mobilization to be effective, citizen groups need to win access to relevant political arenas. This article investigates the development of the Danish interest group system and the representation of interest groups in political arenas. While replicating findings of increas…
The Power over the Marriage Ritual: Positions in the Administrative Consultation Prior to the Implementation of Same-Sex Marriages in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark
Religious rituals are normally regulated by religious societies, but in 2011 the minister of ecclesiastical affairs obliged the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark to change the marriage ritual to include same-sex couples (L106 2011/12). In a secular society, the state's direct interference with religious rituals is highly surprising and raises several questions: Why is it possible and plausible for the Danish state to intervene in church affa…
Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation
This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on …
Class categories and the subjective dimension of class: The case of Denmark
Class relations have been proven to affect various aspects of social life, even in modern individualized societies. However, following claims on individualization and the so-called 'death of class' thesis, studying the subjective dimension of class - that is, the way individuals perceive of class relations and their own position within them - has gone out of style. We argue that even in equalized societies, subjective class perceptions may still …
The lobbying success of citizen and economic groups in Denmark and the UK
The political influence of interest groups manifests in different ways. Interest groups may affect which political problems attract attention as well as the political decisions aimed at solving these problems. Crucially, different types of groups may be successful in respect to these different dimensions of influence. Economic groups have been described as engaging more in “insider” politics affecting public policy decisions, whereas citizen grou…
Balancing Costs of Legislative Party Switching in the Danish Parliament 1953–2015
When elected politicians switch party, it disturbs the electoral connection to voters. Party switching is thus described as a betrayal of democratic representation (Heller and Mershon, 2009, Political Parties and Legislative Party Switching, p. 5). In this article, we argue that party switching results from intra-party conflicts in which individual legislators weigh costs of switching against costs of staying. These costs depend on the legislator…
Two strategies for building a personal vote: Personalized representation in the UK and Denmark
Across parliamentary democracies, elected representatives constitute the link between citizens and government. MPs can connect with voters via the party label, or through personalized forms of representation, which is seen to be increasing in importance. However, scholars disagree on what explains variation in MPs' use of personalized representation strategies. In this article, we argue that politicians use different strategies to personalize the…
Symbolic Class Struggles and the Intersection of Socioeconomic, Cultural and Moral Categorisations
The symbolic categorisation of social groups has become prominent in studies of social class. This article addresses a tension in this research regarding the relationship between different symbolic categories. We argue that the potential of moral categorisations to change or oppose the order of socioeconomic or cultural categorisations depends on whether moral categories are subordinate in a hierarchy or co-exist in a heterarchy of multiple symbo…
Mapping interest group access to politics: A Presentation of the Interarena Research Project
Studies of the political role of interest groups rely on mapping their presence in politics. This article presents the INTERARENA research project which mapped interest group access to the administration, parliament and the news media across several countries. The project departed from a definition of access that emphasized the role of gatekeepers in different political arenas. The article discusses the ambitions of the research project and the s…
From Policy Interest to Media Appearance: Interest Group Activity and Media Bias
Media attention is a scarce, yet attractive, resource for interest groups. Existing studies show that media attention is concentrated on a relatively small number of well-resourced groups, often representing economic interests. However, the literature still struggles to disentangle the reasons behind this bias in media attention. Is it explained by media selection practices or uneven interest group activity? We cannot separate these two possible …
Pre-parliamentary party career and political representation
Members of parliament are accountable to both their district and party. Consequently, they have to balance their responsiveness to these competing principals when their preferences diverge. Existing research on this representational dilemma focuses mostly on the role of political institutions, whereas this article offers a new individual-level explanation: pre-parliamentary party careers. Using sequence analysis, three ideal-typical pre-parliamen…
Voter reaction to legislator dissent across political systems
Mismatched Preferences for Responsiveness: Danish Voters and Politicians
Responsiveness is key in democratic systems and can be perceived as a continuous interaction between voters and politicians. However, only limited research has studied the alignment or potential mismatch between voter and politician preferences regarding responsiveness. This article examines how voters' and politicians' preferences for responsiveness differ and suggests reasons for the identified differences. It proposes two factors leading to di…
Fighting Covid-19 on Democratic Terms. Parliamentary Functioning in Italy and Denmark during the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged parliamentary decisionmaking, which is normally based on time-consuming deliberation and scrutiny. We ask how national parliaments met this challenge during the first wave in the spring 2020, and we argue that institutional powers of the executive designed to handle crises just like a pandemic, paradoxically, increase challenges to democratic decision-making because the parliament misses opportunities to negotiate…
Political science (33 works) · Law (31 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (28 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (27 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Public Administration (20 works) · Public Administration (20 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (18 works) · Public relations (15 works)