Henrik Serup Christensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 318173 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Henrik Serup Christensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Henrik Serup |
| FAMILY NAME | Christensen |
| SIGNATURE | CHRISTENSEN H S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Åbo Akademi University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2916-0561 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 393 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Experts, Experts Everywhere! Survey Experimental Evidence on How Involving Expertise Affects Decision-Making Legitimacy
Science and expertise are frequently invoked to legitimize policy decisions. However, while prior research suggests broad support for expert-led governance, it often overlooks how citizens differentiate between types of experts and how political beliefs shape these perceptions. This study examines how institutional affiliations of experts—universities, government, and think tanks—influence citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy in political decision…
Awareness of opinion change: Evidence from two deliberative mini-publics
Although opinion changes during discussions and negotiations have been studied extensively in different fields of research, surprisingly little effort has been put into studying whether people correctly recognize that they revised their opinions. This is important because it has implications for both the cognitive mechanisms underpinning these changes and their likely consequences. We in this study examine whether participants in two deliberative…
Gender and support for undemocratic politicians
Several studies have examined whether attitudinal factors make people more willing to accept political elites violating basic democratic norms. However, the role of more basic socio-demographic characteristics, such as gender, remains underexplored. This may be a mistake, as studies suggest that these influence the evaluation of democratic transgressions. We focus on the role of gender in evaluations of democratic transgressions and re-examine da…
Miles’ law in Finnish municipalities: Where Decision-Makers Stand Depends on Where They Sit
Miles' Law, i.e., the notion that institutional position affects attitudes, is considered a truism, but not much attention has been given to properly test or develop it. Here, we argue that Miles' Law is effective not only for civil servants but among municipal decision-makers in different positions. We examine how well institutional position can explain differences in attitudes to welfare service provision among decision-makers on different leve…
Politics on the stock market? Political investorism as a form of political participation
Political investorism involves the use of financial investments to promote political aims, but has, with some recent exceptions, received scarce attention from political scientists although there are valid theoretical reasons to consider this a new form of political participation. Here, we add new knowledge to this research agenda by examining empirically whether political investorism constitutes a distinct mode of political participation. Furthe…
Do populists want direct democracy? Examining how thick and thin populist attitudes are associated with the Finnish Citizens’ Initiative
Theoretical works suggest that populist attitudes are associated with demands for direct democracy in the form of referendums. However, it remains unclear how populist attitudes relate to other direct-democratic instruments such as citizens' initiatives. We therefore examine whether populist attitudes affect the attitudes toward the Citizens' Agenda Initiative (CI) in Finland with the help of the national election study from 2019 (n = 1598). We s…
Deliberative Mini-publics Facilitating Voter Knowledge and Judgement: Experience from a Finnish Local Referendum
This article examines the use of a Citizens’ Jury as a source of voter information in the context of a government-initiated (top-down) referendum. Several studies show the capacity of the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) to enhance voters’ knowledge and capacity of judgement in ballot initiative processes. However, similar procedures have not been tested outside the U.S.A. or in the context of government-initiated referendums. Our case is a Citi…
Beyond polarization and selective trust: A Citizens’ Jury as a trusted source of information
In this article, we examine whether a deliberative mini-public can provide a trusted source of information in the context of a polarized referendum. Political polarization gives rise to selective distrust of those on the ‘other side’. The Citizens’ Jury on Referendum Options in Korsholm, Finland, was organized in conjunction with a polarized referendum on a municipal merger. Our analysis is based on a field experiment measuring the effects of rea…
Perceptions of Inequality and Political Participation: The Moderating Role of Ideology
While much research has been devoted to the effects of inequality on political participation, little attention has been paid to how different kinds of subjective perceptions of social inequality affect citizens’ political behaviour. This is important since these perceptions shape the message that reaches political decision-makers when addressing concerns over social inequalities. This article differentiates between sociotropic and egocentric perc…
Guardians of Democracy or Passive Bystanders? A Conjoint Experiment on Elite Transgressions of Democratic Norms
Emerging literature shows that citizens in established democracies do not unconditionally support central democratic principles when asked to weigh them against co-partisanship or favored policy positions. However, these studies are conducted in highly polarized contexts, and it remains unclear whether the underlying mechanisms also operate in more consensual contexts. Furthermore, it is unclear whether “critical citizens” or satisfied democrats …
Unequal inequalities? How participatory inequalities affect democratic legitimacy
Democratic theorists have long emphasized the importance of participatory equality, that is, that all citizens should have an equal right to participate. It is still unclear, however, whether ordinary citizens view this principle as central to democracy and how different violations of this principle affect subjective democratic legitimacy. The attitudes of citizens are imperative when it comes to the subjective legitimacy of democratic systems, a…
The lure of populism: A conjoint experiment examining the interplay between demand and supply side factors
Several studies have examined the success of populist leaders in recent decades. These studies focus on both supply side factors that concern the traits of populist actors and demand side factors in the form of characteristics of the supporters. However, we still lack a solid understanding of how these supply and demand side factors interact to explain the support of populist leaders. We contribute to this literature by examining the interplay of…
Citizens’ intertemporal perspectives on municipal mergers and the role of deliberation for these
This article studies citizens' intertemporal opinions in the context of a proposed municipal merger in Finland in 2019. We ask how important citizens regard short- and long-term aspects of politics concerning the merger. Using a survey sent to a random sample of citizens (N = 320), we studied the impact of a Citizens' Jury on developing intertemporal opinions. This was done partially by tracing the development of intertemporal opinions of the jur…
Knowledge, Trust or Perspectives? A Causal Mediation Analysis of How a Citizens’ Jury Affected Voting Intentions in the General Public
Previous studies suggest that information from deliberative mini‐publics helps voters make informed and reflected judgements and act accordingly. Despite a growing body of literature, the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This study examines three causal mechanisms for affecting voting intentions in a referendum: 1) factual knowledge, 2) trusted information proxy, or 3) perspective‐taking of the opinions of others. The data come from a referendum…
Future Orientation and Political Participation: The Moderating Role of Political Trust
Previous studies show consistent differences in how people evaluate future consequences and implications of this for a variety of phenomena. The implications for the individual propensity for taking part in different forms of political participation have received limited scholarly attention, however. This is unfortunate since it affects how people voice their concerns over future problems and thereby also whether and how decision-makers become aw…
How voters choose one out of many: A conjoint analysis of the effects of endorsements on candidate choice
Candidate endorsements affect the likelihood that people vote for a candidate since they reduce the efforts devoted to vote choices. However, the effects of endorsements from different sources remain under-explored. Furthermore, the effects of endorsements are believed to vary with the level of political sophistication, as voters with low sophistication are more reliant on such shortcuts, but it is unclear whether these differences are similar fo…
Voting Women, Protesting Men: A Multilevel Analysis of Corruption, Gender, and Political Participation
Previous studies have been unable to establish the link between corruption perceptions and political participation. This is partly due to a disregard of different types of political participation, ignoring gender differences in how corruption perceptions affect political participation, and overlooking the importance of context. We therefore here examine gender differences in the links between corruption perceptions and three types of political pa…
A conjoint experiment of how design features affect evaluations of participatory platforms
Immediate rewards or delayed gratification? A conjoint survey experiment of the public’s policy preferences
Previous scholarship has focused primarily on how citizens’ form policy preferences and how those preferences are taken into account in democratic decision-making. However, the temporal aspect of policy preferences has received little attention, although many significant societal problems have consequences that extend far into the future. To fill the gap, we examine to what extent citizens are willing to support policies, when rewards can only be…
The potential of deliberative reasoning: Patterns of attitude change and consistency in cross-cutting and like-minded deliberation
How candidate characteristics affect favorability in European Parliament elections: Evidence from a conjoint experiment in Finland
Previous literature has studied voter behavior in European Parliament elections. However, it remains unclear how candidate characteristics affect favorability of EP candidates since it cannot be taken for granted that these characteristics work as in national elections. We therefore use a conjoint analysis to examine how gender, left-right ideology, issue focus, political experience, representative focus, citizenship, and attitude towards Europea…
How citizens evaluate participatory processes: A Conjoint Analysis
This study examines how characteristics of participatory processes affect citizens’ evaluations of such processes and thereby establish what kind of participatory process citizens demand. The literature on democratic innovations has proposed different criteria for evaluating participatory innovations. What remains unclear, however, is how citizens evaluate these participatory mechanisms. This is here examined in a conjoint analysis embedded in a …
The influence of political knowledge on opinion polarization in citizen deliberation
Empirical studies show that people with high political knowledge tend to polarize more than others. Polarization refers to a process where one becomes more extreme in the direction of her or his original views. While some evidence supports this view, there is also contrasting evidence, rendering ambiguous conclusions. Discussing in a deliberative setting might alleviate polarization among participants independent of whether they are knowledgeable…
Boosting Political Trust with Direct Democracy? The Case of the Finnish Citizens’ Initiative
Complementing representative democracy with direct-democratic instruments is perceived to boost levels of political trust. This was why Finland in 2012 introduced an agenda initiative, which gives citizens the right to propose legislation and thereby provides citizens a say between elections. However, it remains unclear whether involvement in such mechanisms helps restore political trust and what factors shape developments in political trust duri…
Engaging the Millennials: The Citizens’ Initiative in Finland
Millennials’ disengagement from institutionalized politics has been a cause for concern among scholars and pundits. Consequently, there is an increased interest in possibilities to mobilize them through new participatory mechanisms, but the results are still unclear. We contribute to this research agenda by examining whether the Finnish citizens’ initiative mobilized the millennial generation with data from the Finnish National Election Survey fr…
Ideals and Actions: Do Citizens’ Patterns of Political Participation Correspond to their Conceptions of Democracy
The interest in procedures for political decision-making has grown tremendously during recent decades. Given the intense scholarly debate and the implementation of greater opportunities for citizen participation in many democracies, there has been surprisingly little interest in citizens’ conceptions of democracy understood as their preferences concerning the processes by which the political system works. Some recent attempts do, however, suggest…
How citizens evaluate participatory processes: A Conjoint Analysis
This study examines how characteristics of participatory processes affect citizens’ evaluations of such processes and thereby establish what kind of participatory process citizens demand. The literature on democratic innovations has proposed different criteria for evaluating participatory innovations. What remains unclear, however, is how citizens evaluate these participatory mechanisms. This is here examined in a conjoint analysis embedded in a …
When trust matters—a multilevel analysis of the effect of generalized trust on political participation in 25 European democracies
Generalized social trust has been argued to have positive effects for both individuals and society, but despite solid theoretical arguments in favour of different contextual effects, the empirical evidence remains scant. We here examine whether and how the effect of generalized trust on the propensity to become politically active is moderated by the level of generalized trust in society. We inspect two different causal mechanisms: The rainmaker e…
Ideology and Deliberation: An Analysis of Public Support for Deliberative Practices in Finland
The introduction of deliberative practices has been proposed as a method for revitalizing representative democracies suffering from decreasing political involvement and increasing fragmentation (Dryzek, 2000; Grönlund, Bächtiger, & Setälä, 2014; Parkinson & Mansbridge, 2012). Some scholars, however, question whether citizens are willing to engage in deliberative practices (Bartels, 2003; Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002; Posner, 2004). A related conc…
Deliberation and Opinion Change: Evidence from a Deliberative Mini‐public inFinland
A number of studies examining the effects of deliberative citizen forums have found that citizens taking part in deliberative processes experience changes in their policy attitudes. However, it remains unclear why these opinion changes occur, since most studies pay little attention to the communicative exchange that is expected to cause the observed changes. Within deliberative theory, there is an expectation that reasonable individuals should be…
Immediate rewards or delayed gratification? A conjoint survey experiment of the public’s policy preferences
Previous scholarship has focused primarily on how citizens’ form policy preferences and how those preferences are taken into account in democratic decision-making. However, the temporal aspect of policy preferences has received little attention, although many significant societal problems have consequences that extend far into the future. To fill the gap, we examine to what extent citizens are willing to support policies, when rewards can only be…
Guardians of Democracy or Passive Bystanders? A Conjoint Experiment on Elite Transgressions of Democratic Norms
Emerging literature shows that citizens in established democracies do not unconditionally support central democratic principles when asked to weigh them against co-partisanship or favored policy positions. However, these studies are conducted in highly polarized contexts, and it remains unclear whether the underlying mechanisms also operate in more consensual contexts. Furthermore, it is unclear whether “critical citizens” or satisfied democrats …
A Matter of Life or Death: A Survey Experiment on the Perceived Legitimacy of Political Decision-Making on Euthanasia
Most representative democracies seem to experience dwindling levels of legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what people want from parliamentary decision-making. In this study, we test the impact of outcome favourability, actor involvement and justifications on the perceived legitimacy of a parliamentary decision-making process on euthanasia in Finland. We do so with the help of a survey experiment (n = 1243), where…
The Finnish Citizens’ Initiative: Towards Inclusive Agenda‐setting
This article examines whether the Citizens' Initiative (CI) in Finland has enhanced inclusion in processes of political agenda‐setting. Democratic innovations such as CIs have been proposed as a solution to the challenges facing Western democracies. CIs are expected to increase political inclusion by allowing citizens to set the political agenda and by mobilising otherwise marginalised or passive citizens. However, the empirical evidence on this …
All the same? Examining the link between three kinds of political dissatisfaction and protest
Deliberative Mini-publics Facilitating Voter Knowledge and Judgement: Experience from a Finnish Local Referendum
This article examines the use of a Citizens’ Jury as a source of voter information in the context of a government-initiated (top-down) referendum. Several studies show the capacity of the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) to enhance voters’ knowledge and capacity of judgement in ballot initiative processes. However, similar procedures have not been tested outside the U.S.A. or in the context of government-initiated referendums. Our case is a Citi…
Beyond polarization and selective trust: A Citizens’ Jury as a trusted source of information
In this article, we examine whether a deliberative mini-public can provide a trusted source of information in the context of a polarized referendum. Political polarization gives rise to selective distrust of those on the ‘other side’. The Citizens’ Jury on Referendum Options in Korsholm, Finland, was organized in conjunction with a polarized referendum on a municipal merger. Our analysis is based on a field experiment measuring the effects of rea…
How voters choose one out of many: A conjoint analysis of the effects of endorsements on candidate choice
Candidate endorsements affect the likelihood that people vote for a candidate since they reduce the efforts devoted to vote choices. However, the effects of endorsements from different sources remain under-explored. Furthermore, the effects of endorsements are believed to vary with the level of political sophistication, as voters with low sophistication are more reliant on such shortcuts, but it is unclear whether these differences are similar fo…
Engaging the Millennials: The Citizens’ Initiative in Finland
Millennials’ disengagement from institutionalized politics has been a cause for concern among scholars and pundits. Consequently, there is an increased interest in possibilities to mobilize them through new participatory mechanisms, but the results are still unclear. We contribute to this research agenda by examining whether the Finnish citizens’ initiative mobilized the millennial generation with data from the Finnish National Election Survey fr…
Knowing and distrusting: How political trust and knowledge shape direct-democratic participation
This article examines how factual political knowledge and political trust shape direct-democratic involvement in the form of supporting citizens’ initiatives in Finland. Previous studies have debated the relative merits of cognitive mobilization and political dissatisfaction as predictors of support for direct democracy. This study builds on these efforts, but it extends the scope of analysis to examine reported participation in rather than suppo…
Does Deliberation Breed an Appetite for Discursive Participation? Assessing the Impact of First-Hand Experience
Various deliberative practices have been argued to constitute viable supplements to traditional representative decision making. At the same time, doubts have been raised as to whether ordinary citizens want to be involved in such demanding forms of political participation. This question has been difficult to resolve since few citizens have had the chance to take part in genuine deliberative practices. For this reason, we examine how participation…
Boosting Political Trust with Direct Democracy? The Case of the Finnish Citizens’ Initiative
Complementing representative democracy with direct-democratic instruments is perceived to boost levels of political trust. This was why Finland in 2012 introduced an agenda initiative, which gives citizens the right to propose legislation and thereby provides citizens a say between elections. However, it remains unclear whether involvement in such mechanisms helps restore political trust and what factors shape developments in political trust duri…
Perceptions of Inequality and Political Participation: The Moderating Role of Ideology
While much research has been devoted to the effects of inequality on political participation, little attention has been paid to how different kinds of subjective perceptions of social inequality affect citizens’ political behaviour. This is important since these perceptions shape the message that reaches political decision-makers when addressing concerns over social inequalities. This article differentiates between sociotropic and egocentric perc…
The potential of deliberative reasoning: Patterns of attitude change and consistency in cross-cutting and like-minded deliberation
How candidate characteristics affect favorability in European Parliament elections: Evidence from a conjoint experiment in Finland
Previous literature has studied voter behavior in European Parliament elections. However, it remains unclear how candidate characteristics affect favorability of EP candidates since it cannot be taken for granted that these characteristics work as in national elections. We therefore use a conjoint analysis to examine how gender, left-right ideology, issue focus, political experience, representative focus, citizenship, and attitude towards Europea…
Do populists want direct democracy? Examining how thick and thin populist attitudes are associated with the Finnish Citizens’ Initiative
Theoretical works suggest that populist attitudes are associated with demands for direct democracy in the form of referendums. However, it remains unclear how populist attitudes relate to other direct-democratic instruments such as citizens' initiatives. We therefore examine whether populist attitudes affect the attitudes toward the Citizens' Agenda Initiative (CI) in Finland with the help of the national election study from 2019 (n = 1598). We s…
Voting Women, Protesting Men: A Multilevel Analysis of Corruption, Gender, and Political Participation
Previous studies have been unable to establish the link between corruption perceptions and political participation. This is partly due to a disregard of different types of political participation, ignoring gender differences in how corruption perceptions affect political participation, and overlooking the importance of context. We therefore here examine gender differences in the links between corruption perceptions and three types of political pa…
Power Sharing and Political Dissatisfaction: A Multilevel Analysis of the Link Between Power-Sharing Institutions and Kinds of Political Dissatisfaction in 24 European Democracies
Institutional engineering offers a solution to the increasing political dissatisfaction in several representative democracies, since studies suggest that introducing elements of institutional power sharing may decrease negative attitudes. However, it may be important to distinguish different mixes of political attitudes since these can have different implications for the functioning of democracy. This article therefore examines the link between h…
A conjoint experiment of how design features affect evaluations of participatory platforms
The Composition of Political Culture—A Study of 25 European Democracies
The Political Competence of Internet Participants: Evidence from Finland
The role of the Internet in promoting active and efficacious citizenship has been debated. After initial excitement over the possibilities of the Internet, scholars have increasingly grown more cautious. Not only has it been doubted that the Internet is able to mobilize new segments of the citizenry, the abilities of those virtually active to navigate the political system have also been called into question. Hence, the problem concerns a quantita…
Political activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or political participation by other means
The impact of the Internet on political participation has been a debated issue in recent decades. Internet activities have been criticized for being slacktivism, where the real life impact of the activities is limited; the main effect is to enhance the feel-good factor for the participants. This article examines whether this accusation is valid. It does so by examining two aspects of Internet campaigns: Whether they are effective in affecting rea…
All the same? Examining the link between three kinds of political dissatisfaction and protest
Deliberation and Opinion Change: Evidence from a Deliberative Mini‐public inFinland
A number of studies examining the effects of deliberative citizen forums have found that citizens taking part in deliberative processes experience changes in their policy attitudes. However, it remains unclear why these opinion changes occur, since most studies pay little attention to the communicative exchange that is expected to cause the observed changes. Within deliberative theory, there is an expectation that reasonable individuals should be…
The Composition of Political Culture—A Study of 25 European Democracies
Power Sharing and Political Dissatisfaction: A Multilevel Analysis of the Link Between Power-Sharing Institutions and Kinds of Political Dissatisfaction in 24 European Democracies
Institutional engineering offers a solution to the increasing political dissatisfaction in several representative democracies, since studies suggest that introducing elements of institutional power sharing may decrease negative attitudes. However, it may be important to distinguish different mixes of political attitudes since these can have different implications for the functioning of democracy. This article therefore examines the link between h…
When trust matters—a multilevel analysis of the effect of generalized trust on political participation in 25 European democracies
Generalized social trust has been argued to have positive effects for both individuals and society, but despite solid theoretical arguments in favour of different contextual effects, the empirical evidence remains scant. We here examine whether and how the effect of generalized trust on the propensity to become politically active is moderated by the level of generalized trust in society. We inspect two different causal mechanisms: The rainmaker e…
Ideals and Actions: Do Citizens’ Patterns of Political Participation Correspond to their Conceptions of Democracy
The interest in procedures for political decision-making has grown tremendously during recent decades. Given the intense scholarly debate and the implementation of greater opportunities for citizen participation in many democracies, there has been surprisingly little interest in citizens’ conceptions of democracy understood as their preferences concerning the processes by which the political system works. Some recent attempts do, however, suggest…
Knowing and distrusting: How political trust and knowledge shape direct-democratic participation
This article examines how factual political knowledge and political trust shape direct-democratic involvement in the form of supporting citizens’ initiatives in Finland. Previous studies have debated the relative merits of cognitive mobilization and political dissatisfaction as predictors of support for direct democracy. This study builds on these efforts, but it extends the scope of analysis to examine reported participation in rather than suppo…
Ideology and Deliberation: An Analysis of Public Support for Deliberative Practices in Finland
The introduction of deliberative practices has been proposed as a method for revitalizing representative democracies suffering from decreasing political involvement and increasing fragmentation (Dryzek, 2000; Grönlund, Bächtiger, & Setälä, 2014; Parkinson & Mansbridge, 2012). Some scholars, however, question whether citizens are willing to engage in deliberative practices (Bartels, 2003; Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002; Posner, 2004). A related conc…
The Finnish Citizens’ Initiative: Towards Inclusive Agenda‐setting
This article examines whether the Citizens' Initiative (CI) in Finland has enhanced inclusion in processes of political agenda‐setting. Democratic innovations such as CIs have been proposed as a solution to the challenges facing Western democracies. CIs are expected to increase political inclusion by allowing citizens to set the political agenda and by mobilising otherwise marginalised or passive citizens. However, the empirical evidence on this …
Does Deliberation Breed an Appetite for Discursive Participation? Assessing the Impact of First-Hand Experience
Various deliberative practices have been argued to constitute viable supplements to traditional representative decision making. At the same time, doubts have been raised as to whether ordinary citizens want to be involved in such demanding forms of political participation. This question has been difficult to resolve since few citizens have had the chance to take part in genuine deliberative practices. For this reason, we examine how participation…
Self-reported health and democratic innovations: The case of the citizens’ initiative in Finland
This study examines the association between self-reported health and the propensity for supporting citizens’ initiatives in Finland. Democratic innovations such as the citizens’ initiative provide novel ways for citizens to express their preferences, but whether people in poor health make use of such possibilities remains unclear. The data come from the Finnish National Election Study (FNES2015), a cross-sectional representative sample of the Fin…
The influence of political knowledge on opinion polarization in citizen deliberation
Empirical studies show that people with high political knowledge tend to polarize more than others. Polarization refers to a process where one becomes more extreme in the direction of her or his original views. While some evidence supports this view, there is also contrasting evidence, rendering ambiguous conclusions. Discussing in a deliberative setting might alleviate polarization among participants independent of whether they are knowledgeable…
Boosting Political Trust with Direct Democracy? The Case of the Finnish Citizens’ Initiative
Complementing representative democracy with direct-democratic instruments is perceived to boost levels of political trust. This was why Finland in 2012 introduced an agenda initiative, which gives citizens the right to propose legislation and thereby provides citizens a say between elections. However, it remains unclear whether involvement in such mechanisms helps restore political trust and what factors shape developments in political trust duri…
Engaging the Millennials: The Citizens’ Initiative in Finland
Millennials’ disengagement from institutionalized politics has been a cause for concern among scholars and pundits. Consequently, there is an increased interest in possibilities to mobilize them through new participatory mechanisms, but the results are still unclear. We contribute to this research agenda by examining whether the Finnish citizens’ initiative mobilized the millennial generation with data from the Finnish National Election Survey fr…
A Matter of Life or Death: A Survey Experiment on the Perceived Legitimacy of Political Decision-Making on Euthanasia
Most representative democracies seem to experience dwindling levels of legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what people want from parliamentary decision-making. In this study, we test the impact of outcome favourability, actor involvement and justifications on the perceived legitimacy of a parliamentary decision-making process on euthanasia in Finland. We do so with the help of a survey experiment (n = 1243), where…
A conjoint experiment of how design features affect evaluations of participatory platforms
Immediate rewards or delayed gratification? A conjoint survey experiment of the public’s policy preferences
Previous scholarship has focused primarily on how citizens’ form policy preferences and how those preferences are taken into account in democratic decision-making. However, the temporal aspect of policy preferences has received little attention, although many significant societal problems have consequences that extend far into the future. To fill the gap, we examine to what extent citizens are willing to support policies, when rewards can only be…
The potential of deliberative reasoning: Patterns of attitude change and consistency in cross-cutting and like-minded deliberation
How candidate characteristics affect favorability in European Parliament elections: Evidence from a conjoint experiment in Finland
Previous literature has studied voter behavior in European Parliament elections. However, it remains unclear how candidate characteristics affect favorability of EP candidates since it cannot be taken for granted that these characteristics work as in national elections. We therefore use a conjoint analysis to examine how gender, left-right ideology, issue focus, political experience, representative focus, citizenship, and attitude towards Europea…
How citizens evaluate participatory processes: A Conjoint Analysis
This study examines how characteristics of participatory processes affect citizens’ evaluations of such processes and thereby establish what kind of participatory process citizens demand. The literature on democratic innovations has proposed different criteria for evaluating participatory innovations. What remains unclear, however, is how citizens evaluate these participatory mechanisms. This is here examined in a conjoint analysis embedded in a …
Future Orientation and Political Participation: The Moderating Role of Political Trust
Previous studies show consistent differences in how people evaluate future consequences and implications of this for a variety of phenomena. The implications for the individual propensity for taking part in different forms of political participation have received limited scholarly attention, however. This is unfortunate since it affects how people voice their concerns over future problems and thereby also whether and how decision-makers become aw…
How voters choose one out of many: A conjoint analysis of the effects of endorsements on candidate choice
Candidate endorsements affect the likelihood that people vote for a candidate since they reduce the efforts devoted to vote choices. However, the effects of endorsements from different sources remain under-explored. Furthermore, the effects of endorsements are believed to vary with the level of political sophistication, as voters with low sophistication are more reliant on such shortcuts, but it is unclear whether these differences are similar fo…
Voting Women, Protesting Men: A Multilevel Analysis of Corruption, Gender, and Political Participation
Previous studies have been unable to establish the link between corruption perceptions and political participation. This is partly due to a disregard of different types of political participation, ignoring gender differences in how corruption perceptions affect political participation, and overlooking the importance of context. We therefore here examine gender differences in the links between corruption perceptions and three types of political pa…
Political science (36 works) · Politics (32 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (27 works) · Law (27 works) · Social Media and Politics (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Democracy (18 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Social Psychology (16 works)