Research

The COVID-19 crisis generated a series of smaller crises in EU member states, especially in the states with the weakest pre-existing political institutions. This chapter analyses the socio-political context of 2020 and the way political institutions reacted to the pandemic. Political party activity was generally muted, despite the existence of local and general elections in the country.

Many researchers have identified polarization as problematic for democracy and disruptive for society in general. Because the increase of polarization is so dangerous, its mitigation becomes more urgent. We claim that cross-party contact might reduce affective polarization among party activists even in less established democracies. We leverage a pre-registered unique longitudinal dataset of party activists in a multi-party European post-communist democracy using a difference-in-difference framework. We study whether contact between strong partisans who act as party delegates in precincts on election day reduces affective polarization, while comparing with strong partisans without delegate responsibilities. We demonstrate that party activists are affectively polarized and that they are mostly polarized against the out-party elites and the party itself. Election-day contact with out-party peers has a limited effect on reducing animus towards the members and voters of the party the partisans are most polarized against. Similar to the mass public, party activists de-polarize immediately after elections and the effect persists for at least two months.

It is commonly viewed that violence against politicians increases support for the victim’s party. We revisit this conjecture drawing on evidence from an assassination of an opposition politician in Poland. First, we analyze engagement with Twitter content posted by opposition and government politicians using a difference-in-differences framework. Second, we use a public opinion survey collected in the days around the attack and compare party preferences of respondents interviewed just before and respondents interviewed just after the attack. Our results reveal decreased support for the victim’s (opposition) party relative to support for the government. To explain this finding, we show that the opposition antagonized the public by engaging in negative campaigning against the government over their politician’s assassination.

This study tests through an experiment the hypothesis that heavy emphasis on conflicts in the news undermines political trust and has an impact on citizens’ cynicism and political participation. Findings do not support a uniform negative impact of the conflicts covered in the news but demonstrate a cumulative effect of their levels of intrusiveness and incivility. In addition, we found consistent evidence that personal characteristics influence people’s reactions to conflicts. For extrovert individuals, who are typically more assertive in public matters, have higher levels of political knowledge and feel more politically efficacious, exposure to conflict frames does not necessarily result in lower political trust.

An analysis of the 2006 primary campaigns for the Ohio governorship found that candidates offering the media easier access enjoyed substantially more positive coverage that reflected an imbalance in their favor both in candidate-driven news and in the use of candidate quotes.

Using a pre-registered panel of political activists from a new party in a EU-member country, we study if political participation in election monitoring securely increases the monitor’s satisfaction with democracy. We employ a difference-in-difference framework to identify a plausible counterfactual group. We also use data to explore potential heterogeneous effects.

While affective polarization is one of the most studied topics in modern political behaviour research, little is known about the varying levels of AP in different societal groups. In this paper, we zoom in on one new political party in an EU member state and comparatively study the affective polarization levels of the party elites, the party activists, and the party voters. We find some evidence to confirm that party elites are likely less polarized than party activists.

Growing support for populist radical right parties in declining areas, especially in post-communist societies, has often been attributed to the strain of economic decline, failure to instill democratic norms, and xenophobia. We propose a different but complementary explanation: emigration from these regions means that many voters who would have been least likely to support anti-system parties have left and left behind a population of increasingly disaffected voters. We exploit the case of German reunification when 16 million East Germans were suddenly free to move to wealthier West Germany and show that net outflows predict higher levels of populist radical right support. Using both administrative and panel survey data, we investigate multiple mechanisms: those who left are different from those who stayed, and a higher concentration of anti-establishment voters in out-migration areas affects the political preferences of those who stay.

Historical legacies of communist dictatorships have been studied heavily in recent years, showing that political actions initiated in communism may have important effects on contemporary political attitudes and behaviours. Unavoidably, communism creates important tensions between its in-group and its out-group. This paper explores how dealing with the communist past at the onset of modern democracies may perpetuate or mitigate the tensions within society. This study is conducted in CEE post-communist countries, many of which have often been identified as generating high levels of unexplained affective polarization considering their underdeveloped political cleavages.