Odelia Oshri © All Rights Reserved.
Trans4Demo is an international research project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program, set to run from December 2024 to the end of 2027. It investigates the contentious politics arising from climate change and sustainable transitions, particularly how these conflicts impact democracy. The project focuses on the rise of authoritarian tendencies and right-wing populism, which have weakened social cohesion and hindered responses to climate challenges in the EU. By studying these dynamics, Trans4Demo aims to develop a conceptual framework, practical insights, and policy recommendations to support democratic renewal and constructive engagement across European contexts.
Over the past two decades, Muslims have emerged as a substantial political force in advanced democracies, yet little is known about this population’s electoral choices or the factors that shape them. We fielded a survey in Germany – Europe’s most populous country with the continent’s largest Muslim population, and assess the effect of social and political exclusion on the political behavior of that population. We find that exposure to exclusion on the part of the host society propels Muslims towards group voting and casting their votes for leftwing parties. While considerable resources have been invested in integrating Muslim populations into Western societies, this research shows that mere integration efforts fall short. To truly foster political integration, we must examine how Muslims are treated within Western democratic societies.
Previous research has established that men are more likely to vote for populist radical right parties (PPRPs) than women. This article shows how cross-national and temporal variation in PRRPs’ electoral success interacts with individuals’ risk propensity to affect this gender gap. We hypothesize that gender differences in the electoral support of PRRPs stems from gender differences in risk-taking. The study conceptualizes risk in terms of two components, social and electoral, and demonstrates that women are more risk-averse with regard to both. Results challenge common explanations for the gender gap and shed light on the role of the electoral context and the different ways women and men respond to it.
In this research, we examine the role of attachment to an ideological group as a source of stability in a volatile multi-party system. In two studies conducted in Israel (N=1,320), we show that a multi-item Attachment to an Ideological Group (AIG) scale is strongly tied to vote choice and political engagement, and its effects are independent of, and more powerful than, issue-based ideology and partisan identity strength. Compared to individuals with a weak ideological attachment, those who score highly on the AIG scale are more likely to vote for a party from their ideological camp and participate in politics.
Moreover, in two survey experiments, respondents high in AIG displayed stronger anger or enthusiasm—known harbingers of political action—in response to threat or reassurance to their ideological group’s status, attesting to a link between AIG and political engagement. Our findings underscore the importance of ideological group attachments in a volatile multi-party system.
Studies have widely documented that women’s descriptive representation in parliaments enhances their substantive representation. We probe this relationship under varying levels of women’s collective and individual marginality based on an original dataset documenting the parliamentary behavior of Israeli legislators over the course of 11 parliamentary terms (1977–2015). Using several measures of individual-level marginality such as parliamentary tenure, we show that marginalized female legislators are more prone to engage in gender-related parliamentary activity than their less marginal counterparts, albeit only under a certain threshold of women’s marginality as a group. The paper elucidates the dynamic nature of the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of disadvantaged groups by demonstrating that it is contingent on their collective standing in parliament and on the marginality of individual legislators as manifested in their strategic choices
How do national stories shape voter behavior? Do they affect all voters equally, or are some groups more influenced by these narratives? This article examines the impact of “boundary national stories,” which highlight clear distinctions between “us” and “them” in national identity, on voting patterns for populist radical right parties (PRRPs). Using original representative election surveys conducted in four Western democracies, we find that voters who embrace a Boundary national story are more likely to vote for Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) than those who do not hold such stories, and that the electoral effect of such stories is more salient for marginalized groups in society. Our findings demonstrate that, while national stories can foster cohesion, they can also drive us apart and polarize our politics. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of these findings for the study of populism in political science.
How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties? A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU’s discourse, resulting in what is usually termed ‘normative power Europe’. Yet the research and knowledge to-date about the EU’s discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the potential to undermine the coherence of the EU’s identity and thus also its objective to ‘speak with one voice’. This article explores the EU’s discursive management of the continuity-versus-change imperative by analyzing the integration of new values into the text of its treaties. This issue is addressed based on a quantitative content analysis on the full texts of European founding treaties between the 1950s and 2009. Findings show that the distribution of the EU’s values in the text is not uniform: while the language of market economy and democracy is pervasive, the values of peace, European identity, rights and social justice are mentioned less frequently and in restricted linguistic environments. To account for the differences in the integration of values into the EU’s treaty discourse, the article develops the notion of a discursive mechanism of differentiated value integration (MDVI). This rationale echoes the logic of differentiation in policy implementation employed by the EU. It is claimed here that, applied in the European discursive arena, MDVI allows radically different readings of the same text. This helps the EU to maintain a coherent value identity while at the same time enabling change.
In post-conflict societies, traumatic experiences can have a profound effect on electoral behaviour. In Northern Ireland, Westminster elections between 2001 and 2017 were marked by the rise of hardline parties, but the 2019 election saw a significant shift towards the centre. The centre ground vote soared, resulting in the lowest level of political polarisation since the early 2000s. What are the factors underlying this transition to a moderate vote? Drawing on public opinion surveys and electoral data, we find that Brexit played a crucial role in incentivising voters to support parties prioritising non-sectarian constitutional interests. The findings suggest that voters employ party competition as a balancing mechanism. Our article contributes to the understanding of how individuals in post-conflict societies navigate the complex relationship between violence, politics, and peacebuilding.
Why, despite increased female support, do social democratic parties (SDPs) in most Western European countries face electoral decline? To study this puzzle, we harness a well-documented regularity – diminishing support for SDPs by manual workers and their increased support for the far right. We contend that this trend is intensified in contexts where the economic positions of SDPs align with market-oriented policies or converge with those of the far right. Additionally, as men are disproportionately represented among manual workers, this shift contributes to the reversal of the gender gap in support for SDPs. Drawing on public opinion data from 18 countries spanning 46 years, along with labor and party position data, our findings substantiate this argument
We argue that legislators use their speaking time in parliament to offer compensatory speech to their constituents who might oppose how they voted on a policy, in order to reestablish themselves as responsive to the public’s wishes. Leveraging the case of Brexit, we show that legislators pay more attention to constituents who might be dissatisfied with how they voted. Furthermore, their use of rhetorical responsiveness is contingent on the magnitude of the representational deficit they face vis-à-vis their constituency. Our findings attest to the central role of parliamentary speech in maintaining responsiveness. They also demonstrate that communicative responsiveness can substitute for policy responsiveness
This article explores the potential of incorporating narrative theory into the study of coalition formation. Following a discussion of the role of narratives in group-formation processes in a coalition-driven dynamic, we offer a theoretical framework to examine the ways political stories espoused by people are mirrored by the partisan system. We integrate theoretical assumptions of narrative studies with coalition-formation theories in an attempt to frame coalition-formation models in terms of voters’ political stories. We test our theoretical framework by simulating various possible coalitions in the Israeli 2009 elections and assess the results based upon data from an exit poll survey.
Has the European Union (EU) succeeded in socializing citizens to support the democratic values it claims to promote? On the face of it, the prevailing skepticism precludes any expectation of a successful socialization of EU citizens to the EU values. Yet, according to the socialization hypothesis, citizens’ support for these values is expected to increase as countries accumulate more years of the EU membership. Using survey data to isolate distinct dimensions of democratic values, we examine differences among countries in this regard, as well as changes within countries over time. Results confirm the socialization hypothesis, showing that support for democratic values is generally higher in countries with more years of the EU membership, and that this support trends upwards over time.