Voters behave differently in European Parliament (EP) elections compared to national elections because less is at stake in these ‘second‐order’ elections. While this explains the primary characteristic of EP elections, it has often led to a conflation of distinct motivations for changing behaviour – namely sincere and protest voting. By distinguishing these motivations, this article addresses the question of when and why voters alter their behaviour in EP elections. In addition, it argues that the degree of politicisation of the EU in the domestic debate shapes the extent to which voters rely on EU, rather than national, considerations. These propositions are tested in a multilevel analysis in 27 countries in the 2009 EP elections. The findings have important implications for understanding why voters change their behaviour between different types of elections.

The extent and ways in which popular preferences influence government policy are absolutely central to our understanding of modern democracy. Paul Warwick's discussion of these in the European Journal of Political Research in 2010 puts itself at the heart of the debate with its critique of the median mandate theory of McDonald and Budge, proposing an alternative ‘bilateralist’ concept of representation. This article questions whether this concept has much to add to our theoretical understanding of representational processes. However, Warwick's further conceptual points deserve serious consideration. These concern the time horizons within which representative processes work, and the status of the median position given multi‐motivated voting. At the evidential level, Warwick argues that survey‐based measures of voter and party left–right positions fail to produce the correspondence between median and government policy positions that median mandate theory would have us expect. However, survey‐based measures of median voter and party placements obscure important cross‐national variation. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES 2007), as Warwick does, this article shows that survey respondents norm their own and their country's party positions to their national context. The consequence is to make the political centre in all nations appear similar. Allowing for the relevant cross‐national differences brings the relationship between the median voter and government position back in line with expectations.

While institutional theories of party system size are usually examined cross‐nationally, there is ample reason to expect that changes in electoral institutions will affect party system size within countries as well. Although some of this effect may occur immediately, most of the effects are likely to be realised over time and across subsequent elections. A series of error‐correction models examine the short‐ and long‐term effects of changes in electoral institutions on party system size. The results indicate that changes in electoral institutions do produce the expected effects on party system size, and that these effects occur mostly over the long term.

Are citizens in consensus democracies with developed direct democratic institutions more satisfied with their political system than those in majoritarian democracies? In this article, individual‐level data from the second wave of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and an updated version of Lijphart's multivariate measure of consensus and majoritarian democracy covering 24 countries are used to investigate this question. The findings from logistic multilevel models indicate that consensual cabinet types and direct democratic institutions are associated with higher levels of citizens' satisfaction with democracy. Furthermore, consensus democracy in these institutions closes the gap in satisfaction with democracy between losers and winners of elections by both comforting losers and reducing the satisfaction of winners. Simultaneously, consensus democracy in terms of electoral rules, the executive–legislative power balance, interest groups and the party system reduces the satisfaction of election winners, but does not enhance that of losers.

The impact of local campaigning on voter choice has been studied within the theme of mobilisation. Grassroots effort can attract votes efficiently, but campaign contact is (potentially) endogenous, so results showing positive effects could be flawed. Experimental solutions to this problem are possible, but could also have low external validity. Drawing on the electoral geography literature, this article suggests that endogeneity concerns can be addressed through so‐called ‘friends and neighbours voting’. One source of endogeneity is that that candidates may tend to canvass those living close to their own homes, and those canvassed would be expected in any case to be prone to support local candidates. The problem of endogeneity is reframed and treated as an omitted variable bias. Using unique Irish data on the geographic location of the homes of candidates, as well as data on the location of the voters, the analysis confirms that canvassing has a positive impact on candidate choice independent of the effect of geographic distance. More importantly, these two variables interact. The results point to the relevance of the geographic dimension of electoral politics in driving the endogeneity bias in local campaigning studies.

The extent of strategic voting in the Spanish general elections of 2000, 2004 and 2008 is estimated using a new measure of strategic incentives suitable for proportional representation systems that avoids some of the problems associated with lagged variables. Strategic behaviour increased from 12 to 33 per cent of the electoral base of the United Left Party, the major victim of strategic defection. This estimate is a conservative one as elite mobilisation is controlled for in the constituencies, which is unusual in the literature on strategic voting that uses regression‐based methods.

This article offers an overview of levels of party membership in European democracies at the end of the first decade of the twenty‐first century and looks also at changes in these levels over time, comparing party membership today with figures from both 1980 and the late 1990s. While relying primarily on the direct and individual membership figures as reported by the parties themselves, the fit of the data with survey data is explored and it is concluded that the two perform well in terms of convergent validity. The differences between large and small democracies are examined, as well as old and new democracies, and it is found that levels of party membership are related to both the size and age of the democratic polity in question. Finally, the implications of the patterns observed in the membership data are discussed, and it is suggested that membership has now reached such a low ebb that it may no longer constitute a relevant indicator of party organisational capacity.

Public evaluations of EU performance are not only critical indicators of the EU's output legitimacy, but also shape future support for European integration. For citizens to monitor the political performance of the EU they need relevant facts, yet it is anything but clear that gains in information about EU performance cause change in judgements about such performance. Drawing on two‐wave panel data, this article examines whether acquiring information following a real‐world EU decision‐making event alters citizens' judgements about the utilitarian and democratic performance of the EU. It also examines how this effect differs for people with different levels of general political information. It is found that citizens who acquired performance‐relevant information became more approving of the EU's utilitarian performance but did not change their judgements about its democratic performance. Also, individuals with moderate levels of general political information were affected most strongly by new facts about performance. The implications of these findings for EU‐level representative democracy are considered.

Although it is widely accepted that a decentralised system can enhance policy learning and the spread of best practices, an under‐researched question is where that learning process takes place. Using data on the diffusion of health care policies in Switzerland, this article analyses the role of institutionalised intergovernmental cooperation and its impact on the spread of successful policies. The results show that joint membership of policy makers in health policy specific intergovernmental bodies is related to the diffusion of best practices.

How quickly, to what extent and under what conditions do voters and elites adapt to new electoral institutions in order to not waste their votes and effort on hopeless competitors? A latent‐curve model of strategic adaptation is developed and fitted to district‐level election data from Spain. The extent of strategic adaptation is generally found to vary with the strength of the electoral system. However, grave ethnic tensions are demonstrated to seriously retard adaptation even under favourable institutional conditions.

This article develops the reward‐punishment issue model of voting using a newly collated aggregate measure of issue competence in Britain between 1971 and 1997, revealing systematic differences between governing and opposition parties in the way citizens' evaluations of party competence are related to vote intention. Using monthly Gallup ‘best party to handle the most important problem’ and vote intention data, time series Granger‐causation tests give support to a classic issue reward‐punishment model for incumbents. However, for opposition parties this reward‐punishment model does not hold: macro‐issue competence evaluations are Granger‐caused by changes in vote choice or governing party competence. An explanation is offered based upon the differentiating role of policy performance and informational asymmetries, and the implications are considered for comparative studies of voting, public opinion and for political party competition.

Previous studies comparing ideological groups have been restricted to tests of between‐group differences in the means of relevant political psychological variables, thereby neglecting group differences in the variances, meanings and nomological networks of the tested variables. A first exploratory study used data from the European Social Survey (N = 7,314) comparing groups of political party members on the basis of their scores on a self‐placement left–right scale. The second study (N = 69) constituted an in‐depth test for the presence of differences between samples of political activists of moderate parties, communists, anarchists and right‐wing extremists. The results revealed that there is a fair amount of heterogeneity within left‐wing and right‐wing extremists, indicating a substantial amount of within‐group variance of social attitudes, values and prejudice. Moreover, the extremist ideologies are best approached as distinct ideologies that cannot be reduced to extreme versions of moderate ideology, and differences in the meanings and nomological networks of the various extremist ideologies were also obtained. It is erroneous to consider members of extremist groups as being ‘all alike’. The findings obtained from samples of political moderates are not a particularly solid basis for theories about extremism.

The dominant explanation of public attitudes vis‐à‐vis economic globalisation focuses on re‐distributional implications, with an emphasis on factor endowments and government‐sponsored safety nets (the compensation hypothesis). The empirical implication of these theoretical arguments is that in advanced economies, on which this article focuses, individuals endowed with less human and financial capital will be more likely to experience income losses. Hence they will oppose economic openness unless they are compensated by the government. It is argued here that including social capital in the analysis can fill two gaps in explanations relying on factor endowments and the compensation hypothesis. First, generalised trust – one key aspect of social capital – constitutes a personal endowment alongside human and financial capital. Second, structural social capital – another key aspect of social capital – can be regarded as a nongovernmental social safety net that can compensate for endowment‐related disadvantages of individuals. Both aspects of social capital are expected to contribute, for distinct reasons, to more positive views on economic openness. The empirical testing relies on survey data for two countries: Switzerland and the United States. For both countries, the results indicate that generalised trust has a strong, positive effect on public opinion of economic globalisation, whereas structural social capital has no effect.

It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra‐party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems – where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates – create another type of variation in personal vote‐seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party‐in‐a‐district lists results from voters' actual inclination to use preference votes and the formal weight of preference votes in changing the original list order. Hypotheses are tested which are linked to this logic for the case of Belgium, where party‐in‐a‐district constituencies vary in their use of preference votes and the electoral reform of 2001 adds interesting institutional variation in the formal impact of preference votes on intra‐party seat allocation. Since formal rules grant Belgian MPs considerable leeway in terms of bill initiation, personal vote‐seeking strategies are inferred by examining the use of legislative activity as signalling tool in the period between 1999 and 2007. The results establish that personal vote‐seeking incentives vary with the extent to which voters use preference votes and that this variable interacts with the weight of preference votes as defined by institutional rules. In addition, the article confirms the effect of intra‐party competition on personal vote‐seeking incentives and illustrates that such incentives can underlie the initiation of private members bills in a European parliamentary system.

What can explain the strong euroscepticism of radical parties of both the right and the left? This article argues that the answer lies in the paradoxical role of nationalism as a central element in both party families, motivating opposition towards European integration. Conventionally, the link between nationalism and euroscepticism is understood solely as a prerogative of radical right‐wing parties, whereas radical left‐wing euroscepticism is associated with opposition to the neoliberal character of the European Union. This article contests this view. It argues that nationalism cuts across party lines and constitutes the common denominator of both radical right‐wing and radical left‐wing euroscepticism. It adopts a mixed‐methods approach, combining intensive case study analysis with quantitative analysis of party manifestos. First, it traces the link between nationalism and euroscepticism in Greece and France in order to demonstrate the internal validity of the argument. It then undertakes a cross‐country statistical estimation to assess the external validity of the argument and its generalisability across Europe.

While Euroscepticism is the most important driver of United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) support, other attitudinal drivers – namely dissatisfaction towards mainstream parties and xenophobia – are also important. Examining vote‐switching between first‐ and second‐order elections evidence is found of a distinction between two types of supporter: more affluent and middle‐class ‘strategic defectors’ from the mainstream Conservative Party who support UKIP to register their Euroscepticism, and more economically marginal and politically disaffected ‘core loyalists’ who are attracted to UKIP by its anti‐immigration rhetoric and populist anti‐establishment strategy. UKIP also succeeds in attracting core support from groups such as women who have traditionally rejected extreme right parties such as the British National Party (BNP). This suggests that UKIP is well positioned to recruit a broader and more enduring base of support than the BNP.

Explanations of different patterns of preferences for redistribution either highlight the role of the institutional framework in a country or highlight the importance of self‐interest and rational expectations. The study introduces a unified approach to explain differences in preferences for redistributive measures for the case of intergenerational monetary transfers for families and children. Both explanatory approaches are integrated into the action‐based Model of Frame Selection that incorporates normative motives and economic self‐interest into the process of decision making. Using a large sample that deals with questions on the approval of public policies for families and accounts for the normative importance of children and family life in Germany, evidence is provided that both approaches are valid in explaining preferences for government transfers.

The preceding article by Best, Budge and McDonald acknowledges much of the substance of the alternative ‘bilateralist’ interpretation of democratic governance I advocated and attempts to re‐focus the median mandate approach towards a longer‐term, and potentially more productive, understanding of the opinion‐policy relationship. Both are welcome developments. Despite taking these steps, however, the authors choose to allow the fate of the median mandate thesis to rest ultimately on an attempt to re‐establish the short‐term one‐to‐one relationship that I challenged. In this brief note, I argue that this not only undercuts the more positive initiatives noted above, but also is based on a flawed understanding of how the short‐term relationship should be operationalised and tested.

To hold their Members of Parliament individually accountable for their legislative behaviour, British voters would need to base their decision to vote for an MP at least partially on the extent to which the MP's legislative voting behaviour deviated from that of the MP's party leadership. Voters should evaluate this deviation contingent on their views of the party leadership. MP rebellion can signal that voter–MP congruence is greater than that of the voter and the MP's party leadership. In this article it is found that only constituents with negative attitudes toward the Labour government reward rebellious Labour MPs, albeit to a limited extent. A similar conditional association is not observed on a single issue: Iraq. The policy accountability of MPs is relatively weak and general rather than issue‐specific.

This article compares the tactic of trashing genetically modified crops in activist campaigns in Britain and France. In Britain, most crop trashing was carried out covertly, while in France most activists undertook open, public actions. In seeking an explanation for this, the article shows that the analysis of political opportunities, dominant in comparative studies of social movements, can only take us so far. While it helps explain the occurrence of direct action, it is much less useful in explaining the tactical differences between each country. It is argued that a fuller explanation requires an understanding of how action was shaped by different activist traditions. In France, action was staged as a demonstration of serious, responsible, collective Republican citizenship; in the United Kingdom, activists combined a sceptical view of legality developing from anarchist individualism with an explicitly non‐threatening, playful, ethos. The article concludes that a focus on activist traditions can provide an effective bridge between structural and cultural approaches to understanding the determinants of social movement action.