An extensive literature has investigated the importance of governing political elites in the transition from authoritarianism. However, we still know very little about the role of opposition forces, especially in conflict zones within the Global South. This article addresses this research gap by analysing how parliamentary opposition strategies contributed to Libya’s transition outcome. It examines the opposition strategies directed against the Islamic majority within the General National Congress, the country’s first elected parliament after Gaddafi’s fall in 2011. It uses primary data drawn from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2023 with former politicians, academics, political journalists and non-governmental organisation (NGO) activists. The findings illustrate how, although opposition strategies were aimed at countering Islamic influence, they resulted in the destabilising consequences of affective polarisation and institutional fragmentation.

Electoral democracies are under strain. Elections and conventional relations of representation between elected politicians and citizens do not seem to be providing sufficient legitimacy for democratic governance. In principle, democratic innovations such as deliberative minipublics or participatory budgeting could supplement electoral systems so that they function more democratically. But elected representatives may resist these innovations due to unfamiliarity, perceived threats to their power, and the belief that traditional electoral methods suffice for democratic legitimacy. This paper theorizes the potential incentives for elected officials to adopt democratic innovations, examining the conditions under which innovations might align with their interests. Democratic deficits may, and often do, present electoral risks and challenges. By mapping democratic deficits onto elite incentives, we suggest when, where, and why the strategic motivations of elected officials might align with democratic innovations. We illustrate the theory with examples of democratic innovations drawn primarily from the Participedia database. We conclude that strategies for deepening democracy should include understanding how democratic innovations relate to incentives structured by electoral institutions, so that innovations might supplement rather than compete with electoral democracy.

Climate change – and skepticism toward it – is increasingly present not only among far-right parties but also across the political spectrum in more nuanced forms. This article examines the diverse climate attitudes of local political elites, who play a key role in the implementation of climate policy. We develop an analytical framework to assess varying degrees of climate skepticism, with particular attention to a broader ‘gray zone’ of attitudes that combine acceptance of anthropogenic climate change with doubts about its implications, responsibilities, or policy responses. We empirically examine the views of municipal council members in Saxony and Thuringia – two eastern German states characterized by salient climate and energy policy conflicts and ideologically competitive party systems. Using original web survey data, our findings reveal a wide spectrum of partial climate skepticism extending beyond the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and into parts of the political mainstream. Moreover, we identify substantial variation across different dimensions of climate skepticism as well as significant intra-party heterogeneity. Overall, parties are not monolithic actors on climate-related attitudes but internally diverse organizations in which multiple positions coexist. Understanding these local-level attitudes is crucial for assessing the political feasibility of climate policy implementation. By mapping the ‘gray zone’ of climate skepticism among local political elites, this study contributes to a more fine-grained understanding of climate attitudes within and across party lines.

Rooted in concerns about losers’ consent to electoral outcomes, a vast literature documents a winner–loser gap in democratic attitudes among voters, with winners displaying systematically more positive attitudes than losers across a range of indicators. Surprisingly, we know much less about whether this gap extends to politicians. This paper addresses this question both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we distinguish between politicians’ reactions to electoral outcomes at the individual level – whether candidates secure a seat in parliament – and the party level – whether their party enters government, and theorise about their interaction. Empirically, we present comprehensive observational evidence from 27 elections showing that losers systematically report lower satisfaction with democracy, weaker support for representative institutions, and lower perceptions of citizens’ trust. The gap is present at both levels, but the individual-level gap is conditioned by party outcomes: it is most pronounced within winning parties and disappears within losing parties. A complementary analysis leveraging close races and administrative data from Iceland provides plausibility that these associations are, at least in part, causal. Taken together, the findings reveal that democratic attitudes among rank-and-file politicians are, like those of voters, highly malleable and responsive to electoral outcomes. While politicians maintain overall positive attitudes towards democracy, this malleability raises questions about when and how such contingency might translate into anti-democratic behaviour.

Many models of domestic politics in international relations presume that political elites correctly perceive public preferences, even as a growing body of research in political behavior calls this assumption into question. Leveraging seven paired surveys of 4,852 foreign policy elites and 13,687 members of the American public from 2004–24 on twenty-four different questions, we show elites systematically misperceive public opinion in foreign policy, misperceiving the public as more isolationist and inward-looking than it actually is. We replicate this finding with a paired experiment showing that elites effectively underestimate the public’s responsiveness to cues from international organizations, and that elites with isolationist stereotypes underestimate public approval the most. These dynamics – which operate predominantly through stereotyping, rather than projection – have important implications for the study of political elites, public opinion about foreign policy, and efforts to test theoretical models of domestic politics in international relations using public opinion data alone.

This study examines how citizens and politicians evaluate different types of political conflict. Conflicts can be substantive in nature, involving disagreements over policy measures or clashes over core ideological values, or less substantive, concerning strategic relationships between parties. While conflict is inherent to politics, we know little about how different types of conflict are perceived by the public and how this differs from the perceptions of political elites. Whether citizens and their elected representatives share a common understanding of the role of conflict in politics is crucial, as misalignment may hamper political representation and effective governance. Empirically, our study relies on a survey experiment conducted among citizens (N = 8264) and politicians (N = 331) in four countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland) to investigate whether different types of conflict lead to different evaluations. Our results show that politicians are more likely to endorse ideological conflicts (over goals or core values) and substantive conflicts (over policy measures), yet citizens are more likely to approve of personal conflicts than politicians. Furthermore, politicians judge citizens’ perceptions of substantive and ideological conflicts more positively than citizens themselves and overestimate the concern citizens have with personal conflicts. These results may have important implications. If politicians fail to recognize that citizens are less accepting of political conflicts, this might be detrimental for trust in political parties and democracy at large – thus undermining the legitimacy of the political system.

Compensatory policies for the losers of trade are a key feature of the liberal economic order established after the Second World War. Legislators have a variety of policy options to choose. But do political elites and the public have the same attitudes toward compensatory policies? We expect an elite–public gap with the public relatively less supportive of spending policies and more supportive of tax cuts and trade restrictions than political elites. Moreover, we reason that ideology should matter more for elites than the public. Unique data from a survey with legislators in 19 European countries and public opinion surveys in three countries allow us to test this argument. We find that elites and the public indeed differ in their attitudes toward compensatory policies. However, these differences pale in comparison to variation in support for various compensatory policies. These findings shed light on the politics of compensation and on the political attitudes of elites and the public more broadly.

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 reputational cargo across different political elite groups. We argue that career similarity and transfers across elite positions are lower when recruitment criteria are exclusive. We also argue that acquired reputation may be a career liability limiting transfers into other elite groups. Empirically, we examine career trajectories and transfers across elite groups by mapping the full career of Members of the Parliament, top bureaucrats and interest group leaders in Denmark. We demonstrate that within the Danish political elite, career paths are relatively distinct and transfer few. Career distinctiveness and lack of elite transfers are especially pronounced for the bureaucratic elite, which is guarded by stricter recruitment criteria and on guard against reputations that might taint its image as a pure merit civil service. In contrast to other studies, our results suggest that the shutters between elite sectors are relatively closed. However, the few individuals passing through these most exclusive revolving doors may have a significant political impact.

This article explains legislative turnover in eight West European legislatures over 152 general elections in the period 1945–2015. Turnover is measured as the rate of individual membership change in unicameral or lower chambers. It is the outcome of a legislative recruitment process with a supply and a demand side. Decisions made by contenders affect supply, while decisions made by parties and voters influence demand. Such decisions are shaped by four political and institutional factors: the institutional context of political careers, or structure of political career opportunities; political party characteristics; electoral swings; and electoral systems. Ten specific hypotheses are tested within this theoretical framework. The structure of political career opportunities is the most decisive factor explaining variability in turnover rates, followed by electoral swings and political parties. Electoral systems show less substantive effects. Electoral volatility is the predictor with the most substantive effects, followed by duration of legislative term, strength of bicameralism, regional authority, gender quotas, level of legislative income and district magnitude.

This article is a review of Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves’ Born to Rule.

Political agenda‐setting research has shown that policy makers are responsive vis‐à‐vis media priorities. However, the mechanisms behind this effect have remained understudied so far. In particular, agenda‐setting scholars have difficulties determining to what extent politicians react to media coverage purely because of the information it contains (information effect), and to what extent the effect is driven not by what the media say but by the fact that certain information is in the media (media channel effect), which is valued for its own sake – for instance, because media coverage is considered to be a reflection of public opinion. By means of a survey‐embedded experiment with Belgian, Canadian and Israeli political elites (N = 410), this study tests whether the mere fact that an issue is covered by the news media causes politicians to pay attention to this issue. It shows that a piece of information gets more attention from politicians when it comes via the media rather than an identical piece of information coming via a personal e‐mail. This effect occurs largely across the board: it is not dependent on individual politician characteristics.

This research note introduces a dataset on the career paths of 754 Flemish ministerial advisors (MAs) spanning from 1999 to 2020. The dataset offers comprehensive insights into variables such as gender and age distribution, educational backgrounds, and career trajectories of MAs. To develop this dataset, we employed a suite of software tools designed for data collection, cleaning, and coding. This note details both the tools used and the resulting dataset, while also addressing potential biases and the robustness of the findings. We believe that both the data collection methodology and the dataset itself provide valuable opportunities for further research in elite career studies.

Many, if not most, phenomena faced by political elites are characterized by uncertainty. This characterization also holds for the concept uncertainty itself, with conceptualizations and operationalizations differing both across and within bodies of scholarship. The conceptual vagueness poses a challenge to the accumulation of knowledge. To address this challenge, we integrate and expand existing work and develop an uncertainty grid to map phenomena (e.g., Covid-19; digitalization) or aspects thereof (e.g., vaccines; generative Artificial Intelligence [AI]). The uncertainty grid includes both the nature of a phenomenon’s uncertainty (epistemic and/or aleatory) and its level and enables labeling phenomena as certain, resolvably uncertain, or radically uncertain. We demonstrate the utility of the uncertainty grid by mapping the development of uncertainty during the Covid-19 pandemic onto it. Moreover, we discuss how researchers can use the grid to develop testable hypotheses regarding political elites’ behavior in response to uncertain phenomena.

The relationship between parliaments and governments during the Covid-19 pandemic has been closely examined by various disciplines, which have typically analysed data on the laws and procedures enforced to manage the emergency. This literature generally agrees that the government dominated the management of the pandemic, often at the expense of parliamentary prerogatives. However, such data may not be sufficiently detailed to fully grasp some nuances. Above all, they may provide limited information on the factors that influenced the balance of powers between the two institutions. This article focuses on the Italian case. It complements data on legislation with the findings of semi-structured interviews conducted with members of parliament and government, as well as high-ranking bureaucrats, to gain a more in-depth understanding of these processes. The data on legislation suggest that governmental dominance was strong at every stage of the emergency, although parliament slightly regained some prerogatives over time. This recovery began under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, but it became more pronounced under Mario Draghi. The acquisition of knowledge about the pandemic was perceived by several interviewees as a factor that helped parliament regain some control, making it a possible outcome of a policy learning process. However, other factors also emerged as significant, such as the direct role of the prime ministers in strengthening the role of the executive and the difficulties of the technocratic members of the government in navigating parliamentary dynamics during Draghi’s tenure.

A key challenge when surveying political elites is recruitment. Low response rates can lead to biased samples and underpowered designs, threatening the validity of descriptive and experimental scholarship. In a randomized control trial, we test the effects of sending postal invitations in a large survey of local elected officials. We find that German and UK local politicians are more likely to complete the survey if invited by postal mail, rather than simply by email. Recruitment mode does not impact the quality of responses but shapes the population of local officials recruited. Officials invited via postal letter were more likely to come from smaller municipalities and less likely to have a college degree. Costs per response are relatively high but can be reduced as we learn more about selection into elite surveys.