Dieter Stiers

• PhD
• Postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven

Teachers’ beliefs influence the democratic values of their students, often through classroom practices. In this line of research, however, the political attitudes and preferences of teachers have received but scant attention. We report on the ideological and electoral preferences of teachers in secondary education in the Flemish region of Belgium....

For a long period of time, the Walloon region of Belgium has been an exception with regard to electoral trends in Western Europe. Not only the socialist party (PS) remained firmly entrenched as the dominant political party, but the region is also characterized by the absence of a viable radical right challenger party. The elections of June 2024, ho...

It has been well established that the effectiveness and quality of political representation is unequally distributed in Western democracies. Scholars have frequently warned about the rise of ‘diploma democracies’ and a ‘new gilded age’ in which political systems are skewed towards the interests of those with a higher socio-economic status. In this...

There is strong empirical support for the theory of sociotropic economic voting, stating that voters decide which party to vote for based on their perception of the country’s economic situation. There is less evidence, however, for the occurrence of egotropic economic voting, where electoral preferences are determined by individual economic circums...

Issue ownership is an important determinant of the vote, and it is electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the party literature, we know less about how citizens form ownership perceptions. We contribute to this literature by means of tw...

Niche parties have gained substantial political ground in many liberal democracies. While party behaviour scholars have examined which strategies these parties can use to increase their electoral success, less is known about the individual-level determinants of support for niche parties. In this study, I investigate why voters support niche parties...

Most studies on the spatial determinants of radical voting adopt a purely contemporary approach, suggesting that the current characteristics of one’s geographical environment (most notably diversity and economic deprivation) largely determine the propensity to vote for a radical party. While this approach has led to new insights, in the current pap...

The stability of divided societies is an important and recurring concern in political science research. It has been suggested that distinctive socialization processes in the different regions of divided societies will lead to diverging trends in public opinion. Therefore, we investigate trends in public opinion on key political issues and attitudes...

This open access book focuses on the importance that EU politicization has gained in European democracies and the consequences for voting behaviour in six countries of the EU: Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Most of the studies which research the way the EU is being legitimised focus on the European Parliament elections. In t...

In terms of electoral rules, Belgium is an odd case out among the countries investigated in this volume on several levels. Elections for the regional, national and European level are held on the same day, and all voters are obligated to turn out to vote. This combination of circumstances makes Belgium a least-likely case to find evidence for EU vot...

Especially following the 2000 and the 2016 presidential elections, some authors have denounced the legitimacy of the Electoral College as a presidential selection method. It is alleged that the college is not representative of the electorate as a whole and tends to favor one specific political party. In this article, we compare the popular vote wit...

Spatial and valence models are the workhorses of research on electoral behaviour. Yet, little is known about the common factors that influence the strength of both these determinants of the vote. I argue that the political context affects the prevalence of spatial and valence considerations in voters' minds. I investigate this by combining all the...

This study explores how researchers' analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in...

Education for sustainable development aims at strengthening levels of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours beneficial for sustainable development which are crucial to tackle urgent sustainability-related global challenges. In this study, we present the results of a one-year panel study measuring levels of sustainable development knowledge, attitude...

Previous studies have investigated to what extent voters can achieve proximity between their preferences and the positions of the party they vote for. Combining data from the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we investigate whether trust in political parties increases ideological proximity voting. We argue that voters use th...

There is an ongoing academic debate about the question whether sub‐state nationalist parties should be considered as niche parties, focusing almost exclusively on their core issue of centre‐periphery relations, or whether their electoral appeal can be considered as multidimensional. In that case, these other dimensions can vary with regard to the s...

Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Reduce Attention to Environmental Issues? Theories on issue competition assume that there is only a limited number of issues that a person prioritises simultaneously. In this research note, we test this mechanism by using a panel study that was conducted among Belgian parents in 2019 and 2020. Between the two observations...

Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Reduce Attention to Environmental Issues? Theories on issue competition assume that there is only a limited number of issues that a person prioritises simultaneously. In this research note, we test this mechanism by using a panel study that was conducted among Belgian parents in 2019 and 2020. Between the two observations...

The main objective of the study is to distinguish the often‐used concepts and measures of retrospective (economic) performance voting. I argue that concepts that have been used synonymously—such as performance voting, retrospective voting, and economic voting—should be distinguished theoretically and empirically, as they address different phenomena...

A standard assumption in realistic threat theories is that the presence of ethnic minorities is associated with a rise of anti‐immigrant sentiments. However, we do not know whether this presence has a specific local effect, or whether one can detect a more general nationwide perception of threat. Using data from a recent Belgian population survey,...

When conducting a postal survey, a traditional recommendation is to use paper postage stamps instead of an automated postage system, to make sure that invitations have a more personal and attractive appearance. In this research note, we investigate whether this traditional recommendation is still valid. In the autumn of 2020, a postal survey was co...

Recent scholarship on retrospective voting has shown that when they go to the polls, voters evaluate not only incumbent performance, but also the performance of parties in opposition. So far, however, these studies have not been able to identify how voters evaluate the performance of parties in opposition. The answers to a unique open-ended questio...

It has been assumed that a trend toward devolution within a federal country would be associated with a growing apart of public opinion, and the federal kingdom of Belgium is routinely cited as an obvious example in this regard. Since the publication of the seminal Billiet et al. article, more competences have been devolved toward the autonomous reg...

A large body of literature has investigated vote- and popularity-functions, identifying the factors influencing presidential approval ratings or presidential votes. The studies have revealed a strong correlation between the state of the economy and incumbent support. However, so far, less attention has been paid to when voters relate their percepti...

In recent electoral contests, political observers and media outlets increasingly report on the level of “authenticity” of political candidates. However, even though this term has become commonplace in political commentary, it has received little attention in empirical electoral research. In this study, we identify the characteristics that we argue...

While economic voting theory assumes that voters respond to economic conditions, critics have argued that most voters lack an adequate understanding of key national economic indicators. In this paper, we investigate the occurrence of a neighbourhood effect, where citizens can observe unemployment levels in their own local communities. Using both of...

The paper reports findings from a crowdsourced replication. Eighty-four replicator teams attempted to verify results reported in an original study by running the same models with the same data. The replication involved an experimental condition. A “transparent” group received the original study and code, and an “opaque” group received the same unde...

Findings from 162 researchers in 73 teams testing the same hypothesis with the same data reveal a universe of unique analytical possibilities leading to a broad range of results and conclusions. Surprisingly, the outcome variance mostly cannot be explained by variations in researchers’ modeling decisions or prior beliefs. Each of the 1,261 test mod...

In this study, we explore heterogeneity in the relationship between dissatisfaction with democratic representation and voting for a populist party. More specifically, we argue that numerous citizens are dissatisfied with modern political elites and processes, but that not all are attracted by populist parties' programmatic appeal. In particular, wh...

Holding the government accountable is a crucial function of elections. The extent to which voters can actually do so depends on the political system. One element that may influence the likelihood that voters hold the government accountable is the difference between wholesale and partial alternation. Prominent political scientists like Mair, Bergman...

Progressive tax rates are one of the main instruments for redistribution within advanced liberal democracies. In this study, we investigate public support for this policy. In our analysis of a novel question included in the Belgian Electoral Study (2019) we show that left-wing citizens are strongly in favour of this system. Importantly, high levels...

Theories on economic voting and democratic accountability are rooted in the reward–punishment hypothesis, stating that voters punish incumbent governments for economic decline and reward them for economic expansion. We argue that this accountability mechanism goes beyond economic performance indicators, as voters take into account a moral perspecti...

Civic duty has been perceived as a key determinant of turnout. That is, while dutiful citizens turn out in large numbers, those who conceive of voting as a choice do less so. The strong correlation between civic duty and turnout might be due to reverse causation, however. Specifically, individuals might adapt their sense of duty according to previo...

It has been argued that supporting a restrictive view on the inclusion of immigrants finds its origin in a localized feeling of group identity. We test this hypothesis with a household survey in the Belgian city of Ghent (n = 3735). The results show that local and national identities are salient, but also that regional, European, and cosmopolitan i...

While youth suffrage is widely debated, the causal effects of being eligible to vote on adolescents' political attitudes are less well known. To gain insights into this question, we leverage data from a real-life quasi-experiment of voting at 16 in the city of Ghent (Belgium). We compare the attitudes of adolescents that were entitled to vote with...

Beyond any doubt, political knowledge is a crucial resource for citizens of democratic societies. It enables them to participate in politics in a more effective manner, and to identify more successfully the candidate and the political party that best represents her/his beliefs and preferences (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). We also know from decade...

Most studies on lowering the voting age to 16 exclusively focus on the effects on the adolescents concerned. In this paper we investigate the family dynamics of this extension of voting rights, by including the parents of adolescents in the study. The Ghent Study is based on a quasi-experiment of the city of Ghent (Belgium), where adolescents of 16...

This study aims to provide a comprehensive view of the role of political information in retrospective voting by simultaneously investigating the effects of levels of information on the individual level and the availability of information on the contextual level. It is argued that the sophistication-gap in retrospective voting is confined to those c...

Although the theory of retrospective voting receives wide support in the literature on voting behaviour,less agreement exists on voters’time horizon when assessing the government’s performance – that is,whether voters are myopic. Previous studies on voter myopia tend to focus on aggregate-level measures of the economy,or use an experimental approac...

An often used argument against lowering the voting age to the age of 16 is that this age group would lack a sufficiently high level of “political maturity” and therefore would not be able to cast a vote that is in line with their political opinions. In this paper, we use a unique initiative set up by the city of Ghent (Belgium) to invite 16- and 17...

Retrospective voting is one of the most often investigated theories of voting behaviour. It postulates that voters punish or reward incumbent parties according to their performance. This approach, however, cannot explain why voters cast a stable opposition vote, or switch between incumbent parties or opposition parties, respectively. This study fil...

Government cohesiveness is known to moderate retrospective voting. While previous work on this topic has focused on characteristics of the government, we build on the literature on clarity of responsibility and the literature on valence to argue that the extent to which government and opposition are ideologically distinct also moderates retrospecti...

This study draws attention to an important distinction between different types of models in the field of retrospective voting, namely static and dynamic models. Both types of models are often used interchangeably, but their interpretation and implications are fundamentally different. Furthermore, while both types have been used in aggregate‐level s...

Political theorists have argued that democracies should strive for high turnout, leading to an argument for the introduction of compulsory voting, one of the surest ways to increase turnout. Others have warned that this obligation comes at a cost of lower quality votes. We investigate these claims by examining the impact of compulsory voting on pro...

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of sele...

This research note adds to the emerging body of literature arguing that retrospective voting works on the level of political parties – for government and opposition parties alike – by investigating the generalisability of previous research findings. Furthermore, it tests whether there is a knowledge gap in retrospective voting on the party level. U...

The literature on electoral volatility and the literature on electoral campaigns hold contradictory views on voters switching vote (intention) during the campaign. In this note, we shed new light on this contradiction, making two contributions. First, we investigate the extent to which stable and volatile voters choose the correct party. Second, we...

Citizens tend to overestimate the electoral success of their preferred party. We investigate the extent to which Belgian voters overestimate the result of the party that they vote for and the factors that explain which voters do so more than others. Our focus is on the impact of educational attainment and partisan attachment on the overestimation o...

Increasing voter volatility has led to a renewed research interest in determinants of switching party preferences. While previous research has mainly focused on the characteristics of volatile voters, less is known about how stable and volatile voters decide what party to vote for. Using panel data spanning two consecutive electoral cycles in Belgi...

We know compulsory voting is associated with higher levels of electoral turnout. It has been suggested that this leads to a trade-off with the quality of the vote, i.e. the ideological congruence between voters and the party they vote for. In this study, this claim is investigated using data from the 2007, 2010, and 2013 elections in Australia. We...

Elections offer a privileged moment in representative democracy, when citizens have the opportunity to express their views, both on the track record of the incumbent government, as on the way the country should be governed in the future. Procedural fairness theory assumes that taking part in a decision making procedure that is perceived to be fair,...

The Effect of Elections on Political Trust. An Analysis of an Election Panel in Belgium, 2009-2014 Elections are routinely investigated with a focus on the way in which winners or losers of the elections are different in their attitudes towards the political system. There is no previous research on the general impact of participation in the elector...

In this paper we investigate the effect of political sophistication on turnout and whether this effect differs in second-order national elections. Political sophistication is thought to infl uence turnout because the more sophisticated voters have access to more information about the electoral and the party system. In this paper, we start from the...

Elections are a key moment in the democratic process, and are to a large extent determined by the voters that decide to turn out. It is therefore interesting to explore the differences between voters and non-voters if voting were voluntary in Belgium. This research focuses on the political sophistication of the electorate. Furthermore it uses the t...