Marc Hooghe

It has been firmly established that party membership has declined in most liberal democracies over the past several decades, and some authors have argued that the remaining members and partisans, are even more strongly committed to party goals and policies. If partisanship becomes more of an elite phenomenon, it might also become a very effective t...

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...

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...

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...

The evolution of citizenship norms is considered a driving force behind changing political processes in contemporary democracies. Competing expectations have emerged on this topic: a ‘citizen engagement’ argument anticipates an increase in norms that emphasize engaged and expressive values, while a ‘democratic erosion’ argument expects an increase...

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...

Political participation is, by definition, a multifaceted social phenomenon, and different theoretical approaches in participation studies tend to focus on one of these facets. This chapter argues that the meso-level (organizations, mobilization campaigns …) offers most opportunities to combine different theoretical perspectives to the study of pol...

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...

Lowering the voting age is often criticized due to the alleged political immaturity of young voters, which is considered as negative for the quality of democracy. We adopt a unique approach to this issue by measuring political congruence between adolescents and their parents to ascertain whether ideological views and salient positional issues, such...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper, we empirically investigate what kind of welfare concerns drive electoral support for radical right populist parties. The literature on the rise of populism in Western democracies argues that rising inequality is associated with more support for populist radical right parties. This leads to the assumption that populist radical right v...

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...

Studies have shown that the economic crisis that started in 2008 was followed by a sharp decline in political trust in some liberal democracies. These findings suggest that an economic downturn might contribute to a more structural crisis of democratic legitimacy. From 2011 on, however, unemployment levels in industrialized democracies started to d...

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...

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. In representative systems, elections are assumed to play a role in realising such congruence. If those who participate in elections are not representative of the public at large, it follows that the reliance on elections as a mechanism of representation...

Political consumerism, that is, the buying or boycotting of goods and services for political or ethical reasons, is now firmly accepted as a form of political participation increasingly adopted by the young. In this article we investigate two claims often made concerning the democratic potential of political consumerism. First, visibility bias woul...

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 the relation between inequality and levels of political trust has been intensely investigated, there is no consensus yet on the mechanism behind this relation. In this paper, we use multilevel models to analyse the diverging impact of economic inequality on political trust for different social groups within European countries. We observe that...

The literature on economic voting starts from the assumptions that citizens have a sufficiently high level of knowledge about their country’s economic situation, and that they vote according to their perception of the state of the economy. However, these assumptions have been challenged as economic perceptions could be plagued by partisan bias. We...

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...

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...

Mass media have been accused of cultivating anti-immigrant sentiments in Western societies. Most studies on this topic, however, have not made a distinction between the types of television program (information vs. entertainment) or television station (public vs. commercial). Adopting a comparative approach, we use data from the six waves of the Eur...

According to democratic theory, policy responsiveness is a key characteristic of democratic government: citizens’ preferences should affect policy outcomes. Empirically, however, the connection between public opinion and policy is not self-evident and is increasingly challenged. Using an originally constructed data set with information from 21 Orga...

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...

Research has repeatedly shown that formal party membership is in structural decline in liberal democracies. The same strongly negative trend, however, has not been observed for less formal forms of party attachment and authors have claimed that this leads to a pattern of multi-speed party adherence. In the current analysis, we investigate to what e...

National probability election surveys are more and more abandoned. Decreasing response rates and the escalating costs of face-to-face and telephone interviews have strengthened election scholars’ reliance on nonprobability internet samples to conduct election surveys online. In a number of countries, experiments with alternative ways of recruiting...

Concerns about democratic legitimacy in contemporary democracies bring new urgency to understanding how citizens' attitudes and ideals affect their political activity. In this article we analyze the relationship between citizens' democratic ideals and political behaviour in the European Social Survey's 2012 uniquely extensive questions on these top...

The literature on participatory democracy suggests that citizens’ direct democratic involvement will be associated with higher levels of democratic legitimacy. Simultaneously, however, it has been pointed out that a repeated reliance on direct democracy procedures might lead to democratic fatigue among citizens, and it might even lead to a ‘partici...

The campaign leading to the 2016 US presidential election included a number of unconventional forms of campaign rhetoric. In earlier analyses, it was claimed that the Trump victory could be seen as a form of protest voting. This article analyzes the determinants of voters’ choices to investigate the validity of this claim. Based on a sample of the...

Supplementary material to article

The effect of political trust and trust in European citizens on European identity – CORRIGENDUM - Soetkin Verhaegen, Marc Hooghe, Ellen Quintelier

ABSTRACT: This article investigates whether the commitment to social rights as integral to a well-functioning democracy exists among Americans in comparison to their European counterparts. In our comparison of data from the European Social Survey (2012) with a special parallel module of the US Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (2014) the fi...

The literature on political parties suggests that strong partisan identities are associated with citizens' effective interaction with the political system, and with higher levels of political trust. Traditionally, party identity therefore is seen as a mechanism that allows for political integration. Simultaneously, however, political parties have g...

Economic voting theory assumes that on an individual level voters react to economic indicators to hold incumbents responsible for the performance of the economy. On an aggregate level, this would imply that there is an association between economic indicators and levels of volatility since voters have to switch parties if they want to punish or rewa...

This book review finds that in a new handbook on political trust, the recent literature on political trust is summarised by highly distinguished authors. Both theoretical and empirical chapters are included. A major innovation is that the geographical scope of investigation is global, thus allowing for new theoretical perspectives on the democratic...

In this chapter we investigate public support for social security at the European level, like e.g. the proposal for a European Social Union. We start from a path dependency hypothesis, suggesting that current welfare state arrangements will have an enduring impact on public opinion. Given the structural differences between member states, this would...

Free eprint link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/aCzjb2AtGISEFf2qwR9A/full NOTE: There is a publisher embargo on posting the manuscript here until January 2, 2018. The Author Manuscript version is currently available for download (www.jenniferoser.com). ABSTRACT: While in the older literature, low levels of political trust were routinely inte...

The literature on political parties suggests that strong partisan identities are associated with citizens’ effective interaction with the political system, and with higher levels of political trust. Traditionally, party identity therefore is seen as a mechanism that allows for political integration. Simultaneously, however, political parties have g...

Theories about the decline of legitimacy or a legitimacy crisis are as old as democracy itself. Yet, representative democracy still exists, and the empirical evidence for a secular decline of political support in established democracies is limited, questionable, or absent. This lack of conclusive evidence calls into question existing explanatory th...

Lifestyle politics are often defined as a political strategy used to avoid state-oriented politics. However, recent studies indicate that in some cases, lifestyle activists engage in actions that target the state. This study investigates why some lifestyle activists combine these forms of engagement, while others do not. We explore whether such dif...

The aim of this study is twofold. First, we expand on the literature by testing whether generalized trust is negatively related to anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe. Second, we examine to what extent the relation between generalized trust and anti-immigrant sentiments is dependent upon cross-group friendships. We apply multilevel linear regressio...

Online first version from publisher: https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2017.11. Accepted Manuscript version: http://www.jenniferoser.com/publications. ABSTRACT: Normative democratic theory assumes that political systems should ensure civil, political and social rights, and this claim has become more salient since the economic crisis that began in 2008....

Este artículo ha sido retirado: por favor consulte las políticas de Elsevier sobre la retirada de artículos (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). Este artículo ha sido retirado a petición del autor. No hay un acuerdo escrito para poder compartir los datos de este manuscrito. Por lo tanto, no se ha podido firmar el formulario de copyrig...

Este artículo ha sido retirado: por favor consulte las políticas de Elsevier sobre la retirada de artículos (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). Este artículo ha sido retirado a petición del autor. No hay un acuerdo escrito para poder compartir los datos de este manuscrito. Por lo tanto, no se ha podido firmar el formulario de copyrig...

Previous research has established a correlation between fear of crime and anti-immigrant sentiments. In this paper, we explore the role of television in explaining individual differences in fear of crime, perceived ethnic diversity and anti-immigrant sentiments. We use the ‘Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders’ data, a representative survey in th...

Electoral democracies worldwide are all organised around elections but the rules under which the elections are organised differ greatly from one country to another. These electoral rules, such as whether voting is compulsory or what electoral system is used, are thought of as strongly affecting voters’ behaviour and the choices they make. If electo...

Partisanship and cognitive mobilization are generally seen as independent and counter-balancing influences on vote choice. While the former is typically regarded as a shortcut, reducing the need for close ideological congruence with one’s preferred party, the latter is associated with increasing levels of political sophistication and the importance...

Democratic elections imply that the electorate holds incumbents accountable for past performance, and that voters select the party that is closest to their own political preferences. Previous research shows that both elements require political sophistication. A number of countries throughout the world have a system of compulsory voting, and this le...

Political trust is closely related to various forms of electoral behavior. First, political trust tends to stimulate voter turnout, as distrusting citizens are less motivated to cast a vote. Second, low levels of political trust have been associated with an anti-incumbent vote and with populist voting. Third, taking part in elections can actually b...

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,...

Note: Author manuscript version available on www.jenniferoser.com (due to publisher embargo it is not yet possible to post the file on academic network sites). Abstract: Two causal mechanisms have been invoked to explain the positive correlation between union membership and social expenditure. Unions try to influence policy, but they are also more...

Turnout rates are in decline in advanced democracies, but the consequences of this trend for inequalities in participation have not yet been investigated in a large, comparative study. In this article, we investigate educational inequalities in six countries. First, we examine whether Tingsten’s law of dispersion holds and whether decreasing turnou...

There is a consensus in recent literature on electoral research that voter turnout rates are declining significantly. We know less, however, about when this decline started and how significant it is. In this paper, we analyse trends in electoral turnout, as reported in the IDEA dataset for 20 stable democracies over the period between 1950 and 2012...

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...

Low levels of political trust are associated with a preference for protest parties. Some authors have argued that in this manner protest parties indirectly contribute to the stability of electoral democracy, functioning as a ‘safety valve’ for political discontent. In this article, we investigate the relationship between protest voting and politica...

Citizenship education has evolved substantially in recent decades, with a rapid proliferation of education forms and approaches. The currently available evaluation studies, however, do not allow us to determine what kind of approach can be considered as a best practice for schools and education systems. In this article, we rely on the results of a...

Within the literature, there is an ongoing debate on how to understand the broader implications of the process of electoral dealignment. While some authors argue that dealignment leads to a more 'open' electorate that ponders the options offered by the party system, other authors have argued that dealignment leads to a general alienation from the p...

In the framework of intergroup threat theory, it is routinely assumed that the presence of immigrant groups in a local community could contribute to fear of crime among the majority population. This could be explained by a direct relation between ethnic diversity and some forms of crime, but it can also be expected that stereotypes toward specific...

Using recall questions in cross-sectional electoral survey research entails a high level of measurement error. Comparing data from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, we observe that recall information leads to an important underestimation of voter volatility, compared with data that are based on panel observations. While political sophisticatio...

Within research on the political influence that social network members exert on one another, some studies rely on information obtained directly from different members in the network separately (self-reported measures), while others rely on information obtained from one key informant within the social network (measures based on perception). We inves...

Various authors have claimed that citizenship norms have changed dramatically in contemporary societies. Recent research has studied the implications of Russell Dalton’s argument that duty-based citizenship norms (emphasizing voting and obeying the law) are being replaced by engaged citizenship norms (emphasizing self-expressive and non-institution...

Tijdens de periode 2003-2014 berichtten VRT en VTM 52 uren over immigratie. Gemiddeld komt dit neer op 4,3 uren per jaar. De openbare omroep VRT besteedt vaker aandacht aan immigratie dan de commerciële zender VTM. Vergeleken met andere nieuwsthema’s blijkt immigratie niet erg prominent in het Vlaamse nieuws: immigratie is het 24ste belangrijkste t...

In the literature, two approaches toward the development of a European identity can be distinguished. Society-based approaches assume that the most important foundation for the development of a European identity is trust toward other European citizens as this allows Europeans to identify with the European Union as a community of citizens and values...

In Belgium, like in numerous other democracies, the representation of women in parliament has risen sharply in recent decades, partly because of gender quota legislation. This rapid evolution implies that traditional notions on the presence of gender bias in media reporting need to be re-assessed. Relying on data from more than six thousand full ne...

A defining characteristic of second-order elections is that voters base their decision on considerations that were developed for a different policy level. Therefore, this kind of elections does not contribute to the quality of democratic representation. Municipal elections are often considered as second-order elections. In this article, we use data...