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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Alizade, Jeyhun (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) |
| Abstract: | Concern that immigration worsens crime problems is prevalent across Western publics. How does it shape electoral politics? Prior research asserted a growing left-right divide in immigration attitudes and voting behavior due to educational realignment. In contrast, I argue that leftist voters are more conservative on immigrant crime than leftist parties, which can drive highly-educated progressives (so-called `cosmopolitans') to right-wing parties. I demonstrate this voter-party mismatch using survey data from 14 Western European countries linked with expert ratings of party positions. A panel survey from Germany further shows that concern about immigrant crime increases vote intention for the center right among voters of the Greens – the party of leftist cosmopolitans. A conjoint experiment among German voters replicates this defection effect and shows that it persists even if the center right stigmatizes immigrants or adopts conservative socio-cultural issue positions. Repercussions of immigration can in fact drive leftist cosmopolitans to the right. |
| Date: | 2024–04–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:h967e&r= |
| By: | Jansen, Benjamin; Stutzer, Alois (University of Basel) |
| Abstract: | There is a concern that citizens with different political positions and party affiliations increasingly dislike each other. We examine this affective polarization (AP), which is often associated with a weakening of democracy, in the context of Switzerland's multiparty landscape with proportional governmental representation. Evaluating the long-term development of AP in Switzerland with both historical and newly gathered data for 2023, we find hardly any considerable change in AP over the last three decades, except for a substantial jump between 1999 and 2003 and a generally lower level of party sympathy in 2023. Complementary, our analysis of split-ticket voting behavior in national parliamentary elections with continuous data back to 1983 does not support any trend in partisan polarization from a voters' revealed preference perspective. We further find that more affectively polarized individuals report, on average, lower satisfaction with democracy but show a higher willingness to participate in politics across a wide range of different forms of political engagement, even when controlling for individuals' general sympathy towards political parties. |
| Keywords: | affective polarization, political participation, political discussion, latent candidacy, splitticket voting |
| JEL: | D72 D91 |
| Date: | 2024–05–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bsl:wpaper:2024/04&r= |
| By: | Hopkin, Jonathan |
| Abstract: | Democratic states tend to raise large shares of national income through taxes, and spend the money in ways which redistribute resources from higher to lower income groups. This connection between democratic politics and taxes is a commonplace of the political economy scholarship, but there is much less clarity about the mechanisms through which this redistribution occurs, and the reasons for variations in the degree to which the objectives of social justice are achieved. Democracy can coexist with quite large differences in overall income inequality, and these differences are often driven by institutional legacies that find their roots in the past. The scope for the usual tools of democratic governance – elections and political party programmes – to alter these paths are more limited than is often understood. The contemporary politics of taxation appears to offer very constrained choices to policymakers, but the aspirations of voters for redistribution through the tax system remain a fundamental feature of political competition and conflict in the rich democracies. |
| Keywords: | tax; redistribution; democracy |
| JEL: | J1 |
| Date: | 2022–11–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:122757&r= |