Parenthood and the polarisation of political attitudes in Europe

This is an open access article available via the DOI in this record.Becoming a parent can affect the lives of men and women by introducing salient new social roles and identities, altered social networks and tighter constraints on financial resources and time. Even though modern family life has evolved in many important respects, parenthood continues to shape the lives of men and women in very different ways. Given that parenthood can change the lives of men and women in profoundly different ways, it seems that it would bring about changes in the way women and men think about politics and policy issues. Using data from the Wave 4 of the European Social Survey, this article investigates how parenthood, and the distinctions of motherhood and fatherhood, influence attitudes. The findings suggest that parenthood can have a polarising effect on attitudes, and that the polarising effect is most evident in countries where there is less support from the state for parental responsibilities.The work of Banducci and Stevens was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/H030883/1

Extracting Topic-Specific Ideological Positions from News Articles

This is the final version.In this paper, we test three methods of estimating ideological bias in news media stories. This forms the basis for the development of a news reading app. We find that WordScores offers the most reliable estimate and reliability is improved when applied after identifying topic.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Intra-Campaign Changes in Voting Preferences: The Impact of Media and Party Communication

An increasing number of citizens change and adapt their party preferences during the electoral campaign. We analyze which short-term factors explain intra-campaign changes in voting preferences, focusing on the visibility and tone of news media reporting and party canvassing. Our analyses rely on an integrative data approach, linking data from media content analysis to public opinion data. This enables us to investigate the relative impact of news media reporting as well as party communication. Inherently, we overcome previously identified methodological problems in the study of communication effects on voting behavior. Our findings reveal that campaigns matter: Especially interpersonal party canvassing increases voters’ likelihood to change their voting preferences in favor of the respective party, whereas media effects are limited to quality news outlets and depend on individual voters’ party ambivalence

Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects. We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures. Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood

Male warriors and worried women? Understanding gender and perceptions of security threats

Differences between women and men in perceptions of security threats are firmly established in public opinion research, with the “male warrior” and the “worried woman” two well documented stereotypes. Yet, we argue in this paper, the differences are not as well understood as such labels, or the search for explanations, imply. One reason for this is the lack of dialogue between public opinion research and feminist security studies. In bringing the two fields into conversation in analyzing mixed methods research data gathered in Britain, we suggest that while the extent of the gender gap in opinions of security is overstated, the gaps that do exist are more complex than previously allowed: men and women define “security” in slightly different ways; women tend to identify more security threats than men not necessarily because they feel more threatened but due to a greater capacity to consider security from perspectives beyond their own; women are more confident about government’s ability to deal with security threats in the future but not simply because of greater faith in government than men. This complexity implies a need to revisit assumptions, methods and analytical approaches in order to develop the field of gender and security further

Gender, austerity, and support for EMU across generations

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordIncorporating a feminist analytical framework, we examine, from a longitudinal and generational perspective, public support for the euro. Feminist critiques of EMU argue that narratives around the adoption of the euro, the impacts of austerity, as well as the economic recovery have to a large extent ignored women’s experiences. In light of these critiques, we examine the empirical evidence indicating growing support for EMU even after the crisis. Specifically, we examine how women’s experience as participants in the labour force, as well as in the household, influence their support for the euro. We find that the youngest cohorts had significant declines in support post crisis but that the gender gap in support is smaller where labour force experiences are more similar

What Are You Afraid of? Authoritarianism, Terrorism, and Threat

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordResearch on authoritarianism has provided conflicting findings on its relationship with threat. Some studies indicate that in the face of heightened threat individuals with stronger authoritarian predispositions express more right-wing and illiberal preferences; others suggest that it is individuals at the other end of the continuum, with weak authoritarian dispositions—libertarians—who are most likely to change and express such attitudes. Extant efforts to reconcile the differences have been unsatisfactory. We offer a new perspective in which both processes may occur simultaneously. Higher authoritarians are responsive to elevated “normative threat,” characterized by dissatisfaction with established parties and their leaders and perceptions of “belief diversity,” while libertarians respond with more right-wing and illiberal preferences to heightened physical and personal threat, such as from terrorism, which does not affect high authoritarians. We suggest different contexts in which normative threat and personal threat vary, and we are thus likely to see change either in individuals toward one or other end of the authoritarian continuum or among both. Drawing on data in the quasi-experimental context of the 2017 general election in Britain, during which there were two terror attacks, we confirm this pattern in a setting in which both personal and normative threat were elevated