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

Priming Europe: Media Effects on Loyalty, Voice and Exit in European Parliament Elections

ArticleThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan via the DOI in this record.Parties in government face a decline in EP elections after experiencing a surge in votes to win the national election. This occurs because voters are more inclined to give voice to their dissatisfaction with current government performance by voting for the opposition or exiting because less is at stake in second‐order elections. These elections negatively affect the electoral fortunes of governing parties as voters opt to punish poorly performing national governments in EP elections. Meanwhile, greater reliance on the EU issue dimension in vote choice models is taken as evidence for the increasing Europeanisation of EP elections. We examine the role of the media in making the EU issue dimension salient in such a way that government parties may benefit electorally from this increased saliency. To examine whether visibility of government party actors in media coverage increases loyalty for the governing parties either directly or via priming the EU issues for voters, we combine survey data from the 2009 European Election Studies (EES) with data on news coverage of those elections that links the governing party to the EU issue. We show that where the government is visible in EU news coverage, EU issue voting tends to increase loyalty while decreasing the probability to vote for the opposition and thus improves the electoral prospects for governing parties. This is even more the case if the issue is primed by negative campaign coverage.Support for this research was provided by the Austrian Science Fund (S10902-G11)

Voice, Representation and Trust in Parliament

The procedural justice literature argues that providing individuals voice in institutional processes facilitates trust in that institution. For democratic institutions, voice is provided to the citizenry via political representation. In this article, I apply the procedural justice argument to trust in parliament, equating representation with voice: if individuals believe they are represented in parliament, they will trust parliament more than if they believe otherwise. Analyses of data from three of four countries find support for this argument: those individuals who believe that a party with at least one seat in parliament represents their views trust parliament more than those who do not. This relationship holds even when accounting for political self-interest. For those who wish to promote trust in parliament, a suggested normative good with a host of politically important consequences, one potential pathway is to facilitate individuals’ belief that there is a party in parliament that represents them

Dynamic social media affiliations amongst UK politicians

This is the final version of the article. Available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.Inter-personal affiliations and coalitions are an important part of politicians’ behaviour, but are often difficult to observe. Since an increasing amount of political communication now occurs online, data from online interactions may offer a new toolkit to study ties between politicians; however, the methods by which robust insights can be derived from online data require further development, especially around the dynamics of political social networks. We develop a novel method for tracking the evolution of community structures, referred to as ‘multiplex community affiliation clustering’ (MCAC), and use it to study the online social networks of Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the United Kingdom. Social interaction networks are derived from social media (Twitter) communication over an eventful 17-month period spanning the UK General Election in 2015 and the UK Referendum on membership of the European Union in 2016. We find that the social network structure linking MPs and MEPs evolves over time, with distinct communities forming and re-forming, driven by party affiliations and political events. Without including any information about time in our model, we nevertheless find that the evolving social network structure shows multiple persistent and recurring states of affiliation between politicians, which align with content states derived from topic analysis of tweet text. These findings show that the dominant state of partisan segregation can be challenged by major political events, ideology, and intra-party tension that transcend party affiliations.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/N012283/1]