Fighting corruption is a vital aspect of good governance. When assessing government performance voters should thus withdraw electoral support from government parties that turn a blind eye to or even engage in corrupt practices. Whereas most accounts of performance-based voting focus on economic outcomes, we analyse whether and to what extent voters punish incumbents for high levels of corruption. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that while voters perceiving high levels of corruption punish incumbents, corruption performance voting depends on individual-level attributes and the electoral context: it is most likely for non-partisans, for voters who believe that government turnover will bring about change, and in systems where corruption is a salient issue. Yet, corruption performance voting is not moderated by the clarity of political responsibility. Studying these conditions helps us to understand why corruption is more persistent in some contexts than in others.

Multiparty government in parliamentary democracies entails bargaining over the payoffs of government participation, in particular the allocation of cabinet positions. While most of the literature deals with the numerical distribution of cabinet seats among government parties, this article explores the distribution of individual portfolios. It argues that coalition negotiations are sequential choice processes that begin with the allocation of those portfolios most important to the bargaining parties. This induces conditionality in the bargaining process as choices of individual cabinet positions are not independent of each other. Linking this sequential logic with party preferences for individual cabinet positions, the authors of the article study the allocation of individual portfolios for 146 coalition governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe. The results suggest that a sequential logic in the bargaining process results in better predictions than assuming mutual independence in the distribution of individual portfolios.

The chapter makes one conceptual and one empirical contribution to the study of the elite–masses gap in European integration. While most research focuses on substantive representation of voter opinions by MPs, under the ‘issue congruence paradigm’ we consider the entire chain of delegation from voters, to MPs, to governments. Representation gaps are measured as resulting from the two-step aggregation process of preferences typical for party democracies (first step within and the second between political parties). Specifically, the chapter looks at key projects towards a fully integrated Europe, such as common European foreign-, defence-, social security-, and tax-policy, and EU cohesion policy, that are already in place, agreed in principle, or are prominent when deepening European integration is the aim. Of the 15 countries covered in this book, the gaps are particularly large in Britain, Denmark, Germany, and Austria in Western Europe, and Estonia and Poland in Eastern Europe.

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 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.

Although many studies analyse government formation and termination, there is only scant attention to the duration of government formation processes. The few existing studies focus on the empirical evidence of parliamentary democracies in Western Europe until 1998. We present a new data set on 297 government formation processes in 27 European countries that allows us to test models explaining delays in the government formation process developed in Western Europe using new data from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Our results suggest that these models perform much better in the Western European heartland of coalition studies than in the context of CEE. We highlight the implications of these findings and discuss potential avenues for future research.

Why do some government formation periods end after a few days, while others last for several weeks or even months? Despite the rich literature on government formation, surprisingly little is known about the underlying bargaining processes. This article introduces a new dataset on 303 bargaining attempts in nineteen European democracies to analyse the duration of individual bargaining rounds. The study hypothesizes that (1) preference tangentiality, (2) ideological proximity, (3) incumbency and (4) party leadership tenure decrease the duration of coalition bargaining. Employing a copula approach to account for the non-random selection process of the observations, it shows that these actor-specific factors matter in addition to systemic context factors such as post-election bargaining and party system complexity. These findings highlight the need to consider both actor-specific and systemic factors of the bargaining context to explain government formation.

Social network site (SNS) data provide scholars with a plethora of new opportunities for studying public opinion and forecasting electoral outcomes. While these are certainly among the most promising big data applications in political science research, a series of pioneering studies have started to uncover the vast potential of such data to estimate the policy positions of political actors. Adding to this emerging strand in the scholarly literature, the present article explores the validity of (individual) policy positions derived from the social network structure of the microblogging platform Twitter. At the aggregate party level, cross-validation with external data sources suggests that SNS data provide valid policy position estimates. In contrast, the empirical analysis reveals only a moderate connection between individual policy positions retrieved from the social network structure and those retrieved from members of parliament individual voting record. These results thus highlight the potential as well as important limitations of SNS data in indicating the policy positions of political parties and individual legislators.

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