In most countries, men are more likely to vote for parties of the populist radical right (PRR) than women. The authors argue here that there are two mechanisms that might potentially explain this gender gap: mediation (women's attitudes and characteristics differ from men's in ways that explain the PRR vote) and moderation (women vote for different reasons than men). They apply these two mechanisms to general theories of support for PRR parties-the socio-structural model, the discontent model, and the policy vote model-and test these on a large sample of voters in seventeen Western and Eastern European countries. The study shows that the gender gap is produced by a combination of moderation and mediation. Socio-structural differences between men and women exist, but the extent to which they explain the gender gap is limited, and primarily restricted to post-Communist countries. Furthermore, women generally do not differ from men in their level of nativism, authoritarianism or discontent with democracy. Among women, however, these attitudes are less strongly related to a radical-right vote. This suggests that men consider the issues of the radical right to be more salient, but also that these parties deter women for reasons other than the content of their political programme. While the existing research has focused almost exclusively on mediation, we show that moderation and mediation contribute almost equally to the gender gap.

Despite being the probably most common form of political rule in history, monarchies remain understudied in terms of how constitutional arrangements affect leader survival. In this paper, we examine if the principle of succession mattered for the risk that a king or queen would be deposed in Europe, 1000-1800. Specifically, we draw on the work of Gordon Tullock, who argued that hereditary succession orders increases the chances of survival for dictators. The proposed reason is that a crown prince constitutes a natural focal point for the ruling elite, which makes it easier for them to avoid costly power struggles. Furthermore, crown princes are generally much younger than other challengers, and can thus afford to wait for the current king to die or abdicate peacefully. The hypothesis is tested on a new dataset, and the results show that the risk of deposition was several times higher in European monarchies not practicing primogeniture. Moreover, the spread of primogeniture to a large extent explains why the risk of deposition became dramatically lower in Europe during the period of study. Acknowledgments:The authors would like to thank Andreas Bågenholm, Agnes Cornell, Mikael Gilljam, Sören Holmberg, Victor Lapuente, Anna Persson, Steven Pincus, Martin Sjöstedt and Susan Stokes as well as seminar participants at the QoG institute for valuable comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Some parties are more popular among men, while other parties attract more female voters. This article proposes that these differences can be partially explained by two recurring gender differences in the socio-psychological literature. It argues that men’s generally lower sensitivity to social cues makes them more likely to vote for stigmatized and small parties, whereas women’s greater concern with social harmony is expected to make them less likely to vote for extreme parties. The models are tested at the individual and party levels using three waves of Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data from twenty-eight countries. Ceteris paribus, men are more likely than women to vote for parties that are socially stigmatized or ideologically extreme. This has consequences for the current understanding of gender gaps in voting, and reiterates that voting has important social aspects.

Adapting to party lines: the effect of party affiliation on attitudes to immigration Harteveld, E.; Kokkonen, A.; Dahlberg, S. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. Public opinion on immigration is increasingly relevant for political behaviour. However, little is known about the way in which citizens' political allegiances in turn shape their attitudes to immigration. Abundant existing evidence suggests that voters often take cues from the parties they support. Using panel data from the Netherlands and Sweden, this article investigates the dynamic relation between attitudes to immigration and party preferences. The longitudinal nature of the data allows for making stronger claims about causal mechanisms than previous crosssectional studies. The analysis shows that voters who change their preference to the Radical Right become stricter on immigration, whereas voters changing to the Greens become less strict on immigration over time. This confirms that citizens' support for anti-and pro-immigration parties results in a 'radicalisation' of their views on immigration along party lines. A similar 'spiral' of radicalisation can be found around the issue of European integration.

We study how workplace diversity affects how native-born populations form interethnic friendship relations. Drawing on network elasticity research, the relationship between functional and cognitive interdependencies, and intergroup contact theory, we argue that diverse workplaces-because they restrict individuals' opportunities to act on tendencies towards homophily more than other social units-have a particularly strong potential for integration. We test our argument by analysing data from the first round of the European Social Survey with multilevel modelling. In line with expectations, we find that individuals who work at diverse workplaces are more likely than individuals who work at homogenous workplaces to have immigrant friends; that workplace diversity is more efficacious than neighbourhood diversity in generating interethnic friendship relations; and that the association between workplace diversity and the likelihood of having immigrant friends is stronger among individuals who have a low level of education, feel economically vulnerable, and who live in countries characterized by relative resource scarcity.This article discusses how personal interactions at workplaces may foster social cohesion in the context of global migration. Specifically, we argue that ethnically diverse workplaces are conducive for the formation of interethnic friendship networks.The mechanism that connects interethnic friendship formation to social cohesion derives from contact theory and its claim that quality personal contacts may reduce

It is argued in this article that citizens in democracies use their subjective well‐being (SWB) as an evaluative criterion when deciding how willing they are to support and comply with government dictates (political system support). When life is satisfactory, government authorities are rewarded with support, when it is not, citizens punish authorities by withholding their support. To make sense of the relationship, it is suggested that citizens act as if they have signed a happiness contract with ‘those in power’. In support of this argument, comparative survey data shows that SWB predicts attitudes on political system support across country contexts and under strong control conditions. Establishing that the relationship is causal, panel data documents that attitudes on political system support can be undermined following the termination of a close personal relationship, and that the causal effect is mediated via changes in SWB. Finally, as predicted, the happiness‐support relationship is weaker among individuals who are high on spirituality/religiousness and attribute blame for external events to both worldly and non‐worldly powers.

Will frequent interethnic personal contacts help Western countries overcome the strains associated with migration‐based ethnic diversity? To address this problem, the authors of this article studied a setting – high school – that ‘forces’ individuals to have personal contacts. It is argued that schools are social laboratories from which one can learn about the likely effects of a less‐segregated society. Moreover, this study concerns a European national setting (Sweden), rather than the very special American case. The article also focuses on three interrelated but distinct aspects of democratic citizenship: civic knowledge, institutional trust and interethnic tolerance. To estimate the contextual effects of ethnic diversity, multilevel modeling is used to analyse the 1999/2000 CIVED dataset, which covers 3,000 high school students nested within 94 schools. The authors conclude that interethnic contacts do not have the positive effects assumed in much of the literature, but their findings are less pessimistic than many recent reports of the deteriorating fundamentals of social life.

Leadership succession is a perennial source of instability in autocratic regimes. Despite this, it has remained a curiously understudied phenomenon in political science. In this article, we compile a novel and comprehensive dataset on civil war in Europe and combine it with data on the fate of monarchs in 28 states over 800 years to investigate how autocratic succession affected the risk of civil war. Exploiting the natural deaths of monarchs to identify exogenous variation in successions, we find that successions substantially increased the risk of civil war. The risk of succession wars could, however, be mitigated by hereditary succession arrangements (i.e., primogeniture—the principle of letting the oldest son inherit the throne). When hereditary monarchies replaced elective monarchies in Europe, succession wars declined drastically. Our results point to the importance of the succession, and the institutions governing it, for political stability in autocratic regimes.