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This study examines the relationship between educational attainment and euroscepticism from 1973 to 2010. Existing research has shown that, driven by utilitarian considerations, political cues and questions of collective identity, education and euroscepticism are negatively related. However, as the process of European unification has progressed, all three factors have become more salient, so we expect an increasing effect of education on euroscepticism over time. Using 81 waves of the Eurobarometer survey in 12 European Union (EU) member states, our results show that the impact of education on euroscepticism has indeed increased, particularly after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty.

The mobilization of culturally rooted issues has altered political competition throughout Western Europe. This article analyzes to what extent the mobilization of immigration issues has affected how people identify with politics. Specifically, it analyzes whether voters’ left/right self-identifications over the past 30 years increasingly correspond to cultural rather than economic attitudes. This study uses longitudinal data from the Netherlands between 1980 and 2006 to demonstrate that as time progresses, voters’ left/right self-placements are indeed more strongly determined by anti-immigrant attitudes than by attitudes towards redistribution. These findings show that the issue basis of left/right identification is dynamic in nature and responsive to changes in the political environment.

This article extends and tests the trust-as-evaluation approach that is dominant in political science. Citizens supposedly grant and withhold trust in politics based on an assessment of its merits. We argue that the relevance of performances and processes should be conditional on the values that citizens hold dear and the accuracy with which they perceive them. Through multilevel analyses of the European Value Survey 2008, we model the (conditional) effects of a wide range of macro-economic outcomes and procedural characteristics on two aspects of political trust: satisfaction with democracy and confidence in political institutions. We find that macro-economic outcomes do not relate to political trust once we control for corruption. The effects of corruption and macro-economic outcomes are indeed stronger among the higher educated. However, the effect of macro-economic outcomes is not conditional on citizens’ values. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for the use of the trust-as-evaluation approach.

Ideological congruence is an important and popular measure of the quality of political representation. The closer the match between the preferences of the public and those of elected elites, the better representative democracy is thought to function. Relatively little attention has been paid however to the effects of ideological congruence on political judgement. We address this gap by examining whether citizens use egocentric or sociotropic judgments of congruence to evaluate democratic performance. Using a variety of congruence measures, we find that citizens are unmoved by sociotropic congruence; however, our analyses provide clear evidence that egocentric congruence boosts citizen satisfaction, especially among political sophisticates. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of ideological congruence and political representation.1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at annual conferences of the Midwest Political Science Association and the Dutch Political Science Association as well as a workshop at the University of Gothenburg. We thank the discussants and panel participants at these meetings for their feedback. We also thank Wouter Schakel for data assistance. We are grateful for the thoughtful comments of our reviewers as well as 2Over the years ideological congruence has become an important and popular concept in the study of political representation (Huber and Powell 1994;Powell 2000 Powell , 2009McDonald et al. 2004;Klingemann et al. 2006;Griffin and Newman 2008;Golder and Stramski 2010). Third, in addition to testing for the direct effects of various measures of ideological congruence on citizen satisfaction we investigate whether the effects of congruence are contingent upon a person's political sophistication. While a positive relationship between representative congruence and citizen satisfaction seems plausible in the abstract, it is also possible that, given its potential complexity and concomitant inscrutability as a feature of the political environment, congruence -whether egocentric or sociotropic -may in reality only affect those capable of ascertaining its presence and degree.In the end our analyses provide no evidence that variations in sociotropic congruence are related to how citizens think about the general working of their political system. None of the 4 sociotropic measures is found to impact citizen satisfaction, even among political sophisticates. In contrast, we find clear evidence that egocentric congruence matters for citizen satisfaction. In addition, political sophistication moderates the relationship between egocentric congruence and citizen satisfaction. Specifically, egocentric congruence boosts the chances of satisfaction more among citizens with the highest levels of political sophistication.In the next section we elaborate on the concept of ideological congruence as one aspect of political representation that citizens might take into account when evaluating democratic performance. We then introduce the distinction bet...

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