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The Southern periphery of the European Union experienced a profound transformation since 2008.The rapid economic deterioration of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain was accompanied by a substantial increase in citizens' mistrust towards national political institutions. Using quantitative data for eleven EU member states from 2003 to 2013, this paper evaluates the fitness of competing theories in explaining this shift in political attitudes in Southern European countries. On the one hand, we hypothesise that political mistrust changes according to institutional performance. On the other hand, we hypothesise that political mistrust is explained by citizen's rational evaluations of changing macroeconomic performance. The paper argues that the economic crisis acts as an external shock that puts politics, politicians and institutions in the spotlight indistinctively due to citizen's sociotropic evaluations of the national economy. The findings suggest that unemployment is the key variable in understanding short-term changes in political mistrust whereas institutional performance variations are notably less significant.

The article focuses on the party political spaces in four Southern European countries (i.e. Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) since the onset of the Euro crisis. To understand the emerging conflict structures, it argues for the need to consider that these countries simultaneously face an economic crisis and a political crisis and that both crises have strong domestic and European components. Moreover, the major driving forces of change tend to be social movements and political parties that forcefully combine opposition to austerity and to "old politics." This leads to a complex conflict structure shaped by struggles over austerity and political renewal. In this structure, divides over economic and political issues are closely aligned with each other. While this pattern emerges everywhere, there are distinct country differences. Empirically, the article relies on original data from a large-scale content analysis of national election campaigns in the four countries in the period 2011 to 2015.

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How much do the prospects of international recognition of a possible new state affect the domestic support for secession? To answer this research question, we adopted a most similar systems design and conducted a Web‐based survey experiment in Catalonia and Scotland. Respondents were presented with plausible scenarios regarding the international recognition of a hypothetical independent state by other countries and were subsequently asked whether they would support a unilateral declaration of independence. The results show that the prospects of international recognition as a sovereign and independent state influence the degree of support for a unilateral declaration of independence in both cases. This effect was moderated by the intensity of nationalist sentiment and the motivations for independence. Respondents with more outspoken nationalist sentiments were only marginally influenced by these scenarios or treatments. Moreover, participants whose preferences towards secession were driven by ethno‐political motivations were less influenced by international factors than those who wanted an independent state for economic or political reasons.