Kriesi et al. announced the birth of a new cleavage in contemporary Western Europe, one dividing the winners and losers of globalisation. Their studies in 2006 and 2008 contain analyses of party positions in six countries, based on the contents of editorial sections of newspapers. This article challenges the main conclusion of Kriesi et al. by demonstrating − on the basis of two expert surveys − that party positions are mainly structured by one dimension. The structure detected by Kriesi et al. in their analysis of parties is not found, except concerning voter positions. A consequence of this article's findings is that large groups of citizens are not represented by any parties, in particular those who are left‐wing on socio‐economic issues and right‐wing on cultural issues. The article in its conclusion discusses possible causes for the differences between these findings and those of Kriesi et al., and the implications of these findings for democratic representation.

No abstract

The 2008-2009 worldwide economic crisis serves as a backdrop to this study of the dynamics of citizens' economic expectations. Economic expectations are identified as crucial for a range of political attitudes. This study is the first to consider how information affects evaluations in times of a severe crisis, as prior research of information effects on economic evaluations took place in more stable economic times. It links citizens' news exposure and the content of economic news coverage with changes in prospective economic assessments. Drawing on a three-wave panel study and on a media content analysis between the panel waves, we thus provide a dynamic assessment of media influences on changes in economic evaluations. The results demonstrate that media exposure strongly affected expectations regarding the future development of the national economic situation, while being largely unrelated to personal economic expectations. We furthermore show that media dependency increases the magnitude of the media effect. We discuss the disconnect between personal and national economic evaluations with regard to mass-mediated economic information.

Recent studies have shown that the most important factor explaining opinions on European Union issues is attitudes towards immigrants. Two arguments are given to explain this effect. We contend that these arguments are both built on the idea that people with anti-immigrant attitudes frame other Europeans as an out-group. We then test the validity of these arguments by measuring how respondents in a voter survey frame the issue of Turkish membership. We find that framing the issue in terms of out-groups indeed mediates the effect of anti-immigrant attitudes on support for Turkish membership. This finding offers new insights into why levels of public support vary over different EU issues, because opposition is likely to increase when an issue is more easily framed in terms of out-groups.

Anti-immigration parties have experienced electoral lift-off in most Western democracies, although the consequences of their victories for real-life policy outcomes have remained largely unexplored. A key question is: do electoral pressures from anti-immigration parties have a ‘contagion’ impact on other parties’ immigration policy positions? In this article, I argue and empirically demonstrate that this is the case. On the basis of a comparative-empirical study of 75 parties in 11 Western European countries, I conclude that this contagion effect involves entire party systems rather than the mainstream right only. In addition, I find that opposition parties are more vulnerable to this contagion effect than parties in government. The findings of this article imply that anti-immigration parties are able to influence policy output in their political systems without entering government.

a b s t r a c tIt is still not well understood how the media affect anti-immigrant party voting. In this paper, we argue and demonstrate empirically that mere exposure to immigration-and crime-related news is positively related to the likelihood that a voter casts a vote for an anti-immigrant party. On the basis of a media content analysis (N ¼ 20,084 news items) in combination with a voter panel survey (N ¼ 17,014 respondents) conducted in 11 European countries we find for several anti-immigrant parties that e ceteris paribus e exposure to news about immigration or crime increases voters' probabilities to vote for these parties. We discuss our findings in light of prior research on issue ownership, and their implications for the role of the mass media in established democracies.

No abstract

No abstract