Of all atrocities committed by state actors in 20th century Europe, the systematic killings by Nazi Germany were arguably the most severe and best documented. While several studies have investigated the impact of the presence of concentration camps on surrounding communities in Germany and the occupied territories in terms of redistribution of wealth and property, the local-level impact on voting behaviour has not yet been explored. We investigated the impact of spatial proximity to a concentration camp between 1933 and 1945 on the likelihood of voting for far-right parties in the 2013 and 2017 federal elections. We find that proximity to a former concentration camp is associated with a higher vote share of such parties. A potential explanation for this finding could be a ‘memory satiation effect’, according to which voters who live in close proximity to former camps and are more frequently confronted with the past are more receptive to revisionist historical accounts questioning the centrality of the Holocaust in the German culture of remembrance.
Cohesion Policy accounts for the largest area of expenditure in the EU budget. Because of its scope and redistributive nature, evaluation is particularly important. Policy analysis tends to overlook the evaluation stage. Few empirical studies seek to apply theory to EU policy evaluation. This article questions the relevance and usefulness of theorizing evaluation practice, exploring positivist, realist, and constructivist perspectives upon approaches to evaluating Structural Funds Programmes. It illustrates how political science theories can provide scholars with useful insights into the way EU policy evaluation is carried out. It develops a toolkit for analyzing real‐world approaches to evaluation and then applies it to three separate Cohesion Policy programmes. The analysis shows how, from a theoretical perspective – and contrary to the mixed methods rhetoric of the European Commission – positivism remains the dominant approach when evaluating the Structural Funds and considers why this is so, identifying the ability to demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness, cost, influence, and evaluation culture as key characteristics.
The role of national parliaments in scrutinizing their governments in European Union affairs has been at the forefront of debates on democratic accountability in the EU for the past decade. Resolutions are the legislative instruments most clearly associated with government control. This article finds that party political strategies, and especially the different constraints and incentives for mainstream/government parties and issue entrepreneurs on Europe, are the most important factors determining the activity of national parliaments in the form of resolutions on EU affairs. Issue Entrepreneurs are parties which are Eurosceptic and for which Europe is salient. Motions initiated by issue entrepreneurs are numerous but limited to criticizing the government and contain little technical detail, while the resolutions of mainstream government parties mostly support the government's position. Resolutions and motions in EU affairs are thus rather used as an instrument of 'position taking' than as a form of government control, but could still help to foster accountability by bringing EU issues and government policy to the citizens' attention.
Political choice is central to citizens' participation in elections. Nonetheless, little is known about the individual-level mechanisms that link political choice and turnout. It is argued in this article that turnout decisions are shaped not only by the differences between the parties (party polarisation), but also by the closeness of parties to citizens' own ideological position (congruence), and that congruence matters more in polarised systems where more is at stake. Analysing cross-national survey data from 80 elections, it is found that both polarisation and congruence have a mobilising effect, but that polarisation moderates the effect of congruence on turnout. To further explore the causal effect of political choice, the arrival of a new radical right-wing party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is leveraged and the findings show that the presence of the AfD had a mobilising effect, especially for citizens with congruent views.
How do the range of issues voters care about and party system polarization impact democratic outcomes? Recent debates have focused on the negative effect of polarized systems on democratic quality. However, the extent to which this polarization is channeled or diffused over a wide range of issues on the public agenda has not been analyzed systematically. Using data from 31 European countries from 2003-2018, we show that party polarization indeed has a negative effect on people's satisfaction with democracy. Importantly, however, we demonstrate that at high levels of issue diversity, measured as the distribution of responses to the 'Most Important Issue' item, the negative effect of polarization is minimized. Drawing on the deliberative democracy literature, we argue that at low levels of issue diversity, polarization makes compromise in society less likely and the political discourse more antagonistic. However, at higher levels of issue diversity, contestation and conflict can be diffused over a large range of issues, providing more favourable conditions for collective will formation and, ultimately, higher levels of satisfaction with democracy.
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