Recent cross‐national comparative studies have found no effect of countries’ macroeconomic performances on trust in national political institutions, once political explanations (most notably corruption) are taken into account. Although political trust is not determined by the comparison of national economic performance to other countries, it is argued in this article that it is affected by comparisons to their own past performance. In a multilevel, fixed effects analysis of Eurobarometer data (21 waves in 15 European Union Member States between 1999 and 2011) the extent to which within‐country variations in economic performance affect political trust longitudinally is tested. Three major conclusions are reached. First, within‐country, longitudinal changes in performance (growth, deficits, unemployment and inflation) affect political trust. Second, the impact of macroeconomic performance is stronger among the lower educated. Third, even in times of economic duress, budgetary deficits tend to undermine political trust.

Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political information environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since citizens have new channels at their disposal, such as Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly complement or even replace traditional channels of information. This study investigates to what extent citizens have knowledge about daily politics and to what extent news on social media can provide this knowledge. It does so by means of a large online survey in Belgium (Flanders), in which we measured what people know about current political events, their so-called general surveillance knowledge. Our findings demonstrate that unlike following news via traditional media channels, citizens do not gain more political knowledge from following news on social media. We even find a negative association between following the news on Facebook and political knowledge. We further investigate why this is the case. Our data demonstrate that this lack of learning on social media is not due to a narrow, personalized news diet, as is often suggested. Rather, we find evidence that following news via social media increases a feeling of information overload, which decreases what people actually learn, especially for citizens who combine news via social media with other news sources.

Research has shown that in proportional, flexible list systems, ballot list position influences electoral success. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is due to the primacy effect, a psychological bias towards the first option in a list. We also examine alternative explanations such as the electoral beneficial traits these candidates share and extra media coverage they receive. Using data from the 2014 Belgian elections, we find that candidates with higher ballot list positions indeed score better because they have more political experience and receive more media attention. We also find strong evidence for the primacy effect which is caused by a confirmation bias as well as ballot list position being the easiest heuristic for voters.

Previous studies have found similarities with presidential candidates or party leaders to be an important factor in explaining voting behaviour. However, with the exception of gender, few studies have structurally studied voter-candidate similarities in intra-party electoral competition. This study investigates the Belgian case and argues that voter-candidate similarities play a role in the decision-making process of citizens when casting preferential votes. Moreover, it investigates whether underrepresented groups, and especially women, are more guided by these voter-candidate similarities than overrepresented groups. To achieve this aim voter and candidate characteristics are modelled simultaneously. This enables an investigation of the decision-making process of voters while taking into account structural inequalities at the supply side. The results demonstrate that citizens are indeed more likely to cast preferential votes for candidates similar to themselves and that these effects are stronger for underrepresented groups. Hence, preferential voting could ultimately pave the way for better descriptive representation.

A classical question of political science is to what extent electoral systems influence voting behaviour. Yet, many of these studies examine how different electoral systems affect the election results in terms of vote distribution across parties. Instead, we investigate how electoral rules affect intra party preference voting. Given the importance of the debate on the personalization of politics, insight into how electoral rules shape intra-party choice is a valuable contribution to the literature. In our study, we focus on the effect of two specific rules: the option to cast a list vote and on a single versus multiple preference votes. The results of experiments conducted in Belgium and the Netherlands show that electoral rules indeed influence voting behaviour with regard to intra party preference voting, although differences exist between the Netherlands and Belgium. Moreover, we find that the option to cast a list vote equally affects votes for the first candidate on the list, as well as lower positioned candidates. This suggests that preference votes might be less preferential than has often been assumed.