Publications
Journal Articles
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Punctuated Politics: The Rise and Fall of Politicisation in the EU's Refugee Crisis
Journal of European Public Policy, Forthcoming.
The refugee crisis of 2015-2019 exposed deep tensions within the EU's compound polity, generating episodic bursts of political conflict and contestation over policy issues. This paper, drawing on punctuated politicization, conceptualizes politicization as an episodic feedback system linking three demand-side forces, namely problem pressure, public salience, and political pressure to the politicization of policy issues inside the EU's policy process, specifying the mechanisms that generate punctuated patterns observed in prior research. With an innovative dataset based on Policy Process Analysis (PPA), a Bayesian vector error-correction model traces both short-run shocks and long-run equilibria among the four variables. Results show that in the refugee crisis, public salience operates as a key enabling condition, as asylum surges politicize EU decision-making only when they trigger parallel surges in public attention; politicization itself cannot self-perpetuate, failing to affect public attention or asylum inflows absent continued external reinforcement; and political pressure activates countervailing forces, as gains for radical-right parties are followed by lower salience and fewer asylum applications, revealing a self-limiting feedback loop that drives the system back toward equilibrium.
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Electoral Campaign Effects: An Aggregate Analysis of Electoral Issue Competition
with Argyrios Altiparmakis and Hanspeter Kriesi. Party Politics, 2026
Elections are not only verdicts on incumbents but also contests over the issues that parties emphasize. This paper asks whether parties’ issue-specific campaign strategies influence their electoral success, and how parties decide on those strategies. We leverage a new dataset on parties’ electoral campaign efforts in 15 European countries to examine three dimensions of campaign strategy: the salience of issues, the position they take on those issues, and the extremity or moderation of those positions. As for the parties’ strategic choices, the results confirm that European parties organize their issue-specific campaigns largely in line with their ideological positions and their status as challengers or mainstream parties. In response to the electoral effect of their campaign strategies, the results confirm the received wisdom that the parties’ issue-specific campaigns have only a limited effect on the electoral outcome. However, this general result has to be nuanced by party family: challengers and mainstream party families have benefited to varying degrees from their respective strategies. The effects of campaigns on electoral success are the largest for the radical right, which has benefited from putting the emphasis on cultural issues and taking clear-cut or even extreme positions on economic issues. Our findings shed new light on party responsiveness and the limits of political persuasion, showing when campaign appeals can sway voters and when structural factors trump campaign effects.
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Appeasement or Solidarity? Uncovering the Drivers of European Public Opinion on the EU's Foreign Policy
with Alexandru D. Moise. European Union Politics, 2025.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, with its implications for European security, has intensified the need to understand European public opinion on potential conflict strategies. This study delves into the formation of these opinions, focusing on utilitarian factors like economic interests and threat perception, and ideological elements such as political orientation, national identity, and perceptions of Russia and Ukraine. Utilizing a two-wave panel survey from five EU countries, our findings underscore that ideological factors, especially trust in Russia and Ukraine are paramount in shaping support for escalation or de-escalation. Economic concerns, threat perceptions, right-wing ideologies, and strong national identities also play significant roles. This research not only illuminates European sentiment on the war in Ukraine but also enriches broader discussions on the determinants of public opinion in international conflicts.
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What Happened to Putin's Friends? The Radical Right's Reaction to the Russian Invasion on Social Media
with Argyrios Altiparmakis. European Union Politics, 2025.
The Ukrainian crisis has significantly shifted public opinion against Russia and Putin, placing politicians with prior Russian ties in a precarious situation. This paper tracks how parties that had some affinity to Putin have pivoted after the outbreak of war. Through computational text analysis of a decade of Facebook posts from eleven European radical right parties, we investigate their stance evolution towards Russia and their strategic management of public sentiment and Russian relationships. The results show that most radical right parties, after the invasion, neither tried to remain pro-Russia nor focused their attention on shifting their prior position. Instead, they engaged in blurring the issue, diverting attention away from the war and using the events in Ukraine to assert their anti-EU positions.
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Two Functionalist Logics of European Union Polity Formation under External Threat: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
with Alexandru D. Moise, Ioana-Elena Oana and Zbigniew Truchlewski. European Union Politics, 2025.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine challenged the European Union (EU) polity exceptionally, affecting many policy domains. We argue that the external threat triggers different logics of (in)security which can result in polity formation across policies. Two functionalist logics put pressure on the EU to centralize policies that (a) help it meet the geopolitical challenge set by Russia and (b) maintain unity among member states in the face of the challenge. We test this theory with a conjoint survey experiment in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Hungary, where we vary refugee, energy, costs of living, and defense policies. Our results show that there is strong solidarity for sharing the costs of refugees, which cuts across ideological and identitarian groups, and across countries. Other policy areas show more contentious support.
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The COVID-19 Lockdown Paradox: Democratic Support during Democratic Restrictions
with Abel Bojar and Ioana-Elena Oana. European Political Science Review, 2025.
Previous research has shown that positive perceptions of government performance are linked to higher levels of citizens' support for democracy. However, the policy response to the COVID-19 crisis presented a unique paradox as relative success in preventing the virus spread depended on expanding executive powers, often at the cost of individual freedoms. Exploring this paradox, we investigate whether the link between perceptions of government performance and support for democracy holds in a situation where positive performance essentially means a restriction of freedoms. Using original survey data from seven European countries, we show that notwithstanding the democratic sacrifices, people with positive evaluations of the government's response are more likely to maintain support for the democratic system. Nevertheless, people weighed responses to the health domain more heavily than to the economic domain, suggesting that the output legitimacy – democratic support link varies across domain-specific evaluations.
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The Short-lived Hope for Contagion: Brexit in Social Media Communication of the Populist Right
with Argyrios Altiparmakis and Joan Miró. West European Politics, 2024.
Brexit was perceived as a Pandora's box moment by both Eurosceptic and pro-integration parties in the EU, as they expected it would embolden Euroscepticism by providing a paradigm to be followed. The protracted negotiations between the UK government and the EU could have provided a platform for extended campaigns by Eurosceptic parties. This article explores the initial reactions of nine Populist Radical Right parties to Brexit and how they evolved in tandem with the unfolding of negotiations. It also discusses possible reasons for the differentiation in the responses of those parties, from triumphant to moderated reactions. Our empirical basis is a dataset that contains the public communications of these parties on Twitter between 2015 and 2020. The results show that, although there was initial differentiation with some parties calling for referenda in their own countries, by 2017 every party's communications on Brexit drastically decreased, and by the time the UK left the EU (January 2020), calls for secession had disappeared from their discourse.
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A Unified Autonomous Europe? Public Opinion on EU's Foreign and Security Policy
with Alexandru D. Moise. Journal of European Public Policy, 2023.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed the EU into a new phase where both the political elites and the public start to rethink its foreign and security policies. This paper uses a unique survey in seven European countries in the wake of the war to examine European public opinion on how the EU's foreign and security policies should be made and how autonomous they should be. We find that Europeans not only favour increasing military capacity at the national or NATO level but also prefer increasing military capacity at the EU level, though to a lesser degree. We also show that perceptions of both short-term and long-term threats, European identification and mainstream left-wing ideology lead Europeans to favour a more militarily powerful, unified and autonomous EU.
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Emergency Politics, Mass Sentiment and the EU during COVID
with Abel Bojar, Ioana-Elena Oana and Zbigniew Truchlewski. Comparative European Politics, 2023.
During crises, do emergency politics impair the EU polity by alienating Europeans? Recent literature suggests that executive decisions in hard times can spur negative European sentiment, increase polarisation in the public and thus create more problems than solutions. The Covid-19 pandemic offers an ideal opportunity to study this important issue. However, studying mass sentiment towards the EU is mostly constrained by imperfect survey data. We tackle this challenge with an empirical strategy that combines two original data sources: first, we use policy process analysis to identify key EU decisions; second, we leverage Twitter data to measure sentiment. As a result, we can study whether key EU decisions impacted EU sentiment and whether this impact is conditional on the level of EU competence, prior politicisation and problem pressure. We find that EU decisions impact EU sentiment positively and do not polarise it (even among highly politicised decisions). Low prior politicisation and healthcare-related decisions increase the positive impact of EU actions. There is thus no punishment of the EU for acting outside its remit. Our findings have important implications for the politics of polity maintenance in the EU.
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The Effect of Austerity Packages on Government Popularity during the Great Recession
with Abel Bojar, Björn Bremer and Hanspeter Kriesi. British Journal of Political Science, 2022.
During the Great Recession, governments across the continent implemented austerity policies. A large literature claims that such policies are surprisingly popular and have few electoral costs. This article revisits this question by studying the popularity of governments during the economic crisis. The authors assemble a pooled time-series data set for monthly support for ruling parties from fifteen European countries and treat austerity packages as intervention variables to the underlying popularity series. Using time-series analysis, this permits the careful tracking of the impact of austerity packages over time. The main empirical contributions are twofold. First, the study shows that, on average, austerity packages hurt incumbent parties in opinion polls. Secondly, it demonstrates that the magnitude of this electoral punishment is contingent on the economic and political context: in instances of rising unemployment, the involvement of external creditors and high protest intensity, the cumulative impact of austerity on government popularity becomes considerable.
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A Cure Worse than the Disease? Exploring the Health-Economy Trade-off during COVID-19
with Ioana-Elena Oana and Alessandro Pellegata. West European Politics, 2022.
Nationwide lockdowns implemented by governments to confront the COVID-19 pandemic came at a high economic price. The article investigates citizens' evaluation of the trade-off between public health measures and their economic consequences. Using a vignette experiment conducted in June 2020 on 7,500 respondents in seven European countries the article tests whether perceived threats of the health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic affect citizens' preferences for strict or mild lockdown measures. Findings show that European citizens tend to prefer strict measures protecting public health despite their damage to the economy. Even individuals more concerned about the pandemic's economic impact do not prefer milder restrictions. Sociodemographic factors only indirectly affect public preferences, through perceived threats. Additionally, findings show that trust in experts and political orientations matter. These results resonate with previous research showing that public opinion in hard times is likely to be guided by risk perceptions and subjective attitudes.
Special Issues & Chapters
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Electoral Mobilisation in Turbulent Times
Guest Editor with Endre Borbáth and Argyrios Altiparmakis. Party Politics, 2026
This symposium examines how European parties mobilize electorally in an era of recurrent crises and rapid political transformation. Building on the updated PolDem dataset, which tracks media coverage of national election campaigns across fifteen European countries from 1972 to 2023, the symposium investigates how issue salience, party positioning, and voter behaviour interact under turbulent conditions. The introduction situates the contributions around three core themes: (1) measuring and comparing party communication across media and manifestos; (2) mapping cross-national and longitudinal variation in political conflict lines; and (3) identifying the drivers of politicization across economic, cultural, and political dimensions. Together, the articles offer an integrated, content-based perspective on campaign dynamics that links short-term issue emphasis to long-term party-system structuration. The collection advances our understanding of how crises reshape electoral competition and democratic representation in Europe.
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Division and Unity: Public and Party Perspectives on EU Integration under External Threat
Guest Editor with Alexandru D. Moise. European Union Politics, 2025.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reshaped European politics, prompting the European Union (EU) to take indirect actions such as aiding Ukraine, accepting refugees, and imposing sanctions on Russia. This special section explores the implications of these events on European unity. Will the war highlight divisions among countries and ideological groups, as "post-functionalists" would predict? Or will the external threat, in line with the "bellicist logic," and EU solidarity, in line with the "polity formation" literature, foster increased EU policy coordination and centralization? The contributions assess the war's impact on the supply (political parties) and demand (public opinion) sides of the politics of European integration. The articles show moderate support for the "bellicist" mechanisms of threat and consensus. They also find solidarity and unity for refugee and energy policy, with greater ideological and country divisions over economic policy, defence policy, and appeasement strategies toward Russia.
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Introduction: EU Polity Building after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Guest Editor with Alexandru D. Moise, Marcello Natili, Ioana-Elena Oana, Zbigniew Truchlewski and Francesco Visconti. Journal of European Public Policy, 2023.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has posed unprecedented challenges for the European Union (EU) across several policy domains, activating two key logics of polity formation: external security and social security. The external security logic, driven by the 'rally-around-the-flag' effect, suggests that war threats could foster EU unity and centralisation in defence and foreign policy, traditionally outside the EU's competence. Recent scholarship debates whether this could lead to a 'Tillian moment', with implications for collective EU capacities in areas like military aid and sanctions. Conversely, the social security logic addresses internal challenges from dwindling energy resources, higher prices, and distributional conflicts, which may escalate demands for risk sharing and social safety among EU citizens. This approach aims to maintain citizen loyalty amidst the invasion's economic impacts but may create policy inconsistencies and exacerbate trade-offs with ongoing crises like climate change. This symposium explores these logics through empirical studies and common questions, assessing political divisions within and between member states. It investigates whether the invasion has increased public demand for supranational interventions, fostering polity building, or heightened divisions. Initial unity over sanctions against Russia has given way to emerging fractures as the invasion's costs become clearer.
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Economic Grievances, Political Grievances, and Protest
with Silja Häusermann, Hanspeter Kriesi and Thomas Kurer. Contention in Times of Crisis: Recession and Political Protest in Thirty European Countries, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
The chapter establishes that economic and political grievances matter for economic protest in general and public economic protest in particular. In addition, it shows that, during the period covered, political grievances have been strongly influenced by economic grievances across Europe, but most clearly in southern Europe. While the rapid recovery of the countries of north-western Europe and the pain tolerance in the countries of central and eastern Europe probably served to limit the impact of the economic grievances on political dissatisfaction, the fact that the southern European countries not only were hard hit by the economic crisis, but also experienced a relative decline with regard to the other parts of Europe, most likely enhanced the impact of economic on political grievances in this part of Europe. Moreover, it is also above all in southern Europe that the effect of economic on political grievances was conditioned by state capacity and IMF interventions: while weak state capacity enhanced the effect of the former on the latter, IMF interventions attenuated it. Finally, a core finding of this chapter is that economic protest was most heavily influenced by the joint effect of economic and political grievances. Protest mobilization was particularly pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.
Working Papers
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Uncovering Political Bias in Large Language Models using Parliamentary Voting Records
with Jan Burakowski, Jieying Chen, Karen de Jong, Elena Elderson Nosti, Andreas Poole and Joep Windt. Under review.
As large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in digital platforms and decision-making systems, concerns about their political biases have grown. While substantial work has examined social biases such as gender and race, systematic studies of political bias remain limited—despite their direct societal impact. This paper introduces a general methodology for constructing political-bias benchmarks based on aligning model-generated voting predictions with verified parliamentary voting records. We instantiate this methodology in three national case studies: PoliBiasNL (2,701 Dutch parliamentary motions and votes from 15 political parties), PoliBiasNO (10,584 motions and votes from 9 Norwegian parties), and PoliBiasES (2,480 motions and votes from 10 Spanish parties). Across these benchmarks, we evaluate ideological tendencies, party-specific entity biases, and persona-driven shifts in model behavior. Using a range of prompting strategies, our experiments reveal that the benchmarks capture fine-grained ideological distinctions. Prominently, state-of-the-art LLMs consistently display left-leaning or centrist tendencies, alongside clear negative biases toward right-conservative parties. Our findings highlight the importance of transparent, cross-national political-bias evaluation to support the fair and responsible use of LLMs in socially sensitive applications.
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Directional Hallucinations: Ideological Drift in News-Grounded LLM Question Answering
with Jieying Chen, Liam Cunningham and Tom Yishay. Under review.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer questions about political information, including in election-adjacent information settings where factual errors and ideological distortions are high-stakes. We present a reproducible measurement framework that treats hallucinations, unsupported statements in document-grounded QA, as diagnostic signals of ideological drift. Using 21,727 expert-labeled U.S. political news articles spanning left, center, and right sources, we (i) generate an article-specific question, (ii) elicit document-grounded answers from three open-source LLMs, (iii) detect sentence-level hallucinations via reference-based comparison, (iv) classify the ideological valence of hallucinated sentences with a fine-tuned stance classifier, and (v) probe output logits to relate token-level uncertainty to hallucination and drift. Hallucination rates vary substantially across models and concentrate in contentious topics, while source-ideology differences in hallucination frequency are modest. In contrast, hallucination content exhibits robust leftward drift: a majority of hallucinated sentences are classified as left-leaning, including among hallucinations generated from right-leaning sources. Logit-level analysis shows hallucinations arise in high-entropy generation contexts, and in some models uncertainty also predicts leftward drift, consistent with an "uncertainty → guessing" mechanism. In advisory consultation with an election administration stakeholder, we discuss implications for auditing AI-mediated political information and for designing safeguards in election-relevant deployments.
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White-Hat Testing for the Ballot Box: A Framework for Election AI Auditing
with Jieying Chen. Under review.
Recent research shows that conversational AI can shift voter preferences, with effects persisting for weeks. Yet frontier models exhibit a documented "persuasion--reliability tradeoff," producing hallucinated or systematically distorted election information. Despite these risks, election officials lack standardized tools to systematically evaluate AI systems before deployment. We propose CivicAudit-Bench, a stakeholder-guided auditing framework to stress-test large language models for civic hallucinations, false confidence, jurisdiction-dependent failure, and asymmetric refusals/accuracy. This framework introduces a modular, counterfactual, and severity-aware auditing methodology that integrates roll-call–based alignment modelling, entity-swap probing, and jurisdiction-conditional correctness criteria. Informed by engagement with stakeholders and practitioners, the toolkit consists of three modules: (1) PoliBias-US, a multi-indicator alignment screen combining Congressional roll-call ideology scaling with party-cue counterfactual sensitivity, persona robustness, and narrative-framing alignment; (2) HalluBias-Election, an evidence-linked benchmark that measures hallucinations, severity-weighted critical errors, and asymmetries via Entity-Swap Counterfactual Probing and a jurisdiction-safe completion criterion; and (3) Disclosure-Test, pre-registered experiments assessing whether transparency and calibrated-uncertainty disclosures reduce overreliance and attenuate persuasion without blocking legitimate civic information. CivicAudit-Bench outputs versioned audit scorecards and a coordinated white-hat disclosure workflow, strengthening democratic information integrity.
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The Balance of Power: Exploring EU Competence through Party and Citizen Perspectives
Under review.
This paper investigates voter-party congruence on EU policy issues across different levels of EU competence in the 2024 European Parliament elections. Despite increased attention to EU issue voting, existing research has focused mainly on general attitudes toward European integration rather than on specific policy domains. Addressing this gap, we examine congruence patterns across exclusive EU competences, shared competences, national competences and EU institutional arrangement using a unique survey from 16 countries and data from the EU&I Voting Advice Application. Our findings reveal systematic variations in voter-party alignment, with the highest congruence observed in exclusive competences and the lowest in EU institutional issues. Additionally, party family and individual-level factors, including EU knowledge and satisfaction with government at different levels and European integration attitude, significantly influence these patterns. These results highlight the importance of competence-specific considerations in understanding public opinion and party strategy within the EU's multilevel governance framework.
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How Europeans View Democracy at the European Level
with Ben Crum and Hanspeter Kriesi. Under review.
This exploratory study asks how Europeans view EU democracy and how satisfied they are with how EU democracy works. Roughly one-fifth of them do not appear to have any idea about the “democratic deficit” at the EU level. We create a typology of European democrats distinguishing between allegiant, delegative, assertive, and disaffected democrats, show the distribution over the types, and analyze the factors associated with its two dimensions and the types. Citizens' opinions on EU democracy deviate most notably from their views on national democracy in that much fewer of them want to expand it. As expected, pro-Europeans demand more democracy and are more satisfied with EU democracy than Euroskeptics, and feeling represented at the EU level and trusting EU institutions most strongly enhance demand for and satisfaction with EU democracy. In general, Europeans have clearer ideas about how democracy works in the EU than about how they want it to work.
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Drivers and Consequences of Protest Mobilisation in European Crises
with Argyrios Altiparmakis, Hanspeter Kriesi and Ioana-Elena Oana. Under review.
Protest activities have long been regarded as important for expressing grievances and achieving goals in democracies. This paper tackles the questions of why and how people mobilize and investigates the correlates of such mobilization by engaging with the major theories of social movement mobilization and applying them to three major crises (Eurozone, Refugee, and COVID) that have hit European Member States and the EU. Using an original protest event dataset integrated with data on public opinion and original data on supply-side salience spanning the period 2008-2021 in eight countries, we attempt to examine the relationship between the crisis-specific problem pressures, political pressures coming from public opinion, supply-side dynamics, and the nature and extent of political protest. By integrating demand-side indicators in terms of crisis-specific issue salience and supply-side indicators in terms of salience of crisis-specific issues among the elites we aim to analyze the drivers and consequences of protest under the same empirical umbrella. In terms of drivers, we examine the protest activation potential of the crises by looking at how the extent of protest responds to crisis-specific problem pressures resulting in higher grievances and to its wider political context regarding the salience of crisis-specific issues among publics. We show that protest is strongly reactive to crisis-specific problem and political pressures. Heightened problem pressure in terms of economic hardship, refugee arrivals, and covid pressure all increase crisis-specific protest in the same month. With regard to political pressure, the salience of crisis-specific issues in the public also drives protest related to these crises. In terms of consequences, we attempt to gauge the extent to which protest is related to heightened salience of crisis-specific issues on the supply side, but also to government approval. Our results are consistent with the idea that protest has an agenda-setting effect and influences government approval rates in particular crises.
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Electoral Politics in the Covid-19 Crisis: How Partisanship, Policy Assessments, and Trust in Government Shaped Electoral Choices
with Hanspeter Kriesi and Elie Michel. Under review.
Based on a five-wave panel survey in eleven countries during the Covid-19 crisis, we study the effects of policy assessments (satisfaction with the way the government handled the crisis) and trust in government on vote intentions. For the analysis, we rely on well-known concepts from theories on economic voting and political support. The results indicate that both policy assessments and trust in government had massive effects on vote intentions during the Covid-19 crisis. Contrasting with previous results, we do not find a negativity bias of voters during the pandemic. Our results also show that voters perceived the Covid-19 through their partisan perceptual screen (retrospective vote choice and partisan identification), which largely influenced their vote intentions. We conclude that the Covid-19 crisis did not disrupt electoral politics but that voters specific and diffuse support for the government shaped the fate of incumbent governments.
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The Political Dynamics of Contentious Policymaking
Under review.
What is the political dynamics of contentious policymaking? This paper zooms in on the interactions between the governments and their challengers in reaction to contentious policy-making process and tests the impact of contention on government popularity and vice versa empirically. With data on actions in 60 contentious policy-making episodes in twelve European countries during the Great Recession, the panel vector autoregression analysis reveals that the relationship of contentious interactions between actors and government popularity is not uni-directional but endogenous, and each plays a critical and interdependent role in the system in shaping the dynamics of the contentious policy-making process.The findings show that government repression tended to increase challenger radicalisation, supporting a "threat" theory of repression, while challenger radicalism also led to heightened government repression. Challenger radicalism decreased government popularity as expected, while government repression increased popularity, indicating a public preference for "consistency." Government popularity then reinforced government repression but also increased challenger radicalisation, as popular governments attracted more opposition.
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The Streets Speak: Unravelling the Impact of Austerity Packages on Public Protests during the the Great Recession
Under review.
This paper examines the impact of austerity policy announcements on protest mobilisation in 16 European countries during the Great Recession. It argues that austerity policies politicised grievances and enabled blame attribution, while institutional constraints and protest fatigue dampened reactions to later policies. Using monthly protest event data and systematically coded austerity policy announcements, the study utilises an interrupted time series design to analyse austerity announcements as shocks to protest levels. The findings indicate that earlier austerity announcements significantly increased economic protest levels, while later announcements had no effect or even decreased protest. Furthermore, the impact of austerity on protest was conditioned by economic and political contexts. Austerity had a larger effect when accompanied by rising unemployment, worsening household finances, external actor involvement, and higher prior protest levels. The study contributes to understanding varied public reactions to austerity and the dynamics between economic crisis, government policies, and contentious politics.
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Austerity Measures and Political Backlash: Protest, Election, and Fiscal Policy Dynamics across Europe
Under review.
A body of literature claims that austerity policies are surprisingly popular and have little political costs. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics in electoral and protest arenas and the role of protests in politicising economic issues. This paper argues that the joint consideration of these two arenas provides new insights into the political consequences of austerity policies. The empirical analysis to study political consequence of austerity relies on an original protest event data-set combined with electoral outcomes and detailed taxation and expenditure data in 30 European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results of this paper show that citizens are not entirely fiscally conservative but ideologically conflicted. They dislike large deficits and government debt, but they also resist austerity and punish the government, either at polls or in the streets or both, depending on the composition of austerity packages and the party colour of the incumbents. Additionally, when taking into account the interaction dynamics between protest and electoral politics, this chapter shows that the electoral impact of consolidation measures is amplified by protest in the streets in Europe.
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Too Fragile to Succeed? Electoral Strength, Austerity and Economic Confidence
with Federico Maria Ferrara and Thomas Sattler.
In the wake of the Great Recession, European governments implemented harsh fiscal austerity measures to restore economic confidence Yet, the economic success of these policies varied significantly. This raises the question of whether and under what conditions austerity is an effective policy strategy to restore economic stability. This study shows that the impact of austerity on economic confidence is conditioned by an important political factor, namely the electoral strength of the government. Our macro-level time series analysis tracks the impact of austerity announcements on economic confidence over time in 15 European countries during the Great Recession, showing that austerity leads to a decrease in economic confidence However, the negative impact is substantially smaller when austerity is announced by an electorally strong government vis-à-vis a fragile one. Our individual-level survey experiment with a total of 7,500 respondents in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain indicates that the negative effects of spending cuts on both pocketbook and sociotropic concerns are particularly pronounced when austerity policies are announced by governments that are losing electoral support. Austerity, therefore, is perceived as more credible and effective when carried out by electorally strong governments compared to weak ones.
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The Impact of Issue-Specific Electoral Campaigns on the Vote Choice of Europeans
with Argyrios Altiparmakis and Hanspeter Kriesi.
We study the effect of issue-specific electoral campaigns on the vote. To this end, we adopt a structural approach and rely on a combination of European Social Survey (ESS) data (for the demand side) and electoral campaign data (for the supply side) and test our hypotheses using a Bayesian hierarchical model. We confirm that party identities together with block identities and issue-specific predispositions stabilize the vote choice, independently of electoral campaigns. Within the constraints imposed by these stabilising forces, we identify new kinds of effects of electoral campaigns – polarisation, salience and distinctiveness effects. Systemic polarisation during campaigns weakens the dominant parties of the past, while it reinforces the new parties representing the emerging structural conflict, and the liberals. With respect to the campaigning of individual parties, we find only very limited or even counter-productive effects for the parties on the left, while the campaigns of the parties on the right appear more effective – especially the campaigns of the liberals and the radical right.
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Print and Post: Comparing Political Campaign in Traditional and Social Media
Drawing on newspaper sentences and Facebook posts published by parties during 17 national elections in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom (2009-2022), we compare campaign communication across three dimensions–issue agenda breadth, ideological extremity and targeted negativity. The results overturn several clichés. Overall, parties discuss no fewer, and by 2022 slightly more, policy areas on Facebook than in newspapers; only radical-right parties use social media to expand their agendas, whereas mainstream parties streamline theirs. Contrary to fears of online radicalisation, policy positions are less extreme on Facebook, suggesting that algorithmic incentives reward visibility through tone rather than ideology. Tone, however, diverges sharply: one-third of Facebook messages attack a named opponent, compared with one-quarter in print, and this gap widens over the decade. Populist and radical parties spearhead the shift, yet even social-democratic parties in opposition increasingly weaponise social feeds. These patterns imply that digital campaigning intensifies personalised conflict without inflating ideological distance, helping to explain why affective polarisation in Europe has risen faster than policy polarisation. By pairing time-stamped cross-media text with scalable NLP, the study offers a replicable template for tracking how platform logics reshape democratic discourse over time.
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Friends and Foes: European Public Opinion of Major World Powers
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed Europe into a new phase where both the political elites and the public start to rethink its geopolitical future. This paper explains how Europeans recalibrate trust in the three major powers (US, China and Russia) and why those trust hierarchies shift so sharply across leadership cycles. With surveys in 16 EU member states from 2022 to 2025, we test hypotheses derived from alliance-credibility theory, social-identity theory, democratic peace arguments, and competing visions of Europe's global role. The results show Russia is a durable foe: threat perceptions, democratic values, and EU identities keep trust in Moscow at historic lows for every mainstream constituency. Second, the US is a conditional friend: Biden's cooperative cues generate a trust bump among pro-EU and pro-democracy publics, but that premium flips negative under Trump, whose America retains high trust only among nationalist sovereigntists. Third, China occupies an ambivalent middle tier: prosperity-first Europeans and disenchanted integrationists hedge toward Beijing when US credibility falters, while values-first Europeans remain distrustful. The analysis uncovers a dual logic of strategic autonomy, integrationist versus sovereigntist, that reacts in opposite directions to US leadership cues, and shows that identity-based expectations, not material threat alone, determine whether Europeans label a great power friend, foe, or pragmatic partner.
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A New Bayesian Scaling Approach to Party Position and Issue Salience
with Haoyu Zhai.
In this paper we develop a new Bayesian scaling method for estimating party policy preferences (position and salience) from the popular Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data. Our method uses a Bayesian hierarchical modelling approach that integrates theory-driven model specification with data-driven parameter estimation, to achieve meaningful and flexible measure construction from the entire CMP dataset. In particular, it (1) takes more appropriate distributional assumptions about observed data, (2) incorporates multiple levels of information (party, election, and country) into the model, and (3) estimates the full set of parameters at the same time, that improves upon the quality, generalisability, and efficiency of the resulting measures. Our method also allows for scale decomposition at different levels of analysis as well as uncertainty quantification through built-in procedure. Compared to existing measures using the CMP data, our new scales are shown to have superior performances in capturing parties' latent strategic preferences across countries and electoral contests. Beyond the CMP data, our method can also be readily applied to other types of pre-processed text data for latent feature recovery and measure construction.
Work in Progress (Selected)
Substantive
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Learning Who Decides: Responsibility Attribution and Public Support for the EU
with Hongyi She. Book manuscript under contract with Cambridge University Press.
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Whose Guarantee Counts? Treaty Cues and U.S. Signals in European Support for Defending Allies
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Phased to Fight: How Threat and Alliance Uncertainty Shape Support for European Defence
with Alexandru D. Moise, Ioana-Elena Oana and Zbigniew Truchlewski.
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Insurance or Crowding Out? EU Burden-Sharing and the Fiscal Price of Security
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Endogenous Troubles, Exogenous Sympathy: Policy Legacies and Public Support for EU Solidarity
with Alexandru D. Moise.
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Interconnected Battlegrounds: A Multilevel Network Approach to Party Conflicts
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Daily Battles: Dissecting the Impact of Campaigns on Vote Intention
with Evelyne Brie.
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An Extended Exit, Voice and Loyalty Model of EU Crisis Politics
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Unravelling the Complex Web of Conflict: Disentangling Conflict Structures in EU Crisis Policymaking through Network
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Something for Nothing: Mass Opinion on Macroeconomic Policies
with Hongyi She.
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The Austerity Persuasion: How Different Explanations Impact Public Acceptance and Party Fortune
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Simply Running out of Money? Natural Resource Price Shock and Tax Introduction
with Youssef Mnaili.
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Fiscal Preference after the Pandemic: A Conjoint Experiment
Political Methodology
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Non-stationarity and Fractional Integration in Panel Setting? Panel State-Space Approach and Bayesian Hierarchal Approach Compared
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Regularisation vs. Bayesian Shrinkage in VAR: Applications in Political Science
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Piecing Together Political Dynamics: Compositional Data in Dynamic Setting
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ARFIMA-MLM Approach to the Repeated Cross-Sectional Design with Binary Outcome
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Bridging Temporal Divides: Applying Mixed Data Sampling Models
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European Values in Flux: A Bayesian Latent Variable Approach
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Knowledge Graphs and Explainable Predictive Models for Electoral Politics
with Jieying Chen, David Tena Cucala and Benno Kruit.
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Auditing and Debiasing Ideological Skew in Large Language Models with US Roll-Call Data
with Jan Burakowski and Jieying Chen.
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Finding Lorelei: Identifying Protest Cycle in Protest Event Time Series
with Amir Abdul Reda.
Data
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PolDem – Protest Dataset 30 European countries
with Hanspeter Kriesi and many others.
This dataset covers protest events in the 27 EU member state and in four additional non-EU member states – the UK, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland – over a period of more than 20 years, from 2000 to present. The semi-automated coding procedure allows the extraction of relevant variables, such as location, number of participants, protest forms, actors involved, trigger of the events, and issues addressed, from news-wire reports.