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What determines party strategies in the short run during election campaigns? In this paper, I highlight a novel aspect of party behavior pertaining to the connection between election programs and actual campaign statements issued by party elites in the media. I argue that party leaders may feel compelled to fine-tune their rhetoric and stances during campaigns and thus deviate from their party's election programs. Nonetheless, their ability to conduct ad-hoc adaptations is limited. The theory I propose posits that two features of party organizations will determine if party leaders can engage in short-term inconsistencies. First, membership-dominated parties will be less likely to be inconsistent because their leaders will fear alienating (the strong) party members and getting punished as a result. Second, parties with strong societal integration—those that maintain strong ties with society and an extensive network of local branches—are more likely to indulge in ideological inconsistency because they establish close bonds with voters based on problem-solving rather than broad ideological principles. I test these dynamics in 14 European democracies between 1972 and 2017 and find strong empirical support. The findings show that intricate party organizations and robust connections with normal citizens influence parties' short-term strategies during election campaigns.

Scholars voice increasing interest in strategic ambiguity—a strategy whereby parties intentionally conceal their positions on divisive issues. Scholars contend that strategic ambiguity can help European parties broaden their electoral appeals. Although they identify several tactics and styles of position-blurring, the observational literature has yet failed to capture different variants of ambiguous rhetoric, let alone evaluate their effect on the vote. In this article, I rely on cross-country survey experiments that utilize representative samples of around 22,000 respondents from 14 European countries to evaluate the effect of four varieties of ambiguity: vagueness, ambivalence, flip-flopping, and negative messaging. I investigate the impact of ambiguous rhetoric vis-a-vis the context of competition facing the party. The findings reveal that the consequences of ambiguity vary by the actual form it takes and the context of competition facing the party. First, among the varieties, vague and ambivalent variants were superior to negative messaging or flip-flopping. Second, ambiguity helped the party in the absence of popular policy offers in the party system, while it backfired when competitors explicitly agreed with the voter. The findings imply that ambiguity is generally a useful strategy, but its benefits do not extend to rhetorical tactics that harm the party's valence image.

AbstractWhat explains the variation in public support for European integration? While the existing literature has predominantly focused on economic, cultural and political factors, the influence of geography has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by examining the impact of residing in the European Union (EU) border regions on voters' perceptions and attitudes towards the EU. Contrary to previous research, our study reveals a remarkable pattern, indicating that individuals living in border regions exhibit a higher propensity to vote for Eurosceptic parties and hold negative views on the EU. Through the utilization of both behavioural and attitudinal indicators in years ranging between 1999 and 2021 and employing statistical matching, our analysis robustly supports this finding. Moreover, we delve into the underlying mechanisms driving these negative attitudes in border regions, highlighting the significance of institutional factors. A mediation analysis reveals an interesting and previously unexplored theoretical twist: We find that residing in a border region is associated with lower trust in national political institutions, which translates into distrust in the EU. These findings suggest that it might be policymakers residing in the capital of the country rather than people on the other side of the border that make borderland inhabitants' attitudes distinctly negative.

AbstractPast research has long documented that voters dislike parties and leaders who reverse their policy positions. But would they tolerate (principled) policy U‐turns if they are motivated by external events, such as a large‐scale crisis or scientific evidence? In this study, we explore whether the motivation behind positional shifts affects voter evaluations of political parties. To do so, we seek to connect the causes and consequences of policy shifts, a synergy still unexplored in the literature. We suggest that, while U‐turns, in general, can be damaging to a party's reputation, principled changes brought about by new scientific evidence or major crises should not necessarily have negative implications, because these changes can be necessary for the public good. We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment in Germany (n = 3127) featuring two classes of policy reversals: strategic and principled. Surprisingly, however, we find that voters by and large hold negative views of different types of policy U‐turns, thus including when external circumstances suggest change may be necessary. Interestingly, our empirical analysis reveals intriguing patterns. First, voters are willing to tolerate all sorts of policy reversals if the party ends up adopting their positions, suggesting that proximity matters even in the event of exogenous events. Second, voters with high levels of political trust tolerate different types of policy reversals, even when the party changes for mere strategic office‐seeking motivations. Coming from the premise that political and societal change is imperative, these findings have direct implications for democracies.

Authored by James Dennison and Mohamed Nasr, this Migration Research Series paper explores public attitudes to immigration in the Arab world and considers their effects on migration policies in the region. Using quantitative data from across the Arabic-speaking world, the paper first examines the relationship between attitudes to immigration and a number of sociodemographic and attitudinal variables. It then analyses the salience – or importance – of immigration as an issue in the region before probing the key determinants of migration policy change, which include public opinion, in four main countries. ; This work was supported by the EUROMED Migration IV Programme, funded by the European Union (EU) and implemented by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD)

This chapter overviews public attitudes to migration in Southern Partner Countries (SPCs) and considers their effects on migration politics and policies in the region over the past 20 to 30 years. Overall, the quantitative overview of attitudes in the SPCs offers a number of clear patterns: • A large majority (at least 63 per cent) of citizens in almost every country considered display positivity or indifference when asked about general xenophobic attitudes to immigrants. • However, a significant minority offer explicitly xenophobic attitudes to immigrants in all but one country, with between 15 per cent and 38 per cent stating they would not like to have an immigrant as a neighbour. • Attitudes to refugees tend to differ from those of other immigrants, with either greater positively or negatively depending on country context and between 9 per cent and 26 per cent stating that they would not like to have them as neighbours. • By contrast, in every country and across time, the vast majority (75 – 99 per cent) of citizens display anti-immigration attitudes regarding the labour market, with in some cases almost unanimous belief that employers should give priority to citizens. However, attitudes to both immigrants as neighbours and as participants in the labour market are in many cases becoming more positive over time. • When North Africans are asked to choose between free movement of persons between their countries, on the one hand, or government control over intra-North African migration, on the other, they are divided roughly equally in each country, with a slight majority in favour of government controls. • Despite significant anti-immigration sentiment, immigration remains a low salience issue in every country considered (with the recent exception of the issue of Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon). • It is the low salience of immigration that most differentiates the politics of the SPCs from European Union Member States (as shown in Chapter 1 of this report). • Low salience means that policy-makers—regardless of regime type—are likely to feel relatively little public pressure when creating migration policy, giving them significant flexibility. • It also means that NGOs and civil society organisations are likely to have increased influence on policy, rather than the public at large, which we provide some evidence to suggest is indeed the case in Tunisia and Morocco. • In Jordan and Lebanon, by contrast, increased salience of Syrian refugees as a political issue has led to tightening government restrictions. • This is not to say that SPC publics do not see migration as an important issue outright, but rather that they clearly consider it relatively less important than economic, administrative and security issues, and it is these issues that policy-makers are most likely to feel pressure to act on. • We also find some evidence that emigration is considered an exceptionally large problem in SPCs. However, we also find a lack of data regarding attitudes to emigration, as in other regions. ; Developed for ICMPD under the EU funded programme EUROMED Migration IV by the Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration - Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute, Florence

Der Beitrag berichtet anhand neuer Umfrageergebnisse (April 2020) über die öffentliche Zustimmung zu EU-Solidarität in 13  EU-Mitgliedstaaten und in Großbritannien. Die Analyse ergibt u. a. diese Erkenntnisse: Die Befürwortung variiert je nach geografischer Entfernung, Problematik und empfundenem Nettonutzen für das eigene Land ; sie ist eher durch die Erwartung gegenseitigen Nutzens motiviert als durch Gefühle moralischer Verpflichtung oder gemeinsamer Identität ; die meisten Befragten bevorzugen dauerhafte EU-Vereinbarungen zur Risiko- und Lastenteilung gegenüber einzelfallbasierter Ad-hoc-Hilfe ; eine relative Mehrheit zieht ein beschützendes Europa einem marktschaffenden oder einem globalen Europa mit internationalem Führungsanspruch vor.

The EUI-YouGov dataset on European solidarity is built on a large survey designed by the EUI 'Solidarity in Europe' research team and implemented by YouGov. The data aims to empirically assess public opinion on the willingness to redistribute resources within the EU and to examine political attitudes that might explain these preferences. The survey design covers a number of issues, particularly concerning attitudes towards European solidarity; support for cross-border solidarity and policy preferences concerning the COVID-19 crisis; satisfaction and trust in national and European institutions; attitudes towards European integration, identity, value of democracy, world politics, security and defence, Russia, NATO and a European army; preferences concerning taxes and policy priorities; the relative salience of different issues and threats facing individuals, countries and the EU; political ideology, religion and voting preferences; as well as other individual attributes such as gender, age and occupation. The survey inquired 21.593 adults over 13 EU countries and the United Kingdom, from 12 to 27 April 2021. YouGov implemented the survey online using a randomised panel sampling mechanism to ensure it is nationally representative concerning age, gender, social class, region, level of education, voting preference and level of political interest.

The SiE survey on solidarity in Europe, developed by the EUI and YouGov, is implemented yearly since 2018. This trendfile compiles the most relevant variables repeated over the five wave datasets (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022); please consult GESIS for the individual yearly datasets. The trendfile indicators cover a number of topics such as support for solidarity amongst EU countries and beyond; political attitudes concerning European integration; trust in EU and national institutions; response to different crises through various instruments, including the Covid-19 outbreak and the war in Ukraine; preferences concerning EU policy, European security and defence policy, Russia, NATO and a European army; identity; value of democracy; importance and salience of various issues and threats; position concerning world politics; and individual attributes such as left-right self-placement; gender, age, ocupation, religion, past vote in national elections, among other indicators.