Acta Politica

Scholars trying to understand attitudes toward the European Union (EU) are increasingly interested in citizens’ basic predispositions, such as the “Big Five” personality traits. However, previous research on this particular relationship has failed to provide sound hypotheses and lacks consistent evidence. We propose that looking at specific facets of the Big Five offers a deeper understanding of the associations between personality predispositions, their measures, and EU attitudes. For this purpose, the 60-item Big Five Inventory-2, which explicitly measures Big Five domains and facets, was administered in a German population sample. We applied a variant of structural equation modeling and found that personality predispositions promoting communal and solidary behavior, cognitive elaboration, and a lower tendency to experience negative emotions predicted support for further European integration. Greater support of European integration might thus reflect, in part, basic psychological predispositions that facilitate adapting to the political, social, and cultural complexity posed by Europeanization. The study thus contributes to our understanding of deep-rooted patterns in thoughts and feelings that can shape citizens’ EU attitudes.

We explore the impact of campaign effort on constituency-level turnout variation in Britain, under the premise that higher levels of campaign visibility stimulate electoral participation. We focus on the relationship between the competitiveness of the race and campaign effort as a provider of electoral information on the one hand, and voter turnout on the other hand. In doing so, we address the role of campaign effort and competitiveness in shaping turnout both independently as well as jointly. Further to this, we seek to add nuance to our understanding of how electoral campaigns mobilise voters by evaluating the comparative ability of different parties – based on whether or not they are ‘viable’ contenders in a particular constituency – to stimulate turnout. We find evidence that campaign effort mobilises voters and has a significant positive effect on voter turnout; this effect is independent from, and unconditioned by, the competitiveness of the race. However, we do find that this effect is mostly driven by the campaign effort of the ‘viable’ contenders in the constituency.

Sự xuất hiện của các đảng chống nhập cư ở các nền dân chủ phát triển đã kích thích nhiều phản ứng khác nhau. Những phản ứng này, bao gồm việc kỳ thị các đảng này và truy tố các thành viên của họ vì tội phát ngôn thù hận, có thể dẫn đến những hậu quả không mong muốn. Những phản ứng này có tác động gì đến sự hỗ trợ của cử tri đối với các đảng này? Sử dụng phương pháp thí nghiệm, chúng tôi đã giao một mẫu đại diện cho cử tri Hà Lan với một trong sáu phiên bản của một video tin tức bị thao túng về một đảng chống nhập cư mới. Chúng tôi nhận thấy rằng việc kỳ thị đảng này làm giảm khả năng bỏ phiếu cho đảng đó, và điều này đặc biệt hơn khi có thông tin về việc một thành viên nổi bật bị truy tố vì tội phát ngôn thù hận so với khi không có thông tin đó. Dù sao đi nữa, tác động này bị điều chỉnh bởi thái độ chống nhập cư và được trung gian hóa bởi tính hợp pháp được cảm nhận của đảng.

Volunteering rates in Switzerland vary substantially across language regions. In this article, we investigate the cultural roots of this variation by presenting and empirically testing two different conceptualizations of how linguistic culture is related to individual volunteering. Whereas the first perspective perceives the individual as belonging to a particular language community and its norms and values as crucial for individual volunteering, the other sees the linguistic culture mainly as an important context in which an individual lives and which therefore influences individual volunteering. Empirically, we base our analysis on new survey data from 60 Swiss communes and apply a Bayesian multi-level analysis in order to disentangle the linguistic group from contextual effects. Our analysis supports the view that cultural patterns of civic self-organization can indeed explain regional volunteering behaviour in Switzerland. Whereas the propensity to volunteer is generally highest in German-speaking Switzerland, our findings reveal that it is the group of French speakers that exhibits the highest propensity to volunteer when controlling for language region.