How does democratic politics affect infant mortality? The bulk of existing research has debated whether democracies have lower levels of infant mortality than non-democracies. Yet, infant mortality varies as much within countries as it does between countries, suggesting that the political processes affecting infant mortality operate at the subnational level. To shed new light on the debate, this paper examines how three core democratic attributes affect infant mortality within a single democracy: India. I argue that higher levels of political representation, citizens’ participation, and electoral competition provide political incentives for elected representatives to reduce infant mortality. The theory is tested on a times-series data set from 15 major Indian states between 1980 and 2011. Overall, the results demonstrate the significance of democratic politics, particularly political representation, in influencing infant mortality.

Thanks to crowdfunding, deliberative mini-publics can be funded bottom-up to reach a wider support in the population and secure financial autonomy for their design. But who are the people willing to pay for deliberative democracy and why? This article answers this twofold question using an original survey with crowdfunders of the G1000 in Belgium. First, the financial support for deliberative democracy mainly comes from the more socially advantaged groups. But second, the crowdfunders largely diverge in their democratic preferences. Some are critical and favour any forms of alternative decision-making process, including technocratic forms. Others demonstrate a stronger attachment to electoral institutions and their political actors. Hence, the study of the crowdfunders of the G1000 shows that deliberative democracy attracts the support of citizens with different political orientations. This sheds light on the complex and intertwined links between a mini-public and its larger maxi-public.

Do public attitudes concerning the European Union affect the speed with which member states transpose European directives? It is posited in this article that member state governments do respond to public attitudes regarding the EU when transposing European directives. Specifically, it is hypothesized that member state governments slow transposition of directives when aggregate public Euroskepticism is greater. This expectation is tested using extended Cox proportional hazard modeling and data derived from the EU’s legislative archives, the official journals of EU member states, and the Eurobarometer survey series. It is found that member state governments do slow transposition in response to higher aggregate public Euroskepticism. These findings have important implications for the study of European policy implementation, as well as for our understanding of political responsiveness in the EU.

Why did the transnational synchronization of wage inflations fail during the first 10 years of the euro? We analyze data from 1999 to 2008 for 12 euro members and estimate increases of nominal unit labor costs both in the overall economy and in manufacturing as dependent variables. While our analysis confirms that differences in economic growth shaped the inflation of labor costs, we add a political-institutional argument to the debate and argue that the designs of the wage regimes had an additional, independent impact. In coordinated labor regimes, increases in nominal unit labor costs tended to fall below the European Central Bank’s inflation target, while in uncoordinated labor regimes, the respective increases tended to exceed the European inflation target. Due to the stickiness of wage-bargaining institutions, the lack of the capacity to synchronize inflation is not likely to disappear in the foreseeable future.

Social scientists and political theorists often claim that shared values are conducive to social cohesion, and trust and solidarity in particular. Furthermore, this idea is at the heart of what has been labeled the ‘national identity argument’, according to which religious and/or cultural diversity is a threat to the shared (national) values underpinning social cohesion and redistributive justice. However, there is no consensus among political theorists about what values we need to share to foster social cohesion and indeed, for example, nationalists, liberals, and multiculturalists provide different answers to this question. On the basis of a survey conducted in Denmark in 2014, this study empirically investigates the relation between, on the one hand, commitments to the community values of respectively conservative nationalism, liberal nationalism, liberal citizenship, and multiculturalism, and on the other, trust and solidarity. First, we investigate in what ways commitments to these four sets of values are correlated to trust and solidarity at the individual level and, then, whether the belief that others share one’s values is correlated to these aspects of social cohesion for individuals committed to these four sets of values. We find that conservative and liberal nationalism are negatively correlated to our different measures of trust and solidarity, whereas liberal citizenship and (in particular) multiculturalism are positively correlated. In broad terms, this picture remains when we control for a number of socio-economic factors and ideology (on a left-right scale). Finally, individuals who believe that others share their values do not, in general, have higher levels of trust and solidarity. Rather, this belief works in different ways when associated with different sets of community values.

Traditional research on preferences for redistributive social policy suggest increasingly complex models of public opinion formation that envision individuals balancing normative concerns against sophisticated calculations of economic self-interest. This research largely ignores the large body of evidence demonstrating significant differences in levels of political awareness across the population that strongly influence the quality, structure, and determinants of political preferences. Analyzing public opinion data for 14 European countries reveals that large sections of the population do not appear to hold or express social policy preferences that are internally consistent or well-grounded in either their self-interests or ideological predispositions. At low levels of political awareness, little discernible connection exists between seemingly related preferences for redistribution, levels of social spending, left–right positioning, tolerance for inequality, or overall support for the welfare state. Moreover, income, a theoretically central causal variable, has no effect on attitudes toward redistribution when political awareness is low. These results pose a significant challenge to existing models of social policy preferences.

The repertoire of political participation in democratic societies is expanding rapidly and covers such different activities as voting, demonstrating, volunteering, boycotting, blogging, and flash mobs. Relying on a new method for conceptualizing forms and modes of participation we show that a large variety of creative, expressive, individualized, and digitally enabled forms of participation can be classified as parts of the repertoire of political participation. Results from an innovative survey with a representative sample of the German population demonstrate that old and new forms are systematically integrated into a multi-dimensional taxonomy covering (1) voting, (2) digitally networked participation, (3) institutionalized participation, (4) protest, (5) civic participation, and (6) consumerist participation. Furthermore, the antecedents of consumerist, civic, and digitally networked participation, are very similar to those of older modes of participation such as protest and institutionalized participation. Whereas creative, expressive, and individualized modes appear to be expansions of protest activities, digitally networked forms clearly establish a new and distinct mode of political participation that fits in the general repertoire of political participation.