In post-conflict societies, traumatic experiences can have a profound effect on electoral behaviour. In Northern Ireland, Westminster elections between 2001 and 2017 were marked by the rise of hardline parties, but the 2019 election saw a significant shift towards the centre. The centre ground vote soared, resulting in the lowest level of political polarisation since the early 2000s. What are the factors underlying this transition to a moderate vote? Drawing on public opinion surveys and electoral data, we find that Brexit played a crucial role in incentivising voters to support parties prioritising non-sectarian constitutional interests. The findings suggest that voters employ party competition as a balancing mechanism. Our article contributes to the understanding of how individuals in post-conflict societies navigate the complex relationship between violence, politics, and peacebuilding.

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. However, legislators cannot be responsive to all voters at all times with regard to the policies the latter favour. We argue that legislators use their speaking time in parliament to offer compensatory speech to their constituents who might oppose how they voted on a policy, in order to re-establish themselves as responsive to the public's wishes. Leveraging the case of Brexit, we show that legislators pay more attention to constituents who might be dissatisfied with how they voted. Furthermore, their use of rhetorical responsiveness is contingent on the magnitude of the representational deficit they face vis-à-vis their constituency. Our findings attest to the central role of parliamentary speech in maintaining responsiveness. They also demonstrate that communicative responsiveness can substitute for policy responsiveness.

In this work we propose a novel annotation scheme which factors hate speech into five separate discursive categories. To evaluate our scheme, we construct a corpus of over 2.9M Twitter posts containing hateful expressions directed at Jews, and annotate a sample dataset of 1,050 tweets. We present a statistical analysis of the annotated dataset as well as discuss annotation examples, and conclude by discussing promising directions for future work.

Previous research has established that men are more likely to vote for populist radical right parties (PRRPs) than women. This article shows how cross-national and temporal variations in PRRPs’ electoral success interact with individuals’ risk propensity to affect this gender gap. We hypothesize that gender differences in the electoral support of PRRPs stem from disparities in risk-taking. We conceptualize risk in terms of two components, social and electoral, and demonstrate that women are more risk-averse regarding both. Our analysis is based on public opinion data from 14 countries (2002–16) combined with macrolevel data on PRRPs’ past parliamentary fortunes. To distinguish between the social and electoral components in risk-taking, we use the illustrative case study of Germany. Findings demonstrate that gender differences in risk-taking and, by implication, the differences between women's and men's responses to the electoral context are key to understanding the voting gender gap.

In this research, we examine the role of attachment to an ideological group as a source of stability in a volatile multi-party system. In two studies conducted in Israel (N = 1320), we show that a multi-item Attachment to an Ideological Group (AIG) scale is strongly tied to vote choice and political engagement, and its effects are independent of, and more powerful than, issue-based ideology and partisan identity strength. Compared to individuals with a weak ideological attachment, those who score highly on the AIG scale are more likely to vote for a party from their ideological camp and participate in politics. Moreover, in two survey experiments, respondents high in AIG displayed stronger anger or enthusiasm—known harbingers of political action—in response to threat or reassurance to their ideological group’s status, attesting to a link between AIG and political engagement. Our findings underscore the importance of ideological group attachments in a volatile multi-party system.

How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties? A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU's discourse, resulting in what is usually termed ‘normative power Europe’. Yet the research and knowledge to-date about the EU's discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the potential to undermine the coherence of the EU's identity and thus also its objective to ‘speak with one voice’. This article explores the EU's discursive management of the continuity-versus-change imperative by analysing the integration of new values into the text of its treaties. This issue is addressed based on a quantitative content analysis on the full texts of European founding treaties between the 1950s and 2009. Findings show that the distribution of the EU's values in the text is not uniform: while the language of market economy and democracy is pervasive, the values of peace, European identity, rights and social justice are mentioned less frequently and in restricted linguistic environments. To account for the differences in the integration of values into the EU's treaty discourse, the article develops the notion of a discursive mechanism of differentiated value integration (MDVI). This rationale echoes the logic of differentiation in policy implementation employed by the EU. It is claimed here that, applied in the European discursive arena, MDVI allows radically different readings of the same text. This helps the EU to maintain a coherent value identity while at the same time enabling change.