Political support is an important foundation of system stability. We argue, increasing concerns about any issue can erode said support under two conditions: high issue salience and perceived government responsibility.

We evaluate this argument using nine different concerns, focusing in-depth on the currently important issue of climate change. Applying random-effects-within-between models to German panel data from 2010 to 2021, we show that increases in all studied concerns are causally linked to declining democratic satisfaction. This addresses an important blind spot in existing research that focuses predominantly on economic concerns.

For climate change concern, the main effect is clearly driven by the most recent waves, where it affects democratic satisfaction even stronger than material concern changes. For citizens with an arguably higher climate salience, stable Green partisans and post-materialists, the negative effect is amplified. We conclude that the climate crisis is increasingly putting pressure on the foundation of democratic systems.

In this paper we demonstrate that political parties in Germany systematically alter their issue emphasis in easy-read manifestos (ERMs) compared to regular manifestos. We argue parties face an incentive to ‘ride the wave’ by over-emphasizing the issues most salient in the ERMs’ target audience: citizens with disabilities and those struggling with complex language.

Applying natural language processing on 62 ERMs from five parties we find substantial distortions in the communicated political priorities. While welfare-related issues are, on average, over-emphasised by 10 %-points, economic issues are de-emphasised. We corroborate parties’ responsibility for this mismatch through qualitative questionnaires sent to easy-language translation agencies.

Beyond adding to the literature on strategic issue emphasis and applying NLP methods to an unstudied text form, our findings raise important societal questions about political inclusivity. Parties rather leverage ERMs for their own political gain and not their intended purpose of facilitating equal political participation of underprivileged groups.

With this study, we add to the literature on cue-taking and descriptive representation by focusing on a local, low-information context. Specifically, we empirically analyze voting patterns in the 2024 municipal elections in Mannheim, Germany. In this election, a free-list ballot design allowed voters to distribute 48 votes among 508 candidates of multiple parties, making it an ideal case to study these prominent theories of vote allocation. We pre-registered both our theoretical arguments and hypotheses prior to the election.
Our results indicate that, as expected, party affiliation, ballot position, and incumbency significantly influence vote totals. Ballot cues indicating candidate’s gender and occupation, however, do not exhibit any hypothesized direct effects on electoral outcomes. These findings contradict previous experimental studies, highlighting the need for both experimental and observational research to fully understand voter decision-making in complex real-world electoral settings.
Using multilevel models, we further corroborate the crucial role of descriptive representation, showing that candidates receive significantly more votes within their own residential districts. Additionally, voter age dynamics suggest that candidates strongly benefit electorally when their age aligns with the demographic profile of the respective district.

Contemporary politics is characterized by a perceived deficit in political representation and dissatisfaction among citizen: dissatisfaction with government policy, the government in general, and their democratic system. So far, many researchers have demonstrated relationships between these political attitudes separately. In particular, a large part of this strand of research examines predictors of satisfaction with democracy. We advance this existing research by outlining and testing a causal path between perceived deficit in political representation and democratic dissatisfaction. Specifically, we examine this causal path using the example of climate change.

We argue that this causal path includes different degrees of political support. Originally, Easton developed a dichotomous typology of specific and diffuse political support. We follow Norris’ and Dalton’s extension of his seminal work and consider political support as a continuous concept. Panel data from the German Longitudinal Elections Study allows us to trace various measures of citizens’ political support across multiple survey waves between 2017 and 2023. Our measurements range from quite specific political support manifesting itself in perceived issue (in-)congruence, and thus in perceived political representation, to more diffuse support reflected in satisfaction with democracy and support for democratic principles.

First, citizen’s climate change issue congruence with the government is expected to influence their evaluation of the government’s climate policy. Second, this evaluation should influence citizens’ overall satisfaction with the government. However, we expect that this effect is moderated by the salience of climate change among citizens. Third, we expect that general government satisfaction shapes citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. Again, we believe that this effect is moderated by citizens’ representation in the political system. Finally, satisfaction with democracy should influence citizens support for democracy and democratic principles. We test our theoretical expectations using advanced statistical modeling such as random-effects-within-between models and multi-level structural equation models.

This article makes two key contributions. On the one hand, we first establish a causal path from citizens’ perceived deficit in political representation to generalized support for democracy. On the other hand, we shed light on the potential of climate change to affect political attitudes and values if not appropriately addressed by governments.

Does growing climate concern endanger support for democracy? Climate change is a highly salient issue and concern about its consequences is growing. Therefore, I expect climate concern to increasingly factor into citizens’ evaluation of their democratic system. Building on prominent conceptualizations by Easton and Norris, these evaluations can range from being very specific (e.g. trust in the current government or satisfaction with democracy) to very diffuse (e.g. support for democracy and democratic principles).

Using original German panel data (2021-2023; N > 10.000) and random-effects-within-between models, I provide a novel empirical investigation into the causal impact of growing climate concern on system evaluations on different levels. Moreover, through mediation analyses, I am also able to evaluate whether negative impacts indeed follow the causal chain from specific to diffuse evaluations. All hypotheses and analysis steps are pre-registered.

Finally, I test multiple possible conditionalities: The described mechanism should apply more strongly for citizens with a higher climate change salience, because saliency moderates whether an issue factors into citizens’ overall system evaluation. Contrary, feeling that one’s climate position is well represented by parties and higher political efficacy should attenuate the negative impact on their system evaluation.

For one, my contribution provides a valuable empirical test of well-established theories in democracy research within a novel issue dimension. Moreover, climate change salience and concern are likely to rise even further in the future. Thus, understanding the threat for core components of democratic systems posed by this concern also carries important implications beyond the scientific community.

In this contribution I focus on data from my original 2023 SOEP-Innovation Sample Module. Specifically, I:

(a) Use a battery of direct items to assess whether citizens are willing to support non-democratic tools to further their own climate action agenda. As a novel twist, do study this question in both direction, focusing not only on those wanting more climate action, but also those who might want to prevent climate action in non-democratic fashion.
(b) Use a double list experiment that includes two sensitive items from the direct battery to uncover `true’ willingness to resort to non-democratic means. Doing so, I am able to alleviate concerns of social desirability bias in my findings which would lead to an underestimation of non-democratic demand.
(c) Assess how this non-democratic (in-)action demand differs between population sub-groups. Most importantly, I differentiate between respondents that are for more vs. less climate action. Beyond that, extensive batteries capture respondents emotions elicited by climate change impact and the government’s climate politics. I argue that especially increased anger should relate to a higher willingness to endorse non-democratic action/prevention.

All analysis steps and hypotheses will be pre-registered at OSF before I obtain access to the data.

In this project, we attempt to collect suitable panel data from all over the world that simultaneously includes

(a) any type of climate change concern, emotion or attitudes
(b) any type of democratic evaluation (e.g. democratic satisfaction or support, trust in politicians).

Even though there seems to be no truly comparative data, we strive to triangulate the causal impact of increasing climate concerns previously identified by research in Germany in a variety of different national contexts.