Denmark

This paper asks whether wealthy people who become more exposed to poor neighbors change their support for redistribution. Linking three-wave panel survey data to detailed Danish neighborhood income registers, the authors find that within individuals, increased local exposure to poverty is associated with lower support for redistribution among the rich. By contrast, conventional between-person comparisons reproduce the familiar positive association, suggesting self-selection into neighborhoods helps explain prior results.

Frederik Hjorth investigates a non-electoral dimension of the long-observed "cost of governing": the tendency for officeholders to lose rhetorical simplicity. Rhetorical simplicity here means using clear, straightforward language and emphases that make political messages easy for voters to process. If governing pushes politicians toward more complex or constrained speech, that shift could help explain persistent opposition advantages and popular frustration with mainstream parties.

Democracy depends on election losers accepting defeat to enable peaceful transitions of power. This study asks how losing an election shapes candidates' views about whether contests are fair.

Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard asks how voters evaluate incumbents when economic outcomes are distributed unevenly across social groups. The paper revisits the idea of retrospective economic voting—where voters reward or punish incumbents for past performance—but shifts the focus from national aggregates to voters’ social in-groups. This matters because if voters judge incumbents by how their own group fares relative to the nation, electoral incentives will shape not only overall economic policy but its distribution.

Disadvantaged ethnic minorities often need to persuade majority members that they face unfair treatment to win public support and policy change. Peter Thisted Dinesen, Clara Vandeweerdt, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov investigate which kinds of evidence—statistical reports or personal stories, and whether the evidence is unambiguous or ambiguous—are most effective at changing majority perceptions and behavior.

Members of ethnic majorities frequently expect immigrants and ethnic minorities to be less willing to support collective goods. Those expectations shape support for redistribution, public services, and integration policies, so understanding their sources matters for both democratic politics and policy design.

Authors Frederik Hjorth, Jacob Nyrup, and Martin Vinæs Larsen ask how challenger parties—those without prior government experience—manage to break into governing coalitions. This question matters because challenger parties have reshaped politics across Europe, yet scholars still debate the processes that move them from outsider status to partners in government.

Right-wing populist parties often gain support by attracting voters from mainstream left groups. This has sparked debate about whether a 'accommodation strategy'—adopting more restrictive immigration views in line with the political mainstream—can help regain power for left-leaning governments.

Politicians face a constant stream of information but limited time and attention. Roman Senninger and Henrik Seeberg ask which kinds of information elected and aspiring politicians actually pay attention to—public concern, rival-party attention, news stories, or statistical problem indicators—and why those choices matter for agenda-setting and accountability.

It is long assumed that citizens support the welfare state because it insures against future income loss, but isolating future-oriented material interest from normative and political predispositions has been difficult. This study tests whether economic uncertainty drives citizens to take up government-funded social insurance, a critical case for material self-interest to be at stake.

Do politicians respond better to evidence that challenges their views? This study tests the 'affective tipping point' theory using randomized survey experiments with 954 Danish politicians. By analyzing responses compared to those of citizens, we explore how prior attitudes affect information processing.

This article develops a comparative political economy theory linking how welfare states distribute benefits and how credit regimes regulate access to credit with everyday household borrowing. The core claim is that interactions between social policy design and credit availability shape how people manage social risks and thus create distinct patterns of indebtedness across countries.

Do political parties shape opinion even when citizens have a strong personal stake? The focus is a collective bargaining conflict in Denmark over public employees’ salary and work rights, where party signals sometimes ran counter to workers’ immediate economic interests.

This article examines the spread of unemployment information through social networks and its impact on voter attitudes in Denmark.

Surveys are a primary source for studying voter turnout, but they tend to overestimate turnout because of two distinct problems: nonresponse bias (people who do not take surveys differ in voting behavior) and overreporting (respondents claiming they voted when they did not). This study disentangles those two sources of error using linked survey and administrative records for Danish elections.

Does American-style door-to-door canvassing work as well in Europe? This article examines existing U.S. and European research, combining studies from six countries including two new Danish experiments.

Recent economic voting research has examined the local economy's influence on political support but found inconsistent results. This article proposes that citizens' responsiveness to the local economy depends on how frequently they interact with it, a process termed 'context priming'. Specifically, using granular Danish registry data linked to election returns and an individual-level panel survey, we demonstrate that contact with housing markets makes economic evaluations more sensitive to changes in local housing prices. The findings suggest individuals update their assessments based on recent market experiences.

Why did poor, agricultural Denmark become a leader in mass public primary education (1814) with multiple tracks including vocational training? And why didn't rich industrial Britain create such systems until 1870?

The debate on optimal political system size persists despite arguments for both small and large units. This article evaluates the economic efficiency argument using a recent Danish reform where 239 municipalities were amalgamated through an exogenous government intervention, allowing analysis without endogeneity concerns.