Citizens dialogues on the future of Europe are taking place across Europe since 2018. These calibres of mini public were organised with the intent of fulfilling elite commitments made in the Rome declaration in March 2017. The Rome declaration commits to incorporating EU citizens into the conversation on Europe and to provide them with opportunities to shape their countries national positions on Europe’s future form and functioning in key policy areas. My recent paper in Politics explores Ireland’s set of citizens’ dialogues – which have since been deemed a model of best practice – and evaluates the effectiveness of these dialogues in empowering Irish citizens to shape the national position on Europe. The paper argues that although the dialogues were worthy exercises in communicating Europe to citizens at a time when Europe was at political crossroads, the design of the dialogues hindered their full democratic potential.

Funded by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFaT) and organised by European Movement Ireland (EMI), Ireland’s citizens’ dialogues were relatively more systematic and participatory in approach compared to other dialogues across Europe. However, this so-called best practice approach was not without its shortcomings. These dialogues were not intended to empower citizens to be prescriptive in their recommendations, nor bind policymakers to citizens’ preferences on Europe. Evidence suggests that these dialogues resembled a government PR exercise. Public representatives fulfilled a commitment to communicate Europe to Irish citizens but subsequently designed the events in such a way that government policy positions and long-term preference bargaining opportunities would not be constrained by public opinion.

Good mini publics seek to empower citizens to affect policy change. This requires a representative sample of the population (adequate diversity), applied mechanisms to induce deliberation (as opposed to casual debate), adequate time allocation for discussion and a general desire for participants to reach consensus on key critical issues. Ireland’s dialogues lacked these characteristics. In turn, the quality of the dialogues was poor, and this is reflected Ireland’s national report on the Future of Europe. A summary of each shortcoming is as follows:

1. Participants were recruited through a self-selection procedure which hindered the full potential for a diversity in participant make-up. Those who attended were predominantly white-Irish, relatively educated and had an overwhelming pro-EU outlook. Due to self-selection, there was also some evidence of a snowball effect in that some participants arrived with friends/relatives who may or may have not shared similar backgrounds and attitudes on key issues. Thus, there was a risk that group homogeneity was increased.
2. Discussion-based questions were rather wordy and were somewhat difficult for participants to comprehend. More importantly, the questions did not clearly pertain to the future direction of EU integration and governance in key policy areas. Due to the self-selection process (and time restrictions), adequately briefing participants in advance of the events was not feasible. Although participants received a briefing document on arrival, it was clear that there were few adequate measures taken to ensure that participants had basic knowledge of the EU prior to discussing important and complex policy issues. This made it difficult for participants to offer well-thought-out and prescriptive recommendations to their public representatives. One argues that prescriptive recommendations are important if one expects such recommendations to hold informative weight that can go some way to holding policymakers to account for public preferences.
3. Time allocation was quite limited during these events and this significantly hindered any potential for the development of well informed, critically engaged, and meaningful discussion and recommendations. Each event lasted approximately 2.5 hours in total. Thus, participants were required to discuss five policy topics with only a mere 10 minutes per topic. Such strict time allowances could not allow for an adequate process of critical debate, let alone deliberation.

It is suggested by the design that Ireland’s dialogues were not intended to empower citizens to generate critically deduced, prescriptive recommendations on the future of Europe to national policymakers; for doing so would likely bind policymakers to citizens preferences which could affect intergovernmental bargaining at a later stage. Ireland’s national report on the citizens dialogues shows that citizens’ suggestions were broad and vague in essence and do not reflect clear preferences for European integration in terms of form and functioning. Whilst there is no doubt that the Irish government tried to modernise citizens’ dialogues to fulfil commitments made in Rome, research data suggests that Ireland’s dialogues resembled a government PR exercise rather than a genuine willingness to empower citizens to shape the national position. Thus, despite the inherent democratic potential of the dialogues, these mini publics were fundamentally ineffective in truly empowering citizens to shape the future form and functioning of the EU.

Economic performance is of particular relevance to authoritarian regimes because satisfactory economic outcomes give the regime room to maneuver in immediate difficulties and keep them resilient under the pressure of political reform. Political leaders in Kazakhstan, Russia, Venezuela, Vietnam, and other authoritarian countries universally prioritize economic development as a national strategy. As an authoritarian nation with the world’s largest population, China’s politics provide a case for studying the maintenance of public support by authoritarian regimes through their economic performance.

Focusing on the impact of economic conditions on regime support enables us to examine how citizens’ economic evaluation affects their support for a political system. Although a link between the economic situation and governmental approval has been widely realized (see here, here, here and here), little is known about the psychological mechanism by which the economic situation affects the public’s regime support in an authoritarian context.

My recent article in Politics attempts to uncover the political-psychological mechanism in the relationship between public evaluations of economic conditions and political support for authoritarian regimes in the case of China. Citizens’ economic evaluations are systematically scrutinized on two dimensions: subject-based perceptions (sociotropic or egocentric perspectives) and time-based perceptions (retrospective or prospective perspectives). The subject-based economic perception examines the direction and strength of the bond between evaluation of national economy and regime support, and between evaluation of individual economic conditions and regime support. The time-based economic perception examines the direction and strength of the bond between retrospective economic evaluation and regime support and between prospective economic evaluation and regime support.

My findings show that the national economy outweighs household economic conditions in its effects on the public’s support of the regime. When sociotropic evaluation of national economic conditions and egocentric evaluation of personal economic status are tested independently, each type of economic evaluation has a significant effect on regime support. However, after controlling for the evaluation of national economic conditions, the evaluation of individual economic status does not have significant effects on regime support.

However, this does not mean that citizens’ individual economic conditions are trivial in shaping public support for regimes. The results show that the gap between evaluations of the national economy and individual economic situations debilitates regime support. Even if citizens evaluate economic improvement highly when compared with the past or they are optimistic about prospective development of the national economy, the gap between evaluation of the national economy and individual economic conditions erodes their regime support.

The present study identified the relevance of retrospective and prospective evaluations of the economic situation to political support, which sheds a light on political leaders’ ruling strategies. Producing despair of the past and hope for the future contributes to sustaining public support. First, political leaders are keen on propaganda concerning the worse situation of the past. In particular, when economic conditions are unsatisfactory at present, it becomes more important to stress the magnificent improvements in the economy compared with the past. Second, political leaders make an effort to create a blueprint for the realization of a great dream. They are particularly good at creating and manipulating symbols of the regime’s commitments to great national goals, by which ordinary people are easily attracted. The results of this study show that people who are optimistic about future economic prospects tend to have a higher level of regime support.

Do voters use information on parties’ legislative work at EU level when voting in European Parliament (EP) elections? Exactly like in the workplace – where employers monitor the concrete performance of employees – it is crucial that voters keep tabs on the performance of political parties and use that information come election time (retrospective voting). Retrospective voting is considered an optimal strategy, but it is cognitively demanding and prone to biases. For this reason, Ferejohn suggested that monitoring ‘valence’ performance indicators – such as attendance to legislative plenary sessions – is a more convenient shortcut that enables voters to keep tabs on representative effectively.

Other than the inherent difficulties of retrospective voting, EP elections make it even harder: these elections have displayed features of ‘barometer’ or ‘second-order’ elections, and because of that scholars expect it to be even more difficult for voters to monitor what political parties concretely do when serving in the EP, and to use that information when they cast their vote in EP elections. But were things different in 2019, in an era where the politicisation of the EU is at its height?

In my recent article in Politics, I use retrospective data on political parties’ legislative activities of the previous EP term (2014-2019) – web-scraped from the EP official website – to test whether parties with higher plenary attendance, number of speeches delivered, and number of members filling rapporteurships and committee chairmanship positions are rewarded by voters in the 2019 elections. Vote choice data for the 2019 EP elections was retrieved from the European Election Study 2019.

I find that, controlling for ideological congruence and other relevant party characteristics, voters do reward political parties that were more active in the previous EP legislative term, especially as it pertains plenary attendance, a clear valence activity that unambiguously signals hard-work. Parties that gave a lot of speeches, were, instead penalised – possibly the result of speeches being seeing as theatrical, ‘show-horse’ activities, with less immediate links to policy work.

To fully believe these findings, the mechanism – i.e. that voters are aware of political parties’ legislative records – needed to be probed further. To do that, I leveraged the different electoral rules used by the various Member States in the 2019 European elections, as well as the EES 2019 survey question “how closely did you follow the campaign ahead of the European Parliament elections?”. Information about legislative records, in fact, is more likely to get out in electoral systems that encourage the personal vote – e.g. systems with open ballots or, alternatively, systems with small district magnitudes. The system which leads to the highest personal vote incentives is the open list with large district magnitudes, while a closed-list system with large district magnitudes depresses the personal vote most.

I find that the higher the personal vote incentive in a Member State, the more parties’ legislative productivity (in work-horse activities) is electorally beneficial, and especially so in the sample of voters that were paying attention to the EP election campaign.

There is sound evidence that high levels of activity in the previous EP term – especially of the ‘work-horse’ type – give an electoral advantage to national parties. And that, therefore, the normative requirement of retrospective voting can be a feature of multi-level, supranational contexts as well.

Liberal democracy is founded on two pillars: the electoral pillar based on citizen representation and the principle of majority rule, and the constitutional pillar that consists of institutional checks and balances to limit executive power and protect minorities. Ideally, there is a balance between the two pillars, but there is also an inherent tension between the principles of majority rule on the one hand, and the principle of checks and balances and protection of minority rights on the other. In our recent article in Politics we focus on support for liberal democracy among European citizens and particularly on the question whether such support is more widespread among those who support the EU than among Eurosceptics.

While the European Union (EU) has been criticized for its poorly developed electoral institutions, others have argued that its institutions perform well when they are evaluated against the principles of liberal democracy. These principles include institutional checks and balances on executive power, respect for the rule of law, human rights, and civil liberties. Since the European Union is seen to perform well in terms of the constitutional pillar of democracy, but weakly with regards to electoral representation of citizens, support for European integration can be expected to be associated with support for different models of democracy.

We studied the relationship between EU support and support for the principles of liberal democracy among citizens in the 28 EU member states, using data from the European Election Studies 2019. Our findings demonstrate that supporters of liberal principles of democracy tend to be more supportive of the EU, while supporters of more direct forms of citizen influence are more Eurosceptic.

We also find that attitudes towards liberal democracy are less structured than previous research suggests. Yet, the structuration of attitudes towards liberal democracy and the association between these attitudes and EU support is stronger in contexts where the role of the institutions of liberal democracy is more contested. Two examples are presented in the figure below. One item measures whether independent courts should be allowed to overrule the government. In contexts in which the independence of courts is respected, the item is unrelated to EU-support (at the right side of the horizontal axis). Yet in contexts in which the independence of courts is under attack (on the left side of the graph), this item is strongly related to EU-support. We find a similar pattern for an item on the independence of public television. It is unrelated to EU-support when there is no censorship of the media. Yet in countries where the government tries to censor the media, the issue is strongly related to EU-support.

Both the European Commission and the European Parliament attempted to initiate sanctions against Poland and Hungary for not respecting liberal democratic institutions values and its institutions to defend them. These initiatives were highly visible. As a consequence, the liberal democratic institutions themselves became the object of contestation, while at the same time it created a clash with European institutions.

From a normative point of view, some may be worried about the consequences of the contestation of institutions that are designed to constrain the power of the executive. Yet, a more positive side effect might be that citizens do form more consistent attitudes on these matters. Given the fact that there is widespread support for EU membership also in countries where the institutions of liberal democracy are being challenged, the EU should feel confident to defend those institutions. At the very least, this is what the citizens in these countries would expect.

Since the end of the Cold War, liberalists have expected that China’s rapid economic growth and capital flows would foster greater cooperation and stability in Asia. However, China’s frequent use of economic sanctions has increased concerns among East Asian countries. More importantly, Beijing is likely to explore more options to apply economic coercion in maintaining its foreign policy objectives. Its growing economic clout and expanding policy instruments also lead to the following questions: does economic interdependence promote stability or foster conflicts? Under what conditions are China’s economic coercion most effective? How would medium-sized or smaller countries respond to China’s sanctions?

These questions are not only core issues for international relations, but they also carry important implications for decision-makers in Asian countries and the U.S. government. As China becomes a rising power in Asia, Beijing has gradually learned how to achieve its goals through using economic coercion and diplomatic assertiveness.

In my recent article in Politics, I re-evaluate the literature on East Asian politics and economic statecraft. First, I highlight the salience of power asymmetry to the field of economic statecraft. Second, I offer a three-level analysis of when and how China exercised economic coercion and incentives towards Taiwan. Third, this study examines how Taiwan addressed Beijing’s sanctions on Chinese group tourists starting in 2016. The final section discusses some conclusions that can be drawn and suggests some avenues for future research.

As most Asian countries will encounter the dilemma between accepting more Chinese trade and capital and hence greater vulnerability to China’s economic coercion, they can also learn from each other based on previous experience. Putting China’s coercive diplomacy in perspective matters for China’s neighbors. Specifically, scholars and policymakers in Asia have to differentiate between the short-term and long-term impacts of China’s economic leverage. They should avoid making an overly alarmist or dismissive view of China’s coercive strategy.

In this case, Taiwan has much to offer to the rest of the world regarding how to respond to China’s economic coercion. Strong cooperation between Taiwan and countries in Southeastern Asia can also establish the basis for a coordinated strategy in response to China’s economic sanctions.