OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The median citation count of West European Politics is 3. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2021-04-01 to 2025-04-01.)

Article	Citations
Neither religious nor rational: heterodoxy and institutional trust	164
Changing affective alignments between parties and voters	98
Accountability in pan-European borrowing: mind the gap	72
Frightening politics: citizens’ reactions to party statements about law and order	69
Parliaments in times of crisis: COVID-19, populism and executive dominance	64
The shifting issue content of left–right identification: cohort differences in Western Europe	60
Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright Memorial Prizes 2024	58
Adopting restriction: how coalition governments respond to radical right parties	48
Highlighting supranational institutions? An automated analysis of EU politicisation (2002–2017)	35
Party goals and interest group influence on parties	32
What makes people trust or distrust politicians? Insights from open-ended survey questions	30
Do they feel like they don’t matter? The rural-urban divide in external political efficacy	29
Mainstream partisans’ affective response to (non) cooperation with populist radical right parties	29
Social democracy transformed? Party change and union ties	27
America’s rusted families: working-class political participation through three biological generations (1965–1997)	27
The (unintended) consequences of ineffective corruption control on populism in Europe	26
The ‘mainstream’ in contemporary Europe: a bi-dimensional and operationalisable conceptualisation	26
A class of their own: parliamentarians are less likely to be perceived as working class	25
Differentiated implementation and European integration: the development of EU food quality labelling	25
Kinder, gentler – and crisis-proof? Consensus democracy, inclusive institutions and COVID-19 pandemic performance	23
The conditional politics of class identity: class origins, identity and political attitudes in comparative perspective	23
When do social democratic parties unite over tough immigration policy?	23
An unexpected Socialist majority: the 2022 Portuguese general elections	22
Fragmentation revisited: the UK General Election of 2024	22
Who speaks for manual workers? Unequal congruence in the 2017 German Federal Election	20

Taking back control of the welfare state: Brexit, rational-imaginaries and welfare chauvinism	20
Selecting party leaders	19
Differentiated or integrated? The influence of European Administrative Networks on differentiated implementation of EU environmental policy	19
Withering the exogenous shock: EU policy responses to the Russian war against Ukraine	18
Inequality in the public priority perceptions of elected representatives	17
The broad-appeal strategy and policy representation	17
The role of national delegations in the politics of the European Parliament	17
Local protest event analysis: providing a more comprehensive picture?	17
Ideational agenda-setting leadership: President von der Leyen and the EU response to the invasion of Ukraine	16
Creating compliance in crisis: messages, messengers, and masking up in Britain	16
The effect of the constructive vote of no-confidence on government termination and government durability	16
Switzerland’s intricate differentiated integration with the European Union: bringing governance (back) in	15
Coalition agreements and governments’ policy-making productivity	15
The enlargement of international organisations	14
The 2021 Norwegian election	14
The Dutch Parliamentary elections of March 2021	14
A turn towards post-neoliberalism? Housing policy paradigm crisis in Europe	13
The 2023 Swiss federal elections: the radical right did it again	13
Platform affordances and political participation: how social media reshape political engagement	12
Political change and administrative turnover in meritocratic systems	12
The rightward shift and electoral decline of social democratic parties under increasing inequality	11
Closing the gap: how descriptive and substantive representation affect women’s vote for populist radical right parties	11
Rebordering Europe in the Ukraine War: community building without capacity building	11
The Dutch parliamentary elections of November 2023	11
Radical right parties and their welfare state stances – not so blurry after all?	11
Policy diffusion across political ideologies: explaining Denmark’s desire to externalise asylum	10
Loyal lists, distinctive districts: how dissent-shirking and leisure-shirking affect mixed-candidate selection	10
Partisan politics and economic intervention: evidence from an aggregating approach	10
Who supports metropolitan integration? Citizens’ perceptions of city-regional governance in Western Europe	10
Quiet offence, passive defence? Interest groups, lobbying strategies, and agenda-setting influence	10
The formalisation of minority governments	10
Perceptions of policy responsiveness: the effects of egocentric and sociotropic congruence	10
Generational differences in disguise? A longitudinal study of the liberalising effect of education on socio-cultural attitudes	10
A theory of external judicial politics: the ECJ as cautious gatekeeper in external relations	10
The long-lasting effects of citizenship education	9
Radical right advance and party system change: the 2024 Portuguese snap elections	9
The 2022 Maltese general election: an outcome foretold	9
The Spanish 2023 general elections: unexpected snap elections to survive in power	9
Democratic standards in external differentiation: the area of freedom, security and justice	9
Fairness of inequality and support for redistribution: directly comparing citizens and legislators	8
Growing polarisation: ideology and attitudes towards climate change	8
Making sense of gold and governance: the importance of practices and repertoires	8
Don’t think it’s a good idea! Four building sites of the ‘ideas school’	8
The technocratic side of populist attitudes: evidence from the Spanish case	8
EU external differentiated integration as a crisis response tool? Evidence from Ukraine	8
An unrequited conflict: affective polarisation among ruralites, suburbanites and urbanites in Switzerland	7
The 2024 French legislative elections: maintaining elections, political crisis	7
COVID-19: a dual challenge to European liberal democracy	7
Compulsory voting, economic conditions and turnout: explaining the outcome of constitutional referendums	7
Leaving democracy? Pandemic threat, emotional accounts and regime support in comparative perspective	7

The impact of occupational background on issue representation	7
Assembly dissolution powers and incumbency advantages in coalition formation	7
How the radical right reshapes public opinion: the Sweden Democrats’ local mobilisation, 2002–2020	7
To amend or not to amend: under what circumstances do Spanish legislators propose amendments to executive bills?	7
It’s a hoax! The mediating factors of populist climate policy opposition	7
How have secularisation and educational expansion affected support for the mainstream right in Western Europe?	7
Statement of Retraction: Analysing the political effects of ‘fake news’ deflections in the UK	7
Are citizens responsive to interest groups? A field experiment on lobbying and intended citizen behaviour	6
Institutional overlap and the survival of intergovernmental organisations	6
Islam, opinion climates, and immigrant party loyalties in Western Europe	6
Look where you’re going: the cultural and economic explanations of class voting decline	6
Pieces of the puzzle? Coalition formation and tangential preferences	6
Attributing blame: how political parties in Germany leverage cooperative federalism	6
Unpacking ambiguity in ideational change: the polysemy of the ‘Europe of Knowledge’	6
Pandemic politics: policy evaluations of government responses to COVID-19	6
Public political tolerance of the far right in contemporary Western Europe	6
When does the parliamentary opposition take to the streets? Social protest against government COVID-19 policy	6
Group-based public opinion polarisation in multi-party systems	6
Political participation profiles	6
Allowing mobility and preventing migration? The combination of entry and stay in immigration policies	6
Mummy’s girls, daddy’s boys: the gendered transmission of political engagement in families	6
Fear and the COVID-19 rally round the flag: a panel study on political trust	5
A cure worse than the disease? Exploring the health-economy trade-off during COVID-19	5
Staying connected: explaining parties’ enduring connections to civil society	5
Blame avoidance in hard times: complex governance structures and the COVID-19 pandemic	5
Institutional accountability: the differentiated implementation of collaborative governance in two EU states	5
Differentiated policy implementation in the European Union	5
The short-lived hope for contagion: Brexit in social media communication of the populist right	5
External differentiated integration: between stability and change	5
The resilience of parliamentary oversight during the COVID-19 pandemic	5
How to study the populist radical right and the welfare state?	5
The (a)symmetric effects of income and unemployment on popular demand for redistribution	4
Far left and far right party reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine	4
Dimensions of disagreement in EU affairs: is parliamentary opposition driven by left-right or European integration contestation?	4
How do cross-pressures affect immigration attitudes? Party and educational influences	4
Immigration and the conditionality of unemployment benefits in OECD countries	4
How do voters interpret social class appeals? Lessons from open-ended responses	4
The stigmatisation effect of the radical right on voters’ assessment of political proposals	4
Intergovernmentalism in a supranational field: France, Germany, and EU competition policy reform	4
Who benefits from the retrospective vote? Bringing in new parties	4
Policy signals in party communication: explaining positional concreteness in parties’ Facebook posts	4
The making of an ‘unhappy marriage’? The 2023 Finnish general election	4
Generations and political change	4
Where you sit is where you stand: education-based descriptive representation and perceptions of democratic quality	4
Radicalisation and discursive accommodation: responses to rising Euroscepticism in the European Parliament	4
Do European media ignore female politicians? A comparative analysis of MP visibility	4
New (types of) parties and government: the Danish general election 2022	4
Individual drivers of toxicity in radical right-wing populist legislative campaigns	3
Crisis, uncertainty and urgency: processes of learning and emulation in tax policy making	3
A life course approach to political preference formation across social classes	3
Actors, costs and values: the implementation of the Work-Life Balance Directive	3
How citizens’ conceptions of democracy relate to positive and negative partisanship towards populist parties	3
The strength of attachment: regionalism, nationalism and vote choice	3
Another sleeping giant? Environmental issue preferences in the 2019 European Parliament elections	3
Justifying mobility restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic: a test in multilevel governance	3
Rebuilding the coalition ship at sea: how uncertainty and complexity drive the reform of portfolio design in coalition cabinets	3
Embedded liberalism or embedded nationalism? How welfare states affect anti-globalisation nationalism in party platforms	3
Why Norway has more female local councillors than Denmark: a crack in the Nordic gender equality model?	3
How party polarisation exacerbates the link between democratic deficit and populist voting: evidence from Europe	3
Understanding MPs’ perceptions of party voters’ opinion in Western democracies	3
Brexit – the EU membership crisis that wasn’t?	3
Political parties and Muslims in Europe: the regulation of Islam in public education	3
Social media partisans vs. party members: political affiliation in a digital age	3
Government alternation and satisfaction with democracy	3
The Polish election of 2023: mobilisation in defence of liberal democracy	3