Studies of voting behavior in advanced industrial societies have demonstrated that voters rely on a plethora of information sources, including retrospective evaluations of parties, party identification and strong social networks, in making complex voting decisions. However, there is less...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream parties if the latters' electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal State of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

This paper investigates the effect of aggregate-level information shocks regarding support for a populist right-wing party on the individual disposition to report a respective political preference in survey interviews. Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its...

The paper estimates the policy representation of 34 German parties that participate in the 2017 Bundestag (federal) election. For this purpose, the party positions on 31 topical issues are compared with the results of recent public opinion polls. Then we construct the party indices of popularity...

The paper estimates the policy representation of 34 German parties that have participated in the 2017 Bundestag (federal) election. For this purpose, the party positions on 31 topical issues are compared with the results of recent public opinion polls. Then we construct the party indices of...