Several recent events in Europe have brought back the significance of social class. Most recently, the pandemic uncovered divides between lower-class families without financial reserves, and more wealthy families. Working class people were more exposed to health hazards, and more strongly affected by unemployment, adding to existing inequalities. Beginning a decade earlier, the financial and economic crisis had already exacerbated economic inequalities, and political events such as the Brexit vote showed how regional inequalities can lead to political polarization and controversial political decisions. In addition, extreme political actors have been on the rise, and their success is often explained by economic and social anxieties. How the views and grievances of the so-called "left behind" influence political developments like the vote of Donald Trump, is however less clear. In other words, our understanding of how increasingly unequal social structures lead to specific political outcomes remains limited. This project argues that group identities, and more specifically social class identity, might provide the "missing link" between societal and economic changes and (extreme) political outcomes. It seeks to answer the following questions: How salient are social class identities in Western Europe and what determines their salience? Does inequality lead to more conflict between social classes? What is the role of political actors in shaping social class identities? How important are social class identities for political decision-making? To address these questions, project will develop a theoretical and empirical framework to study social class identity in complex social and economic contexts, by combining insights from political sociology, public opinion research and social psychology. We build on existing research on class voting and on voting for right-wing populist parties by introducing an important component: the strength of group attachment. This is based on the assumption that objective social class might not be politically relevant, unless there is some form of emotional attachment to a specific class. The four suggested work packages will combined provide a broad picture on the role of social class identity in European politics, its sources , its specific content, as well as its consequences for political behavior. Thereby, we contribute to a broader literature about the political consequences of economic inequality. Second, the project will shed light on the role of group identities beyond what is generally considered "identity politics". Further, the project will contribute to our understanding of European parties' strategies and success in mobilizing voters with group appeals, and eventually to our knowledge of the reasons why extreme and populist parties have been successful in Western Europe.

Trotz der Bedeutung der direkten Demokratie in der Schweizer Politik weist die bisherige Forschung zum Abstimmungsverhalten der Bürgerinnen und Bürger Lücken auf. Mit einem konzeptuell und methodisch innovativen Vorgehen will das Projekt 'Swiss Direct Democracy in the 21st Century' (SDD-21) einen Beitrag zu einem besseren Verständnis der individuellen Meinungsbildungsprozesse leisten. Im Rahmen von eidgenössischen Volksabstimmungen werden zu diesem Zweck in vier Modulen die Rolle von relevanten Einflussfaktoren untersucht, die in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur bislang vernachlässigt wurden.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has the final say in human rights protection in Europe. The Court has developed a method of interpretation, European consensus (EuC), which it can use to decide on morally, politically or socially sensitive issues. With this method, the Court assesses whether the common practice of European states, international actors, and other authorities leads to the emergence of new human rights standards. EuC allows the ECtHR to build standards in socially sensitive areas such as religious dress and social minorities protection. Despite its importance, there is little clarity on the meaning and function of EuC in legal scholarship. What is the EuC? How does consensus function within the ECtHR system? How to build an appropriate measure in framework for EuC? We take a pluri-disciplinary approach to define EuC and measure its use in ECtHR case law. By applying computational text analysis techniques often used in quantitative political science, we will construct and validate new measures of EuC. We combine expert human coding of legal texts done by human rights lawyers and computational approaches from social science for textual data. Our new measures will allow the team to determine both the nature and also the level of consensus in each judgment as well as identify the language that indicates consensus analysis in the first place. Once we have constructed these new measures, we will use them to test important questions in the literature such as whether the ECtHR is more likely to find consensus when human rights standards emerge in one set of countries rather than another, whether certain countries are more likely to disagree with a new emerging consensus as determined by the Court, whose views are reflected in consensus judgments, and finally, how consensus functions within the ECtHR system.

The proposed research project studies the causes and dynamics of public opinion polarization in Europe since the early 1990s. It is striking how little we know from a comparative social science perspective about the attitudinal foundations of political polarization in Europe. Existing research has provided explanations for the rise of populist parties but has largely ignored the counter-reactions to the right-wing populist mobilization. Moreover, contrary to the broad popular view of increasing social fractions, the few existing single-country studies on political polarization actually find that political attitudes have de-polarized rather than become more distant. The project combines insights from three strands of research - public opinion research, the polarization literature and cleavage theory - to study attitude polarization in Europe from a comparative perspective. In total, I aim to answer three sets of questions: First, have political attitudes in Europe really polarized and with regard to what issues? Second, how do recent economic and societal changes contribute to attitude polarization in Europe? Third, does opinion polarization have an (unequal) mobilizing or de-mobilizing effect? The first part investigates how the degree of attitude polarization has changed in Europe since the early 1990s. To this aim, I suggest a refined concept of polarization that puts a main focus on polarization between different socio-economic status groups, rather than on the general population level. This is an important conceptual refinement, because polarizing trends may be hidden on the sub-population level. Second, building on the concept of attitude polarization, I develop a theoretical framework to study how economic and societal changes contribute to attitude polarization. Recent changes such as rising inequality and mass immigration to Europe have an unequal impact on the social and economic status of different socio-economic groups, which may cause attitudinal change. The core analysis of the project then investigates to what degree this unequal impact leads to polarization of political attitudes. The last part will assess the political consequences of attitudinal conflict, by studying its mobilizing and de-mobilizing effects on voters. The analyses will be based on data from social surveys (International Social Survey Programme, European Social Survey) from 24 European countries, and data from two panel studies, the British Household Panel and the German Longitudinal Election Study for a more rigorous analysis of causal effects.