Erik Gahner Larsen

Direct and indirect welfare chauvinism as party strategies: an analysis of the Danish people's party

This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right-wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the basis of ethnicity. Indirect welfare chauvinism is the result of policy measures that apply to both natives and immigrants, but which deliberately negatively affect immigrants the most. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of labour market reforms in Denmark, where one of the most successful populist right-wing parties in Europe – the Danish Peoples Party – held a pivotal position in the period 2001–11, the article traces the intentions and deliberate policy-making strategies of the party. It shows that the distinction between direct and indirect chauvinism is a useful theoretical tool for understanding how the Danish Peoples Party can fulfill the expectations of both its electorate and its coalition partners, even if they point in different directions.

Media Content and Political Behavior in Observational Research: A Critical Assessment

This article discusses possible issues of how media content and exposure were linked in previous research. It argues that the original conclusions of the article ‘Whos Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News’ do not hold due to the chosen operationalization. It also demonstrates that using the proposed methodology, both exposure to conflictual and non-conflictual news yield the same substantive conclusion. In addition to re-evaluating the role of conflict, the article contributes to the discussion on how to integrate media and individual-level measures in the study of electoral behavior.

Democracy for the youth? The impact of mock elections on voting age attitudes

ABSTRACT Should 16-year-olds be entitled to participate in elections? We theorize that mock elections for adolescents, who are not eligible to vote, affect the short-term support among the general public for lowering the voting age. To test our theoretical expectation, we utilize variation among municipalities in the organization of mock elections during the Danish local elections in 2009. Difference-in-difference estimates with data from the subsequent local elections in 2013 demonstrate that citizens in municipalities with mock elections for adolescents were more supportive of lowering the voting age and that their support was strongly rooted in ideological differences.

Commentary on: People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age

People differ in the extent to which they engage in the search for meaning in life (Steger et al., 2008). Previous research has documented that personal experiences can influence the sense of meaning in life (Machell et al., 2015) and that people report higher levels of searching for meaning in their earlier life stages (Steger et al., 2009). In a recent published article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alter and Hershfield (2014) (abbreviated AH) argue that people are more likely to engage in meaning searching activities as they approach a new decade in chronological age. More specifically, the authors conclude on the basis of six studies, that “adults undertake a search for existential meaning when they approach a new decade in age (e.g., at ages 29, 39, 49, etc.)” (p. 17066). The authors note that the paper “demonstrates a striking pattern in human behavior.” In this commentary I use the empirical material from AH as well as additional data and argue that the patterns demonstrated by AH are open to alternative explanations and lack conclusive evidence1.