Public attitudes towards welfare policy are often explained by political values and perceptions of deservingness of welfare recipients. This article addresses how the impact of values and perceptions varies depending on the contextual information that citizens have available when forming welfare opinions. It is argued that whenever citizens face deservingness‐relevant cues in public debate or the media, a psychological ‘deservingness heuristic’ is triggered prompting individuals spontaneously to think about welfare policy in terms of who deserves help. This is an automatic process, equally influential among the least and the most politically sophisticated. Moreover, when clear deservingness cues are present, the impact of values on opinions vanishes. These arguments are supported by data from two novel experimental studies embedded in separate nationwide opinion surveys. The findings revise conventional wisdom of how values and heuristics influence public opinion and have major implications for understanding dynamics in aggregate welfare opinion and attempts from political elites to manipulate public opinion.

This study of journalists' 1961–2001 use of researchers in three national Danish daily newspapers identifies a dramatic and accelerating sevenfold increase in the number of articles referring to researchers—an increase that is related to a significant shift in which types of researchers are cited and for what purpose. Researchers communicate research results much less than they did in the past; instead, they increasingly serve as expert commentators on knowledge produced outside of research institutions, on political and administrative decisions, and on other events. Second, because researchers more frequently comment on such wide-ranging, socially and politically important matters, it is now social scientists, rather than hard scientists, who appear most often.

Tuinier, J. D., & Visser, G. (2013). Democratie onderzoeken in een Fort, een Fabriek en in een LAB: Achtergronden, doelen en uitgangspunten van de Interactieve Methodiek [Investigating democracy in a fortress, a factory and in a lab: Backgrounds, objectives and principles of an interactive methodology]. Utrecht, the Netherlands: Stichting Vredese-ducatie/Peace Education Projects. Retrieved from https://www .fortvandedemocratie.nl/ Van Bergen, D. D., Feddes, A. R., Doosje, B., & Pels, T. V. M. (2015).Collective identity factors and the attitude toward violence in defense of ethnicity or religion among Muslim youth of Turkish and Moroccan Descent.

Most research on political tolerance relying on the ‘least-liked’ group approach has painted a bleak picture of low and feeble levels of tolerance. An alternative approach, permitting an evaluation of the breadth of tolerance, is combined with the use of survey experiments to demonstrate that tolerance varies considerably across target groups. Specifically, the formation of tolerance judgements is shown to differ depending on a group’s association with violent and non-democratic behaviour. Thus, tolerance is high and resilient towards groups that themselves observe democratic rights – even if these groups are disliked or feared. The theory suggests that this is caused by norms of reciprocity and, contrary to extant research, this article shows that within the limits set by these norms, tolerance is strong.

Conventional wisdom holds that women are more peace-loving or more pacific than men. Most of our knowledge about the gender gap in foreign policy attitudes originates from the United States, but it cannot be taken for granted that these results can be generalized to other countries. This article examines gender differences in foreign policy attitudes in Denmark; it discusses the systemic factors behind such gender differences as well as the systemic factors that cause foreign policy attitudes to influence elections. By the 1980s a clear gender gap in foreign policy attitudes had developed in Denmark. Several explanations for this gender gap are examined in the article: the theory about women's greater distance to foreign policy, the theory about specific women's values, and the theory about the political and feminist radicalization of women. The article concludes that Denmark's gender gap in foreign policy attitudes in Denmark in the late 1980s was due primarily to a general left-wing mobilization of women. Paradoxically, however, this development also seems linked to a revitalization of traditional women's values. The discussion of the systemic causes of the gender gap and of its election impact centers around three factors: the salience of foreign policy, the political mobilization of women, and the available political alternatives in a given election.