In fighting the spread of COVID-19, the drastic measures undertaken by governments worldwide demonstrate a trade-off between public health and fundamental democratic principles. Yet this behaviour is not consistent across democracies, which motivates this paper to examine why some democracies were willing to constrain individual freedoms and concentrate power more than others during the pandemic's first wave. Creating two indices to measure the degree to which COVID-19 policies interfere with these democratic principles in 34 European countries, the analyses show that the large variation cannot be solely explained by pandemic-related factors. It is argued that the strong protection of democratic principles already established in 'normal' times makes governments more reluctant to opt for restrictive policies. By highlighting how differences in policy responses are attributed to provisions guaranteeing individual liberties, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how democracies handle the democratic dilemma in times of crises. KEYWORDS COVID-19; public health policies; democracy; fundamental rights; state of emergency; public health crisis The COVID-19 pandemic came fast and hit hard. After the virus spread in China in early 2020, it did not take long until Italy, as the first European country, had to deal with a strong rise in daily SARS-CoV-2 infections. When the situation got out of control, Italy's Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte proclaimed a nation-wide lockdown. Most European CONTACT Sarah Engler

The comparative study of subnational units is on the rise. Multilevel regression and poststratification (MrP) has become the standard method for estimating subnational public opinion. Unfortunately, MrP comes with stringent data demands. As a consequence, scholars cannot apply MrP in countries without detailed census data, and when such data are available, the modeling is restricted to a few variables. This article introduces multilevel regression with synthetic poststratification (MrsP), which relaxes the data requirement of MrP to marginal distributions, substantially increases the prediction precision of the method, and extends its use to countries without census data. The findings of Monte Carlo, U.S., and Swiss analyses show that, using the same predictors, MrsP usually performs in standard applications as well as the currently used standard approach, and it is superior when additional predictors are modeled. The better performance and the more straightforward implementation promise that MrsP will further stimulate subnational research.

A key requirement of democratic governance is that policy outcomes and the majority preference of the electorate are congruent. Many studies argue that the more direct democratic a system is, the more often voters get what they want, but the empirical evidence is mixed. This analysis explores the democratic effect of initiatives and referendums theoretically and empirically. The prediction of the formal model is that "bad" representation (i.e., a large preference deviation between the electorate and the political elite) is good for the democratic effect of direct democracy. An empirical investigation of original voter and elite survey data, analyzed with multilevel modeling and post-stratification, supports this argument. Building on the literature, the findings of the analysis suggest that the extent to which direct democratic institutions are conducive for policy congruence-and may thus be advisable as democratic correctives to representative systems-depends on the political conflict structure.

The debate between economic and political explanations of the adoption of proportional representation (PR) has yielded mixed results. We reexamine this debate and argue that one has to take the different levels on which the causal mechanisms are located into account. This leads to a novel reformulation of Rokkan's hypotheses: we claim that PR is introduced when legislators face strong district-level competition and when their parties expect to gain seats from a change of the electoral law. In the empirical part, we model legislators' support for the PR adoption and evaluate the relative importance of district-level competition and vulnerability resulting from electoral inroads made by Social Democratic candidates; partisan calculations arising from disproportionalities in the allocation of votes to seats; and economic conditions at the district-level, specifically variation in skill profiles. Support for the adoption of PR is explained by a combination of district vulnerabilities and seat-vote disproportionality.

This paper examines whether voters’ experience of extreme weather events such as flooding increases voting in favor of climate protection measures. While the large majority of individuals do not hold consistent opinions on climate issues, we argue that the experience of natural disasters can prime voters on climate change and affect political behavior. Using micro-level geospatial data on natural disasters, we exploit referendum votes in Switzerland, which allows us to obtain a behavioral rather than attitudinal measure of support for policies tackling climate change. Our findings indicate a sizeable effect for pro-climate voting after experiencing a flood: vote-share supporting pro-climate policies can increase by 20 percent. Our findings contribute to the literature exploring the impact of local conditions on electoral behavior.