Has the European Union (EU) succeeded in socializing citizens to support the democratic values it claims to promote? On the face of it, the prevailing skepticism precludes any expectation of a successful socialization of EU citizens to the EU values. Yet, according to the socialization hypothesis, citizens' support for these values is expected to increase as countries accumulate more years of the EU membership. Using survey data to isolate distinct dimensions of democratic values, we examine differences among countries in this regard, as well as changes within countries over time. Results confirm the socialization hypothesis, showing that support for democratic values is generally higher in countries with more years of the EU membership, and that this support trends upwards over time.

In this research, we examine the role of attachment to an ideological group as a source of stability in a volatile multi-party system. In two studies conducted in Israel ( N = 1320), we show that a multi-item Attachment to an Ideological Group (AIG) scale is strongly tied to vote choice and political engagement, and its effects are independent of, and more powerful than, issue-based ideology and partisan identity strength. Compared to individuals with a weak ideological attachment, those who score highly on the AIG scale are more likely to vote for a party from their ideological camp and participate in politics. Moreover, in two survey experiments, respondents high in AIG displayed stronger anger or enthusiasm—known harbingers of political action—in response to threat or reassurance to their ideological group’s status, attesting to a link between AIG and political engagement. Our findings underscore the importance of ideological group attachments in a volatile multi-party system.

Previous research has established that men are more likely to vote for populist radical right parties (PRRPs) than women. This article shows how cross-national and temporal variations in PRRPs' electoral success interact with individuals' risk propensity to affect this gender gap. We hypothesize that gender differences in the electoral support of PRRPs stem from disparities in risk-taking. We conceptualize risk in terms of two components, social and electoral, and demonstrate that women are more risk-averse regarding both. Our analysis is based on public opinion data from 14 countries combined with macrolevel data on PRRPs' past parliamentary fortunes. To distinguish between the social and electoral components in risk-taking, we use the illustrative case study of Germany. Findings demonstrate that gender differences in risk-taking and, by implication, the differences between women's and men's responses to the electoral context are key to understanding the voting gender gap.

Abstract. How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties?A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU's discourse, resulting in what is usually termed 'normative power Europe' . Yet the research and knowledge todate about the EU's discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the potential to undermine the coherence of the EU's identity and thus also its objective to 'speak with one voice' . This article explores the EU's discursive management of the continuityversus-change imperative by analysing the integration of new values into the text of its treaties. This issue is addressed based on a quantitative content analysis on the full texts of European founding treaties between the 1950s and 2009. Findings show that the distribution of the EU's values in the text is not uniform: while the language of market economy and democracy is pervasive, the values of peace, European identity, rights and social justice are mentioned less frequently and in restricted linguistic environments. To account for the differences in the integration of values into the EU's treaty discourse, the article develops the notion of a discursive mechanism of differentiated value integration (MDVI). This rationale echoes the logic of differentiation in policy implementation employed by the EU. It is claimed here that, applied in the European discursive arena, MDVI allows radically different readings of the same text. This helps the EU to maintain a coherent value identity while at the same time enabling change.

This article explores the potential of incorporating narrative theory into the study of coalition formation. Following a discussion of the role of narratives in group-formation processes in a coalition-driven dynamic, we offer a theoretical framework to examine the ways political stories espoused by people are mirrored by the partisan system. We integrate theoretical assumptions of narrative studies with coalition-formation theories in an attempt to frame coalition-formation models in terms of voters' political stories. We test our theoretical framework by simulating various possible coalitions in the Israeli 2009 elections and assess the results based upon data from an exit poll survey.