Municipal mergers are typically contentious and polarizing issues among both citizens and politicians. In deciding on these, municipal-level referendums are often commissioned by municipal councils. Referendums, though, are also per se polarizing processes that only exacerbate an already polarizing issue. Adding deliberation to referendum processes has been shown in previous studies to be a more democratically sustainable process than mere referendums. In this study, we explore the use of mixed deliberation between citizens and politicians within a municipal merger process in the municipality of Korsholm in Finland, one year before a referendum on the issue occurred. The deliberations were two-hour sessions in February 2018, with local politicians present in each discussion group. Using pre- and post-deliberation surveys, we trace how citizens (n = 117) engaging in deliberation developed their social trust, political trust, and political efficacy during deliberation. Generally, we expected that all of these would be strengthened in deliberation. The results, however, reveal only a few statistically significant effects, some of which ran contrary to expectations.

The extent of political efficacy within a community reflects the general state of affairs within that community, with higher levels of political efficacy presumably related to other kinds of socially preferable attitudes. High levels of political efficacy could further be regarded as a glue that keeps a political community together and should be even more important within minority communities. As political efficacy differs across minority communities, it indicates that individual levels of political efficacy is not only an individual trait but something also affected by the local contextual features. To explore the relationship between varying local contexts and political efficacy within a minority population, we use data from Barometern 2019 (N = 3,913), which is a survey measuring the opinions and attitudes of the Swedish‐speaking population in Finland, i.e., the Swedish‐speaking Finns. This study, thus, analyses the role of contextual‐ and individual‐level determinants (e.g., age, education and gender) as well as linguistic identity (Swedish and bilingual) and political interest on both internal (subjective sense of political understanding) and external (political responsiveness) political efficacy. We find that context matters for political efficacy within a minority context but that the effects differ between the internal and external types of political efficacy. The findings presented will contribute to increasing our knowledge about political efficacy within a minority context.

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The recent wave of electoral success for right‐wing populists has coincided with an increase in political scandals as well as a new, neo‐populist type, of scandals. Thus, it has been argued that the public might have become increasingly numb to scandals and that scandalous behaviour by populist politicians is often neglected as part of their ‘typical’ behavior. In this article, we explore how involvement in neo‐populist scandals affects the public's trust in individual politicians and whether this effect is moderated by the politician's party affiliation – both populist and non‐populist – and party preferences of citizens judging a scandal. We also compare the effects with two other types of traditional scandals, involving financial misconduct or an extra‐marital affair. Two factorial vignette survey experiments (N = 1,000 and 1,577) were carried out in 2017 and 2019 to explore whether and how neo‐populist scandals affect trust in politicians under varying circumstances. The key findings are that neo‐populist scandals clearly have negative effects on trust for a scandalous politician but the judgement of scandals are subject to strong partisanship effects. Thus, supporters of a populist party do not see a scandalous behaviour by a populist politician as harmful for their trust in that politician. This effect is not evident among supporters of a traditional party when ‘their’ politician is involved in a scandal. Populist supporters also tend not to see scandals in general as especially harmful to their trust in politicians, regardless of type of scandal nor affiliation of a scandalous politician.

The democratic performance is declining across a number of Central and Eastern European Member States of the European Union, this while regime support has seemingly been steadily increasing. This dual development leads to questions regarding whether the democratic performance actually matters for regime support within a region consisting of countries that are still being considered as relatively new democracies. The findings from this study shows that there is a negative connection between higher levels of democratic performance and regime support within the countries in this region during the period of 2004-2019. Nonetheless, higher levels of democratic performance are still related to higher levels of regime support across the region.