Dominik Schraff

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Schraff

First Name

Dominik

ORCID

0000-0003-3386-1352

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Publications1 - 10 of 14

Estimating subnational preferences across the European Union
Lipps, Jana; Schraff, Dominik (2021)
Political Science Research and Methods
Political trust during the Covid‐19 pandemic: Rally around the flag or lockdown effects?
Schraff, Dominik (2021)
European Journal of Political Research
How can we explain the rise in diffuse political support during the Covid‐19 pandemic? Recent research has argued that the lockdown measures generated political support. In contrast, I argue that the intensity of the pandemic rallied people around political institutions. Collective angst in the face of exponentially rising Covid‐19 cases depresses the usual cognitive evaluations of institutions and leads citizens to rally around existing intuitions as a lifebuoy. Using a representative Dutch household survey conducted over March 2020, I compare the lockdown effect to the dynamic of the pandemic. I find that the lockdown effect is driven by pre‐existing time trends. Accounting for non‐linearities in time makes the lockdown effect disappear. In contrast, more flexible modelling techniques reveal a robust effect of Covid‐19 infections on political trust. In line with an anxiety effect, I find that standard determinants of political trust – such as economic evaluations and social trust – lose explanatory power as the pandemic spreads. This speaks to an emotionally driven rally effect that pushes cognitive evaluations to the background. © 2020 European Consortium for Political Research.
Is the Member States' Curse the EU's Blessing? Inequality and EU Regime Evaluation
Schraff, Dominik (2020)
Journal of Common Market Studies
How does inequality shape regime evaluations in Europe's multi‐level governance system? I argue that rising inequality improves citizens' evaluation of the EU's political system. This effect is driven by two mechanisms. First, adverse social and political consequences of inequality within national democracies strongly erode national regime evaluations. This leads to an improvement of EU regime evaluations in relative terms. Second, citizens compensate negative national conditions by redirecting hopes to the supranational level. This compensation mechanisms further tilts regime evaluates in favour of the EU. An empirical analysis of change in national and European parliament trust across 27 member states and 14 years provides empirical support for this argument. It also shows that the two mechanisms coexist and that their relevance is conditioned by previous levels of regime support. (© 2020 University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd)
United or divided in diversity? The heterogeneous effects of ethnic diversity on European and national identities
Schraff, Dominik; Sczepanski, Ronja (2022)
European Union Politics
In this article, we argue that the size and cultural proximity of immigrant populations in people's residential surroundings shape national and European identities. This means that the type of migrant population activates cultural threat perceptions and opportunities for contact to varying degrees. Geocoded survey data from the Netherlands suggests that large non-Western immigrant shares are associated with more exclusive national identities, while mixed contexts with Western and non-Western populations show more inclusive identities. These results suggest that highly diverse areas with mixed immigrant populations hold a potential for more tolerance. In contrast, exclusive national identities become strongly pronounced under the presence of sizeable culturally distant immigrant groups.
Eurozone bailouts and national democracy: Detachment or resilience?
Schraff, Dominik; Schimmelfennig, Frank (2019)
European Union Politics
How did the Eurozone bailouts affect national democracies? Recent research indicates strong citizen detachment due to the external constraints imposed by bailout programs on national autonomy. This paper re-examines the detachment thesis by broadening the view toward multiple dimensions of democracy and effect heterogeneity across time and space. Using the generalized synthetic control method, we find a negative effect of bailouts on satisfaction with democracy and turnout but show that effects vanish after several years and vary strongly across bailout cases. In addition, we find resilient attitudes and behaviors in spite of national democratic institutions that continue to deteriorate. These findings indicate that economic policy outcomes have a stronger influence on satisfaction with democracy and electoral turnout than the quality of the democratic process.
Is the Urban-Rural Divide Affectively Polarised? Comparative Evidence from Nine European Countries
Hegewald, Sven; Schraff, Dominik (2025)
Comparative Political Studies
Recent studies in the United States and Europe have documented a growing divergence in voting behaviour and political attitudes between cities and the countryside. However, we still lack systematic evidence on the extent to which this urban-rural divide is also affectively polarised. To shed light on this, we advance the concept of place-based affective polarisation, which we define as the difference between in-group and out-group affect in relation to place-based groups. Drawing on original survey data from nine European countries, we show that place-based affective polarisation is substantial along the urban-rural divide and associated with strong feelings of place-based resentment and identity. Furthermore, we find that higher levels of place-based affective polarisation correlate with support for GAL parties (green, alternative, libertarian) among urbanites and support for TAN parties (traditional, authoritarian, nationalist) among ruralites. Overall, our findings point to a strong political cleavage between urban and rural areas in several European countries.
Who rallies around the flag? Evidence from panel data during the Covid-19 pandemic
Hegewald, Sven; Schraff, Dominik (2024)
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties
Recent studies on political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic diagnosed a rally-around-the-flag effect leading to exceptionally high levels of trust in politics. While this finding has been established over various country contexts, our understanding of the precise dynamics behind the rally effect remains limited. In this paper, we argue that socio-demographic characteristics, in particular age differences, as well as pre-existing trust levels moderate the extent of the rally effect. Using individual-level panel data from the Netherlands, covering the time before and during the first Covid-19 wave, we show that the rally effect is particularly pronounced among older individuals, while it is absent among the young. Furthermore, we find a catch-up effect among the more distrusting parts of the population, such as populist supporters and low-income earners, who seem to largely drive the rally effect during the initial stage of the pandemic. This shows that the extent of the rally effect is conditional on socio-demographic characteristics, pointing towards the role of group risks and pre-crisis trust differentials in shaping people's response to an existential threat.
Does differentiated integration strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the EU? Evidence from the 2015 Danish opt-out referendum
Schraff, Dominik; Schimmelfennig, Frank (2020)
European Union Politics
Differentiation has become a durable feature of European integration but we know little about its effects on citizens. Does differentiated integration improve the democratic quality of the European Union and strengthen citizens’ support – or does it promote political divides and foster citizens’ alienation from European integration? This article develops a theoretical argument on the positive attitudinal effects of differentiated integration, contending that differentiation accommodates heterogeneous preferences in a diverse EU and strengthens citizens’ ownership of European integration. A quasi-experimental analysis of public opinion of the 2015 Danish Justice and Home Affairs opt-out referendum demonstrates that the public vote increased citizens’ EU efficacy, indeed. Eurosceptic voters in particular strengthen their belief that their individual voice counts in EU politics, suggesting that differentiation can have a positive effect on the perceived democratic quality of the EU.
Asymmetric ratification standards and popular perceptions of legitimacy
Schraff, Dominik (2022)
Journal of European Public Policy
The ratification of EU agreements is characterized by the application of different democratic procedures across member states. Building on the demoi-cratic theory of legitimate global governance, I argue that citizens benchmark their national procedure against highly visible direct democratic ratification votes held in other member states. If citizens experience unequal influence on EU decision-making, the perceived legitimacy of the EU regime erodes. I test this argument with a research design that combines a population-based survey experiment and a quasi-experiment. First, a survey experiment in Germany reveals that information about asymmetric ratification standards decrease fairness perceptions and satisfaction with EU democracy. Second, a natural experiment around the 2005 French vote on the EU constitutional treaty shows that the referendum decreased satisfaction with EU democracy in states with pending and indirect ratification. These findings suggest that asymmetric access of citizens to EU decision-making can decrease popular support for EU governance.
The European NUTS-level election dataset: A tool to map the European electoral geography
Schraff, Dominik; Vergioglou, Ioannis; Demirci, Buket Buse (2023)
Party Politics
Datasets on subnational election results in Europe frequently do not match with regional statistics available for cross-national research, mainly because territorial statistical units change over time and do not map onto the national electoral districts. This hinders consistent comparative research across time. This research note introduces EU-NED, a new dataset on subnational election data that covers national and European parliamentary elections for European countries over the past 30 years. EU-NED's major contribution is that it provides election results on disaggregated levels of the statistical territorial units used by Eurostat with an unprecedented consistency and temporospatial scope. Moreover, EU-NED is integrated with the Party Facts platform, allowing for a seamless integration of party-level data. Using EU-NED, we present first descriptive evidence on the European electoral geography and suggest avenues of how EU-NED can facilitate future comparative political science research in Europe.

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Dominik Schraff

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