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The June 2024 issue of the (volume 45, number 3) addresses big and pressing questions about deliberation, decision-making, party politics, and governance. 

In the opening piece, , using the case of Belgium, address the conditions under which politically dissatisfied citizens embrace deliberation or strongly reject it. They find that citizens’ specific definitions and interpretations of the meaning of deliberation matter a lot in terms of their support or rejection of the concept.

The second piece by  examines the political responsiveness of parties before and after elections at the agenda-setting or the decision-making stages. The authors argue that a variety of factors impact parties’ responsiveness, among them whether parties promised change (or not) or the type of governmental coalition they are involved in, as well as their location on the political spectrum. 

delves into inequality and its salience as a left-right political issue. Using the Netherlands and Denmark as case studies, the author finds that left-right self-placements are well predicted by individuals’ acceptance of inequality and that right-wing self-placement is even stronger when acceptance of inequality is connected to a particularly salient policy issue.

Also on the issue of inequality,  find that the social context of welfare decisions plays a crucial role in individuals’ support for redistributive policies.  examine political investorism as a form of political participation in the Finnish context. They find this kind of political participation to be particularly prevalent among well-educated young urban women. Examining the special political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic,  uncover that instead of causing rally-around-the-flag effects in democracies, the COVID-19 pandemic largely led voters to hold incumbent parties responsible for its effects. They note that high casualties and hard lockdowns may have been the root cause. examine the effects of policy-makers’ willingness to make uncertain investments to bring about future change. They find that policy-makers willing to make sacrifices with uncertain future pay-offs tend to be younger and more left-leaning. However, the electoral pay-offs of such political efforts are thin, suggesting that future-oriented investments have neither strong positive nor strong negative political effects. The final piece, a review article by , examines the literature on the connection between health and political behavior, including methodological challenges and the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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Contents

Original Research Articles

Picturing deliberation: How dissatisfied citizens make sense of it 
Ramon van der Does and Guillaume Petit

Party policy responsiveness at the agenda-setting and decision-making stages: The mediating effect of the types of government and promise
Ana Maria Belchior, Hugo Ferrinho Lopes, Luís Cabrita and Emmanouil Tsatsanis

An urban myth? Government involvement in the economy and left–right politics
Jesper Lindqvist

The presence of a social context increases support for redistribution: Inequality aversion and risk aversion
Junko Kato and Hirofumi Takesue

Politics on the stock market? Political investorism as a form of political participation
Henrik Serup Christensen and Anton Brännlund

The COVID-19 pandemic and the electoral performance of governing parties in electoral democracies
Yen-Pin Su and Ekaterina R Rashkova

Does it pay to think about the future? Future orientation, ideology, age and vote earning among political candidates
Annika Lindholm, Lauri Rapeli and Ã…sa von Schoultz

Healthy citizens, healthy democracies? A review of the literature 
Elisabeth Gidengil and Hanna Wass