Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract """First we go viral, then we sway the public"": How Protest Affects Public Opinion in the Hybrid Media System." "Stefaan Walgrave" "Media, Movements and Politics (M2P)" "How does protest affect public opinion in the hybrid media system? The past decade, social media have become a key instrument in protest movements' toolbox. To date, however, little work has thoroughly scrutinized how social media have altered movements' ability to generate attention and sway public opinion. This project asks: How do movements navigate social media to win the public's interest? To what extent and when do protests resonate on social media? And, how do protests affect individuals' perceptions via online messaging? To answer these questions, I follow a three-step approach. First, I explore movements' digital strategy to gain public support. I do so by means of in-depth interviews with movement communication strategists. Second, I compare social and mass media covering protests and examine to what extent and under which conditions protests succeed to resonate in the hybrid media system. I do so by means of a content analysis covering a large number of Belgian protests across a multitude of issues over a longer period of time (2017-2022). Third, I use vignette experiments to understand how both 'physical' and 'digital' features of protest affect individuals' beliefs, attitudes and behavior. The project breaks new ground in three particular ways. It (1) redefines the public opinion concept by studying audience analytics, (2) systematically compares mass and social media resonance, and (3) examines how movements play the ""public opinion game"" online." "How Are Policymakers Influenced by What the Public Wants? An Experimental Study of the Effect of Public Opinion on Elite Preferences and Behavior." "Stefaan Walgrave" "Media, Movements and Politics (M2P)" "For a democracy to function well—it is often argued—representatives must listen to the people who elected them. More specifically, policy should represent citizens' preferences. A core task of political scientists is to examine whether this democratic assumption is met in reality. This project aims to contribute to the large body of scientific work on policy representation in three particular ways. First, it scrutinizes the causal effect of public opinion on political elites. A lot of research demonstrates that policy decisions and public opinion are associated. However, we lack strong evidence that this association results from elites' effort to act in a responsive way. Second, the project unravels the mechanisms underlying this representational process, which have largely remained unobserved. Extant research has theorized about why elites adapt their behavior—and even their own preferences—to public opinion, but these mechanisms have not been empirically tested. Finally, this project innovates methodologically. It uses survey-embedded experiments and in-depth interviews with political elites to study policy representation. Experiments guarantee researcher control, and are therefore well-suited to establish causality and tease out the mechanisms that drive the influence of public opinion on political elites. In-depth interviews help to interpret the findings and put them into context." "The Voice of the People. Displays of Public Opinion in the News and Their Influence on Audiences." "Stefaan Walgrave" "Media, Movements and Politics (M2P)" "One of the main functions of news media in democracies is representing public opinion. There are several ways in which journalists can do so: by covering (1) polls (2) vox pops (3) inferences about public opinion (4) protest or (5) social media references. Many studies focus on one of these public opinion displays. However, surprisingly, no research exists studying how these different displays are combined in the news. Gaining an understanding of how public opinion is presented in the news is important, as people look at the media to learn about the opinions of others. The core questions of this project are consequently: How is public opinion represented in news content and how does this influence citizens? To answer these questions I combine a content analysis comprising news from three countries (the US, UK & Belgium) with a series of experiments. The content analysis will focus on how frequent the different displays are and how they are combined in the news. Moreover, how journalists frame public opinion is also examined: do they present the public as a homogenous mass? This is important, as homogeneity is expected to play a role in the influence process of public opinion displays. In the second phase of the project, a series of cumulative experiments will be conducted to gain an understanding of how and when public opinion displays influence audiences' perceived public opinion and personal opinion and of the role of homogeneity in the process." "Politicians' Evaluation of Public Opinion." "Stefaan Walgrave" "Media, Movements and Politics (M2P)" "When taking policy decisions, elected politicians balance their own ideological views against public opinion. As a result, responsiveness is selective: politicians' course of action sometimes follows and sometimes contradicts popular preferences. It is not yet well understood how politicians make this trade-off. This project examines a novel and understudied explanation at the micro level: how politicians evaluate public opinion signals. The core idea is that some public opinion signals are appraised more positively by politicians than others; and that this appraisal affects whether public opinion weighs on their actions. The objectives are (1) to lay bare the criteria that politicians use to evaluate public opinion; (2) to study how characteristics of a public opinion signal (sender, channel and content) affect its evaluation; (3) to understand how these evaluations affect political actions; and (4) to explore the interplay between politicians' own opinions and their evaluations of public opinion. To study these questions, the project draws on surveys, survey-experiments and interviews with politicians in Belgium. In two rounds of data collection, we will scrutinize what role evaluations of public opinion play in the coming about of political representation. The findings have the potential to inform us on important debates such as why certain disadvantaged groups (e.g. the poor) are represented worse than other groups." "Public Opinion versus Popular Sovereignty: Liberalism in France after the Revolution (1789-1830)" "Raf Geenens" "Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven (RIPPLE)" "Today, political theorists often understand public opinion as an expression of popular sovereignty: people exercise their power by voicing and discussing their political views. Scholars have shown that this amalgamation of the two notions first occurred during the French Revolution. To date, however, no study has investigated how theorists of public opinion envisaged it in relation to popular sovereignty after the Revolution. As a result, we have forgotten the tensions between the two concepts that emerged at this juncture. This was a time when their meaning was subject to intense philosophical debate. My project seeks to fill this gap, by investigating how French liberals – Jacques Necker, Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard and François Guizot – proposed public opinion as an alternative to popular sovereignty in reaction to the Revolution. By restoring them to their original context, I aim to show that these thinkers only discussed popular sovereignty in answer to its uses by political opponents and to highlight its flaws. Instead, they used public opinion to theorize the workings of representative government. For them, public opinion and popular sovereignty implied distinct ideas about the goal of politics, the meaning of political participation and the political actors it involved. Retrieving this deep-seated opposition might teach us that advocacies of the rule of public opinion do not necessarily imply sympathy for democratic politics." "Equality, equity or need? Public opinion towards distributive justice in the changing welfare state" "Bart Meuleman" "Centre for Sociological Research" "Contemporary Western societies are characterized by a de-structuring of the social contract of organized modernity. This brings along renewed discussions on distributive justice, i.e. how the burdens and benefits of our major institutions and social arrangements can be distributed fairly. Three principles of distributive justice are distinguished: (1) equity: distribution dependent on contributions; (2) equality: the same access to social welfare for all citizens; (3) need: selective concern to citizens highest in need. Although contemporary societal conflicts are essentially rooted in these principles, a limited body of research has tapped into public opinion on distributive justice.My doctoral project aims to contribute to the literature by providing insight into citizens’ distributive justice preferences through achieving three objectives:1. Conceptualize and investigate distributive justice preferences through a domain-specific and multi-layered approach.2. Investigate the roots of distributive justice preferences by identifying individual determinants as well as macro-level explanations.3. Study the consequences of distributive justice preferences for crucial policy discussions, such as activation policies and basic income policies." "Deservingness perceptions in European welfare states: Comparative analyses of public opinion on the social rights and duties of needy groups." "Bart Meuleman" "Centre for Sociological Research" "In welfare states different groups of needy people are treated differently. For some groups social protection is more easily accessible, more generous, longer lasting, and/or less subjected to reciprocal obligations than for other groups. Generally, such differential treatment is assumed to be influenced by economic (e.g. less protection for less productive groups), political (e.g. better protection for groups with stronger lobbies) and cultural factors (e.g. better protection for ‘our kind of’ people, or for ‘well-behaving’ people). This project aims to contribute to a cultural understanding of welfare distribution by analysing public images of needy groups, and popular perceptions of their welfare deservingness. Such knowledge is highly relevant in times of economic crisis and the resulting calls for welfare reform. This project combines various comparative surveys with economic and institutional context data to tackle three broad research questions. First, we give a description of the rank order of welfare deservingness of needy groups in selected welfare states, and explain individual differences in deservingness opinions by means social-structural positions and ideological dispositions. Second, we try to explain differences in deservingness opinions across European welfare states by means of economic and institutional context variables. Third, we study short-term as well as long-term changes in European deservingness opinions." "Public opinion on the welfare state, climate change and energy in the EU and Russia" "Wim van Oorschot" "Centre for Sociological Research" "This project compares opinions of Russian citizens with that of EU citizens as regards the welfare state, climate chnage and energy, using data of various waves of the European Social Survey." "(WHY) DO POLITICIANS CARE ABOUT PUBLIC OPINION? Politicians' accountability beliefs: the missing link in explaining policy (in)congruence." "Stefaan Walgrave" "Media, Movements and Politics (M2P)" "Politicians nowadays face the criticism of not being responsive towards citizens' demands, with as a classical though crucial example the recent populist uprisings. Citizens seem to believe that, even if they convey their preferences loud and clear, they are ignored by those who should represent them. One crucial guarantee of responsive politicians, lies in the threat of electoral reprisal: politicians are incentivized to do what citizens want because they want to retain in office. Politicians' desire to be reelected makes them presumably enact more congruent policies. In this project, I focus on this important mechanism, by examining politicians' beliefs about how and to what extent the congruence of their behavior with what citizens want, will have positive or negative electoral consequences. In strong contradiction with the centrality of this research question in the public debate, it has rarely come to the attention of academics. In this project, I address this gap with an in-depth study of politicians' so-called ""accountability beliefs"". First, I aim to conceptualize those accountability beliefs. Second, I examine accountability beliefs empirically by means of an extensive survey with politicians in three different countries. Third, I aim to explain those beliefs by leveraging differences between countries, parties, politicians and issues. Finally, by conducting a survey-embedded experiment, I investigate whether politicians' accountability beliefs affect their behavior." "Politicians as opinion leaders. How politicians' news sharing influences media trust and polarization." "Peter Van Aelst" "Antwerp Media in Society Centre (AMSoC), Media, Movements and Politics (M2P)" "This proposal puts the role of politicians as opinion leaders central. The new digital media environment has given politicians more tools to influence, both directly and indirectly, people's consumption and interpretation of news and information on current affairs. We will study what news stories politicians share on social media and how this affects their followers and public opinion in general. First, politicians can influence to what extent people trust mainstream and alternative media. By sharing and commenting on the content of news stories on social media, politicians can help disseminate their messages, circumventing the gatekeeping role of the media. This influence can enhance the trust in (alternative/partisan) media outlets, but also damage the media's reputation as a democratic institution. Second, politicians can promote more extreme views and opinions, and contribute to the polarization of their audience. Ultimately, politicians, by acting as opinion leaders, may contribute to their followers getting stuck in so-called 'echo chambers' of like-minded information. We will use a multi-method approach (content analysis, user engagement analysis, survey, experiment) to study the news sharing behavior of politicians and its effects on their followers in Belgium (Flanders), the Netherlands, and the UK."