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For many students, writing a thesis is the final and pivotal step in their university education and their success matters for students themselves, but also universities and society overall. Despite involving large numbers of students, supervision at the undergraduate level is an understudied field of research in comparison to doctoral supervision. This article aims to advance the pedagogical literature on supervision, where the vast majority of prior contributions are qualitative case studies. We investigate what kind of supervision generates the best outcomes for undergraduate students writing their theses. Using a survey on thesis supervision answered by 251 bachelor and master level students, we assess how five dimensions of supervision (support, control, content, process and format) are related to four key outcomes (thesis quality, completion on time, deep learning and scientific curiosity). Our findings show that different types of supervision promote different outcomes. For instance, supervision focused on control is associated with higher thesis quality and more scientific curiosity, whereas supervision focused on support is associated with completion on time, but also with less scientific curiosity. Taken together, the article demonstrates the importance of a holistic approach to thesis supervision, and provides both theoretical and empirical additions of value to existing research.

Racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented at all levels of U.S. politics. Yet, the 2020 Census reports that people of color constitute the majority of Americans under 18, and could thus serve as a pool of descriptive candidates in the near future. We study how race and age intersect in the first of multiple steps that may lead to election: interest in running for office. Using the 2020 CMPS, we first show that Black and Latino Americans are more interested in running for office than are White and Asian Americans. This observed ambition gap cannot be accounted for by standard explanations like socioeconomic disparities, ideology, political interest, and broad civic engagement. Rather, it is explained by differences among age cohorts: younger Black and Latino Americans are more interested in running for office, due to having been disproportionately engaged in recent movements advocating racial justice. We conclude that differences in political ambition between racial and ethnic groups do not explain the underrepresentation of Black and Latino Americans; rather, by drawing on the untapped ambition found among younger, more diverse, cohorts, future recruitment efforts for the next generation of politicians can help translate this potential into representational parity in U.S. politics.

Carbon taxes are an effective tool to reduce carbon emissions but their use is hampered by a lack of public support. We develop the theoretical argument that social insurance programmes may be designed to mitigate perceptions of economic risk and unfairness, and thereby increase public acceptance of carbon taxes. Employing a novel combination of cross-sectional data, we test whether and how the coverage, replacement rates, and duration of three social insurance programmes relate to support for carbon taxes in 20 European countries. The results reveal that coverage correlates significantly with support for carbon taxes, while replacement rates and the duration of social insurance exhibit no such association individually. However, a combination of broad coverage and high replacement rates is linked to greater support for carbon taxes than broad coverage alone. The relationship between social protection and carbon tax support is furthermore equally strong among economically vulnerable and other groups.

This study provides new insights regarding how the EU dimension relates to the left-right dimension in national politics. It does so by examining to what extent parties’ oppositional behaviour in EU affairs in parliament is a function of their distance to the government, other parties, the voters and party supporters on the EU dimension and the left-right dimension, respectively. The results suggest that oppositional behaviour is determined by two parallel dynamics: When expressing opposition, political parties are receptive both to the positions of the government and other parties on the EU dimension, and to the positions of voters and supporters on the left-right dimension. Our results thus indicate that the politicization of EU affairs in national parliaments primarily is an elite phenomenon. In their relation to the voters and supporters, parties still primarily navigate along the traditional left-right dimension.

This study attempts to break new ground by systematically comparing oppositional behaviour of Members of Parliament (MPs) in the two key arenas found in parliament: the plenary and the committee. Do MPs express more opposition frontstage in the plenary than backstage in the committee when discussing European affairs? The article sheds new light on political opposition in parliament by using a dataset of hand-coded statements made by MPs during plenary debates and European Affairs committee deliberations in five national parliaments. The results lend strong support to the main hypothesis that MPs express more opposition during plenary debates than committee deliberations.

Racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in most Western democracies. This article investigates one potential root cause behind this pattern: minority and majority citizens might differentially expect to feel discriminated against if they were to enter politics. Using data from three large-scale surveys, we find that minorities in both the U.S. and Sweden are less likely to expect to feel welcome than the majority population. These discrepancies in expected discrimination persist, even after controlling for other factors. Moreover, expected discrimination is not without political consequence: those who expect to feel less welcome are less likely to indicate interest in running for political office. Finally, these results do not differ for politically engaged citizens who constitute a more realistic pool of potential candidates. We conclude by discussing what expectations of discrimination can tell us about the fairness of the political system and how these attitudes could shape political ambition among minorities.

Is oppositional behaviour in legislatures gendered? Despite a growing literature on gender and legislative behaviour, there is a conspicuous absence of research on differences between female and male members of parliament (MPs) when it comes to one of the key aspects of parliamentary debates: the voicing of opposition. This article connects the literature on gender and legislative behaviour with opposition scholarship. We examine the role of gender for oppositional behaviour in four legislatures with a focus on debates concerning European Union affairs. Our results show that female MPs generally are equally likely to express opposition as their male colleagues. This result, however, is conditioned by government status. Whilst there is no significant difference between the proportion of opposition expressed by female and male MPs from opposition parties, we find that male MPs representing government parties express more than twice as much opposition as their female colleagues.

Previous studies have found an ‘empowerment effect’ of minority representation, but often face a difficult methodological obstacle: any observed correlation between visible political leadership by marginalized groups and political engagement of its members may be due to reverse causation or unaccounted-for confounders. We use a novel video-vignette design and conduct two pre-registered survey experiments to test if visible political leadership of Muslims affects American Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ political engagement. In both studies, Muslim and non-Muslim respondents randomized into the inclusive treatment judged the political system to be more fair and legitimate. Treated Muslim participants also showed slightly more positive attitudes towards prospective political participation and political candidacy. These findings suggest that the visible representation of underrepresented groups can have outcomes beneficial to inclusion and democracy, and that increasing the political visibility of one group does not necessarily harm the legitimacy perceived by members of another group.

This chapter analyses the standing of democracy in the EU and, in particular, the extent to which parliaments (national and European) function as arenas for political opposition in European affairs. It identifies two opposed views in previous research. According to the one, political opposition is essentially absent from EU politics. According to the contrary view, lines of conflict between government and opposition are becoming clearer in the politics of the Union. In a systematic examination of plenary debates in five national parliaments and in the EP, the authors test the viability of these hypotheses. They find that vigorous opposition prevails in the parliaments examined, and that EU politics is marked far more by conflict than by consensus. The problem, from a democratic perspective, lies not in any lack of opposition, but rather in the fact that the opposition conducted in the parliaments only reaches the voters to a limited extent.