I checked 7 public opinion journals on Saturday, April 04, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period March 28 to April 03, I found 5 new paper(s) in 3 journal(s).

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties

Concurrent or not concurrent? Date selection of provincial elections in Argentina (1985–2023)
Andrés Lacher
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Suiting up or speaking out: analyzing candidate appearance & message complexity as heuristics for voter evaluation
Steven Perry, Matt Lamb
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Public Opinion Quarterly

Thinking Ideologically: The Limited Role of Left and Right Labels as Policy Shortcuts
Sarah Lachance, Clareta Treger
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How do voters use left-right ideological labels as shortcuts for policy positions in evaluating electoral candidates? We offer a distinction between maximal and minimal forms of ideological thinking. While maximal thinking implies that voters rely on ideological proximity as a proxy for policy congruence with candidates, minimal thinking requires only that voters use ideological labels to infer candidates’ positions—even if their own ideological identification is inconsistent with policy preferences. Drawing on original experimental data from Canada (N = 1,087)—a multiparty system with a fluid ideological landscape—we find that voters’ ideological self-placement is often misaligned with their policy positions, especially among right-leaning individuals. However, voters still use ideological proximity to infer candidates’ policy stances in the absence of policy information, supporting the Minimal Theory. These findings contribute to theories of political decision-making beyond the United States and have implications for substantive representation in systems with centrist or ideologically flexible parties.

Social Science Computer Review

How Much Data Should I Request? Balancing Richness and Compliance in Digital Trace Data Donations
Ernesto de LeĂłn, Laura Boeschoten, Fabio Votta, Joris Mulder, Bella Struminskaya, Daniel Oberski, Theo Araujo, Claes de Vreese
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Digital trace “data donation” studies offer researchers a unique opportunity to collect high-quality behavioral data, but decisions about the scope of requested data can impact both dataset richness and participant compliance. This paper examines the tradeoffs between requesting larger data packages, which include more extensive historical records, and participants’ willingness to donate. In a randomized experiment with Facebook and Instagram data donations, we compare a control condition where participants are asked to request the default 1-year data period to a treatment condition in which they are asked to request data for their entire account history. We analyze how different request sizes affect (1) participants’ compliance rates and (2) the characteristics of the data resulting from these different requests. We find that participants asked to request more data are less likely to complete the task. However, we propose that this is not primarily due to heightened privacy concerns, but rather because these data packages are significantly larger and therefore take longer for the platforms to deliver. This additional time to deliver data packages results in increased attrition. In terms of the effects on the data itself, we show that decisions about the time-span of the data impacts not only the volume of data requested, but also has implications for measurement validity, as the temporal window fundamentally redefines what key constructs represent, potentially transforming intended static indicators into narrow snapshots of recent behavior. We provide guidance for researchers navigating these decisions, considering both the benefits of richer longitudinal data and the risks of reduced participation.
The Black Box, Animated Idols, and Racialization
Lamia Balafrej
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This essay argues that the black box—both as cryptic device and as critique of illegibility—is not unique to modern technology and has deep roots in the medieval Mediterranean world. Technical opacity was frequently addressed in Latin and Arabic sources, often with a critical undertone. Then as now, technoskeptical writers saw the self-acting device as treacherous, due to its reliance on hidden labor and mechanisms. This critique arose especially in relation to unfamiliar or foreign devices, like animated idols; as such, it was often racializing, attributing opacity as well as deceit to the object and its makers. Modern critiques of technology that focus on invisible labor may reproduce similar biases by enforcing a privileged, first-world perspective. A transhistorical approach thus not only shows the enduring history of the black box; it also illuminates the religious genealogy of techno-skepticism, as well as the biases that inhere in the black box, especially when deployed as a critical discourse.