I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, March 25, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period March 18 to March 24, I found 26 new paper(s) in 12 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Using large language models to analyze political texts through natural language understanding
Kenneth Benoit, Scott De Marchi, Conor Laver, Michael Laver, Jinshuai Ma
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Large language models (LLMs) offer scalable alternatives to human experts when analyzing political texts for meaning , using natural language understanding (NLU). Qualitative NLU methods relying on human experts are severely limited by cost and scalability. Statistical text‐as‐data methods are scalable but rely on strong and often unrealistic assumptions. We propose a systematic, scalable, and replicable method that can extend existing qualitative and quantitative approaches by using LLMs to interpret texts meaningfully rather than as mere data. Our ensemble means of LLM‐generated estimates of party positions on six key issue dimensions correlate highly with equivalent mean ratings by country specialists. When applied to coalition policy declarations, LLM estimates align more closely with standard models of government formation than hand‐coded estimates. We conclude with a discussion of the profound implications of modern LLMs for political text analysis.
Rulers on the road: Itinerant rule in the Holy Roman Empire, AD 919–1519
Carl MĂŒller‐Crepon, Clara Neupert‐Wentz, Andrej Kokkonen, JĂžrgen MĂžller
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Itinerant rule, rule exercised through traveling, was a common yet insufficiently researched, premodern form of governance. Studying the determinants of ruler itineraries in the Holy Roman Empire, AD 919–1519, we argue that rulers' visits targeted “marginal” elites. Powerful rulers could count on family members and thus targeted unrelated local elites. Weak emperors had to monitor their less loyal relatives and left unrelated nobles unvisited. We reconstruct emperors' itineraries from 72,665 dated and geolocated documents and measure territorial control by their relatives. Exploiting the weakening of imperial power through the Great Interregnum (1250–1273), we find that strong, pre‐1250 emperors frequented areas controlled by their relatives relatively less. In contrast, family control increased visits post‐1273. Causal identification rests on the discontinuous reduction of emperors' power through the Great Interregnum and differences in family relations between subsequent emperors. The results show strategic itinerant rule as an important but understudied form of governance.
You and whose economy? Group‐based retrospection in economic voting
Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard
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When managing the economy, governments make decisions that influence not only overall growth but also its distribution. How do voters judge incumbents for this? I revisit the idea of group‐based retrospective voting and argue that voters assess the economic performance of their social in‐groups relative to the national economy. By sanctioning the incumbent for in‐group performance, voters can incentivize policy‐making that better aligns with their interests. I test the theory, first, by estimating the relationship between in‐group performance and incumbent support in panel data. This relationship is comparable in magnitude to sociotropic voting. I further conduct three experiments in Denmark and the United States, randomizing information about the performance of groups defined by geography, age, education, ethnicity, and class. The findings suggest there are limits to sociotropic voting, as voters want their groups to follow or beat the national trend. This has important implications for electoral accountability and party competition.

American Political Science Review

The Effects of Exposure to New Electoral Rules: Field Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone
AVI AHUJA, GWYNETH MCCLENDON
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How do electoral rules influence voters? We build on existing research that has examined voter, rather than elite, reactions to electoral rules and implement a field experiment around a switch from single-member plurality rules to multi-member closed-list proportional rules (PR) in Sierra Leone, expanding the study of electoral rules’ influence on voters further into the Global South. We find that exposure to multimember district/PR increased women’s commitment to voting and decreased both men’s and women’s support for particularistic campaign appeals in this context. These results likely flow from voters’ perceptions of whether politicians are accountable to parties or to voters under different systems, rather than from increased party competition, new party entry, a clear switch to programmatic party competition, or increased trust in elections. We discuss the implications for studying electoral rules in clientelistic democracies.
Elite Partisan Disagreement and Military Victory: Evidence from South Korean Battle Experiments
MICHAEL F. JOSEPH, JOON H. CHUNG, HUI SEONG PARK
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Does partisan disagreement impact expectations of victory in war? We conjectured it could by degrading military cohesion. We registered two main predictions: (a) soldiers fight less effectively if they observe political parties disagree during a crisis about whether to initiate war and (b) the effects of (a) are amplified when soldiers are affiliated with a dissenting opposition party. With some nuance, we found broad support for these predictions through two preregistered survey experiments that recruited South Korean military cadets and soldiers of appropriate ranks for warfighting. Our novel design estimated effects on the will to perform six essential battlefield tasks given land-battle doctrine, unit structures, and force employment of modern democratic armies. Thirteen exploratory tests yield findings consistent with arguments that military institutions provide nonpartisan socialization, but surprising for research on nationalism, soldier-to-soldier trust, and the psychological and dispositional determinants of military effectiveness. We also introduce and calibrate rifle shooting outcomes for experiments.
What Is the Wrong of Capitalism? A Reply to Chiara Cordelli
NICHOLAS VROUSALIS
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Chiara Cordelli has recently criticized radical republicans for failing to ground a domination-based anti-capitalism. Cordelli argues that radical republicans “cannot prove either that domination under capitalism is less contingent than other wrongs, that capitalism’s distinctive wrong amounts to domination, or that such domination is unjust.” This article responds to Cordelli’s objections. I argue that Cordelli’s emphasis on capitalization does not threaten the non-contingency of capitalist domination; that capitalism’s distinctive wrong is domination and not alienation, and that this wrong is structural all the way down. Cordelli is right that capitalism involves alienation of our future to the vagaries of profit-maximization. But alienation is only a moment in capitalism’s fundamental wrong and ill—the domination of labor by capital.
Do Elites Know Best? Candidate Selection and Policy Implementation in Postindependence Tanzania
JEREMY BOWLES
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How do candidate selection processes shape policy outcomes? Studying Tanzania’s initial single-party legislative elections, I assess how electing candidates preferred by party elites affected policy implementation, which emphasized rural development during this period. Leveraging the deterministic assignment of ballot symbols—which was orthogonal to candidate characteristics but had large electoral effects—finds that their election substantially increased the supply of salient local public goods. Assembling novel candidate-level data, I document that elites prioritized candidates’ national prominence while voters prioritized their local ties. Rather than representing misaligned incentives, the results are consistent with elites, in an incipient regime, more quickly understanding which characteristics would matter for candidates’ performance in office. Beyond highlighting novel conditions under which elite-led candidate selection facilitates responsiveness, the results underscore the distributive consequences of candidate selection even in nondemocratic settings.

Electoral Studies

Money talks? Party financial incentives to promote underrepresented groups
Thiago do Nascimento Fonseca, Débora Thomé, João V. Guedes-Neto
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Regional patterns in citizens’ reactions to a political assassination: Evidence from Japan
Taka-aki Asano, Shoko Omori, Masaki Taniguchi
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European Journal of Political Research

What kind of energy transition? Public opinion trade-offs between economic growth, ecological sustainability, and equity
Marcello Natili, Alessandro Pellegata, Francesco Visconti
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ensuing increased concerns over energy prices, have created new controversies in the European political discourse over how to pursue an energy transition that can reconcile economic, environmental, and social objectives. In this context, this paper examines public opinion priorities and potential trade-offs across social groups regarding the need to combat climate change, ensure energy supply, and protect household disposable income. Using a conjoint survey experiment embedded in a cross-national survey conducted in December 2022, at the peak of the ‘energy crisis’, we first examine citizens’ preferences for alternative policy packages to respond to situations that vary among three conflicting dimensions: the climate and energy strategy pursued by national governments, different kinds of social compensation measures, and financing mechanisms. Second, we explore how these preferences vary across ideological leanings, socioeconomic groups, and vulnerability profiles related to environmental degradation and policies mitigating the effects of climate change. Our findings indicate that synergies exist between ecological and social goals: support for renewable energy investment increases when policies include social transfers and progressive financing mechanisms. However, partisan and socioeconomic divides make this multidimensional policy issue politically challenging. Policy solutions that combine renewables investments with social compensation are attractive to left-leaning individuals and to the pivotal group of centrist voters. However, low-income production workers who fear job loss tend to remain opposed to the energy transition, even when compensation is provided. This result highlights the trade-offs and political dilemmas that (left-leaning) parties face when navigating the energy transition.
Navigating the Blueprint: The Development of Institutional Trust Structures during Adolescence
Linde Stals, Carmen van Alebeek
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Understanding the structure of citizens’ trust in state institutions is essential for assessing its role in sustaining healthy, legitimate democracies. While research has revealed a puzzling duality in institutional trust among adults – being subdomain-specific yet unidimensionally ordered – little is known about how these patterns originate and develop. This study integrates evaluative and socialisation perspectives to investigate the development of institutional trust structures during adolescence. Using longitudinal data from the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values (2018–2022), tracking adolescents from ages 12 to 16 ( N = 1,092 individuals), we employ confirmatory factor analysis and Mokken scaling to assess how the subdomain-specific and hierarchical features of institutional trust evolve across time and cognitive resources (ie school track and political sophistication). Our results support an early macro-level socialisation account of trust development, showing that adolescents as young as 12 already distinguish between order and representative institutions and consistently rank them in ways that mirror adult trust structures. However, among adolescents with higher cognitive resources, these structures become more volatile in mid-to-late adolescence, suggesting the gradual onset of more individualised, evaluative trust judgements. Taken together, the findings show a dual process of institutional trust development, suggesting that early cultural imprinting provides a baseline blueprint of institutional trust, which may later be recalibrated by more sophisticated citizens through individual evaluation.

Party Politics

Determinants of government duration: Correcting for hyper inflating measures
Yael Shomer, Osnat Akirav
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Recent years have seen growing scholarly attention to the role of intra-coalition partisan change. Yet, Shomer et al. (2022) critiqued the common definition of government termination that regards any partisan change as a government termination, arguing that it inflates the number of governments and distorts scholarly understanding of government duration—particularly in certain countries. This research note examines whether, and to what extent, adopting Shomer et al.’s (2022) modified definition alters substantive conclusions about the determinants of government duration and stability. We follow their approach, redefining government termination based on: (1) a new prime minister, (2) an election, or (3) a crucial partisan loss that alters majority status. Using this revised definition and applying parametric event history models that incorporate established determinants of duration, we find evidence that the conventional measure can bias conclusions about what drives government stability, especially with regards to the impact of ENGP and parliamentary polarization.

Political Behavior

Party or Policy? The Role of Policy Partisanship in Voter Decision-Making
Clareta Treger, Thomas Galipeau, Thomas Bergeron, Sarah Lachance, Natasha Goel, Md Mujahedul Islam, Blake Lee-Whiting, Beatrice Magistro, Peter John Loewen
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Which matters more to voters, the political party or the policy positions of electoral candidates? We contribute to this longstanding debate by analyzing the relative importance of policy information and party cues in the multi-party Canadian context. The Canadian case allows us to disentangle the effects of policy and party on voter decision-making, which are closely intertwined in the more polarized and extensively studied U.S. case. First, we use a conjoint survey experiment to test whether implicit party cues embedded in policies shape voters’ evaluations of electoral candidates. We find that while Canadians often associate policies with specific parties – what we call policy partisanship , they do not seem to use these implicit party cues in their evaluation of candidates, focusing on policy congruence instead. Second, we test whether explicit party cues reduce the weight of policy congruence in candidate evaluations and find that they do not. Overall, our findings suggest that party cues are not as useful for voters in multi-party systems or moderately polarized systems, and that voters rely on policy information to make electoral decisions.

Political Geography

Degrowing desire
Robert Fletcher
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The Lithium Road. Political practices in favor of extractive infrastructures in the Bolivian Altiplano.
David Schröter, Felipe Fernåndez, Alke Jenss
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The fiction of disaster: Forest fires and state-making in the Indian Himalaya
Kapil Yadav
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Political Psychology

From partisans to individuals: Lowering an opinion's diagnosticity via counterstereotypes can reduce categorization based on that opinion
Carsten W. Sander, Juliane Degner
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Research has shown that individuals often infer political categories like Republican, Democrat, conservative, or liberal from behavioral cues. In polarized contexts, where political outgroups are evaluated very negatively, these political categorizations may lead to negative outcomes and exacerbate polarization. The current research investigated whether political categorization can be reduced via counterstereotypical exemplars. Across three experiments, we exposed participants to stereotype‐confirming vs. stereotype‐disconfirming category exemplars to make political opinions seem more or less diagnostic of different political categories. Our findings provide initial evidence that counterstereotypes that decrease the diagnosticity of an opinion can significantly reduce political categorization on the basis of this opinion. This reduction was more pronounced when making a cue appear more common in a category where it is rare, compared with making a cue appear less common in the category where it is frequent. We discuss these findings in light of their potential implications for polarization dynamics. We also consider potential reasons why the diagnosticity of political opinions is perceived as particularly high in polarized contexts and suggest that greater visibility of counterstereotypical individuals may help reduce political categorization and its negative consequences.

Political Science Research and Methods

Dynamic persuasion: decay and accumulation of partisan media persuasion
Matthew Baum, Adam J. Berinsky, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Joohye Jeong, Zachary Markovich, Teppei Yamamoto
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Both academic researchers and political pundits have generally accepted two over-time features of persuasion by partisan media: that the persuasive effects of partisan media might be temporary and decay quickly after a single exposure, and that these effects accumulate from multiple exposures. That effects decay may serve to ameliorate concerns about the broad impact of such media on partisan polarization. Yet the assumption that persuasive effects accumulate may raise larger concerns from real-world repeat exposure. To explore these possibilities, we implement a novel set of multiwave experiments that allow us to examine concerns about media effects over time. We present estimates from three studies suggesting that the persuasive effect of exposure to just a short article or video clip can persist for up to a week. In contrast to this persistence, our results suggest that an experiment adequately powered to detect the cumulative effect from multiple doses of partisan media—let alone one powered to detect cumulative effects among subgroups of the population—would require an unrealistic number of respondents. These cumulative effects are thus difficult to test in an experimental setting with limited resources.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Public Administration Beyond Public Administration Journals
Asmus Leth Olsen, Karl-Emil Bendtsen, Paul van Leeuwen
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Public administration (PA) research published in economics journals (PA in Econ) can be summarized by five stylized facts using bibliometric analysis and expert survey data. First, PA in Econ represents a large volume of research, comparable to all quantitatively oriented PA research published in PA journals. Second, PA in Econ exists in a parallel universe, with almost no citations to the field of PA. Third, PA in Econ features a much more diverse set of empirical settings, including more non-Western cases. Fourth, PA in Econ employs more rigorous designs for causal inference. Fifth, PA in Econ is evaluated as equally relevant by PA scholars. We conclude by arguing that the most aspirational way forward for the field of PA is to live up to its identity as an interdisciplinary field and aim to integrate PA research across disciplines.
Where Do I Stand? Perceptions of Racialized Social Status Among Latine Immigrants
Angie N. Ocampo-Roland
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This article examines Latine immigrants’ perceptions of group status relative to White and Black individuals, highlighting how these perceptions shape their understanding of the US racial hierarchy. Focusing on the role of social interactions, the analysis explores equitable interactions (e.g., with a neighbor, coworker, or friend) and nonequitable interactions (e.g., with a supervisor) and their association with perceived status relative to each group. It also considers how experiences of discrimination and anti-Latino treatment influence these perceptions. Findings indicate that respondents view Whites as more advantaged, whereas perceptions of Black Americans’ status remain ambivalent. Equitable interactions improve Latines’ perceived status relative to Whites but do not consistently improve their sense of status relative to Black individuals. Conversely, discrimination substantially diminishes perceived status relative to Whites and, to a lesser extent, relative to Black individuals. Although results suggest modest opportunities for coalition building with Black Americans, the findings indicate these alliances may be limited. Similarly, discrimination is a major barrier to Latine–White relations, leaving Latine immigrants feeling marginalized relative to both groups.
Political Realignment and Congressional Deference to Donald Trump
Jeffrey M. Stonecash
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Congress is portrayed as compliant with President Donald J. Trump’s agenda because he is intimidating its members. This neglects an alternative explanation that focuses on the increased congruence of presidential and congressional electoral bases. Trump is the beneficiary of a geographical realignment that took decades and has created a high degree of overlap of the two bases. This analysis tracks that process from 1952 to 2024. It has produced a situation in which policy concerns overlap and encourage congressional compliance.
Building an LLM-Powered Content Moderation Bot in the Classroom
Shelby Grossman, Anthony Mensah, Alex Stamos, Jeffrey Hancock
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As online platforms seek to improve content-moderation strategies, large language models (LLMs) may be a potential tool. This study examines opportunities and limitations of LLM-powered moderation through a unique lens: student projects for a Stanford University course titled Trust and Safety. In this course, students developed Discord bots using LLMs to moderate specific types of harmful content. Interviews with 16 of the students suggest that these models demonstrate high accuracy, often exceeding students’ expectations. Notably, in cases of disagreement between the student and the model, closer analysis frequently validated the model’s judgments. However, students also observed limitations: LLMs proved unhelpfully sensitive to prompt phrasing and exhibited many contextual interpretation challenges common to human moderators and traditional machine-learning classifiers.

Research & Politics

The political roots of ageism in greying democracies: Evidence from Italy, South Korea, and the United States
Alonso RomĂĄn Amarales, Scott Williamson
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Ageing populations are reshaping the political landscape in many democracies, raising concerns about intergenerational inequalities in power and representation. Do these political factors contribute to ageism toward older people? While ageism is a well-documented form of prejudice, its political roots remain underexplored. This paper examines whether perceptions of political exclusion based on age are linked to negative attitudes toward older people. Using original survey data from Italy, South Korea, and the United States, we study how both general concerns about older generations dominating political life and more personal feelings of age-based exclusion are associated with ageism. The results from all three countries reveal strong and consistent links between perceived political grievances and explicit expressions of ageism, whereas implicit ageism appears largely unrelated to political perceptions. Our findings suggest that age-based prejudice is not merely a cultural or psychological artefact, but is also connected to perceived injustices in democratic representation.

The Journal of Politics

Sentiment on the Campaign Trail: Gender Differences in Candidates’ Use of Emotive Language
Tiffany D. Barnes, Charles Crabtree, Akitaka Matsuo, Yoshikuni Ono
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When Realism Demands the Unfeasible Functional Binds, Functional Prompts, and the European Union
Carlo Burelli
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Immigration, Public Housing, and Support for the French National Front
Gloria Gennaro
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