I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, November 04, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period October 28 to November 03, I found 29 new paper(s) in 12 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Women and the double standard of ambition
Geertje J. Bol
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Few human qualities are as morally unstable as ambition: We seem unable to decide whether to admire or condemn the desire for self‐advancement. This instability guarantees double standards—and none has been more enduring than that of women's ambition. This article traces the emergence of this double standard in early modern England, when ambition came to be widely accepted as natural and even virtuous in men, yet remained unnatural and vicious in women. It then turns to four seventeenth‐century feminists—Rachel Speght, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, and Judith Drake—who challenged this emerging double standard. They reimagined ambition as a feminist tool, using it to argue for women's equality and even superiority. Unearthing this neglected strand of ambitious feminism not only contributes to the history of political thought but also points the way to a reconciliation between feminism and ambition that avoids the pitfalls identified by feminist theorists today.

American Political Science Review

When Business Speaks, Legislators Listen: Experimental and Qualitative Evidence from Brazil
FERNANDO B. MELLO
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The influence of interest groups on policy making is a central concern in representative democracies, yet identifying causal effects remains a significant challenge. This article argues that legislators respond to informational cues about the economic importance and coalition breadth of interest groups. A field experiment in Brazil, which randomized the receipt of printed and WhatsApp messages from a pro-reform business organization, reveals that legislators are more likely to vote in favor of the group’s position when its membership size, economic importance, and sectoral reach are emphasized. A survey experiment with lobbyists supports this mechanism, showing that messages highlighting group characteristics increase legislators’ expected engagement and support. In-depth interviews with key political figures—including a former president, ministers, and deputies—further corroborate these findings. This study contributes to the literature on informational lobbying and cue-based persuasion by employing realistic experimental treatments and mixed-methods evidence.
Councils and Indirect Rule in British Africa
JUTTA BOLT, LEIGH GARDNER, JENNIFER KÖHLER, JACK PAINE, JAMES A. ROBINSON
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Did Western colonial rule transform African political institutions? Despite extensive research on indirect rule, we have little systematic evidence about how colonizers’ aims interacted with the structure of indigenous institutions to shape local governance. We explain why colonizers faced incentives to delegate authority to traditionally legitimate institutions, even in historically decentralized areas. Empirically, we analyze originally compiled data on African political institutions in the precolonial and colonial periods for more than 450 subnational units across British Africa. We focus on councils as a form of executive constraints. Subnational councils were widespread, exhibited strong correlations with precolonial institutions and patterns of socioeconomic development, and exerted meaningful decision-making powers. These indirect-rule institutions reflected reforms to replace ineffective installed agents. Pressure from below prompted British officials to reintroduce systems of executive constraints based on precolonial models. Our findings reject widespread claims that colonizers could unilaterally implement indirect-rule institutions while disregarding precolonial precedents.
Globalization and the Hinterland: International Trade and the Rural–Urban Divide
EDWARD D. MANSFIELD, OMER SOLODOCH
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The growing political divide between rural and urban regions is often attributed to rural deindustrialization and import competition in manufacturing. Yet this cleavage emerged in many countries well before rural industrialization, pointing to underlying economic forces that existing accounts have overlooked. We argue that comparative advantage in agriculture is one such force: rural voters are more likely to support protectionist parties and policies when local agriculture is uncompetitive, since this sector is often central to their communities’ economic and social life. Using a new harmonized dataset of surveys from 123 countries and extensive data on voting behavior in the European Union, we find strong support for our argument. An additional analysis exploiting exogenous subnational variation in agricultural competitiveness in the United States post-NAFTA further corroborates our findings: the political divide between rural and urban voters is pronounced in uncompetitive regions but negligible in those possessing a comparative advantage in agriculture.
Economic Self-Interest and Support for Redistribution: New Evidence Using Election Results Data
JIEUN LEE, E. GRANT BALDWIN, G. AGUSTIN MARKARIAN, BENJAMIN J. NEWMAN
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A formidable corpus of scholarship explores the role of economic self-interest in shaping public support for redistribution. One striking feature of this literature is its near-exclusive reliance on reported preferences in surveys, with little-to-no research analyzing revealed preferences in the form of actual voting on redistribution. Leveraging eight redistributive ballot initiatives across six American states and a total of 73,053 observations of revealed support for redistribution, we uncover consistent evidence that the economic standing of precinct voters is systematically related to their support for redistribution. We find that lower- to upper-middle-income precincts are each significantly more supportive of redistribution than upper-income precincts, with pronounced decreases in support associated with the increasing prevalence of high-income households subject to proposed tax increases. Finally, we observe the largest class differential in support for redistribution in more heavily Republican precincts.
Trade Interdependence in the Modern Global Economy
MICHAEL-DAVID MANGINI, STEPHEN CHAUDOIN
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Analyzing global trade interdependence requires an approach that incorporates fundamental features of the modern economy: intense trade in intermediates and the changing availability of alternative partners and substitute products. We use theoretical models of structural gravity to construct measures of dyadic dependence that directly incorporate these features. The measures describe (1) how much trade interruptions damage a country’s welfare and (2) how much additional trade it would take from their existing trade partners to compensate. We then show three important findings. First, the new measures differ from traditional measures based on aggregate trade statistics. Second, they show how, contrary to much common wisdom, the world has not marched inexorably toward greater interdependence. Third, we use China’s foreign assistance, as exemplified by the Belt and Road Initiative, to assess the consequences of one major government policy. Chinese assistance has increased partners’ dependence on China, without a reciprocal increase in Chinese dependence.

British Journal of Political Science

Youth Representation and Democratic Legitimacy
Aksel Sundström, Charles T. McClean, Daniel Stockemer
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How does the age composition of democratic institutions shape public evaluations of their legitimacy? While most institutions are dominated by older politicians, we argue that incorporating younger representatives can enhance perceptions of legitimacy. To test this claim, we conduct a survey experiment in the United States that varies the age composition of a bipartisan state legislative committee and its decisions. We find that including younger members increases perceptions of procedural fairness and institutional trust, and improves evaluations of decisions on lower-salience policies. These effects are stronger among young people and Democrats. Evidence on mechanisms suggests these legitimacy gains reflect beliefs that younger politicians are more attuned to young people’s experiences and concerns. Observational evidence from US state legislatures and a replication experiment in the United Kingdom yield consistent patterns, suggesting that these findings extend beyond the original experimental context. This suggests that expanding youth representation can meaningfully strengthen democratic legitimacy.

Electoral Studies

Accuracy goals and wishful thinking in electoral expectations
Hannah Rajski
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Coalition formation and the winner–loser gap inside parties
Leen Lingier, Veikko Isotalo, Åsa von Schoultz
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The conditional backfire: Radical right salience and centre-right electoral costs of EU accommodation
Wali Reheman
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Enabling the vote? Disabilities and mail voting in Florida
Daniel A. Smith
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Estimating effective electoral thresholds
Jack Bailey
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Vegetation quality and performance voting in Africa: Evidence from Zambia
Haakon GjerlĂžw
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European Journal of Political Research

Generic title: Not a research article
Populism, radicalism, and protest mobilization by parties in Europe – CORRIGENDUM
Leonhard Schmidt, Bruno Castanho Silva
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Learning democracy: The lasting effects of political education on democratic support
Anja Neundorf, Roman-Gabriel Olar, Johannes Gerschewski, Rosalind Shorrocks, Natasha Lindstaedt
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Do citizens need to grow up in a democracy to value it? We examine how school education – democratic or authoritarian – shapes long-term support for democracy. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment in the former German Democratic Republic, where rigid school entry rules and abrupt reforms after reunification created exogenous variation in exposure to socialist schooling, we show that an additional year of such education significantly reduced democratic support in adulthood. To test generalizability, we analyze harmonized survey data from 106 countries alongside new expert-coded measures of educational content and state effort. The results reveal that democratic attitudes are shaped not only by the negative imprint of authoritarian schooling but crucially by the positive imprint of democratic civic education, especially when democracies invest heavily in it. Our findings demonstrate that democracy must be learned to be valued, underscoring the central role of education in democratic consolidation and resilience.

Party Politics

Is sidestepping the judiciary seen as democratic? Evidence from Great Britain and Spain
Noam Titelman, Javier Sajuria, Lisa Zanotti
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Executives often bypass the courts without public backlash and, sometimes, with public support. This research note evaluates one strategy employed by politicians for securing public backing when bypassing the courts: a majoritarian framing. We evaluate this strategy through candidate survey experiments in Great Britain ( n = 957) and Spain ( n = 995) that contrast this framing with institutional checks and balances. On average, respondents rate the candidate pushing for court bypassing as less democratic. Nevertheless, a sizeable minority in both countries judges this option as more democratic. These results indicate that heterogeneous understandings of what counts as democratic can sustain public tolerance for executive bypass of the courts.
Campaigning on emotion: Party strategy and emotional appeals in the 2024 UK general election
Ivån Sånchez-Marañón, Jordi Rodríguez-Virgili, Miguel Gómez-Irimia
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Purpose: This article examines how political parties used emotional appeals in campaign advertising during the 2024 United Kingdom general election. Methods: Through content analysis of ads published by the Conservative Party, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and Reform UK across their main social media platforms, we identify party-level patterns in emotional strategy and the conditions shaping their use. Findings: The Conservative Party relied heavily on fear, consistent with its trailing incumbent status. Labour led on anger, directing appeals almost exclusively at the Conservative governing record, while also deploying enthusiasm around the promise of change. Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats made the most frequent use of enthusiasm. Across all parties, enthusiasm targeted the ingroup, while anger and fear targeted the outgroup. Conclusions: These findings align with theoretical expectations derived from incumbency status and poll position across a full field of competing parties in a single campaign, providing evidence that electoral periods fuel affective polarisation.
Agrarian revolt or populist disruption? The breakthrough of the farmer-citizen-movement (BBB) in the Netherlands
Simon Otjes, Thereza Langeler, LĂ©onie de Jonge
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Founded in 2019, the Dutch Farmer-Citizen-Movement ( BoerBurgerBeweging , BBB) has emerged as a significant force in Dutch politics. In a highly urbanized country, the rise of an explicitly rurally oriented political party is striking. We analyze the origins of the BBB, seeking to explain its electoral breakthrough. Using the frameworks of agrarianism and agrarian populism, we assess whether the BBB represents a revival of either tradition. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, we examine the party’s rhetoric and voter base in its founding years. Our findings indicate that the BBB adapted agrarian populist ideological tenets to fit the 21 st century context in which it operated. It initially mobilized around opposition to environmental policy and regional resentment, while valorizing rural life and expressing distrust of political elites. The BBB illustrates how populism can be reshaped through agrarian concerns, deepening the cleavage between the urban center and the rural periphery.

Political Analysis

Retrieval-Augmented Surveys
Yamil Velez, Alec Ewig
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We introduce retrieval-augmented surveys, a novel survey approach that links respondents’ open-ended priorities to concrete policy proposals in institutional databases, enabling personalized measures of how citizens’ concerns map onto formal agendas. Our pipeline elicits and clarifies each respondent’s top issue concern, summarizes items in a policy database and retrieves semantically relevant candidates (“nearest neighbors”) for inclusion in a respondent-tailored survey. We illustrate the approach with an application to political representation in Congress, evaluating performance across four metrics. First, large majorities of respondents judge the retrieved policy items as mostly or fully addressing their concerns. Second, a hand-coding audit corroborates the alignment of retrieved items with respondent issue stances. Third, support for retrieved items is stable over a short-term panel, with 82% of respondents at the top of the support scale remaining there three weeks later. Fourth, in a tailored conjoint, alignment on the nearest neighbor item has a larger estimated effect on candidate choice than benchmark policies. The framework is modular and portable to other settings, such as rulemaking, municipal agendas, and public budgets, enabling scholars to identify where representation succeeds or fails in the institutional pipeline.

Political Behavior

Correction: A Healthy Democracy? Evidence of Unequal Representation Across Health Status
Julianna Pacheco, Christopher Ojeda
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Distinction Without a Difference: American Public Opinion on Immigrants and Refugees
Alexander Tripp, Cindy D. Kam
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Do Americans hold refugees in higher regard than immigrants? If so, why? We theorize that refugees activate humanitarian concerns and perceptions of deservingness, while immigrants trigger threat perceptions and competition, leading to divergent mental associations toward each group. We investigate these questions with a nationally representative online survey experiment fielded in 2024 that contrasts Americans’ attitudes toward refugees and immigrants using both open- and close-ended questions. Open-ended mentions reveal that refugees trigger themes of involuntariness, conflict, and humanitarianism, while immigrants elicit themes of domestic politics, fairness, and threat. Close-ended responses indicate that Americans view immigrants as more competent and more agentic than refugees, and they associate refugees and immigrants with different reasons for coming to the United States. Despite these differences in beliefs, respondents report no significant differences on warmth stereotypes, group affect, or policy preferences. Thus, while Americans do possess some divergent beliefs about refugees and immigrants, ultimately these are distinctions without a difference when it comes to group affect and policy opinions.

Political Geography

A geopolitics of ensekirite: Feminist corporeal geographies of insecurity and intervention in contemporary Haiti
Jennifer Greenburg
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Political Psychology

The rhythm of persuasion: Media channels, psychological priming, and voting decisions through political music in Nigeria
Ukamaka C. M. Ozioko, Success Esomchi Obi, Anibueze U. Anselm, Agaba Joseph David, Chinasa Emelda Nnanyelugo, Charles Chukwudi Eze, Jude Chukwudi Agbo, Gever Verlumun Celestine
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The objective of this study was to determine the effect of exposure to political music on voting decisions among Nigerian voters. Data were collected from a multistage sample of 388 participants, and logistic and linear regression models were applied to evaluate the hypotheses. The findings revealed that an individual's overall exposure to political music significantly predicts their likelihood of voting, demonstrating a small positive effect size (Odds Ratio = 1.08). Rather than operating through indirect moderation pathways, exposure media and geographic location emerged as the strongest direct predictors of persuasive influence. Specifically, direct exposure via local radio ( ÎČ = .21) and shared audio files ( ÎČ = .12) significantly predicted a voter's influence score. Furthermore, rural voters reported being significantly more influenced by political music than their urban counterparts, with geographic location operating as the strongest overall direct baseline predictor ( ÎČ = −.48). The study concludes that the psychological effectiveness of political music lies not in generalized, blanket exposure, but in a targeted strategic focus that leverages specific media channels and subcultural demographic segments to maximize persuasive impact on voter behavior.
Feeling the body politic: Interoception as a mechanism of political stress resilience
Mariana Von Mohr, Manos Tsakiris
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Politics can substantially harm physical and mental health, especially in polarized contexts, making political polarization a major non‐medical cause of disease and suffering. We examined whether citizens can protect their health without undermining civic engagement. Across three studies with over 2000 participants during the 2022 U.S. midterms and 2024 presidential election, we show that interoceptive sensibility, that is, the ability to perceive and trust one's internal bodily signals, protects against politics' adverse health effects. Higher interoceptive sensibility consistently predicted lower emotional, physical, behavioral, and social health costs, controlling for political identity, demographics, and emotion regulation. During the charged 2024 election, it further predicted fewer negative emotions, more hope for the future, and less fear, particularly when their candidate lost. Interoceptive sensibility also correlated with political engagement and efficacy, suggesting it enhances rather than inhibits participation. Our findings highlight it as a promising trait for mitigating political stress without reducing civic involvement.
Partisan social cognition and biased experiences in a polarized world: The neural processing of identity‐based group membership
Adam Moore, Sujin Hong, Cyril R. Pernet, Alexa M. Morcom, Neil Roberts, Agamemnon Krasoulis, Laura Cram
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Pairing neuroimaging and behavioral testing, we offer new insights into affective polarization, hyper‐partisanship, and their effects. Our findings introduce a temporal dimension to existing theoretical frameworks concerning the impact of social identity on political perceptions. We demonstrate that group‐identity shapes in‐the‐moment neural processing of real‐world experiences in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) protocol and Cyberball game where participants experience varying levels of inclusion/exclusion from in/out‐group members. In other words, people don't simply rely upon group membership (e.g., partisanship, national identity) to post‐hoc rationalize an experience, but instead that group membership also actively biases neural processing of otherwise objectively identical experiences, shaping (and distorting) political perception, with significant behavioral effects.
Do “warm glow” feelings affect climate mitigation behaviors? A field experiment on consumer electric energy choices
Jennifer Jerit, Jason Barabas, Hwayong Shin, Molly Gahagen, Scott May
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Addressing the climate crisis is going to require behavioral change in many aspects of daily life. A growing literature suggests the promise of “warm glow” messaging that features the pleasure and satisfaction one experiences from acting sustainably. Yet previous research has relied almost exclusively on self‐reported behavioral intentions, leaving open whether such appeals meaningfully affect real‐world, costly choices. We partnered with a local organization to conduct a field experiment on energy choices in Hanover, New Hampshire. Using a randomized roll‐out design in early 2025, we systematically varied the timing of postcard mailers that contain a warm glow message encouraging customers to increase the renewable content of their energy option. Analyses of administrative data on consumer energy choices reveal that warm glow messages delivered in a field setting have a null effect on adoption of higher‐renewable power choices, with a small number of customers changing to the greener but more costly option. Our study provides novel behavioral evidence on the real‐world impact of intrinsic motivation appeals in the climate domain.
The critical role of political trust in the energy transition
Jordana W. Composto, SofĂ­a Silvosa, Anandita Sabherwal, Elke U. Weber
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Achieving net‐zero CO 2 emissions requires sustained collaboration between civil society and the private and public sectors across time and geographies, but low trust in and among these actors impedes coordinated action. This multidisciplinary review examines how different forms of trust, in particular political trust (i.e., trust between actors with differential power), shape the energy transition, addressing four core questions: How does trust impact energy project development and outcomes? How do the processes of building, maintaining, eroding, and repairing trust differ? What are the asymmetries in trust gain and loss? How does a project's history and stage determine which process is at play and whether trust repair is possible? A narrative literature review and analysis of fifteen case studies spanning diverse energy contexts identifies key trust dyads: government‐community, developer‐community, regulator‐developer. Mapping these trust dyads on project outcomes reveals when trust functions as either a barrier or a pathway to success. We complement our literature review and case analysis with primary data from stakeholder surveys and expert workshops that validate the real‐world relevance of trust research insights and identify the largest trust deficits and effective trust‐building strategies perceived by expert practitioners. Our findings across sources of evidence converge to show that political trust operates through distinct mechanisms across different actor relationships, with direct implications for project design, stakeholder engagement, and policy implementation. The review concludes by outlining future research directions and opportunities for cross‐disciplinary collaboration to address trust challenges in the energy transition.

Political Science Research and Methods

Government ideology and gender equality in public sector career progression
Lasse Aaskoven, Benjamin C.K. Egerod, Frederik K. KjĂžller
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Why are women underrepresented in civil service management across rich democracies? We argue that government ideology matters for this question, and that women bureaucrats’ careers stagnate under right-wing governments, since they do not suppress gender-inequality-reinforcing promotion patterns. We examine this using administrative occupation data on all Danish central government employees, observed quarterly from 1998 to 2019. The evidence is consistent with our argument: Under left-wing governments, men and women in the civil service progress similarly, while women progress more slowly than men under right-wing governments. The gender gap in career progression widens at the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, where political attention is greater, and this gap is not reduced by the presence of women ministers.
Partisan responsiveness in real time: causal evidence from Trump’s military attack on Iran
Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, Peter Luca Versteegen, Daniel Devine, Owen Winter
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Elite cues signal citizens how to interpret political events through a partisan lens. Do these effects occur in real time? We exploit President Trump’s unexpected announcement of US military strikes against Iran during a nationally representative survey to estimate the causal effect of elite cues on public opinion. Leveraging minute-level variation in exposure, we find that partisan divergence emerges almost immediately: support for military intervention increases among Republicans but declines among Democrats. These large effects remain robust across 28,672 model specifications and 57,344 partisan-specific treatment effects. Our quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that elite cues can polarize public opinion within minutes, even before media framing and partisan commentary have diffused, highlighting the speed of partisan opinion formation and its implications for democratic accountability.

The Journal of Politics

How does Coethnicity with Refugees Shape their Reception? Evidence from Afghan Refugees in Pakistan
Mashail Malik, Niloufer Siddiqui, Yang-Yang Zhou
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