I checked 18 political science journals on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 12 to May 18, I found 19 new paper(s) in 9 journal(s).

American Political Science Review

Attitudes Toward Electoral System Reform and Party System Change in the U.S.
QUINTON MAYNE, SHANE P. SINGH
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Electoral reform efforts in the United States are widespread, yet little is known about how Americans evaluate alternative electoral systems or their consequences. We address this gap using conjoint and vignette experiments to study how Americans assess electoral reforms based on their implications for the number of parties and the degree of ideological polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives. Focusing on democratic voice, governability, and responsiveness, our designs emphasize party-system outcomes rather than technical institutional features that may be difficult for citizens to understand. We find that Americans are strongly averse to reforms that generate pronounced legislative polarization, even when it might be expected to enhance democratic voice. Findings pertaining to multipartism are more mixed, with some evidence that respondents respond positively to moderate departures from the two-party system. Perceived gains in voice and responsiveness do not generally compensate for losses in governability, except under arrangements that avoid polarization.
The Politics of Privilege: Discrimination, Monopolized Social Rights, and Reform
ANDREW SABL
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This article analyzes three kinds of privilege—roughly, the monopoly or near-monopoly of a prized social good by a group—in terms of the political barriers facing attempts to reform them. Extending previous work, it distinguishes among discrimination privileges, which are zero-sum and relative, benefiting some groups at others’ expense; monopolized social right privileges, involving goods enjoyed only by some that can and should be extended to all; and differential treatment privileges, involving disagreement over whether a good currently monopolized by some should be extended to all or to none. The political barriers to reforming discrimination privilege involve group interest; those to reforming monopolized social rights include privilege, ignorance, cost, priorities, policy uncertainty, and the psychological wage. Differential treatment privilege is complicated. An exercise in applied political realism, this article treats normative categories as political inputs rather than philosophical conclusions and seeks to demonstrate the insights enabled by doing so.

British Journal of Political Science

Who Do Parties Speak To? Introducing the PSoGA: A New Comprehensive Database of Parties’ Social Group Appeals
Alona O. Dolinsky, Lena Maria Huber, Will Horne
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Which social groups do political parties appeal to? This is an important question, yet a lack of comparative data has constrained research. To address this gap, we introduce the Parties’ Social Group Appeals (PSoGA) Database, which includes two novel datasets covering 791 election manifestos from 139 parties across Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom from 1970 to 2025. This article outlines the methodology for constructing and validating the datasets, demonstrates compatibility with policy-focused resources like MARPOR, and highlights key aspects. This database provides researchers with unprecedented insight into representation dynamics across space and time by documenting the groups that parties speak about and appeal to.
Partisan (In)Tolerance and Affective Polarization
James Tilley, Teresa Bejan, Sara B. Hobolt
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Political tolerance of others’ civil liberties is an essential and everyday condition of democratic politics without which citizens cannot engage constructively with those of different views. In this paper, we combine insights from political theory and political behaviour to develop and test the concept of ‘partisan intolerance’. We conceptualize partisan intolerance as the gap between a person’s willingness to interfere with contentious activities by in-partisans versus the same activities by out-partisans. Using two pre-registered experiments, we find high levels of partisan intolerance in Britain. Moreover, while partisan intolerance is not associated with abstract measures of political tolerance, we find a strong association with affective partisan polarization. Our findings thus suggest that increasing affective polarization among partisans is accompanied by a high degree of intolerance towards their opponents’ basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.

Electoral Studies

Election outcomes and social trust in polarized times
Mark Williamson, Amber Hye-Yon Lee, Daniel Rubenson, Iva Srbinovska, David Sumantry, Jonah Davids, Annika Maulucci, Kristina Kisin
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Administrative unit proliferation in parliamentary systems: Evidence from turkish elections, 1960-2018
Murat Abus, Sabri Ciftci
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European Journal of Political Research

The paradox of representation: How identity fragmentation complicates voter-party congruence
Jozef Michal Mintal, Felix Butzlaff, Bence Hamrak, RĂłbert Vancel, Kamila BorsekovĂĄ
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How should democratic representation be measured in an era of increasingly individualized and volatile political identities, and fragile collective attachments? Traditionally, research on representation has sought a single best dimension measure of voter-party congruence and representative fit; yet, in postmodern societies marked by fluid and fragmented identities, this approach, we argue, oversimplifies voter choice and misrepresents the quality of democratic representation. To address these limitations, we draw on social theory diagnoses that illuminate how contemporary processes of individualization, alienation, and fragmentation shape political identity formation and democratic representation. We develop a novel framework of multi-point congruence to assess voter-party alignment across the full voter-party matrix along three dimensions: aggregate issue agreement, party-defined salience, and voter-defined salience. Using a unique voting advice application dataset from Slovakia’s early elections in 2023 ( N = 134,699), an illustrative case for postmodern electoral dynamics, we show that personalized representation, centered on voter-defined priorities, maximizes policy alignment but fosters fragmentation, as voters often find multiple parties equally proximate. By contrast, party-centered representation sharpens partisan distinctiveness but increases ideological distance from voters. These competing logics of representation expose a core democratic trade-off: tailoring representation to individual preferences enhances policy fit but erodes partisan clarity, potentially leading to higher voter volatility and weakening voter-party linkages at the system level. Overall, our framework offers a more nuanced and generalizable assessment of voter-party alignment and representative quality in fragmented party systems of the contemporary, capturing not just how alignment occurs, but the democratic tensions it entails.
Political socialisation before and after migration: How origin-country political culture shapes immigrant voting in Europe
Zeynep Mentesoglu Tardivo, Simona Guglielmi
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Electoral participation among immigrants is frequently examined through the lens of residence country integration policies and institutional access. However, immigrants arrive with embedded values and political attitudes developed through early political socialisation in their country of origin, which may influence their engagement with democratic institutions long after migration. Grounded in theories of political (re)socialisation – exposure, resilience, and transferability – and drawing on the ‘impressionable years’ argument in resilience theory, we hypothesise that pre-migration political culture influences electoral participation, but its influence varies across generations. Specifically, we examine how pre-migration exposure to different political regimes affects electoral behaviour and how the timing of arrival (before or after age 13) and the length of residence moderate these effects. To test the hypotheses, the analysis draws on European Social Survey (ESS) data (Rounds 5–11), covering 23 EU member states. We focus on citizens of foreign origin, including 14,216 first-generation, 3,620 1.5-generation (arriving before age 13), and 5,359 second-generation immigrants. Using additional measures from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), we employ logistic regression models that integrate individual-level predictors with origin-country political culture, derived from migrants’ or their parents’ countries of birth. Our findings speak to all three strands of the political resocialisation framework. Early arrival and longer residence are associated with higher electoral participation, while pre-migration political socialisation continues to shape political behaviour after migration. Most notably, we find that first-generation immigrants socialised under authoritarian regimes exhibit higher electoral participation than their peers from democratic origins, suggesting the presence of a reactive mobilisation mechanism.
When do politicians choose to upset the apple cart? The fairness-loyalty trade-off in whistleblowing
Stephen Dawson
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Whistleblowing is increasingly viewed as a valuable mechanism to root out misconduct and corruption, yet we know very little about the conditions under which it is used in political parties. Building upon literature from social psychology, this study argues that the decision to blow the whistle on party colleagues is the outcome of a trade-off between two basic moral values that are particularly acute in the case of politicians: fairness and loyalty. Using a novel pre-registered survey experiment with over 1,000 Swedish politicians, this paper establishes that priming values of fairness can increase a politician’s willingness to blow the whistle against fellow party members. However, priming values of loyalty has no effect on whistleblowing intentions relative to control conditions. Results also suggest that severe misconduct is more likely to be reported only when it was committed by an individual rather than the party collectively, and that the party’s inaction is the biggest cause of external whistleblowing. The results of this study have significant implications for our understanding of the impact of organisational cultures and accountability on the behaviour of politicians.

Political Analysis

Improving Small-Area Estimates of Public Opinion by Calibrating to Known Population Quantities
William Marble, Joshua D. Clinton
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Multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) is widely used to estimate opinion in small subgroups and to adjust unrepresentative surveys. Yet, even flexible MRP models contain errors generated by non-response and model misspecification. We propose a principled, data-driven method to leverage observable errors on auxiliary quantities with known marginal distributions—for example, election outcomes—to improve estimates of policy attitudes. Our method leverages the correlation between auxiliary variables and outcomes of interest to calibrate MRP estimates to these known marginal distributions. We illustrate our approach using a pre-election poll measuring support for an abortion referendum. We find that the method reduces county-level error by nearly two-thirds relative to traditional MRP. We also show how our calibration approach can be used to generate estimates for smaller nested geographies, such as precincts, even in the absence of poststratification data at this level. Our approach provides a framework for fully incorporating known population data to improve estimates of public opinion in small subgroups, providing scholars another tool to study representation.

Political Behavior

Correction: Opinion Change in Nonpartisan Contexts: The Case of Residential Zoning Reform
Stephanie Ternullo
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Political Pundits and the Maintenance of Ideological Coalitions
Allison Wan, Jon Green
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Political Geography

“We'll never go”: Inuit youth refusals as climate politics
Jen Bagelman, Carmen (Qagun) Kuptana, Darryl Tedjuk, Eriel Lugt, Maéva Gauthier, MichÚle Tomasino, Ingrid Medby, Rachel Pain
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The military green transition: Decarbonisation as warfighting opportunity
Nico Edwards
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Tubular governance: Surveillance, control, and migrant lives in China
Qinyu Feng
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Political Psychology

Similar moral values, different agendas: U.S. politicians' use of moral language is issue‐specific
ÉloĂŻse CĂŽtĂ©, Sze‐Yuh Nina Wang, Yoel Inbar
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We used Structured Topic Models (STM) combined with a word embedding model to examine U.S. politicians' use of moral language and identify the issues Democrats and Republicans moralize most on X (formerly Twitter). Analyzing 1,578,057 posts from U.S. members of Congress (2019–2023), we found that (1) Democrats and Republicans did not differ meaningfully in what kinds of moral language they used but that (2) they used moral language for different issues. For example, Republicans used language reflecting harm and care to criticize Democratic economic policies, whereas Democrats used it to criticize Trump's immigration policies. These findings suggest that politicians on the right and left rhetorically invoke similar moral values but do so to highlight different issues.
The Circumplex of Personality Metatraits and political behavior: Predicting turnout and major party choice across six Polish elections
Norbert Maliszewski, Piotr P. Brud, Ɓukasz Wojciechowski, Jan Cieciuch
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This article applies the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits (CPM) to predict electoral participation and party choice. Across three studies conducted on representative samples of Poles (total N = 2936), respondents reported their voting behavior in six elections held between 2011 and 2025 (covering parliamentary, presidential, and European contests). The results demonstrate that the CPM offers a comprehensive framework that not only outperforms the Big Five in predictive validity but also reveals the systemic psychological underpinnings of political behavior. Voter turnout was consistently driven by sectors responsible for social regulation and stability—Alpha‐Plus, Gamma‐Plus, and Delta‐Plus—whereas abstention was rooted in psychological withdrawal, distrust, and disharmony (Gamma‐Minus, Alpha‐Minus). Support for the liberal Civic Coalition (KO) reflected a desire for intellectual novelty and personal autonomy (Beta‐Plus, Delta‐Minus) anchored in social cooperation (Gamma‐Plus). Conversely, the Law and Justice party (PiS) strongly aligned with the “grievance politics” hypothesis, drawing its core support from sectors defined by ressentiment and hostility (Gamma‐Minus, Alpha‐Minus) rather than traditional conservatism (Delta‐Plus). However, the analysis also revealed that PiS successfully mobilized the stability‐oriented Alpha‐Plus sector, thereby forming a heterogeneous coalition of rebellious disruptors (Alpha‐Minus) and stability‐seeking rationalists (Alpha‐Plus). These patterns were largely consistent across the election cycles.

The Journal of Politics

Gender Quota Laws and Women in Cabinets
Tiffany Barnes, Giulia Venturini, Ana Catalano Weeks
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Cadre networks and bureaucratic careers in autocracies
Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Jan H. Pierskalla
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