I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, August 12, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period August 05 to August 11, I found 30 new paper(s) in 11 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Durable majority gerrymanders: Where partisan gerrymandering can displace democracy
Maxwell Palmer, Benjamin Schneer
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We develop the concept of, and estimation tools for, durable majority gerrymanders : electoral district maps drawn to reduce an opposing political party's probability of winning a majority in a legislative chamber. Directly interpretable, forward‐looking, and motivated by the democratic principle that a party in power should have some chance of losing it, this measure provides new insights into the role of redistricting in state legislative elections. We show that, when map drawers are unconstrained, the ability to create durable majorities is so widespread that at least one party in every state can draw a map where a majority of legislative districts withstand almost any likely future electoral swing. Enacted maps are less durable due to a combination of underlying geography, voter partisanship, and state‐level guidelines. This paper provides the theoretical framework and empirical tools to understand which gerrymandered maps enable state‐level majorities to emerge and to endure.
Endogenous coalition formation in policy debates
Philip Leifeld, Laurence Brandenberger
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Political actors form coalitions around their joint normative beliefs in order to influence the policy process on contentious issues such as climate change or population aging. Policy process theory maintains that learning within and across coalitions is a central predictor of policy change but has yet to explain how policy learning works. This article explains the formation and maintenance of coalitions by focusing on the ways actors adopt policy beliefs from other actors in policy debates. A policy debate is a complex social system in which temporal network dependence guides how actors contribute ideological statements. Belief adoption matters in three complementary ways: bonding , which exploits cues within coalitions; bridging , which explores new beliefs outside one's perimeter; and repulsion , which reinforces polarization between coalitions and cements their belief systems. We formalize this theory of endogenous coalition formation in policy debates and test it on a micro‐level empirical data set.

American Political Science Review

Generic title: Not a research article
Instrumentally Inclusive: The Political Psychology of Homonationalism – CORRIGENDUM
STUART J. TURNBULL-DUGARTE, ALBERTO LÓPEZ ORTEGA
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Electoral Studies

How snap election calls shape vote intention uncertainty
Klara MĂŒller, Alejandro FernĂĄndez-RoldĂĄn
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Getting to know her: Information and gender bias in preferential voting systems
Justin F. Reeves, Daniel M. Smith
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Learning without improving: Within-voter changes in political knowledge and vote choice proximity
Felix BĂ€ckstedt, Elias Markstedt, Henrik Oscarsson
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European Journal of Political Research

Online gendered violence and visibility in electoral autocracies: Evidence from multi-level elections in TĂŒrkiye
Jungmin Han, MĂŒge Finkel, Steven Finkel, Firat DuruƟan, Erdem YörĂŒk
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Online platforms have become indispensable tools for political candidates to gain visibility, particularly for female candidates in electoral autocracies who often lack access to traditional networks, party hierarchies, and media platforms. We argue that online visibility, while a resource for female candidates, disproportionately exposes them to online violence that functions as a mechanism of political control, reinforcing patriarchal exclusion from the political sphere. Our analysis draws on more than three million tweets directed at 1,834 candidates across the 2023 parliamentary and 2024 local election campaigns in TĂŒrkiye, providing a rare opportunity to observe how these dynamics unfold at both the national and subnational levels. We find that while online visibility increases abuse for all candidates, the effect is markedly stronger for female candidates, who are disproportionately targeted across diverse forms of violence, including profanity, demeaning and ridiculing language, physical threats, and ethnic and religious hate speech. Moreover, our results suggest that in local elections, where candidates rely more heavily on personalized campaigns, increases in visibility are more strongly associated with female candidates’ exposure to online violence.
Losing elections, losing trust? A quasi-experimental investigation of the winner-loser gap on political trust
Nicholas Charron, Jana Schwenk
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Voters’ experiences of winning or losing elections significantly influence their attitudes, particularly satisfaction with democracy, while other outcomes such as trust are less studied. Additionally, studies often rely on observational data, limiting causal conclusions about effects. We make three key contributions to this literature. First, we use a quasi-experimental design based on the implementation of the European Quality of Government Index Survey during elections across several European countries and regions to demonstrate causal effects of elections on trust. Second, we introduce a novel theoretical argument that voters of populist parties are especially sensitive to electoral outcomes. Third, we explore three ways to define ‘winners’ and ‘losers’: government/opposition status, vote margin changes, and results relative to recent polling. Our findings show that elections generally boost trust, with a pronounced winner-loser gap driven by winners, particularly when measured as entering government. Additionally, populist party voters exhibit greater sensitivity to these effects.
Preferences or principles? The ‘noncompliance penalty’ and the limits of public support for the rule of law
Taylor Kinsley Chewning, Amanda Driscoll, MartĂ­n Gandur, Jay N. Krehbiel, Michael J. Nelson
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When will individuals support government noncompliance with the written law? A bedrock principle of the rule of law is that politicians who fail to comply with written law will face political consequences. Drawing on survey experiments fielded in two consolidated democracies, we introduce the noncompliance penalty , the loss of public support for a government action that contravenes the law. The results show that citizens do penalize governmental noncompliance with the law. However, we find that this penalty decreases if government noncompliance advances the policy interests of favored protest groups, and mixed evidence that this penalty increases with professed support for the rule of law. Perhaps surprisingly, our results suggest that citizens with the strongest commitment to the rule of law can become the most accepting of noncompliance if it advances their policy goals. These findings have important implications for understanding whether the public will punish politicians who disregard the formal letter of the law.
The winner–loser gap in democratic attitudes among politicians: Individual and collective outcomes
Erick Stivens Padilla-Galviz, Álvaro Canalejo-Molero
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Rooted in concerns about losers’ consent to electoral outcomes, a vast literature documents a winner–loser gap in democratic attitudes among voters, with winners displaying systematically more positive attitudes than losers across a range of indicators. Surprisingly, we know much less about whether this gap extends to politicians. This paper addresses this question both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we distinguish between politicians’ reactions to electoral outcomes at the individual level – whether candidates secure a seat in parliament – and the party level – whether their party enters government, and theorise about their interaction. Empirically, we present comprehensive observational evidence from 27 elections showing that losers systematically report lower satisfaction with democracy, weaker support for representative institutions, and lower perceptions of citizens’ trust. The gap is present at both levels, but the individual-level gap is conditioned by party outcomes: it is most pronounced within winning parties and disappears within losing parties. A complementary analysis leveraging close races and administrative data from Iceland provides plausibility that these associations are, at least in part, causal. Taken together, the findings reveal that democratic attitudes among rank-and-file politicians are, like those of voters, highly malleable and responsive to electoral outcomes. While politicians maintain overall positive attitudes towards democracy, this malleability raises questions about when and how such contingency might translate into anti-democratic behaviour.

Party Politics

Review of stolen representation: Black disfranchisement and state legislative politics in the American South OlsonMichael P. Stolen Representation: Black Disfranchisement and State Legislative Politics in the American South. Cambridge University Press, 2026. xviii + 266
Alex Garlick
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Party membership motivations and political activism in a polarized new democracy: Evidence from South Korea
Gi-Woo Roh, Jungsub Shin
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This study investigates party membership motivations in South Korea, a highly polarized new democracy, and how they distinctively shape intra-party and campaign participation. Using survey data from 1,410 Democratic and People Power Party members, we evaluate the General Incentives Model alongside negative partisan motivation. Results show that while altruism is the primary reason for joining, higher affective polarization significantly intensifies negative partisan motivation, making it a key membership driver, particularly among conservatives. Crucially, engagement mechanisms are not monolithic: selective benefits predict both forms of participation, whereas collective policy motives specifically foster campaigning. Conversely, social norms motivation deters visible campaigning due to polarization-induced cross-pressures. Furthermore, negative partisan motivation reduces routine intra-party engagement without increasing campaign involvement. Ultimately, membership surges driven by out-group hostility produce “detached members,” indicating that expanding party rolls in polarized contexts does not automatically deepen democratic participation or organizational capacity.
Ethno-regionalist parties beyond Western Europe: Kurdish parties in Turkey
ƞenol ArslantaƟ, DĂŒzgĂŒn ArslantaƟ
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While there is an extensive literature on ethno-regionalist parties (ERPs) in Western Europe, Kurdish ERPs in Turkey remain undertheorized. Focusing on party ideology, organizational structure, and electoral strategy, this article advances three findings. First, ideologically, Kurdish ERPs consistently articulate a left-leaning program centered on labor and democratization, while increasingly integrating post-materialist tenets such as feminism and environmentalism. Second, organizationally, they function as movement parties with a highly resilient structure. Third, strategically, they expand beyond their ethnic stronghold through broad leftist alliances and a “Turkification” ( TĂŒrkiyelileƟme ) process, becoming pivotal national actors. These findings underscore the need to account for the interaction between ethno-regional mobilization, political-institutional constraints, and party-movement linkages in understanding ERPs in the European periphery.
Ambition and access: Linking regional opportunity structures and career-ambitious youth party members
Clint Claessen, Stefanie Bailer, Tamaki Ohmura
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Youth party members are primarily driven by intrinsic moral and social motives,  yet ambitions for political and professional careers vary considerably across individuals. Building on findings linking parties' national opportunity structures to having an increase in career-ambitious youth wing members, this research note examines opportunity structures at the regional level. Using a self-collected survey of youth party members in Germany (2017–2018, n = 1216), we show that career-ambitious members are particularly frequent in youth parties that are organizationally strong with numerous local and (sub)regional branches where ambitious youth wing members can make a career. Therefore, this research note provides a key insight into the motivations of young people, and especially those pursuing a political career, for joining youth parties and speaks to a broader literature concerned with political ambition, party organization, and careers.

Political Analysis

Let Them Eat Pie: Addressing Sample Selection in Multiparty Elections
Ali Kagalwala, Thiago M. Q. Moreira, Guy D. Whitten, Yongzhi Xu
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Elections are central to the study of politics. When studying parties’ vote shares across districts, scholars are encouraged to use compositional-outcome models in order to test their theories about what factors shape the dynamics of electoral support. Existing compositional modeling approaches incorrectly deal with scenarios in which not all parties compete in every electoral district. Because unobserved factors that affect a party’s decisions to contest a district are likely correlated with its performance in districts where the party fielded candidates, failing to account for partial contestation is likely to result in sample selection bias. Addressing sample selection in a compositional setting is challenging because the outcomes are in log-ratio form, and thus the errors often deviate from normality. To deal with these issues, we introduce a novel maximum likelihood approach which accounts for this type of sample selection and demonstrate through simulations that our method outperforms commonly used solutions, including the conventional Heckman correction. We illustrate the utility of our approach by analyzing the 2017 and 2019 U.K. parliamentary elections in English constituencies.

Political Behavior

Elite Interactions and Social Bonds: How Partisan Cooperation Shapes Perceptions of Cross-Party Friendships
Lie Philip Santoso
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Political Geography

From Everywhere to Somewhere: understanding the spatial limits of AI's political power
Yu-Shan Tseng
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Urban refugee children's integration through a spatial lens: Everyday emotional geographies in two cities
Manya Oriel Kagan
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The authoritarian politics of energy infrastructures: Repertoires of contestation, economic relations, and state practices through a multi-scalar perspective
Alke Jenss, Alessandra Bonci
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At the limits of property: Tent encampments and political life
Allison R. Evans
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Pandemic (Im)mobilities: How humanitarian workers navigated evacuation and COVID-19
Amy Gilmore
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Political Psychology

Consistency, not waste aversion, explains apparent sunk‐cost effects in politics
Marco Mattei, John Michael
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Do sunk costs shape how voters judge political leaders, or do reputational signals carried by current choices dominate? Across three preregistered experiments (total N = 1462) using vignettes about a national rail project, we orthogonally manipulated sunk costs (high vs. absent), leaders' decisions (continue vs. abandon), campaign commitments (pro, anti, none), and reminders of prior voting behavior. In Experiment 1 ( N = 346), Bayesian ANOVA showed that evaluations (vote likelihood, perceived honesty, competence) were reliably higher when leaders continued rather than abandoned a project, with no main effect of sunk costs and no interaction. Experiment 2 ( N = 719) replicated the null sunk‐cost effect and further found no effect of campaign commitments once the leader's current decision was known. Experiment 3 ( N = 397) used a structural equation model to test mediation: perceived commitment—but not perceived sunk costs—robustly predicted evaluations, and abandonment sharply reduced perceived commitment; prior‐vote cues were weak and did not mediate effects. Together, the studies indicate that people take continuation to signal commitment and view it positively, whereas abandonment stopping signals a breach of commitment and is penalized. Apparent sunk‐cost sensitivity in politics may often reflect a premium on consistency rather than waste aversion. We discuss implications for designing “face‐saving” off‐ramps and reframing evidence‐based reversals as fidelity to higher order commitments.
Social dominance orientation
Felicia Pratto
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Social dominance orientation (SDO) refers to how much a person generally opposes group‐based equality and supports group‐based dominance. SDO is measured as an individual difference and pertains very broadly to people's socio‐political attitudes and perceptions, to endorsement or rejection of political parties and candidates, and to behaviors that enforce organizational hierarchies. This paper reviews empirical evidence published from 2010 to 2024 concerning social dominance orientation, first presenting evidence of its stability over time and measurement integrity, next showing that, across numerous cultures and languages and ways of measuring group prejudice and stereotypes, SDO correlates with prejudice favoring people in dominant groups rather than people in subordinate groups, and that this effect is stronger within dominant groups than subordinate groups. Similarly, we review evidence that people higher on SDO are more anti‐social and tend to take hierarchy‐enhancing rather than hierarchy‐attenuating roles. We then delve into the psychology of SDO and summarize the evidence for the relation of SDO and closed cognitive styles, low scores on humility‐honesty, and low concern for other people rather than the self. Using existing adult and child development studies, we outline two processes by which higher SDO may develop: one based on learning to categorize and to rank categories as superior/inferior, and one based on parents' emphasis on obtaining high status to gain approval. We conclude by outlining the next questions that might be pursued.

Political Science Research and Methods

Measuring racial attitudes pre-treatment in survey experiments
Leah Christiani, Nathan Kelly, Jana Morgan
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Experimental researchers often need to assess the moderating effect of racial attitudes. However, it is unclear whether the racial attitude battery deployed may bias treatment effects. Less subtle batteries could bias treatment effects toward zero if measuring racial attitudes primes these attitudes for subjects assigned to all conditions, including the control condition. We assess whether bias is introduced across four conditions, pre-treatment: not measuring racial attitudes, using stereotype endorsement measures, using the American National Election Study racial resentment battery, or using the simplified Cooperative Election Study racial resentment battery. We do not uncover widespread instances of treatment bias. However, we do identify bias when the stereotype endorsement measures are used pre-treatment. We conclude with recommendations for researchers.
Debriefings in misinformation research should include fact-checks to correct misperceptions and increase perceived learning
Emma Hoes, Sacha Altay
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Debriefings are a cornerstone of ethical research, especially when deception is used. In misinformation experiments, debriefings both disclose the deception and warn participants about misinformation. Unlike other misinformation interventions, they reveal that researchers deliberately introduced the falsehoods, raising concerns about trust and skepticism. In a preregistered U.S. experiment (N = 896), we compare no debriefing, a general debriefing, and a specific debriefing with fact-checks and source links. Only the specific debriefing reduced belief in false claims participants saw, not in novel ones. The general debriefing slightly reduced belief in true news, suggesting warnings may heighten skepticism. Both improved attitudes toward the study and perceived transparency, supporting the use of specific debriefings as an ethical and effective practice in misinformation research.
How patronage communicates: information campaigns and government responsiveness in China
Haemin Jee, Kaiping Chen
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How do social relationships among government officials shape information flows within bureaucratic hierarchies? Classic principal–agent theories emphasize information asymmetries as a source of inefficiency, yet we know far less about the actual nature of communication within bureaucracies. We argue that patron–client ties embedded within formal hierarchies play a central role in structuring internal information flows. Lower-level officials with patronage ties to higher-level leaders have incentives to conduct informal information campaigns that signal diligence and competence as a way to compete for political favors. Using newly assembled data from China—including a rare corpus of internal emails between city-level patrons and county-level clients, as well as original datasets on county governments’ public responses to citizen complaints—we find that client counties communicate more frequently with higher-level officials, more often highlight their diligence in addressing complaints, and more actively defend themselves against accusations. However, client and non-client counties perform similarly in how they respond publicly to citizen complaints. These findings reveal how patronage relations can increase upward information flows without impacting public-facing performance. More broadly, these results suggest that communication in nondemocratic settings may serve to strengthen informal political ties.
Right-wing terrorism and far-right support: evidence from anti-Roma attacks in Hungary
Gabor Simonovits, Attila Gaspar, Bekes Gabor, Marton Vegh
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How do ethnically motivated terrorist attacks shape electoral support for the far right? We study a unique case: a coordinated series of anti-Roma murders in Hungary in 2008–2009, the most severe episode of anti-minority violence in the country since World War II. Combining difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods, we compare attacked settlements to multiple counterfactuals, including planned-but-unrealized targets. We find that Jobbik, Hungary’s radical right party, gained 11–14 percentage points more support in attacked villages than in comparable controls in the 2010 election—an increase 53–70% larger than baseline trends. The effect persisted for several years and spilled over to nearby settlements. In contrast to some research from Western Europe suggesting that right-wing terrorism can reduce far-right appeal, our findings highlight how deep-seated prejudice can reverse this pattern. The results underscore the importance of antecedent inter-group relations in conditioning political reactions to ethnic violence.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Reproductive Rights, Reframed: Federalism and Vote Choice in the 2024 Election
Spencer Goidel, Joseph A. Aistrup, John C. Morris, Martin K. Mayer, R. Bruce Anderson, Robert C. Kenter
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The overturning of Roe v. Wade sent shockwaves through the American political system. Running on women’s reproductive health care rights, Democrats vastly outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections. The 2024 US presidential election provided a test of whether broad public support for reproductive health care access would continue to translate into electoral gains for Democrats. Using a novel set of survey questions, this article examines attitudes toward abortion and the abortion pill (i.e., mifepristone) as well as preferences over whether policy should be decided federally or by individual states (i.e., locus of authority). Our findings provide partial support for the expectation that locus-of-authority preferences shape vote choice. Whereas support for a constitutional protection for abortion remained strongly associated with voting against Trump regardless of locus-of-authority preferences, the pattern for mifepristone access more closely matched our expectations. Among voters who supported mifepristone access, those who were comfortable leaving the issue to the states were significantly more likely to support Donald Trump. His emphasis on state control may have functioned as strategic ambiguity, especially on a less-polarized reproductive health issue such as mifepristone access.
Teaching Election Inversions in the Electoral College: Two Simple Models
Ruoxi Li, Rebecca Simpson
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The Electoral College is an important concept in many undergraduate American politics courses. Although students often understand the basics of the “House-seats-plus-two” rule and the “winner-take-all” system, many struggle to understand election inversions, in which the winner of the popular vote loses the Electoral College vote and therefore loses the presidency. This article presents two models using only foundational arithmetic to explain election inversions, including an example illustrating how a Republican candidate could also win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College vote. A survey of student-learning experiences showed positive results: students found the models accessible and helpful, and they reported greater confidence in the integrity of US presidential elections and in American democracy after working with the materials. These models can be incorporated into a range of American politics courses to help even first-year undergraduate students make sense of the US presidential election system.
Democracy for Whom? Herrenvolk Democracy and the American Founding
Jessala A. Grijalva
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As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence amid democratic erosion, this article asks why 250 years of democratic development have not produced a multiracial democracy. It argues that the United States is a herrenvolk democracy—a regime in which democracy coexists with racialized limits on political membership and governing power. By examining colonial law, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Naturalization Act of 1790, I show how the founding joined popular sovereignty to racial exclusion in ways that continue to shape struggles over belonging, representation, and coercive power. The legacy of 1776 includes both the Declaration’s democratic promise and a durable model for how democracy can coexist with exclusion.
Contemplating Conquest: Public Opinion on the Forcible Seizure of Territory
Amnon Cavari, Asif Efrat, Omer Yair
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The norm against conquest—a central tenet of the international order—is eroding. This study is among the first to examine public support for this norm, using a real-world case: Israel’s seizure of Syrian territory following the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024. Our survey experiment in Israel reveals that citizens are sensitive to the prohibition on conquest. They demonstrate greater support for an occupation that involves only military control of the forcibly seized territory and weaker support for civilian settlement in or annexation of the foreign territory: policies that amount to conquest. Our finding—a stronger preference for legally acceptable occupation over illegal settlement or annexation—sends a positive signal for the constraining power of norms.