I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, August 26, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period August 19 to August 25, I found 26 new paper(s) in 8 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

A theory of political divergence and gradual institutional change
Clair Yang
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Why do some societies succeed in breaking away from historical traditions while others remain trapped? This paper proposes a formal theory to investigate the interaction between short‐run and long‐run political dynamics, highlighting a co‐evolution of political institutions and social structures. A society consists of various social groups, such as the rulers, the elites, and the commoners. Short‐run strategic considerations give rise to different coalitions among these groups, which determine not only political regimes but also redistribution policies. In the long run, these policies shape the accumulation of wealth and power, where small initial differences can lead to divergent paths of development. Finally, the paper examines three historical case studies on medieval Europe, imperial China, and the medieval Muslim world to illustrate potential pathways of long‐run political development.
Captured participatory institutions: Theory and evidence from Venezuela's Consejos Comunales
Jared Abbott, Jose Morales‐Arilla
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Can participatory institutions (PIs) facilitate development when captured by the government? We propose an original theoretical framework to investigate how changing incumbent priorities can shape the developmental and political effects of captured PIs. While patrons concerned with survival can force PIs to specialize in political activities, those pursuing regime consolidation may incentivize PIs to multitask, delivering developmental gains and political rewards. We deploy our framework to study Venezuela's Communal Councils. Leveraging difference‐in‐differences analyses, an original survey of Council participants, and 51 interviews with government officials and grassroots Communal Council members, we find that Councils yielded both economic and political returns during an early period marked by political stability and regime consolidation. However, as Venezuela's economic collapse pushed the government into an authoritarian survival mode, Councils became politically specialized. While showing that captured PIs can foster development under certain circumstances, our findings cast doubt on PIs’ development‐enhancing potential under autocracy.

Electoral Studies

Generic title: Not a research article
Corrigendum to “Learning without improving: Within-voter changes in political knowledge and vote choice proximity” [Elect. Stud., October 2026 103 / 103119]
Felix BĂ€ckstedt, Elias Markstedt, Henrik Oscarsson
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When marriage ends: Divorce and the erosion of conservative political alignment
Seungwoo Han
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Interpersonal political discussion and affective polarization: Comparative evidence from 41 elections and five panel studies
Mariano Torcal, Paul A. Beck
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Voter reactions to party policy repositioning: The role of inclusive intra-party decision-making
Sofia Marini, Leen Lingier, Jasmien Luypaert, Markus Wagner
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The Korean national assembly elections dataset, 1948–2024: Complete candidate-level records
B.K. Song, In Hyee Hwang, Bomi Lee
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Party Politics

When opposition leaders speak: personalisation and question time in Australia
Daniel Casey, Thiago N. Silva, Pandanus Petter
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Question Time is a highly visible and adversarial parliamentary arena central to executive accountability, yet increasing personalisation may redirect scrutiny from collective party actors to individual leaders. This article analyses personalisation in Australian Question Time using more than 21,500 opposition questions asked between 1981 and 2025. We examine two dimensions of centralised personalisation: who asks opposition questions and whom those questions target, theorising variation through party structure (single-party vs coalition opposition) and institutional reforms to leadership selection rules. The findings challenge claims of a uniform rise in elite behavioural personalisation. While opposition questioning has become increasingly Prime Minister-centred over time, who asks questions follows a distinct pattern. Leader dominance varies across parties and institutional periods, rising in single-party oppositions but remaining lower and declining in coalitions, and falling further after leadership reforms. These results show that parliamentary personalisation is multi-dimensional and contingent on party organisation and institutional rules.
Book review: Everyday democracy: Liberals, conservatives & their routine political lives Everyday Democracy: Liberals, Conservatives & Their Routine Political Lives by BerryJeffrey M.GlaserJames M.SchildkrautDeborah J.. 2025. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rafael Jacob
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Book review: Local campaign behaviour in Canadian elections: The contours of centralization Robbins-KanterJacob, Local Campaign Behaviour in Canadian Elections: The Contours of Centralization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025. $Cdn 85.00 (hbk); $Cdn 32.95 (pbk), x + 201pp. ISBN 978-1-4875-6476-6; 978-1-4875-6477-3.
R. Kenneth Carty
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AI and the party: The three faces of party organization and artificial intelligence
ƞebnem Yardımcı-Geyikçi, Patricia Correa, Giulia Sandri, Philipp Darius, Jasmin Fitzpatrick, Anne Goldmann, Fabio Lupato, Erdem YörĂŒk, Kristina Weissenbach
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This Research Note explores the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and party politics by applying Katz and Mair’s “three faces” framework to analyze the role of AI in reshaping party organization. While AI is not yet uniformly transforming parties, its growing use in campaigning, policymaking, membership engagement, and internal management introduces new dynamics of centralisation, personalisation, and automation. The note highlights both the opportunities AI offers for efficiency and responsiveness, and the risks it poses to transparency, accountability, and democratic representation. It argues that the incorporation of AI into party life is uneven, contested, and mediated by broader political and institutional configurations, and require closer empirical and conceptual scrutiny. In doing so, the paper outlines a new research agenda for understanding how technological change intersects with party transformation in contemporary democracies.
Public support for cordons sanitaires against the radical left and radical right
Alexander Davenport, Jþrgen Eikvar Axelsen, Aleơ Kudrnáč
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Though radical parties have often been excluded from government by mainstream elites (the ‘cordon sanitaire’), little is known about how voters evaluate such practices. Using data from the Czech Republic, where radical left and radical right parties have both been excluded, we examine voters’ support for the cordon sanitaire, and whether they differentiate between parties in this regard. We find considerable popular support for the cordon sanitaire, with less than a quarter of respondents rejecting this idea outright. Notably, left-wing voters are more likely to oppose cordons sanitaires against both the radical left and right, while right-wing voters are highly supportive of excluding both parties from government, with limited support among the electorate for excluding only one side of the ideological spectrum. The results indicate that where the cordon sanitaire has been established at the elite level, it may garner substantial popular support for excluding a range of radical parties.

Political Behavior

Correction: Irregularities in Perez Brower (2024), “Reframing Gendered Issues: Intersectional Identity Frames and Policy Agendas”
Christopher Adolph, Caitlin Ainsley, Aslı Cansunar
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Political Geography

Defending water, defending place: Water insecurity and neighbour-based organising in Mexico City's popular neighbourhoods
Andrés Emiliano Sierra Martínez
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Political Psychology

Not‐so‐great expectations: Outgroup indifference facilitates conflict resolution in negatively interdependent contexts
Smadar Cohen‐Chen, Garrett L. Brady, Gerben A. van Kleef, Eran Halperin
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We examined how responses to outgroup indifference in conflict are shaped by the perceived nature of interdependence, which changes expectations of outgroup emotions toward the ingroup. Unlike conflicts perceived as positively interdependent, we hypothesized that in conflicts perceived as negatively interdependent, outgroup indifference would constitute a positive expectancy violation, thereby inviting favorable responses. Moreover, we examined affective and inferential processes as mediators across four studies ( N = 2521). In Study 1, outgroup indifference (vs. anger and hatred but not hope) reduced negative emotions (but did not affect expected collaboration), subsequently increasing support for cooperation. Study 2 added qualitative measures and showed that outgroup indifference (vs. anger) increased support for cooperation through decreased negative emotions and increased expected collaboration. Study 3 provided correlational evidence that perceptions of interdependence predict participants' expectations of outgroup emotions. Lastly, in Study 4, outgroup indifference increased expected collaboration and emotions when interdependence was perceived as negative.
Does disability trump family background? Determinants of electoral participation among young individuals with intellectual disability
Björn Boman, Jonas Hultin Rosenberg, Johan Wejryd
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Systematic differences of electoral participation between various social groups indicate crucial constraints of comprehensive democratic inclusion. Yet, there is a dearth of research on electoral participation among individuals with intellectual disability (ID), whose participation rates are considerably lower than among non‐ID citizens. This study examines determinants of electoral participation among individuals with ID based on administrative records covering five cohorts of individuals from the Swedish upper‐secondary school for pupils with ID ( N = 8438), and their parents. Our main results indicate that the severity of the disability and parents who have voted are the strongest predictors of voting among individuals with ID. The latter suggests that family background is vital. However, the socioeconomic status of the families, such as parents' level of education, income, and occupation, are less pivotal factors.

Public Choice

A rationale for political disengagement
Johan A. Dornschneider-Elkink, Sarah Parlane, Thomas Sattler
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Partisan conflict and economic policy uncertainty: insights from a time-varying causality approach
Nikolaos Antonakakis, Menbere Workie Tiruneh, David Gabauer, Samuel R. Schubert, Lemonia Papadopoulou-Kelidou
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How does partisan conflict (PC) relate to economic policy uncertainty (EPU)? When does uncertainty feed back into conflict, and how stable is that link? We examine these dynamics using a time-varying Granger causality framework applied to United States monthly data from 1985 to 2025, combining the PC Index with aggregate and disaggregated EPU subindices. PC consistently precedes spikes in fiscal, tax, spending, and health care uncertainty. In contrast, the predictive direction reverses mainly during large shocks, such as trade conflicts or financial regulation crises, and largely disappears during recessions. Generalised forecast error variance decompositions show that PC shocks account for a modest but non trivial share of forecast error variance in fiscal, tax, spending, and health care uncertainty, while policy shocks in trade and regulatory domains explain a much larger share of the variance in partisan conflict itself. These results reveal asymmetric, time-varying predictive linkages between political polarization and policy uncertainty. The findings, which are based on the decomposition of EPU into its components and time-varying Granger causality, contribute to theories of veto players, gridlock, and signaling by identifying the institutional conditions under which political conflict is associated with greater economic volatility and when policy uncertainty appears to reinforce partisan division.
Pension’s resource-time trade-off: the role of inequalities in the design of retirement schemes
Renaud BourlĂšs, Santiago LĂłpez-Cantor
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The political economy of exit protection
Ali Palida
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Existing theories explain how exit disciplines governments but generally treat citizens’ ability to relocate as an institutional primitive. This paper instead endogenizes exit protection by modeling jurisdictions that first choose whether to preserve or eliminate mobility before competing through extraction. Although preserving exit uniquely maximizes investment and social welfare, it is not self-enforcing because jurisdictions can profit by creating captive populations. Exit protection is therefore institutionally fragile. The paper then evaluates alternative constitutional architectures capable of addressing this incentive problem and develops one formally. The analysis identifies a benchmark constitutional architecture under which decentralized political orders could, in principle, sustain exit without relying on hierarchical enforcement, repeated interaction, or citizen coercive power.
Electoral incentives when the stakes are low: a case study from an economics department
Francesco De Sinopoli, Giovanna Iannantuoni, Diego Lubian
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Since the pioneering work of Lizzeri and Persico (2001), it has been well known that, in winner-take-all systems, office-motivated politicians may favor targeted redistribution over the provision of public goods. Motivated by the possibility that similar incentives may arise even in small organizations, we examine a policy proposal to revise a journal-ranking system in a medium-sized Economics Department. At the same time, a majority of faculty members signed a petition on an unrelated issue publicly supporting the department’s governance. Using individual publication records, we analyze whether the distributional consequences of the proposed reform were systematically related to such support. We find that faculty members who signed the petition were significantly more likely to benefit from the initial proposal, while this association became considerably weaker after an open departmental discussion and a subsequent revision of the proposal. The observed pattern is consistent with theories emphasizing distributive incentives and the disciplining role of transparency in collective decision-making though alternative readings of the revision cannot be excluded.
Dual regulation and the cost of electricity rents to households: evidence from Texas
Seth J. Carter
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A hangover like any other: the cost of ruling for populist parties
Andreas Bergh, Anders KÀrnÀ
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Populist parties have grown rapidly in popularity in many European countries and have increasingly become common in government coalitions. Because these parties often make expansive promises and derive much of their appeal from their outsider status, entering government may become an electoral liability by the next election. Analyzing populist and mainstream parties in 32 European countries from 1980 to 2023, we estimate the average electoral effect of government participation. We find a post-power penalty of about 4.5–5 percentage points on average. This penalty is remarkably similar for populist and mainstream parties, suggesting that populist parties do not suffer an additional electoral cost from governing. Moreover, the size of the post-power penalty does not vary systematically with growth, inequality, social spending, globalization, or unemployment during the governing term. These findings suggest that bringing populist parties into government does not, by itself, impose a distinctive electoral cost on them relative to other incumbent parties.
Electoral cycles and consumption in India
Ronit Mukherji, Sakshi Satija
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Constitutional drafting processes and constitutional success
Adam Chilton, Murat Mungan, Mila Versteeg
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Several recent constitution-making processes have been celebrated for being participatory, inclusive, and representative. However, many of these processes also failed. We theorize that aspects of these kinds of constitutional drafting processes could reduce the probability of constitutional success. To show why, we construct a “Constitution Drafting game” (CD game) in which representatives from different interest groups must draft a constitution. We consider the case where the probability of constitutional success is single peaked, but the value from successful adoption is increasing in the degree of issue protection chosen. The drafting process then leads to protection choices that are above those which maximize the odds of constitutional success. Moreover, when the CD game is equivalent to a “nice aggregative game”, as in Acemoglu and Jensen (2013), the maximum and minimum equilibrium probabilities of constitutional success are decreasing in the number of representatives. Within a more specific game structure, we show that the symmetric equilibrium degree of protection chosen by each representative is decreasing in the number of interest groups represented, while the total degree of protection is increasing in it, leading to lower probabilities of constitutional success. We explain how optimism can exacerbate the degree of protection chosen by each party.
Money talks, moderation walks: the centripetal impact of campaign contributions in the U.S. house
Andrew Christopher Pickering, Mehmet Akif Yardimci
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Quarterly Journal of Political Science

Checks, Balances, and Presidential Ambitions
Christian Fong, Kenneth Lowande, Ayse Eldes
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This study investigates the relationship between running for president and members’ contributions to the core legislative functions that impact Congress’s standing relative to the presidency. This study finds some evidence that ambitious legislators attend roll call votes and oversight hearings at lower rates, but at the same time, they are more legislatively productive, conduct just as much informal oversight and are equally informational in their public oversight. When Congress votes on an issue that affects the balance of power between Congress and the president, they are more likely to side with Congress than legislators without presidential ambitions are. These behavioral differences persist even after their presidential runs, which suggests they are not driven by a strategic effort to audition for the presidency.