🗣 Communication Paper Picnic 🧺: Political Science

I checked 18 political science journals on Tuesday, March 31, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period March 24 to March 30, I found 41 new paper(s) in 12 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Unraveling authoritarian reform decision‐making: A metacognitive–subcognitive model

Eugene Yu Ji

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Recent research indicates that state reforms in East and Southeast Asia have been predominantly top‐down and authoritarian‐led. However, this significant observation implicitly relies on important assumptions about authoritarian decision‐making behavior and psychology that remains understudied. Using a dynamical‐systems approach, this paper introduces a “metacognitive–subcognitive” model of cognitive uncertainties to analyze decision‐making in authoritarian‐led reforms. The model predicts that major authoritarian‐led political reform, such as democratization, is most likely to occur if the leader is “wishfully optimistic” enough to view the expected outcomes of the reform, despite the associated risks and pressures. Applying the model to six cases in East and Southeast Asia demonstrates the effectiveness of the model in decoding the state‐led reform decision‐making dynamics of authoritarian regimes. Overall, the paper proposes a new framework and methodology that can both distinguish and relate causal, structural, and contingent factors contributing to authoritarian decision‐making dynamics.

What is (de)politicization and what is wrong with it?

Dimitrios Halikias

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This article attempts to clarify the meaning of (de)politicization. Politicization sometimes refers to the inappropriate intrusion of partisan loyalties in nonpolitical social domains ( affective politicization ). Politicization can also constitute an ideal of civic agency and energy ( contestatory politicization ). In other contexts, politicization is meant as a kind of institutional corruption, in which government decisions are made for the sake of sectional advantage ( patrimonial politicization ). It can also refer to the imposition of controversial values judgments by ostensibly neutral institutions like the courts and bureaucracy ( values politicization ). These concepts raise divergent normative considerations of varying weightiness. This article motivates the potency of a fifth concept of politicization, which centers on the category of authoritative rule ( archic politicization ). It offers an ideal–typical contrast between political rule and depoliticized power, and it treats the distinct justifications for and objections to the substitution of depoliticized, impersonal reason for authoritative, political will.

Mutual restraint in nondemocratic legislatures

Sarah Hummel

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Nondemocratic regimes sometimes benefit from tolerating the expression of critical opinions and visions for policy in their legislatures. Doing so enables them to gather important information about societal preferences, to co‐opt potential challengers, and to address other threats to their control. In these cases, regimes and deputies exhibit mutual restraint: deputies respect regime‐set limits on their freedom to express critical opinions, while regimes refrain from punishing deputies for expressing negative views when the stakes are acceptably low. By examining both the responsiveness of individual deputies and how regimes police the limits of acceptable behavior, we are better able to identify both the functions and strengths of nondemocratic legislatures. I illustrate these dynamics using data about deputy voting behavior and legislative success in the Kyrgyz Jogorku Kenesh (2016–2020).

American Political Science Review

Elite Partisan Disagreement and Military Victory: Evidence from South Korean Battle Experiments

MICHAEL F. JOSEPH, JOON H. CHUNG, HUI SEONG PARK

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Does partisan disagreement impact expectations of victory in war? We conjectured it could by degrading military cohesion. We registered two main predictions: (a) soldiers fight less effectively if they observe political parties disagree during a crisis about whether to initiate war and (b) the effects of (a) are amplified when soldiers are affiliated with a dissenting opposition party. With some nuance, we found broad support for these predictions through two preregistered survey experiments that recruited South Korean military cadets and soldiers of appropriate ranks for warfighting. Our novel design estimated effects on the will to perform six essential battlefield tasks given land-battle doctrine, unit structures, and force employment of modern democratic armies. Thirteen exploratory tests yield findings consistent with arguments that military institutions provide nonpartisan socialization, but surprising for research on nationalism, soldier-to-soldier trust, and the psychological and dispositional determinants of military effectiveness. We also introduce and calibrate rifle shooting outcomes for experiments.

British Journal of Political Science

The British Academy Brian Barry Prize Essay: Civil Disobedience and State Anxiety

Chong-Ming Lim

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Political philosophers writing about civil disobedience have tended to neglect the anxiety of the state about such disobedience. I identify three components of state anxiety – Contagion , Fragility , Value – concerning the contagiousness of disobedience, and the fragility and value of public institutions. I argue that state anxiety can be substantiated or specious, depending on the plausibility of Contagion and Fragility . It can also be significant or trivial, depending on the plausibility of Value . Finally, and focusing on John Rawls’ influential discussions of civil disobedience, I show how political philosophizing can mirror state anxiety about disobedience and, in doing so, bolster it.

Electoral Studies

A populist incitement? Populism, attack rhetoric, and support for political violence

Alessandro Nai, Elizabeth L. Young, Vlastimil Havlík, Alena Kluknavská

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European Journal of Political Research

The effects of government propaganda in electoral authoritarian regimes: Evidence from Turkey

Philipp M. Lutscher, Jonas Bergan Draege, Carl Henrik Knutsen

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Previous research conducted in closed autocracies indicates that government propaganda can deter opposition, shift political attitudes, and influence emotions. Yet the specific mechanisms and contextual factors influencing how and when propaganda works remain unclear. We theorize how power-projecting government propaganda works differently for government supporters and opponents in polarized electoral authoritarian regimes, focusing on emotional reactions, sense of societal belonging, and downstream effects on contentious political behavior. Through two preregistered surveys in Turkey ( N = 6,286), we find that supporters exposed to propaganda videos feel a greater sense of belonging and are more susceptible to engage in pro-government activities. Opponents report heightened anger and anxiety and seem deterred from protesting. However, the latter effect weakened during the highly contested 2023 electoral campaign. These results indicate that propaganda can help electoral authoritarian regimes deter anti-government action and encourage pro-government action, but that its deterrent effects may weaken during periods of high mobilization and contention.

Chains in episodes of democratization

Kelly Morrison, Martin Lundstedt, Yuko Sato, Klas Markström, Staffan I. Lindberg

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How do democratic institutions develop during episodes of liberalization in autocracies? Existing research has theorized about the long process of institutional change that makes up regime transitions, but existing quantitative methods are not equipped to analyze these multi-stage patterns of development across many variables. In this research note, we introduce a new methodology, Analysis of Chains (AOC), that allows for such analysis. Unlike previous methodologies, AOC identifies long patterns of simultaneous changes across numerous dichotomous, ordinal, and/or continuous variables. To demonstrate the utility of this method, we use AOC to catalog chains of institutional development across 47 indicators of democracy in 377 episodes of liberalization from 1900 to 2021. In addition to generating a descriptive account of the multi-step processes of regime change in each of these episodes, this innovative approach yields two general findings for transitology research. First, the results show that institutions related to elections and freedom of association are the most common elements of democracy to develop earlier during democratization episodes. Second, there is limited correlation between the order of institutional development and successful transition to democracy. Overall, the research note makes critical methodological and empirical contributions to research on democratic transitions.

The impact of unelected representatives on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy: A cross-national survey experiment

Pieter de Wilde, Andrea Vik, Lene Aarøe, Oliver Treib

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When activists act as unelected representatives by voicing political demands on behalf of various constituencies, does this affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy? We theorize that this may be the case if and when such individuals constitute an effective channel of representation, meaning that (1) activists substantively represent individuals and (2) they are included in politics. Furthermore, we theorize that marginalized individuals become more satisfied with the way democracy works when they witness activists with whom they agree. We test this through a preregistered vignette experiment in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Romania ( N = 8196). Our findings are mixed. Unelected representatives can sway citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in some instances. Specifically, the electoral winner–loser gap can be narrowed through substantive representation from unelected representatives. This presents an invitation for further research on the role activists play in shaping the legitimacy of liberal representative democracies.

Electoral vulnerability and women MPs’ estimation of voters’ preferences on women’s issues

Daniel Höhmann, Stefanie Bailer, Christian Breunig

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Given that parliamentary democracies channel the preferences of their citizens through elected representatives, parliamentarians need to estimate the policy preferences of their electorate. We investigate how the gender of representatives influences this assessment for policies characterized as women’s issues. Building on theories of shared group experiences, gendered role expectations, and strategic behavior, we expect that, in comparison to their men colleagues, women representatives are better at estimating their party voters’ policy position when they are electorally vulnerable. Combining original survey data from political elites and voters in Germany and Switzerland, our estimation indicates that women representatives’ estimation of public opinion on women’s issues is not more accurate than that of their men colleagues. Yet, the perceptual accuracy of women representatives increases markedly if they are electorally vulnerable. Corroborating our theoretical expectations, a placebo test implies that our findings are specific to women’s issues.

Conflicting perceptions: Misalignment between citizens’ and politicians’ evaluations of political conflict

Emma Sarah van der Goot, Laura Jacobs, Pirmin Bundi, Frederic Varone, Toni (G.L.A.) van der Meer, Rens Vliegenthart, Lior Sheffer, Jorge Miguel Fernandes

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This study examines how citizens and politicians evaluate different types of political conflict. Conflicts can be substantive in nature, involving disagreements over policy measures or clashes over core ideological values, or less substantive, concerning strategic relationships between parties. While conflict is inherent to politics, we know little about how different types of conflict are perceived by the public and how this differs from the perceptions of political elites. Whether citizens and their elected representatives share a common understanding of the role of conflict in politics is crucial, as misalignment may hamper political representation and effective governance. Empirically, our study relies on a survey experiment conducted among citizens ( N = 8264) and politicians ( N = 331) in four countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland) to investigate whether different types of conflict lead to different evaluations. Our results show that politicians are more likely to endorse ideological conflicts (over goals or core values) and substantive conflicts (over policy measures), yet citizens are more likely to approve of personal conflicts than politicians. Furthermore, politicians judge citizens’ perceptions of substantive and ideological conflicts more positively than citizens themselves and overestimate the concern citizens have with personal conflicts. These results may have important implications. If politicians fail to recognize that citizens are less accepting of political conflicts, this might be detrimental for trust in political parties and democracy at large – thus undermining the legitimacy of the political system.

Financing the state: Government tax revenue from 1800 to 2012

Per F. Andersson

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The 19th and 20th centuries are key periods in the development of the modern fiscal state, but a lack of reliable historical revenue data remains an obstacle for students of the period. In this research note, we introduce the Government Revenue Dataset (Govrev), which provides information on central government revenues in 31 countries in Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan from 1800 to 2012. Compared to previous efforts, our dataset is an improvement both in coverage and in validity. We use the new dataset to reanalyze the relationship between elite competition and taxation, showing that, contrary to previous findings, direct taxation is not driven by elite competition. In fact, thanks to the fine-grained detail of our data, we find that elite competition is associated with a heavier reliance on indirect taxation.

One-dimensional, multidimensional, or non-dimensional? Ideological structure in mass and elite opinion

Philippe Mongrain, Stefaan Walgrave

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There is an enduring debate about whether, to what extent, and along which fault lines citizens’ policy preferences are ideologically structured. Some scholars maintain that public opinion is largely unstructured, with individuals adopting inconsistent and idiosyncratic positions – for instance, holding a ‘left’ stance on issue A does not necessarily imply a ‘left’ stance on issue B. Others argue that citizens’ views are shaped by coherent ideological constraints, such that a ‘left’ position on one issue is systematically accompanied by ‘left’ positions on others. This paper contributes new evidence to this debate by leveraging unprecedented big data. We draw on original data from Belgium’s widely used Voting Advice Application (VAA), known as the Vote Test , which was completed more than six million times in the run-up to the June 2024 elections. Our analysis is based on the actual log files of the application, encompassing millions of observations. The Vote Test consisted of twelve distinct VAAs designed for the seven concurrent elections held in Belgium in 2024 – including simultaneous federal, regional, and European contests across the country’s three regions – yielding millions of responses to hundreds of policy statements. Using these exceptional data, we examine the correlations among citizens’ answers and assess the dimensionality of the opinion landscape. We further compare the structure of mass opinion with that of political elites, who responded to the identical set of policy statements. Our findings reveal minimal, if any, ideological structuring among voters, especially when contrasted with the more consistent patterns observed among elites.

A track too far? The effect of general versus vocational upper secondary education on voter turnout

Marcus Österman, Jonas Larsson Taghizadeh

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Despite the wealth of research on how education affects political participation, there are few studies that successfully identify the effects of different types of education or different educational tracks. In this article, using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, we present evidence on how electoral participation is affected by pursuing a general (academic) versus a vocational programme in upper secondary education. These two pathways represent a fundamental educational differentiation in most European countries. By exploiting Swedish register data and the admission process for upper secondary education, we provide robust support for causal inference. In contrast to previous research, we do not find positive effects from attending a general programme on voter turnout. In fact, in our RD analysis, our estimates suggest negative effects. This analysis focuses on students who apply for general and vocational programmes – a group with average academic skills. The negative effects appear related to that these students perform poorly in general programmes and risk dropping out. Furthermore, in a population-level analysis relying on within-family comparisons, we predominantly find null effects on turnout of attending a general programme, compared to a vocational one. We conclude that there are no universal positive effects of starting a general rather than a vocational secondary education – and that effects can turn negative for students who start an education that is too demanding. This finding implies that it is important to design secondary education such that it matches the abilities of different students, not only for labour market prospects, but also for their political inclusion.

Crisis management and territorial preferences: Experimental evidence during the pandemic

Sandra León, Amuitz Garmendia Madariaga

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Centralization represents the historical response of political elites to overcome the difficulties of coordination when faced with an external threat. Yet, we know little about the demand side of authority distribution in the context of a crisis. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of the effect of crises and coordination inefficiencies on the territorial preferences of individuals. We predict that crisis-time uncoordinated responses will prompt a centralizing shift in preferences. We tested this argument using online survey experiments in a comparative sample of 13 countries in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The results show that exposure to unsuccessful intergovernmental coordination shifted individual preferences toward a more centralized power allocation in a majority of countries. This effect is moderated by contextual conditions, such as actual multilevel policy efforts and changes in the intensity of the pandemic. Individual-level territorial identity or partisan identification also intervenes as a significant moderator of our treatment.

Group identities and party competition

Christina Isabel Zuber, Philip J. Howe, Edina Szöcsik

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The rise of nationalist and populist candidates worldwide provides compelling evidence that parties win elections, not by appealing to voters’ policy preferences alone, but rather by connecting those preferences to group identities. This state-of-the-field article argues that party scholars need to integrate constructivist insights from neighboring fields to better understand the role of group identities in party competition. We review recent demand- and supply-side studies on the role of group identities in elections and bring them into conversation with the literature on ethnic politics and nationalism and political economic models of identity politics. On this basis, we suggest a research agenda that models voters as having both policy preferences and desires for self-esteem and self-consistency, which are mediated by their identification with social groups. Voters want to benefit others they see as being similar to themselves, to raise the status of the groups they identify with, and to maintain self-consistency by narrowing the gap between themselves and members of groups with which they identify. Political parties strategically combine policy offers with group appeals to address – and shape – all these motivations. Shifting from a ‘policy-only’ towards a ‘policy-cum-identity’ paradigm will enable the field of party politics to better understand the dynamics of real-world electoral competition and to reconcile its models with the latest developments in the political theory of representation.

Institutionalizing mutual toleration? Opposition power and the decline of democracy

Simone Wegmann

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Around the globe, democracies have come under pressure. At the same time, one of the most prominent research areas in political science is the question of which democratic designs generate the most stability. However, so far, one inherent part of democracies has not received much attention in this literature: the opposition. Although research has shown that there is a wide range of power granted to oppositions, little research exists investigating the consequences of these institutional differences. In this research note, I focus on the importance of mutual toleration for democratic stability and argue that this might manifest in institutionalized legislative opposition power, which, in turn, might affect democratic stability. Preliminary results indicate that instances of democratic decline are more likely to occur in countries with weak institutionalization of opposition power. These results have important implications and open up avenues for future research on questions relating to determinants of democratic stability.

More social, less material, more influenced by family ties: Why young women join political parties

Sofia Ammassari, Duncan McDonnell, Annika Werner, Reinhard Heinisch, Marco Valbruzzi, Carsten Wegscheider

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Do young women and men join political parties for different reasons? To investigate, we theorize the following: first, women will be more attracted by social incentives and men by material ones, while purposive incentives will be equally appealing to both; second, before signing up, women will have more party-affiliated family ties than men; and third, these ties will moderate the gender gap in incentives. Drawing on YOUMEM survey data from over 3500 youth wing members of the main center-left and center-right parties in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we find strong support for our argument. Our results show that, already in this early – but crucial – part of the pipeline to power, the incentives for joining parties are gendered: young women are more mobilized by social benefits, and less so by material ones. In addition, they are more likely than men to have party-affiliated family ties, indicating that these resources are particularly valuable to them in overcoming the disadvantages they face when entering politics. Notably, family ties boost women’s purposive motivations more than men’s, but they also reduce women’s material motivations to a greater extent. Our findings indicate that if parties are interested in recruiting more young women, they should emphasize the social rewards of membership in their recruitment campaigns.

The role of procedural fairness in EU legitimacy: Lessons from the Spitzenkandidaten process

Paul Meiners, Andreas C. Goldberg, Pieter De Wilde

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The European Union (EU) is facing an ongoing challenge to its institutional and political legitimacy. The 2014 European Parliament elections marked a decisive step towards bringing the EU closer to its citizens by increasing the personalization of EU politics. Under the slogan ‘this time it’s different’, the idea was that the ‘winning’ lead candidate (Spitzenkandidat) of the EP elections would become the new President of the European Commission (EC). However, the selection of von der Leyen as EC President after the 2019 EP elections neglected this process. Inspired by procedural fairness theory, we investigate the impact of the Spitzenkandidaten process on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in the EU. In a first study, we use observational survey data to examine whether Europeans reacted negatively when the Spitzenkandidaten process was ignored in 2019. In a second study, we investigate how the Spitzenkandidaten process could be salvaged to increase citizens’ satisfaction with EU democracy. We focus on the involvement of citizens through a primary system to select potential Spitzenkandidaten and the binding nature of the results of the EP elections to determine the EC President. Our two studies show the low impact of the Spitzenkandidaten process: Member state governments are able to override the results of the Spitzenkandidaten process without having to fear a (large) public backlash. Increasing citizen participation through a European primary does not affect this conclusion. In summary, we find very little evidence for the relevance of procedural fairness for citizens’ evaluation of the EU and the Spitzenkandidaten process.

Party Politics

A bibliometric analysis of the field of party politics

Emilie van Haute, Emilien Paulis

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This paper produces a bibliometric analysis of the field of party politics, its structure, central authors and co-authors, and communities. Using bibliographical data from Party Politics ( N = 1897 authors), combined with measures of symbolic (bibliometric data), cultural (role in data production), and social capital (role in international groups), we have mapped the contours of the field and identified the mechanisms through which hierarchies, communities, and research agendas are sustained. Three complementary network analyses, based on authorship, co-authorship, and sources, reveal distinct but interconnected communities of scholars, each contributing to different facets of party politics research. The study invites scholars to reflect on the social and institutional dynamics that shape the very conditions of knowledge production in the field. More generally, it raises normative questions that extend beyond the field of party politics on the role of capital, international associations, and collaboration between sub-fields in knowledge production.

Political Geography

The price of climate finance: Agency, knowledge and refusal in Mexico

Miriam Gay-Antaki

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Degrowing desire

Robert Fletcher

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The Lithium Road. Political practices in favor of extractive infrastructures in the Bolivian Altiplano.

David Schröter, Felipe Fernández, Alke Jenss

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Political Psychology

Conspiracy thinking and belief in partisan conspiracy theories: A moderating effect of partisan congruence?

Omer Yair, Shira Hebel‐Sela, Amnon Cavari, Asif Efrat

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Various studies have shown that people's predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories, commonly referred to as “conspiracy thinking,” strongly predicts belief in a myriad of conspiracy theories. Research also shows that partisan affiliations shape conspiracy theory beliefs: people tend to embrace theories that portray their political opponents as conspirators, while rejecting those that implicate their side. In this paper, we theorize that one's conspiracy thinking and partisan affiliations interact in predicting belief in partisan conspiracy theories. Specifically, we argue that the effect of conspiracy thinking is moderated by one's partisan affiliation, such that this effect is stronger when the conspiracy theories are congruent with one's partisan affiliations than when they are incongruent. Drawing on six studies from the US and Israel (total N = 10,765; 61 conspiracy theories in total), we find strong and consistent support for our argument. In addition, we find no interactive effect when predicting belief in non‐partisan conspiracy theories. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of conspiracy theory endorsement.

The age of virtue signaling: Moral grandstanding as competitive display among young men

Sebastian Jungkunz

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Moral grandstanding—the use of moral discourse to enhance one's status—has become a central feature of contemporary political expression. Drawing on representative survey data from Germany, France, Greece, and Hungary ( N = 8420), this study examines how grandstanding motivations vary across age, gender, and political affiliation. I distinguish between two motivational dimensions: prestige‐seeking, which aims to inspire admiration, and dominance‐seeking, which seeks to shame or outcompete others. The results reveal a striking demographic pattern: young men (ages 18–35) consistently report the highest levels of dominance‐oriented moral grandstanding, independent of party support. Gender differences are particularly pronounced in younger age groups, while older respondents, regardless of gender, exhibit lower levels of dominance‐seeking. In contrast, prestige‐seeking motivations are more evenly distributed and less sensitive to demographic variation. These findings suggest that moral grandstanding, particularly in its more antagonistic form, is driven less by party affiliation than by underlying social and psychological dynamics—most notably, the competitive status behaviors of young men. By identifying demographic roots of moralized political expression, this study contributes to broader debates on polarization, digital discourse, and the social performance of political identity.

Political Science Research and Methods

Dynamic persuasion: decay and accumulation of partisan media persuasion

Matthew Baum, Adam J. Berinsky, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Joohye Jeong, Zachary Markovich, Teppei Yamamoto

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

Is winning the first primaries of primary importance? A regression-discontinuity approach

Jonne Kamphorst, Alexander Davenport, Marcus Hagley, Elias Dinas, Arnout van de Rijt

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The literature on American politics widely agrees that early victories in U.S. presidential primaries are pivotal for securing the nomination, a belief that underpins the front-loading behavior of states. However, demonstrating this success-breeds-success effect is challenging because unobserved candidate qualities could independently link early victories to later success. To address this, we used a regression-discontinuity design, focusing on variations near the victory threshold. Our analysis shows that conclusions about early states rely heavily on limited observations around the cutoff. If any inference is to be drawn, it is that winning in Iowa or New Hampshire has no lasting impact on subsequent contests, nor does winning on any election day affect outcomes on the next. These findings question the presence of momentum effects for winners in the primaries.

Measuring interethnic marriage in Africa

Daniel N. Posner

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Interethnic marriage is commonly employed as an indicator of social cohesion. However, intermarriages are a reflection of both preferences and opportunities. If we are to interpret intermarriage rates as indicators of people’s willingness to cross group boundaries, we must find a way of controlling for exposure to out-group members in local marriage markets. In this Note, I exploit census data from Zambia to demonstrate how this can be done. The findings, which reveal significant differences across estimates that do and do not control for local exposure to out-group members, underscore a significant weakness in common approaches. The findings also point to important substantive implications for understanding changes in social cohesion in Zambia—and likely other African societies—over time.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Does “Precocious Research Creativity” Account for Notable Late-Career Research Achievements by Political Scientists?

Kim Quaile Hill, Soren Jordan

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This article offers the first test with valid measures and rigorous multivariate methods of the hypothesis that significant early-career research achievements of academics predict late-career achievements of the same type. Considerable research investigated the correlates of late-career research success; however, this promising hypothesis that originated in psychological and educational research on adolescents has not been tested systematically for academic careers. In a sample of three annual temporal cohorts of political science faculty members, our study finds notable evidence in support of this hypothesis. Our findings also provide a foundation for future research on how innate abilities, the character of doctoral programs, and the advantages of different types of academic positions shape long-term career productivity.

Female Authors in Top-Cited Political Science Articles: Underrepresented but Not Marginalized

Audrey Gagnon, Daniel Stockemer, Chloé Dubuc

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What is the gender distribution among authors in top-cited articles? To answer this question, we examined the 20 most-cited articles for each of the 201 most frequently used concepts in political science during the past 10 years. Using a sample of 4,020 articles comprising approximately 8,500 authors, we confirmed the underrepresentation of female authors among top-cited articles. Women account for approximately 38% of authors within this canon of articles. On the one hand, this finding is encouraging considering that women’s proportion of authorship did not decline relative to their overall representation among published authors. On the other hand, it is discouraging considering that most recent influential research continues to be written primarily by men. To explain variation in the proportion of female authors per article, we find that women are more likely to engage in single-authored publications and to use qualitative methods. In contrast, we find no significant difference between male and female scholars in the rankings of the journals in which they publish.

Using AI to Assess Demographic Balance of Syllabi and Bibliographies

Sarah Musgrave, Jane L. Sumner

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The Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT) was introduced in 2016 as a shortcut for researchers and instructors who wanted to quickly determine the gender balance of the authors in their bibliographies and syllabi. In the years since then, some journals and departments have encouraged its use. However, technology also has changed significantly during this period, and the emergence of generative AI models have introduced systems with enormous potential to evaluate the demographic balance of syllabi and bibliographies. By leveraging information on the Internet other than names, and by being less constrained in terms of formatting and name recognition, this article shows that generative AI systems are superior to the GBAT, in terms of both their accuracy and their ability to evaluate general demographic balance rather than only gender balance.

Research & Politics

What is populism good for? An experimental test of mobilization effects

Alexander Kustov, Yaoyao Dai

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In recent decades, populist parties and candidates have gained increasing electoral support across the world. Despite this evident electoral success of populists, however, recent experimental studies find limited effects of populist rhetoric alone on vote choice. If such rhetoric is not effective in shaping voting preference, why would politicians adopt it, and what might explain the electoral success of populist candidates and parties? We argue that populism might influence elections through increasing turnout instead of or in addition to changing voters’ preference for candidates. However, existing conjoint and vignette survey experiments generally focus on forced candidate choice, which assumes full mobilization, potentially biasing the between-candidate choice estimates and missing abstention decisions important in real-world politics. To address this, we conducted a large-scale U.S. conjoint experiment of campaign messaging with an explicit abstention option to test for the possible mobilization effects of populism independent of persuasion effects and the various associated policy positions. Our results show that while populist rhetoric has limited persuasive impact, it can slightly increase mobilization, especially among voters who already hold populist views. Overall, however, voters’ alignment with candidates’ policy positions matters far more for both vote choice and turnout than the use of populist messaging itself.

The Journal of Politics

Elite Rhetoric and the Running Tally of Party-Group Linkages

Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard, Frederik Hjorth

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Occupation-Specific Skills, Labor Market Context, and Preferences for Redistribution

Josep Serrano-Serrat

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Cutting in Line: How Powerful Organized Interests Hasten and Delay Executive Branch Nominations

Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Dino P. Christenson, Lauren Ratliff Santoro, Elizabeth Steffensmeier

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Who’s Persuasive? Understanding Citizen-to-Citizen Efforts to Change Minds

Martin Naunov, Carlos Rueda-Cañón, Timothy J. Ryan

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Universal Mail Ballot Delivery Boosts Turnout: The Causal Effects of Sending Mail Ballots to All Registered Voters

R. Michael Alvarez, Yimeng Li

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Bottom-Up? Top-Down? Determinants of Issue Attention in State Politics

Andreu Casas, Oscar Stuhler, Julia Payson, Joshua A. Tucker, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler

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