I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, July 15, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period July 08 to July 14, I found 28 new paper(s) in 11 journal(s).

Electoral Studies

The impact of youth pro-climate policy preferences on political support: evidence from salience shifts in Germany
Lovisa Mundschenk
Full text
Surviving political disruption: Renomination patterns of former Party of Regions deputies in post-Euromaidan Ukraine
Masatomo Torikai
Full text
Education and the gender voting gap in U.S. presidential elections
Cameron J. Arnzen, Sarah R. Cohodes
Full text

European Journal of Political Research

To what extent do political elites influence public opinion about immigration?
Tiphaine Le Corre, Jane Green, Alexander Yeandle
Full text
Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding individual-level factors shaping immigration attitudes. However, we know far less about the top-down influence of political elites on such attitudes. In this review, we synthesise scholarly evidence to examine how elite discourse affects public opinion about immigration. We propose that immigration preferences are best understood through three dimensions of public opinion: attitude extremity (the degree to which individuals support or oppose immigration), attitude importance (the extent to which they consider immigration to be an important issue), and attitude expression (the behavioural manifestation of immigration attitudes). Our review suggests that elite rhetoric has a limited effect on the extremity of immigration attitudes, as these preferences are typically rooted in long-standing belief systems and shaped early in life. Isolating the influence of elites on the importance of immigration as an issue is more complex, as shifts in public concern often coincide with changes in elite discourse and media coverage, all of which are shaped by external events. However, our review indicates that political elites can play a significant role in shaping the expression of immigration attitudes – both at the ballot box and in everyday social interactions. These insights have important implications for identifying pressing research gaps and for understanding the politicisation of immigration in contemporary politics.
Beyond skills: How occupational essentiality and social value relate to attitudes toward immigrant labor
William L. Allen, Mariña Fernåndez-Reino, Isabel Ruiz
Full text
Research on public attitudes toward immigration consistently shows that people prefer higher- over lower-skilled immigrants, largely for sociotropic economic and fiscal reasons. We argue that this account is incomplete: citizens also evaluate immigrant workers according to the essentiality and social value of the work they perform, alongside formal skills and education. We conceptualize two logics for evaluating occupations – economic-fiscal and moral-social – that shape attitudes toward labor immigrants, before testing this argument in two studies in the UK. Study 1 uses a preregistered conjoint survey experiment ( N = 4,951) fielded during the UK’s third COVID-19 lockdown in January 2021. Respondents evaluated hypothetical labor immigrants varying in occupation, skill level, and origin. Immigrants working in occupations designated as ‘essential’ during the pandemic were substantially more likely to be preferred for admission (by about 22 percentage points) and more likely to be viewed as economically beneficial (by about 10 percentage points) than those in nonessential jobs, net of skill. Study 2 reports results from an online survey ( N = 1,944) fielded in 2025 measuring perceptions of occupational essentiality, social value, economic value, prestige, skill, and labor shortages. Perceived essentiality is strongly associated with social value while remaining distinct from skill and prestige. Importantly, perceptions of occupational essentiality remained stable over time and correlated with preferences for admitting immigrants in those same occupations. Together, these findings highlight occupational essentiality as a distinct and consequential driver of immigration attitudes with implications for labor migration debates and policymaking.
Sign a petition or storm the parliament? Aversive personality differentiates normative vs. nonnormative political activism
David Scholz, Benjamin E. Hilbig
Full text
Past research on political activism has largely emphasized the role of intra personal developments. One prominent example is the so-called ‘conveyor belt’ metaphor, suggesting that political activism typically begins with normative political activism (NPA) – such as signing petitions – but can eventually escalate into nonnormative political activism (NNPA), eg violent protests. However, theoretical developments in the realm of socially and/or ethically aversive personality strongly emphasize the role of inter personal differences, ie that different individuals, in general, are inclined toward NPA vs. NNPA. We herein test this conjecture and investigate whether the socially aversive personality can dissociate the tendency for different individuals to engage in NPA or NNPA. To do so, we conducted four studies (total N = 4,737) across two languages (English and German), administering a measure of the dark core of personality (D) and two different measures of NPA vs. NNPA, respectively. Results consistently indicated that individuals higher in D were more inclined toward NNPA and concurrently less inclined toward NPA – and vice versa for those low in D. Stated simply, aversive personality dissociates between NPA and NNPA, showing that different individuals are more likely to engage in one vs. the other. Thus, the present work adds to the growing evidence signifying the importance of personality for political behavior, in particular by offering a single personality trait which can differentiate the tendency to engage in NPA vs. NNPA.

Party Politics

Politics in the era of the attention economy and platformisation: How Instagram Reels are shaping political communication in India
K. Akash, K. S. Mochish
Full text
Beyond mass rallies, cinema-inspired campaigns, and television debates, digital platforms have introduced new dynamics to political communication in India. This paper analyses how Indian political parties use Instagram Reels to construct political messages, focusing on the themes, strategies, and visual styles that characterise their digital representation. To interpret how platform rules and attention-driven strategies are reshaping political discourse, the study draws on the attention economy, the race to the bottom of the brainstem, and platformisation. These frameworks highlight the most effective messages, emotions, and visual formats that fit their algorithmic logic and platform-specific requirements. The research focuses on content analysis of the 30 most-viewed Instagram Reels from the six prominent political parties. Indian political communication increasingly mirrors influencer culture and platformisation logics. The noise of sensationalist spectacles and affective-stimulus-driven emotive content marginalises the substantive rational needs of political communication in a diverse democratic society.

Political Analysis

Monotone Ecological Inference
Hadi Elzayn, Jacob Goldin, Cameron Guage, Daniel Ho, Claire Morton
Full text
We study the identification of individual-level associations when only aggregate data are available. We characterize the biases of, and relationships among, canonical ecological inference (EI) estimators. We use these results to develop a partial identification approach: monotone EI. The approach exploits information about one or both of the following conditional associations: (1) outcome differences between groups within the same neighborhood and (2) outcome differences within the same group between neighborhoods with different group compositions. We show how assumptions about the sign of these conditional associations, whether individually or in relation to one another, can yield informative sharp bounds. We illustrate our results using county-level data to study differences in COVID-19 vaccination rates among Republicans and Democrats in the United States.

Political Behavior

Seeing Divides: Citizens’ Biased Perceptions of Political Cleavages
Philipp Lutz, Serena Does
Full text
Citizens’ perceptions of political divides shape democratic processes, yet we know little about how these divides are mentally represented. This article develops a conceptual framework that integrates cleavage theory with the study of meta-perceptions—individuals’ beliefs about the attitudes of social groups—to examine how people cognitively map political cleavages. We argue that these perceptions are systematically distorted by cognitive biases, which operate in three distinct ways: egocentrism (projecting one’s own views onto others), conservatism (assuming others hold more conservative attitudes than they actually do), and false polarization (overestimating attitudinal differences between groups). Using original survey data from Germany and focusing on immigration as a prominent contemporary cleavage issue, we measure cleavage perceptions and introduce a novel method to decompose perceptual errors into three distinct biases. The results provide robust evidence for the presence of all three biases and show that they interact asymmetrically across the cleavage spectrum, producing structured misperceptions that mirror underlying political divides. These findings illuminate the cognitive foundations of political cleavages and suggest that psychological mechanisms embedded in social structures can systematically distort citizens’ understanding of societal divisions, with implications for democratic deliberation and political behavior.
The Model Minority Stereotype and Republican Partisan Identification Among Asian Americans
Chinbo Chong, Tanika Raychaudhuri
Full text

Political Geography

Populism and territoriality
Hakkı TaƟ
Full text
Food as necropolitics: The starvation of Palestinian sovereignty and stakes of geopolitical ecology
Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Malini Ranganathan
Full text
Indigenous struggle, oil extraction and the rights of nature: The case of the Marañón River, Peru
Mirella Pretell, Tom Perreault
Full text
Who extracts matters: A reply to Dietz and Dorn (2026)
Kavengi Kitonga
Full text
The political ecology of resource corruption: Co-constituting legality and territoriality at the frontier
David Aled Williams, Achiba Andrew Gargule
Full text

Political Psychology

Navigating social change and social harmony: Testing SIMCA in Gen Z collective action in Madagascar and its role in reconciliation processes
Gaëlle Marinthe, Yvana Hassim Rajabali
Full text
The Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) effectively predicts collective action and social change, but has been less examined in emerging movements and non‐WEIRD contexts. This research had two aims: to test SIMCA during the Gen Z mobilization in Madagascar, a largely online movement that culminated in the overthrow of the government in October 2025; and to examine how SIMCA variables relate to post‐action activism and reconciliation. Study 1 ( N = 959), conducted during the governmental transition, tested SIMCA—including national identification, Gen Z identification, perceived injustice, collective efficacy, and morality—on online collective action support, intention, and participation. Study 2 ( N = 258), conducted post‐transition, examined associations with activism intention, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Gen Z identification and morality were consistently associated with collective action and activism intention, whereas perceived injustice was primarily linked to ongoing collective action. Collective efficacy showed mixed associations. In contrast, national identification emerged as a key factor of post‐action forgiveness. These findings suggest that SIMCA variables are involved not only in social change but also in post‐action social harmony. They highlight the distinct roles of politicized and non‐politicized identities, underscoring the importance of conceptualizing collective action as a temporally and contextually embedded process.
Does White identity stop at the water's edge? White solidarity and racialized perceptions of foreign adversaries in the United States
Lucy Song
Full text
What is the effect of racial in‐group identity on white Americans' policy preferences? Although a robust strand of literature has investigated this relationship in the context of domestic politics, little is known about how white solidarity shapes foreign policy attitudes. This article provides the first examination of whether white racial consciousness “stops at the water's edge”—namely, whether racial solidarity affects how white Americans process information about white versus non‐white foreign adversaries and evaluate the threats they pose. Leveraging recent applications of political psychology in racial politics, this article delineates competing theoretical expectations about the role of white identity in the formation of foreign threat perception. With evidence from a preregistered survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of white Americans that randomized the racial categorization of a hypothetical foreign adversary, this study finds that higher levels of white identity are associated with lower perceived threat when the adversary is portrayed as white, and higher perceived threat when the adversary is portrayed as non‐white, even after accounting for out‐group racial resentment. These findings elucidate the microfoundational determinants of interstate conflict and contribute to cross‐subfield efforts in Political Science to study the transnational effects of in‐group identity politics.
Whether people justify and challenge economic inequality depends on the activities of social movements
Judit Kende, Roberto GonzĂĄlez GutiĂ©rrez, canan coƟkan, Ana Figueiredo, Maja Kutlaca, Karen Phalet, Hema Preya Selvanathan
Full text
When do people challenge economic inequality and when are they more likely to accept it? Whether people justify inequality is key to challenging or accepting it, but research is inconclusive on how objective economic inequality is related to individuals' justification of inequality. In the present research, we propose that social movements play a key role in framing inequality as unjust so that higher inequality is seen as less just. Our study focused on Chile, a relatively affluent but highly unequal country and we examined whether local income inequality was related to individuals' beliefs depending on local labor movement activities. Using survey data from 1886 participants across 64 municipalities, our results showed that municipal‐level income inequality and labor movement activities jointly predicted individual‐level justification of inequality, and indirectly also predicted support for collective action. When either very low or very high local levels of income inequality were coupled with less intense labor movement activities, individual justification of inequality was higher. Justification of inequality in turn predicted less support for the labor movement as a measure of collective action to challenge income inequality. The findings highlight the importance of social movements, such as the labor movement, in framing inequality as unjust.
The mental health–politics nexus: How mental health trajectories from adolescence to midlife shape political attitudes and voting patterns
Sam Fluit, Kinga Bierwiaczonek, Jonas R. Kunst, Tilmann von Soest
Full text
With political polarization increasing, it is important to understand the development of political preferences. Previously, adolescent mental health problems have been linked to lower adulthood voting rates, while relationships between life trajectories of mental health and political attitudes and orientations remain largely underexplored. Using longitudinal data from the population‐based cohort Young in Norway ( N = 2215) spanning three decades, we examine associations between adolescent internalizing (depression, anxiety symptoms) and externalizing problems and 12 midlife political preferences. Latent class growth analysis identified three trajectories for internalizing and two for externalizing problems. Elevated levels of either problem type demonstrated significant associations with lower political and social trust in midlife. Elevated initial internalizing problems, regardless of subsequent development, were related to more left‐wing profiles. Conversely, persistently elevated externalizing problems showed associations with stronger right‐wing profiles. These findings demonstrate that mental health trajectories from adolescence into adulthood are systematically related to distinct political preferences in midlife.

Political Science Research and Methods

Backsliding under contested oversight
Robert Gulotty, Zhaotian Luo
Full text
Citizens do not directly observe democratic backsliding and, as a result, may hesitate to respond to subversion. We develop a model of third-party oversight bodies, such as the media or courts, that detect and assess actions that may be subversive to democracy and inform citizens. Oversight deters subversion, disciplines incumbents, and enables corrective actions by providing credible information about ambiguous incumbent behavior to citizens. However, when the oversight body is contested, citizens may doubt the intent behind its criticisms. When the oversight body is cautious in its criticisms, it elicits negative inferences about its intentions, what we term a fake news effect. The consequences are severe, undermining oversight and enabling backsliding. Democratic accountability depends on reliable sources of information and elected officials’ commitment to upholding norms of conduct.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Ambiguity Politics: Governance and Institutions in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan
Romain Malejacq, Jasmine Bhatia, Florian Weigand
Full text
Most studies on modern state formation assume that enhanced state capacity and institutionalization increase clarity and predictability. We argue that this view fails to consider ambiguity politics—a form of governance in which formal and informal institutions are inconsistent, unclear, or ill-defined, thereby creating space for multiple interpretations, practices, and procedures. Combining inductive insights from research in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and deductive engagement with different strands of literature, we developed a typology that distinguishes mechanisms of ambiguity politics according to the level at which the ambiguation takes place (elite/administrative) and the intentionality of it (strategic/accidental). Although ambiguity politics is particularly visible in conflict and postconflict settings, we show that it is not inevitably a temporary stage toward greater order and predictability but rather a persistent feature of governance in various contexts.
The Development Dilemma of Critical Minerals: Zimbabwe’s Lithium and China
Veda Vaidyanathan
Full text
This article analyzes the development paradox posed by the energy transition. It examines the interplay between Zimbabwe’s lithium potential and the dominant role played by China in the sector. Zimbabwe’s attempts to become a leading supplier of lithium through a series of policy interventions coincides with China’s growing electric vehicle and battery markets that fuel the mineral’s demand. However, power asymmetries in the relationship—as well as domestic constraints posed by weak state capacity, political economy challenges, and social costs of mining—limit the Zimbabwe government’s ability to translate its mineral wealth into developmental outcomes. This illustrates the broader dilemma of the global energy transition for producer countries: critical minerals do not automatically yield development; instead, outcomes depend on enhancing domestic agency and regulating external influence.
American Republican Property and Its Global Constitutional Legacy: The Enduring Politics of Fiduciary Ownership
Bru LaĂ­n, Jordi MundĂł
Full text
The republican conception of property developed during the American founding continues to shape contemporary legal and constitutional orders, yet its foundations and legacy remain underappreciated. This article reconstructs that tradition by showing that American republicanism understood property as a politically constituted, fiduciary entitlement oriented to public purposes. On this view, property emerges as a civil right grounded in the social compact rather than as an inherent natural right conferring absolute dominion. The article traces the nineteenth-century consolidation of an absolutist, Blackstonian conception of property and contract that, under the influence of legal formalism, increasingly depoliticized both. It further shows how legal realism and North American institutional economics disrupted this framework by recasting property as a socially constructed bundle of rights. Recovering the earlier fiduciary-republican conception, the article demonstrates its enduring normative and doctrinal significance in contemporary constitutionalism worldwide, including in eminent domain, as embedded in the social function of the property clause, and in the decommodification of labor.
Motivating High School Seniors to Register to Vote with Registrars’ Visits
Melissa R. Michelson, Stephanie L. DeMora, Maricruz A. Osorio
Full text
In Spring 2024, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in Latino-majority communities in Arizona and Texas to test the impact and effects of voter registration campaigns run by local Registrars in high schools. We theorized that bringing election officials into schools dispels informational uncertainty, cultivates positive political attitudes and emotions, and ultimately boosts voter registration rates. Two partner schools were identified in each state and then randomized into treatment and control conditions. Before treatment, seniors at all four high schools were asked to complete a survey about their interest in and attitudes toward politics and voting. Registrars then conducted in-person visits at the two treatment schools. After treatment, the seniors again were asked to complete a survey. We find that the Registrars’ visits increased enthusiasm, encouragement, and interest around voting and decreased anxiety.
Between Panic and Hype: Disclose and Defend Pedagogy for AI Writing in Political Science Classrooms in the Global South
Jeffrey G. Karam
Full text
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has provoked polarized reactions in higher education, ranging from fears of plagiarism and the “death of the college essay” to claims of pedagogical transformation. Political science, in which writing remains central to learning, is at the center of this debate. This study advances a critical middle ground, arguing that generative AI should be treated as neither an existential threat nor a pedagogical shortcut but instead as a tool whose use must be structured around accountability, critical literacy, and equity. By synthesizing scholarship on AI in higher education, writing-as-process pedagogy, and educational inequality, this article challenges the “replacement” logic that equates writing with text production and examines the limits of framing AI as a neutral assistant. It introduces Disclose and Defend Pedagogy, a design framework that organizes pedagogical responses to AI along two dimensions—openness and accountability—and incorporates equity-aware practices related to access and language. A practice-grounded, instructor-led case study from a political science course taught in Lebanon during Spring 2025 illustrates how disclosure requirements, process-oriented assessment, and classroom dialogue made AI use visible and accountable in a resource-constrained, crisis-affected setting while also highlighting the practical limits and implementation lessons of this approach. The study concludes that Global South contexts clarify what is at stake in AI integration: safeguarding responsibility, judgment, and voice in political science writing while equipping students to use and interrogate generative tools critically under unequal conditions of access.

Public Choice

Party discipline, representation, and the condorcet jury theorem
Yves KlÀy, Marco Portmann, David Stadelmann
Full text
How does district magnitude affect the quality of political representation? The Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) predicts that majority decisions improve with group size when members vote independently and are more likely than not to be correct. We test whether this aggregation mechanism applies to political decisions by examining whether larger legislative delegations better reflect constituent preferences. Nominal district magnitude often overstates the number of independent decision-makers because of party discipline. We therefore introduce effective district magnitude as a measure that more accurately captures the number of independently voting politicians within a constituency. Using 263 Swiss referenda (1992–2024) matched to parliamentary decisions, we find that the probability that a majority of a district’s delegation aligns with the preferences of its constituents increases with (effective) district magnitude, consistent with the CJT. The CJT aggregation mechanism closely predicts delegation-constituency congruence only for effective, not nominal, district magnitude. Our results provide empirical evidence that the CJT applies to representative democracies. They also show how party discipline limits the advantages of larger districts.
Ranked choice voting with different elimination procedures
Spencer Katzman, Keith L. Dougherty
Full text
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is one of the fastest-growing electoral reforms in the United States, yet few scholars have considered the degree to which RCV could be improved with a different elimination procedure. This paper examines RCV with three different elimination procedures: plurality elimination, negative plurality elimination, and Borda elimination. After some analytical observations, we examine how often RCV with each of these procedures violates three criteria separately: the Condorcet winner criterion, independence of eliminated alternatives, and monotonicity using data from RCV elections in the United States as well as simulated data from the Impartial Culture condition with some trailing rankings removed. Our results show that while there are few differences in US election data, Borda elimination consistently outperforms the traditional plurality elimination by a statistically significant amount in our simulations. Nevertheless, the magnitude of those difference are often small.

Research & Politics

Do you think David can win against Goliath? Evidence on factors affecting popular perceptions of victory in Taiwan against Chinese aggression
Ronan Tse-min Fu, Elaine I-lien Lee, Karyn Y. Kao
Full text
How do citizens form perceptions of victory in war under power asymmetry? Although scholars have extensively studied the objective determinants of war outcomes, we know far less about how citizens subjectively weigh these factors. We examine this question in Taiwan, a demanding test: extreme power asymmetry with China, an available American patron, and a politically engaged citizenry should maximize the pull of external considerations. A prevailing view holds that Taiwanese victory perceptions depend almost exclusively on American military intervention. We challenge this view using two conjoint experiments with over 2400 respondents, extending the conjoint approach to a domain it is well-suited to address but rarely studied. International military support exerts the strongest effect, yet domestic factors collectively carry comparable weight. Military readiness and public morale emerge as the second and third most influential determinants, and together with political unity, these domestic attributes account for over 40% of citizens’ decision calculus. Even where conditions should maximize the pull of external considerations, Taiwanese citizens do more than look outward. They evaluate their own society’s capacity to resist. These findings suggest that weaker states facing powerful adversaries possess meaningful levers for enhancing perceived resilience beyond securing external guarantees.