I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, July 29, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period July 22 to July 28, I found 33 new paper(s) in 12 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Correcting measurement error bias in conjoint survey experiments
Katherine Clayton, Yusaku Horiuchi, Aaron R. Kaufman, Gary King, Mayya Komisarchik
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Conjoint survey designs are spreading across the social sciences due to their unusual capacity to estimate many causal effects from a single randomized experiment. Unfortunately, by their ability to mirror complicated real‐world choices, these designs often generate substantial measurement error and thus bias. We replicate both the data collection and analysis from eight prominent conjoint studies, all of which closely reproduce published results, and reveal high levels of measurement error in all. We then discover a common empirical pattern in how measurement error appears in conjoint studies and, with it, introduce an easy‐to‐use statistical method to correct the bias. Along the way, we provide a much simpler and simultaneously more powerful approach to designing, organizing, understanding, and analyzing conjoint data analyses.

American Political Science Review

Still Instrumentally Inclusive
STUART J. TURNBULL-DUGARTE, ALBERTO LÓPEZ ORTEGA
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Do individuals in Western democracies shift their views on LGBT+ inclusion when exposed to opposition from Muslim out-groups? And is this “homonationalist” responsiveness stronger among anti-immigration individuals? Our article “Instrumentally inclusive [
]” addressed these questions using representative data from Britain (Study 1) and crowd-sourced data from Spain (Study 2). We revisit Study 2 in response to concerns about post-stratification weighting a convenience sample and erroneously inconsistent use of robust standard errors. Varying population reference parameters, weight caps, variance estimators, subgroup definitions, and covariate adjustments, we find strong support for the original findings. Neither reasonable alternative weighting schemes nor corrected variance estimators substantively change the results. In fact, the originally published point estimates are equal to or smaller than the median across alternative specifications. Consistent with the Article, we find that treatment increases support for LGBT+ inclusion in Spain, without consistent identifiable variation by immigration attitudes.

British Journal of Political Science

Thinly Veiled: The Use of Femonationalist Speech in European Parliaments
Jorge M. Fernandes, Bonnie M. Meguid, Ana Catalano Weeks
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Femonationalism – the use of gendered rhetoric to promote nativist anti-immigration views – is thought to be on the rise across Western European democracies, but scholars lack a systematic understanding of its prevalence across parties and countries, the conditions under which it appears, and the role gender plays in its use. To make progress on these questions, this study explores the use of femonationalism in legislative speeches from five Western European countries from 2009 to 2024. Combining dictionary methods with topic modeling, we find that far-right parties are most likely to use femonationalist rhetoric, increasing these appeals when party opponents threaten their issue distinctiveness by converging towards their anti-immigration policy position. Crucially, our analysis also highlights the role of gender in shaping femonationalist rhetoric: while the overall strategy is party-driven, men and women legislators emphasize different dimensions of femonationalism, with men focusing on security concerns and women invoking gender equality.

Electoral Studies

Who won the feed? TikTok campaigning of the alternative for Germany (AfD) and the left in Germany’s 2025 federal election
Victoria Palchikova, Julia Schulte-Cloos
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European Journal of Political Research

Beyond the ideal type: Investigating ‘mixed preferences’ for who should govern in nine European countries
Sebastien Rojon, Jean-Benoit Pilet, Paulina Pankowska, Davide Vittori, Emilien Paulis
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Noting widespread disenchantment with representative actors and institutions, a growing field of research has investigated public support for decision-making by alternative actors, such as ordinary citizens and independent experts. However, previous research has mainly focused on ideal-type models of government centred on a single actor, rather than considering that citizens may hold ‘mixed preferences’ for multiple actors. Through a latent profile analysis of survey responses to an established battery measuring preferences for who should govern, we identify six preference types that exist across nine European countries, though their prevalence varies from country to country. The results show that only a small minority of respondents support an ideal-type model, i.e., the representative democrats, while most favour a combination of actors. A sizeable share of respondents continues to support politicians but would like to see greater involvement from either citizens or experts. Finally, we identify three profiles that lack strong theoretical or empirical grounding in previous research but emerge across multiple countries and therefore merit further attention: stealth populists, responsible democrats, and moderates.

Party Politics

Divergence or nationalization? Voting across constituencies in four European countries
Valentin Pautonnier, Ruth Dassonneville, Richard Nadeau
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While the nationalization of elections is often viewed as a key characteristic of modern European democracies, the growing body of evidence on urban-rural electoral divergence suggests a reversal of nationalization, due to regional disparities in electoral outcomes. In this paper we study this issue by analyzing constituency-level election results from Denmark, England, France, and Germany over six decades. Using a divergence index, we uncover a trend toward increasing electoral divergence in election outcomes between constituencies in three of the four countries (not in Denmark), particularly since the 2000s. While we find evidence that non-mainstream parties and party system fragmentation contribute to this increase, even the results of mainstream parties have diverged more in recent elections. We also show that rural-urban electoral polarization is an important predictor of divergence which, alongside party system fragmentation and non-mainstream party strength, accounts for much of the temporal trend—suggesting that the growing structuring of party competition along the density gradient is a key driver of de-nationalization. Our findings challenge former analyses suggesting the inevitability of nationalization and underscore the importance of geographical divides in shaping European political landscapes.
Allocative claims and pork barrel politics
Marius SĂ€ltzer, Hauke Peters, Charlotte Keyßler
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Political strategies are shaped by electoral institutions and incentives. There is a large literature on pork barrel politics in single-member districts (SMD), but understanding the institutional effects that shape the incentives for pork requires comparison within the same system. The German Mixed-Member Electoral system offers an ideal institutional setup, but official data on pork is not available. Instead, we focus on the use of pork references as an electoral strategy, adapting credit-claiming theory to textual analysis of candidates’ social media posts. Using supervised machine learning on Facebook posts by candidates in the 2017 and 2021 federal election campaign period, we fine-tune a BERT classifier on 1000 manually coded posts to identify pork references (F1: 0.82). Our results demonstrate that incumbents, particularly district incumbents and those who outperform their national party’s vote share, are significantly more likely to emphasize pork in their communication. Moreover, candidates are more likely to use pork references if their competitors within the district employ similar strategies, and when electoral competition in the district is high. Our findings imply that particularistic logic exists beyond SMDs and can be shaped by the internal specificities of more complex incentive systems.
Technocracy or not, this is the question: can party system predict the number of technocrats in governments?
Alessandro Di Biagio
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In the last three decades, Europe has witnessed an increase in the number of technocrats – non-partisan, non-elected experts appointed on the basis of technical competence – in government. This paper examines whether structural characteristics of party systems predict the share of technocrats in cabinets across 30 European countries between 2000 and 2024. Building on theories of party competition, delegation, and representation, it investigates how systemic features of party democracy shape technocratic appointments. Using fractional regression models, the study tests the relationship between the share of technocrats and three key party-system variables: ideological polarization, party system fragmentation, and party institutionalization. The findings reveal that technocrats are significantly more prevalent where ideological distance between parties complicates bargaining and creates demand for neutral mediators who can bridge incompatible policy positions. Conversely, when more parties compete for portfolios, partisan actors crowd out non-partisan experts rather than delegating to them. Most importantly, in systems where parties possess stable organizations, coherent programmatic profiles, and deep societal roots, technocratic inclusion is significantly lower.

Political Behavior

Editorial Expression of Concern: Reframing Gendered Issues: Intersectional Identity Frames and Policy Agendas
Christopher F. Karpowitz, Jessica R. Preece
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Response to a Critique
Margaret Perez Brower
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Government Spending Shapes the Emergence of Women Candidates for Local Office
Tiffany D. Barnes, Patrick Cunha Silva, Mirya R. Holman
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Irregularities in Perez Brower (2024), “Reframing Gendered Issues: Intersectional Identity Frames and Policy Agendas”
Christopher Adolph, Caitlin Ainsley, Aslı Cansunar
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Partisanship and the Social Construction of Deservingness in the United States
Christopher Ellis, Christopher Faricy
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Editors’ Commentary: Reflections on Post-Publication Corrections
Christopher F. Karpowitz, Jessica R. Preece
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Political Geography

Generic title: Not a research article
Erratum to “Populism and territoriality” [Political Geography 131 (2026) 103617]
Hakkı TaƟ
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Digital marronage in the neoliberal university: Building a liberatory stack
Jenny E. Goldstein
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Probabilistic spaces: Terrains of resilience targeting in an age of generative AI
Alexander Campolo
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Between markets and regimes: Minority urban entrepreneurs' political voice in gentrifying neighborhoods across diverse political-geographic contexts
Yael Shmaryahu-Yeshurun
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Refuturing in the ruins: Higher education after resilience targeting
Sarah Elwood
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Inscribing the Dutch imperial geopolitical order: The colonial geography of Louis van Vuuren (1873-1951)
Sophie Bijleveld, Michiel van Meeteren
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Fostering refugee receptivity through perspective taking: Evidence from Thailand
Enze Han, Sirada Khemanitthathai, Xiaojun Li
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Joyful education: Care-fully resisting resilience targeting
Kevin Grove
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The regime of bordering: Borderwork, mobility, and relational state power in the Greek–Turkish borderlands
Zeynep KaƟlı
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Resilience targeting and the war on pluralist democracy
Kevin Grove
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Locating critical AI geopolitics
Klaus Dodds, James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon
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Political Psychology

More than a partisan pandemic: Worldview and COVID ‐19 response in the United States
Marc J. Hetherington, Andrew M. Engelhardt, Isaac D. Mehlhaff
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As the COVID‐19 pandemic unfolded, public responses increasingly divided along political lines: Democrats tended to support policies and behaviors recommended by public health experts and Republicans tended to oppose them. We argue that exclusively party‐based explanations for these patterns are incomplete. Instead, we call attention to people's philosophy about life—their “worldview”—as an important force behind their pandemic responses. We posit that citizens use beliefs derived from interactions with their everyday life to inform their affinities and preferences when analogous matters enter the political realm. Using original cross‐sectional and panel survey data gathered over the course of the pandemic, we theorize and empirically validate a multidimensional measure of worldview. We show that worldview is a coherent, belief‐system‐like entity that remained stable during the pandemic, suggesting its centrality in mass responses to uncertain and novel stimuli. We then show that even before strong party cues emerged, worldview structured Americans' reactions to COVID‐19 and constrained the positions parties could take. Worldview's influence was both direct and indirect, channeled through its relationship with partisan preference. While partisanship is a potent force in political belief systems, much of its effect, we suggest, comes from its association with people's general philosophy about life.
Identity threat, personal values, and political attitudes: Evidence from a large‐scale survey across the European Union
Colin R. Kuehnhanss, Mario Scharfbillig
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In political contexts, identities are typically based on shared values. Populist rhetoric often utilizes real and perceived threats to evoke such identities, especially on the far right. Using dedicated items in a survey covering all 27 EU Member States ( N = 27,032), we present evidence on the understudied link between perceived identity threat and values, reflecting foundational motivations of people, as well as downstream political attitudes. At the EU level, personal values related to anxiety avoidance correlate positively with perceived identity threat, whereas growth‐focused values correlate negatively. The positive relationship between identity threat and values focusing on increasing one's self‐efficacy and status is especially pronounced, suggesting compensatory motivational processes. National‐level analysis reveals a more nuanced picture. Perceived identity threat correlates strongly with lower support for liberal policies. This result is relatively homogenous across the EU‐27 and holds when controlling for personal values. Overall, the findings resonate with populist rhetoric focusing on in‐groups and status while attacking liberal policies and universalist values. Conversely, the findings offer hope that policies and communication reducing identity threat may reinforce support for liberal policies and aligned values.
Measuring affective polarization: Matching concepts to measures
James N. Druckman, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky, John Barry Ryan
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Affective polarization is the extent to which partisans like their own party relative to their dislike of opposing parties. High levels of affective polarization in the United States and many other countries have prompted widespread scholarly interest and practical concern. Yet, despite nearly 15 years of scholarship, significant uncertainty remains about how best to measure affective polarization. We offer a comprehensive review focused on the measurement of affective polarization, underscoring how seemingly innocuous choices can yield substantially different results. These include the target of evaluation (e.g., engaged ideologues, ordinary voters), the dimensions of evaluation (e.g., liking/disliking, moralization), the measurement context (e.g., whether respondents are interviewed by an interviewer or complete surveys independently) and the political context (e.g., the power relationship between parties). We conclude that the next generation of inquiry will need to more carefully align measures of affective polarization with specific research questions.
Beyond prejudice reduction: Personal and civic effects of intergroup contact among marginalized youth in Northern Ireland
Danielle L. Blaylock, Patrick F. Kotzur, Alexander W. O'Donnell, Rhiannon N. Turner, Stephanie Burns, Laura K. Taylor, Linda R. Tropp
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Intergroup contact reduces prejudice, but its potential to foster broader personal and societal change remains understudied. We address these gaps by examining a large‐scale peacebuilding intervention (PEACE4Youth) among marginalized youth in post‐conflict Northern Ireland. Using latent growth curve modeling across three waves, we demonstrate that increased intergroup contact is associated with improvements not only in youth's outgroup attitudes but also in their self‐esteem, leadership skills, and civic engagement. Youth with steeper contact gains showed the strongest growth across all domains, supporting intergroup contact as a mechanism for multidimensional change. While effects emerged across Catholic and Protestant youth, baseline differences underscore the role of pre‐existing disparities. These findings extend contact theory by empirically linking contact to personal and societal development, redefining it as a tool not only for harmony but also for empowering individuals to transform divided societies.

Political Science Research and Methods

Benchmarking in public updating of economic perceptions
Derek A. Epp, Christopher Wlezien
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How do people respond to new information about social conditions? For example, does an improvement always lead people to say things are “better”? We argue that people update their views differently depending on whether preexisting perceptions are positive or negative, meaning equivalent changes in conditions can elicit different public reactions. To test this possibility, we update a classic model of aggregate public responsiveness to economic conditions by including recent public perceptions as a moderator variable. This reveals a substantial source of heterogeneity: changes in the economy matter either a great deal for public perceptions or not at all, depending on the prior levels of those perceptions. The results imply that updates of public perceptions are benchmarked to the recent past.

Public Choice

The long decline of trust in democratic institutions
Sam Peltzman
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I document declining trust in the Executive and Legislative branches of the US federal government from 1972 onwards. Data are from General Social Survey questions asking whether respondents “have a great deal”, “only some,” or “hardly any” confidence “in those running these institutions”. Net confidence (percentage difference between “great deal” and “hardly any”) in the two branches has declined continually from nearly zero in the early 1970s, accelerating substantially from the 1990s on. Different processes drive this decline for each branch. Partisan and ideological opponents of the President increasingly distrust the incumbent while supporters are roughly neutral. Trust in the US Congress has been eroding more uniformly across all parties and ideologies. In recent years net confidence has been around -30 for the Executive and -45 for Congress. This profound distrust (10 times as many have hardly any v a great deal of confidence in Congress) is widely shared across main socio-demographics, such as age, gender, income, etc., though the decline is steeper for older and white respondents. The decline is also greater than for other institutions, including until recently the third branch (Supreme Court). I close by discussing implications for research in public choice.
Beyond free riding or free racing: a framework for understanding subnational tax policy interdependence
Allyson L. Benton
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Subnational governments operating under the same federal fiscal arrangements often make markedly different tax policy choices. Research explains this variation through vertical relationships between subnational and national governments, horizontal relationships among subnational governments, or both, and along either economic or political logics. This study offers a unifying analytical framework integrating these dimensions and logics to help scholars locate their research within the wider literature, identify adjacent processes that may interact with or confound their focal mechanisms, and specify appropriate empirical strategies. I illustrate the framework’s value through analysis of Mexico’s state vehicle ownership tax (2008–2024). Situating the analysis within the framework yields three competing arguments about how horizontal economic and political logics interact. Spatio-temporal analysis shows that partisan competition, not geographic proximity, is the primary channel of horizontal tax policy interdependence. This partisan effect is conditional on neighbors’ tax activity, but in an unexpected way: it is strongest where neighboring states hold their taxes steady and weakest where they are cutting most heavily. The case demonstrates the framework’s usefulness in revealing new substantive findings and prompting new theoretical questions.
Allocating faculty compute budgets
Joshua S. Gans
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Research & Politics

War propaganda without misinformation? Normative framing and side-taking in war
Kolby Hanson, Angelina Kunitskaia
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How do citizens of third-party states form sympathies in foreign wars? Most prior work on wartime public opinion focuses on the effects of information: material costs, elite assessments, and characteristics of combatants. Yet wartime coverage must also make choices about how to frame a conflict, separate from endorsements or facts. For example, a military intervention might be introduced in the context of one state’s sovereignty or the other state’s quest to restore democracy, even holding the facts constant. We argue that these normative frames have a large impact on public sympathy and support, especially in third-party publics, for whom material costs may be secondary considerations and loyalties may be open to debate. We demonstrate these effects with two vignette experiments among a representative sample of 1200 American adults. Framing decisions swayed respondents’ moral judgments and sympathy by 40–65 percentage points, and support for military aid by 20–30 percentage points. These effects were large and consistent regardless of the characteristics of warring parties, respondents’ foreign policy views, or their attitudes on current events such as the wars in Gaza or Ukraine.