I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, October 21, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period October 14 to October 20, I found 45 new paper(s) in 13 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Spatiality of preemptive coercion: How autocrats demolish informal settlements for political control
Shiqi Ma
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Why do authorities demolish informal settlements in metropolises? The social sciences have a long tradition of addressing this issue through the lens of economic development or welfare provision. I instead propose a theory of political control. Autocrats adopt demolition as a preemptive and coercive tool to remove communities substantively and symbolically less legible to them, thereby ensuring societal compliance and restoring visual order. Empirically, I compile a unique dataset of 320 demolished and undemolished informal settlements in Beijing between 2017 and 2018, based on satellite imagery, digital street views, and fieldwork. The results indicate that the low legibility of informal settlements to authorities correlates with a greater likelihood of demolition. This paper contributes to the social science literature by connecting legibility politics with urban governance. It also introduces a spatial perspective and leverages novel data sources to deepen our understanding of preemptive coercion under authoritarianism.

American Political Science Review

On Liberalism’s Global Career: Dadabhai Naoroji and Representative Government
TEJAS PARASHER
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This article reconsiders the relationship between the globalization of political liberalism and the globalization of political equality. Departing from interpretations of liberal theories of rights and representation as egalitarian or democratic, the article reconstructs an elitist paradigm of liberal representative government from the colonial world. It does so by offering a new reading of the thought of Indian political leader Dadabhai Naoroji. It recovers Naoroji’s overlooked commentary on political representation and imperial reform. I show that Naoroji drew upon analyses made by the first generation of Indian liberal thinkers about imperial political economy and mass-elite relations and used these arguments to formulate a distinctive model of electoral politics as a form of hierarchical tutelage. The recovery of Naoroji’s theory illustrates the deep tensions between representation and mass politics that marked liberalism’s global circulation.
The Ambiguities of Ownership and Class: A Reply to Nicholas Vrousalis
CHIARA CORDELLI
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The article replies to Nicholas Vrousalis’s attempt to rescue radical republicanism from my critique that it fails on three counts: its non-contingency, domination, and structural injustice theses. Central to my response are the claims that (i) capitalist power cannot be reduced to legal ownership of the means of production, as the process of capitalization is constitutive of capital; (ii) neither neo-republican nor Kantian notions of domination adequately capture what is inherently wrong with capitalism, and (iii) the concept of “class domination” remains theoretically puzzling. I then defend an alienation-centered critique: capitalism’s mode of investment subjects citizens to an impersonal and anarchical form of governance, which, by being necessarily alienating, contradicts democratic self-determination. Overall, this critique forms the core of a “political, political theory of capitalism” and grounds the case for a specific kind of democratic socialism—socialism as reconciliation—which is more demanding than both republican and liberal socialisms.

Electoral Studies

Spillover effects of a far-left populist's victory: Revisiting the 1998 Venezuela election
Ka Ming Chan
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Democracy in the crossfire: The electoral fallout of extremist political violence
Lamprini Rori, Costas Roumanias, Constantine Boussalis
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Polarization, crises, and accountability: The role of conditional partisan bias in economic perceptions
Ivån Sånchez-Marañón
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European Journal of Political Research

Digital turnout mobilization: Enhancing voter turnout with digital messaging
Kasper M. Hansen, Esther EjrnĂŠs Bastholm
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Voter turnout is declining across Europe, raising concerns about democratic legitimacy and prompting a search for effective mobilization strategies. The new digital era has transformed the landscape for political communication, making it possible to mobilize voters through direct digital messages. These messages have proven to be a low-cost and easily scalable tool, capable of reaching millions of voters efficiently and with broad coverage. We synthesize existing evidence through a comprehensive meta-analysis of voter mobilization experiments from the past decade that apply digital messages as a Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) tool. The analysis assesses the overall effectiveness of digital messaging in increasing turnout, with particular attention to its potential for engaging marginalized groups and promoting participatory equality. Second, we present results from a new population-wide GOTV experiment conducted during the 2024 European Parliament election in Denmark – the first to apply digital messages to the entire electorate. The intervention increased turnout by 0.5 percentage points. By using year-of-birth bins to estimate effects across all age cohorts and disaggregating the immigrant category into Western and non-Western subpopulations, we can examine previously unexplored in-depth heterogeneous effects. We find that digital messages consistently have positive effects on turnout, including among marginalized voters.

Journal of Experimental Political Science

Perceiving Politics: Considering the Political Categorization of Faces
Thomas Bergeron, Blake Lee-Withing, Natasha Goel
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Categorizing people into groups is a fundamentally human trait, but we know very little about how people assign political identities to strangers. Across two innovative survey experiments, we consider how people politically categorize others according to a single source of information: faces. We find that displays of emotions, particularly negative emotions, predict the political sorting of strangers. Faces featuring negative emotions are categorized as out-partisans, whereas faces exhibiting happiness are categorized as co-partisans.

Party Politics

Caught in the crossfire: electoral spillover effects of accommodating the radical right
Jasmin Rath, Lukas Hetzer, Jan Berz, L. Constantin Wurthmann, Sarah Wagner
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Mainstream parties face mounting pressure from radical right challengers. While existing research highlights the electoral costs of accommodating the radical right, we know less about how this decision affects potential coalition partners. When mainstream parties accommodate, this generates spillover effects for potential coalition parties that may be perceived as complicit in legitimising the radical right. We test this mechanism in Germany, exploiting an Unexpected Event during Survey Design: the CDU/CSU’s announcement of tougher migration policy and signaled openness to AfD support. We examine how initial supporters of the CDU/CSU’s potential coalition partners changed their vote intentions in response. We find that the event increased switching from the SPD to The Left by approximately three percentage points, with a similarly directed but statistically insignificant effect for the Greens. These results demonstrate that accommodating the radical right affects not only the accommodating party itself, but the broader coalition landscape in multi-party democracies.
Electoral reforms rejected: Partisan cues in an anti-party context
Todd Donovan, Caroline Tolbert, Olive Kuester
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Proposals to change how parties functioned in elections appeared on several American states’ ballots in 2024, often bundling nonpartisan primaries (NPPs) with ranked choice voting (RCV). Given the complexity of the proposals, voters faced a difficult task and may have relied on cues from campaigns when voting. We conducted a post-election survey to measure recalled exposure to campaigns and cues and model the role of cues in voting on these proposals. We find voters made choices consistent with partisan cues they report being exposed to. Democrats recalling Democratic elites were in favor were more supportive. Republicans who recalled a co-partisan elite being opposed were more likely to be opposed. We also used a survey experiment that manipulated exposure to partisan cues to test for effects of cues on support for NPPs and found results that corroborate what we observed with our self-reported survey data. Thus, even in an environment of mass anti-party sentiment, we find rules changes affecting parties may be difficult to pass via ballot measures when there is insufficient support among dominant party elites.

Political Analysis

The Synthetic Imputation Approach: Using LLMs to Generate Synthetic Texts for Underrepresented Categories in Supervised Classification Tasks
Joan C. Timoneda
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Annotated text data are central to many empirical applications in political science, yet many annotation tasks involve categories that are sparsely populated. These low- N categories pose problems for both encoder-only and decoder-only (generative) Transformer large language models (LLMs), leading to low performance, biased evaluation and measurement error in downstream analyses. This article introduces the synthetic imputation approach, a targeted method for expanding sparse categories while remaining consistent with the category-defining content of the human-coded examples. The approach uses a generative LLM to produce additional texts for underrepresented categories by conditioning on small, rotating subsets of human-coded examples. Rather than paraphrasing or replacing the original data, synthetic imputation adds informative variation only where data are thin. I evaluate the approach using both encoder-only and decoder-only LLM classifiers across multiple political science applications. The results show that synthetic imputation substantially improves performance and evaluation stability in sparse settings, recovering full-sample performance once a modest number of true observations is available, with limited and predictable overfitting at very low levels of N .

Political Behavior

Do Appeals to the Diaspora Affect their Attachment to the Homeland? Findings from Jewish-Americans before and during the Israel-Hamas War
Yehonatan Abramson, Anil Menon, Alon Yakter
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Due to the growing importance of diasporas in contemporary geopolitics, many states seek to cultivate diasporic attachment and encourage diaspora mobilization using strategic narratives. Are such appeals effective? We report results from a pre-registered two-wave survey experiment conducted among Jewish Americans before and during the Israel-Hamas war. Our intervention assesses the impact of three common appeals identified by prior work: threats to the homeland, shared historical memory, and discrimination in the diaspora’s country of residence. We find that none of these appeals influenced Jewish-Americans’ attachment to, support for, or intent to mobilize for Israel, even during a war in the “homeland.” Instead, baseline differences in these outcomes reflect deep-seated generational, denominational, and partisan cleavages within the Jewish American community. These findings suggest that intra-diaspora fragmentation and long-standing views of the “homeland” might dominate short-term rhetorical interventions. Consequently, strategic frames deployed by kin states and political animators may be less effective on diaspora audiences than intended.
Relational Clientelism, Information Processing, and Accountability
Miquel Pellicer, Eva Wegner
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Research shows that providing information on incumbent programmatic performance often has limited impact on citizen attitudes towards incumbents, even if citizens tend to care strongly about corruption and service delivery. We use a survey experiment in South Africa and Tunisia to study if relational clientelism, a type of clientelism often valued by clients, plays a role in this puzzle. We present respondents with a radiocast that varies the profile of the politician (clientelistic vs. neutral) and his performance in service delivery and corruption (good vs. bad). We find that, when clientelistic politicians are valued, performance information on them matters less than for neutral politicians. The effect appears to operate via motivated reasoning: Respondents are less likely to process negative performance information when exposed to the clientelistic profile. Our findings suggest that, in certain contexts, relational clientelism is a valued candidate characteristic that can offset bad programmatic performance akin to co-partisanship or co-ethnicity.
Conversation Without Conversion: Evidence from Cross-Partisan Interactions on a Mobile Chat Platform
Diana Jordan
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Partisan Wishful Thinking in Polarized Times
Seth Warner
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Culture Holds us Together: Confucian Clan Culture and Collective Actions in China’s Land Expropriation
Shenghua Lu, Hui Wang
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Voice After Exit: the Prioritization of Homeland-Facing Foreign Policy Among the Hong Kong Diaspora
Maggie Shum, Eddy S. F. Yeung, Ka Ming Chan, Sanho Chung, Athena Tong, Sam Yip
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Citizens around the world have migrated under the shadow of authoritarianism, and many are increasingly acquiring political and voting rights in their host countries. Yet we know little about the content of their foreign-policy preferences or the salience with which they prioritize homeland-facing issues relative to domestic concerns. We argue that experiences of authoritarian rule prior to migration generate anti-regime sentiments among diasporas, inclining them toward hawkish foreign-policy positions toward the homeland regime. These preferences heighten the salience of homeland-facing foreign policy, even relative to highly consequential domestic issues. We test this argument with harmonized candidate-choice experiments administered to an original sample of Hong Kong diasporas in four host countries (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We find that respondents strongly preferred candidates advocating hawkish economic and geopolitical policies against China. These foreign-policy positions were consistently prioritized over salient domestic issues such as healthcare and the economy, and this structure of preferences held across subgroups with varying degrees of host-country integration and homeland ties. Our findings provide novel experimental evidence that diasporas continue to care intensely about and voice on behalf of their homeland even after exit.
Daughters and Political Preferences of Politicians: A Preregistered Prospective Study on Swedish Politicians
Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, Elin Naurin, Patrik Öhberg
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Important studies have suggested that politicians become more liberal by having daughters, but more recent work has been unable to replicate this result. It is therefore essential to further clarify how politicians’ family situations affect their policy making in different contexts, and in particular when it comes to gender-related policies. We provide a unique test based on prospective data collection on Swedish politicians based on a pre-analysis plan strictly followed in all analyses and tests. Data is collected in two surveys implemented after the 2022 general parliamentary election in Sweden on members of parliament and candidates in the parliamentary election (n=1,147 complete responders are included in our analyses). In our primary hypotheses, we test whether having daughters is associated with more left-leaning political preferences, a stronger preference for female-favoring policies, and a weaker preference for male-favoring policies. We find no evidence of an effect on left-leaning political preferences or female-favoring policies. These results do not support the original work on this topic but are in line with the more recent null results. We also find suggestive evidence (p<0.05) that having daughters is associated with a weaker preference for male-favoring policies. As the effects of having daughters on male-favoring policies have not been explored earlier, this opens up an interesting avenue to investigate in future studies.
Misperceptions of Male Bias Against Female Candidates: An Obstacle to Women’s Political Representation?
Carolyn Barnett, Alexandra Blackman, Marwa Shalaby
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Political Geography

Leaking energy externalities: exploring Mozambique-EU relations within the global energy market
Ruy Llera Blanes, Ana Carolina Rodrigues, Euclides Gonçalves
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Alternative energy nationalisms: Energy futures on display at Expo mega-events
Natalie Koch, Saulesh Yessenova
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Banal assimilation and minority politics in northern Sweden
Katrina Hirvonen
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Piecing the ‘Land puzzle’: The invisible labours of India's national land digitalisation initiative
Ayona Datta, Neha Gupta
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Political Psychology

From misogyny to mobilization: Hostile sexism and conflictual online discussions indirectly predict men's rights activism via heightened identification as a men's rights supporter
Morgana Lizzio‐Wilson, Emma F. Thomas, Cassandra M. Quarisa, Anna C. Barron, Danny Osborne
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Although sexism may serve as a gateway into the men's rights movement, few studies have examined group processes in online environments that fuel this reactionary movement. We address this gap by examining whether interacting with like‐minded others fosters an emergent social identity as a “men's rights supporter” among sexist men; and whether identification predicts willingness to engage in reactionary actions undermining gender equality. Across two studies ( N s = 443, 755), men completed a hostile sexism measure and read about the perceived impacts of feminism on men. Participants then either discussed whether feminism negatively impacts men in an online chatroom (group deliberation) or reflected individually (individual deliberation). Hostile sexism predicted identification as a men's rights supporter, and this link was stronger in the group deliberation condition. In turn, identification predicted greater reactionary action intentions. Unexpectedly, these effects emerged only among men who indicated that their group was unsure about the impact of feminism after the discussion. A post‐hoc content analysis of the pooled chat logs revealed that these men engaged in discussions marked by conflict and disagreement, suggesting that identification with the movement emerged through dissent rather than consensus. These findings highlight complex social dynamics underpinning engagement with the men's rights movement.
Egotropic and sociotropic negativity bias in social policy reform preferences
Tijs Laenen, Elise Aerts
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Although negativity bias is widely documented in political psychology, evidence is far more mixed when it comes to voters' preferences for social policy reform, particularly when they are confronted with trade‐offs between personal and societal outcomes. Building on existing theories of political communication, this article examines how voters evaluate policy reforms when considering realistic information about potential losses and gains. Empirically, we analyze a simu‐survey experiment examining how voters update their reform preferences in response to information derived from microsimulation modeling about the predicted effects of policy reform on their pocketbook and on the poverty level. The results show that negative information weighs more heavily than positive information in shaping reform preferences at both the egotropic and sociotropic levels. In the case of competing information, the effects are asymmetric: Positive pocketbook information tends to be neutralized by negative poverty information, whereas negative pocketbook information outweighs positive poverty information. However, egotropic negativity bias is most pronounced for smaller pocketbook losses, which are more likely to violate voters' prior expectations than larger losses. Consistent with this pattern, expectation violations—rather than differences in recall of, or trust in, information—seems the primary mechanism underlying negativity bias in policy preferences.
Between reconciliation and peace making and brutalization: The Israeli case
Daniel Bar‐Tal
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This article examines the relationship between peacemaking, reconciliation, and brutalization in violent conflicts. It argues that these processes are deeply interconnected: effective peacemaking and reconciliation can interrupt or reverse brutalization, whereas unsuccessful or incomplete peacemaking may allow brutalization to persist, deepen, and become normalized, even alongside formal reconciliation initiatives. This article is organized into two parts. The first one reviews the scholarly literature on peacemaking, reconciliation, and brutalization. It examines each process separately. Then proposes an analytical model that explains the emergence, escalation, and persistence of brutalization. Finally, it conceptualizes its relationship with peacemaking and reconciliation. The second part applies this model to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, focusing on Israeli Jewish society in its confrontation with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This case study serves to illustrate the model and assess its explanatory value. Beyond examining peacemaking and reconciliation, the article's primary objective is to develop a comprehensive conceptualization of brutalization by defining its nature, identifying its underlying psychological and social mechanisms, and analyzing its antecedents and consequences for collective cognition, emotions, behavior, and norms.
A blind spot for dominance? Why liberals underestimate dominant leaders more than conservatives
Danbee Chon, Hemant Kakkar
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The success of dominance‐oriented leaders often evokes surprise and dismay. We offer a psychological explanation beyond partisan reasoning, positing a systematic tendency among liberals to underestimate the appeal and efficacy of such leaders compared with conservatives. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we propose that liberals' heightened emphasis on harm avoidance and fairness explains their reduced liking for dominance‐oriented leaders, and that this reduced likability helps explain why they underestimate these leaders' prospects of success more than conservatives do. We test our predictions across multiple studies, including both political and organizational contexts, demonstrating that political liberals consistently perceive dominance‐oriented leaders as less likely to succeed than conservatives do—even when the leader's political affiliation is irrelevant, unknown, or aligned with their own. We conclude our investigation by suggesting that these diminished expectations from liberals might paradoxically enhance the success trajectories of dominant leaders.
Solidarity between U.S. people of color: Synthesizing evidence, highlighting challenges, and proposing actionable solutions
Efrén Pérez
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Mounting research establishes that solidarity between U.S. people of color (PoC) is triggered when a racially stigmatized ingroup believes they are discriminated similarly to another outgroup based on their alleged inferiority or foreignness . This heightened solidarity then produces political opinions and behaviors that benefit stigmatized outgroups who are not one's own—for example, Black adults become more pro‐Latino, Asian adults become more pro‐Black, and Latino adults become more pro‐Asian. This essay organizes, discusses, and synthesizes the overflowing evidence on this solidarity mechanism, paying special attention to its generality across stigmatized groups and political settings. The essay then highlights major pending challenges and opportunities to learn more about U.S. inter‐minority solidarity, emphasizing rival explanations, complementary pathways, and methodological pluralism. In parallel, this latter discussion illustrates the advantages of creating greater conceptual and theoretical synergy with comparativist research on ethnic identities and political conflict in nations across sub‐Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Western Europe. Finally, the article outlines new research agendas to deepen our understanding about U.S. inter‐minority politics, paying special attention to intra‐ group processes that regulate solidarity's vitality in an uncertain, complex, and threatening polity.
A secondary bond: Why economic threats boost compensatory preference for government control in China
Ronghua Xu, Yi Ding, Yongyu Guo, Jan‐Willem van Prooijen
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Compensatory control theory suggests that threats to personal control increase the desire for external control. Yet, despite the growing salience of global economic instability—amplified by trade conflicts, protectionist policies, and heightened geopolitical tensions—empirical research has rarely examined this dynamic in the context of economic threats. Moreover, the direct psychological consequences of endorsing external control—whether it ultimately enhances or diminishes personal control—remain largely unexplored. Addressing both gaps, the present research focuses on the socio‐political context of China to investigate whether individuals facing economic threats and diminished personal control show increased preference for government control, a particularly powerful and salient external source of control in Chinese society. Across studies, the results showed a positive relationship between perceived economic threats and preference for government control, mediated by a reduction in personal control (Studies 1–3). Furthermore, we found that endorsement of government control helped enhance, rather than undermine, personal control (Studies 4 and 5). These findings suggest that government control serves as a compensatory source of control in response to economic threats.

Political Science Research and Methods

Love of variety? An experimental study of heterogeneous responses to foreign brands in the marketplace
Valentina Gonzalez-Rostani, Jude C. Hays
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Do everyday encounters with foreign brands shape political attitudes? We argue that brand origin cues activate national identities, producing different responses among nationalists and cosmopolitans. In an online shopping experiment, U.S. participants were randomly assigned to compare American (control), European, or Asian (treatment) sport utility vehicles without explicit mention of brand origin. Exposure to foreign brands increased opposition to trade and immigration and support for Donald Trump among nationalists. Cosmopolitans generally showed little change. These effects are not reducible to partisanship, revealing within-coalition divides among Republicans and among Democrats and Independents. Our findings show that subtle consumer experiences spill over into politics, creating a bottom-up channel of polarization that links nationalism and populism to support for neomercantilist and nativist policies.
Private-sector support for programmatic candidates: evidence from a Senegalese election
Abhit Bhandari, Lucas Borba, Jessica Gottlieb
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Demand for clientelism in low-income countries distorts political incentives and constrains growth. Informal workers are seen as a strong clientelist constituency because they rely on forbearance and targeted benefits, yet they also constitute an electoral bloc that could coordinate in support of beneficial programmatic policies. We examine whether—and how—such demand for clientelism can be attenuated. We implement an information experiment with firm owners ahead of Senegal’s 2022 local elections, during which an upstart political faction campaigned on programmatic reform. Reminding informal workers of their coordination capacity reduced engagement with dominant clientelistic networks. This shift did not translate into support for programmatic alternatives but into political disengagement. Demand for clientelism can be mitigated, but programmatic mobilization remains a challenge.

PS: Political Science & Politics

A District-Level Forecast of the 2026 U.S. House of Representatives Midterm Elections
Peter K. Enns, Leigh Farah, Claudia L. Miner, Thomas Gareau-Paquette
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Citizen forecasts and the 2026 us congressional midterm elections: Do americans still expect the iron law to hold?
Debra Lynn Leiter, Michael L Lewis-Beck, Mary Stegmaier
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How Model Choice Obscures Forecast Uncertainty: The Rashomon Effect and the 2026 Senate
Jack T. Rametta, Christopher Hare
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Forecasting 2026 Congressional Control: A Comparison of IEM and Kalshi Prediction Markets
Thomas Gruca, Thomas A. Rietz
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Political Economy Forecasts: The 2026 Midterms
Charles P. Tien, Michael S. Lewis-Beck
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Polling Without People: Can Silicon Samples of CASM-Inspired LLM Personae Mimic Human Respondents in Pre-Election Polling?
Danielius Jonaitis, Brendan Corcoran, Binam Poudyal, Alexandra Roskam, Ava Alan Ali, Shriya Agrawal, Raymond Duch, Roberto Cerina
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Updating the Fundamentals: Forecasting the 2026 Midterm Election Post-Gallup
Olivia B. Quinn, Amanda Brush, Eric R. A. N. Smith
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Demslide or republican resilience? A political history forecast of the 2026 us congressional elections
Stephen Quinlan, Michael Lewis Beck
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Introduction to Forecasting the 2026 US Midterm Elections Special Issue at PS: Political Science & Politics
John Kenny, Debra Lynn Leiter
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The Role of Identity-Related Issues in Partisan Shifts Among White Americans, 2016–2020
Regina Branton, Meredith Walsh Niezgoda
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During the 2020 US presidential election, identity-related issues—immigration, racial justice, and white identity—were central to public discourse. This study examines how these issues shaped shifts in partisanship among white Americans who changed their affiliation from 2016 to 2020. Using American National Election Study panel data, we analyze how attitudes toward immigration, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and white identity relate to Democratic Party, Republican Party, and Independent affiliations. We find that stronger white identity and restrictive immigration views increased the likelihood of switching to the Republican Party, whereas support for BLM increased the likelihood of identifying as a Democrat. These findings suggest identity-related issues played a key role in reshaping partisan alignments, especially in strengthening the Republican Party’s identity-based appeal.
Forecasting the US Midterm Congressional Elections Without Poll Data
Paul F. Whiteley
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The Journal of Politics

The Climate Tribunate. Using conflict-focused democratic innovation to address the climate crisis
Janosch Prinz, Manon Westphal
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The Left Misunderstood: How Voters’ Perceptions of What Matters to the Left Benefit the Right
Jonne Kamphorst
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The Distinctive Nature of Non-Partisanship: How Independents Pursue and Prioritize Political Information
Stuart Perrett, Delia Baldassarri
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