I checked 18 political science journals on Tuesday, April 07, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period March 31 to April 06, I found 96 new paper(s) in 13 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

What exploitation is
Benjamin Ferguson, Peter Hans Matthews, David Ronayne, Roberto Veneziani
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We experimentally elicit views of what exploitation is from over 2,000 subjects. Our experimental design does not test existing theories of exploitation. Rather, it focuses on more fundamental properties that are the building blocks for these theories. We find, first, that exploitation is not a vacuous concept: Not all economic interactions are deemed exploitative. Second, contrary to several of the major approaches in the literature, both inequalities in the distribution of economic gains and asymmetric power relations contribute to exploitative relations. What matters most is the interaction of power and inequality: The effect of both elements together is significantly greater than the sum of each on their own. Finally, and perhaps remarkably, we found no major differences in exploitation ascriptions between experts and lay subjects. These findings have implications for the ethics of employment contracts, particularly in the context of sweatshop labor.

American Political Science Review

Coethnics Covote in Africa: Studying Electoral Cleavages with a Covoting Regression Model
CARL MÜLLER-CREPON, NILS-CHRISTIAN BORMANN
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Ethnicity is an important cleavage in Africa, yet its influence on voting is contested. Selection biases from restricted choice sets complicate micro-level analyses, while ecological inferences and unobserved confounders hamper meso and macro-level approaches. Our new Covoting Regression (CVR) tackles several of these challenges. It estimates the effect of coethnicity on the probability that pairs of voters covote for the same party while conditioning on other shared characteristics. Thereby, CVR mirrors the micro-foundations of aggregate indicators such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index. We analyze Afrobarometer surveys from 28 countries and estimate that coethnicity increases covoting intentions between respondents by 17 percentage points. Politically relevant groups and covoting for ethnic parties drive this estimate, which is consistent across institutionally diverse countries and at least four times larger than that of other cleavages. The CVR addresses key issues in studying electoral consequences of socio-economic cleavages and bridges gaps between levels of analysis.
State-Building in the City: An Experiment in Civilian Alternatives to Policing
CHRISTOPHER BLATTMAN, GUSTAVO DUNCAN, BENJAMIN LESSING, SANTIAGO TOBÓN
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We helped design and evaluate a statebuilding intervention in Medellín, Colombia. The municipal government dramatically intensified nonpolice state presence in 40 neighborhoods over 20 months. On average, perceptions of security and legitimacy changed negligibly, suggesting that returns to statebuilding investments are generally low, at least within electoral cycles. Prespecified heterogeneity analysis, however, reveals significant increases in security and legitimacy where state governance began relatively higher, while impacts were null or possibly negative where it began lower. This suggests increasing rather than diminishing returns to statebuilding. The divergence apparently resulted from city officials under-delivering in initially lower-governance sectors. One reason might be “start-up costs” in statebuilding. Alternatively, both initial state penetration and incentives to implement new programs might depend on neighborhoods’ ability to hold agencies accountable. Whatever their source, increasing returns could drive persistent “neglect traps”—channeling political attention and investment to areas where state penetration is already robust, reinforcing existing disparities.
Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and Causal Mechanisms
JIAWEI FU, TARA SLOUGH
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The credibility revolution advances the use of research designs that permit the identification and estimation of causal effects. However, understanding which mechanisms produce measured causal effects remains a challenge. The dominant current approach to the quantitative evaluation of mechanisms relies on the detection of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) with respect to pretreatment covariates. This article develops a framework to understand when the existence of such HTEs can support inferences about the activation of a mechanism. We show first that this design cannot provide evidence of mechanism activation without additional, generally implicit, exclusion assumptions. Further, even when these assumptions are satisfied, the presence of HTEs supports the inference that the mechanism is active but the absence of HTEs is generally uninformative about mechanism activation. We provide novel guidance for interpretation and research design in light of these findings.

British Journal of Political Science

Strategic Interdependence: Using Internet Outage Data to Study How Combatants Manage Collective Institutions During War
Nadiya Kostyuk, Jon Lindsay, Eunji Emily Kim, Aniket Anand, Zachary Bischof, Amanda Meng, Alberto Dainotti
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This article challenges the view that war and interdependence are inherently incompatible by examining how combatants manage collective institutions during conflict. Using the internet as a case of such an institution, we show that belligerents selectively preserve or disrupt mutual access based on battlefield conditions. Disruption is more likely during mobile offensives, which offer greater operational freedom, while static or constrained operations incentivize maintaining interdependence for co-ordination, intelligence, or deception. Drawing on geolocated data from internet outages in the Russia–Ukraine war (2022–3) and qualitative evidence from this conflict and the Armenia–Azerbaijan conflicts (2020, 2023), we find that the disruption likelihood declines as battlefield constraints increase. These findings reveal how interdependence can serve as a tactical asset rather than merely a casualty of war. This has important implications for understanding the relationship between institutions and conflict, as wartime strategies shape not only battlefield outcomes but also prospects for post-war peace building.
Fighting the Future: Short-Term Investors and Business Opposition to Climate Policy
Jared J. Finnegan, Jonas Meckling
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Business interests have often stymied progress on climate policy, raising the question of the source of business opposition to decarbonization policy. We bring intertemporal trade-offs into the study of business and climate change to build new theory on the relationship between firm ownership and policy opposition. Climate policy confronts companies with an intertemporal trade-off: incur costs today for gains in the future. Firms with short-term owners face pressure to maximize short-term profits, making them unable to undertake this trade-off. They therefore oppose climate policy. We test our argument using a dataset of US firms and an original firm-level measure of climate policy opposition. Firms most exposed to short-term capital oppose policy more than observably similar firms with long-term ownership. Our theory develops the microfoundations of long-term policy making. The greater an economy’s exposure to impatient capital, the more business opposition policy makers are likely to face in adopting long-term policies.
Muting the Liars: A Democratic Response to Disinformation
Yi-Hsuan Huang
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Disinformation poses a serious threat to democracy, yet regulating it risks infringing on freedom of speech. This article defends the democratic legitimacy of regulating disinformation by distinguishing it from two similar forms of speech: ‘false opinion’ and ‘toxic persuasion’. I argue that disinformation, as deliberate falsehoods intended to manipulate citizens’ political judgment, does not merit protection. Regulation, on this account, is normatively legitimate and desirable when it safeguards citizens’ ability to function as meaningful decision makers in the democratic common world. I then propose a dual-track model to identify removable content. Paired with regular review, transparency obligations, and an appeal process, this framework offers principles that help democracies to balance between protecting expressive freedom and resisting disinformation.

Electoral Studies

Do strategic voters have a strategic personality? Examining the role of machiavellianism in strategic voting
Scott Pruysers, Julie Blais, Luke R. Mungall
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District magnitude, Black political empowerment, and candidate emergence
Iris E. Acquarone, Matthew Hayes
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Wishful thinking in mass–elite electoral expectations
Philippe Mongrain, Anam Kuraishi, Karolin Soontjens, Stefaan Walgrave
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The myth of compensatory effects: How party organisation shapes women's representation in dual-candidacy mixed electoral systems
Heinz Brandenburg, Maarja LĂŒhiste
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Do open lists increase turnout? Probably not, but they increase rates of voter error: New evidence from Spain
Leonardo Carella
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Just like me? Testing descriptive attributes as voting heuristics
Leonie Rettig, Lukas Isermann
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Do voters hold the president’s party accountable for local economic conditions?
B.K. Song
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District expectations and strategic defection in two-tiered proportional systems: The case of the 2021 Norwegian election
Alexander Verdoes
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European Journal of Political Research

The politics of industrial decline: Blame and compensation
SĂžren Frank Etzerodt
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How does industrial decline influence politics? I propose three mechanisms linking industrial decline to voting. First, if unemployment soars as a consequence of a plant closure, this will result in local communities being economically deprived, which leads to lower support for the incumbent. Second, blame attribution should also play an important role since incumbents can be blamed for their handling of plant closures. Third, I argue that if people are compensated, this anti-incumbent effect should be reduced. I leverage the case of the closing of Lindþ Steel Shipyard in Denmark to test in a quasi-experimental setting how a plant closure is linked to voting. Leveraging a difference-in-differences (DiD) design with national election data at the municipality level from 2001–2019, I first find that the closing of the shipyard reduced votes for the right-wing incumbent government. Second, I find that the closures increased unemployment in the short to medium term, and unemployment is negatively correlated with votes for the incumbent. Third, relying on survey data and interview data, I showcase that the government was blamed for its handling of the closure and the EU was credited for its support. Fourth, leveraging an event study design, I find that the political effects are not persistent. In the election, after receiving the compensation, the effects become insignificant, which at least suggests that the compensation could have been effective.
Globalisation, government partisanship, and labour strike intensity
Melle Scholten
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How does government partisanship affect strike intensity? While there is a strong emergent literature examining the consequences of labour strikes on political attitudes, how politics affects strikes is less well understood. This is despite the fact that strikes historically have been politically salient and have had political goals. In line with previous contributions, this research note shows that labour strikes in the OECD are generally less intense with higher representation of left-wing parties in government. However, this effect is conditional on levels of economic globalisation: as trade penetration increases, left-wing parties in government become less able to address the concerns of organised labour, and the effect of government partisanship on strike intensity attenuates. These findings matter for understanding the traditional alliance between labour movements and left-wing parties in advanced democracies with open economies.

Party Politics

Populists in power: The limits of inclusion
Eitan Tzelgov, Steven Lloyd Wilson
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This study examines the inclusion-moderation thesis within the context of Israeli populism, focusing on how government participation influences the communication styles of populist legislators. By analyzing a comprehensive dataset of tweets from Israeli lawmakers between 2015 and 2022, we explore whether holding office leads to a moderation of populist rhetoric. Our findings indicate that while coalition members generally exhibit reduced populist communication, this moderation varies significantly between ministers and backbenchers. Most importantly, in populist radical-right parties (PRRPs) backbench coalition legislators do not moderate: they maintain a populist communication style akin to their opposition counterparts. This research contributes to the understanding of populism in a non-European context and highlights the complexities of integrating radical parties into democratic governance, suggesting that moderation is not uniformly achieved across party lines.

Political Analysis

Correcting Nonignorable Nonresponse Bias in Turnout Estimation Using Callback Data
Xinyu Li, Naiwen Ying, Kendrick Qijun Li, Xu Shi, Wang Miao
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Overestimation of turnout has long been an issue in election surveys, with nonresponse bias or voter overrepresentation identified as major sources of bias. However, adjusting for nonignorable nonresponse bias is substantially challenging. Based on the ANES Non-Response Follow-Up study concerning the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we investigate the role of callback data, that is, records of contact attempts in the survey course, in adjusting for nonresponse bias in the estimation of turnout. We propose a stableness of resistance assumption to account for nonignorable missingness in the outcome, which states that the impact of the missing outcome on the response propensity is stable in the first two call attempts. Under this assumption and by integrating with covariate information from the census data, we establish identifiability and develop estimation methods for turnout. Our methods produce estimates very close to the official turnout and successfully capture the trend of declining willingness to vote as response reluctance increases. This work highlights the importance of adjusting for nonignorable nonresponse bias and demonstrates the potential of widely available callback data for political surveys.
From Faces to Politics: Vision-Language Models (Sometimes) Link Visual Demographic Characteristics to Ideological Labels
Soyeon Jeon, Messi H. J. Lee, Jacob M. Montgomery, Calvin K. Lai
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When foundation models analyze political content, do they use demographic characteristics as shortcuts for ideological attribution? We conducted detailed experiments with GPT-4o-mini and validated key findings across GPT-4o and LLaVA , using identical, ideologically neutral campaign advertisements with systematically varied candidate demographics. All models consistently attributed more liberal ideologies to women than men. These effects exceeded real-world gender differences from a nationally representative survey. However, racial associations differed by model: strong in GPT-4o-mini (where Black candidates received substantially more liberal attributions), attenuated in GPT-4o , and insignificant in LLaVA . These demographic effects persisted across temperature settings, prompt variations, and even explicit debiasing instructions in GPT-4o-mini . Our findings reveal that visual demographic features can shape AI outputs in ways that vary across models, with implications for applications such as content classification.

Political Behavior

We Could Have Been Worse: ‘Whataboutism’ and Defensive Memory Among Perpetrator Groups
Joe Kendall
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Is It Worth It? An Experimental Examination of the Added Value of Deliberation in a Direct Democratic Process
Stella Koenen, Kristof Jacobs, Alex Lehr
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It is often argued that deliberation could improve citizens’ acceptance of the outcomes of direct democratic decision-making. However, the available scientific evidence remains limited and it remains unclear to which degree these findings can be generalized and reflect causal effects. We therefore use a randomized survey experiment on a large-scale representative sample of the Dutch population to disentangle the impact of direct democratic processes in the form of referendums in isolation compared to situations where deliberation is added, and wherein the outcome of this deliberation is either (a) congruent or (b) not congruent with the referendum outcome. We find a positive significant effect among our respondents when there is congruence between the deliberative mini-public and the referendum outcome and a negative significant effect when there is incongruence. Both effects seem to cancel each other out: overall we find no clear evidence in favor of an average positive or negative impact of deliberation added to a referendum. In an explorative analysis we find some evidence suggesting that outcome acceptance of incongruent processes is lower the less respondents deem the procedure fair (moderator effect). Lastly, while not designed as direct replication, our study provides some evidence in line with a prior seminal study by Germann et al. (Political Studies 72(2), 677–700, 2024) regarding higher outcome acceptance, specifically among decision losers, when deliberation is added to referenda, although only when the outcomes of deliberation and the referendum are congruent.
Oscillations in Perceptual Accuracy: How Well Do People Perceive Parties’ Ideological Positions?
Semih Çakır, Oguzhan Alkan, Ruth Dassonneville, Zeynep Somer-Topcu
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While citizens are sufficiently informed about parties’ ideological stances during elections, we know little about how the perceptual accuracy of party positions evolves beyond the election campaign period. We argue that, during election campaigns, when political information is more readily available, citizens perceive party positions more accurately, but this perceptual accuracy decreases outside of election time. Leveraging the as-if random variation in interview timing in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset across 21 established democracies and the panel data structure of the British Election Study Internet Panel, we show that perceptual accuracy declines post-election and increases during the pre-electoral campaign period. Additional analyses suggest that these fluctuations in accuracy are primarily due to individuals becoming less informed rather than updating their perceptions in response to new information. These findings have important implications for democratic representation.

Political Geography

Hydro-legal geopolitics: Why states join—or reject—global water treaties
Mohsen Nagheeby
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Good bridges make good neighbors: The convergence of political support astride the Connecticut river
Quinn M. Bornstein, James G. Gimpel
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The spatial politics of green hydrogen: Speculative enactments, contested dynamics and alternative pathways in southern Chile
CristiĂĄn Flores FernĂĄndez
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Rethinking environmental governance for development: the blue Ɠconomy dispositif
Alex Midlen
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Imposing connectivity: Privileging an elephant corridor over ecotourism in the Sigur Plateau, South India
Ananda Siddhartha
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From home to summit: Sovereign bodies and the everyday geopolitics of mountain tourism in Iraqi Kurdistan
Marie Poulain, Jean Miczka
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There is nothing here! Unequal access to services and rural resentment in Spain
Rubén García del Horno
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Geonarratives of outer space: How astronaut memoirs narrate conquest
Darshan Vigneswaran, Enrike van Wingerden
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Civilian militia formation and protection against rebel violence: Evidence from Nigeria
Imrana Buba, Jana Krause
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Maritime security technologies and coastal neo-fortification
Alexandra E.J. Hall
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Technopolitics of water appropriation: How Mumbai claims hydrological dominance in its metropolitan region
Sachin Tiwale
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How local candidates mobilize voters: Evidence from India
Dishil Shrimankar, Oliver Heath
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State making at the infrastructural frontier: bureaucratic practices and the techno-politics of hydraulic infrastructure in post-revolutionary Mexico City
Alejandro De Coss-Corzo
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Enduring crises, dynamic border work: Migration governance in Ventimiglia since COVID-19
Silvia Aru
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Climate Justice or Climate Apartheid? The justice trade-offs of private solar investments for South Africa's just transition
Charlotte Lemanski, Christina Culwick Fatti, Fiona Anciano
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Testing the liberal borders of the EU: (De)Constructing the right of asylum through informality
Francesca Fortarezza
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Political Psychology

Susceptibility to misinformation and propaganda during wartime: Evidence from the Israel‐Gaza war
Nur Givon‐Benjio, Yaniv Reingewertz, Michael L. Gross
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Advances in digital technologies have facilitated the creation and dissemination of misinformation, creating a complex information ecosystem where distinguishing between real and fake content has become increasingly challenging. Wars, in particular, present a unique case in which misinformation is often weaponized to shape public perception, both domestically and internationally. While individual differences in susceptibility to misinformation are well documented, research in this context remains sparse. Our study addressed this gap by examining individual differences in susceptibility to misinformation and propaganda during the Israel‐Gaza war. Using a sample of 792 Israeli participants, we assessed participants' ability to distinguish between real and fake news headlines, covering both war‐specific and war‐neutral content. We tested a range of predictors, including cognitive, moral, socio‐political, and conflict‐specific variables. The results showed that enemy dehumanization, conspiracy mentality, willingness to act violently for political ideology, social media activity, and skepticism are associated with lower discrimination ability. In addition, discrimination ability was lower for war‐specific news and among participants with right‐wing political ideology. Taken together, the study offered insights into the mechanisms underlying susceptibility to misinformation during wars.
Intergroup contact with people experiencing poverty reduces hostile but not benevolent classism
Mario Sainz, Gloria JimĂ©nez‐Moya, Roberto M. Lobato, Andreas Laffert, Alexandra VĂĄzquez, Roberto GonzĂĄlez
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Intergroup contact can reduce bias against disadvantaged groups, yet it may differentially shape ambivalent attitudes. This project examines how contact with people experiencing poverty relates to ambivalent classism and its policy consequences. We hypothesized that positive and frequent contact would have mixed effects, reducing the hostile dimension of classism while reinforcing benevolent forms (protective paternalism and complementary class differentiation). We conducted a multi‐country correlational study ( N = 4209) examining associations between intergroup contact and hostile and benevolent dimensions of ambivalent classism, incorporating support for social policies in separate models for women and men experiencing poverty. We then carried out two experimental studies. In Study 2 ( N = 784), we used a recall paradigm to manipulate contact quality. In Study 3 ( N = 931), a conceptual replication, we employed a fictitious society paradigm to manipulate both contact quality and quantity with women and men experiencing poverty. Across studies, positive contact consistently reduced hostile classism but increased complementary class differentiation. Effects on protective paternalism and support for dependency‐oriented policies were less consistent. Overall, the findings suggest that while contact may attenuate overt hostility, it can simultaneously reinforce benevolent representations of poverty, with implications for support of restrictive policy measures.

Public Choice

Inequality and terrorism: a meta-regression analysis
Amar Anwar, Quan Li
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Do US presidents leave fiscal fingerprints? the power of the executive branch through a century of tax data
Brandon Parsons, Mike Kimel
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Electoral autocracy with powerful local elites: theory and evidence from Brazil
ArnĂłbio Chagas, M. Christian Lehmann
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Contracting unverifiable quality in healthcare: the importance of political stability for relational contracts
Marco Buso, Berardino Cesi, Silvia Coretti, Gilberto Turati
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We consider an infinitely repeated game between a public purchaser of a health service and a semi-altruistic hospital when some quality dimensions of the service are non-contractible. We examine how a Pay-for-Performance Relational Contract (P4P-RC) can induce the hospital to deliver positive unverifiable quality. We find that the optimal conditions for both price and quality of the P4P-RC converge to the first-best, the higher the stability of the interaction between the purchaser and the hospital. Using measures of political stability in Italy as a proxy for a stable interaction, we empirically test the relationship between proxies of healthcare service quality and political stability from 1996 to 2020. We find evidence that unverifiable quality increases with the political stability of the regional governments.
Political cycles’ impact on Chinese local governments’ environmental expenditures
Zengbao Hu, Stuart McDonald, Xiaoyu Zhang
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Economic freedom and rent seeking: evidence from US states
Fernando A. M. C. D’Andrea, Hugo Vaca Pereira Rocha, Nicholas Jensen, Vitor Melo, Zachary D. Blizard
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Is invalid voting more common in complex electoral systems than in simpler ones? An examination of mixed systems and first-past-the-post systems
John Högström
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This study examines the level of invalid voting in mixed electoral systems in comparison with the level of such voting in First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) systems. High levels of invalid votes can indicate problems with the electoral system used and can weaken the legitimacy of elections. Theoretically, a higher level of invalid votes can be linked to elections in which a complex electoral system, such as a mixed system, is used. Conversely, lower levels of invalid voting can be linked to elections in which a simple electoral system, such as a FPTP system, is used. We carry out a large, global, cross-national empirical comparison of invalid voting for national parliaments worldwide that covers more than six decades. First, we examine whether the level of invalid voting is higher in mixed systems than in FPTP systems. Second, we examine whether the level is higher in countries that currently use mixed systems but previously used FPTP systems or were formerly non-independent states. The results show that invalid voting is more prevalent in mixed systems than in FPTP systems. They also illustrate that invalid voting is more prevalent when countries transition from a FPTP system to a mixed electoral system, or when they adopt a mixed system following full independence or the restoration of sovereignty. In the persistent debate about which electoral system is preferable, invalid voting rates represent one of several indicators of system quality, and according to this measure, FPTP systems outperform mixed systems.
Covert regime change and ideology
Joshua Ammons, Shishir Shakya, Konstantin Zhukov
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Constitutional change: introduction to the special issue
Eric Alston, Justin T. Callais
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International lobbying for intellectual property rights reform: the effect on R&D offshoring to the developing world
Zachary Cohle
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Research & Politics

Do they really believe that? Measuring salient conspiracy endorsement
Lisa Basil
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Surveys frequently report widespread belief in conspiracy theories, prompting concerns about their democratic consequences. Yet, standard survey measures often implicitly treat agreement as equivalent to politically consequential belief, even though agreement can reflect a range of engagement—from momentary reactions to durable worldviews. This paper argues that an important dimension of belief is often insufficiently captured in existing approaches: salience. I introduce a salience-based measure that incorporates certainty and prior familiarity to distinguish more tentative or situational endorsement from internalized, action-relevant belief. Using original survey data, I show that this measure correlates more strongly with psychological traits associated with conspiracism and better predicts self-reported engagement: including discussing, posting about, and researching conspiracy theories. These results suggest that traditional measures may overstate the prevalence of politically meaningful conspiratorial belief and obscure substantial heterogeneity among those who agree with conspiracy claims. By refining how belief is measured, this paper offers a tool to more accurately identify which survey endorsements are likely to reflect consequential belief.
Introducing the trust in government (TrustGov) dataset: A new resource for cross-national time-series trust research
Yuehong Cassandra Tai
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Although political trust is a long-standing interdisciplinary topic, the lack of com parable cross-national time-series data has limited scholars’ ability to analyze its determinants and consequences and to generalize findings across countries and over time. To address this gap, this paper introduces the Trust in National Government (TrustGov) Dataset—a cross-national time-series resource covering 115 countries and territories from 1973 to 2020, harmonizing 1,545 country-year observations from 189 national and cross-national surveys using a Bayesian latent variable model. The dataset is validated through a series of convergent and construct validity tests. TrustGov supports qualitative and mixed-method research by guiding case selection and helping scholars probe mechanisms behind shifts in trust. It also enables quantitative analyses of trust’s dynamic relationships with determinants such as inequality, election integrity, and institutional performance, as well as outcomes such as policy preferences and crisis resilience. The project will be updated regularly through periodic releases as new data become publicly available, supporting ongoing research on political trust.
Corruption next door, satisfaction at home: Spillover effects of corruption on political trust in China
Yixuan Zhang
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How do political scandals in neighboring regions affect people’s evaluations of their own government? By investigating the spillover effects of corruption investigations on public political trust in China, this article finds that scandals in neighboring areas can trigger a contrast effect among the public. Corruption investigations in nearby regions positively influence people’s trust in their local government, suggesting that evaluations of an institution are shaped not only by the institution itself but also by the performance of comparable entities.
Allied commitments and public support for military interventions: A cross-national experiment
Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka, Ondrej Rosendorf
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Recent survey experiments have found that the public in NATO member states is more supportive of intervening militarily on behalf of formal allies than non-allies. However, we lack empirical evidence on whether this effect of alliance treaties generalizes to non-NATO and non-Western countries. To fill this gap, we conducted a preregistered cross-national survey experiment on population samples ( N = 7200) in two Western NATO countries (the United States and the United Kingdom) and four non-Western regional powers (Russia, China, India, and Brazil). The results of our experiment show that while allied commitments increase public support for military interventions globally, their effect is comparatively weaker in non-Western, non-NATO countries. Our findings contribute to the scholarly debates on the microfoundations of collective defense and the generalizability of IR experiments beyond the Western context.
Not just women for women: How gendered affinities affect candidate support
Alejandro Tirado Castro, Susan Banducci
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Despite gains in women’s political representation, many studies continue to identify structural and attitudinal barriers that contribute to their persistent under-representation in elected office. One commonly cited explanation is a baseline reluctance among some voters to support female candidates. However, research on gender affinity suggests a more complex picture: voters often prefer candidates who resemble themselves, and especially women are more likely to support women. This identity-driven dynamic stands in contrast to a generalized bias against women and raises important questions about how gender identity, beyond binary gender, shapes voter behavior. To address these questions, we use a conjoint experiment to test whether gender affinity influences candidate preferences and how it is moderated by gender identity. Our findings reveal a consistent gender affinity effect with women respondents preferring women candidates, and men preferring men candidates. These patterns are stronger among individuals with more pronounced gender identities, that is, hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity. Our study makes two contributions. First, by incorporating measures of gender identity, we move beyond a binary conception of gender to provide a more nuanced account of gender affinity. Second, our approach allows us to move beyond the traditional focus on affinity between women voters and women candidates to also consider how gender identity shapes political preferences among men.
Private members’ bills & parliamentary motions: Who bothers?
Eunseong Oh, Indridi H. Indridason
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While the role of legislators in parliamentary systems may sometimes seem to involve little more than to support the government of the day, legislators in many parliaments regularly take advantage of their, often limited, opportunities to introduce members’ bills and parliamentary motions. The success of these efforts is typically limited, which raises the question of why legislators bother. We argue that the legislators’ behavior is in part driven by the incentives their parties present them with. Government and opposition MPs behave in a different manner because government and opposition parties value legislative activity and types of legislative activity differently. Government MPs are expected to stay out of the way of the government’s agenda or focus their attention on less salient issues. In contrast, opposition MPs are expected to do the opposite and to present their parties as viable government alternatives. Examining members’ bills and parliamentary motions in Iceland over a thirty-year period, we observe patterns consistent with the importance of parties in shaping legislative behavior, while also finding some evidence of MPs’ career concerns affecting their behavior.

The Journal of Politics

Does Youth Representation Matter for Social Spending?
Charles T. McClean
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Against the Wind: The Radical Right, Renewable Energy, and the Politics of the Green Transition
Pauliina Patana, Held Alexander
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Varieties of Participation and Investment in Local Public Goods: Evidence from an RCT in Kenya
Tara Grillos, Michael Touchton
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Effects of Popular Legitimacy on International Organizations: An Elite Survey Experiment
Thomas Sommerer, Jonas Tallberg
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The Politicization of Bureaucrats: Evidence from Brazil
Anderson Frey, Rogerio Santarrosa
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Do Politicians Listen to Youth Wings? Evidence from an Elite Experiment
Henrik Bech Seeberg
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“It’s a Gender Thing”: The Wrongdoing of Stereotype Articulation
Lasse Nielsen, Mathilde Cecchini
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Do External Threats Reduce Affective Polarization? An Experiment on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Jonas Pilgaard Kaiser, Markus Seier
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Unorthodox Lawmaking and the Value of Committee Assignments
James M. Curry, Leah Rosenstiel
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The Gender Gap in Political Careers Under Proportional Representation
Tobias Nowacki
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Between Withdrawal and Engagement: Disentangling the Effects of COVID-19 on Turnout
Kevin T. Morris
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Keep Winning with WinRed? Online Fundraising Platform as the Party’s Public Good
Seo-young Silvia Kim, Zhao Li
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The Answer Was There All Along: Worry About the Dynamics!
Ali Kagalwala, Guy D. Whitten
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Executive–Legislative Policymaking Under Crisis
Nathaniel A. Birkhead, Jeffrey J. Harden, Jason H. Windett
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The Politics of Disaster Prevention
Martin Gilens, Tali Mendelberg, Nicholas Short
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Loss Framing in Territorial Disputes
Andi Zhou, Hein Goemans, Michael Weintraub
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Observable Bounds of Rationality and Credibility in International Relations
Andrew Kenealy, Trent Ollerenshaw, So Jin Lee
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Social Density, Clientelism, and Community Benefits
Jeremy Spater, Erik Wibbels
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Intraparty Competition, Geographic Responsiveness, and Incumbent Deselection in Closed-List Proportional Representation
Jochen Rehmert
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Defending Elections Against the Oligarchic Charge
Palle Bech-Pedersen
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Cycles of Silence: Police–Citizen Cooperation in Communities with Criminal Groups
Andrew Cesare Miller
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A Model of Party Effects on Legislative Behavior Based on Roll Call Data
Fang-Yi Chiou, Guillermo Rosas
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Incivility Does Not Exist: An Experimental Assessment on the Drivers of Incivility Perceptions and Their Effects on Candidate Evaluations
Chiara Vargiu, Alessandro Nai, Diego Garzia
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Bureaucrats in Congress: The Politics of Interbranch Information Sharing
Pamela Ban, Ju Yeon Park, Hye Young You
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How Exiles Mobilize Domestic Dissent
Elizabeth R. Nugent, Alexandra A. Siegel
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Understanding Resourcing Trade-Offs in International Organizations: Evidence from an Elite Survey Experiment
Mirko Heinzel, Bernhard Reinsberg, Christian Siauwijaya
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Arms and Elections: Arms Deals with Autocracies, Defense Contracting, and US Presidential Elections
Joshua Alley
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Candidate Positions, Responsiveness, and Returns to Extremism
Mellissa Meisels
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The Supply of Conspiracism in State-Controlled Media
Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, Richard A. Nielsen, David Romney
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Commodity Booms, Conflict, and Organized Crime: Logics of Violence in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Plantation Economy
Paul D. Kenny, Rashesh Shrestha, Edward Aspinall
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