I checked 18 political science journals on Thursday, July 03, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period June 26 to July 02, I found 59 new paper(s) in 8 journal(s).

American Political Science Review

Generic title: Not a research article
Complements or Substitutes? How Institutional Arrangements Bind Traditional Authorities and the State in Africa – ERRATUM
SOEREN J. HENN
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Electoral Studies

Voting alone: Early voting and turnout in couples
Johannes Bergh, Dag Arne Christensen, Henning Finseraas
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Rural representation in Europe: The presence of place in national parliaments
Guillem Rico, Rubén García del Horno, Enrique Hernåndez
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Place-based resentment and party support in multiparty systems: A study of three consecutive elections in the Netherlands
Twan Huijsmans, Wouter van der Brug
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Self-interest and voter support for defund the police
Marcel Roman, Benjamin Newman
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Happy and glorious? The sometimes-unifying effects of the British monarchy
Braeden Davis, Yu-Shiuan Huang
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The politics of litigating and adjudicating electoral disputes: Evidence from Zambia
Øyvind Stiansen, Haakon GjerlÞw, Lise Rakner
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Political Analysis

Accessibility and Equity in the Research Process: Gender Bias in Elite Interview Recruitment
Margaret A. T. Kenney, John Salchak
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Researchers’ racial and gender identities influence their outcomes in academia and the field of political science. This letter interrogates how researcher identity affects the research process: specifically elite interview recruitment. Within an ongoing research project we embed a pre-registered audit experiment randomizing the gender of the researcher conducting outreach to estimate whether there are differences in interviews scheduled holding all other confounders constant. We find that when outreach is conducted by a woman, elites are more likely to schedule an interview. This letter contributes to our understanding of bias and inequality during the research process. In addition, our study offers a new approach to audit experiments that limits deception and wasted time for elites.
Generalizing Trimming Bounds for Endogenously Missing Outcome Data Using Random Forests
Cyrus Samii, Ye Wang, Junlong Aaron Zhou
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We present a method for narrowing nonparametric bounds on treatment effects by adjusting for potentially large numbers of covariates, using generalized random forests. In many experimental or quasi-experimental studies, outcomes of interest are only observed for subjects who select (or are selected) to engage in the activity generating the outcome. Outcome data are thus endogenously missing for units who do not engage, and random or conditionally random treatment assignment before such choices is insufficient to identify treatment effects. Nonparametric partial identification bounds address endogenous missingness without having to make disputable parametric assumptions. Basic bounding approaches often yield bounds that are wide and minimally informative. Our approach can tighten such bounds while permitting agnosticism about the data-generating process and honest inference. A simulation study and replication exercise demonstrate the benefits.
What to Observe When Assuming Selection on Observables
Kevin M. Quinn, Guoer Liu, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin
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Political scientists regularly rely on a selection-on-observables assumption to identify causal effects of interest. Once a causal effect has been identified in this way, a wide variety of estimators can, in principle, be used to consistently estimate the effect of interest. While these estimators are all justified by appeals to the same causal identification assumptions, they often differ greatly in how they make use of the data at hand. For instance, methods based on regression rely on an explicit model of the outcome variable but do not explicitly model the treatment assignment process, whereas methods based on propensity scores explicitly model the treatment assignment process but do not explicitly model the outcome variable. Understanding the tradeoffs between estimation methods is complicated by these seemingly fundamental differences. In this paper we seek to rectify this problem. We do so by clarifying how most estimators of causal effects that are justified by an appeal to a selection-on-observables assumption are all special cases of a general weighting estimator. We then explain how this commonality provides for diagnostics that allow for meaningful comparisons across estimation methods—even when the methods are seemingly very different. We illustrate these ideas with two applied examples.

Political Geography

Just climate experimentation: Distributive, procedural, and recognition justice in two low-carbon pilots in China
Yiqun Yang, Kevin Lo
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Devolution and democratic engagement in England
Nicholas Patrick Sweeney
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Precarious work and local governance through the lens of informality and caring for place
Valeria Guarneros-Meza
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Political Psychology

Psychological dispositions and political attitudes in a hyperpartisan context
Elizabeth Simas, Sebastian Ege
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Political Science Research and Methods

Foreign faith and rising state: An examination of state-building dynamics in late 16th-century Japan
Minzhao Wang, Austin Michael Mitchell, Weiwen Yin
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How does a ruler implement state-building at the local level? This paper examines state-building in late 16th-century Japan by focusing on Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s land surveys, which were crucial for establishing a centralized regime. We argue that Hideyoshi strengthened control over the locality via land surveys as a strategic response to the perceived threats emanating from Catholic missionaries. Using various empirical strategies including spatial econometrics, sensitivity analysis, and an instrumental variable approach, we find that the presence of Catholic churches significantly increased the likelihood of a locality being surveyed. These results highlight the importance of information-gathering beyond fiscal purposes for security objectives and emphasize the role of threats from foreign religious institutions in state formation processes.
Polarization but not populism strengthens the association between presidential election results and emotions
Dahjin Kim, Taishi Muraoka, Christopher Lucas, Jacob M. Montgomery, Margit Tavits
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We investigate whether election results are associated with emotional reactions among voters across democracies and under what conditions these responses are more intense. Building on recent work in comparative politics, we theorize that emotional intensity is stronger after elections involving populist candidates and highly polarized parties. We test these expectations with a big-data analysis of emotional reactions on parties’ Facebook posts during 29 presidential elections in 26 democracies. The results show that ideological polarization of political parties might intensify emotional reactions, but there is no clear relationship with the presence of populist candidates.
How strong are international standards in practice? Evidence from cryptocurrency transactions
Karen Nershi
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Despite widespread adoption of international anti-money laundering standards over the last 30 years, their effectiveness remains poorly understood due to persistent data limitations. I address this gap in the scholarship by leveraging cryptocurrency transaction data to assess how specific regulatory design features shape compliance. Using bunching estimation, I demonstrate that customers strategically adjust transaction sizes to avoid threshold-based screening requirements, while exchanges fail to adequately address this behavior through risk-based monitoring. Analysis of British Virgin Islands exchanges using difference-in-differences estimation before and after regulatory changes provides additional evidence supporting these conclusions. The findings reveal how regulatory design features shape behavior in cryptocurrency markets and suggest specific improvements for regulatory frameworks.
Public and expert preferences in survey experiments in foreign policy: evidence from parallel conjoint analyses
Melle Scholten, Kirill Zhirkov
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The boom in survey experiments in international relations has allowed researchers to make causal inferences on longstanding foreign policy debates such as democratic peace, and audience costs. However, most of these experiments rely on mass samples, whereas foreign policy is arguably more technocratically driven. We probe the validity of generalizing from mass to elite preferences by exploring preferences of ordinary U.S. citizens and foreign policy experts (employees of the U.S. Department of State) in two identical conjoint experiments on democratic peace. We find that experts are not only more opposed to military actions against other democracies than members of the public—but also that overall preferences about the matters of war and peace are stronger among foreign policy professionals.
Electoral participation and satisfaction with democracy in Central and Eastern Europe
Filip Kostelka, Lukåƥ Linek, Jan Rovny, Michael Ơkvrƈåk
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Does democratic satisfaction drive voter turnout, or does voting increase satisfaction with democracy? This paper explores the satisfaction-participation nexus in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where democratic dissatisfaction is prominent. It tests preregistered hypotheses using a five-wave panel survey from the Czech 2023 presidential election and a pooled dataset from five CEE countries. Unlike previous studies from Western Europe, it finds evidence for both mechanisms: pre-election satisfaction correlates with participation, but, simultaneously, voters experience a stronger election-related increase in satisfaction than abstainers. Further analyses reveal that the strong increases in satisfaction are driven by election winners and begin already during the election campaign. Our findings highlight the specificities of the satisfaction-participation link and elections’ legitimizing effects in newer democracies.
Beyond standardization: a comprehensive review of topic modeling validation methods for computational social science research
Jana Bernhard-Harrer, Randa Ashour, Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Petro Tolochko, Hajo Boomgaarden
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As the use of computational text analysis in the social sciences has increased, topic modeling has emerged as a popular method for identifying latent themes in textual data. Nevertheless, concerns have been raised regarding the validity of the results produced by this method, given that it is largely automated and inductive in nature, and the lack of clear guidelines for validating topic models has been identified by scholars as an area of concern. In response, we conducted a comprehensive systematic review of 789 studies that employ topic modeling. Our goal is to investigate whether the field is moving toward a common framework for validating these models. The findings of our review indicate a notable absence of standardized validation practices and a lack of convergence toward specific methods of validation. This gap may be attributed to the inherent incompatibility between the inductive, qualitative approach of topic modeling and the deductive, quantitative tradition that favors standardized validation. To address this, we advocate for incorporating qualitative validation approaches, emphasizing transparency and detailed reporting to improve the credibility of findings in computational social science research when using topic modeling.
Labeling social media posts: does showing coders multimodal content produce better human annotation, and a better machine classifier?
Haohan Chen, James Bisbee, Joshua A. Tucker, Jonathan Nagler
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The increasing multimodality (e.g., images, videos, links) of social media data presents opportunities and challenges. But text-as-data methods continue to dominate as modes of classification, as multimodal social media data are costly to collect and label. Researchers who face a budget constraint may need to make informed decisions regarding whether to collect and label only the textual content of social media data or their full multimodal content. In this article, we develop five measures and an experimental framework to assist with these decisions. We propose five performance metrics to measure the costs and benefits of multimodal labeling: average time per post, average time per valid response, valid response rate, intercoder agreement, and classifier’s predictive power. To estimate these measures, we introduce an experimental framework to evaluate coders’ performance under text-only and multimodal labeling conditions. We illustrate the method with a tweet labeling experiment.

Public Choice

The spectacular enlargement of the Bundestag and the long road to the 2023 German electoral law reform
Joachim Behnke
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Since 2002, the regular size of the German Bundestag has been 598 seats. However, due to overhang and compensatory mandates, the Bundestag was enlarged to 709 seats after the 2017 election and to 736 seats after the 2021 election. This made the Bundestag the largest parliament of any democratically governed nation state in the world. To address this issue, the Bundestag passed a reform of the electoral law on March 17, 2023. This article explains the mechanics behind the significant increase in seats in 2021. Furthermore, it analyzes the conditions that must be met for a significant increase to occur. Specifically, it examines the relationship between the increase in surplus seats that triggered the expansion and the change in the party system’s structure. This relationship is demonstrated by developing a simple formal model. The German electoral system is a system of personalized proportional representation. However, as shown, some essential and desirable normative requirements that such a system should fulfill are mutually incompatible. Against this background and considering the history of the reform, it is demonstrated how the chosen reform option developed.
Coups and constitutional change
Christian BjĂžrnskov, Stefan Voigt
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Successful coup plotters come to power by disregarding the constraints of their country’s constitution. Yet, 42% of them initiate the writing of a new constitution within three years after their coup. In this paper, we ask under which conditions coup-plotters are particularly likely to instigate a new constitution, whether coups staged by members of the military lead to constitutions different from those instigated by civilian plotters, and in what sense these constitutions can be distinguished from those that have emerged out of other contexts. To do so, we introduce five measures of constitutional characteristics that specifically relate to the allocation of political power. We find that military coup plotters are particularly likely to draw on constitutional assemblies in order to produce new constitutions and that constitutions created in the aftermath of a coup are particularly difficult to amend. Individual traits of the coup plotters, such as their (military or civil) rank or their age, are not significantly associated with the structure of the new constitutions. We also show that in most ways, constitutions written by coup plotters are similar to those of other autocracies except that they include more paragraphs without being longer. We argue that our findings can inform the ongoing debate about the characteristics of autocratic regime transitions and democratisation.
Cancellation of overhang seats: the price of unkept promises
JarosƂaw Flis, Joachim Behnke, Katarzyna Lorenc, Jeremiasz Salamon
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Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral systems aim to balance territorial representation, personal voter-politician connections, and party proportionality. However, legislators face significant challenges in achieving these goals simultaneously. In Germany, these efforts led to the pressing issue of overhang seats, which prompted a reform of the electoral system in 2023. This study examines the effects of this reform and three alternative solutions discarded during the legislative process, focusing on their impact on representation and proportionality. We evaluate these solutions using various inequality indexes and their specific components to address issues such as disproportionality, malapportionment, and wasted votes. Our analysis includes counterfactual recalculations of the 2025 Bundestag election results across four alternative electoral systems: the German electoral system first used in the 2025 elections, the German electoral system used until 2021 elections, and two systems using the restricted Sainte-LaguĂ«/Webster method to allocate votes, with or without inviolability of direct mandates. Our findings reveal minimal differences in unequal representation among the systems. However, the adopted solution introduces the controversial phenomenon of “orphaned seats” disproportionately affecting major political forces like the CDU/CSU and AfD. This fact is particularly significant in the specific context of German politics, but it reveals a certain vulnerability in the reform — it is difficult to expect stability from a solution whose most controversial effect is felt most acutely by the strongest players.
Winners and losers of a Russian oil-export restriction
Johan Gars, Daniel Spiro, Henrik Wachtmeister
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Russia has on several occasions threatened to limit its oil exports as part of its energy-economic warfare. Using a quantifiable short-run model of oil trade and detailed production and consumption data, this paper evaluates the winners and losers of potential Russian oil-export reductions and connects these to the potential interests of the Russian regime, including Russia’s oil producers and consumers and its international friends and foes. We find that Russian producer profits would fall for any export restriction even as world oil prices increase. For example, a reduction of 10% of exports would yield Russian producer-profit losses of USD 290 million per day, equivalent to 5% of GDP, mostly due to lower domestic prices. Hence, an export restriction would substantially harm Russia’s oil-industry interests, including the oligarchs and elites benefiting from this trade. However, Russian consumers benefit from an export restriction, as they get access to cheaper oil if Russia exports less. Adding these benefits, an export restriction up to 12% causes net gains for Russia’s oil producers and consumers combined. Categorizing countries into those Russia may consider as foes, friends, and neutrals and using data on their oil consumption and production, we find that foe countries lose the most in absolute terms but friend countries lose more relative to their GDP. Hence, the Russian regime cannot restrict its oil exports without incurring a high collateral cost on its international friends. In sum, to motivate an export restriction, the Russian regime would need to put an order of magnitude more weight on its interest in causing international harm than on its own oil industry’s profits; or it would need to put a high weight on benefiting its own consumers instead of its oil industry.
Risk diversification and vote decisions in mixed-member electoral systems
Susumu Shikano, Erik S. Herron
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This paper builds on the literature about mixed-member electoral systems, exploring how ballot design interacts with voter behavior. We present a theoretical model for vote decision-making in mixed-member systems that takes into account the interaction between both tiers. The model is grounded in a spatial model for vote decision-making under risk and inspired by the logic of portfolio diversification under risk. Accordingly, voters are modeled as risk-averse decision-makers who may prefer diversified vote packages (i.e. split-ticket) when party and candidate uncertainties are highly correlated. The risk diversification strategy abates when voters cast their votes sequentially. This finding provides a potential explanation for the impact of vote sequence in mixed-member systems, an under-investigated topic in the literature. It thus links the established literature on mixed-member systems with scholarship on ballot design and its effects. Additionally, the paper’s analysis explores the implications of combining the proposed model with the well-established wasted vote model.

The Journal of Politics

The Disparate and Durable Effects of Mail Voting Restrictions: Evidence from Texas
Michael G. Miller, Kevin T Morris, Ian Shapiro, Coryn Grange
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Child Welfare System Contact and Voting
Ariel R. White, Marie-Pascale Grimon, Rebecca Goldstein, Kelley Fong
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Democracy Reduces Inequality: Evidence Using Individual-level Data on Infant Mortality in Africa, 1960-2016
Carmen Jacqueline Ho, Marie Christelle Mabeu, Roland Pongou
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Dynamic Screening in International Crises
Noam Reich
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Gendered Justice in Comparative Perspective: False Equality and False Difference in Criminal Appeals
Susan W. Johnson
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Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes
Justin Grimmer, William Marble, Cole Tanigawa-Lau
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Local Backlash Against INGOs? How Heterogeneous Interests Condition the Effects of Conservation Advocacy Campaigns
Takumi Shibaike
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Fiscal Rules, Corruption, and Electoral Accountability
Gianmarco Daniele, Tommaso Giommoni
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Selective Exposure and Electoral Competition
Avidit Acharya, Peter Buisseret, Adam Meirowitz, Floyd Jiuyun Zhang
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Complementarity and Public Views on Overlapping International and Domestic Courts
Kelebogile Zvobgo, Stephen Chaudoin
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Is Clientelism (Only) for the Poor? Insights on Class and Clientelism from a Survey Experiment in Lebanon
Melani Cammett, Christiana Parreira, Sami Atallah
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Gender Stereotypes in Autocracies: Experimental Evidence from Morocco
Carolyn Barnett, Alexandra Blackman, Marwa Shalaby
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Meet the Press: Gendered Conversational Norms in Televised Political Discussion
Daniel Naftel, Jon Green, Kelsey Shoub, Jared Edgerton, Mallory Wagner, Skyler Cranmer
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Once We Too Were Strangers: Can a Heritage of Displacement Be Leveraged to Build Support for Present-Day Refugees?
Nicholas Sambanis, Matthew D. Simonson, ƞule Yaylacı
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A Gladiatorial Arena: Incivility in the Canadian House of Commons
R. Michael Alvarez, Jacob Morrier
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Immigration Shocks and Unfounded Concerns About Crime: Evidence from Haitian Migration to Chile
Fernando Severino, Giancarlo Visconti
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Transgender and Gender-Diverse People Disproportionately Report Problems While Trying to Vote Compared to Cisgender People
Dakota Strode, Tenaya Storm, Andrew R. Flores
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Descriptive Representation in an Era of Polarization
Anna Weissman
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Credit Claiming in the European Union
Tom Hunter
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Fanatical Peace: How Fundamental Disagreements Can Discourage Conflict
Peter Bils, Richard Jordan, Kristopher W. Ramsay
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The Effective Power of Military Coalitions: A Unified Theoretical and Empirical Model
Brenton Kenkel, Kristopher W. Ramsay
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Can Individual MPs Damage Their Party’s Brand? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Public Procurement Corruption Scandal
Arndt Leininger, Lukas Rudolph
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Terrorism, Perpetrators, and Polarization: Evidence from Natural Experiments
Vincenzo Bove, Riccardo Di Leo, Georgios Efthyvoulou, Harry Pickard
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“Kick Them Out” as a Voting Strategy: Theory and Evidence from Multimember District Elections
Hiroto Katsumata, Shunya Noda
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The Domestic Political Costs of Soliciting Foreign Electoral Intervention
Michael Tomz, Jessica L. P. Weeks
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Using Social Media to Respond to Negative Polls: Politicians’ Issue Responsiveness on Facebook
Helene Helboe Pedersen, Henrik Bech Seeberg
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Disrupting Compliance: The Impact of a Randomized Tax Holiday in Uruguay
Thad Dunning, Felipe Monestier, Rafael Piñeiro-Rodríguez, Fernando Rosenblatt, Guadalupe Tuñón
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Identity, Industry, and Perceptions of Climate Futures
Noah Zucker
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Muzzling the Media? Explaining Popular Support for Media Restrictions in Africa
Jeffrey Conroy-Krutz
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The Nonconsequences of COVID-19 on Left–Right Ideological Beliefs
Jack Blumenau, Timothy Hicks, Alan M. Jacobs, J. Scott Matthews, Tom O’Grady
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Troubles in Text: Using Natural Language Processing to Recognize Government Rationalizations for Rights Abuses
Sarah K. Dreier, Sofia Serrano, Emily K. Gade, Noah A. Smith
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Does Income Transparency Affect Support for Redistribution? Evidence from Finland’s Tax Day
Maurice Dunaiski, Janne Tukiainen
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The Historical Sources of Language Policy
David D. Laitin, Rajesh Ramachandran
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You Better Shop Around: Litigant Characteristics and Supreme Court Support
Jamil S. Scott, Elizabeth A. Lane, Jessica A. Schoenherr
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