🗣 Communication Paper Picnic 🧺: Political Science

I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, September 30, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period September 23 to September 29, I found 43 new paper(s) in 11 journal(s).

American Political Science Review

Marriage as Slavery: Oroonoko, the Slave Trade, and the Origins of English Feminism

MARY JO MACDONALD

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This article investigates Mary Astell’s controversial comparison of marriage to slavery. While existing scholarship situates this analogy within the neo-Roman republican framework, which defined slavery as subjection to absolute rule, I investigate another paradigm: the transatlantic slave trade. To make this case, the article traces the influence of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) on early feminist thought. By foregrounding the market logic underpinning chattel slavery, Behn popularized the idea that slavery’s harms were rooted, not in absolute power, but in the commodification of human beings. Astell appropriated this insight, showing that marriage resembled slavery not because husbands wielded power over wives but because the institution had been commodified: women were treated as things to be bought and sold. In uncovering this genealogy of feminist thought, the article highlights the enduring contributions of the “first” English feminists—insights that are entangled with, and shaped by, the development of the slave trade.

The Punitive Dimension of Presidential Particularism

LUKAS K. ALEXANDER

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Existing accounts of presidential particularism emphasize the targeted distribution of benefits to electorally valuable constituencies. This research note demonstrates that presidential particularism can also operate punitively, through the selective imposition of costs on constituencies that provided weaker electoral support for the president. I examine this dynamic through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a highly centralized and politicized agency created at the start of Donald Trump’s second term. Leveraging data on nearly 700,000 federal contracts linked to DOGE contract cuts and 2024 county-level election returns, I show that these cuts were systematically concentrated in counties that provided weaker electoral support for Trump. These patterns hold across contract- and county-level analyses. Together, these findings broaden theories of presidential particularism by showing that presidents may use administrative authority to impose costs on electorally oppositional constituencies. More broadly, I demonstrate how presidents can wield administrative power as a tool of partisan punishment.

Structural Injustice as Emergent Disorder

HOCHAN KIM

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Structural injustice remains a puzzling concept despite its increasing prominence. I distill recent theoretical challenges into a dilemma: either structural injustice lacks the normative credentials of injustice given that wrongdoing is inessential, or it is redundant given existing theories that trace injustice to culpable state and other institutional failures. I then develop a novel account of structural injustice, the Complexity View, that unravels this dilemma. The emergent properties of human actions in a complex society explain what is “structural” about structural injustice, specifically how it can arise without (culpable) wrongdoing. Structural injustice is unjust because it is wrong to contribute to social processes that cause harm and to passively accept preventable forms of vulnerability and deprivation as tragic misfortunes. But this account of structural injustice has a sobering implication: while complexity explains what distinguishes structural injustice from other wrongs, it also sets significant epistemic limits on social reform.

What Would It Mean to Democratize Finance? An Evaluation of Divergent Conceptions of Democracy and Finance

LEAH DOWNEY, STEFAN EICH

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Calls to “democratize finance” abound today. Yet this apparent consensus obscures sharply divergent conceptions of both democracy and finance. This article maps these demands along two axes, distinguishing between access- and power-based conceptions of democracy, and between three dimensions of finance: payment, capital markets, and banking. We then develop three normative claims. First, we argue that conceptions that reduce democratization to expanded market access are not merely insufficient but, when applied to speculative capital markets, amount to predatory inclusion. Second, thicker accounts of democratization as equal inclusion are normatively more promising but internally unstable, as their democratic commitments generate pressures toward power sharing. Third, the most plausible conceptions of democratizing finance are power-centered and involve greater public control over credit creation and allocation. Rather than defending a single institutional solution, the article assesses a range of reform proposals while specifying a normative threshold for evaluating what it would mean to democratize finance.

Democratic Accountability with Citizen Coproduction

JIE MA, KEITH E. SCHNAKENBERG, IAN R. TURNER

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Many policies require citizens to actively participate in their implementation in order to be successful, a situation referred to as citizen coproduction. Though citizen coproduction is necessary in many policy areas, it could create difficulties for democratic accountability because citizens and politicians share responsibility for policy failures and attribution of blame may be difficult. We analyze the problem of democratic accountability with citizen coproduction in the context of a model in which politicians, who vary with respect to their competence at selecting policies, choose whether to implement policies whose success depends on citizen coproduction choices. For citizens, the problem is one of attribution: when coproduction is low, it may be hard to select good incumbents because policy failures are frequent even when policy choices are good. Incumbents anticipate these effects, which sometimes implies that they are less likely to choose reforms when they are more likely to be successful.

British Journal of Political Science

Religious Cross-Pressures and Electoral Decision Making

Yara Sleiman

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For many Americans, religious teachings are central to political identity, yet these teachings often do not align neatly with party platforms. How do voters decide when their faith crosses partisan lines? I examine this question by focusing on Catholic and Muslim Americans, whose moral and social world-views span both sides of the partisan divide. Using a novel ‘dynamic’ choice experiment, I show that religious cross-pressures shape how voters arrive at their choices. Contrary to classic accounts linking cross-pressures to disengagement, I find no evidence of increased decision avoidance; instead, voters remain engaged but simplify their choices. Cross-pressure salience is linked to greater decision difficulty, reduced information search, and greater reliance on issue prioritisation. These findings challenge the view that attitudinal conflict improves the quality of democratic participation, suggesting instead that cross-pressures constrain deliberation and may weaken the representational signal voters send to parties.

Ideas at Work: Educated Colleagues Shape Political Attitudes

Hilma Lindskog

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Workplaces are increasingly sorted by education. How does the educational composition at the workplace shape political attitudes? To address this question, I use Swedish population-wide administrative data combined with a representative election survey – an empirical approach that links respondents to their colleagues. The central finding is that the share of university educated at the workplace influences individuals’ attitudes independently of the individual’s own educational background. Further analysis indicates that the effect is partly caused during the time spent in the labor market and varies with the educational field composition of the workplace. The results shed light on how social connections at work, as opposed to personal experiences, shape political attitudes. This has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the politically relevant aspects of the work life, as well as for the formation of the education divide.

Electoral Studies

From the center to the fringes: A comparative test of attitudinal explanations for mainstream-to-challenger defection

Denis Cohen, Werner Krause, Anna Aigner

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When AI talks politics: How reliable is ChatGPT?

Alex Hartland, Daniela Braun, Giuseppe Carteny, Rosa M. Navarrete

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Pulling for the party: Electoral campaign targeting and local information in Zimbabwe

Adam S. Harris, Nicole Beardsworth, Ioanna Gkoutna

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European Journal of Political Research

Generic title: Not a research article

The winner–loser gap in democratic attitudes among politicians: Individual and collective outcomes – ERRATUM

Erick Stivens Padilla-Galviz, Álvaro Canalejo-Molero

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How left-wing parties shape the voting gender gap across Western Europe

Davide Angelucci, Ester Flumeri

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Empirical evidence suggests that the traditional gender gap in voting behaviour has been reversed in many advanced democracies. Cultural and structural factors have led the younger generations of women to shift from voting more conservatively than men to being more likely to support left-wing parties. Although these transformations have affected virtually all advanced democracies, empirical evidence shows that this gap is not uniform across time and space; there is significant variation in both the presence and strength of the association. In this paper, we argue that this variability can be partly explained by the role of left-wing political parties. In particular, we hypothesise that the modern gender gap is stronger when left-wing parties adopt progressive positions on both the socio-cultural and economic dimensions of politics. To test these hypotheses, 19 Western European countries are analysed using a dataset that integrates individual-level data from the European Social Survey (Waves 1–10) with party-level data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, covering 85 elections between 1999 and 2021. The results reveal that the modern gender gap is shaped by party positioning, with left-wing parties’ positions on both the economic and, most relevantly, the socio-cultural dimension playing a key role in reinforcing or mitigating gendered voting patterns.

The political class in citizens’ minds: Mapping public perceptions of politicians

Mads Nørgaard

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Politicians are often portrayed as a socially distinct and internally homogeneous elite – a narrative central to populist rhetoric and scholarly debates on political discontent. Yet we know little about how voters mentally represent politicians. Using survey data from Denmark ( N = 1302), combining free association tasks, open-ended descriptions, and closed-ended items, I demonstrate that most citizens view politicians as both internally homogeneous and socially distinct from the general population. These perceptions correlate with negative characterisations and significantly lower political trust, external efficacy, and democratic satisfaction. Crucially, perceived social distinctiveness matters more than perceived homogeneity: citizens who view politicians as different from ordinary people show substantially diminished political support, regardless of whether they see politicians as similar to one another. By shifting the analytical focus to citizens’ mental representations, this study highlights the importance of not only who politicians are but also how they are imagined by the public.

Do voting advice applications have durable causal effects? Evidence from concurrent survey and field experiments

Micha Germann, Iulia Cioroianu, Fernando Mendez, Constantinos Djouvas

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Voting advice applications (VAAs) are used by millions of voters, yet their causal effects on political knowledge, preferences, and behavior remain unclear. We present new evidence from two experiments conducted during the 2024 UK General Election: (1) a panel survey experiment that provides access to participants’ VAA advice, achieves high compliance with treatment assignment, and allows us to track outcomes over time; and (2) a concurrent field experiment embedded in a real-world VAA that allows us to assess the ecological validity of our findings. We find that VAA usage leads to durable changes in voters’ perception of how close they are to parties on policy issues, shifts party preferences in line with the advice received, and affects the vote choices of undecided voters. These results suggest that VAAs play an important role in election campaigns. However, we find no evidence that VAAs increase electoral participation.

Diaspora diplomacy in the making: The Case of Latvian diaspora professionals working in international organisations

Inta Mieriņa, Baiba Bela

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Nationals living abroad are increasingly recognised as important, yet often overlooked, actors in international diplomacy. Unlike previous research – which has focused mainly on states and diasporas as singular entities – this study highlights the pivotal contributions of individuals. It introduces a new theoretical framework that emphasises the multifaceted roles of professionals in international organisations as resources for strengthening their home state’s development, influence, and global visibility. The study examines the actors involved in diaspora diplomacy, how diplomatic work is conducted by, for, and through diasporas, and what motivates citizen diplomats. The analysis draws on a survey ( N = 150), six focus groups ( N = 18), and four interviews with highly skilled Latvian professionals in international organisations. Findings reveal the decentralised, networked nature of diaspora diplomacy, challenging the notion of the state or diaspora as a singular actor. Individual diaspora members play vital roles, advancing their home country’s goals and visibility through their professional activities. All core functions of public diplomacy – communication, representation, listening, advocacy, and nation branding – are actively performed at the individual level by citizen diplomats. However, the degree to which states benefit from this resource depends on having a coordinated strategy for diaspora engagement.

Terrorist threat decreases citizens’ relative preferences for women candidates: Insights from a Danish conjoint experiment

Brian Littmann, Nadia Natasha James Nielsen, Lasse Laustsen

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For several decades, democracies across the Globe have faced the persistent threat from terrorist attacks. A possible consequence of terrorist threat is that citizens come to find men candidates relatively more appealing compared to women candidates. However, recent meta-analyses reveal that citizens generally prefer women over men candidates when terrorist threat is absent. Here, we report the results from a pre-registered conjoint experiment testing whether the terrorist risk assessment from the official Danish intelligence authority (Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, PET) affects candidate gender preferences among a sample of 1,034 representative Danes. Results reveal an average marginal component effect of 8.6 percentage points favoring women candidates in the absence of terrorist threat. However, when the risk of terrorism against Denmark is made salient, this effect is significantly reduced to 5.3 percentage points. Follow-up analyses reveal that left-wing respondents change their candidate gender preferences most when terrorist threat becomes salient. Implications for challenges to political representation are discussed.

Party Politics

Practical social democracy Magnus FeldmannJonas HinnforsMark Wickham-Jones (eds.), Practical Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026. £110 (hbk); £38 (pbk), xi + 406pp. ISBN 9781009614290.

David J Bailey

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The party soldier, the young careerist, and the outsider: How distinctive career paths affect party dissent

Iakovos Makropoulos

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Parties are not unified entities, yet research on intra-party dissent has focused on legislators while overlooking the broader pool of candidates and the distinct career paths that bring them into politics. Drawing on theories of careerism, representation, and spatial competition, I argue that pre-parliamentary careers shape both whether candidates dissent from their party and in which direction. Using the Comparative Candidates Survey across thirteen country-elections, I find that party soldiers with local roots are the most loyal, whereas young careerists who have never worked outside politics are the most likely to dissent. Crucially, when careerists break with their party, they move toward the centre rather than the extremes, and they do so most when their electoral chances are high. These findings link the professionalisation of political careers to party cohesion and candidate-voter congruence.

Different articles, similar arguments: A response to Rosenberg

Philip Cowley, Tim Bale

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In this short response to Rosenberg (2026), we focus on three points. First, we note that there is now agreement that intra-party sortition is unlikely to deliver a more socially representative legislature without some other measures such as stratification or quotas. Second, we argue that it is curious to criticise us for not considering the possibility of change in the future in response to the introduction of intra-party sortition, when we did exactly that at some length in our original article. And third, we raise a broader issue about exactly how scholars might measure the overall representativeness of an institution.

Partisan differentiation in legislative texts in South Korea: Agenda selection, framing, and partisan classifiability in the 21st national assembly

Sangjoon Ka

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How do parties translate their ideological identities into the language of legislation? This study analyzes 22,964 member-sponsored bills from the Democratic Party of Korea and the People Power Party in the 21st Korean National Assembly, decomposing partisan differences into three dimensions: agenda setting, framing, and partisan classifiability. The study finds significant divergence in topic distributions across parties, with the Democratic Party prioritizing judicial reform and labor rights while the People Power Party emphasizes real estate taxation and regional development. More substantively novel is the evidence for within-topic framing differences: even after agenda composition is held constant, keyword contrasts within shared policy domains reveal recurring asymmetries in problem diagnosis and justificatory language. A text-only classification model further confirms that partisan identity is consistently encoded in legislative texts. These findings indicate that agenda selection and within-topic framing combine to produce a consistent partisan signal. Party discipline, decentralized incentives for position-taking, and ideological polarization constitute plausible institutional and political conditions under which such a pattern may emerge, with broader implications for comparative research on party-centered democracies.

Digitalisation without democratisation: Organisational conditions for deliberative override capacity in European parties

Gema Sánchez Medero

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Contemporary political parties are digitalising their internal processes at an accelerating rate, yet higher levels of digitalisation do not consistently translate into deeper internal democracy. This article builds a diagnostic framework around deliberative override capacity (DOC), the organisational conditions under which members can access, contest, and reverse technically mediated decisions. Combining an exploratory analysis of the DIGIPART dataset (n = 76) with a theory-building statutory analysis of 18 parties across seven countries, we find that only two parties exhibit the full statutory configuration associated with robust DOC, while most combine formal participatory commitments with executive or proprietary control of the digital infrastructure. A DOC proxy applied to the seventy-six parties indicates that DOC captures variation existing indices do not: parties scoring highly on democratic digital-innovation indices may nonetheless exhibit governance indeterminacy, that is, a formal participatory commitment without any statutory specification of who controls the digital infrastructure. We develop a heuristic typology of override configurations across ideological families and draw out its implications for party-organisation research and party law. The design is configurational and cross-sectional; we identify co-occurrence patterns rather than causal effects.

Political Geography

Electric imperialism: Europe, state capital and the global political economy of the energy transition

Yngve Heiret

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What's in a name? Name change, memory-work, and symbolic resistance in Rhode Island

Lily Martin, Juliet Johnson, Benjamin Forest

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Full boat, empty boat: The politics of maritime migration and its racial spectres

Tarsis Brito, Silvester Schlebrügge

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Review forum

Malene H. Jacobsen, Persis Rustom Taraporevala, Raksha Pande, Radhika Borde, Rupal Oza

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Political Science Research and Methods

The effects of participating in government-led citizens’ assemblies

Mariana C. Duarte, Jorge M. Fernandes, Miguel M. Pereira

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Contemporary democracies face growing public disaffection and mistrust. Governments have tried to revert these trends by promoting participatory governance. Prior studies established how deliberation can empower citizens. However, whether these effects hold in real-life initiatives initiated by partisan governments remains unclear. We test the ability of citizens’ assemblies to foster democratic attitudes in a natural experiment leveraging the random selection of participants to Lisbon’s citizens’ assemblies Participation led to an increase in issue knowledge and salience, external political efficacy and institutional trust. However, it did not impact internal political efficacy nor helped citizens better recognize the challenges of collective decision-making. The results hold for two assembly editions and reveal the potential of government-led participatory initiatives to reconnect citizens with democracy.

Religiosity and local debt repayment: evidence from Italian mayors

Luca Vitale

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Does a politician’s religion influence their policymaking? While existing research has examined how gender, class, and ethnicity shape political decisions, the role of religiosity remains understudied. This paper investigates how religious values influence debt repayment decisions among local politicians. I develop a novel measure of individual religiosity, based on names matching local patron saints, and apply it to 62,908 candidates in Italian municipal elections. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that narrowly elected religious Catholic mayors are more likely to increase debt repayment. This effect likely reflects two mechanisms: Catholic moral teachings, which stress the obligation to repay debt, and risk aversion rooted in religion. Overall, these findings demonstrate that religion meaningfully shapes the fiscal behavior of elected officials.

Public Choice

Electoral timing and local user charges: evidence from sewerage tariffs in Japan

Yoshimi Adachi, Hikaru Ogawa

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The effects of changing electoral systems from first-past-the-post to single transferable vote: causal evidence from New Zealand

Shaun Bowler, Diogo Ferrari, Matthew Gibbons, Jack Vowles

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Elite-led revolutions

Raouf Boucekkine, Rodolphe Desbordes, Paolo Melindi-Ghidi

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Populism and impatience

Thomas Aronsson, Clemens Hetschko, Ronnie Schöb

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We develop a model where highly impatient voters are more likely than others to be subject to institutional frictions in the form of binding borrowing constraints. As impatient, borrowing-constrained voters cannot move long-term policy gains to the present, they turn to short-sighted, typically populist agendas, to politically obtain what the credit market denies them, namely relief from a short-term sacrifice. Empirical analyses based on German and British data show that there is indeed an association between impatience and the likelihood of preferring a populist party which remains substantial even after controlling for life outcomes, as well as across a number of sensitivity analyses. A comparison between populist parties within the German data reveals that impatience is associated with right-wing populism, but not left-wing populism. The results also confirm that the relationship between impatience and the likelihood of preferring a populist party is indeed attributed to voters who are likely borrowing-constrained. We conclude that institutional frictions can lead voters to support short-sighted policy agendas.

Primaries, caucuses, and momentum: theory and evidence from 48 years of presidential nomination campaigns

John Aldrich, Jim Granato, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Phuong Pham, M. C. Sunny Wong

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Public choice book review for FDR: a new political life, by David Beito (2025, Carus Books)

Jason E. Taylor

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Edward Clarke’s struggles

Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, Poulami Sarkar

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Beyond the myth of suffocating centralization: from legal intent to evidence in early Italy

Giorgio Brosio, Roberto Zanola

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This paper re-examines the widespread claim that the Italian Municipal Law of 1865 effectively suppressed local autonomy. Rather than relying on the statute’s formal design or on later legal commentary, the analysis turns to the actual behaviour of municipalities in the decades after unification. Regional fiscal data from 1866 to 1911 show that local governments retained substantial discretion, adopted markedly different tax and expenditure strategies, and followed trajectories that diverged sharply across the country. These patterns speak directly to the debate between law and economics and public choice. While the legal interpretation stresses the centralising intent of the Law, our evidence suggests that local outcomes were shaped not only by the formal institutional framework but also by differences in local incentives and fiscal preferences. The paper shows that the formal structure of a law does not necessarily determine its practical effects, and that institutional analysis gains much from combining legal and political-economy perspectives.

Quarterly Journal of Political Science

Coloring in the lines: the role of segregation and majority-minority districts in local descriptive representation

Gustavo F. Novoa

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The urban politics literature finds municipal elections are highly racialized, but it is unclear how this is reflected in redistricting. I analyze the implementation of majority-minority districts in 133 US cities during the 2010 redistricting cycle. I find that in cities where Black or Hispanic citizens are minorities, they are proportionally underrepresented in city council districts, but are overrepresented in cities where they make up the majority. To isolate the role of residential segregation, I use a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from the underlying distribution of plausible maps. The proportion of Hispanic-majority districts implemented generally matches median simulated plans, but nearly one-third of cities implemented more Black-majority districts than the median simulation. The proportion of Black city council members positively predicts the gap between the median proportion of majority-minority districts simulated and the proportion implemented. I then link this data to the electoral outcomes of racially identified candidates. I find that majority-minority and majority-White districts elect co-racial or co-ethnic candidates in over 75% of elections (n = 2,434). Finally, I predict the number of Black and Hispanic councilors elected under simulated plans. Implemented plans led to an estimated 9.5% more Black councilors on average, but roughly the same number of Hispanic councilors.

Research & Politics

Lobbying by Rebel Groups in the United States: Introducing the Rebel Lobbying Dataset, Version 1, 1945–2012

Yu Bin Kim, Ilayda B. Onder

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During civil wars, some rebel groups hire lobbying and public relations (PR) firms to cultivate favorable perceptions abroad. Almost 15% of rebel groups, for example, lobbied through PR firms at least once in the United States between 1945 and 2012. Yet, data limitations have made it difficult for scholars of rebel diplomacy to study rebel lobbying systematically. To help mitigate these limitations and facilitate future research, we introduce the first version of the Rebel Lobbying Dataset (RLD), which captures whether and when rebel groups hired professional lobbying firms in the United States. The RLD covers 230 rebel groups engaged in 103 civil conflicts worldwide from 1945 to 2012. After presenting several descriptive patterns, we demonstrate the dataset’s utility by examining whether rebel lobbying in Washington is associated with subsequent U.S. support for rebel groups. By making rebel groups’ use of professional lobbying firms visible at scale for the first time, the RLD opens new avenues for studying the determinants, timing, and consequences of how rebel groups pursue foreign influence.

The Journal of Politics

Consequential histories: A field experiment at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Laia Balcells, Francesca Parente, Ethan vanderWilden

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The Evolution of Collective Action: Evidence from Mexico

Cesar B. Martinez-Alvarez, Mark Buntaine

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Causes and Consequences of Gendered Bureaucratic Recruitment: A Study of China

Xiaoxia Huang

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The Left-Wing Peace & The Right-Wing Peace

Joshua A. Schwartz, Dominic Tierney

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“When they go low, we kick them”: The reciprocal nature of citizens’ support for democratic transgressions

Lisa Janssen, Hannah Werner, Anna Kern

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