🗣 Communication Paper Picnic 🧺: Political Science

I checked 18 political science journals on Friday, February 06, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period January 30 to February 05, I found 65 new paper(s) in 12 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Race, gender, and party in EEOC cases, 1996–2006: Assessing the role of judge attributes in case outcomes in the US district courts

Sean Farhang, Gregory J. Wawro, Michael E. Sobel

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We study the relationship between trial judge attributes and monetary outcomes in cases brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We define an estimand, the average feature comparison (AFC), that addresses whether or not a case outcome would differ were it assigned to a judge of one type as opposed to another—here male versus female, White versus non‐White, or Republican versus Democratic appointee. We develop a framework for estimating the AFC that takes into consideration which judges are eligible to be randomly assigned to given cases. We find the probability a case results in nonzero relief is greater if that case were assigned to a non‐White judge than to a White judge, but the relief amount is not. For gender (party), we do not find evidence that the monetary outcome of a case would be different if it was assigned to a male (Democrat) rather than a female (Republican) judge.

How shifting priorities and capacity affect policy work and constituency service: Evidence from a census of legislator requests to U.S. federal agencies

Devin Judge‐Lord, Eleanor Neff Powell, Justin Grimmer

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When elected officials gain power, do they use it to provide more constituent service or affect policy? The answer informs debates over how legislator capacity, term limits, and institutional positions affect legislator behavior. We distinguish two countervailing effects of increased institutional power: shifting priorities and increased capacity. To assess how institutional power shapes behavior, we assemble a massive new database of 611,239 legislator requests to a near census of federal departments, agencies, and subagencies between 2007 and 2020. We find that legislators prioritize policy work as they gain institutional power (e.g., become a committee chair) but simultaneously maintain their levels of constituency service. Moreover, when a new legislator replaces an experienced legislator, the district receives less constituency service and less policy work. Rather than long‐serving and powerful elected officials diverting attention from constituents, their increased capacity enables them to maintain levels of constituency service, even as they prioritize policy work.

Migrating to stay or commuting to work? How fairness perceptions and exposure shape attitudes toward labor migration

Lena Maria Schaffer, Gabriele Spilker

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Existing literature posits that attitudes toward immigration are shaped by the impact of migrants on native workers' wages and employment, as well as by various other material, cultural, and social concerns. However, empirically disentangling these influences can be challenging. By taking advantage of the fact that different types of labor migrants, namely either taking residence and working in a country or commuting over an international border, equally affect labor market competition but have different cultural and social implications, we strive to identify the effect of labor migration on attitudes toward migration. We empirically investigate this phenomenon using two experiments embedded within a representative survey in Switzerland, one priming and one conjoint experiment. Results robustly show that natives evaluate resident foreigners more positively than cross‐border commuters and that levels of exposure and fairness aspects explain this preference.

Annual Review of Political Science

The Political Economy of the Clean Energy Transition

Alexander F. Gazmararian, Dustin Tingley

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Why are some countries more successful at advancing the clean energy transition than others? Existing research, centered on industrialized democracies, often frames international collective action against domestic distributive explanations. This review synthesizes many previous comparative and international explanations in a credibility framework that clarifies when governments can reduce opposition and create climate coalitions. Applying it to both developed and developing countries reveals how institutions, state capacity, and global constraints jointly shape decarbonization trajectories and suggests a new research agenda for the political economy of climate change.

Information Processing in Participatory Institutions

Daniel Berliner

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Participatory institutions often aim to yield information useful to policymakers, whether about public preferences, problems, or solutions. But how can large numbers of public contributions be processed into interpretable and actionable information outputs? As theorists and practitioners increasingly call for participatory institutions to operate at larger scales, often enabled by new technologies, this challenge only becomes more important. This article reviews recent work on participatory institutions in order to develop several insights: ( a ) that there are different types of information that policymakers may aim to learn and that are relevant to different policy stages; ( b ) that information must be effectively processed in order to be interpretable and actionable for policymakers; ( c ) that there are different types of information processing, depending on the specificity and novelty of the information outputs that policymakers aim to learn; and ( d ) that there are different ways in which this processing can be delegated, whether to experts, ordinary people, or automated algorithms. Better recognizing these differences will help both researchers and practitioners better understand the potential and the limitations of participatory institutions in different settings and with different goals.

Democracy and the Environment

Kathryn Baragwanath, Saad Gulzar

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We survey research on the relationship between democracy and the environment. The first part of our review examines how democratic systems influence environmental outcomes. Scholars have found, at best, a weakly positive correlation between democracy and environment, with little support for the proposed democratic environmental Kuznets curve, a finding we confirm with new data. We argue that democracy is too coarse a category to capture variation in environmental outcomes. Therefore, the second part of the review surveys how specific institutional features structure principal–agent relationships between citizens, leaders, and organized groups. We show that effective environmental governance depends on institutions that align incentives, reduce informational asymmetries, and match temporal horizons. These can arise in democracies but can also, under certain conditions, appear in autocratic contexts such as China, where state capacity and political incentives have aligned to produce targeted improvements. We conclude by identifying key open questions and promising directions for future research.

Electoral Studies

Generic title: Not a research article

Corrigendum to ‘Does switching pay off? The impact of parliamentary party instability on individual electoral performance’ [Elect. Stud. Volume 99, February 2026, 103037]

Allan Sikk, Sona N. Golder, Raimondas Ibenskas, Paulina Sałek-Lipcean

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Generic title: Not a research article

Corrigendum to ‘Happy and glorious? The sometimes-unifying effects of the British monarchy’ [Elect. Stud. 96 (2025) 1-7 102961]

Braeden Davis, Yu-Shiuan Huang

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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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Who punishes the government? Income-based disparities in economic voting

Chloé De Grauwe, Silke Goubin

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Assessing the impact of internet voting on voter turnout in the 2024 Russian presidential elections

Alena Teplyshova

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Ableist institutions and party selection processes: Exploring the political recruitment of disabled candidates

Elizabeth Evans, Stefanie Reher

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Fickle loyalties: Intragroup competition in open list elections

Andrew Saab

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Childhood poverty and political participation: The role of family, gender and economic mobility

Clara Weißenfels

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Party organizational strength and voter turnout in authoritarian regimes

Juhyeok Lee, Nam Kyu Kim

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The rural-urban cleavage in US presidential elections: Stability and sudden change

Valentin Pautonnier, Ruth Dassonneville, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Richard Nadeau

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Political violence and invalid voting: A case study

Abelardo Gómez Díaz

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Amplifying the message? The effect of endorsements in primary elections

Alessio Albarello, Mayya Komisarchik

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Effects of a politician’s reputation for providing electoral clientelism: A theory with evidence from Brazil

Eduardo Mello, Will Jennings, Lawrence McKay, Oto Montagner

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Party gatekeeping of working-class candidates under closed-list proportional representation

Sania Akter, Yann Kerevel, Austin S. Matthews

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Burdens and gains. The association between house rent increases and voting in the city of Madrid

Álvaro Sánchez-García, Hugo Marcos-Marne

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An attentive audience? If and how voters evaluate coalition formation

Ida B. Hjermitslev, Svenja Krauss

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How do underrepresented voters view electoral system trade-offs?

Don S. Lee, Charles T. McClean

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All the “Missing” ladies: Attribution bias in candidate selection after electoral setbacks

Selcen Cakir, Elif Erbay, Konstantinos Matakos

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Applicability of quantitatively predictive logical models at subnational level of governance: Testing the Seat Product Model on Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Slovak regional elections

Pavel Maškarinec

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Added, not selected: The limited electoral effectiveness of party elite interventions in candidate selection

Thomas Däubler, Theresa Reidy

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Could you please repeat it? The effect of language, and language variety on trust in multinational settings

Toni Rodon, Bernat Puertas, Avel·lí Flors-Mas, Núria Franco-Guillén, Sergi Morales-Gálvez

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Who is trusted to navigate the storm? Gendered leadership preferences in times of crisis

Lotte Hargrave, Jessica C. Smith, Viktor Valgarðsson, Daniel Devine, Hannah Bunting, Caroline Leicht

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Campaign spending in mixed member proportional systems: How political and institutional context shapes party strategy

Dominic Nyhuis, Sebastian Block, Morten Harmening, Tilko Swalve

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Conflict on the campaign trail? How campaign effort and electoral competitiveness shape affective polarization

Justin Robinson, Ruth Dassonneville

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Finding your perfect match nearby. A test of proximity and issue salience voting in local elections

Raf Reuse, Dieter Stiers

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Electoral systems and geographically targeted oversight: Evidence from the Taiwan Legislative Yuan

Yen-Chieh Liao, Li Tang

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Issues of high potential: A novel methodology to uncover unactivated public policy demands

James Breckwoldt

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Introduction to the Special Issue “The rural-urban divide in Europe: Assessing its impact on political attitudes and voting behavior”

Pedro Riera, Sigrid Roßteutscher

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Does switching pay off? The impact of parliamentary party instability on individual electoral performance

Allan Sikk, Sona N. Golder, Raimondas Ibenskas, Paulina Sałek-Lipcean

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Did Trump do better where inflation was worse? Evidence from county-level data

Patrick Flavin

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Housing and electoral behaviour: The changing face of class voting in advanced democracies

Josh Goddard

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European Journal of Political Research

Welfare by design: Public responses to the distribution of old-age pensions

Dani M. Marinova, Timothy Hellwig

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A basic premise of research on welfare state spending is that electoral incentives matter, with voters backing programme expansion and opposing retrenchment. However, the evidence supporting this premise is mixed. Departing from previous studies, we argue that these apparent null effects arise from an emphasis on the generosity of social benefits rather than their distribution . Shifting attention to the latter, we argue that individual preferences over the allocation of welfare spending depend on their relationship to economic vulnerability. Individuals in secure economic situations support schemes with benefits proportional to contributions, while those in more vulnerable positions favour systems based on recipient need. These heterogeneous preferences translate into public evaluations of policymaker performance, providing a pathway for the electoral connection. We test this argument in two stages. First, we use data from the European Social Survey to examine how individual precarity shapes preferences for needs-based versus contributory pensions. Second, we use the Executive Approval Database to assess how the composition of pension expenditures and perceptions of debt affect government support across eleven European welfare states from 1986 to 2019. Study findings provide evidence consistent with our theoretical expectations. Results highlight the micro-level foundations of policymakers’ electoral incentives and provide a path forward for specifying connections between the allocation of social policy spending and mass politics.

Beyond partisanship: Ideological identities and affective evaluations

Ida Bæk Hjermitslev, Markus Wagner

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Research on affective polarization has largely focused on partisanship as the source of political social identities. However, identities also form around ideological divisions such as liberal/conservative or left/right, particularly in contexts where ideological divisions are more permanent than parties. In this paper, we study ideological identities and how they influence interpersonal affect. In our survey ( n = 2152), conducted in Germany, many individuals declare ideological identities, and these are of similar strength as partisan identities. We also run a conjoint survey experiment where respondents evaluate individuals with varying personal characteristics and, crucially, see varying amounts of information: only ideological affiliation, or also partisanship, policy stances, and/or political interest. We find that ideological affiliation matters for how respondents evaluate individuals, even when extensive additional information is present. However, ideology is slightly less relevant than partisanship, while policy stances are privileged over both. Our findings imply that we should broaden our lens in studying affective polarization to encompass political identities beyond partisanship.

High emissions, low engagement? How members of parliament represent the carbon footprint of their constituents

Lucas Geese, Chantal Sullivan-Thomsett

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Many affluent democracies have pledged to achieve ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. Achieving these targets would denote important national contributions to the international goal of keeping global warming ‘well below’ 2°C as agreed in the 2015 Paris agreement. Yet pursuing the necessary long-term decarbonisation policies influencing individuals’ everyday lives will require a considerable and enduring level of political leadership. But what enables or constrains politicians to perform such leadership? To date, little is known about the factors influencing politicians’ willingness to advocate for decarbonisation measures in the short-term for the long-term gain of climate change mitigation. This study draws on rare data of consumers’ carbon footprints, parliamentary speechmaking, and qualitative elite interviews in a mixed-methods research design to study how the intensity of constituents’ consumption-based carbon emissions influences the decarbonisation-focused behaviour of members of parliament (MPs) in the UK. Our quantitative findings reveal that MPs pay considerably less attention to decarbonisation issues when they represent carbon-intense constituencies. Moreover, this effect is particularly pronounced for Conservative MPs and amplified in marginal seats. The qualitative interview evidence helps to contextualise these quantitative findings, suggesting that MPs consider the decarbonisation of lifestyles a crucial political challenge and that their electoral considerations and party-political contexts play an important role in how they handle this challenge. Overall, our study draws a sobering picture of politicians’ willingness to sacrifice short-term electoral gains for the long-term prospect of net zero, especially for those MPs representing constituencies that could make high-impact contributions to nationwide emission cuts.

European integration and transformed parliamentary opposition: Evidence from five decades of legislative politics

Karl Loxbo, Brigitte Pircher

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While European integration has transformed national parliaments, its long-term impact on conflicts between governments and opposition parties remains insufficiently understood. This study addresses that gap by analysing how Sweden’s accession to the European Union (EU) in 1995 altered the patterns of parliamentary opposition. Using longitudinal data on government proposals in the Swedish parliament, 1970–2022, we apply a difference-in-differences design to compare opposition intensity before and after accession. Our findings reveal two major transformations. First, we identify a sustained decline in opposition in internationally embedded economic and tax policies, supporting the view that the EU political system structurally depoliticises economic governance. Second, we observe a gradual but pronounced politicisation in policy areas tied to national identity and social welfare, where EU competences are limited and domestic discretion remains. We thus find that European integration reshapes parliamentary conflict by dampening opposition in economic policymaking while intensifying contestation in policy areas related to national identity and social protection. Rather than reducing opposition overall, EU membership redirects it across issue areas. Taken together, the results show that the distribution of national and supranational competences conditions parliamentary opposition. As Sweden is a most likely case of EU-induced cleavage transformation, similar dynamics are likely across other member states as well. The study advances parliamentary research by shifting attention from formal powers and debates to observable opposition behaviour over time. It also adds to theories of modern-day cleavage formation by providing evidence that European integration reduces conflict in economic policy while intensifying identity-based divides.

Party Politics

Preaching to the choirs. Political parties’ online targeting strategies in multi-party systems

Mads Fuglsang Hove, Sara B. Hobolt, Arjen van Dalen, Claes de Vreese

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Research suggests that political campaigns use online political microtargeting to mobilize a party’s existing voter base rather than to persuade new voters. However, most studies have been conducted in the US, where low turnout and high partisanship create optimal conditions for such a strategy. In this study, we analyze novel data on political parties’ use of targeting in Facebook and Instagram ads to examine the nature of microtargeting. The context of the 2022 Danish general election - with multiple parties, high voter turnout, and low partisanship - is a hard case for the mobilization thesis. Yet, in line with existing literature, we find that political parties focus their online targeting strategies on existing voters. However, the findings also suggest that political parties adjust their messages to conform with the presumed preferences of the targeted group, highlighting heterogeneity in the mobilization strategy.

Measuring party positions and issue salience with mass media and manifesto data: Comparing PolDem with Manifesto Project data

Theresa Gessler, Swen Hutter

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To what extent do measures of the issue positions and salience of political parties differ when they are extracted from mass media debates and election manifestos? Answering this question, the paper serves a dual purpose within this special issue of Party Politics : (i) introducing the PolDem election dataset used throughout the issue, and (ii) analyzing its convergence with the widely used Manifesto Project data. The newly released PolDem dataset, based on a relational content analysis of newspaper articles published during national election campaigns, covers 15 European countries and 111 campaigns. Focusing on four broad issue domains (economic, cultural, European integration, and political issues) across countries from Northwestern, Southern, and Central-Eastern Europe, the results demonstrate strong convergence in issue positions, except for in political issues related to democracy and corruption. However, the datasets differ significantly in issue salience, especially for less salient, noneconomic issues, niche parties and in less polarized contexts.

Ideological asymmetries of trust in elections and non-voting political participation

Erin B. Fitz, Kyle L. Saunders

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We replicate and extend previous research that asks whether operational ideology moderates the relationship between trust in elections and non-voting political participation (NVP) in the United States. Using data from the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES, n = 4256), we find more evidence that operational liberals are positively associated with NVP regardless of trust, whereas distrusting operational conservatives, in particular, are associated with greater NVP. Panel data from the 2020–2024 ANES ( n = 1857) further reveal that prior liberal operational ideology is positively associated with subsequent trust in elections and NVP. Together, our findings contribute to existing literature by demonstrating ideological heterogeneity in trust in elections, NVP, and the relationship between the two. Should these patterns continue, a central challenge of preserving democratic processes may be less about the inherent value of trust and participation, and more about under which conditions these factors signal broader democratic health.

On visibility and normalization: Parliamentary representation and media attention to radical right parties, leaders, and issues

Tiago Silva, Hugo Marcos-Marne, Susana Rogeiro Nina, Marina Costa Lobo, Filippo Pasquali

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Is the mainstream news coverage of politics contributing to the legitimization and normalization of the radical right? To answer this question, we focus on two countries (Portugal and Spain) where Radical Right Parties (RRPs) emerged late and developed very quickly. A longitudinal dataset (2015–2024) of newspaper articles was employed to assess the salience of VOX and Chega , their leaders, and four core issues of the radical-right, before and after they first entered the national parliament. A major theoretical expectation was that parliamentary entrance might bolster the media salience of these parties and their leaders vis-à-vis other new political parties. While we find that Chega does indeed receive more media attention than other comparable parties, especially during election times, no such pattern can be detected for VOX. Concerning attention given to leaders, measured as salience and personalization index, we confirm that André Ventura, leader of Chega is given disproportionate attention, while that is not the case for VOX’s Santiago Abascal. Concerning issues, our findings indicate that although notable cross-national differences in media coverage persist, several key issues were already prominent before 2019 (consistent with the agenda-setting expectation) and may have helped advance the radical-right agenda in both Portugal and Spain.

Political trust and elite closure: Evidence from Latin America

Camila Ortiz-Inostroza, Matías Bargsted

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We examine how the degree of social closure among political elites shapes mass-level political trust in Latin America, a region marked by historically closed elites and persistently low trust. Building on contrasting perspectives, we argue that elite closure undermines citizens’ trust, but its influence also depends on a country’s long-term patterns of closure. In contexts where elites have been highly closed over time, further increases are expected to erode trust. In more open systems, by contrast, closure may be positively associated. Our analysis combines LAPOP data (2004–2018) with PELA-USAL elite indicators in a large-N comparative framework. Estimates from hierarchical models indicate that elite closure—characterized by legislative re-election rates and family ties in politics—significantly reduces political trust. However, these results are heterogeneous: rising closure erodes trust only in countries where elites have historically been highly closed, highlighting the context-dependent role of elite composition in shaping citizens’ political trust.

Political Analysis

Potential and Pitfalls of Audio as Data for Political Research: Alignment, Features, and Classification Models

Rafael Mestre, Matt Ryan

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Political science is a field rich in multimodal information sources, from televised debates to parliamentary briefings. This paper bridges a gap between computer and political science in multimodal data analysis using audio. The adoption of multimodal analyses in political science (e.g., video/audio with text-as-data approaches) has been relatively slow due to unequal distribution of computational power and skills needed. We provide solutions to challenges encountered when analyzing audio, advancing the potential for multimodal data analysis in political science. Using a dataset of all televised U.S. presidential debates from 1960 to 2020, we focus on three features encountered when analyzing audio data: low-level descriptors (LLDs), such as pitch or energy; Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs); and audio embeddings/encodings, like Wav2Vec. We showcase four applications: (a) forced alignment of audio text using MFCCs, time-stamping transcripts, and speaker information; (b) speech characterization using LLDs; (c) custom-made classification models with audio embeddings and MFCCs; and (d) emotional recognition models using Wav2Vec for classification of discrete emotions and their valence-arousal dominance. We provide explanations to help understand how these features can be applied for different political research questions and advice on vigilance to naive interpretation, for both experienced researchers and those who want to start working with audio.

Political Geography

Good bridges make good neighbors: The convergence of political support astride the Connecticut river

Quinn M. Bornstein, James G. Gimpel

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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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How local candidates mobilize voters: Evidence from India

Dishil Shrimankar, Oliver Heath

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Political Psychology

Rethinking the link between cognitive reflection and susceptibility to political misinformation: Distinguishing hard from soft news

Giannis Lois, Antonis Gardikiotis, Zografoula Karaspyrou, Elias Tsakanikos, Constantine Sedikides

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The literature presents two contrasting accounts on how cognitive reflection (overriding intuition with deliberation) influences susceptibility to political misinformation. According to the classical reasoning account, predominantly rooted in research on soft news, cognitive reflection improves discernment of true from false information. According to the motivated reasoning account, rooted in research on hard (policy‐related) issues, individuals prone to cognitive reflection display stronger political bias and fall for politically congruent misinformation. We integrate these accounts by examining how the soft‐hard distinction interacts with individuals' reasoning style to shape truth discernment and susceptibility to political bias. An integrative data analysis (IDA) combined data from 18 political misinformation studies ( N = 41,289) with independent soft‐hard news ratings. Additionally, two experiments ( N = 666), in the United States and Greece, exposed participants to either soft or hard news. Across all datasets, participants prone to cognitive reflection displayed stronger political bias, but only when evaluating hard news. Cognitive reflection was associated with improved truth discernment for soft and hard news in the IDA, but not consistently so in the experiments. Our findings reconcile discrepancies in misinformation research and demonstrate that cognitive reflection is not a one‐size‐fits‐all solution to political misinformation as it can exacerbate bias in policy‐related issues.

Investigating generalized versus case‐by‐case support for labor unions

Grace Flores‐Robles, Ana P. Gantman, Kevin Carriere

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Across industries, workers, and the general public, activity by and support for labor unions seems to be increasing, alongside falling membership and legislative losses. How do we make sense of these seemingly contradictory parallel trends? In four studies ( N = 996), we find that support for unions is high in the United States. However, we find that support varies based on both individual‐ and group‐level factors. Specifically, conservatism and system‐justifying ideologies are negatively related to union support, whereas structural attributions for poverty are positively related to union support. We also find left–right ideological differences in union support; conservatives are less likely to support unions overall (but are relatively more supportive of police unions) compared to liberals. In contrast, liberals are more supportive of labor unions more generally than conservatives, and are more likely to support teachers' unions than police unions. Overall, support for unions is high but not generalized; worldviews, ideology, and type of labor differentiate that support.

Estimating the causal effects of cognitive effort and policy information on party cue influence

Ben M. Tappin, Ryan T. McKay

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Party cues can influence public opinion, but the extent to which they do so varies dramatically from context to context. Why? The long‐standing theory that party cues function as “heuristics” provides an answer, predicting that variation in exposure to policy information, a propensity for effortful thinking, or both causally affects the influence of party cues. However, this prediction has escaped decisive empirical testing to date, leaving in its wake a string of mixed results. Here we characterize the challenges that limit previous tests, and report on two large‐scale experiments designed to overcome them. We find that exposure to policy information causally attenuates the influence of party cues, but engagement in effortful thinking per se does not. Our results advance understanding of the “when” and “why” of party cue influence; clarify a number of previously ambiguous findings; and have broad theoretical, methodological, and normative implications for understanding the influence of party cues.

Political Science Research and Methods

Partners in government: politicians’ gender preferences in coalition formation

Alba Huidobro

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Do politicians consider the gender of party leaders when selecting coalition partners? Little is known about whether gender shapes how political elites evaluate potential coalition allies. I theorize that politicians prefer women as coalition partners for their perceived qualities, such as consensus building, trustworthiness, and governance abilities, making them a less threatening option for politicians’ aspirations. Conducting an original conjoint experiment with 979 Spanish mayors, I find that mayors, especially those on the center and left, prefer to form coalition governments with parties led by women. The analysis of the mechanisms suggests that women leaders are perceived as easier to communicate and more competent to govern. These findings suggest that gendered perceptions and stereotypes may play a role in elite decision-making and shaping coalition preferences.

Beyond the mean: how thinking about the distribution of public opinions reduces politicians’ perceptual errors

Nicholas Dias, Jack Lucas, Lior Sheffer

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Elected politicians regularly over-estimate the conservatism of their constituents’ preferences. While these findings have concerning implications for democratic representation, the magnitude and sources of so-called “conservative over-estimation” are poorly understood. We show that a novel approach to measuring politicians’ perceptions—which asks politicians to draw the distribution of their constituents’ preferences, rather than provide a point estimate—clarifies the magnitude and causes of conservative over-estimation. While the vast majority of politicians exhibit a conservative bias, our “perceived-distribution” task cuts the size of this bias in half. Moreover, psychological projection counterbalances conservative over-estimation among left-wing politicians but reinforces it among right-wing politicians. Our results raise questions about existing accounts of elite misperceptions and help to identify the psychological causes of conservative over-estimation.

When restrictive economic zoning leads to racial segregation

Jessica Trounstine

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Scholars have shown that restrictive zoning is correlated with racial segregation, but we lack an understanding of why this occurs. I argue that the link operates through the clustering of housing costs generated by land use regulations. Using an agent-based model, I find that restrictive zoning produces racial segregation, but only when residents have homophilic preferences and unequal wealth. Then using a novel dataset of parcel-level zoning codes, I show neighborhoods that are restrictively zoned have higher home values, are less diverse, wealthier, and have more homeowners. Finally, I show that cities vary in the degree to which zoning regulations are geographically clustered. Collectively, these results indicate that land use regulations contribute to the maintenance of racial segregation across neighborhoods.

PS: Political Science & Politics

The Senate Sandbox: Teaching Legislative Politics through Open-ended, Multi-week Simulations

Alison Craig, Ryan Dennehy, Frances Lee, Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod, Robert Oldham, Samuel Simon

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Political science educators must take innovative approaches to respond to twenty-first-century classroom challenges. Simulation-based pedagogy can foster deep student engagement while developing strong peer relationships, encouraging empathy, and improving professional skills. There are many ways, however, to conduct simulations in political science courses. We argue that open-ended, multi-week simulations in which students participate as relative equals may be especially beneficial for effective learning. Although this “sandbox”-style approach to simulation learning is portable to other settings, we have used it in legislative politics courses focused on the US Senate. Drawing from our experiences and student reviews, we argue that simulations in which students can immerse themselves in a role for an extended period, focus on issues they care about, and learn from their mistakes and successes along the way create a uniquely valuable learning experience. Our approach can present challenges for instructors, but we believe it is flexible enough to be deployed in a variety of institutional settings and that any trade-offs are more than worth it.

From Commonality to Unity: The Opportunities and Challenges of Latinxs’ Cross-racial Alliances with Blacks

Álvaro José Corral

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As a racialized group that is subject to discrimination, US Latinxs are often considered “natural” coalitional partners for Black-led civil rights struggles. Although the BLM movement may serve as a potential site for cross-racial coalition building because both Latinxs and Blacks suffer from racial profiling by law enforcement, the development of a shared status across group boundaries hinges on the interpretation by Latinxs of both their personal- and group-level discrimination experiences. Using the 2020 CMPS, I explore how multiple dimensions of Latinx racial group consciousness (perceptions of discrimination, intra- and intergroup commonality, and racial identity) shape their cross-racial alliances with Black social movements. Results from multivariate analysis show that Latinxs who acknowledge Black Americans’ continued struggle against racial discrimination in both American society and the Latinx community are positively oriented toward the BLM movement. Findings also reveal contrasting effects for inter- and intragroup commonality: the former is strongly and consistently predictive of increased support for the BLM Movement, whereas the latter is associated with decreased support. These findings underscore both the opportunities and challenges for Latinx–Black political coalition building.

Public Choice

First things first? Austerity, political parties and the composition of public budgets in the German states

Kai Brumm

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Political trade-offs are inherent to public budgeting in modern democracies. Faced with limited resources, policymakers must annually decide which projects to fund and which to delay or abandon. In the German federal system, these trade-offs are especially pronounced at the Länder level: State governments have little control over their tax revenues, while the constitutional debt brake prohibits structural deficits. Consequently, Länder cabinets are compelled to reallocate spending in response to fiscal stress. This study is the first to systematically investigate budgetary trade-offs between policy sectors in the German states. It examines how declining revenues and rising interest payments alter the composition of subnational budgets and whether political parties pursue distinct spending priorities under fiscal pressure. To explicitly model budgetary trade-offs, the analysis employs compositional dependent variables and applies seemingly unrelated regressions to a comprehensive panel dataset. The findings show that fiscal deterioration crowds out investment in infrastructure, universities and research. In turn, spending on school-based education, domestic security, and social protection gains in relative importance. Yet parties matter under austerity. Bourgeois governments seek to preserve public investment, whereas left-wing majorities prioritise social policies, including early childhood education and care. By combining a theory-driven approach with innovative methodology, the article advances our understanding of how policymakers adapt to financial constraints in a federal setting with limited fiscal autonomy. It contributes to broader debates on public finance, party politics, and policy prioritisation under austerity.

The Bootlegger’s choice: astroturf groups, genuine Baptists or both?

Joseph Abdelnour, Gilles Grolleau, Naoufel Mzoughi

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The Journal of Politics

Capital Influence: Endorsements and Donations to Political and Charitable Organizations

Cheryl Boudreau, Scott A. MacKenzie

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Quantity over Quality? Local Income Inequalities and Public Service Delivery in Brazil

Jonathan Phillips

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