I checked 18 political science journals on Friday, May 22, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 15 to May 21, I found 27 new paper(s) in 13 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Breaking barriers: How an international treaty for women reduces the size of the informal economy
Chris Gahagan
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Prior research on the role the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has improving women's outcomes has shown ratification results in increased political and social rights, yet no improvements in economic rights. I challenge prior findings by providing evidence that CEDAW improves women's economic rights by reducing gendered legal barriers to employment. I also demonstrate CEDAW has unexpected but desirable downstream consequences that further improve women's economic outcomes by facilitating movement from the informal to the formal economy. Through matching within a difference‐in‐differences design, I show ratifying countries experience a significant increase in women's equality of economic opportunity and a significant decrease in the size of the informal economy. These results hold under multiple robustness checks and placebo tests. By examining specific outcomes that are relevant to CEDAW, I offer greater insight into CEDAW's impact on women's economic outcomes than previous research has afforded.
Post‐instrument bias
Julian Schuessler, Adam N. Glynn, Miguel R. Rueda
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When using instrumental variables, researchers often assume that causal effects are only identified conditional on covariates. We show that the role of these covariates is often unclear and that there exists confusion regarding their ability to mitigate violations of the exclusion restriction. We explain when and how existing adjustment strategies may lead to “post‐instrument” bias. We then discuss assumptions that are sufficient to identify various treatment effects when adjustment for post‐instrument variables is required. In general, these assumptions are highly restrictive, albeit they sometimes are testable. We also show that other existing tests are possibly misleading. Then, we introduce a sensitivity analysis that uses information on variables influenced by the instrument to gauge the effect of potential violations of the exclusion restriction. We illustrate it using a published study and summarize our results in easy‐to‐understand guidelines.

British Journal of Political Science

Who Do Parties Speak To? Introducing the PSoGA: A New Comprehensive Database of Parties’ Social Group Appeals
Alona O. Dolinsky, Lena Maria Huber, Will Horne
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Which social groups do political parties appeal to? This is an important question, yet a lack of comparative data has constrained research. To address this gap, we introduce the Parties’ Social Group Appeals (PSoGA) Database, which includes two novel datasets covering 791 election manifestos from 139 parties across Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom from 1970 to 2025. This article outlines the methodology for constructing and validating the datasets, demonstrates compatibility with policy-focused resources like MARPOR, and highlights key aspects. This database provides researchers with unprecedented insight into representation dynamics across space and time by documenting the groups that parties speak about and appeal to.

Electoral Studies

Who does disproportionality favour? A measure for cross-domain comparison of disproportionalities
Chris Hanretty, Iain McMenamin
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European Journal of Political Research

The paradox of representation: How identity fragmentation complicates voter-party congruence
Jozef Michal Mintal, Felix Butzlaff, Bence Hamrak, RĂłbert Vancel, Kamila BorsekovĂĄ
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How should democratic representation be measured in an era of increasingly individualized and volatile political identities, and fragile collective attachments? Traditionally, research on representation has sought a single best dimension measure of voter-party congruence and representative fit; yet, in postmodern societies marked by fluid and fragmented identities, this approach, we argue, oversimplifies voter choice and misrepresents the quality of democratic representation. To address these limitations, we draw on social theory diagnoses that illuminate how contemporary processes of individualization, alienation, and fragmentation shape political identity formation and democratic representation. We develop a novel framework of multi-point congruence to assess voter-party alignment across the full voter-party matrix along three dimensions: aggregate issue agreement, party-defined salience, and voter-defined salience. Using a unique voting advice application dataset from Slovakia’s early elections in 2023 ( N = 134,699), an illustrative case for postmodern electoral dynamics, we show that personalized representation, centered on voter-defined priorities, maximizes policy alignment but fosters fragmentation, as voters often find multiple parties equally proximate. By contrast, party-centered representation sharpens partisan distinctiveness but increases ideological distance from voters. These competing logics of representation expose a core democratic trade-off: tailoring representation to individual preferences enhances policy fit but erodes partisan clarity, potentially leading to higher voter volatility and weakening voter-party linkages at the system level. Overall, our framework offers a more nuanced and generalizable assessment of voter-party alignment and representative quality in fragmented party systems of the contemporary, capturing not just how alignment occurs, but the democratic tensions it entails.
Political socialisation before and after migration: How origin-country political culture shapes immigrant voting in Europe
Zeynep Mentesoglu Tardivo, Simona Guglielmi
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Electoral participation among immigrants is frequently examined through the lens of residence country integration policies and institutional access. However, immigrants arrive with embedded values and political attitudes developed through early political socialisation in their country of origin, which may influence their engagement with democratic institutions long after migration. Grounded in theories of political (re)socialisation – exposure, resilience, and transferability – and drawing on the ‘impressionable years’ argument in resilience theory, we hypothesise that pre-migration political culture influences electoral participation, but its influence varies across generations. Specifically, we examine how pre-migration exposure to different political regimes affects electoral behaviour and how the timing of arrival (before or after age 13) and the length of residence moderate these effects. To test the hypotheses, the analysis draws on European Social Survey (ESS) data (Rounds 5–11), covering 23 EU member states. We focus on citizens of foreign origin, including 14,216 first-generation, 3,620 1.5-generation (arriving before age 13), and 5,359 second-generation immigrants. Using additional measures from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), we employ logistic regression models that integrate individual-level predictors with origin-country political culture, derived from migrants’ or their parents’ countries of birth. Our findings speak to all three strands of the political resocialisation framework. Early arrival and longer residence are associated with higher electoral participation, while pre-migration political socialisation continues to shape political behaviour after migration. Most notably, we find that first-generation immigrants socialised under authoritarian regimes exhibit higher electoral participation than their peers from democratic origins, suggesting the presence of a reactive mobilisation mechanism.
Strategies of agenda denial: Anti-gender opposition to LGBTQ+ policies in Italy
Anna Lavizzari, Andrea Terlizzi
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While the agenda setting literature largely focuses on how issues gain the attention of policy-makers, the strategies used to keep certain issues off the governmental agenda remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by examining agenda denial in the context of LGBTQ+ equality policies. It analyzes how opponents of such policies employ both strategies of avoidance and non-confrontation, as well as strategies of attack and issue redefinition, in order to prevent LGBTQ+ equality from advancing on the policy agenda. The opponents examined in this study are anti-gender actors, who have increasingly positioned themselves at the forefront of the backlash against gender equality, forming alliances across political and civil society sectors to push back or halt progress on LGBTQ+ policies. By dissecting their opposition arguments, this study examines how they strategically mobilize reason (evoking empirical proofs and factual evidence) and emotion (evoking sensibilities and feelings) to sustain their denial strategies. Focusing on Italy, where parties of the right-wing bloc and anti-gender organizations are increasingly intertwined and have gained significant influence, this study utilizes qualitative, interpretive content analysis of parliamentary debates on laws against homotransphobia, as well as organizational documents from anti-gender actors. The paper contributes to the literature by linking gender studies with agenda denial theory, offering fresh insights into gender backlash dynamics from a public policy perspective.

Journal of Experimental Political Science

The Policy Feedback Effects of State Assistance: Did Small Business Bailouts Increase Support for Public Aid Programs?
Neil Malhotra, Saikun Shi
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We examine whether exposure to government assistance can generate positive policy feedback effects among constituencies not traditionally supportive of the welfare state. Focusing on the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a small business bailout enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how making government assistance salient affects attitudes toward social assistance programs among a typically Republican-leaning and relatively affluent group. Leveraging a bespoke survey of verified program recipients and an embedded experimental manipulation, we find that reminding PPP recipients of program participation increases support for government spending on healthcare, nutritional assistance, and unemployment benefits by an average of 6.9 percentage points—equivalent to roughly 16 percent of the partisan divide on these issues. The findings provide novel causal evidence that making the receipt of government assistance salient increases support for anti-poverty programs among well-off people, even when those programs do not directly benefit them.

Party Politics

Youth representation in Latin American legislatures: Cross-national party-level evidence from the PELA project
Vicente FaĂșndez-Caicedo, Sergio Huertas-HernĂĄndez
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Despite relatively low legal age thresholds for legislative office in Latin America, young people remain markedly underrepresented in national parliaments. Drawing on more than 9,000 individual interviews from the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America (PELA-USAL) project covering 18 countries between 1994 and 2024, this research note provides a cross-national descriptive overview of the age profile of legislators. The analysis examines age distributions across countries, political parties, gender, and ideological positioning. The findings show that only 12.2% of deputies are under 35, with substantial cross-national variation: while only 3.4% of legislators in Argentina fall into this category, the share reaches 14.8% in Mexico. Using individual-level survey data, the study documents persistent youth underrepresentation and highlights important variation across party systems and ideological orientations in Latin American legislatures.
Political parties and democratic innovations: From challenges to consequences
Sergiu Gherghina, Bettina Mitru, Petar Bankov, David M Farrell
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Despite the popular appeal of democratic innovations and of political parties’ need to reconnect with citizens, many parties are reluctant to embrace innovations - especially in the form of direct and deliberative democracy - either internally or in the wider political system. This is counter-intuitive behaviour on which the literature rarely reflects. This special issue addresses this gap and makes two main contributions to the existing research. Theoretically, it formulates broad questions to be picked up by further research and develops more focused analytical frameworks on how political parties use reforms. Empirically, it enriches the literature about the importance of ideology, explains why party elites and members engage with, avoid or are undecided about democratic innovations, and investigates the consequences of the relationship between parties and new democratic approaches for the political system, society, and decision-making.
Intra-government democracy and policy responsiveness to public opinion
Tobias Böhmelt, Lawrence Ezrow
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Does the internal organization of governmental parties influence their ability to respond to shifts in public opinion? We argue that intra-government democracy , defined as the average internal democracy of governmental parties, explains variation in responsiveness. Intra-government democracy has positive features such as promoting internal deliberation and it encourages attention to core supporters’ preferences. However, deliberation limits policy changes, and responding to supporters may distract governing parties from the median voter. Thus, we expect that internally democratic governments will be less responsive to changes in the median voter position. We test this expectation using three different estimation strategies for time-series cross-national data on public opinion and governmental policies since the 1970s, and these analyses support our argument. This finding has important implications for our understanding of how intra-party institutions influence substantive responsiveness to public opinion.
Issue ownership in times of crisis: Dynamics of party issue ownership during the COVID-19 pandemic
Christopher Klamm, Marc Debus, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Ines Rehbein, Sarah Wagner
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The COVID-19 pandemic became one of the most salient issues for the public in the past few years, so that political parties had to address this issue if they wanted to maximize their vote share and thus the support of the citizens in upcoming elections. Due to the pandemic’s all-encompassing nature, many parties were forced to adjust their policy stances to the multitude of issues facing the public, the economy, and the health care sector. In this contribution, we analyse to what extent parties associated the COVID-19 pandemic with their issue ownership drawing upon German parliamentary parties’ press releases. Using a novel multi-step text analysis approach, we estimate which additional topics parties address in their press releases when publishing their position on the COVID-19 pandemic. We find mixed evidence for our expectation: only in a limited number of prominent issue areas, including domestic affairs, labour policy, macroeconomic issues and civil rights, do the parties we identify as more likely to associate these issues with the pandemic actually make such associations.
Party systems at the European union’s doorstep: Party system structuration and dimensionality in the Western Balkans
Adea Gafuri, Jacob R. Gunderson, Jesper Lindqvist
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Although consisting of EU (potential) candidate countries, the Western Balkan Six (WB6: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia) remain largely absent from the study of party politics. Mapping the dominant lines of party contestation in the region and comparing them cross-nationally is vital to understanding what types of ideological conflicts divide the parties of this region, how programmatic the party systems are, and whether they resemble other party systems. We are the first to use and validate the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey to investigate which issues structure Western Balkan party systems and to quantitatively map these systems. Generally, these party systems are weakly programmatic, unidimensional, and structured along cultural issues with a background consensus on the EU. This article contributes to the scholarly understanding of party competition in a geopolitically important region and facilitates future research on party systems in young democracies.

Political Analysis

Improving Small-Area Estimates of Public Opinion by Calibrating to Known Population Quantities
William Marble, Joshua D. Clinton
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Multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) is widely used to estimate opinion in small subgroups and to adjust unrepresentative surveys. Yet, even flexible MRP models contain errors generated by non-response and model misspecification. We propose a principled, data-driven method to leverage observable errors on auxiliary quantities with known marginal distributions—for example, election outcomes—to improve estimates of policy attitudes. Our method leverages the correlation between auxiliary variables and outcomes of interest to calibrate MRP estimates to these known marginal distributions. We illustrate our approach using a pre-election poll measuring support for an abortion referendum. We find that the method reduces county-level error by nearly two-thirds relative to traditional MRP. We also show how our calibration approach can be used to generate estimates for smaller nested geographies, such as precincts, even in the absence of poststratification data at this level. Our approach provides a framework for fully incorporating known population data to improve estimates of public opinion in small subgroups, providing scholars another tool to study representation.
Estimating Treatment Effects on Proportions with Synthetic Controls
Konstantin Bogatyrev, Lukas F. Stoetzer
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Synthetic control methods are widely used for causal inference in case studies and panel data settings, often applied to model counterfactuals for proportional outcomes. However, conventional synthetic control methods are designed for univariate outcomes, leading researchers to model counterfactuals for each proportion separately. We make the case for jointly estimating synthetic controls across multiple compositional outcomes. Using the same weights for each proportion establishes a constant control comparison, improving comparability while adhering to compositional constraints on treatment effects. We illustrate the benefits of the method through a simulation and two applications to recent empirical studies. This implementation integrates naturally with a wide range of synthetic control approaches, providing interpretable estimates for compositional panel data common in political science.

Political Behavior

Perceptions of Discrimination Against White People in Post-Floyd America: Media Coverage and Public Opinion, 2020–2024
Matthew Levendusky, Shawn Patterson, James N. Druckman, Michele Margolis, Josh Pasek
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The aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests illustrates a fundamental truism of race relations in America: racial progress is difficult to sustain. While the protests initially seemed to usher in a progressive era of racial politics, a counter-narrative quickly emerged arguing that efforts to remedy past injustices against people of color discriminated against white people. We show that this framing soon dominated media coverage of, and elite messages about, racial issues. Moreover, using data tracking public opinion between 2020 and 2024, we show that Americans came to believe that white (Black) people experienced more (less) discrimination. In fact, by 2021, Republicans, on average, perceived white people as facing more discrimination than Black people.
Tesla Takedown: Brand Politicization and Partisan Consumerism in the Trump Era
Kyle Endres, Donald P. Green, Costas Panagopoulos
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During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Tesla CEO Elon Musk endorsed the Republican nominee Donald Trump, contributed nearly $250 million to PACs supporting his candidacy, and grew close to Trump as a prominent figure in his second administration through his involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency, prior to his withdrawal from the Trump inner circle in May 2025. We contend his alliance with Trump politicized his electric vehicle company Tesla, polarized the carmaker’s brand image and reputation, and likely resulted in partisan consumerism. Using daily brand tracking data, we find support for these contentions across a variety of brand perception metrics including quality, value, employment reputation, and purchase considerations. Specifically, we show that, on average, Democrats grew to view Tesla more negatively while Republicans warmed to the brand in the aftermath of Musk’s endorsement of Trump and in the early months of his second administration. Consumers are responsive to partisan activity by corporate leaders and appear willing to adapt their views of corporate brands and purchasing behaviors to align with and express their partisan allegiances. Corporate leaders engage in partisan politics at the peril of their brand images and, ultimately, even the bottom line.

Political Geography

“We'll never go”: Inuit youth refusals as climate politics
Jen Bagelman, Carmen (Qagun) Kuptana, Darryl Tedjuk, Eriel Lugt, Maéva Gauthier, MichÚle Tomasino, Ingrid Medby, Rachel Pain
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The military green transition: Decarbonisation as warfighting opportunity
Nico Edwards
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Dispossessed geographies: Statelessness and eco-resistance in Rojhelat
Ahmad Mohammadpour
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Tubular governance: Surveillance, control, and migrant lives in China
Qinyu Feng
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Political Psychology

Similar moral values, different agendas: U.S. politicians' use of moral language is issue‐specific
ÉloĂŻse CĂŽtĂ©, Sze‐Yuh Nina Wang, Yoel Inbar
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We used Structured Topic Models (STM) combined with a word embedding model to examine U.S. politicians' use of moral language and identify the issues Democrats and Republicans moralize most on X (formerly Twitter). Analyzing 1,578,057 posts from U.S. members of Congress (2019–2023), we found that (1) Democrats and Republicans did not differ meaningfully in what kinds of moral language they used but that (2) they used moral language for different issues. For example, Republicans used language reflecting harm and care to criticize Democratic economic policies, whereas Democrats used it to criticize Trump's immigration policies. These findings suggest that politicians on the right and left rhetorically invoke similar moral values but do so to highlight different issues.

Political Science Research and Methods

Political lotteries and roll-call voting in the Belgian parliament during democratization
Brenda Van Coppenolle, Jessica De Rongé, Sofija Riegger
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How do political lotteries affect choices and outcomes? We study the monthly lotteries used to assign all legislators to deliberation committees in 19th century Belgium. We focus on the period of democratization around the entry of a new, third, and Socialist party. We ask whether random, more extensive exposure to certain MP types affected voting over all roll-call votes between 1892 and 1902, i.e. debating more Socialists, more incumbents, or more of those from majority Flemish-speaking districts. We find small but significant exposure effects on rebelling against the party majority, against the deliberative ideal but along government-opposition logic. Legislatures may similarly limit lottery’s potential today.
Electoral opportunism and economic policy: disentangling myopia and moderation
Axel Cronert, PĂ€r Nyman
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This study jointly considers two opportunistic behaviors among political incumbents that may be triggered by electoral uncertainty—policy myopia and policy moderation—which hitherto have been the focus of separate research traditions. We evaluate their prevalence in economic policy-making among Swedish local governments, using a new measure of electoral competitiveness, capturing the incumbent government’s re-election probability, for which plausibly exogenous variation is generated by exploiting national-level polls. We find a substantial moderating effect of competitiveness on incumbents’ tax rate decisions—shifting policy towards the political center—but little evidence of policy myopia, whether in taxation, budget balance, or public investment. Corroborated by evidence from a politician survey, these findings caution against the popular understanding of democratic policy-making as inherently short-sighted.

Research & Politics

Immigration attitudes and the emerging education divide in left-right identification
Ruth Dassonneville, Ian McAllister
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Across the advanced democracies, educational attainment has become increasingly linked to citizens’ political orientations. Education, it seems, polarizes citizens – with the higher educated turning to the left and the lower educated to the right. Here, we contend that this ideological divide between the highly and less educated does not stem from changing political opinions, but rather from a change in the issues that are associated with left and right . Drawing on over two decades of data from the European Social Survey, we demonstrate that Europeans have progressively come to associate left-right positions more with views on immigration. As a result, long-standing educational divides in immigration attitudes have become more strongly reflective of left-right self-identifications. Our findings suggest that the growing education-based cleavage is driven not by opinion change, but by the rising salience of immigration in structuring ideological labels.

The Journal of Politics

Gender Quota Laws and Women in Cabinets
Tiffany Barnes, Giulia Venturini, Ana Catalano Weeks
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Cadre networks and bureaucratic careers in autocracies
Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Jan H. Pierskalla
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