I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, November 11, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period November 04 to November 10, I found 35 new paper(s) in 14 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Can citizen election observation increase public confidence in US elections?
Jennie Barker, Oren Samet, Susan D. Hyde
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Nonpartisan citizen election observation plays an important role in promoting the credibility of electoral processes around the world. This article assesses whether nonpartisan observation can shape attitudes among the US public, randomizing information about nonpartisan domestic observers in a series of survey experiments fielded to nearly 10,000 respondents. These included both hypothetical vignettes and information about a real‐world nonpartisan domestic observation mission undertaken by The Carter Center during the 2022 midterm elections in Fulton County, Georgia. The results show that information about positive assessments by nonpartisan observers of the hypothetical and Fulton County elections increased respondents' confidence in electoral results and processes, and also made respondents more likely to identify the officially announced winner over the candidate they favored as the candidate who won. Alternative ways of framing observers were largely inconsequential.

American Political Science Review

The Influence of Police Unions in Local Elections: Evidence from U.S. Cities’ Spending and Performance
MARIA CARRERI, EDOARDO TESO, RUI YU
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Despite growing attention to local policies governing public safety issues, and mounting reports of police union spending to local candidates, the role of police unions in local politics remains understudied. We address this gap by assembling a novel, large-scale dataset on campaign finance in U.S. mayoral elections, covering 2,303 races across 1,073 cities from 2001 to 2019. We document that police unions frequently donate to mayoral candidates—especially in mid-sized and large cities—targeting likely winners and incumbents, and without displaying clear partisan bias. Using a within-city design that accounts for heterogeneous treatment effects in the presence of staggered treatment timing, we find that the election of a police-union-backed mayor leads to an expansion in police department size. However, we do not find improvements in police performance in these cities, suggesting that unions’ political involvement, while providing additional resources, might also be associated with reduced incentives for effort.
The Seeds of State Capture: Merit and Patrimonialism in the Colonial Bureaucracy
SARAH BRIERLEY, NOAH NATHAN, GEORGE KWAKU OFOSU, TINGXUAN ZHU
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Bureaucracies vary in the extent to which hiring is meritocratic versus patrimonial. Such outcomes are typically seen as the result of politicians’ behavior. However, politicians often delegate hiring to existing bureaucrats. When political leaders are socially distant from communities they seek to govern and these areas are peripheral to politicians’ core interests, bureaucrats’ private preferences can dominate hiring decisions instead. Colonial and other forms of external state-building typify cases where patrimonialism created by bureaucrats, not politicians, can emerge. Digitizing individual-level records across six decades of British rule in Ghana, we find evidence of patrimonialism rather than meritocracy in the hiring of African staff, with large inequities across ethnic groups. Our results demonstrate the underexplored agency of local bureaucrats in state-building and highlight conditions under which bureaucrats’ preferences, rather than only political principals’, shape state institutions. They also challenge conventional wisdom about why, and when, newly-independent African states became “neopatrimonial.”

British Journal of Political Science

Who’s Asking Whom? Gendering in Parliamentary Interactions
Denisa Kostovicova, Tolga Sinmazdemir, Lanabi La Lova, Vesna Popovski
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Male domination is asserted and reproduced through speaking behavior in parliaments. We address the enduring challenge of women’s marginalization by examining the interactive nature of speech. People adjust their speaking behavior based on the gender and status of those with whom they interact. Analyzing over 2,500 question-and-answer sequences in the Croatian Parliament (2004–20), we identify interactional asymmetry: male MPs ask fewer and shorter questions of female ministers than of male ministers, and engage in shorter exchanges with women than with men. Notably, female MPs partially replicate this pattern, posing shorter questions to female ministers. Female ministers, however, use their executive status to assert authority and respond with longer answers than men, despite their marginalization as women. We reveal how non-cooperation through withholding speech and limiting engagement with women operates as a form of power in interactions, reproducing parliaments as masculine institutions whilst affecting the quality of government oversight.

Electoral Studies

Rethinking political identity in Europe: Partisan and ideological attachments in times of affective polarization
Luana Russo, Jochem Vanagt
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European Journal of Political Research

Democracy matters twice: How democracy relates to winner-loser gaps in political trust across countries and over time
Marta KoƂczyƄska, Mariano Torcal, Matías A. Bargsted
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This study explores how non-democratic experiences shape gaps in political trust between electoral winners and losers in contemporary democracies, complementing existing theories that focus solely on citizens’ limited democratic experience within democratic contexts. We argue that democracy matters twice: first through historical legacies of authoritarian rule, and second through contemporary democratic improvements. Using harmonized data from the European Social Survey and Americas Barometer across 40 countries in Europe and Latin America (2002–2018), we demonstrate that individuals with greater personal exposure to autocratic rule display stronger reactions to electoral outcomes, resulting in winner-loser gaps twice as large among those who spent their entire adult lives under autocracy compared to those with no autocratic experience. Our findings also reveal that political trust is not culturally fixed but responds to democratic quality. Short-term improvements in liberal democracy significantly narrow winner-loser gaps, primarily by increasing trust among electoral losers who benefit from enhanced checks on power, free speech, and minority rights. Conversely, democratic backsliding widens these gaps. These results enhance understanding of how historical legacies and current democratic conditions together shape political trust and provide crucial insights for understanding its political polarization (politicization) and democratic challenges in post-authoritarian societies.
Towards a more open, kind, and diverse political science: Our vision for the EJPR
Alessandro Nai, Isabelle Roth Borucki, Caterina Froio, Airo Hino, Robert A. Huber, Julia Schulte-Cloos, Emilie van Haute, Markus Wagner
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Party Politics

Selective doors: The role of party ideology, candidate selection rules, and Muslim population in the selection of Muslim minority candidates in European countries
Memoona Nadir
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Candidate selection is an integral part of the political process in European democracies as political parties decide who will be on candidate lists. The candidates’ selection process can sometimes disadvantage potential candidates, especially minority candidates, including Muslims. This article has examined the selection of Muslim candidates in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and the UK in 16 elections (2007-2022) and the factors that affect this. The results show that while Muslims are generally underrepresented in terms of candidates, there is significant variation between countries. A number of party-level and constituency-level factors, such as party ideology, the size of the Muslim population, and candidate selection rules, influence the selection of Muslim candidates.
Keep the peace? The early politics of Covid-19 and the limits of partisan influence on public opinion
Franziska Graf, Alexa Lenz, Christian Adam
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Crises often call for swift and far-reaching government action that depends on broad public acceptance to be effective. While political disagreement is commonly seen as undermining support, its actual impact on public attitudes remains contested. This study examines public opinion during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany – a context that shifted from early cross-party unity to later politicization. Combining original media data on partisan messaging and panel survey data from 2020, we assess how the emergence of partisan criticism shaped public acceptance of pandemic response policies. Although increasing partisan politicization was associated with declining public acceptance of pandemic measures, we find no evidence that this relationship was driven by partisan cue-taking. Instead, citizens adjusted their party preferences rather than their policy views in response to disagreement with their preferred party. These findings highlight the limits of partisan persuasion, and the growing importance of citizens’ own evaluations as elite consensus erodes.

Political Analysis

How Accurate Are Survey Measurements of Objective Phenomena?
Lisanne Wichgers, Linchiat Chang, David Chapman, Elizabeth Elder, Jon Krosnick, Matt Berent, Amanda Scott, Elaine Albertson, Elizabeth Quinlan
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How accurate are survey measurements of phenomena that can be objectively verified? This article reports a review of various types of evidence assessing accuracy (vs. benchmarks not derived from self-reports) across a wide spectrum of content areas, including demographics, healthcare, labor force statistics, substance use and more. The vast majority of measurements were accurate, according to three assessment methods. Individual respondents’ self-reports closely matched objective records of the same phenomena for the same individual. Small aggregate differences were observed between survey sample means and aggregate means derived from objective records. Self-reports correlated strongly with measures of the same attributes of those individuals from secondary data not based on self-reports. Taken together, the evidence suggests that survey measurements of objective phenomena are highly accurate.
An Image Is Worth K Topics: A Visual Structural Topic Model with Pretrained Image Embeddings
MatĂ­as Piqueras, Alexandra Segerberg, Matteo Magnani, MĂ„ns Magnusson, NataĆĄa Sladoje
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Political scientists are increasingly interested in analyzing visual content at scale. However, the existing computational toolbox is still in need of methods and models attuned to the specific challenges and goals of social and political inquiry. In this article, we introduce a visual structural topic model (vSTM) that combines continuous image embeddings with a structural topic model. This has important advantages compared to existing approaches. First, continuous embeddings allow the model to capture the semantic complexity of images, which is relevant to the study of politics. A consequence of using continuous embeddings is that we can directly use off-the-shelf pretrained deep learning models, offering state-of-the-art performance in image analysis tasks while saving time, cost and resources. Second, the structural topic model provides the ability to analyze how topics and covariates are related, while maintaining a nuanced representation of images as a mixture of multiple topics. In our experiments, we show that the vSTM is able to identify topics that are interpretable, coherent and relevant to the study of online political communication.
Euclidean Ideal Point Estimation from Roll-Call Data via Distance-Based Bipartite Network Models
Seungju Lee, In Kyun Kim, Jong Hee Park, Ick Hoon Jin
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Conventional ideal point models rely on Gaussian or quadratic utility functions that violate the triangle inequality, producing non-metric distances that complicate geometric interpretation and undermine clustering and dispersion-based analyses. We introduce a distance-based alternative that adapts the latent space item response model (LSIRM) to roll-call data, treating legislators and bills as nodes in a bipartite network jointly embedded in a Euclidean metric space. Through controlled simulations, Euclidean LSIRM consistently recovers latent coalition structure with superior cluster separation relative to existing methods. Applied to the 118th U.S. House, the model provides competitive predictive performance while yielding bill embeddings that clarify cross-cutting issue alignments. The results show that restoring metric structure to ideal point estimation provides a clearer and more coherent inference about party cohesion, factional divisions and multidimensional legislative behavior.

Political Behavior

Delayed Date and Motivated Vote: How Election Postponement Shapes Turnout
Jia Li
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Autocracies postpone elections for political control, but we lack an understanding of how voters respond to election postponement in autocracies. This paper argues that election postponement motivates voter turnout across partisan groups, because voters see the postponement as a sign of regime weakness and increased electoral competitiveness. Evidence from a survey experiment in Hong Kong demonstrates that reminder messages about election postponement motivate various partisan groups to turn out, an effect robust to whether and how the message is framed. While the turnout effect is larger when the message’s narrative aligns with the subject’s partisanship—such as the propaganda and intimidation frames for government supporters and the electioneering frame for opposition supporters—all postponement reminder messages have an average turnout effect, with no significant differences across partisan groups. These findings suggest that election postponement is consequential in shaping citizens’ political behavior, with crucial implications for election turnout and authoritarian stability.
Rivals Within: Intra-Party Competition and the Origins of Particularistic Campaign Appeals
Hyeongmyeong Kim
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Political Geography

Land, sea, and frontier: Spatial imaginaries of Chinese civilizationism
Chenchen Zhang
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Territories of racial capitalism: Hegemony, social reproduction, and the rise of the rubber frontier in British Malaya
Majed Akhter
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Urban 'placemaxxing' fantasies: Spatial imaginaries of the reactionary manosphere
Jason Luger
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Political Psychology

Unrequited: Zero‐sum asymmetry in the political domain fuels affective polarization
Martino Ongis, David Kidd
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Zero‐sum beliefs about political relationships—the conviction that one party's gains are inevitably offset by another party's losses—have often been cited as drivers of partisan conflicts. However, across five studies with diverse samples of U.S. residents ( n = 1383), four of which were preregistered, we find that overall zero‐sum endorsement shows weak and inconsistent associations with affective polarization. Instead, beliefs are frequently one‐sided: Many individuals endorse the idea that their political opponents' gains are harmful while rejecting the notion that their own gains come at others' expense. We refer to the strength of this outgroup‐ingroup imbalance as zero‐sum asymmetry . Across correlational and experimental studies, higher zero‐sum asymmetry reliably predicts heightened partisan animosity. At the same time, it is associated with higher civic efficacy and, in several samples, greater political participation and democratic commitment. Notably, symmetric zero‐sum endorsement is relatively rare compared to asymmetric patterns. Together, these findings highlight the directional structure of perceived political trade‐offs as a key contributor to affective polarization, with broader implications for how citizens interpret partisan competition and evaluate the health of democratic systems.
Affective dynamics of welfare chauvinism under different policy funding structures
Duygu Merve Uysal
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This research investigates how distinct emotional responses to immigrants—namely, compassion, anger, and anxiety—are connected to welfare chauvinist attitudes within varying welfare policy funding contexts. Leveraging Turkey's experience with large‐scale immigration and the exogenous nature of EU funding, a population‐representative survey experiment was conducted, manipulating claimant identity (native vs. immigrant) and the funding source of welfare assistance (state vs. EU‐funded). Results show that a “care deficit” operates as a key mechanism linking immigrant identity and lower support for immigrant welfare access, but only within the nation‐bound welfare system. Once compassion is evoked, however, it operates similarly for natives and immigrants. Furthermore, moderation analyses reveal divergent patterns of compassion, anger, and anxiety in shaping welfare chauvinist attitudes across different policy funding structures. Highlighting the crucial interplay between emotions and the policy funding schemes in which welfare assistance is delivered, this research contributes to the debate on what drives welfare chauvinism. Drawing on the political psychology literature, this study offers a perspective on the emotional dynamics associated with the persistent native‐immigrant welfare support gap and discusses potential factors that may contribute to narrowing this disparity.
Beyond remembrance: Genocide commemoration as a lens for understanding collective victimhood and contemporary conflicts
Mengyao Li, Ani Grigoryan, Slieman Halabi, Anna Baumert
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Genocide commemorations are a key societal mechanism through which collective victimhood is constructed and transmitted across generations, yet their implications for contemporary conflicts remain underexamined. We conducted parallel naturalistic longitudinal studies in Armenia around Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and Israel around Holocaust Remembrance Day (Time 1), with a lower‐salience comparison 2 months later (Time 2). Across both studies, Armenian and Jewish‐Israeli participants reported heightened existential threat and reduced inclusive victim consciousness around Remembrance Day than at the post‐Remembrance Day assessment. Armenian participants also reported lower willingness to reconcile with Azerbaijan, while their attitudes toward Ukrainian victims of the Russia–Ukraine war did not differ significantly across time. In Israel, attitudes toward the conflict with Palestinians did not differ significantly across time, but participants reported greater willingness to help Ukrainian victims at Time 1. Time 1 indirect effect analyses further revealed competing pathways: greater personal involvement in commemoration was indirectly associated with more conflict‐supportive attitudes (via heightened threat, moral entitlement, and reduced inclusive victimhood) and with more conciliatory and prosocial attitudes (via heightened moral obligation). These findings highlight that genocide commemorations are linked to competing psychological processes, which may explain their divergent implications for intergroup relations, a tension discussed in the paper.
Terror across borders, politics at home: Political influencers navigating diasporic threat and political identity on social media
Gabrielle D. Beacken
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Terror attacks occurring in one jurisdiction can shape the perceived political attitudes of populations in a separate jurisdiction—through diasporic ties or the mediation of political discourses via social media. This study examines how left‐ and center‐leaning Jewish influencers addressing American audiences perceived and expressed the impact of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, on their political attitudes and messaging in the context of the 2024 US Presidential election. This study implemented a three‐pronged digital ethnographic approach: digital observation on Instagram, 15 in‐depth interviews, and digital fieldwork analyzing interviewees' political posts in the lead‐up and aftermath of the election. Findings reveal heterogeneity of political attitude and orientation in the face of transnational terror and perceived threat to Jewish life—from preference falsification to single‐issue voting and calls for bipartisanship. Rather than describing a political transformation away from liberal or progressive thought, interviewees described a refocusing of political energy around Jewish safety. This study argues that the transnational threat of October 7, compounded by feelings of political abandonment domestically, was accompanied by a process of attitudinal navigation—complicating expectations of in‐group solidarity, threat‐to‐conservatism pathways, and the strategic communication of political influencers as emergent opinion leaders on social media.
The critical role of political trust in the energy transition
Jordana W. Composto, SofĂ­a Silvosa, Anandita Sabherwal, Elke U. Weber
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Achieving net‐zero CO 2 emissions requires sustained collaboration between civil society and the private and public sectors across time and geographies, but low trust in and among these actors impedes coordinated action. This multidisciplinary review examines how different forms of trust, in particular political trust (i.e., trust between actors with differential power), shape the energy transition, addressing four core questions: How does trust impact energy project development and outcomes? How do the processes of building, maintaining, eroding, and repairing trust differ? What are the asymmetries in trust gain and loss? How does a project's history and stage determine which process is at play and whether trust repair is possible? A narrative literature review and analysis of fifteen case studies spanning diverse energy contexts identifies key trust dyads: government‐community, developer‐community, regulator‐developer. Mapping these trust dyads on project outcomes reveals when trust functions as either a barrier or a pathway to success. We complement our literature review and case analysis with primary data from stakeholder surveys and expert workshops that validate the real‐world relevance of trust research insights and identify the largest trust deficits and effective trust‐building strategies perceived by expert practitioners. Our findings across sources of evidence converge to show that political trust operates through distinct mechanisms across different actor relationships, with direct implications for project design, stakeholder engagement, and policy implementation. The review concludes by outlining future research directions and opportunities for cross‐disciplinary collaboration to address trust challenges in the energy transition.

Political Science Research and Methods

Generic title: Not a research article
Right-wing terrorism and far-right support: evidence from anti-Roma attacks in Hungary – CORRIGENDUM
Gabor Simonovits, Attila Gaspar, Gåbor Békés, Marton Vegh
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Trade liberalization and the welfare state: how subnational geographies shape compensation
Alice Xu
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How globalization reshapes the welfare state in developing democracies remains contested, and evidence on whether trade liberalization expands or contracts social spending is mixed. Using a quasi-natural experiment in Brazil, I first find support for the “compensation hypothesis:” trade integration generates welfare compensation. I then argue that trade’s differential impact across subnational regions helps explain the mixed evidence. Subnational political and economic geographies mediate trade’s effect on social policy. In particular, I argue that the geographic concentration of political identities facilitates collective action. I find that geographically concentrated constituencies exhibit higher voter turnout and more participatory councils advocating for labor rights and welfare. Trade’s positive welfare effect is magnified where political or economic identities are geographically concentrated. The findings spotlight how subnational geography shapes globalization’s redistributive consequences.
Coalition differentiation at scale: measuring intra-coalition rhetorical distinctiveness with supervised classification
Christine Sheldon
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Coalition parties face a unity-differentiation dilemma: they must uphold compromise to govern effectively, while maintaining distinct identities to maximize electoral success. Existing measures of coalition differentiation almost exclusively rely on static proxies to infer behavior, and the few dynamic measures often only cover a limited sample of governments, limiting comparative analysis. This article introduces a comparative, dynamic measure of rhetorical differentiation based on supervised classification of legislative speeches. Higher classification accuracy indicates greater rhetorical distinctiveness between coalition partners, while misclassification indicates greater rhetorical overlap. The measure provides monthly party-level scores for close to 50 coalition governments, across six European democracies, and thereby enables the dynamic analysis of coalition party differentiation in a public-facing arena, for a sizable comparative sample.
Optimal party strategies on niche issues: a computational approach to multiparty competition for position and salience
Anna Sophie Kurella, Lovisa Mundschenk
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How should parties respond to competition from a new challenger on a niche issue? Meguid argues that accommodation is effective, but recent evidence shows it may cost votes. We identify vote-maximizing strategies of established parties facing an extreme challenger using an extended Downsian model with position and salience. Based on empirical data from Germany, our results show that accommodation works only for low-valence parties, and only while the challenger is new. Otherwise, adversarial strategies benefit small parties. Major established parties maximize votes by holding moderate positions and engaging weakly with the issue. Our findings offer a theoretical baseline for understanding optimal strategies in party competition.
Social intolerance as a product of political identities: evidence from a conjoint experiment in five countries
Mariano Torcal, Josep Maria Comellas, Alina VrĂąnceanu
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Do group identities rooted in salient social and political characteristics foster homophily and social distance? If so, which identities shape social preferences more strongly, and under what conditions? While existing literature on affective polarization and inter-group relations privileges particular social and political identities, we know less about the dynamics that unfold when multiple identities are considered simultaneously. Using conjoint experiments in five multiparty systems (Argentina, Chile, Italy, Portugal, and Spain), we find that political identities are generally more influential than social ones among individuals with partisan affinities. This is especially true among left-wing individuals, who display greater social distance to radical right supporters. Our findings suggest that social distance is rooted in political attachments, which may channel salient social divisions.
Democratic hypocrisy: support for undemocratic responses to protest in Germany
Morgan Le Corre Juratic, Markus Wagner, Daniel Bischof
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Political tolerance is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, yet citizens apply it selectively: intolerance is higher for disliked groups. However, does this extend to democratic hypocrisy, leading to support for undemocratic responses to protest? We address this important question through a vignette survey experiment ( N  = 5,000) in Germany, comparing reactions to similar protest tactics used by farmers and climate activists in a realistic, externally valid setting. We show that respondents were not only less willing to grant climate activists key democratic rights but also significantly more likely to support undemocratic responses to climate protesters, including imprisonment without trial. Our findings underline that citizens engage in democratic hypocrisy: their political biases lead them to support undemocratic actions against disliked groups.
Educational polarization: evidence from the White House staff
Kenneth Lowande, Saloni Singh, Abigail Paegert, Alan Andrade
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American political polarization has mapped onto educational pedigree, with credentialed elites increasingly supporting Democrats. We examine the implications of this trend in the most powerful office in American politics: the White House. From 1995 to 2024, we show Democratic presidents employed staffs with higher educational attainment, and that Republicans were more likely to attend public institutions, those without R1 status, and those ranked below the top 50%. We then show that universities whose alumni disproportionately went on to work for Democratic presidents were more likely to face investigations, enforcement actions, and funding cuts after President Trump took office in 2025. Our findings suggest educational pedigree among staff who operate key political institutions warrant further investigation.
Blame attribution in authoritarianism: the public’s response to three safety crises in China
Dehua Sun
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Citizens rely on information to evaluate the government, but their sources are limited in authoritarian regimes. This study shows that citizens can learn from extraordinary events, such as public safety incidents, which are socially salient, highly visible, and clearly attributable. When the state bears causal responsibility for a safety failure, political trust declines under both a controversial and an uncontroversial response. Using survey data that cover three national crises in contemporary China, the analysis compares respondents in the weeks immediately before and after the incidents. Trust in government declined following the 2011 bullet train crash and the 2018 vaccine scandal, but not following the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. Further analysis finds no increase in perceived corruption, while perceptions of free expression declined after the train crash but not after the earthquake, consistent with dissatisfaction over information control. The findings have implications for authoritarian accountability and regime stability.
Is alliance credibility interdependent?
Joshua Alley, Brian Blankenship
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How might changes in the credibility of one alliance relate to the credibility of other alliance commitments? Debate between competing views on this question spans decades in part because systematic tests are difficult. We contribute systematic evidence with a new measure of credibility in U.S. alliances and novel technique to estimate interdependence. Our measure draws on expert ratings of allied beliefs over U.S. credibility and our analysis employs Gaussian process regression to analyze credibility. We find strong correlations in allied credibility perceptions within regions and little correlation across regions. Supplementary analyses suggest that these correlations reflect common unobservables and a small impact of shared perception of past U.S. behavior.
Comparing belief certainty formats in the measurement of political knowledge
Robert Vidigal
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Psychological certainty plays a role in how respondents retrieve and express their attitudes, beliefs, and opinions. This study compares two question formats that allow respondents to express certainty about their political knowledge. Using a YouGov sample ( N = 2,161), a single-item certainty-in-knowledge format, where political knowledge and belief certainty are measured jointly, and a branching format, where knowledge is measured first, followed by certainty in a separate question, are compared. The results show that the certainty-in-knowledge format significantly reduces the likelihood of respondents looking up answers online. Including a “Don’t Know” option does not increase gender differences. These findings demonstrate a question format that improves validity in online surveys by reducing measurement artifacts.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Tackling the Lack of Territorial Diversity: Lessons from a Two-Year Supply-Side Intervention in Brazil
Victor AraĂșjo, Malu A. C. Gatto, Magna InĂĄcio
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Political science increasingly acknowledges the importance of diversifying the discipline, yet authors based in the Global South remain underrepresented in top international journals. Addressing this imbalance requires tackling both demand- and supply-side factors. Focusing on supply-side factors, we piloted the Writing Academy, a training and mentorship program for Brazilian political science doctoral students. Drawing on survey data from applicants, we examine the main barriers to internationalizing their research. We find that a lack of knowledge of the rules for international publications—not language—is the primary barrier to submissions to international journals. Pre- and post-intervention survey data indicate that the Writing Academy reduced unfamiliarity with academic journals and increased participants’ confidence in publishing their research in international journals. These findings suggest that targeted training and mentorship can reduce supply-side inequalities in global scholarly participation.
The Shadow of 1776: Imperial Republicanism, Technocracy, and the New Gaza
Md Samiul Azim
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This article situates the current governance of Gaza within the contrast between imperial rule and trusteeship and argues that the proposed US-led paradigm is a reimagining of the “Imperial Republic.” The technocratic trusteeship is introduced as a governing trope that promises self-determination yet defers it forever through expert administration. Through critical discourse analysis and legal–historical comparison between policy documents and mandate-era precedents, this study shows that sovereignty is displaced by managerial oversight, capacity building, and security conditionality. The most important discovery is that technocratic trusteeship transforms administrative performance into political freedom, efficiency, and neutrality, thereby annihilating any perception of disempowerment. This model has broader implications for international governance, indeed, unwrought by the legacy of 1776.

Research & Politics

Political institutions and public opinion on abortion decisions post-Dobbs
Jeong Hyun Kim, Nichole Bauer, Anna Gunderson
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At a time when state institutions are increasingly setting abortion policy through different channels, understanding which decision-making processes the public views as legitimate has crucial consequences for democratic governance and public trust in democratic institutions. We argue that in the post-Dobbs political climate, public support has shifted away from court-issued abortion decisions toward those made through voter referendums, driven by higher perceived procedural fairness in direct democracy. We fielded two unique survey experiments, one before the Dobbs decision removing the federal constitutional right for pregnant people to seek an abortion, and one after the decision. Pre-Dobbs, we find few differences in citizens’ perceptions of abortion decisions made by state courts, legislatures, or referendums. Post-Dobbs, we find that people evaluate both pro-abortion and anti-abortion decisions more favorably when decided through voter referendums. Our results hold critical implications for policies on abortion in the post-Dobbs landscape, but also for policy formation and evaluation on other contentious public policy issues.

The Journal of Politics

Running in Context: Marginalization, Political Ambition, and Candidate Emergence
Iris Acquarone
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