I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, September 09, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period September 02 to September 08, I found 24 new paper(s) in 15 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Designing multi‐site studies for external validity: Site selection via synthetic purposive sampling
Naoki Egami, Diana Da In Lee
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Multi‐site/context studies have become popular strategies to address the most common and challenging external validity concerns about contexts. Under such studies, scholars conduct causal studies in each site and evaluate whether findings generalize across sites. Despite the potential, there has been little guidance on the fundamental research design question—how should we select sites for external validity? Existing approaches have challenges: random sampling of sites is often infeasible, while the current practice of purposive sampling is suboptimal without statistical guarantees. We propose synthetic purposive sampling (SPS), which optimally selects diverse sites for external validity. SPS combines ideas of purposive sampling and the synthetic control method—it selects diverse sites such that nonselected sites are well approximated by the weighted average of the selected sites. We illustrate its general applicability using both experimental and observational studies. Overall, this paper offers a new statistical foundation to design multisite studies for external validity.

British Journal of Political Science

Calculation and Conscience: Motivations for the Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minorities
Stephanie Zonszein, Apurav Bhatiya, William Dinneen, Guy Grossman
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Existing work shows that minority legislators are more likely to represent their group’s interests compared to dominant group legislators. However, it is unclear whether this is due to intrinsic motivations or electoral incentives. We use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to analyze ethnic minority representation in the UK Parliament. By comparing white MPs who narrowly beat minority candidates to minority MPs who narrowly beat white candidates, the RDD controls for electoral incentives since it holds constant constituency factors correlated with a minority parliamentary win. Analyzing over 1 million parliamentary questions and speeches, we find that minority MPs are more likely than white MPs to discuss issues important to ethnic minorities. Additional evidence suggests that narrowly elected MPs face similar electoral incentives and that minority MPs representing minorities face re-election penalties. Our findings are consistent with the idea that minority substantive representation is driven at least in part by intrinsic motivations.

Electoral Studies

Educational contexts and the gender gap in party support – an analysis of young voters in Germany
Sigrid Roßteutscher, Susanne Garritzmann, Birgit Becker, Max P. Jansen
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Small time costs matter: Reform-induced polling station congestion reduces turnout in a high-turnout PR system
Axel Cronert, Marcus Österman
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Divided beyond politics: How perceptions of non-political differentness are linked to affective polarization among citizens
Ine Goovaerts, Artemis Tsoulou-Malakoudi, Gaetano Scaduto, Fernando Feitosa, Jonas Lefevere
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Does gender enter the ballot box? Uncovering gender dynamics in Spanish voting patterns
Alejandro Tirado Castro, Marta Fraile, Susan Banducci
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European Journal of Political Research

Overpromising populists? Why challenger parties make fewer, not more, promises than established parties
Mathias Bukh Vestergaard
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Many Western democracies have experienced an increase in the prevalence of parties that have never been in government. Since these so-called challenger parties are not held accountable to the same extent as established parties, there is a concern that they will simply churn out promises and fuel a process of rising political distrust. This paper explores the extent to which this image of overpromising populists is accurate. Instead of expecting more promises from challenger parties, the paper argues that we should find the opposite. Using a novel dataset of over one million content-coded quasi-sentences from election manifestos, the paper empirically demonstrates that challenger parties make substantially fewer election promises than established parties and that this is likely due to their lack of governmental experience. These results have important implications for research on the growing phenomenon of challenger parties and their distinct communication in electoral campaigns.
Do emotions affect political trust judgments?
Camille Marie Landesvatter, Paul Cornelius Bauer
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Our study explores the nature of political trust ratings in surveys. We provide novel empirical evidence that, in addition to informed and rational reasoning, emotional states play a role in trust evaluations. Leveraging a U.S. sample, we employ a novel smartphone survey methodology that captures real-time voice responses during the trust evaluation process. We then classify these responses using sentiment analysis and speech emotion recognition techniques. Our findings demonstrate a substantial presence of negative sentiment when respondents evaluate political trust. Moreover, the sentiment conveyed in these responses significantly impacts trust scores, with positive sentiment bolstering trust and negative sentiment leading to its decline. A more granular examination of emotions reveals limited variation with only one notable effect where respondents employing ‘happy’ language and paralinguistics exhibited higher trust scores.

Journal of Experimental Political Science

Shared Discrimination’s Effect on Solidarity between People of Color Is Uniform Across Major Racial, Political, and Social Differences
Kasheena Rogbeer, Emily Ortiz, Efrén Pérez
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Solidarity between people of color (PoC) is key to understanding multiracial coalition-building in the United States. However, limited statistical power has constrained research on whether shared discrimination’s effect on solidarity is reliably moderated by differences in race, political orientation, and social background, which structure the internal diversity of racially stigmatized subgroups within the mega-category, PoC. We report a preregistered meta-analysis of eight published experiments ( N = 5,813), which used a common design to test shared discrimination’s effects among Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Middle Eastern and North African individuals. Despite known heterogeneity in these group’s social and political attitudes, we find that shared discrimination’s effect on solidarity is statistically uniform across race/ethnicity, partisanship, ideology, nativity, education, gender, and age. These results indicate that shared discrimination appeals broadly and reliably activate solidarity across diverse PoC subgroups, further affirming this psychological mechanism’s crucial role in fostering robust multiracial coalitions.

Party Politics

The German Local Manifesto Project (GLMP): A new data source for studying local party politics
Martin Gross, Christina-Marie Juen
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Local politics remains comparatively understudied in political science, partly due to limited data on party competition at the municipal level. This research note introduces the German Local Manifesto Project (GLMP), a new dataset of German local election manifestos that expands the empirical infrastructure for studying programmatic competition in municipalities. The dataset contains 2307 manifestos from 306 political actors across 248 municipalities between 1989 and 2024, covering both national party branches and Independent Local Lists (ILL). Compared with existing collections of local manifestos, GLMP provides broader coverage of political actors and municipal contexts. The data allow scholars to analyze ideological positioning and policy priorities in local elections. An illustrative analysis demonstrates how the dataset can be used to compare ideological dispersion between ILL and national party branches. By providing large-scale manifesto data for German municipalities, GLMP opens new opportunities for research on local party competition and political representation.

Political Analysis

Correcting for Nonignorable Nonresponse Bias in Ordinal Observational Survey Data
Lukåƥ Lafférs, Jozef Michal Mintal, Ivan Sutóris
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Many political surveys rely on post-stratification, raking or related weighting adjustments to align respondents with the target population. But when respondents differ from nonrespondents on the outcome itself (nonignorable nonresponse), these adjustments can fail, introducing bias even into basic descriptives. We provide a practical method that corrects for nonignorable nonresponse by leveraging response-propensity proxies (e.g., a respondent’s rating of the interview or interviewer-coded cooperativeness) observed among respondents to extrapolate toward nonrespondents, while directly integrating observable covariates and retaining the benefits of post-stratification with known population shares. The method generalizes the variable-response-propensity framework of Peress (2010) from binary to ordinal outcomes, which are widely used to measure trust, satisfaction and policy attitudes. The resulting estimator is computed by maximum likelihood and implemented in a compact R routine that handles both ordinal and binary outcomes. Using the 2024 American National Election Study, we show that accounting for nonignorable nonresponse produces substantively meaningful shifts for life satisfaction (estimated latent correlation ρ ≈ 0.47 $\rho \approx 0.47$ rho almost equals 0.47 ), while yielding only modest changes for retrospective economic evaluations ( ρ ≈ 0.14 $\rho \approx 0.14$ rho almost equals 0.14 ), highlighting when nonignorable nonresponse substantively affects survey estimates.

Political Behavior

Women Politicians’ Role Model Effects: The Influence of Shared Identities Beyond Gender
Louise Halberg Nielsen
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Women consistently report lower levels of political interest and political ambition than men. Studies have examined how women politicians as role models can make women more politically engaged, but studies have not typically examined additional shared identities beyond gender. I propose that women politicians with whom women share additional identities will be perceived as more relatable and inspiring and, consequently, have stronger role model effects on women’s political engagement. Through a conjoint experiment (Study 1), I find that having additional shared identities with a woman politician increases perceptions of her as relatable and inspiring. However, a survey experiment with novel video treatments depicting a woman politician’s story (Study 2) did not produce positive role model effects on women’s political interest, internal political efficacy, or nascent political ambition – regardless of additional shared racial and partisan identity with the woman politician. Moreover, the video treatment had remarkably different effects across White and Black women, regardless of additional shared racial and partisan identity. An observational analysis (Study 3) replicates the finding that additional shared racial and partisan identity with women political representatives is not systematically correlated with higher levels of political interest. These findings carry important implications for understanding women politicians’ role model effects and the potential of role models to increase women’s political engagement.
Does Listening to Trustworthy News Affect Political Attitudes and Trust?
Pablo BarberĂĄ, Andrew Guess, Simon Munzert, JungHwan Yang
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Political Geography

‘From K2 to Kanyakumari, Bharat is One’: The visual and geopolitical place-making of road signs in Ladakh
Alexander E. Davis
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Collective action at the margins of the state: Institutional braiding and the micro-politics of development in Solomon Islands
Claire Mcloughlin, Gordon Nanau, Tony Hiriasia
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The subjective dimension of residential segregation: Comparing neighborhood perceptions in vulnerable neighborhoods and the wider population
Peter Esaiasson, Jacob Sohlberg, Kim Mannemar SÞnderskov, Oskar Rönnberg, Niels Nyholt, Henning Finseraas, Mari Vaattovaara
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Geopolitics in court: judicial epistemology versus hybrid war
Alan Ingram
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Political Psychology

Revisiting the SciPop Scale: Measurement alignment, scoring rules, and cross‐context comparability
Xue‐Fei Yan, Zhihao Ma
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Science‐related populism—populist attitudes toward scientific authority—has attracted growing scholarly attention. Although the SciPop Scale measures this construct, its cross‐national psychometric properties remain underexamined. Using data from the Trust in Science and Science‐Related Populism project ( N = 69,341; 68 countries/regions) and the Swiss Science Barometer ( N = 1124), we evaluate factor structure and reliability, test multigroup invariance, apply alignment for approximate invariance, and compare scoring philosophies (Bollen vs. Goertz approach) on criterion validity. We further employ multidimensional item response theory models to provide complementary item‐level diagnostics, including discrimination, threshold, item information, and differential item functioning. Results show that reliability is high and a four‐factor model fits most broadly. Full measurement invariance holds across sex, age, education, residence, political orientation, and religiosity; partial invariance appears across regions, economic development, cultural values, and regime types. Cross‐national comparability is limited but improves via measurement alignment. Different scoring methods identify different weakest dimensions. For criterion validity, Bollen‐based aligned scores consistently outperform the Goertz approach, yielding higher explanatory power in cross‐national and cross‐group analyses. Finally, we provide guidelines for researchers using the SciPop Scale and future directions for measuring science‐related populism.

Political Science Research and Methods

Masking or lexicographic preferences? Using conjoint experiments to distinguish between two fundamental theories of choice
Simon Calmar Andersen, Morten Hjortskov
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Many studies on candidate choice and other political preferences suggest that the effect of one attribute may mask the effect of another attribute, which the respondent has no information about. If, for instance, respondents lack information about party membership, they may infer that female candidates are Democrats, which would lead to biased estimates of the pure effect of candidate gender. We propose an alternative explanation—namely that respondents have lexicographic preferences—and we present an empirical test using conjoint experiments to distinguish between what we call pure masking and lexicographic preferences. We illustrate our method using data on the effect of gender, race, and party in candidate choice and replicate the results in a preregistered conjoint experiment. We offer recommendations for researchers studying candidate and political choices.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Where You Go, What You Do, Who You Are: Predictors of Political Science Job-Market Outcomes, 2023–2024
Scott W. Desposato
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Several studies have found that only graduates of top-ranked PhD programs have a reasonable chance of landing a tenure-track professorship. However, these findings are based on an examination of the backgrounds of current faculty at PhD-granting institutions, which leaves findings vulnerable to several types of bias. I address these limitations by analyzing the placements of political science PhD candidates during the 2023–2024 academic job-market cycle. In my analysis, departmental rank had virtually no impact on whether candidates found tenure-track assistant professorships, but it did predict the types of positions that candidates found. Other factors had stronger associations with placement outcomes. In particular, publishing solo-authored and coauthored articles, having underrepresented minority or female identity, and studying American politics were all associated with significantly higher placement rates.

Quarterly Journal of Political Science

Discretionary disclosure and electoral accountability
Kun Heo
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Politicians often have discretion over what policy information to reveal to the public. This paper develops a formal model comparing electoral accountability under mandatory and discretionary disclosure. I identify a fundamental trade-off between detection − where voters directly observe wrongdoing − and inference − where voters penalize the suspicious absence of information. Mandates facilitate detection but eliminate the strategic signal embedded in discretionary disclosure. Mandates weaken the connection between silence and possible wrongdoing, effectively exonerating the incumbent in voters’ inferences. The model demonstrates that when the baseline probability of information transmission is high, the inference-based mechanism constrains rent-seeking more effectively than the detection-based mechanism. Consequently, disclosure mandates can paradoxically weaken electoral discipline: by making silence less informative, they undermine voters’ ability to draw inferences from silence, even while increasing the overall probability that voters observe policy outcomes.

Research & Politics

National security versus human security: Intrastate conflict and states’ rhetoric on conventional arms control in the United Nations general assembly
Tobias Risse
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While arms control during the Cold War was primarily concerned with weapons of mass destruction and their role in national security, the end of the bipolar order shifted attention toward intrastate conflicts, the conventional weapons with which they are fought, and their humanitarian consequences for civilian populations. Yet we still lack systematic evidence on how governments directly involved in such conflicts perceive conventional arms control. I argue that acute intrastate conflicts, but not intractable conflicts, lead states to view conventional arms control primarily as a matter of national security rather than a humanitarian issue. I test this argument quantitatively, using data on states’ rhetorical positions on conventional arms control in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and on enduring internal rivalries (EIRs). Consistent with my expectations, I find that intrastate conflicts unrelated to EIRs are associated with a stronger emphasis on national security in UNGA speeches, whereas conflicts embedded in EIRs are not significantly related to states’ rhetoric on conventional arms control. These findings shed new light on the relationship between intrastate conflict and arms control.
What does the public know about their State’s abortion laws in the post-Dobbs era?
Marisa Abrajano, Marianna Garcia, Aaron Pope, Robert Vidigal, Jonathan Nagler
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Following the Dobbs decision in the U.S., there were widespread reports of misinformation regarding the ruling. Many Americans may therefore have faced uncertainty about abortion laws in their state, and Latinos—approximately 40% of whom are foreign-born—may be particularly vulnerable due to limited familiarity with the U.S. political system. To better understand awareness of state abortion policies, we fielded a national online panel survey containing large samples of Latinos ( N = 2326) and non-Hispanic whites ( N = 769). We find that Latinos were 6 percentage points less likely to correctly identify their state’s abortion law relative to white Americans and were 10.7 percentage points more likely to overestimate the strictness of those laws, even when controlling for demographic, religious, and political covariates. Foreign-born Latinos were also 19.5 percentage points more likely to overestimate the strictness of their state’s abortion law compared to their U.S.-born counterparts. These findings contribute to our understanding of differential learning following sudden policy change and highlight significant knowledge gaps that may affect whether individuals seek abortion care if they misunderstand the legal status in their state. Such gaps may have downstream consequences for health care access and economic inequality.

The Journal of Politics

Beliefs and Racial Identity Norms among Black Americans: An Examination of How Black Americans Understand Racism
Antoine Banks, Eric Groenendyk, Ja'nae Jackson, Erik Kimbrough, Mark Pickup
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