I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, October 14, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period October 07 to October 13, I found 36 new paper(s) in 14 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Teaching the past, informing the present? School history education and attitudes toward foreign countries
Soyoung Lee, Jeongmin Park
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How does school history education emphasizing past grievances with other countries impact attitudes toward conflict and cooperation with the countries today? We examine this question using original data from 34 classrooms across 17 high schools in Seoul, South Korea. We first test whether exposure to anti‐Japanese content in school history education negatively impacts students' attitudes toward cooperation with Japan. We then compare how the attitudes of students educated with a more pro‐US textbook differ from those using a more anti‐US one. We find that school history education influenced what historical events students believed as “facts” and their evaluation of historical events. However, the effect on students' historical memories did not by itself automatically translate into corresponding attitudes toward present‐day Japan or the United States. Our findings offer various implications for studies on international rivalries and historical memories, as well as for debates on the political effects of school education.

American Political Science Review

Generic title: Not a research article
Presidential Investment in the Administrative State – ERRATUM
NICHOLAS R. BEDNAR, DAVID E. LEWIS
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Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right: Evidence from England’s National Health Service
ZACHARY P. DICKSON, SARA B. HOBOLT, CATHERINE DE VRIES, SIMONE CREMASCHI
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The rise of populist right parties is well studied, but relatively little attention has been given to how public service performance influences voter support. Given that public services are often the primary means through which citizens interact with the state, we argue that declining public services can create grievances that increase the appeal of populist right parties. Focusing on England’s National Health Service, we combine administrative data on local health facility closures with panel data on public preferences and voting intentions. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that closures reduce satisfaction with public services and increase support for populist right parties. These effects are moderated by migrant registrations at local health practices, highlighting the interaction between public service performance and immigration concerns in fueling populist right support. Our findings underscore the role of public service decline as a driver of support for populist parties, especially in areas undergoing demographic change.
When Can Clientelism Serve Democratic Ends? A Democratic Theory of Distributive Politics
SAMUEL ELY BAGG, UDIT BHATIA
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This article employs normative democratic theory to examine a counterintuitive suggestion raised repeatedly by empirical scholars of clientelism: namely, that practices of particularistic exchange might sometimes serve democratic ends. Certainly, most particularistic practices are widely agreed to undermine democracy, on both intrinsic and instrumental grounds. Yet some observers resist blanket condemnation—and in particular, many highlight the redeeming democratic virtues of certain practices that seem to facilitate collective organization among disempowered groups. Drawing on “realist” approaches to democratic theory, we vindicate this basic insight while clarifying its scope conditions. Countervailing power is a crucial democratic priority, and programmatic methods of promoting it sometimes face serious obstacles: as when clientelist practices are deeply entrenched, or incumbents capture the tools of programmatic competition. Under such conditions, we conclude, democracy-seeking leaders may justifiably employ particularistic practices to promote countervailing power—but only if they respect five constraints tethering them strictly to that goal.
The Idea of a Counter-Structure: Rethinking Collective Action against Climate Injustice
JONATHAN MASIN-PETERS
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This article argues that addressing the structural injustices of climate change requires rethinking collective action. Disruptive and prefigurative politics are often treated as separate collective action repertoires, but I argue that a just energy transition requires that they work in tandem. To capture this interaction, I propose the idea of “counter-structural” collective action, in which disruptive protest creates windows of opportunity that prefigurative alternatives can then fill. Through analysis of two UK climate movements, Transition Towns (TTs) and Camps for Climate Action (CCA), I show how activists reconfigure structural elements to build new, carbon-free social and political forms. The theory of counter-structural action provides a framework for assessing the empirical cases. The cases, in turn, illustrate a broader conception of collective action that better reflects the social theory grounding structural injustice. Together, the theory and cases support the dual aims of climate justice: challenging fossil-fuel path dependence and advancing egalitarianism.

Electoral Studies

Rally around the Liberals or a conservative pushback? Understanding the Trump effect in the 2025 Canadian federal election
Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau, Daniel Stockemer, Rodrigo Praino
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How the cultural backlash fails: an investigation into the link between social conservatism and far-right voting in European electorates
Christian Kloetzer
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European Journal of Political Research

Authoritarian orientations and the contestation of liberal self-determination: Cross-national evidence from 30 countries
Heiko Giebler, Lukas Antoine, Rasmus Ollroge
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In contrast to expectations of global liberal convergence, liberal values and institutions are increasingly contested. This study investigates whether core liberal conditions for self-determination are likewise subject to contestation and how this varies across societal contexts. Drawing from liberal theory, we identify five enabling conditions for self-determination: physical well-being, basic economic security, learning and personal growth, moral equality, and influence on political decision-making. These conditions differ in their degree of ‘liberal uniqueness’, with the latter two representing distinctly liberal ideals. Using original survey data from over 45,000 respondents across 30 countries, we examine how authoritarian orientations – conceptualised as preferences for authority, conformity, order, and security – relate to support for these conditions. Such orientations are consistently and negatively associated with uniquely liberal conditions, especially moral equality and political influence. In contrast, there is no meaningful relationship with basic economic security and a positive association with physical well-being. Preferences for learning and personal growth fall in between. These associations vary with levels of societal modernisation; in more modernised societies, the gap between respondents with stronger and weaker authoritarian orientations grows wider, with the strongest widening observed for the uniquely liberal conditions. Our findings suggest that authoritarian orientations are linked to different understandings of self-determination. These competing visions of what it means to live freely are more polarised in modern societies. Recognising this divergence helps to better understand the normative foundations of contemporary societal conflicts across diverse countries.
Strategic alienation: The dynamics of group appeals in negative campaigning
Lena Maria Huber, Martin Haselmayer
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This paper examines how political parties use social group appeals in negative campaigning. We argue that parties strategically target opponents with group-based attacks to portray them as failing key social groups. Using a novel dataset of Facebook and Twitter posts by parties in the UK (2016–2024), linked to voter perceptions of group representation from the British Election Study, we test whether such attacks are more likely when the sender party enjoys strong group-based credibility, or the target party is seen as a weak representative of the respective group, or both. We find no evidence for the former but strong support for the latter: parties disproportionately target rivals with poor reputations for representing specific groups, and especially so when the sender holds a reputational advantage. These findings advance our understanding of identity-driven party competition, showing that group-based attacks exploit opponents’ representational vulnerabilities rather than reinforce attackers’ own strength.
Powered by (discrete) emotions? The consequences of affective polarization for self-censorship and outgroup silencing
Luna Laufer, Laura Gerstner, Pia Kinzler, Julia Stockwald, Anna-Luisa Sacher, Carsten Reinemann
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Amid ongoing debates about political polarization in Western Democracies, this study investigates the role of affective polarization in the context of practices related to political discourse. In doing so, it moves beyond generalized affective polarization and delves into discrete negative emotions (fear, disgust, and anger), examining how they relate to the willingness to engage in self-censorship and the belief in the importance of silencing others, i.e., the respective political outgroup. Findings from a quota-based online survey conducted in autumn 2024 in Germany ( N = 1,918) reveal that the effects of affective polarization vary depending on the underlying emotion: fear of the political outgroup is linked to an increased willingness to self-censor. In contrast, anger is associated with a reduced willingness to self-censor, while all three negative emotions are connected to a higher belief in the importance to silence the political outgroup. These results underscore the critical role of discrete emotions in affective polarization, offering nuanced insights that extend beyond generalized dislike. In addition, they provide valuable insights into how affective polarization may threaten democratic values.
Beyond skills: How occupational essentiality and social value relate to attitudes toward immigrant labor – ADDENDUM
William L. Allen, Mariña Fernåndez-Reino, Isabel Ruiz
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Journal of Experimental Political Science

Using Television Drama to Promote Electoral Corruption Reporting: An Evaluation in Northern Nigeria
Dan Brown, Ariel Lee Bothen, Michelle Krieger, Fatima Turaki, Mansur Kurugu, Maji Peterx, Catherine Angai, Ummi Yakubu, Vanessa Alli
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We evaluated an edutainment intervention to encourage electoral corruption reporting in northern Nigeria via a live broadcast of a popular Hausa-language TV show, which aired October–December 2022, shortly before the February 2023 presidential elections. We incorporated behaviorally informed anticorruption messages into the scripts of the TV drama to encourage its tens of millions of viewers to report instances of electoral corruption. We used a randomized encouragement trial design, sampling over 6,000 participants across northern Nigeria through pre-recorded phone surveys. Watching the show caused a statistically significant increase in the perceived helpfulness and frequency of reporting, but we could not detect changes in knowledge of how to report or reporting behaviors.
Covariate Adjustment in Political Science Experiments: Progress and Recommendations
Matthew H. Graham, Binh Hoang
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Covariate adjustment can reduce the standard error of experimental treatment effect estimates without increasing the sample size but is vulnerable to abuse unless a specific procedure is preregistered. We assess adjustment practices in ten political science journals in 2013, 2018, and 2023–24. Encouragingly, preregistration and covariate adjustment have each been rapidly adopted. Preregistration is also a good predictor of what practices are used in articles. However, just 12% of articles published in 2023–24 preregister a specific covariate adjustment procedure and use adjustment for the main estimate. Although preregistering an adjusted estimator is not always advisable (when covariates are unavailable or preregistration is not possible), there is substantial room for improvement. We recommend that when feasible, researchers preregister a specific covariate adjustment procedure and use it for their preferred estimate regardless of covariate balance. This may require a shift in preregistration culture away from predicting results and toward constraining analysis.
How Do (Mis-)Perceptions of Refugee Gender Composition Shape Attitudes? Evidence from a Survey Experiment
Andrea Blasco, Michal Krawczyk, Hannah Nohlen
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People’s perceptions of others, particularly those from other countries, can shape their attitudes and willingness to offer solidarity. We study public beliefs about the gender composition of forcibly displaced populations in a large online survey experiment. Participants ( n = 13,008) representative of the adult population of six EU countries, consistently underestimated the share of women among the people displaced by the Russian war on Ukraine. We show that a belief-correction intervention effectively prompted updates in public beliefs, aligning them more closely with actual numbers. The source of information matters: updates were greater when the intervention cites official statistics rather than other people’s opinions. Although female migrants are typically preferred, the intervention did not change perceptions regarding current refugees’ impact on crime and economy or policy preferences (family reunification). While all these measures correlate with beliefs about gender composition, the intervention did not significantly affect any of them.

Party Politics

Book review: Political parties and the state in the global south SchoemanAlbertus, Political Parties and the State in the Global South . New York: Routledge, 2025. Paperback. ÂŁ 47.99, xii + 200pp. ISBN 9781032430515.
Satyaki Barua
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The relationship between EU fiscal transfers and the European policy profile of political parties
Johannes Lattmann, Marc Debus
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This research note examines how fiscal transfers within the European Union shape the programmatic strategies of domestic political parties. We argue that a country’s net-contributor or net-receiving status conditions the strategies how parties articulate their positions on European integration. In net-receiving states, Euroskeptic parties strategically mute EU-related rhetoric to avoid undermining their broader policy stance. Moreover, the increase in pro-EU positions among parties in net-receiving states is driven mainly by support for further EU-level redistribution. We evaluate these claims using Chapel Hill Expert Survey data from 2002–2024 and a regression discontinuity design that uses continuous measures of net contributions to the EU budget. The empirical analyses, in which we also test for a linear relationship, align with our expectations. Euroskeptic parties mention the EU less in net-receiving contexts while beneficiary status solely shifts party positions toward pro-redistribution preferences at the EU level. These results illustrate how Euroskeptic parties cope with the potential positive impacts of the EU.

Political Behavior

Un-Priming Politics: A Method to Reduce Overreporting of Political Engagement
Elizabeth C. Connors, John V. Kane
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Survey researchers frequently employ measures of political engagement, yet social desirability pressures can lead to overreporting. Building upon existing literature, we adopt an iterative approach to determine how such overreporting can be reduced. Four preregistered survey experiments were conducted (total N=7,122). We first confirm that social desirability considerations can underlie some types of self-reported political engagement. Second, having tested a variety of interventions that were designed to reduce overreporting, we find that our most effective treatment ( Dampen Politics) was one that aimed to decrease the salience of politics. This treatment significantly reduced (1) the degree to which respondents perceived the survey as political, and (2) some types of self-reported political engagement, particularly political interest and voting. We tested alternative implementations of the Dampen Politics treatment, each time assessing its robustness and validity. Our findings suggest a simple adjustment in survey wording and organization can meaningfully decrease overreporting of political engagement.

Political Geography

“Russia's border doesn't end anywhere”: Imitation of homeland-making in the nationalist rhetoric of Vladimir Putin
Fedor Popov
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Affective geographies of the will to fight: disappointment, hope, and dignity among environmental defenders in the Colombian Llanos
Parisa Nourani Rinaldi, Gabriela Valdivia, Pablo Jaramillo, MarĂ­a Cecilia Roa-GarcĂ­a
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Political Psychology

The boundaries of global concern: How socioeconomic context shapes the link between global consciousness and environmental attitudes
Ayu Okvitawanli, Moh. Abdul Hakim, Reginapta Nitya Prasetyani, Takeshi Hamamura
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Climate change requires unprecedented international cooperation; yet growing protectionist sentiment poses a significant barrier to collective action. Global Consciousness (GC), a psychological orientation characterized by a connection to humanity and the world as a whole, has been theorized as a key driver of benevolent behaviors, including pro‐environmental attitudes. However, empirical evidence linking GC to environmentalism remains largely confined to specific contexts, leaving the generalizability of this relationship across diverse societies unclear. Leveraging data from the European Values Survey (EVS) and the World Values Survey (WVS), this study examines the link between GC and indicators of environmentalism: confidence, active membership in environmental organizations, and prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth. We further examine whether socioeconomic context moderates this relationship, hypothesizing that the effect of GC on environmental attitudes will be stronger in wealthier nations, as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI). Multilevel models revealed that, across 35 countries in Study 1 ( N = 40,259) and 86 countries in Study 2 ( N = 123,280), GC is consistently and positively associated with environmentalism. Crucially, this relationship is significantly moderated by HDI. These results indicate that the positive effect of GC on environmentalism is stronger in countries with higher socioeconomic progress, suggesting that GC more readily translates into actions when supported by macro‐level structural resources.
Conceptualizing and measuring global consciousness
James H. Liu, Robert Jiqi Zhang, Jacky C. K. Ng, Sylvia Xiaohua Chen
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To examine the conceptualization and the measurement of global consciousness (GC) in cross‐national contexts, we conducted a secondary analysis on survey data collected from 16,241 individuals across 35 societies. Results demonstrate that GC is best conceptualized as a multidimensional construct by a bifactor ESEM model, in which GC captures an overarching and direct source of common variance across all manifest indicators, whereas domain‐specific residual variance is retained by three existing measures: Identification with All Humanity (IWAH), Cosmopolitan Orientation (COS), and a shortened version of Global Orientations (GOS). Metric invariance was successfully achieved across 30 out of 35 societies. At the individual level, GC was negatively associated with political conservatism, an effect that was amplified in societies with higher HDI, more robust rule of law, and a salient culture of individualism. In an exploratory societal‐level analysis, aggregated GC functioned as an informative ecological indicator, appearing more prominent in the Global South societies across the sample. This preliminary pattern is probably attributable to the open system where GC is measured, reflecting the hopes and aspirations of people in the making.
The partisan dilemma: How people evaluate sacrificial dilemma decisions by politicians across the political divide
Silvana D'Ottone, Matilde Tumino, Paul Conway
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Politicians often face policy decisions where sacrificing some targets benefits others. As motivations behind such decisions can be ambiguous, partisans may ascribe nobler motives to politicians who make decisions they approve of and whose party they identify with. Consequently, evaluations of politicians can be shaped by the politician's decision, party affiliation, the domain of sacrifice, and the evaluator's political orientation. Across three studies, the US and South American participants ( N = 1595) evaluated liberal/left‐wing and conservative/right‐wing politicians who accepted or rejected educational and economic sacrifices. We examined how participants' political orientation influenced judgments of sacrificial decisions. Conservative/Right‐wing political orientation frequently (though not always) predicted higher ratings of conservative/right‐wing politicians and lower ratings of liberal/left‐wing politicians across decision acceptability, vote‐worthiness, warmth, and competence—even when both politicians made the same choice. Study 2 demonstrated that the direction of bias depends on the policy domain, with liberal‐leaning participants less accepting of educational sacrifices and more accepting of economic sacrifices than conservative‐leaning participants. Study 2 further suggested that inferences about politicians' underlying motivations partly drive partisan bias. These findings demonstrate that judgments of realistic sacrificial dilemmas are significantly influenced by the social context—specifically, who is evaluating whom and over which issues.

Political Science Research and Methods

“We need the right kind of people in this neighborhood”: racial motivation in opposition to new housing construction
Clayton Becker
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How we measure racial bias matters. Previous literature demonstrates that direct questioning leads to unreliable responses. Scholars have thus developed a number of techniques to uncover racial bias without cuing a defensive response. I investigate the performance of text- and image-based factorial experiments in the case of racial motivation for opposition to new housing development relative to a more traditional list experiment. My results demonstrate that these often-used methods yield substantially different conclusions about the importance of racial biases in opposition to new housing construction. While the factorial experiments suggest little evidence of racial bias, the more traditional list experiment reveals that the potential for racial change in their neighborhood is a concern for a meaningful share of respondents.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Forecasting a President-Centered Midterm: Leader-Centered Personalization in the 2026 US House Elections
Mohammad Hamza Iftikhar
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Special Occasions? When Mid-Cycle Contests Predict Congressional Elections, and When They Don’t
Charles R. Hunt
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Forecasting a Democratic Resurgence? Partisan Accountability in the 2026 U.S. Midterm Elections
Carlos Algara, Isaac Hale, Byengseon Bae, Edward Headington
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The Transmission Problem: A Nationalization-Weighted Forecast for the 2026 Midterm Elections
Jamie L. Carson, Maximillian B. Whitford
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When Do Prediction Markets Improve Election Forecasts? Evidence from Matched U.S. Races
Jack Rossbach
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Forecasting Gubernatorial Elections in an Era of Polarized and Nationalized Politics
Gregory J. Love, Ryan E. Carlin, Matthew M. Singer
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Changing Maps and Outcomes: Gerrymander Potential and District Dissimilarity in Forecasting the 2026 Midterms
Jay A. DeSart
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Explaining and Predicting the Two-Party Mid-Term House Vote Share: 2026 Prediction
Ray C. Fair
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Public Choice

Temporary internal displacement and receiving communities’ voting behavior
Salvatore Carrozzo
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Research & Politics

Big Tech, big risk? How education and ideology shape public attitudes toward Big Tech companies
Tobias Tober, Marius R. Busemeyer, Sebastian Koos
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This paper examines public attitudes toward Big Tech and their relationship to policy preferences in six OECD countries. Drawing on original survey data collected in 2022 from 19,800 respondents in Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, we analyze how education and political ideology shape evaluations of large technology firms such as Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. Using six survey items on the perceived economic, social, and democratic effects of Big Tech, we identify two weakly correlated attitudinal dimensions: positive and negative evaluations. A cluster analysis reveals five groups of respondents—supporters, skeptics, ambivalent, dismissive, and neutral—highlighting that public opinion on Big Tech is not organized along a single continuum. Bayesian multinomial regression models show that higher education is associated less with outright support than with greater ambivalence, while ideology structures attitudes in distinct ways: skepticism is more pronounced on the left, whereas ambivalence rises especially among highly educated respondents on the right. These attitudinal clusters are closely linked to preferences for regulation and government support. The findings suggest that public opinion toward Big Tech is complex, politically structured, and consequential for policy debates.

The Journal of Politics

The Ground of Judgment
Peter Steinberger
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Are Citizens Inoculated by Past Democratic Backsliding?
Michal OvĂĄdek, Tommaso Pavone
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“Rights Talk” Can Inhibit Persuasion and Compromise
Stephan Stohler, Emily Thorson
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Diffuse Review, Diminished Accountability: Public Reactions to Judicial Checks on Executives
Jay Nash Krehbiel, Amanda Driscoll, Michael Nelson
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