I checked 18 political science journals on Saturday, May 16, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 09 to May 15, I found 22 new paper(s) in 10 journal(s).

American Political Science Review

Attitudes Toward Electoral System Reform and Party System Change in the U.S.
QUINTON MAYNE, SHANE P. SINGH
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Electoral reform efforts in the United States are widespread, yet little is known about how Americans evaluate alternative electoral systems or their consequences. We address this gap using conjoint and vignette experiments to study how Americans assess electoral reforms based on their implications for the number of parties and the degree of ideological polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives. Focusing on democratic voice, governability, and responsiveness, our designs emphasize party-system outcomes rather than technical institutional features that may be difficult for citizens to understand. We find that Americans are strongly averse to reforms that generate pronounced legislative polarization, even when it might be expected to enhance democratic voice. Findings pertaining to multipartism are more mixed, with some evidence that respondents respond positively to moderate departures from the two-party system. Perceived gains in voice and responsiveness do not generally compensate for losses in governability, except under arrangements that avoid polarization.
The Politics of Privilege: Discrimination, Monopolized Social Rights, and Reform
ANDREW SABL
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This article analyzes three kinds of privilege—roughly, the monopoly or near-monopoly of a prized social good by a group—in terms of the political barriers facing attempts to reform them. Extending previous work, it distinguishes among discrimination privileges, which are zero-sum and relative, benefiting some groups at others’ expense; monopolized social right privileges, involving goods enjoyed only by some that can and should be extended to all; and differential treatment privileges, involving disagreement over whether a good currently monopolized by some should be extended to all or to none. The political barriers to reforming discrimination privilege involve group interest; those to reforming monopolized social rights include privilege, ignorance, cost, priorities, policy uncertainty, and the psychological wage. Differential treatment privilege is complicated. An exercise in applied political realism, this article treats normative categories as political inputs rather than philosophical conclusions and seeks to demonstrate the insights enabled by doing so.

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.
Partisan (In)Tolerance and Affective Polarization
James Tilley, Teresa Bejan, Sara B. Hobolt
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Political tolerance of others’ civil liberties is an essential and everyday condition of democratic politics without which citizens cannot engage constructively with those of different views. In this paper, we combine insights from political theory and political behaviour to develop and test the concept of ‘partisan intolerance’. We conceptualize partisan intolerance as the gap between a person’s willingness to interfere with contentious activities by in-partisans versus the same activities by out-partisans. Using two pre-registered experiments, we find high levels of partisan intolerance in Britain. Moreover, while partisan intolerance is not associated with abstract measures of political tolerance, we find a strong association with affective partisan polarization. Our findings thus suggest that increasing affective polarization among partisans is accompanied by a high degree of intolerance towards their opponents’ basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.

Electoral Studies

Election outcomes and social trust in polarized times
Mark Williamson, Amber Hye-Yon Lee, Daniel Rubenson, Iva Srbinovska, David Sumantry, Jonah Davids, Annika Maulucci, Kristina Kisin
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Generational replacement and voter turnout in Japan
Tetsuya Matsubayashi, Sohei Shigemura
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Administrative unit proliferation in parliamentary systems: Evidence from turkish elections, 1960-2018
Murat Abus, Sabri Ciftci
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European Journal of Political Research

An emotional climate: Legislators’ emotional engagement with climate issues across age, party and time
Julius Diener
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What makes politicians personally invested in climate issues? While we know which politicians speak on climate issues, we lack knowledge of whether they do so out of electoral reasons or being assigned to this issue by their party leaders or whether they are personally invested in these issues. I argue that young members of parliament (MPs) and MPs from green and progressive parties are more emotionally invested in climate issues and that the emotional investment in climate issues has increased over time for all MPs. I use data on the emotional engagement of MPs during their speeches in the German Bundestag from 2011 to 2020 measuring emotional engagement via vocal pitch. Analyzing within-MP variation, I find that MPs are overall more emotionally engaged when giving speeches mentioning climate issues and that this effect has increased substantially over time. Contrary to my expectations, I find no difference between MPs with a different age or party affiliation. These findings have important implications for understanding the drivers of the personal engagement of politicians with climate issues. They indicate that both support of climate action and opposition to it may increase emotional engagement.
Spanning the ideological spectrum: Women’s political representation and spending on family work policies
Emanuel Emil Coman, Sarah Shair-Rosenfield
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What causes increased spending on family work policies? The empirical record suggests that increasing women’s representation leads to an increase in welfare spending when the representational increase reflects a legislative shift to the Left. Here, we argue that family work policy is an issue that spans the ideological spectrum, with women on the Left and Right more likely than their male counterparts to prioritize spending on policies that directly enable women’s presence in the formal labor force. The adoption of a gender quota that applies only in larger Italian municipalities enables us to causally evaluate whether greater women’s political representation translates into more spending on the provision of preschool education. Our findings support the argument that women’s descriptive representation can lead directly to women’s substantive representation, particularly when we focus on a policy area – in this case, pre-primary education – with shared implications for women across the political spectrum.
When do politicians choose to upset the apple cart? The fairness-loyalty trade-off in whistleblowing
Stephen Dawson
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Whistleblowing is increasingly viewed as a valuable mechanism to root out misconduct and corruption, yet we know very little about the conditions under which it is used in political parties. Building upon literature from social psychology, this study argues that the decision to blow the whistle on party colleagues is the outcome of a trade-off between two basic moral values that are particularly acute in the case of politicians: fairness and loyalty. Using a novel pre-registered survey experiment with over 1,000 Swedish politicians, this paper establishes that priming values of fairness can increase a politician’s willingness to blow the whistle against fellow party members. However, priming values of loyalty has no effect on whistleblowing intentions relative to control conditions. Results also suggest that severe misconduct is more likely to be reported only when it was committed by an individual rather than the party collectively, and that the party’s inaction is the biggest cause of external whistleblowing. The results of this study have significant implications for our understanding of the impact of organisational cultures and accountability on the behaviour of politicians.

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.

Political Behavior

Correction: Opinion Change in Nonpartisan Contexts: The Case of Residential Zoning Reform
Stephanie Ternullo
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Political Pundits and the Maintenance of Ideological Coalitions
Allison Wan, Jon Green
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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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Political Psychology

Seeing the same evidence differently: Biased assimilation and moral conviction in public evaluations of scientific expertise
Robin Bayes
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Particularly in democracies like the United States, the effective use of expertise to inform better policy decisions depends on public buy‐in. One barrier to this is biased assimilation, wherein individuals evaluate expert‐based knowledge, and the experts who promote it, differently based on alignment with their existing policy attitudes. While biased assimilation effects are well‐established, less is known about whether attitude‐level attributes like moral conviction may moderate them, as well as whether this effect may spill over into more general attitudes toward science. Using a two‐wave survey experiment in a sample of U.S. adults, this study confirms biased assimilation effects, as well as a novel moderating effect such that biased assimilation is strongest when it comes to attitudes held with strong moral conviction. As the moralization of an attitude increases, so do evaluations of pro‐attitudinal scientific knowledge and expert recommendations, suggesting that moral conviction may make people less critical information consumers. However, I find little evidence that these dynamics carry over into general attitudes toward scientific knowledge and scientists, even among those with the strongest moral conviction. These findings should temper fears that moralization or the use of expertise in divisive policy issues will erode general public support for science.
Group identification and contribution guilt predict political consumerism
Jack W. Klein, Ka Wan Chan, Samson Yuen, Christian S. Chan
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Participation in ideologically motivated boycotts and buycotts (i.e., political consumerism) represents an increasingly important form of collective action. However, relatively few studies have investigated this phenomenon, and little is known about its psychological predictors. We tested whether group‐based psychological constructs—group identification and contribution guilt (i.e., guilt arising from the perception of having insufficient contribution to a cause)—predicted political consumerism in the context of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. Study 1, a large two‐wave prospective study ( N = 6014), found that identification with the radical faction of the protest movement and contribution guilt predicted future participation in boycotts and buycotts. Likewise, Study 2, a pre‐registered daily diary study ( N = 110), found that identification with the protest movement and contribution guilt regarding political consumerism significantly predicted actual political consumerism behavior. Together, this research provides ecologically valid evidence that group identification and contribution guilt are important predictors of political consumerism.
The Circumplex of Personality Metatraits and political behavior: Predicting turnout and major party choice across six Polish elections
Norbert Maliszewski, Piotr P. Brud, Ɓukasz Wojciechowski, Jan Cieciuch
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This article applies the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits (CPM) to predict electoral participation and party choice. Across three studies conducted on representative samples of Poles (total N = 2936), respondents reported their voting behavior in six elections held between 2011 and 2025 (covering parliamentary, presidential, and European contests). The results demonstrate that the CPM offers a comprehensive framework that not only outperforms the Big Five in predictive validity but also reveals the systemic psychological underpinnings of political behavior. Voter turnout was consistently driven by sectors responsible for social regulation and stability—Alpha‐Plus, Gamma‐Plus, and Delta‐Plus—whereas abstention was rooted in psychological withdrawal, distrust, and disharmony (Gamma‐Minus, Alpha‐Minus). Support for the liberal Civic Coalition (KO) reflected a desire for intellectual novelty and personal autonomy (Beta‐Plus, Delta‐Minus) anchored in social cooperation (Gamma‐Plus). Conversely, the Law and Justice party (PiS) strongly aligned with the “grievance politics” hypothesis, drawing its core support from sectors defined by ressentiment and hostility (Gamma‐Minus, Alpha‐Minus) rather than traditional conservatism (Delta‐Plus). However, the analysis also revealed that PiS successfully mobilized the stability‐oriented Alpha‐Plus sector, thereby forming a heterogeneous coalition of rebellious disruptors (Alpha‐Minus) and stability‐seeking rationalists (Alpha‐Plus). These patterns were largely consistent across the election cycles.
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.

PS: Political Science & Politics

The Effects of a Women’s Mentoring Workshop on Career Outcomes in Political Science
Tali Mendelberg, Nicholas Short
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Mentoring programs are widely assumed to benefit women’s advancement in professional settings, including political science. However, causal evidence is scarce. We conducted a randomized evaluation of the American Political Science Association’s flagship women’s mentoring program for PhDs, the most rigorous evaluation in political science to date. The program consisted of a workshop followed by periodic small-group meetings. We randomized applicants to the program or a control group. We administered surveys pretreatment, immediately after the workshop, and two to seven years afterwards, collecting curriculum vitae and publication data during each wave. The program was rated positively by participants, increasing their sense of belonging in the profession at year 2, but otherwise had null effects. The results hold when we account for treatment uptake and strength; for various cohorts and time frames; and for a range of attitudes, behaviors, and publication metrics. More comprehensive reforms may be needed to make a long-term difference for women in academia.
Generational and Ideological Divides in Support for Speech-Suppressing Protest
Kevin Jay Wallsten
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Despite the centrality of tolerance and free expression to liberal democracy, little is known about the American public’s attitudes toward disruptive protest actions that suppress constitutionally protected speech. Drawing on a nationally representative survey, this article examines the acceptance of shouting down speakers, blocking audiences from attending events, and using violence to stop public speeches across two different question formats: (1) an abstract, “non-group” question; and (2) a “most-offensive-idea” question in which respondents evaluate tactics aimed at speech that they find personally offensive. Across both formats, Gen Z is significantly more accepting of shoutdowns, blockades, and violence than older cohorts. Ideological differences, however, depend heavily on the measurement approach, with liberals and conservatives diverging on the non-group questions but converging on the most-offensive-idea questions. Together, these results reveal a robust generational divide in permissiveness toward speech-suppressing protest and more conditional, context-dependent ideological differences.

Public Choice

Duverger’s tilted balance: “Two-party system” operationalized
Rein Taagepera
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