I checked 18 political science journals on Thursday, April 09, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period April 02 to April 08, I found 34 new paper(s) in 12 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Veto players and policy development
Alexander V. Hirsch, Kenneth W. Shotts
Full text
We analyze the effects of veto players when the set of available policies is not exogenously fixed, but rather determined by policy developers who work to craft new high‐quality proposals. If veto players are moderate, there is active competition between developers on both sides of the ideological spectrum. However, more extreme veto players induce asymmetric activity, as one side disengages from development. With highly extreme veto players, policy development ceases, and gridlock results. We also analyze effects on centrists' utility. Moderate veto players dampen productive policy development, and extreme ones eliminate it entirely, either of which is bad for centrists. But some effects are surprisingly positive; somewhat extreme veto players can induce policy developers who dislike the status quo to craft moderate, high‐quality proposals. Our model accounts for changing patterns of policymaking in the U.S. Senate and suggests that if polarization continues centrists will become increasingly inclined to eliminate the filibuster.

American Political Science Review

Coethnics Covote in Africa: Studying Electoral Cleavages with a Covoting Regression Model
CARL MÜLLER-CREPON, NILS-CHRISTIAN BORMANN
Full text
Ethnicity is an important cleavage in Africa, yet its influence on voting is contested. Selection biases from restricted choice sets complicate micro-level analyses, while ecological inferences and unobserved confounders hamper meso and macro-level approaches. Our new Covoting Regression (CVR) tackles several of these challenges. It estimates the effect of coethnicity on the probability that pairs of voters covote for the same party while conditioning on other shared characteristics. Thereby, CVR mirrors the micro-foundations of aggregate indicators such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index. We analyze Afrobarometer surveys from 28 countries and estimate that coethnicity increases covoting intentions between respondents by 17 percentage points. Politically relevant groups and covoting for ethnic parties drive this estimate, which is consistent across institutionally diverse countries and at least four times larger than that of other cleavages. The CVR addresses key issues in studying electoral consequences of socio-economic cleavages and bridges gaps between levels of analysis.
Bureaucratic Resistance and Policy Inefficiency
KUN HEO, ELISA WIRSCHING
Full text
Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for incumbent politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of electoral politics in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent’s reform based on post-reform government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats can undermine. Bureaucratic resistance for political leverage is most likely to occur when voters are torn between the reform and the status quo. Resistance lowers the informational value of government service for voters and can lead to policy distortions and accountability loss. When reform is moderately popular, resistance leads to policy inefficiency by preventing beneficial reforms due to electoral risks and inducing ineffective reforms by offering bureaucrats as scapegoats. Our model identifies a distinct mechanism of bureaucratic power and its implications for policy and accountability.
State-Building in the City: An Experiment in Civilian Alternatives to Policing
CHRISTOPHER BLATTMAN, GUSTAVO DUNCAN, BENJAMIN LESSING, SANTIAGO TOBÓN
Full text
We helped design and evaluate a statebuilding intervention in Medellín, Colombia. The municipal government dramatically intensified nonpolice state presence in 40 neighborhoods over 20 months. On average, perceptions of security and legitimacy changed negligibly, suggesting that returns to statebuilding investments are generally low, at least within electoral cycles. Prespecified heterogeneity analysis, however, reveals significant increases in security and legitimacy where state governance began relatively higher, while impacts were null or possibly negative where it began lower. This suggests increasing rather than diminishing returns to statebuilding. The divergence apparently resulted from city officials under-delivering in initially lower-governance sectors. One reason might be “start-up costs” in statebuilding. Alternatively, both initial state penetration and incentives to implement new programs might depend on neighborhoods’ ability to hold agencies accountable. Whatever their source, increasing returns could drive persistent “neglect traps”—channeling political attention and investment to areas where state penetration is already robust, reinforcing existing disparities.
Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and Causal Mechanisms
JIAWEI FU, TARA SLOUGH
Full text
The credibility revolution advances the use of research designs that permit the identification and estimation of causal effects. However, understanding which mechanisms produce measured causal effects remains a challenge. The dominant current approach to the quantitative evaluation of mechanisms relies on the detection of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) with respect to pretreatment covariates. This article develops a framework to understand when the existence of such HTEs can support inferences about the activation of a mechanism. We show first that this design cannot provide evidence of mechanism activation without additional, generally implicit, exclusion assumptions. Further, even when these assumptions are satisfied, the presence of HTEs supports the inference that the mechanism is active but the absence of HTEs is generally uninformative about mechanism activation. We provide novel guidance for interpretation and research design in light of these findings.

British Journal of Political Science

Revisiting the Link between Politicians’ Salaries and Corruption
Marko Klasnja, MihĂĄly Fazekas, Ahmed Al-Shaibani
Full text
It has long been argued that paying politicians higher salaries should help decrease corruption. However, the empirical evidence is mixed, partly due to the large variation in contexts, research designs, conceptual definitions and measures of corruption, and the predominance of case studies with potentially limited generalizability. To alleviate these challenges, we evaluate uniformly defined and validated corruption risk indicators from an original dataset of more than 2.4 million government contracts in eleven EU countries, covering more than half of the European Union population and gross domestic product. To aid causal identification, we exploit sizable changes in salaries of local politicians tied to population size across close to 100 discrete salary thresholds. Applying fixed effects estimators, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we consistently find that better-paid local politicians (by about 15 per cent on average) oversee less risky procurement contracts, by a third to one standard deviation on our measure of corruption risk.
The Missing Link: Technological Change, Dual VET, and Social Policy Preferences
Matthias Haslberger, Patrick Emmenegger, Niccolo Durazzi
Full text
How does technological change affect social policy preferences? We advance this lively debate by focusing on the role of dual vocational education and training (VET). Existing literature would lead us to expect that dual VET increases demand for compensatory social policy and magnifies the effect of automation risk on such demands. In contrast, we contend that dual VET weakens demand for compensatory social policy through three non-mutually exclusive mechanisms that we refer to as (i) material self-interest; (ii) workplace socialization; and (iii) skill certification. We further hypothesize that dual VET mitigates the association between automation risk and social policy preferences. Analyzing cross-national individual data from the European Social Survey and national-level data on education systems, we find strong evidence for our argument. The paper advances the debate on social policy preferences in the age of automation and sheds new light on the relationship between skill formation and social policy preferences.
The Evolution of Firm Lobbying in American Politics: Testing Theories of Lobby Activity and Centrality (1999–2018)
Marcel Hanegraaff, Ellis Aizenberg, Diliara Valeeva
Full text
This research note investigates how the involvement of firms in American politics has developed over the past two decades. The central question is whether individual firms have become more active lobbyists compared to business associations in the US Congress over this period. Different subdisciplines in political science have various expectations regarding the evolution of firm lobbying. We test which perspective is most accurate. To evaluate the hypotheses, we use a novel dataset comprising approximately 180,000 instances of lobbying activity by different types of interest organizations across a wide range of sectors and issues. In our analyses, we trace both the relative activity of firms versus business associations and their centrality in lobbying networks. While most theoretical models in the literature suggest a rise of firm lobbying activity, our results highlight a strikingly stable pattern of firm lobbying activity and centrality within the US political system over the past two decades.

Electoral Studies

District magnitude, Black political empowerment, and candidate emergence
Iris E. Acquarone, Matthew Hayes
Full text

European Journal of Political Research

The politics of industrial decline: Blame and compensation
SĂžren Frank Etzerodt
Full text
How does industrial decline influence politics? I propose three mechanisms linking industrial decline to voting. First, if unemployment soars as a consequence of a plant closure, this will result in local communities being economically deprived, which leads to lower support for the incumbent. Second, blame attribution should also play an important role since incumbents can be blamed for their handling of plant closures. Third, I argue that if people are compensated, this anti-incumbent effect should be reduced. I leverage the case of the closing of Lindþ Steel Shipyard in Denmark to test in a quasi-experimental setting how a plant closure is linked to voting. Leveraging a difference-in-differences (DiD) design with national election data at the municipality level from 2001–2019, I first find that the closing of the shipyard reduced votes for the right-wing incumbent government. Second, I find that the closures increased unemployment in the short to medium term, and unemployment is negatively correlated with votes for the incumbent. Third, relying on survey data and interview data, I showcase that the government was blamed for its handling of the closure and the EU was credited for its support. Fourth, leveraging an event study design, I find that the political effects are not persistent. In the election, after receiving the compensation, the effects become insignificant, which at least suggests that the compensation could have been effective.
Democratizing the genomic revolution? Comparing democratic innovations in France and the UK
Andrea Felicetti, Federica Frazzetta
Full text
The ongoing revolution in the field of genome editing (GE) has ignited intense debate around new genomic techniques (NGTs) in Europe. Their societal and ecological implications underscore their critical importance. However, the development and implementation of NGTs present significant challenges from a democratic perspective. Amid calls for democratizing NGTs governance, democratic innovations have been proposed as potential solutions. This paper investigates the efficacy of democratic innovations in democratizing NGT governance within the European context. Employing an assemblage democracy approach, we conduct an in-depth analysis of online documents and activities related to two important public engagement processes addressing NGTs in France and the United Kingdom. Our findings reveal context-specific challenges in each country and propose potential remedies to enhance democratization efforts. This research contributes to the ongoing debate on science governance and participatory democracy in Europe, offering insights for scholars engaged in the intersection of emerging technologies and democratic processes.
Unequal treatment perceptions and rural backlashes against carbon taxation
David Hope, Julian Limberg, Yves Steinebach
Full text
Why do we see such strong backlashes against carbon taxes in rural areas? In this article, we focus on the role of perceptions in rural communities that the government unfairly advantages the urban centres of political and economic power. We argue that when people living in rural areas perceive of unequal treatment by the state, they are less supportive of carbon taxes, because they believe that carbon taxes unfairly punish those that have already been disadvantaged by the state. We carry out a survey with a representative sample of around 3000 respondents from the United Kingdom to test our argument. We provide observational and experimental evidence showing that for those living in rural areas, increased perceptions of unequal treatment by the state reduce the perceived fairness of carbon taxes and substantially lower support for carbon taxation. Our results suggest that tackling deep-rooted resentments around unequal treatment in rural areas is crucial for building broad public support for carbon taxation.
Discriminatory secularism and attacks on religious minorities in Europe
Nilay Saiya, Stuti Manchanda
Full text
In contrast to the ‘benign’ and ‘hostile’ forms of secularism found globally, many European states exhibit a distinctive model we term ‘discriminatory secularism’. In this arrangement, the state discriminates against certain minority religions while privileging religious majorities, creating an uneven religious playing field. Discriminatory secularism is justified not on the basis of religious ideology but on the basis of secularist principles. We argue that discriminatory secularism fosters a culture of hostility toward minority faith communities, increasing the likelihood of physical violence against them. Using cross-national data from European states between 2003 and 2017, we find that higher levels of discriminatory secularism are strongly associated with greater violence against religious minorities. These results remain robust across multiple model specifications and statistical techniques.
Who is a populist? Comparing Blair and Macron to Corbyn and MĂ©lenchon
Or Dar
Full text
This paper critically examines the concept of populism, challenging the predominant ideological definition by highlighting the importance of political relations between populist actors and elites. It argues that populism should be conceptualized as a political phenomenon characterized by conflict with dominant elites, rather than solely as a set of ideas centered on ‘the people’ and ‘elites’. Through a comparative analysis of four politicians – Tony Blair, Emmanuel Macron, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon – the study demonstrates that although some actors utilize populist rhetoric, their tendency to generate conflict with elites distinguishes populist actors from other uses of populist ideas. The cases empirically demonstrate that ‘softer’ cases of populism indeed do not contain conflict and, thus, according to my approach, are not really populist. Thus, I demonstrate the inclination of ideational definitions to overstretch the concept of populism.

Party Politics

Populists in power: The limits of inclusion
Eitan Tzelgov, Steven Lloyd Wilson
Full text
This study examines the inclusion-moderation thesis within the context of Israeli populism, focusing on how government participation influences the communication styles of populist legislators. By analyzing a comprehensive dataset of tweets from Israeli lawmakers between 2015 and 2022, we explore whether holding office leads to a moderation of populist rhetoric. Our findings indicate that while coalition members generally exhibit reduced populist communication, this moderation varies significantly between ministers and backbenchers. Most importantly, in populist radical-right parties (PRRPs) backbench coalition legislators do not moderate: they maintain a populist communication style akin to their opposition counterparts. This research contributes to the understanding of populism in a non-European context and highlights the complexities of integrating radical parties into democratic governance, suggesting that moderation is not uniformly achieved across party lines.

Political Behavior

We Could Have Been Worse: ‘Whataboutism’ and Defensive Memory Among Perpetrator Groups
Joe Kendall
Full text
Is It Worth It? An Experimental Examination of the Added Value of Deliberation in a Direct Democratic Process
Stella Koenen, Kristof Jacobs, Alex Lehr
Full text
It is often argued that deliberation could improve citizens’ acceptance of the outcomes of direct democratic decision-making. However, the available scientific evidence remains limited and it remains unclear to which degree these findings can be generalized and reflect causal effects. We therefore use a randomized survey experiment on a large-scale representative sample of the Dutch population to disentangle the impact of direct democratic processes in the form of referendums in isolation compared to situations where deliberation is added, and wherein the outcome of this deliberation is either (a) congruent or (b) not congruent with the referendum outcome. We find a positive significant effect among our respondents when there is congruence between the deliberative mini-public and the referendum outcome and a negative significant effect when there is incongruence. Both effects seem to cancel each other out: overall we find no clear evidence in favor of an average positive or negative impact of deliberation added to a referendum. In an explorative analysis we find some evidence suggesting that outcome acceptance of incongruent processes is lower the less respondents deem the procedure fair (moderator effect). Lastly, while not designed as direct replication, our study provides some evidence in line with a prior seminal study by Germann et al. (Political Studies 72(2), 677–700, 2024) regarding higher outcome acceptance, specifically among decision losers, when deliberation is added to referenda, although only when the outcomes of deliberation and the referendum are congruent.
Just a Little Melancholic, Maybe a Little Blue: Mental Health as an Emerging Political Identity
Lauren Van De Hey
Full text
Is mental health an emerging political identity? In the first study that investigates experiencing mental illness as a political identity, I find that it is. Using a nationally representative survey of Americans fielded in the 2022 CES (N = 1,000), I answer the question: “ For whom is mental illness a political identity?” I adapt Jardina’s work (White Identity Politics. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108645157 .) to create mental health identity and mental health alienation batteries that examine closeness with the ingroup, importance of identification to self, strength of identification within the ingroup, and alienation. I find that people who have experienced mental illness feel close to others who have experienced mental illness. They are also likely to self-categorize as having or having had a mental illness, share a sense of group consciousness with others who have or had mental illness, and recognize the need to work together to change laws that are unfair to people with mental illness. I further find that there is an emerging mental health political identity that is most pronounced among younger (Gen Z) and more liberal Americans. I also find that the emerging mental health identity has political predictors and political consequences. Those who self-categorize and have high scores on the mental health identity and/or alienation scales are just as likely to participate politically and use (social) media, on average, as those who do not self-categorize and have low scores on the mental health identity and/or alienation scales. In addition, there is a strong association between mental health categorization, identification, and alienation and the expressed desire for increased healthcare, education, and welfare spending. Finally, I find that the political predictors and political consequences for the emerging mental health identity differ from those for physical disability and serious physical illness categorization and identification. These findings have far-reaching consequences for mental health advocacy and the role mental health identity will play in the political sphere—especially as Gen Z matures as a cohort.
Oscillations in Perceptual Accuracy: How Well Do People Perceive Parties’ Ideological Positions?
Semih Çakır, Oguzhan Alkan, Ruth Dassonneville, Zeynep Somer-Topcu
Full text
While citizens are sufficiently informed about parties’ ideological stances during elections, we know little about how the perceptual accuracy of party positions evolves beyond the election campaign period. We argue that, during election campaigns, when political information is more readily available, citizens perceive party positions more accurately, but this perceptual accuracy decreases outside of election time. Leveraging the as-if random variation in interview timing in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset across 21 established democracies and the panel data structure of the British Election Study Internet Panel, we show that perceptual accuracy declines post-election and increases during the pre-electoral campaign period. Additional analyses suggest that these fluctuations in accuracy are primarily due to individuals becoming less informed rather than updating their perceptions in response to new information. These findings have important implications for democratic representation.

Political Geography

Hydro-legal geopolitics: Why states join—or reject—global water treaties
Mohsen Nagheeby
Full text

PS: Political Science & Politics

AI’s Role in Deliberative Discussion
Jakob Miller, Katie Kelley, Peter Staritz
Full text
The ability to discuss politics intelligently with others is a central activity in many undergraduate political science courses, often forming a key part of student assessments and contributing significantly to the development of civic competence. This study explores the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tool to facilitate deliberative discussions among students. Based on our research, we present evidence that student interactions with an AI for political discourse can yield benefits that are similar to human-to-human political deliberation—including an increased openness to sharing views, discovery of common ground, and incremental improvement in respect for differing political views. These findings suggest that AI may offer a promising, scalable, and accessible solution to enhance deliberative learning experiences while potentially overcoming barriers observed in traditional classroom settings.
Dominating the Narrative: How Scholars Outside of Africa Define African Politics in the Top Political Science Journals
Zack Zimbalist, Elisa Omodei
Full text
Using a citation network approach, this study investigates how the subfield of African politics has evolved since its emergence in the late 1950s by focusing on the influence of African and Africa-based scholars in the top 20 political science journals. We find that African and Africa-based authors are systematically underrepresented in our sample and among the most influential authors today. Starting from a low base, African and Africa-based scholars experienced a period of increasing influence between 2000 and 2010; however, their influence has declined substantially since then. This article highlights two key factors associated with this decline: (1) the rising competitiveness of top-tier political science journals, which increasingly are privileging particular quantitative methodologies that require substantial financial resources and training; and (2) the increasing citation rates of non-African and non-Africa-based scholars in leading political science journals. The article concludes with recommendations that promote greater inclusivity and pluralism, with broader implications for the political science discipline.
Who Drives the Security Narrative in US Trade Policy?
Mehmet Yavuz, Gemma Mateo, Andreas DĂŒr
Full text
Appeals to national security play a central role in contemporary US trade politics. Who drives this security narrative and why? We argue that executive branch actors, regardless of political party affiliation, are more likely to frame trade policy in national-security terms. In Congress, however, we expect Republicans to rely more heavily than Democrats on a national-security narrative. We tested these expectations through a systematic analysis of trade-related discourse by congressional and executive actors from 2001 to early 2025. Using a large language model to examine a substantial corpus of speeches, press releases, and official statements, we find only partial support for our argument: the anticipated partisan difference appears, but security framing is more prevalent in Congress than in the executive branch. Overall, the evidence suggests that actors use security framing as a strategic tool to reinforce their role and confer legitimacy on particular trade policies.

Public Choice

Inequality and terrorism: a meta-regression analysis
Amar Anwar, Quan Li
Full text
Contracting unverifiable quality in healthcare: the importance of political stability for relational contracts
Marco Buso, Berardino Cesi, Silvia Coretti, Gilberto Turati
Full text
We consider an infinitely repeated game between a public purchaser of a health service and a semi-altruistic hospital when some quality dimensions of the service are non-contractible. We examine how a Pay-for-Performance Relational Contract (P4P-RC) can induce the hospital to deliver positive unverifiable quality. We find that the optimal conditions for both price and quality of the P4P-RC converge to the first-best, the higher the stability of the interaction between the purchaser and the hospital. Using measures of political stability in Italy as a proxy for a stable interaction, we empirically test the relationship between proxies of healthcare service quality and political stability from 1996 to 2020. We find evidence that unverifiable quality increases with the political stability of the regional governments.
Political cycles’ impact on Chinese local governments’ environmental expenditures
Zengbao Hu, Stuart McDonald, Xiaoyu Zhang
Full text
Economic freedom and rent seeking: evidence from US states
Fernando A. M. C. D’Andrea, Hugo Vaca Pereira Rocha, Nicholas Jensen, Vitor Melo, Zachary D. Blizard
Full text
Constitutional change: introduction to the special issue
Eric Alston, Justin T. Callais
Full text
International lobbying for intellectual property rights reform: the effect on R&D offshoring to the developing world
Zachary Cohle
Full text

Research & Politics

Do they really believe that? Measuring salient conspiracy endorsement
Lisa Basil
Full text
Surveys frequently report widespread belief in conspiracy theories, prompting concerns about their democratic consequences. Yet, standard survey measures often implicitly treat agreement as equivalent to politically consequential belief, even though agreement can reflect a range of engagement—from momentary reactions to durable worldviews. This paper argues that an important dimension of belief is often insufficiently captured in existing approaches: salience. I introduce a salience-based measure that incorporates certainty and prior familiarity to distinguish more tentative or situational endorsement from internalized, action-relevant belief. Using original survey data, I show that this measure correlates more strongly with psychological traits associated with conspiracism and better predicts self-reported engagement: including discussing, posting about, and researching conspiracy theories. These results suggest that traditional measures may overstate the prevalence of politically meaningful conspiratorial belief and obscure substantial heterogeneity among those who agree with conspiracy claims. By refining how belief is measured, this paper offers a tool to more accurately identify which survey endorsements are likely to reflect consequential belief.
Corruption next door, satisfaction at home: Spillover effects of corruption on political trust in China
Yixuan Zhang
Full text
How do political scandals in neighboring regions affect people’s evaluations of their own government? By investigating the spillover effects of corruption investigations on public political trust in China, this article finds that scandals in neighboring areas can trigger a contrast effect among the public. Corruption investigations in nearby regions positively influence people’s trust in their local government, suggesting that evaluations of an institution are shaped not only by the institution itself but also by the performance of comparable entities.
Allied commitments and public support for military interventions: A cross-national experiment
Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka, Ondrej Rosendorf
Full text
Recent survey experiments have found that the public in NATO member states is more supportive of intervening militarily on behalf of formal allies than non-allies. However, we lack empirical evidence on whether this effect of alliance treaties generalizes to non-NATO and non-Western countries. To fill this gap, we conducted a preregistered cross-national survey experiment on population samples ( N = 7200) in two Western NATO countries (the United States and the United Kingdom) and four non-Western regional powers (Russia, China, India, and Brazil). The results of our experiment show that while allied commitments increase public support for military interventions globally, their effect is comparatively weaker in non-Western, non-NATO countries. Our findings contribute to the scholarly debates on the microfoundations of collective defense and the generalizability of IR experiments beyond the Western context.
Not just women for women: How gendered affinities affect candidate support
Alejandro Tirado Castro, Susan Banducci
Full text
Despite gains in women’s political representation, many studies continue to identify structural and attitudinal barriers that contribute to their persistent under-representation in elected office. One commonly cited explanation is a baseline reluctance among some voters to support female candidates. However, research on gender affinity suggests a more complex picture: voters often prefer candidates who resemble themselves, and especially women are more likely to support women. This identity-driven dynamic stands in contrast to a generalized bias against women and raises important questions about how gender identity, beyond binary gender, shapes voter behavior. To address these questions, we use a conjoint experiment to test whether gender affinity influences candidate preferences and how it is moderated by gender identity. Our findings reveal a consistent gender affinity effect with women respondents preferring women candidates, and men preferring men candidates. These patterns are stronger among individuals with more pronounced gender identities, that is, hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity. Our study makes two contributions. First, by incorporating measures of gender identity, we move beyond a binary conception of gender to provide a more nuanced account of gender affinity. Second, our approach allows us to move beyond the traditional focus on affinity between women voters and women candidates to also consider how gender identity shapes political preferences among men.

The Journal of Politics

A Model of Party Effects on Legislative Behavior Based on Roll Call Data
Fang-Yi Chiou, Guillermo Rosas
Full text