I checked 18 political science journals on Tuesday, May 12, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 05 to May 11, I found 45 new paper(s) in 14 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Vote buying and negative agenda control: A problem for the study of money in politics
Andre Van Parys
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Politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens frequently argue that money has an outsized influence on US politics. Yet research on the effect of money on politicians' behavior finds limited effects, especially on voting behavior. I construct a formal model to show that these limited effects may be an artifact of the institutional powers of agenda setters, and the strategic nature of the data generating process. The model predicts that, under general conditions, vote buying against proposals can occur with no vote held, and that vote buying is most likely when uncertainty is high, the interest group and agenda setter are extreme, and the pivotal legislator is moderate. I argue that these conditions held during the 2021 negotiations over the Build Back Better Act. Using a synthetic control design, I test whether the swing voters in the Senate received more campaign contributions than they would have otherwise, finding evidence consistent with the model.

American Political Science Review

Procedural Polarization: How Election Rules Shape Voters’ Confidence
JOSHUA D. CLINTON
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Prior research demonstrates voters’ confidence in elections depends on whether their preferred candidate wins, but does agreement with the electoral rules being used also matter? Leveraging growing procedural polarization in election laws, public opinion data from 2008 to 2024, and a large-scale survey experiment conducted before the 2024 election, I show that agreement with election procedures matters for voter confidence beyond well-established effects related to partisan control and electoral outcomes. Observational and experimental analyses consistently reveal that voters are less likely to express confidence in election results conducted using procedures they oppose. The effects are particularly large for voter identification laws and among Republicans and independents. The findings underscore a tension in American federalism: as states increasingly adopt divergent electoral rules aligned with co-partisan preferences, partisan divides in electoral confidence may deepen. If so, procedural responsiveness to partisan preferences may undermine electoral confidence and, in turn, perceptions of electoral legitimacy.

British Journal of Political Science

Uncovering Mutual Understanding on Immigration with Open-Ended Survey Questions
Soran Hajo Dahl
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The immigration debate is a major source of political conflict, yet little is known about how citizens themselves perceive it. This paper uses a survey experiment with open-ended questions to examine which arguments respondents attribute to their opponents, which they consider the strongest for the opposing side, and how both compare to the arguments opponents actually use. The study is conducted in Norway, a low-polarization, consensus-oriented context where relatively accurate and charitable interpretations of opponents’ reasoning might be expected. Still, the findings show that while many recognize legitimate arguments on the other side, they attribute considerably weaker arguments to their opponents. Text analysis reveals that their preferred counterarguments resemble opponents’ own more closely than those they attribute to them. This suggests that mutual understanding in the immigration debate is obstructed less by a failure to appreciate opponents’ arguments than a systematic misrepresentation of them.
National Attachment, Past In-Group Perpetratorhood, and Out-Group Attitudes
Laia Balcells, Elias Dinas, Ethan vanderWilden
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Exclusionary attitudes are often justified by histories of conflict. A large body of literature explores how making in-group victimhood salient can affect attitudes towards out-groups. Much less, however, has been done to study how episodes in history that position the in-group as perpetrators may reduce or exacerbate animosity towards the victimized group. We fill this gap by studying antisemitism in contemporary Spain. Using a well-powered and pre-registered survey experiment, we prime respondents with the historical expulsion of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century. The effects of priming this historical episode are conditional on one’s degree of national attachment: respondents who are less attached to the Spanish nation express lower levels of antisemitism in response to the treatment, while those reporting high levels of attachment appear to exhibit a modest backlash. These results update our understanding of how majority populations confront histories that implicate their own group as perpetrators.
Love Blinds? Winners, In-Party Favoritism, and Support for Violations of Democratic Norms
Yu-Shiuan Huang
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Why are electoral winners more willing to support democratic norm violations? Using a mediator blockage survey experiment in the United States, I find that winners endorse norm erosion due to heightened in-party favoritism following their party’s electoral victory. The experiment successfully manipulated in-party favoritism, the mediator, demonstrating that respondents exposed to a winning signal, suggesting their party is likely to secure both the presidency and control of Congress, exhibit greater in-party favoritism. This increase significantly predicts a greater tendency to perceive norm-eroding policies, such as banning protests or disqualifying candidates, as democratic and to support these policies. Additionally, winners are less likely to evaluate these policies through a lens of strategic political calculation, that is, whether these policies benefit their party directly or indirectly, challenging the prevailing view that winners tolerate norm violations for instrumental reasons.

Electoral Studies

Generational replacement and voter turnout in Japan
Tetsuya Matsubayashi, Sohei Shigemura
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European Journal of Political Research

Changing the relationship status: how coalition history affects voter perceptions of parties
Kendall Curtis
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Research shows that voters use coalition decisions as a heuristic to infer party positions, but little work has studied whether coalition decisions have long-term effects. I argue that voters have longer-lasting impressions of coalition relationships that affect their perceptions of parties after any given coalition ends. Voters keep a running tally of which parties have governed together and update their perceptions of current coalitions based on these prior expectations. Using data from ParlGov and CSES, I analyze coalition relationships across European countries to model the inter-dependencies between party dyads. The results of this analysis show that voters view parties that have previously coalesced as closer together when neither party is in government, as long as they do not change partners, and voters have the strongest reactions to unprecedented and exclusive coalition partnerships.
Political constraints, public party funding, and the regulation of political finance: A global study
Iain McMenamin, William Charles Rowland Horncastle
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It has been suggested that the higher the political constraints, the greater the regulation of political finance. This is because, when parties operate in highly constrained contexts with numerous veto opportunities, there is more pressure to reach a consensus on reform. While public funding tends to be a positive-sum game conducive to the inclusive policymaking of constrained systems, political finance regulation tends to be a zero-sum game that can be stymied by veto players. We test these ideas using Lieberman’s nested analysis design. First, we run a series of logistic and OLS regression models on a global dataset, using IDEA’s indicator of public party funding and the Regulation of Political Finance Indicator (RoPFI) as dependent variables, and the index of political constraints (POLCON) as the independent variable. We find a strong association between public funding and political constraints, but no association between constraints and political finance regulation more generally. These findings are resistant to numerous robustness tests. We use the regression models to inform case selection for two plausibility probes of our main arguments. Our readings of the Netherlands and Botswana support the large-N analysis and are consistent with the different role political constraints play in public funding versus political finance regulation more generally. Our research has concrete implications for reformers and those advising them, and we make numerous contributions to political finance, party systems, and veto points literature.
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.
Echoes of hostility: Democratic sanctions and public backlash against democracy in targeted states
Lumin Fang, Jiwu Yin
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Previous research has shown that economic sanctions affect public opinion in targeted countries, either by rallying the public around the incumbent government or turning them against the sanctioning actors. This study explores the effects of economic sanctions on popular political orientations, with a particular focus on democratic sanctions. We argue that, in response to external coercion in the name of democracy, the public is motivated to defend their own country, thereby triggering a backlash against democracy. Based on evidence from Arab states (2010–2019) and using instrumental variable estimation to address the endogeneity, our research reveals that democratic sanctions can trigger anti-democratic attitudes in targeted countries. Furthermore, the backlash effects intensify with the escalation of patriotic indoctrination, confirming that foreign pressure interacts with a state’s indoctrination potential in influencing public political orientations.
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.

Political Analysis

Democracy Manifest or Democracy Latent? A Unified Framework for Identifying Regime Types and Transitions
Omer Faruk Orsun, Muhammet A. Bas
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Regime types and transitions are central to a wide range of political phenomena. Reflecting this importance, prior research has produced a variety of regime measures. This diversity, however, comes with important challenges for applied research: selecting a measure among many options, having to define regime categories based on cut-offs, identifying regime transitions by specific magnitudes of change over a specific time window and dealing with measurement uncertainty and missing data. In this article, we introduce Unified Transitions and Stability (UNITAS), a new framework that offers a solution to these challenges. Combining information from commonly used regime indicators, this approach identifies regime types and transitions probabilistically, locates the most likely periods of regime transitions and incorporates measurement uncertainty. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate the desirable properties and robustness of UNITAS under various scenarios. In an illustrative application, we show that stable semi-democracies are not inherently conflict-prone and that autocratization is consistently associated with higher civil war risk while democratization is not.
Text as Behavior
Omar Wasow
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Text analysis typically focuses on content—such as sentiment or topic—but expression is also a form of effortful action. Building on this insight, I propose using simple features of open-ended tasks to study text as behavior. This approach treats expression, such as writing, as cognitively, emotionally and temporally “costly” for subjects but inexpensive for researchers. I show basic statistics like the number of characters can approximate effort and significantly improve estimation of quantities of interest, including candidate choice, the probability of turning out to vote and psychological states about which a subject may not be fully aware. Further, these methods can convert nonresponse into informative data; validate survey instruments; serve as mechanism checks; be hard for a subject to “game”; work across different languages and analogize well to real-world situations. In sum, text as behavior can help address a range of issues related to quantifying attitudes and actions.

Political Behavior

Hacking Voters’ Trust in Democracy: Panel Evidence on Safeguarding Confidence in Election Integrity
Ryan Shandler, Iris Ong, Olivia Leu, Anthony DeMattee
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We are experiencing a crisis of trust in democracy. As elections become increasingly digitized, voters have grown uneasy with the digital infrastructure that underpins the electoral process. This study investigates how cyber threat narratives erode trust in the integrity of elections, and tests targeted interventions to counteract this effect. Using a pre-registered, two-wave survey experiment fielded during the 2024 election, we find that media coverage of cyberattacks significantly undermines perceptions of electoral integrity, an effect that spans party lines. Even cyberattacks unrelated to elections reduced trust in voting systems, suggesting that voters generalize digital insecurity. However, offering some hope, we also identify an intervention that counteracts the negative effect. By inoculating participants four weeks earlier with a short video describing election safeguards, participants maintained stable trust levels despite their later exposure to threatening content. These findings offer a new perspective on democratic trust in an age of digital elections.
Affective Representation in Congress
Ryan Dawkins, Adam Cayton, Carey Stapleton
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Disability Benefits? The Impact of Physical Disability in Electoral Decisions
Kyle Hull
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How Confrontational Protest Shapes Public Opinion: Experimental Evidence from Climate Mobilization
Daniel Saldivia Gonzatti, Lennart SchĂŒrmann, Sophia Hunger, Swen Hutter
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This study examines how different protest forms shape public opinion, distinguishing between support for protest tactics and policy goals. While protest is widely recognized as a legitimate mode of political participation, its forms vary in how they are perceived by the public. Drawing on two cross-sectional surveys and two survey experiments on climate protests in Germany, we focus on the distinction between demonstrative and confrontational protest forms. We find that demonstrative tactics are broadly perceived as legitimate. Being exposed to them leads to a stronger sympathy and more support for the movement compared to a control group. In contrast, confrontational tactics—such as blockades or symbolic art attacks—reduce these responses, particularly among left-leaning citizens, while leaving the already low support levels of right-leaning citizens unchanged. Crucially, we find null effects concerning policy support: the negative impact on attitudes toward protesters neither weakens nor strengthens support for their policy goals. Thus, confrontational protest may not substantively harm its broader political cause, at least in the short run. This finding contributes to the literature on social movement and protest effects by highlighting that loss of support for the movement does not automatically translate into changes in public support for the policy goals the movements advocate.

Political Geography

Reppin’ your constituency? Urban-rural differences in geographical representation in Swedish parliamentary debates
Albert Wendsjö
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In the gap between my thoughts and yours: A response to commentaries on the 2025 political geography plenary
Anna J. Secor
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Standing in the spaces
Rachael Squire
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Geographies of migrant mobile containment along the Balkan Route
Lucija Klun Turk, Claudio Minca
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On becoming political: between controversies and deliberation. The making of the rubbish issue in Buenos Aires
Lucila Newell
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Dissociation or disavowal? or, Where's the fetish?
Ilan Kapoor
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Reckoning with liberalism
Alan Ingram
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2025 Political Geography Plenary: On the bad timeline: Dissociative geo-politics in the time of Trump
Anna J. Secor
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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.
A person by place approach to examining prototypes of climate change impacts and their relation to pro‐environmental attitudes and behavioral intentions
Marjorie Prokosch, Ashley N. Krause
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Climate change is a pervasive phenomenon posing growing adverse effects on health, well‐being, and wealth worldwide. Perceptions of climate change, and opinions on how to mitigate it, vary across meaningful regional and cultural variables. Knowledge of baseline prototypes (i.e., mental images, exemplars) surrounding climate change can shape our understanding of people's perceptions and knowledge of climate change. Prototypes sway perceptions of event harm, victim suffering, and pro‐social intentions and behaviors. We proposed three registered studies to examine prototypical images and mental concepts of climate change victims, the places they inhabit, and how these prototypes relate to people's climate intentions (i.e., their likelihood of engaging in individual, and collective climate action, and environmental policy support). Further, we probed important place‐related (e.g., inhabited place, lived experiences there) and individual difference variables that should also impact prototypes and climate intentions. Results yield insight into socio‐ecological interactions that shape understanding of and action toward climate change mitigation.
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.
Ethnic bias from within: Catalan preferences for Catalan‐sounding names in adoption decisions
AgustĂ­n Blanco Bosco, Alberto LĂłpez Ortega
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Although name‐based differential treatment has been widely studied in societies with a dominant language, less is known about how such preferences function within multilingual societies where regional and national hierarchies intersect. In Catalonia, where Spanish–Catalan linguistic boundaries overlap with contested political identities, we investigate whether name‐based preferences shape evaluations in adoption decisions. Using a conjoint experiment simulating adoption applications ( n = 4298), we find evidence of a preference for couples with Catalan‐sounding names over those with Spanish‐sounding names. This effect concentrates among Catalan native speakers, those with strong Catalan national identity, respondents with two Catalan‐born parents, supporters of pro‐independence parties, and left‐wing voters regardless of their stance on independence. We also find that the effect is particularly pronounced among respondents with anti‐Muslim attitudes. This research contributes to understanding how name‐based markers function differently across political and linguistic contexts, highlighting the challenges facing multilingual democracies in maintaining social cohesion while navigating competing identity claims.
The nation and the self: National identity, national narcissism, and social belonging across cultural contexts
Wang Zheng, Zhiyu Liu, Yinqiu Zhao, Chunhao Ma
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Belonging is a fundamental need, and nations remain potent bases of affiliation. We report a preregistered, cross‐national study testing how national identity (secure attachment) and national narcissism (defensive, recognition‐seeking attachment) relate to social belonging, and whether these links vary with individualism–collectivism. Using data from 57 countries/regions, we estimated multilevel models (individuals nested within countries) and adjusted for standard individual and national covariates. Cultural context was indexed with both the Minkov–Hofstede individualism scores and the Global Collectivism Index, and the comparative effect of national identity versus national narcissism was evaluated with relative weight analysis. Two main conclusions emerge. First, both forms of national attachment are positively associated with social belonging, but national identity is the comparatively stronger correlate when both are considered simultaneously, consistent with the view that secure identification is associated with a generalizable pattern of everyday inclusion. Second, cultural moderation is asymmetric: The narcissism–belonging association varies with cultural value orientations—attenuated in more individualistic and amplified in more collectivistic contexts—whereas the identity–belonging link is comparatively stable across cultures. These findings refine the conceptual distinction between secure and defensive ties to the nation and clarify when national attachment supports felt connection. Implications for theory, civic communication, and belonging interventions are discussed.

Political Science Research and Methods

How descriptive over- and under-representation impacts citizens’ evaluations of decision-making across policy domains
Verena Reidinger, Lucas Leemann, Jonathan Slapin
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We demonstrate that the impact of descriptive representation on citizens’ perceptions of democratic processes varies with levels of representation and the nature of the issue decided. In a survey experiment, a committee decides on three policies that disproportionately impact women, but vary in whether individuals perceive them as moral or conferring targeted benefits. Our findings show that citizens associate descriptive representation with fairness. However, perceptions of some decisions, e.g., abortion, strongly improve with women’s equal and over-representation. On other issues—those perceived as offering women a targeted benefit—women’s over-representation reduces perceptions of fairness. These findings highlight the importance of exploring the interaction between decision-making body composition and policy agenda when seeking to understand citizens’ views of democratic policymaking.

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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Quarterly Journal of Political Science

Americans can imagine changing partisan affiliation: evidence from hypothetical scenarios
Alexander Coppock, Donald P. Green, Ethan Porter
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While attempts to change Americans’ partisanship via persuasive treatments largely fail, partisanship can and does change over time. In this paper, the authors first confirm, via survey and field experiments, that typical campaign messaging in the United States does not budge partisanship. The authors then present experiments in which participants encounter extraordinary hypothetical scenarios (e.g. one party causes economic collapse) before reporting what their partisanship would be under such circumstances. Twelve percent of partisans imagine switching parties in the pro-out-party hypothetical conditions, compared with 5% in the control hypotheticals in which the status quo persists, for a seven-percentage point (SE 1.5 points) difference. These hypothetical shifts are on par with the largest changes in American macropartisanship ever recorded. While the act of ruminating on hypothetical scenarios is not followed by changes in partisanship measured post-treatment, the evidence suggests that extraordinary world events may be able to shift partisan affiliation.
False flags: a strategic approach
Andrew H. Kydd
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A “false flag operation” is when one actor covertly carries out an attack in hopes that an adversary will take the blame for it. For instance, the Soviet Union began the 1939 Winter War against Finland by shelling a town on their own side of the border so that domestic and international opinion would blame Finland for starting the war. Why carry out such an attack? Under what conditions would it be rational? I develop a game-theoretic model to address these questions. An actor could carry out a false flag attack in equilibrium if it does not find it too costly, their adversary wants to do that kind of attack and the third party is willing to punish the adversary because they are more likely to be the guilty party. I discuss the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia as a potential case of successful false flag attacks by Vladimir Putin that convinced the Russian public to support a renewed war against Chechnya.
Policy decay and political competition
Steven Callander, Gregory J. Martin
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Modern political systems exist not in a vacuum but in a world of continuous technological, social and economic change. This change means policies designed for today’s world will fit only imperfectly tomorrow, a phenomenon they refer to as policy decay. In principle, policymakers could legislate to remove decay and restore the status quo. In practice, however, the need for “something to be done” creates opportunities for the majority party to leverage their proposal power and for the minority party to obstruct to gain an electoral advantage. We consider a classic agenda-setter model and show how the combination of decay and political competition alters the underlying logic of policymaking. Policy changes frequently in this setting, even when moderate, contrary to the notion of legislative gridlock. Yet legislation to remove decay is not always struck, leaving all policymakers worse off. Moreover, the agreements that are struck are often to the benefit of the minority party, reversing the classic logic of agenda-setting power.
Electoral college and election fraud
Georgy Egorov, Konstantin Sonin
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One frequently overlooked aspect of the US-style electoral college system is that it discourages election fraud. In a presidential election based on popular vote, competing parties are motivated to manipulate votes in areas where they have the most significant influence, such as states where they control local executive offices, legislatures and the judiciary. With the electoral college, the incentives for fraud shift to swing states where the local government is politically divided, and fraud is therefore more difficult and riskier. An increase in polarization makes fraud more likely but does not affect the fraud-protection advantage of the electoral college. Similarly, the single-member district electoral system provides better protection against election fraud than proportional representation.
The incentives of scientific experts: evidence from the history of public health
Casey Petroff
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The author examines the dual roles of experts—on one hand, as scholars responsible to a community of their expert peers, and on the other hand, as interested advisors to policymakers—using evidence from a large corpus of 19th-century medical research on cholera. Experts with links to Britain’s overseas trade sector were more likely than experts without such connections to advance theories arguing against the theory of contagious disease spread (which had costly implications for British commerce). This difference is driven by the early part of the century, when a scientific consensus around how cholera spreads had not yet solidified. The author argues that conflicted experts are more likely to act on their bias in low-information environments, when revealing new information can have a larger impact on policy. As a consensus forms, the value of hiding unfavorable information decreases, and even conflicted experts will reveal what they know to gain scientific credit.
Persuasion and ideological voting in legislatures
Adam Zelizer, Daniel E. Bergan
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American legislators are generally thought to be ideologues who take consistently partisan positions, but recent research suggests they are also pliant targets of persuasion campaigns by special interests, lobbyists, fellow legislators and even academics. This paper explores this seeming discrepancy. First, we revisit the credibility of findings of legislative persuasion to determine whether legislators’ positions can be changed and, if so, whether such changes are robust and long-lasting. Second, we examine whether persuasion works against or alongside ideology. Finally, we interview legislators to hear their experiences as targets of persuasion. We conclude that legislative persuasion can be long-lasting and found on bills other than those targeted by advocates. Persuasion can increase ideological position-taking and polarization by allowing legislators to better sort into positions consistent with their broader ideology. Finally, persuasion works through different mechanisms, including learning about policy expertise or electoral considerations, that vary in relevance across legislators. Our findings suggest legislative persuasion may play a key role in how parties, interest groups and constituents drive polarization.
“I alone can fix it:” the strongman narrative and leader support
Carlo M. Horz, Korhan Kocak
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Politicians want to maintain public support – especially in the context of democratic backsliding. One widely used instrument is the Strongman Narrative (SN): a narrative claiming that a strong leader can improve economic performance. Modeling beliefs about causal processes using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), the authors study the conditions under which the SN shapes citizens’ support decisions. The authors find a form of “authoritarian legacy:” past support for authoritarian leaders increases the citizen’s incentives to support the leader today. Moreover, believing in the SN increases moderates’ support for the leader. The authors show that the SN is the most desirable narrative for the leader among all three-variable DAGs featuring support, leader strength and economic performance: it ensures the leader enjoys citizens’ support under the broadest set of conditions. The authors extend the model to investigate the consequences of citizens caring about democratic backsliding and find that, unless citizens’ costs of backsliding are sufficiently high, the SN remains the narrative that is the most desirable for the leader.
Restoring unanimity: the role of attention allocation in committee decision-making
Jidong Chen, Ming Yang
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The unanimity rule is considered inferior at aggregating information in committee decision-making to the simple majority rule (Feddersen and Pesendorfer, 1998), which exhibits less institutional bias toward one outcome over another. In this paper, we argue that institutional bias can, paradoxically, lead to better decision-making when it causes committee members to adapt their attention in a way that counteracts the potential errors caused by the bias itself. Specifically, this paper develops a committee-voting model where members can flexibly allocate their attention before a collective decision between two options. As a result of the flexibility in attention allocation, we show that the unanimity rule can outperform simple majority rule in ensuring correct committee decisions. This occurs because, as the voting rule shifts to favor one outcome over another, it directs committee members’ attention toward the aspects of possible errors more likely caused by the institutional bias. Under certain conditions, the adjustment of attention can mitigate the downside of the more biased rule, thereby resulting in a better collective choice. The analysis suggests that committee members’ attention, as a limited resource, can be properly mobilized to compensate for the limitations of the institution and achieve the collective goal.
Pax Monopolista or the Rule of Law ? The enforcer’s dilemma in reputational criminal wars
Martin Castillo-Quintana
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Why do states often refrain from enforcing the law against powerful criminal organizations (OCGs)? Although typically attributed to corruption, I argue that forbearance can be optimal even for an honest state seeking to minimize violence. I develop a formal model where OCG strength is uncertain, and costly conflict builds reputations for strength that deters challengers. In this environment, enforcement has opposing effects: it weakens OCGs but can also undermine reputational deterrence, inadvertently creating power vacuums and escalating violence. The analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off – mediated by reputation-induced selection into conflict – between the extensive (likelihood) and intensive (intensity) margins of conflict. States rationally choose between a Pax Monopolista (targeting weak groups to leverage strong groups’ reputations) and the Rule of Law (indiscriminate enforcement), depending on state capacity and the interim reputation that the strongest OCG acquires in equilibrium. Weak state capacity favors a Pax Monopolista. Crucially, selectively targeting the strongest group is never the optimal strategy for minimizing short-term violence.
Empowering young citizens through the practice of accountability: an experiment in Bangladesh
Akshay Govind Dixit, Munshi Sulaiman
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The authors evaluate a novel accountability-based approach to civic education, which enables young people to hold local authorities to account for the quality of public services. They theorize that engaging young people in making demands of local authorities empowers them as active citizens while enhancing their interest in politics. In Bangladesh, young people who volunteered to participate in the study were randomly assigned to join a program that informed them of their rights to education and healthcare and enabled them to make demands of their service providers. Relative to a comparison group that only received information, participation in holding service providers accountable enhanced their self-efficacy and political efficacy, increased knowledge of politics and the extent to which they discussed politics and followed the news. These effects were similar across three separate cohorts of participants, underscoring their robustness. The findings show how active citizens can be fostered even in non-democratic, low-resource settings.

Research & Politics

Does the perceived prestige of a political office affect support for women candidates?
Nichole Bauer
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Research documents that women political leaders tend to be excluded from the highest and most prestigious political offices such as the presidency or gubernatorial offices in the U.S. However, it is not clear if the perceived prestige of a political office directly leads voters away from supporting a woman political candidate or if other characteristics of the highest political offices hinder women’s advancement through the political pipeline. This research note examines how voters rate the prestige of various political offices from local to federal offices, and, through exploratory analysis, connects the perceived prestige of these offices to levels of support for women political candidates. I also consider the relationship between high prestige and high masculinity for political offices. The empirical tests in this research note do not find that perceived prestige directly leads to less support for women political candidates.