I checked 18 political science journals on Friday, May 15, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 08 to May 14, I found 27 new paper(s) in 9 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

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.
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.
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

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 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.
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

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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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.
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.

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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