I checked 18 political science journals on Friday, April 11, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period April 04 to April 10, I found 43 new paper(s) in 13 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Tracing the “true liberalism”: F. A. Hayek as a reader of Tocqueville
Gianna Englert
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In reaction to diagnoses of a “crisis of liberalism,” scholars are actively engaged in revising our understanding of the tradition's history. This article explores an alternative account of the liberal past that appeared at a parallel moment of “crisis”: the Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek's interwar typology of two liberalisms, true and false. It argues that Hayek mobilized Alexis de Tocqueville as one representative of the “true liberal tradition,” revived to challenge varieties of collectivism and illiberalism in the twentieth century. Hayek's Tocqueville was an evolving exemplar of that true liberalism in reaction to its opponents, left and right, assuming distinct roles for Hayek as he tried to foreclose the road to serfdom. Hayek's idiosyncratic renderings of Tocqueville, this article maintains, offer both normative and methodological lessons for us today about defining the liberal tradition and identifying the sources of its decline.
How the State Discourages Vigilantism—Evidence From a Field Experiment in South Africa
Anna M. Wilke
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Mob vigilantism—the punishment of criminal suspects by groups of citizens—is widespread throughout the developing world. This paper sheds light on the relationship between state capacity and citizens’ choice between reliance on the state and vigilantism. I implemented a field experiment in South Africa that randomly varies the capacity of police to locate households. Findings from surveys conducted several months later suggest households that have become legible to police are more willing to rely on police and less willing to participate in vigilantism. An additional information experiment points toward increased fear of state punishment for vigilantism rather than improved police service quality as the likely mechanism. The broader implication is that citizens’ willingness to cooperate with capable state institutions need not reflect satisfaction with state services. Such cooperation can also be due to the state's ability to limit citizens’ choices by ruling out informal alternatives like vigilantism.
“Welcome to France.” Can mandatory integration contracts foster immigrant integration?
Mathilde Emeriau, Jens Hainmueller, Dominik Hangartner, David D. Laitin
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European governments, struggling with incorporating diverse immigrant populations, introduced integration contracts. Through language training and compulsory civics courses, these contracts aim to induce new migrants to adopt the host society's culture, respect its values, and improve their labor market outcomes. Despite their popularity, little empirical evidence exists on whether integration contracts catalyze integration or trigger a backlash. To shed light on this question, we leverage the staggered introduction of France's integration contract across metropolitan departments between 2003 and 2006 to implement a regression discontinuity design. We use census data, labor force surveys, and our own survey of refugees to estimate the effect of the contract on integration outcomes. We find the integration contract facilitated employment in the short term without backlash but did not translate into long‐lasting integration gains.
Networks of coercion: Military ties and civilian leadership challenges in China
Tyler Jost, Daniel Mattingly
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Civilian‐led coups are one of the most common routes to losing power in autocracies. How do authoritarian leaders secure themselves from civilian leadership challenges? We argue that autocrats differentiate civilian rivals in part by their social ties to the military. To reduce the threat of coups, leaders buy off civilians with strong military ties by promoting them to lower‐tier institutions—but isolate these same civilians by denying them promotion to higher‐tier institutions that afford opportunities to challenge the leader. We introduce an original data set of over 117,000 postings of 34,140 Chinese military officers and map ties between the entire civilian and military elite between 1927 and 2014. We find that civilian leaders with strong ties to the military improve prospects for promotion to the Central Committee, but degrade the likelihood of promotion to the apex Politburo Standing Committee, particularly for civilians outside the leader's social network.

Annual Review of Political Science

How Lobbying Matters
Alex Garlick, Wiebke Marie Junk, Heath Brown
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For decades, political scientists have struggled to provide empirical evidence that lobbying influences policymaking. A considerable gap arose between widespread public suspicions of lobbying and the literature's findings, which failed to document systematic lobbying influence in politics. This gap has closed within the last decade. Causal inference strategies, high-quality data sets, and attention to lobbying in multiple venues have allowed researchers to document the ways in which lobbying matters. In this review, we summarize three ways lobbying has an effect, as documented in this new literature. First, in line with public suspicions, lobbyists have transactional relationships with public officials in which they exchange money for political access and influence. Second, lobbyists persuade public officials by providing information that changes the positions taken by policymakers. Third, successful mobilization of citizen support or lobbying coalitions helps lobbyists attain policy aims. Jointly, these influence pathways nuance our view of lobbying as both harmful and beneficial for democratic representation.
Industrial Policy Revisited
Dan Breznitz, Jane Gingrich
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In the past decade, there has been a global resurgence in attention to industrial policy (IP), a resurgence that cuts across political ideologies and geographic regions. IPs are inherently political, intimately connected to the roles of the state in the economy and of states within an international economic system. This review demonstrates that while overt IPs have waxed and waned in their political acceptability in the aftermath of World War II, IPs have always remained part of the policy tool kit. In using IP, policymakers have had to navigate three common governance domains: building coalitions to support productive investments, building the state's capacity to collaborate with and discipline the private sector, and creating political incentives for credible commitments to firms. Nonetheless, the political dynamics in each of these domains have shifted over time. Historically, IPs focused on export-based catch-up strategies, requiring the mobilization of coalitions around manufacturing investment and export discipline. Today's IPs often target frontier technologies and aim to address perceived vulnerabilities in global supply chains and new geopolitical competition, demanding greater experimentation with more uncertain economic outcomes and higher risks of failure. We trace the evolution of the literature on IP through four phases: state-led developmental policies, the changing coalitions and institutions in a globally fragmented production system, neoliberalism, and the more recent renewed focus on transformative IP.
Africa's Unfinished Democratic Journey: My Modest Part
Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi
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My life is roughly divided into three parts. The first part covers my formative years: birth a few years before Ghana's independence, elementary education in a tiny rural village, secondary school in a nearby town, and undergraduate studies at the University of Ghana, where my interest in politics and public affairs was nurtured. The second part concerns the expansion of my intellectual horizons. It begins with my doctoral studies in political science at the University of California, Davis. It continues with my return to Ghana in the mid-1980s, when it was under military rule, to teach, research, and write about African politics from inside the continent. It ends with my relocation to Washington, DC, where I was exposed to the world of think tanks. Part three deals with my return to Ghana in the late 1990s. I spent the time observing and documenting Africa's democratic transitions in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I also played a key role in the moment through two nonstate research and advocacy institutions—the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and Afrobarometer.
Re-imagin(in)g Territorial Conflict
Hein Goemans, David Carter
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Territorial disputes continue to fuel both armed conflicts and security threats around the world despite norms against the violent resolution of territorial conflict. The pervasiveness of territorial conflict presents a puzzle since the value of territory has allegedly decreased in an age of globalization and interdependence, and many territorial conflicts involve territory with little tangible value. Our inquiry begins not with states, but with groups and rules of group membership. Changing the unit of analysis to the group and its membership rules exposes the bases for territorial disputes both historically and in current world politics. We show that under different rules of group membership, territory has different meanings. Different rules directly affect which territory will be contested. Conflict is particularly likely and especially difficult to resolve when groups with different rules of membership lay claim to the same territory.
Defining and Measuring Democratic Norms
Gretchen Helmke, Josiah Rath
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If scholars and pundits are right, the erosion of norms in the United States and abroad poses a significant danger to democracy. Understanding what exactly norms are, what makes them democratic, and how best to measure them are thus essential building blocks for generating and evaluating explanations of how such norms weaken and collapse. Our article addresses each of these key elements. On the conceptual front, we argue for more precision in defining norms and more consideration in labeling them as democratic. On the measurement front, we develop a general utility function and use it to evaluate the various methodological strategies that researchers have deployed to causally identify democratic norms. In between, we synthesize the fast-growing literature on norms and democratic backsliding using a fourfold typology, with transgressors and enforcers on one dimension and political elites and citizens on the other. We conclude by pinpointing several new areas for future research.

British Journal of Political Science

Who Counts? Non-Citizen Residents, Spatial Sorting, and Malapportionment
André Walter, Patrick Emmenegger
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Existing research argues that malapportionment primarily favours rural areas, resulting in conservative biases of electoral systems. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the study of apportionment processes by identifying the institutional design under which malapportionment may favour other regions. Because of the geographical sorting of non-citizen residents, we argue that regions with high shares of non-citizen residents benefit from population-based apportionment, whereas the spatial sorting of non-citizens does not affect malapportionment in the case of citizen-based apportionment. Empirically, we use sub-national data from ten advanced democracies to forward evidence that differences in apportionment mechanisms and district-level shares of non-citizen residents systematically influence malapportionment. Our findings suggest that the impact of malapportionment on political representation and public policies may be more heterogeneous than previously thought.
The Gendered Cost of Politics
Frederik Klaaborg KjĂžller, Lene Holm Pedersen
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We investigate how sexism and harassment affect political candidates’ preferences for political positions by deploying a conjoint experiment among political candidates in the 2021 Danish local elections. We find that, compared to men candidates, women candidates experience far more sexism and harassment, and assess their risk of victimization as being far higher. Correspondingly, the conjoint experiment reveals that women candidates state stronger preferences for equal working environments in politics than men, while holding similar preferences for formal working conditions like political positions, remuneration, and workload. Substantively, women’s willingness to lower their remuneration and increase their workload to avoid sexism in politics is more than double the size of men’s willingness. Our approach provides us with highly accurate descriptions of candidates’ preferences for political jobs, which are often assumed rather than measured directly. This lets us quantify the magnitude of an important working condition in politics with significant repercussions for women.
Informed or Overwhelmed? Disentangling the Effects of Cognitive Ability and Information on Public Opinion
Adam R. Panish
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Received wisdom in political science holds that informed citizens are better able to develop coherent, stable policy preferences. However, past research fails to differentiate between the effects of information and cognitive ability. I show that, for people with low levels of ability, consuming more political information predicts lower levels of ideological constraint and response stability. This effect is driven by relatively technical issues, suggesting that attempts to inform the electorate may backfire by overwhelming some voters. More broadly, these results suggest that an increasingly saturated information environment may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, differences in political sophistication.
Evidence Can Change Partisan Minds but Less So in Hostile Contexts
Jin Woo Kim
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A large body of literature indicates that partisan-motivated reasoning drives resistance to political persuasion. But recent scholarship has challenged this view, suggesting that people don’t always resist uncongenial information, and even when they do, it is not clear why. In this article, I present two survey experiments that examine when and why partisans selectively dismiss uncongenial information. The findings show that, in the absence of affective triggers, partisans were persuaded by both congenial and uncongenial information. But when randomly induced to feel adversarial, they became more dismissive of uncongenial information and ultimately disagreed more, not less, after considering the same information. These results (1) identify a crucial condition that provokes resistance to political persuasion; (2) demonstrate partisan-motivated reasoning more clearly than previous studies; and (3) underscore the importance of the quality of elite-level political discourse in determining the quality of citizen-level opinion formation.
Does the Accumulation of Assets Shape Voting Preferences? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study in Britain
Justin Robinson, Pavlos Vasilopoulos, Sofia Vasilopoulou
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Research has found that asset accumulation is associated with vote preferences, with those with a high number and value of assets being more likely to vote for centre-right parties. Yet the bulk of this literature often falls short of accounting for alternative mechanisms that could be driving this relationship. In this letter, we investigate the association between patrimony and the vote longitudinally, assessing the effects of within-person changes in patrimony on party support. Drawing on an 11-year panel from Britain, our results indicate that patrimony, whether measured by the number of assets one owns or the total value of these assets, is unrelated to support for the Conservative Party. This finding is solid against several robustness tests. Our data analysis suggests that patrimonial voting in Britain – as identified in prior research – may be driven primarily by pre-existing differences between asset owners and non-owners rather than the assets themselves.

Electoral Studies

Voter support for illiberal candidates: Demonstrating the differential influence of authoritarianism's three facets on vote choice
Aaron Dusso, Tijen Demirel-Pegg
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How does rurality affect campaigning?
Stephanie Luke, Charles Pattie, Luke Temple, Katharine Dommett
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Voting under debtor distress
Jakub Grossmann, Ơtěpán Jurajda
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What drives the link between university study and attitudinal change?
Elizabeth Simon, Daniel Devine, Jamie Furlong
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European Journal of Political Research

United in success, fragmented in failure: The moderating effect of perceived government performance on affective polarization between coalition partners
JOCHEM VANAGT, MARKUS KOLLBERG
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Coalition governments are said to make voters of coalition parties feel more warmly towards supporters of their coalition partners and, hence, reduce affective polarization. However, even countries frequently governed by coalitions commonly experience high levels of affective polarization. We argue that for coalitions to reduce affective polarization, they must be perceived as successful . In coalitions that are perceived as unsuccessful, voters will not develop an overarching coalition identity. Such coalitions fail to change whom voters consider as their in‐group, therefore not mitigating affective polarization. We test this argument using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data. We find that the positive effects of coalition membership reported in previous work are exclusively driven by voters who are satisfied with the coalition's performance. Coalitions have no depolarizing effect among voters dissatisfied with their governing performance. These results question whether democratic institutions themselves can mitigate affective polarization and instead demonstrate the responsibility of elites to make inter‐party cooperation work.
The politics of seeking and avoiding discourse in parliament
ELIAS KOCH, ANDREAS KÜPFER
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When do politicians debate each other in parliament, and when do they prefer to avoid discourse? While existing research has shown MPs to unilaterally leverage the dialogical nature of legislative debates to their advantage, the circumstances facilitating actual discursive interaction have so far received less attention. We introduce a new framework to study the emergence of discourse in political debates. Applying this framework, we expect ideological differences and government–opposition dynamics to shape politicians' choices about seeking or avoiding discourse. To test these hypotheses, we draw on an original dataset of all 14,595 attempted and successful interventions ( Zwischenfragen ) – extraordinary, voluntary discursive exchanges between speakers and MPs in the audience – in the German Bundestag (1990–2020), extracted using an annotation pipeline developed specifically for this study. We find that MPs separated by diverging preferences seek discourse with one another more often than their ideologically aligned counterparts. At the same time, these exact attempts do less frequently result in discursive interactions. When considering government–opposition dynamics in this process, we observe very similar patterns: Attempts to initiate discourse are particularly common among opposition MPs facing government speakers, and we find tentative evidence suggesting that government actors are most likely to avoid these invitations to discursive interaction. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of elite behaviour in public environments.
Anti‐LGBTIQ rhetoric and electoral outcomes under the shadow of war: Evidence from Poland's 2023 parliamentary election
PHILLIP M. AYOUB, DOUGLAS PAGE, SAMUEL WHITT
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The existing literature debates how war can precipitate shifts in electoral coalitions. However, what remains unclear are the underlying cultural contestations affected by war, including how homo‐ and transphobia have been weaponized politically as a key social division during wartime elections. We examined original survey data collected before the 2023 Polish parliamentary election, which resulted in the defeat of the anti‐LGBTIQ Law & Justice Party (PiS). In that election, competing coalitions led by the centre‐right‐liberal opposition Civic Platform (PO) and the incumbent right‐wing‐conservative PiS diverged over values like tolerance of LGBTIQ rights, all amid the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Our survey experiment found that informing voters about the PiS's anti‐LGBTIQ rhetoric failed to boost either PiS or PO support. However, the same information coupled with Putin's homo‐ and transphobic justifications for the Russo‐Ukrainian war shifted voter support significantly towards the PO. These findings make an important contribution by showing the limitations of anti‐LGBTIQ rhetoric as a once ‘tried‐and‐true’ electoral strategy and offering a strategy to counter the appeal of political homo/transphobia.

Party Politics

Gendered dynamics in representation: Examining candidates' policy congruence with parties and voters
Zoe Lefkofridi, Carsten Wegscheider, Nadine Zwiener-Collins
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This study tests novel hypotheses on how gender affects candidates’ policy congruence with parties and voters. We argue that structural barriers lead female candidates to align more closely with their parties, while gendered ideological differences shape their congruence with voters across policy domains. Additionally, we examine whether candidates’ voter- or party-centric campaign focus mediates these gendered dynamics. Using data from the 2013 Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and blackbox scaling to estimate latent policy positions, we find no gender differences in candidate-party congruence. However, female candidates align more with female voters on the economic dimension but exhibit lower congruence with both female and male voters on socio-cultural issues. While voter-centric campaigns increase candidate-voter congruence on socio-cultural issues, campaign focus does not mediate gendered patterns of congruence. These findings shed new light on gender and policy congruence across dimensions, advancing our understanding of the dynamics between descriptive and substantive representation.

Political Behavior

Labor vs. Big Business: Interest Groups, Cue-Taking, and Voting Behavior
Daniel R. Daneri
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How do individuals interpret interest group cues to make informed voting decisions that are aligned with their partisan identities and ideologies? In the 2020 election cycle, Californians voted on a ballot proposition that concerned the employment status of gig economy workers such as Uber and Lyft drivers. In a manner uncharacteristic of most policy issues, votes for and against the measure did not neatly align with partisan identities. I conduct a content analysis of newspaper coverage and paid social media advertising and find that voters received potentially imbalanced exposure that favored arguments by app-based companies and their allies. I theorize that voters were persuadable due to low attitude crystallization and a new information environment with respect to independent contractor status as a policy issue. To test this, I conduct an experiment among self-identifying Democrats in which I expose them to a series of cue-taking treatments from businesses and labor unions regarding legislation on an independent contractor status policy (low attitude crystallization) or a paid family/medical leave program (high attitude crystallization). The results support my theory and suggest that, despite a half-century of decline, labor unions’ endorsements continue to serve as a compass to guide individual voter decision-making towards progressive positions.
Stereotyping Women with Sympathy: Youth Political Socialization in Mixed-Gender Environments
Sun Young Park
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The Mosque Next Door: How the Visibility of Mosques Influences Support for the Far-Right and Anti-Immigration Policies
Chiara Valli, Timothy B. Gravelle, Alessandro Nai, Mike Medeiros, CĂ©line Murri, Beatrice Eugster
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As racial-ethnic and religious minorities have grown in Western societies, so too has the electoral success of nativist and far-right political parties. These parties commonly mobilize against Muslim minority groups, often targeting Islamic symbols such as mosques. This raises a key question: does the presence of mosques in local communities influence citizens’ vote choice? To answer this question, we analyze aggregate voting patterns in Swiss municipalities between 2007 and 2023. This includes data on voting returns from five elections and six anti-immigration popular initiatives. We augment these data with original spatial data that locates mosques in Switzerland, categorizing them as either a visible or non-visible feature of the built environment. Using coarsened exact matching (CEM), we estimate the causal effect of prominent, visible mosques on citizens’ voting patterns. Results indicate that a visible mosque in a municipality increases support for the far-right by approximately 3% points across elections. Similarly, a visible mosque increases support for popular initiatives targeting Muslims and other migrants by 3–5% points. By contrast, non-visible mosques have no significant effects on voting in popular initiatives or far-right party support. These findings highlight how politically salient features of the built environment shape voting patterns.
The Influence of Episodic Information on Political Elites: Evidence from Chile
Daniel Cruz
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Are politicians more influenced by anecdotal information than statistical data? While extensive research has explored the implications of this question for the general public, studies examining the role of anecdotes or exemplars among politicians are lacking. If politicians are disproportionately influenced by information derived from personal experiences (episodic information), their agendas, priorities, and perceptions may become biased. Through a series of preregistered survey experiments conducted among elected officials in Chile, this study examines the extent to which politicians are more sensitive to episodic information over statistical information. The findings suggest that politicians consistently ignore statistical information while relying more on episodic information, measured as the effect of each type of information on both their assessment of policies and how much they remember about experiences in a public service. Furthermore, the study reveals that the effect size and magnitude are comparable to those observed among the general population. These findings shed light on politicians’ use of this cognitive shortcut, and raises the need for further research on this topic.
Downward Class Mobility and Far-Right Party Support in Western Europe
Alexi Gugushvili, Daphne Halikiopoulou, Tim Vlandas
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This article contributes to debates about the importance of class in far-right voting behavior by focusing on intergenerational class mobility. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), we employ Diagonal Reference Models (DRMs) to examine whether and how actual downward class mobility is linked to far-right party voting. First, drawing on a framework that focuses on discontent, loss, and blame, we explore four types of mechanisms that may mediate this relationship: life satisfaction (discontent), income insecurity (loss), distrust of elites (internal blame attribution) and anti-immigration attitudes (external blame attribution). Our results show that individuals from salariat origins and working-class destination are more likely to vote for the far-right. However, the relationship between downward class mobility is only mediated by life satisfaction and income insecurity, suggesting that the class route to far-right voting is largely linked to existential and material issues. Second, we explore whether these individual-level variables, as well as overall national-level mobility, moderate the effect of downward mobility. We find that while mobility effects do not vary depending on these individual traits, overall national-level mobility does moderate the effect of downward mobility, suggesting that context matters for individual-level associations between class mobility and far-right voting. Third, we assess the extent to which downward class mobility is important for far-right party success by examining the share of downwardly mobile individuals within the far-right electorate. We find that while downwardly mobile individuals are likely far-right supporters, they constitute a small percentage of the far-right electorate. Overall, our findings show that downward class mobility significantly affects far-right voting but only under specific conditions.
Nevertheless, Role Models Persisted: Girls Exposed To Women Politicians More Likely To Vote as Adults
Christina Wolbrecht, David E. Campbell
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Do girls exposed to women politicians become more politically engaged adults, as many politicians and scholars predict? To our knowledge, no previous research has examined whether exposure to women politicians in adolescence contributes to a greater likelihood of political participation in adulthood . We employ a panel study that followed more than 6,000 adolescents into adulthood, controlling for a range of individual and contextual variables associated with both turnout and the presence of women candidates. We find that adolescent girls who were exposed to a woman running a viable campaign for a visible office in 2002 were more likely to vote in both presidential and non-presidential elections as adults than those who did not experience any such women candidates. The effect is concentrated among women who grew up in less political households; absent political socialization in the family, the presence of women politicians made a difference. Men’s turnout is unrelated to exposure to women candidates in adolescence.
Collective Memory and the Stigmatization of Authoritarian Nostalgia: Evidence from Italy
Francesco Colombo
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Political Geography

Worlding decolonisation: Rediscovering federalist and pluralist geographies of more-than-national liberation
Federico Ferretti
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Political Psychology

Seeing red: How gerrymandering emotionally mobilizes turnout
Hilary J. Izatt
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Partisan gerrymandering threatens the health of democracy by manipulating formal institutions away from majority rule. In the conventional formulation, institutional manipulation mechanically alters political outcomes. Yet research has neglected the psychological effects of partisan redistricting, which can provoke an emotional backlash from voters. This study presents a theory of voting behavior in which citizen anger over political machinations incites greater turnout that can, in turn, partially compensate for partisan gerrymandering. The constituents that politicians target for disadvantage are agents who can learn they are being targeted, react emotionally, and become that much more motivated to vote. In two survey experiments on large samples, citizens were randomly assigned to receive information about gerrymandering that aimed to either advantage or disadvantage their party. Advantaged citizens on average feel positive emotions but do not significantly alter their intended turnout behavior. Disadvantaged citizens, on the contrary, report greater amounts of fear and anger. The angry participants declare significantly higher rates of voting intent. The results indicate that institutional manipulation may not result simply in mechanical effects but might also provoke psychological backlash that may be partly offsetting, suggesting an avenue for democratic resilience.
“Not as bad as I thought”: Economic attitudes and motivated reasoning in coalition governments
Georgios Kavetsos, Christian Krekel, Georgios Melios
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Two prominent mechanisms have been advanced to explain the effects of election outcomes on economic attitudes/perceptions: partisan competence attribution, based on voters' genuine belief of an elected party's competence; and partisan motivated reasoning, where voters change their economic attitudes so as to remain consistent with their past behavior/view. To date, these two mechanisms have not been considered jointly. We draw on a unique, closely spaced, panel dataset around the 2013 German general elections to consider retrospective (past evaluations) and prospective (future expectations) attitudes about both one's personal economic situation and that of the national economy. We find no evidence for competence attribution; voters of the future coalition parties do not expect higher household incomes nor their job situation to improve. We find changes in retrospective attitudes about the national economy, explained by partisan motivated reasoning given a political alliance that was negated and depreciated throughout the pre‐election period. We discuss the implications these results have.
The authoritarian personality model of punitiveness is inconsistent in predicting punishment preferences: A sentencing vignette study in a representative sample from six countries
Andrzej Uhl, Malia M. Marks, PaweƂ Ostaszewski
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Right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are routinely used to predict punitiveness and believed by some to form the dispositional basis of punitive attitudes toward offenders. The measures of punishment preferences employed in this line of research show conceptual overlap with RWA items and could have biased the previous results. Instead, this study used sentencing vignettes distributed as part of a large population survey. Contradicting the assumptions of extant research, our data indicated that there may not be a single underlying punitiveness trait. Rather, we identified clusters of punishment responses with a latent class analysis. At odds with theoretical and empirical understandings of the authoritarian personality, the effect of RWA on punitiveness was partially suppressed by SDO, which itself was associated with lower punitiveness. Moreover, the subscales of RWA produced opposing effects on recommended sentences, undermining the assumption that RWA should be considered unidimensionally. The predictive power of scales derived from political psychology is modest and does not improve models differentiating between higher levels of punitiveness.

Political Science Research and Methods

From cradle to congress: the effect of birthplace on legislative decision-making
Colin Emrich, Hillary Style, Ryan J. Vander Wielen
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The extent to which legislators pursue their privately held preferences in office has important implications for representative democracy and is exceedingly difficult to measure. Many models of legislative decision-making tacitly assume that members are willing and able to carry out the wishes of their constituents so as to maximize their reelection prospects and, in so doing, relegate their personal preferences. This project explores this assumption by examining the role that members’ place of birth plays in shaping legislative behavior, apart from other politically relevant factors like partisanship. We find that birthplace exerts an independent influence on members’ voting behavior. Using a variety of geographic measures, we find that members who are born in close proximity to one another tend to exhibit similar patterns in roll call voting, even when accounting for partisanship, constituency attributes, and a variety of other determinants of voting. We also demonstrate in a secondary analysis that the agricultural composition of members’ birthplace influences their support for agricultural protection. Our findings suggest that members’ personal history shapes the representational relationship they have with their constituents.
Conservative bias in perceptions of public opinion among citizens: perceived social norms about abortion rights in post-Roe United States
Giulia Fornaro
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Politicians appear to overestimate how conservative public opinion is in the U.S. and other Western democracies. Whether this “conservative bias” extends to voters remains unclear but has important implications for belief formation and behavior. I examine this in the context of abortion access after the Dobbs decision. Despite the salience of the topic, original survey data collected post-Dobbs reveal consistent underestimation of public support for abortion access. Individuals identifying as “pro-life” drive most of this underestimation, suggesting the presence of egocentric biases in which “pro-life” Americans overestimate the commonality of their views. Conservative biases among voters may contribute to a skewed information environment for politicians, potentially providing leverage for further restrictions on abortion access.
Bayesian reasoning for qualitative replication analysis: Examples from climate politics
Tasha Fairfield, Andrew Charman
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This paper demonstrates how Bayesian reasoning can be used for an analog of replication analysis with qualitative research that conducts inference to best explanation. We overview the basic mechanics of Bayesian reasoning with qualitative evidence and apply our approach to recent research on climate change politics, a matter of major importance that is beginning to attract greater interest in the discipline. Our re-analysis of illustrative evidence from a prominent article on global collective-action versus distributive politics theories of climate policy largely accords with the authors’ conclusions, while illuminating the value added of Bayesian analysis. In contrast, our in-depth examination of scholarship on oil majors’ support for carbon pricing yields a Bayesian inference that diverges from the authors’ conclusions. These examples highlight the potential for Bayesian reasoning not only to improve inferences when working with qualitative evidence but also to enhance analytical transparency, facilitate communication of findings, and promote knowledge accumulation.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Engaging Diversity: An Inclusive Approach to Undergraduate Mentorship in Mobilization and Political Economy
Valentina GonzĂĄlez-Rostani, Chie Togami, Tania RamĂ­rez-Farias, Mariely LĂłpez-Santana, Fernando Tormos-Aponte, Mayra VĂ©lez-Serrano
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The discipline of political science faces significant disparities in the representation and participation of underrepresented groups in graduate education, including first-generation college students, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. Underrepresentation has a wide variety of limiting effects, including a narrower range of questions being explored within the field. This article proposes a template for teaching and mentoring undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to enhance their opportunities in graduate programs. Specifically, it examines the Mobilization and Political Economy (MPE) Summer Program, an in-residence graduate pipeline program designed to equip participants to study and conduct research on political mobilization, social movements, and political economy. The MPE Summer Program aims to develop and sustain broad-scale collaborative infrastructures that prefigure reciprocal and equitable pathways to increase participation in the social sciences across the United States.

Public Choice

Are there normative social epistemologies? Vernon Smith, Adam Smith, and the challenge of systems
Michael C. Munger
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Research productivity during the Russian war in Ukraine
Alessandra Guariglia, Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy, Oleksandr Talavera, Olha Zadorozhna
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We investigate the effect of the Russian-Ukrainian war on the research productivity of scholars affiliated with around 15,000 Ukrainian research institutions. Using the 2014 Russian invasion as a quasi-natural experiment, we apply a difference-in-differences estimator on a sample of half a million journal articles collected from Scopus. Researchers affiliated with institutions located in the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk and the whole of Crimea form our treatment group, and those affiliated with institutions in the unoccupied regions of Ukraine, our control group. We document a significant decline in quantity and quality of research, measured by the average number of papers/citations, produced by authors based in the Donetsk/Luhansk occupied regions with active hostilities. By contrast, we observe a rise in the quantity of papers published by authors based in annexed Crimea. Yet, this pattern, which can be explained by increased funding by Russian authorities towards institutions located in Crimea, is driven by articles published in Russian journals and by scientists with relatively low productivity. Our results are robust when using different control groups and estimation methods, including causal machine learning tools, and when controlling for publication lags.
The emergence of democratic constitutions: comparing the modern world to ancient Greece
Robert K. Fleck, F. Andrew Hanssen
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Democracy has flourished twice in human history: first in ancient Greece and then, more than two millennia later, in the modern world. Although the historical record regarding most Greek poleis (city-states) is scant, there nevertheless exists sufficient information to categorize the constitutions of nearly 200 of the more than 1000 poleis that once existed. Using similar data from the modern world, we compare two centuries of ancient data to two centuries of modern data. In both eras, democracy grew in prevalence because, over many decades, transitions to democracy were sufficiently frequent to offset “backsliding” away from democracy. Thus, democracy eventually became the most common form of constitution in both ancient Greece and the modern world. Democracy appears to have expanded more rapidly among Greek poleis than among modern countries; however, we observe that after reaching 50 percent, the proportion of Greek democracies declined, rose again to half of all states, declined again, and rose to half again. The modern world just recently reached the 50 percent threshold, and whether it follows the Greek pattern remains to be seen.

The Journal of Politics

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