🗣 Communication Paper Picnic 🧺: Political Science

I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period June 10 to June 16, I found 41 new paper(s) in 10 journal(s).

American Political Science Review

The Effects of Religious Messages and Endorsements on Political Attitudes: A Meta-Reanalysis

RADHA SARKAR, ALEXANDER COPPOCK

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The experimental study of the effects of religious messages and endorsements by religious leaders on political attitudes has a relatively short history yet has coalesced around three main claims: religious treatments are especially effective because of their religious character, effects are larger for religious affiliates than nonaffiliates, and effects are larger for high religiosity types than low religiosity types. Here, we meta-reanalyze the experimental record (58 treatment-outcome pairs drawn from 43 studies reported in 26 papers) to probe the generalizability of these claims. Our findings indicate that these three headline claims do not generalize straightforwardly across contexts: effects are large in some cases and close to zero in others, and we find no evidence in favor of the claimed heterogeneities by religious affiliation or religiosity. Based on a census of the estimands in this literature, we offer suggestions for future research that would enhance commensurability and synthesis.

Annual Review of Political Science

Subaltern Mobilization in the Global South

Amit Ahuja

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Democracy offers subaltern groups tools to reduce inequalities by asserting political equality, but these groups must sustain political mobilization to achieve real gains. In the Global South, subaltern groups confront three key obstacles: ( a ) threats of violence and intimidation, ( b ) the challenge of recovering suppressed histories and forging collective identity, and ( c ) severe organizational deficits. Contrary to expectations, democracy and modernity have not eradicated hierarchy, and new forms of domination persist. As backlash against the expansion of subaltern rights develops, we urgently need to study subaltern politics. Contemporary resubordination revives the same obstacles that historically impeded mobilization.

Education as a Political Institution

Agustina S. Paglayan

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Education institutions are fundamentally political. They mold political values, shape inequality, create opportunities for patronage through teaching jobs, and can even be used for political surveillance. Yet most political science research treats education as just another welfare-enhancing public service, leaving key puzzles unresolved, such as why some countries have universal schooling but low skills, and why both autocracies and democracies invest heavily in indoctrination. In this article, I reconceptualize education systems as inherently political institutions with four distinctive features. Then, based on a review of research since the early 2000s, I demonstrate how the study of education—reconceptualized as I propose—yields unique insights into core political phenomena such as state building, nationalism, conflict, and regime politics. Finally, I identify and discuss two central questions for future research: Why do governments choose different combinations of education access and quality? How do education policies shape political outcomes beyond participation, including social order, preferences for redistribution, and democratic stability? The field is ripe for inquiry.

Principles of Political Equality and the Logic of Power

Pablo Beramendi, Timothy Besley, Margaret Levi

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At its core, democracy carries a promise of political equality that rests on rules, norms, and procedures that govern the polity to afford equal consideration and freedom from domination to every member. However, despite being widely cherished, political equality is rarely defined precisely. This article offers a framework for studying political equality that can be used to organize thinking. We begin with an idealized notion of direct democracy, then move to its application in representative democracies. We use the framework to argue that political equality requires three conditions: inclusiveness, anonymity, and representativeness. The framework is also useful in characterizing problems of structural power inequalities that can impede political equality.

Conceptualizing and Measuring Geopolitical Alignments

Erik Voeten

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A vast literature examines how geopolitical alignments influence militarized conflict, trade, investment, aid, and other outcomes in international relations. Yet, considerable ambiguity remains regarding how such alignments are conceptualized and how existing measures correspond to distinct theoretical understandings. This article clarifies the conceptual foundations of geopolitical alignment along two key dimensions. First, some measures capture ideological contestation over the global order, whereas others reflect political disagreement or rivalry over specific issues, such as territorial disputes. Second, some measures conceptualize alignment as agreement (e.g., similarity in UN voting), while others treat it as a relationship (e.g., alliances or arms transfers). These distinctions correspond to alternative understandings of alignment that carry important implications for empirical research. For instance, Saudi Arabia appears to be aligned with China when alignment is defined ideologically, but with the United States when defined by security ties. The article provides guidance on selecting appropriate measures for different conceptualizations and introduces a new indicator based on the ideological profiles of a state's arms suppliers.

Non-Western Visions of International Order

Dylan M.H. Loh, Lucas de Oliveira Paes, Ayşe Zarakol

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The scholarship on the concept of order has been expanding within international relations. The continuous upheaval of world politics first triggered a broad debate on the resilience of the liberal international order (LIO), which then led to scholarship on alternative conceptions of order, especially outside of the West. This review focuses on this body of research on non-Western views of order. It is structured geographically, taking a tour of scholarship from and on East and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and Eurasia. Although each region has its own intellectual traditions, we observe that these views portray the LIO in a less idealized form, exposing its hierarchical and Western-centered nature. However, while pushing for more inclusive and plural arrangements, these critiques have not yet amounted to the articulation of radical alternative ordering projects.

Monument Protection Laws and the Evolving American Monumental Landscape

Melynda Price, Zachary Bray

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Statues of Confederate figures represent only a small portion of the memorial sites under reconsideration in the United States, but much of the political debate about American monuments in recent years has focused on arguments about the motives behind their potential removal, renaming, or modification. Although the contested removal of Confederate statues across the United States has spurred significant public discourse, much work remains to assess the ways in which a changing monumental landscape shapes American political development. This article reviews the evolution of monument controversies, monument protection laws, and relevant scholarship, focusing on the importance of the politics of memory to situate current debates in a long history of political battles over how the American past should be remembered. We discuss the ways in which monument conflicts reflect tensions over American identity and point out some of the most important recurring problems in American monument protection laws.

The Political Economy of the Clean Energy Transition

Alexander F. Gazmararian, Dustin Tingley

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Why are some countries more successful at advancing the clean energy transition than others? Existing research, centered on industrialized democracies, often frames international collective action against domestic distributive explanations. This review synthesizes many previous comparative and international explanations in a credibility framework that clarifies when governments can reduce opposition and create climate coalitions. Applying it to both developed and developing countries reveals how institutions, state capacity, and global constraints jointly shape decarbonization trajectories and suggests a new research agenda for the political economy of climate change.

Causal Inference, Agency, and the Problem of Inherent Endogeneity

Martin J. Williams

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Researchers often leverage exogenous variation in an independent variable in order to understand its effects, yet endogenous decision processes are central to many of the real-world phenomena we wish to understand. This review explores whether there are situations in which exogenous and endogenous variation in the same independent variable (e.g., a policy, treatment, or other action) may lead to different outcomes. I begin by laying out a conceptual framework for understanding these inherently endogenous causal processes, identifying three types of mechanisms through which they might arise and discussing their application to a range of empirical phenomena, such as institutional reform, community natural resource governance, and interstate conflict. I then suggest that learning about inherently endogenous causal processes requires researchers to place endogenous decision-making at the center of analysis rather than seeking to abstract away from it. I survey a range of methods (both positivist and nonpositivist) for doing so.

Contesting LGBTQI Inclusion: Expansion, Contraction, and New Dilemmas

Phillip M. Ayoub, Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte

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LGBTQI politics has become a vibrant field of inquiry, illuminating how struggles over sexual and gender diversity shape core debates in comparative politics and international relations. This review synthesizes scholarship on the causes, consequences, and contestation of LGBTQI rights, tracing the path from grassroots mobilization to institutional uptake. We thus reflect on the question of why LGBTQI rights expand and contract, while highlighting the unprecedented speed of rights expansion alongside persistent and growing coordinated opposition. The review underscores that queer agency has been central to these transformations in ways that inform our core theories in political science. It argues for integrating LGBTQI politics into mainstream theory building as a key site for understanding democratic resilience and the contested evolution of human rights.

Ethnography and Ethnographic Sensibility in Political Science

Diana Fu, Richard A. Nielsen, Edward Schatz

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In an era when artificial intelligence and chatbots make it enticing to interface with an entirely digital field site, immersive ethnographic practices and an ethnographic sensibility remain indispensable. Honing an ethnographic sensibility increases the fidelity of our theories to the real world; improves researchers’ sensitivity to the ethical, emotional, and moral stakes of research; and sparks creativity. As more researchers in political science adopt an ethnographic sensibility, they are increasingly engaging in ethnography-plus research, which may include other qualitative or quantitative methods. To assess the promise of these approaches, we consider new directions in digital research methods, especially for difficult-to-access settings in authoritarian regimes that involve navigating the thorny ethics of state surveillance. Digital research with an ethnographic sensibility could benefit from an ontological and epistemological examination of what ethnography can and cannot deliver. The emerging generation of researchers looking to develop an ethnographic sensibility should practice participant observation, embrace reflexivity, and attune to the body and sensations.

Did Globalization Undermine Governance and Spur a Backlash?

Judith L. Goldstein, Edward D. Mansfield

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A substantial literature on the decline in support for liberal trade policies and globalization has emerged. Most of these accounts, however, do not adequately address the puzzling issue of why it took so long for governments to respond to rising discontent stemming from trade globalization's economic effects. The literature we review suggests that government actions during this era were shaped by neoliberal principles that established powerful ideological and institutional constraints. To promote trade and growth, political leaders and policymakers were committed to reducing government's footprint in the economy. That commitment inhibited both their interest in and ability to respond to globalization's impact, fostering an environment ripe for antiglobalist political entrepreneurs. We argue that the neoliberal cast of the contemporary era of trade globalization, together with the associated rules-based multilateral regime that restricted member states’ flexibility, may have sown the seeds of the backlash against it.

Fictive Politics

Reo Matsuzaki, Fabian Drixler, Anna Grzymala-Busse

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No systematic framework exists to analyze the different forms of fictions in politics. We develop the concept of fictive politics to illuminate how actors simulate selective, alternative, or entirely fictional representations of reality while dissimulating incompatible facts. We distinguish three ideal types: deceptions, where audiences are unaware that they are facing a fiction; veiled facts, where audiences suspect a fiction but choose not to probe it; and open fictions, where audiences are fully aware that they are witnessing a fiction. We show that fictions answer critical political needs, including maintaining systems of domination, managing conflicts between competing interests and values, and facilitating cooperation between state and society.

Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics

Peace A. Medie, Soledad Artiz Prillaman

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The study of nonelite women's political participation has received renewed focus, especially in the Global South. A focus on nonelite women reveals distinct models and understandings of the gendered constraints to political participation and power. Yet a lack of clarity in the conceptualization of nonelite women and their distinctions from elite women inhibits our understanding of the causes and consequences of women's political inclusion and its subsequent implications for democratic accountability and resilience. This article provides a conceptual framework for understanding nonelite women, their distinct political preferences from elite women, and their available political strategies. We review the literature on the constraints to nonelite women's political participation, highlighting the roles of resources, political institutions, and patriarchal social norms. We conclude by theorizing how patriarchal norms and their global variants shape the political behavior and strategies of nonelite women and their implications for the sustenance of political gender gaps.

Democratic Duties

Julia Maskivker

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This article reviews some of the most influential accounts of our democratic duties. It organizes the debate into three normative reasons that ground said duties: reasons of justice, reasons of citizen equality, and reasons of civic virtue. Although this division is somewhat forced—since duties can be justified on several considerations at the same time—it helps us organize the extremely scattered debates in the literature. Finally, the article concentrates more specifically on a number of duties as emblematic of the conversation, including the duty to vote, jury duty, and others.

Conceptualizing Academic Freedom

Jacob T. Levy

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Academic freedom is an unusual and complex set of norms and practices. It arises out of the combination of the corporate self-governance of medieval universities and the spirit of disciplinary scientific inquiry in modern research universities. It combines a principle of antiorthodoxy as to conclusions with the robust associational self-governance of scholarly communities whose members evaluate one another as participants in that shared enterprise. It has never been easily or wholly embraced by wider societies; today it is under wholesale attack. This article combines conceptual, normative, and historical analyses of academic freedom as a general norm with attention to conflicts over it in the mid-to-late 2010s and early 2020s. Some genuinely hard cases and questions tested the meaning of academic freedom and university values well before the current crisis.

Relational Egalitarianism

James Lindley Wilson

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Relational egalitarianism refers to an approach to interpreting the meaning and value of equality. This approach emphasizes the egalitarian quality of social relations and deemphasizes the equal distribution of goods. This article provides a short history of relational egalitarianism. I then survey relational egalitarian criticisms of distributively focused egalitarian principles, arguing that theorists are converging on the view that both relational and distributive concerns have independent significance. I discuss attempts to identify what relational equality involves and why it matters. I argue that defenses of relational egalitarianism are more robust than often suggested. I review relational egalitarian approaches to specific political and policy problems, with a special focus on scholarship in democratic theory, given relational egalitarians’ long-standing concerns with inequalities of power and authority. I conclude with reflections on the relevance of relational egalitarianism for political science and political theory.

Austerity and Populism

Evelyne Hübscher, Thomas Sattler

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A large literature explains the rise of populist parties with the economic insecurities stemming from globalization and technological change. But despite the long-standing focus of the comparative and international political economy literature on fiscal policy, these studies largely ignore governments and their economic policies. This article brings policy back into the picture by reviewing the research agenda on the political effects of fiscal policy, and fiscal austerity in particular. This research finds that governments, especially those with a large electoral margin, can implement austerity and still survive in office. Support for austerity varies with the composition of the austerity package, the public discourse, and the narratives to which voters are exposed. Nonetheless, austerity has important political effects even if governments do not collapse: It increases votes for nonmainstream, often populist, parties among economically vulnerable voters because austerity magnifies rather than alleviates the social risks of these voters.

Information Processing in Participatory Institutions

Daniel Berliner

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Participatory institutions often aim to yield information useful to policymakers, whether about public preferences, problems, or solutions. But how can large numbers of public contributions be processed into interpretable and actionable information outputs? As theorists and practitioners increasingly call for participatory institutions to operate at larger scales, often enabled by new technologies, this challenge only becomes more important. This article reviews recent work on participatory institutions in order to develop several insights: ( a ) that there are different types of information that policymakers may aim to learn and that are relevant to different policy stages; ( b ) that information must be effectively processed in order to be interpretable and actionable for policymakers; ( c ) that there are different types of information processing, depending on the specificity and novelty of the information outputs that policymakers aim to learn; and ( d ) that there are different ways in which this processing can be delegated, whether to experts, ordinary people, or automated algorithms. Better recognizing these differences will help both researchers and practitioners better understand the potential and the limitations of participatory institutions in different settings and with different goals.

Bureaucratic Influence in International Politics

Richard Clark, Lindsay R. Dolan, Tyler Jost

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Over the past decade, a new wave of research has restored interest in the central and complex role of bureaucracy in international politics. We introduce the concept of bureaucratic influence to unify theories modeling how bureaucrats—ranging from foreign policy advisers to international organization staff—shape behaviors ranging from international conflict to global governance. We identify two dimensions that structure the pathways through which bureaucrats exert such influence: the degree of centralization in the decision-making process and the selection criteria political leaders apply. We synthesize the resurgent literature along these dimensions, illustrating how emerging findings challenge several conventional wisdoms about the scope and nature of bureaucratic influence. Finally, we take stock of the empirical accomplishments of recent scholarship, highlighting the rich micro-level data it has introduced while noting the bureaucratic populations that remain understudied. Our review illuminates how bureaucratic actors embedded in states and international organizations shape consequential events in international politics.

The Politics of Inflation

Lucy Barnes

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Inflation returned to the foreground of political economies worldwide after 2019, after 30 years of relative quiescence. Inflation remains unpopular—including among those who are hurt by the policies currently used to reduce it—and damaging for established regimes and incumbent governments. But whether the explanations and tools developed to contain price increases after the 1970s are appropriate for twenty-first century inflation is less clear. Credibly independent conservative monetary policy, export-oriented production, and wage coordination helped limit demand-driven and wage-push inflation in the past, but global supply shocks and structures and sellers’ inflation may be more important drivers of contemporary inflation. These are yet to be systematically examined in political science, and their political consequences and policy solutions look quite different.

Democracy and the Environment

Kathryn Baragwanath, Saad Gulzar

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We survey research on the relationship between democracy and the environment. The first part of our review examines how democratic systems influence environmental outcomes. Scholars have found, at best, a weakly positive correlation between democracy and environment, with little support for the proposed democratic environmental Kuznets curve, a finding we confirm with new data. We argue that democracy is too coarse a category to capture variation in environmental outcomes. Therefore, the second part of the review surveys how specific institutional features structure principal–agent relationships between citizens, leaders, and organized groups. We show that effective environmental governance depends on institutions that align incentives, reduce informational asymmetries, and match temporal horizons. These can arise in democracies but can also, under certain conditions, appear in autocratic contexts such as China, where state capacity and political incentives have aligned to produce targeted improvements. We conclude by identifying key open questions and promising directions for future research.

The Power-Enhancing and Power-Diminishing Effects of Digital Technologies: Marginalized People and US Racial Authoritarianism

LaGina Gause, Angie Bautista-Chavez

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The United States continues to evade scrutiny as a place that actively represses, expels, and rules over subsets of its population. This oversight has foreclosed investigation into the empirical relationship between digital technologies, civic engagement, and political control in the United States. For example, how are digital technologies used as a resource for the individual and collective power of marginalized people? How are digital technologies deployed to suppress or disorganize the individual and collective power of marginalized people? To integrate existing work and generate new lines of inquiry, we offer an analytical framework that centers the experiences of marginalized groups, interrogates the United States as a racial authoritarian democratic regime, and examines how institutions and actors leverage digital technologies in a complex political landscape. We argue that digital technologies can have both enhancing and destructive effects on the civic engagement and collective power of marginalized groups in the United States.

Participatory Democracy and Its Limits

Kevin J. Elliott

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This review surveys the limits of participatory democracy and reconsiders its merits, with particular emphasis on the limited attention of citizens. I trace the development of participatory democracy within political science and democratic theory and suggest that participation has fallen out of its previously central role as a criterion of democratic quality. What remains is a set of functions and pitfalls, which I explore in a series of inquiries into participation: ( a ) in lottocracy and electoral democracy, ( b ) in its relationship to representation, and ( c ) in local land use planning. I conclude with thoughts for future research informed by the discussion.

It Took a Village

Kathleen Thelen

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In my work I have tried to understand how political and political-economic institutions reflect and reinforce power asymmetries and how, therefore, the institutional context in which politics is played out shapes the outcomes that emerge. Over the course of my career, I moved away from the analysis of comparative statics (why different institutions produce different outcomes) to study the way in which institutions themselves evolve and change over time. While my early work centered on the political economy of the rich democracies in Europe, my focus has shifted and now centers on the study of the American political economy in comparative perspective, with an emphasis on corporate power and the role of the courts in the political economy.

The Politics of Climate Change in the Developing World

Guy Grossman, Audrey Sacks, Alice Z. Xu

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Climate change politics in the developing world remains understudied, despite the region's acute vulnerability and centrality to climate futures. This article synthesizes emerging research across three domains: public opinion and climate salience, the political effects of climate exposure, and the institutional production of climate risk. We highlight a central paradox: Widespread public concern often exists alongside low climate literacy, suggesting that political salience stems from lived experience with environmental degradation rather than scientific attribution. Yet the literatures on climate and environmental politics have developed along separate tracks, limiting conceptual integration and obscuring how local environmental decline manifests as climate risk. Turning upstream, we examine how institutions shape climate exposure itself. Climate vulnerability, we argue, is not merely inherited but also politically produced and unequally distributed through the institutions that govern carbon sinks, build adaptive capacity, and allocate political voice. We identify critical gaps around the distributive politics of adaptation, representation, and institutional sources of climate exposure.

Original Peoples Count: Persistence and Strengthening of Indigenous Communities, Identities, and Nations in Latin America

Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj

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This review examines the persistence and strengthening of Indigenous communities, identities, and nations in Latin America over the past two decades. Indigenous peoples in the region have transitioned from social movements to wielding actual political power, reshaping national politics, governance structures, and development paradigms. We analyze the evolution of scholarly literature beyond earlier biases in country selection and insufficient attention to racial and gender dimensions, highlighting communitarian feminist perspectives that link body, territory, and collective governance. The review addresses fundamental questions of Indigenous identity formation, linguistic revitalization, and the endogeneity of census categorizations. We examine territorial defense against extractivism, digital colonialism, and threats to data sovereignty, while also exploring traditional governance institutions, legal pluralism, and autonomy claims. Indigenous perspectives challenge conventional political science approaches through holistic worldviews that integrate spiritual, social, and environmental dimensions. Critical emerging issues include historical trauma's impact on political behavior, Indigenous health inequalities (particularly in mental health), and urban Indigenous youth participation. We argue that political science can gain much from recognizing Indigenous epistemologies, learning from Indigenous peoples’ experiences in their transformative processes for reimagining governance, collective action, and political engagement.

Electoral Studies

How swing model assumptions shape vote-to-seat predictions

Cornelius Erfort, Thomas Gschwend, Lukas F. Stoetzer, Simon Munzert

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European Journal of Political Research

Mass attitudes towards Russia’s aggression against Ukraine: Tentative support for top-down opinion formation

Filip Kostelka, Martín Alberdi, Max Bradley, Toine Fiselier, Alexandra Jabbour, Nahla Mansour, Eleonora Minaeva, Silvia Porciuleanu, Diana Rafailova

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This paper studies variation in mass attitudes towards the Russo-Ukrainian War. Although most Europeans express dismay at Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, more ambivalent or even pro-Kremlin positions are not rare. Drawing on the literature on foreign policy and war, we hypothesise that support for the aggressor may stem from a quartet of factors: economic interests, ideological preferences, partisan alignment, and disinformation. We examine the role of these factors using two types of survey data. The first is an original survey conducted in five countries (Czechia, France, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia) and spanning over 12,000 respondents. The second is the Solidarity in Europe survey, with more than 24,000 respondents from seventeen countries. The results of three types of analyses reveal that neutral and pro-Kremlin attitudes, held by sizeable segments of European society, are most strongly linked to the positions of respondents’ preferred political parties, followed by disinformation and ideology. Overall, top-down models of public opinion seem to better explain within-country variations in attitudes towards the conflict than bottom-up models. These findings, which should be interpreted with caution, carry important implications for containing Russia’s influence on European public opinion and contribute to the literature on public preference formation in the field of foreign policy.

Political Behavior

Home and Away: Explaining the Paradoxical Political Attitudes of Indian Americans

Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, Milan Vaishnav

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Do individuals hold fixed political attitudes that persist across different contexts, or do their views shift depending on their group’s relative status within each setting? We argue that political preferences are shaped in part by whether one’s group is positioned as a majority or a minority in a given context. Groups that consistently occupy minority positions tend to hold stable, liberal attitudes driven by support for minority rights. In contrast, groups that are majorities in one context but minorities in another are more likely to adopt context-specific views, endorsing liberal positions where they are disadvantaged and more conservative stances where they are dominant. We test this argument using an original, nationally representative survey of Indian Americans, a diaspora population for whom both U.S. and Indian politics are politically salient. We delineate two main findings. First, Indian Americans concurrently support more liberal policies when thinking about the United States and more conservative policies when considering the Indian context. Second, these differences are largely driven by religion: while Muslim Indian Americans – minorities in both contexts – maintain consistently liberal attitudes, Hindu Indian Americans express liberal views in the United States but more conservative stances in India, where Hindu majoritarianism has become entrenched. These findings have important implications for understanding political behavior in the United States, as well as the role of group status and perceptions of majoritarianism in shaping attitudes.

Partisan Social Norms, Racial Attitudes and Civic Discourse

Emily A. West

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Political Geography

Ambient water weaponisation: The permeation of violence in the hydrosphere

Jeremy J. Schmidt, Cameron Harrington

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Political Psychology

The relationship between populism and national identity: A scoping review

Gonçalo Freitas, Mariana P. Miranda, Paulo Nascimento, Constança Conchinhas, Pedro C. Magalhães, Jorge Vala

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There is growing research on the relationship between populism and national identity, but findings remain conceptually and methodologically fragmented. This scoping review synthesizes quantitative evidence from 69 manuscripts (87 studies, 232 associations). Following JBI and PRISMA‐ScR guidance, we charted study characteristics and used thematic content analysis to classify populism as demand‐side (attitudes/beliefs, sentiments/evaluations, endorsement/voting) or supply‐side, and national identity as secure versus defensive forms. Evidence is concentrated in Europe (≈69% of studies) and relies mainly on cross‐sectional designs (≈75%), with fewer experimental (≈16%) and longitudinal studies (≈7%). Across operationalizations, populism shows consistent positive links with defensive national attachments (e.g., nationalism, national narcissism), especially for voting/endorsement and affective evaluations of populist actors. In contrast, associations with secure national identification (e.g., national satisfaction/pride) are mixed, often null or negative, depending on measurement and modeling choices. Overall, the findings provide a comprehensive evidence mapping that can inform future research on populism and identity.

The affective nature of affective polarization: Evidence from physiological and self‐reported responses to US politicians

Kevin Arceneaux, Bert N. Bakker

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What is the nature of affective partisan polarization? We answer this question in a preregistered laboratory study conducted in the United States measuring partisans' affective reactions to static images of US politicians with self‐reports and physiological indicators of valence and arousal. Consistent with prior research, participants reported substantially more negative evaluations of out‐party than in‐party politicians. However, we do not observe reliable physiological differentiation between in‐party and out‐party elites under these conditions. This disconnect between self‐reported negative affect and concurrent physiological responses suggests that, in the context of minimal elite exposure, affective polarization can be expressed without detectable visceral activation. These findings are consistent with constructivist and attitude retrieval accounts and constrain strong versions of the hot cognition thesis, though they do not logically exclude all possible roles for visceral affect under different conditions.

Facts as a foundation: How people respond to historical atrocities in five countries

Oguzhan Turkoglu, Berenike Firestone, Sabina Čehajić‐Clancy, Ruth K. Ditlmann

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Informing people about historical atrocities and injustice is considered critical for sustaining democracies and preventing similar atrocities in the future. Yet, what remains unknown is whether exposure to factual information about ingroups' historical injustices, such as genocide, slavery, or colonial crimes, leads to increased willingness to address those injustices. In the first study to systematically assess the impact of such exposure in five countries (Canada, France, Germany, Spain, United States), using large samples ( n > 1500 per country) and a comprehensive battery of outcomes, we find significant, although limited, impact of exposure to factual information. Pre‐registered analyses across countries revealed that participants in the experimental condition reported increased acknowledgment and increased distancing from the identity, while no direct impact on collective action and denial was observed. Exploratory analyses revealed that across countries exposure led to self‐reported learning, which predicted all measured outcomes, as well as interesting heterogeneity at the country‐level. These findings suggest that factual information is an important first step but that other ingredients are needed to facilitate broader dismantling of past injustice.

Political Science Research and Methods

What electability means to voters and how it affects their decisions

Mayya Komisarchik, Alessio Albarello

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Voters must often resolve dilemmas between choosing their favorite candidate and the one likeliest to win an election. Researchers know surprisingly little about how voters even conceptualize electability, let alone make these decisions. We use two novel survey experiments to evaluate how voters trade off policy agreement and electability in their decisions. The first experiment presents respondents with policy agreement between themselves and candidates and candidates’ electability rankings on the same scale, allowing us to directly compare. We show that while making electability information salient modestly reduces support for candidates with limited prospects, respondents remain primarily policy-motivated. Additionally, we show that respondents actually construe electability as a signal about a candidate’s qualifications rather than as a signal about getting votes.

Public Choice

Downstream centrality and industry lobbying in production networks

Kwok Ping Tsang

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Which industries lobby the most? I study whether an industry’s position in the production network is associated with reported federal lobbying. The argument is that supplying many downstream customers creates two forces. A policy that helps a supplier can raise privately appropriable stakes when downstream benefits are partly capitalized back to the supplier through derived demand, supplier surplus, contracts, or preservation of customer relationships. The same downstream reach also expands the set of beneficiaries that can free-ride. The model therefore predicts a hump-shaped relationship between downstream reach and focal-industry lobbying. Using a panel of 71 U.S. industries from 1999 to 2023, I find a nonmonotone pattern in mapped LDA lobbying expenditures. The pattern appears in every annual cross-section and is stronger on spending among active industries than on lobbying entry. The estimates are descriptive and apply first to mapped spending. Only about one-third of reported spending maps cleanly to industries, and partial-identification bounds show that inference becomes weaker once the unmapped remainder is taken into account.

When the money stops: fiscal and political reactions to changing grant eligibility

Touria Jaaidane, Sophie Larribeau

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