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.

As of February 24, 2022, over forty thousand foreign-invested firms operated in Russia, a host state that initiated an interstate war—an exceptional shock in the modern era of economic globalization. Using company registration data, we document that after 18 months of war, 33.3% of foreign-invested firms had changed ownership or become inactive. We conceptualize exit as a politicized transaction in which sellers and buyers face external pressures and bargain over terms. Concerning pressures to sell, those in consumer-oriented industries were more likely to exit. On bargaining, we find Russian state interests consequential: foreign-invested firms already under Russian managerial control were more likely to exit, whereas those in Russian strategic industries were not. Despite extraordinary economic sanctions to isolate Russia, and surging social backlash against doing business in Russia, results imply that multinationals are at best unstable tools of economic statecraft, even in the midst of war.

This article examines the racial discourse of Zou Rong, a 20th-century Chinese radical intellectual, and the puzzling rendering of transnational racial politics at work in his pamphlet The Revolutionary Army . In this text, Zou employs the imported concept of race to refashion Han Chinese identity within a politically motivated global racial taxonomy. He then problematizes the “double enslavement” of the Han race at the trans-imperial nexus of domestic Manchu domination and global white supremacy. Finally, he urges a multifront revolution in China by discursively vindicating Han Chinese racial uplift within a newly reconfigured system of racial hierarchy. In reconstructing the formation and broader political stakes of Zou’s racial discourse, this article centers the deeply contingent and paradoxical alignment of racism and imperialism and the nuanced power relations between peoples of color. It also exemplifies a transnational approach to comparative political theory that focuses on the circulation and negotiation of ideas.

Coalition research increasingly emphasizes party-level explanations of coalition outcomes. However, this work does not account for the complex multilevel structure between parties and governments: many parties participate in multiple governments and governments often comprise multiple parties. In this paper, I show that this crisscrossing structure creates dependencies among observations both across and within governments. If ignored, these dependencies produce downward-biased uncertainty estimates that cluster-robust standard errors fail to fully correct. To address this issue, I then introduce a model that extends the Multiple Membership Multilevel Model to represent the multilevel structure of coalition government data. The model accounts for party-level dependencies across governments through party-specific effects in each coalition they join, and for dependencies within governments by representing the total party effect on a government as a weighted sum of its members’ contributions. By allowing party weights to vary with covariates describing their interrelationships, the model enables researchers to examine the interdependent nature of coalition outcomes. I validate the model through simulation and an empirical application to coalition government survival, showing that ignoring party-level dependencies can produce misleading conclusions at all levels of analysis. The model is estimated via Bayesian MCMC and implemented in the accompanying R package ‘bml’.

Many inferential tasks involve fitting models to observed data and predicting outcomes at new covariate values, requiring interpolation or extrapolation. Conventional methods select a single best-fitting model, discarding fits that were similarly plausible in-sample but would yield sharply different predictions out-of-sample. Gaussian processes (GPs) offer a principled alternative. Rather than committing to one conditional expectation function, GPs deliver a posterior distribution over outcomes at any covariate value. This posterior effectively retains the range of models consistent with the data, widening uncertainty intervals where extrapolation magnifies divergence. In this way, the GP’s uncertainty estimates reflect the implications of extrapolation on our predictions, helping to tame the “dangers of extreme counterfactuals” (King and Zeng, 2006). The approach requires (i) specifying a covariance function linking outcome similarity to covariate similarity and (ii) assuming Gaussian noise around the conditional expectation. We provide an accessible introduction to GPs with emphasis on this property, along with a simple, automated procedure for hyperparameter selection implemented in the R package gpss . We illustrate the value of GPs for capturing counterfactual uncertainty in three settings: (i) treatment effect estimation with poor overlap, (ii) interrupted time series requiring extrapolation beyond pre-intervention data, and (iii) regression discontinuity designs where estimates hinge on boundary behavior.

While many Americans identify as politically “independent,” conventional wisdom suggests most are covert partisans, especially “leaners.” However, we argue that independents exhibit distinct attitudes toward political parties. Analyzing American National Election Studies open‐ended responses from 1984 to 2020, we employ structural topic models and support vector machines to explore differences in how independents and partisans express “dislikes” about the major parties. Our results show that leaning independents differ significantly from self‐identified partisans in their language and align more closely with pure independents. Furthermore, we find that independents are more likely than partisans to mention issues related to “politics”—such as political cynicism, concern about special interests, or distaste for partisan conflict—when discussing their “dislikes.” These findings suggest that independents have meaningful distinctions from partisans beyond voting behavior, cautioning against overlooking the nuances between these groups.

How—and with whom—do rulers share power? Existing research focuses on the strategic logic of powersharing. In this paper, we analyze its economic foundations. Powersharing is modeled as a subnational fiscal contract, in which rulers allocate political representation based on constituencies’ revenue potential. Empirically, we combine historical geospatial data on different types of primary commodity production—mineral point resources and diffuse smallholder cash crop agriculture—with the ethnic affiliation of cabinet ministers across 15 African countries. We find that cash crop groups are overrepresented in post‐independence cabinets, while mining or food crop production does not translate into higher shares of power. Consistent with a revenue bargaining framework, we find that rulers traded political representation and targeted public services for indirect taxation of cash crops. Overall, this suggests powersharing serves not only as a means to distribute resources and co‐opt potential challengers but also to expand the pie and the rents at the ruler's disposal.

Interest groups intent on spurring political participation often highlight potential threats to galvanize audiences into action. However, while loss aversion is typically seen as a strong motivator, it is important not to neglect the motivational effect of hope and reward‐seeking behavior as people navigate their political landscape. By drawing on a renewed focus on the simultaneous role of positive and negative emotions when processing risk appraisals, this paper reassesses the most effective ways to frame threat messages surrounding immigration activism. I test the major claims of this model with two original online survey experiments of Latino adults in the United States ( n = 1,001; n = 1,266), including a vignette and emotion‐induction design. The results demonstrate that a mobilizing message combining elements of both threat (loss) and opportunity (gain)—primed by negative and positive emotions—is a significant catalyst of various forms of collective action, including informal and formal forms of political participation.

Researchers are often interested in the long‐run relationship (LRR) between variables where the dependent variable has dynamic properties. Though determining the long‐run multiplier (LRM) for an independent variable is straightforward, correctly estimating the significance of the LRM is often difficult, especially when time series are short and tests for series’ stationarity are uncertain. We propose a Bayesian framework for estimating the LRM by using a bounded prior on the lagged dependent variable to constrain estimates for dynamic processes to the plausible range of values arising from either stationary or integrated series, and then taking draws of the posterior distribution to summarize the credible region. Doing so provides direct estimates of the LRM and its uncertainty, even for short time series. We highlight the advantages of this approach via Monte Carlo experiments and replicate several studies to show that our method clarifies LRRs that were inconclusive using existing techniques.

Electoral authoritarianism is receiving increasing attention from political scientists, yet it has been mostly ignored by political philosophers. This paper aims to fill some of this gap by considering whether it is morally permissibly for democrats to participate in autocratic elections as candidates or voters. Autocratic elections allow meaningful multiparty competition but are systematically unfair and partly unfree, and therefore, arguably, normatively illegitimate. The paper considers three objections to participation in autocratic elections. These objections hold, respectively, that participation has bad consequences for democratization, that it is normatively futile, and that it is morally wrong in itself. The paper argues that the objections are not decisive, and that participation is usually morally permissible and even preferable over alternative forms of challenge. However, the objections establish that the normative superiority of electoral challenge over the alternatives is only a matter of degree, and that participants often dirty their hands.

Will voters participate in the primary of a party they oppose to prevent the nomination of a candidate they fear? Partnering with a political action committee, we conduct a first‐of‐its‐kind, large, preregistered field experiment ( N = 83,902) in the lead‐up to the 2024 Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire. A specialized get‐out‐the‐vote intervention increases turnout in the Republican primary among undeclared voters who are modeled as likely to vote for Democratic candidates in the general election. Our treatment increased Republican primary turnout in this sample by 1.6 percentage points while reducing turnout in the Democratic Primary by .5 percentage points. Supplementing our experiment with surveys before and after the primary, we estimate that each vote cast by Democratic‐leaning voters in the Republican primary had between a 78% and 95% probability of supporting the relatively moderate Republican primary candidate. We argue that voters are capable of sophisticated, risk‐mitigating behavior in primaries.

We compare multicandidate elections under plurality rule versus ranked choice voting (RCV). We examine a widely held presumption that RCV more effectively incentivizes candidates to pursue broad campaigns that can appeal to all voters, rather than targeting a narrow segment of the electorate. That presumption is correct when preference transfers are competitive, that is, when multiple candidates have a reasonable chance of securing voters' second‐choice support. However, when transfers are uncompetitive due to partisan, ethnic, or cultural alignments, that presumption is reversed: RCV can strengthen candidates' incentives to pursue targeted campaigns.

Elections can lead to substantial policy changes and, thus, are a significant source of risk. Firms can respond to such policy uncertainty by lobbying, but it is hard to quantify whether they do so and, if so, how much lobbying benefits them. We construct a new dataset and leverage investors’ expectations of variability in stock returns in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election to generate a new firm‐level measure of exposure to policy uncertainty. We show that lobbying reduces policy uncertainty, and that this result holds even after controlling for selection into lobbying and sectoral heterogeneity. We then develop and quantify a model of heterogeneous firms with endogenous lobbying. We find that affecting policy through lobbying is costly and the returns from it are highly skewed and rapidly diminishing. Thus, while lobbying expenditures reduce the impact of policy risk, few firms anticipate sufficient gains to invest in it.

Communism has proven to be a profoundly but not perfectly homogenizing force across a highly heterogeneous set of countries. This article offers a minimalist definition of communist regimes as those where a party-state claims a tripartite monopoly over politics, the economy, and society. After tracing the conceptual history of communism in comparative politics and reviewing the global trajectories of communist regimes throughout their Cold War heyday, we argue that variation in how the three monopolies have been executed and enforced offers the most helpful lens for studying how communist regimes have differed both from their non-communist counterparts and from each other. In their historical trajectories, communist regimes have varied based on: (1) incomplete convergence in regime origins, (2) increasing divergence in regime evolutions, and (3) chronic informality in regime practices. Understanding how the communist world has varied is inextricably tied to understanding when it has varied.

In regions with frozen conflicts, where group divisions span not only geographical but also linguistic lines, how does the high cost of accessing the outgroup affect interethnic relations, and how can it be reduced? While online platforms offer a unique opportunity for unmediated cross-group interaction, this potential remains unrealized in linguistically divided contexts. To assess the impact of barriers to outgroup access online, I assigned Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking Cypriots to seek out outgroup content of personal interest over two weeks, aided by translation tools. The experiment showed, on average, significantly improved attitudes and behavioral intentions toward ethnic outgroups. By complementing the experimental data with interviews and analysis of online interactions, I theorize about the mechanisms driving the benefits of online outgroup immersion for individuals with limited offline outgroup exposure and examine how language barriers further constrain potential for online intergroup contact in deeply divided societies.

This article introduces the concept of visibility in infrastructure politics and public projects. I introduce what “visibility projects” are—distorted public projects aimed at increasing government officials’ visibility in politics and career prospects. These projects are highly costly and often compromise business interests because political visibility does not often translate into business profits. Using China’s urban bus sector as a case, I further show that when a sector is chosen for visibility projects, government officials can seek financial contributions and operational changes from businesses in the sector, creating an uneven playing field between private companies and state-owned enterprises. Private companies, facing hard budget constraints, are more likely to resist visibility projects than state-owned firms, which can ultimately lead to de-privatization of a sector. I show these dynamics with a quantitative analysis based on an original dataset, a process-tracing case study, and in-depth interviews.

How do authoritarian regimes make propaganda persuasive? This study evaluates the impact of foreign influencers in propaganda. Social media videos and state broadcasts from countries such as Russia and China often feature sympathetic Westerners, yet their effects on audiences remain unclear. We conducted two survey experiments with 4800 respondents in China and the United States. Participants viewed soft propaganda videos in which either an American or a Chinese influencer described their feelings of freedom in China. The results reveal that foreign influencers did not persuade Chinese audiences but Americans evaluated pro-China messages more favorably when delivered by a fellow American. This suggests foreign influencers improve perceptions of authoritarian rule among their co-nationals, but not within such regimes. Our findings show how autocracies can build global support through foreign influencers, which, given heightened geopolitical competition and the emergence of social media as a dominant news source, has implications for democratic resilience.

As the number of immigrants into middle-income countries continues to rise, so do concerns about host nations’ increasing anti-immigration responses. Existing studies in high-income countries present promising pathways to promote immigrant inclusion. In particular, exposing host-nation members to immigrant personal narratives increases positive feelings towards immigrants and support for inclusionary policies. We assess whether, in a middle-income country where immigration’s economic impact is salient to host-nation members, immigrant narratives need to address this impact so that they can influence attitudes. Meta-analysis estimates from three survey experiments in Colombia conducted between 2021 and 2023 suggest that narrative-based interventions need not engage with economic concerns to promote positive affect towards immigrants, but when they address economic concerns they can also increase support for open immigration policies. Given that these narratives also reduce economic concerns, we find that the conditions for inclusionary interventions to be most effective are nuanced in middle-income migrant destinations.

Electoral integrity has come under increasing pressure in the United States. Evidence shows that voters rarely ‘punish’ anti-democratic behavior if doing so implies voting for opponents. However, such electoral defection sets a high bar for detecting voter alienation. Here, I complement the analysis of partisans’ willingness to forego democracy’s rules with a more pliable measure of support: partisan attachments. Three preregistered survey experiments offer a nuanced picture of partisans’ tolerance for electoral subversion. On the one hand, few partisans will defend democracy by voting against their party. On the other hand, electoral violations alienate the party base and can even reduce animosity towards the opposing party, indicating that parties cannot undermine elections with impunity. Finally, the evidence suggests that partisans mainly update partisan attachments when the information is sponsored by a co-partisan source, indicating that credible linkage institutions may play a crucial role in shaping accountability.

The use of AI by government agencies in guiding important decisions (for example, on policing, welfare, education) has triggered backlash and demands for greater public input in AI regulation. Yet it remains unclear what such input would reflect: general attitudes towards new technologies, personal experience with AI, or learning about its implications. We study this question experimentally by tracking the attitudes of over 1,500 workers whose task assignments were randomly determined by either a human or an AI ‘boss’, with task content and valence also randomized. Across a three-wave panel, we find that personal experience with AI-as-boss affected workers’ job performance but not their attitudes on using AI in public decision making. In contrast, exposure to information about the technology produced significant attitudinal change, even when it conflicted with participants’ prior disposition or direct experience. The results highlight the promise of incorporating public input into AI governance.

For individuals fleeing oppressive regimes, the support from migrant communities often serves as a lifeline. Although prior research has mostly focused on how host societies respond to migration, this study shifts the lens to examine how migrants themselves decide whom to support in contexts of authoritarian repression and war. Drawing on an original survey of 2,036 Russian emigrants residing in more than 60 countries, which features a conjoint experiment, as well as 60 in-depth interviews, we investigate the criteria underlying migrant-to-migrant assistance. Russian migrants prefer to assist those emigrants who are fleeing because of political persecution or their dissenting political views, rather than those leaving for economic reasons. We suggest that this preference reflects not only political solidarity with antiwar emigrants but also a strategic effort to reshape the image of the Russian diaspora in response to nationality-based discrimination. In addition, contrary to the literature, migrants, driven by perceptions of vulnerability and a sense of guilt over Russia’s wartime actions, offer more support to members of ethnic minorities than to ethnic Russians.

This study contributes to the growing literature on white identity in American politics by examining how dominant in-group identification varies among individuals and how expressions of white identity respond to shifts in social and political context that disrupt the racial order. Drawing on three rounds of in-depth interviews with white residents of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota from 2020 to 2023, I identify three ideal types of white identifiers: Type I (low awareness), Type II (disadvantaged awareness), and Type III (advantaged awareness). The findings suggest that the 2020 uprising constituted an epistemic disruption that heightened the salience of whiteness, prompting varied responses ranging from grievance to solidarity. While some participants reverted to prior identity expressions as the disruption faded, others maintained increased awareness and engagement. This study highlights the contextual nature of white identity and underscores the limitations of survey-based approaches in capturing its complexity. It offers a typology and framework for understanding how white Americans navigate racial identity amid sociopolitical change.

Educational attainment is related to more political trust. In this study, we adopt a global perspective, arguing that this ‘education effect’ is conditional on the development of ‘schooled societies’. In such societies, schooling as a central institution installs educational attainment as a main source of social status, granting the higher educated a dominant position in the political field. Consequently, higher educated citizens have high levels of political trust, while the less educated are distrusting. In less schooled societies, however, the ‘education effect’ is more ambiguous, as the social status of the higher educated is less guaranteed and depends on their relationship to the state. Consequently, there may be a large gap in political trust between those who are publicly employed and those who are not. We, therefore, examined the relationship among educational attainment, a schooled society, sector of employment, and political trust. We combined the Schooled Society Index with data from the World Values Survey and European Values Study. Multilevel analyses across 84 countries ( N individual = 102,102) revealed that the positive relationship between educational attainment and political trust was conditional on the development of ‘schooled’ society. Furthermore, in less strongly schooled societies, there was an important gap in political trust among the higher educated, depending on whether or not they were publicly employed. Such patterns cannot be explained by educational differences in political knowledge or cognitive sophistication. In contrast, our results imply that the ‘educational effect’ on political trust is strongly dependent on the social status of education-based groups.

This article examines what motivates elected representatives to engage with citizens in organised settings, specifically investigating the role of anticipatory representation – aligning policies with future voter preferences. Using representation theory, the study involves in-depth interviews with representatives in three Norwegian municipalities, focusing on their perception of public meetings as avenues for listening, convincing, and deliberating. The findings suggest that anticipatory representation minimally influences politicians’ attendance at these meetings. Instead, they view public meetings primarily as opportunities to listen to citizens rather than as platforms for persuasion or policy deliberation. Despite often disliking the confrontational aspects of these meetings, politicians attend to demonstrate presence and show interest in their constituents. Thus, the main motivation for their participation is the chance to exhibit responsiveness, rather than engaging in argumentative or deliberative exchanges. This research sheds light on the dynamics of politician–citizen interactions in democratic settings.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help voters make informed choices by aligning their policy preferences with party positions. This study examines whether VAA exposure enhances young citizens’ ideological knowledge – understanding political dimensions and party positions. A randomized experiment ( n = 2308) in Belgium (Flanders) tested whether VAA exposure improved young voters’ ability to place a fictional party on the left-right axis. We replicate these effects in an additional observational study ( n = 1221) tracking effects of natural VAA exposure during the campaign. We find that VAAs increase ideological knowledge, helping participants more accurately classify a fictional party as left- or right-wing. Exposure to a youth-targeted VAA has particularly strong effects. The impact is greater for politically less sophisticated individuals, suggesting an equalizing effect. These findings indicate that VAAs’ political learning benefits extend further than previously documented, contributing not only to policy-specific knowledge but also to a broader understanding of ideological structures.

Conspiracy theories are widely viewed as harmful to politics, and a growing number of studies have sought to identify their detrimental effects. Our study adds to this literature by examining whether brief, realistic exposure to conspiracy theories about a major political event can undermine individuals’ commitment to a broad set of democratic norms. We rely on two online survey experiments conducted in Brazil with a total of 8 thousand respondents. Participants assigned to the treatment conditions were exposed to conspiracy theories surrounding the stabbing of then–presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro during a campaign event; control group participants viewed either the official account of the event or unrelated content. Subsequently, participants answered questions about democratic norms, institutional trust, and political hostility. We find some evidence that exposure to conspiracy theories reduces support for democracy, particularly in the electoral dimension. Surprisingly, non-partisans are more affected than partisans. Results also indicate that exposure to conspiracy theories reduces institutional trust but does not affect political hostility. However, the effects of conspiracy theories are not consistent across narratives, emerging more clearly in the one that blames the right for the event. These findings underscore the nuanced and specific nature of the influence of conspiracy theories on democratic values, which can help calibrate our concerns about these narratives.

Although state prosecutors play a critically important role in the U.S. criminal justice system, these elections have received limited scholarly attention. Prosecutor elections historically have been dominated by men but have seen growing numbers of women candidates. Using data from elections between 2012 and 2020 in the 200 most populous prosecutorial districts, we assess the likelihood of a woman candidate running for the office and her chances of winning the election. We find women run more often in districts with greater racial diversity and in either nonpartisan or open seat races, where they face fewer political barriers. With respect to success, women incumbents and those aligned with the successful presidential candidate in the district are more likely to win. Nonpartisan elections and open seat contests also favor women candidates. Our analysis sheds light on the evolving role of gender in local elections and its implications for the American political landscape.

Interest in using nonprobability online samples continues to grow despite concerns about selection bias. Many methods exist for adjusting nonprobability data so it may yield generalizable inferences. Here we investigate whether a propensity score weighting method can balance differences between a probability sample and a nonprobability sample of Twitter (now X) users to evaluate the feasibility of using social media data for producing generalizable inferences on public opinion. We fielded identical surveys to 2,001 probability-sampled respondents (June 30–July 22, 2022) and 949 Twitter users (March 1–July 13, 2022); final analytic sample sizes were 1,972 and 822, respectively. The nonprobability sample differed significantly in demographic characteristics (younger, lower income, higher educational attainment), and broadly endorsed significantly more liberal attitudes toward a range of political and policy issues than the probability sample. We show that the propensity score weighting procedure, using demographics, techno/psychographics, and political ideology, reconciles differences between the samples for 25 of the 27 attitudes assessed. The results demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the propensity score weighting procedure to replicate a probability sample with nonprobability social media data and add to the literature on the use of nonprobability samples to draw population-level inferences.

Recent events have driven a surge in scholarly attention to public support for political violence in the United States. Yet, research paints a conflicting picture about the levels and correlates of support for violence. We argue that these disagreements are partly due to researchers’ measurement choices. After reviewing common practices and identifying measurement challenges, we introduce a measure designed to overcome these problems that allows respondents to choose their target of aggression. Across multiple studies, we compare our measure to two common alternatives. While we find similarities, our measure uncovers substantially more support for aggression and violence, particularly among weak partisans, holding implications for the levels and correlates of support for aggression. Further, by design, our measure provides information about the type of aggression that is endorsed and the most common targets. We conclude with recommendations for researchers studying support for political aggression.

While historically, the aim of propaganda was to convince the public of a certain agenda, many political commentators contend that modern forms of disinformation come with a different goal in mind: To confuse, rather than convince. It is believed that to secure this goal, informational spaces are diluted, rather than dominated, a strategy termed “zone‐flooding.” The present research provides a unified psychological account of confusion that draws on methods from Signal Detection Theory and metacognition, to examine the public's object‐level ability to discern truth from falsehood and accurate metacognitive insight into that distinction. In two preregistered studies, including one Registered Report, we presented quota‐matched samples (Study 1, Germany: n = 1488; Study 2, USA: n = 1891) with true‐only, false‐only (“classical propaganda”) or noisy (“zone‐flooding”) information about climate change in the form of tweets. Across both studies, across various operationalizations of zone‐flooding (e.g., targeting the political left vs. right; different numbers of tweets), and against various baselines (politically equated vs. ecologically valid tweets), we find no empirical evidence for the notion that zone‐flooding causes confusion in this initial test. The present work lays the theoretical basis for a psychology of zone‐flooding and public confusion within one coherent theoretical and methodological framework.

This paper defends a provocative thesis: namely, that the present structure and composition of the academy undermine democratic legitimacy. Political philosophers have often stressed that universal suffrage by itself is not sufficient for such legitimacy. In these critiques, they have focused on the disproportionate power of the wealthy to shape politics and public discourse. I argue here that there is a deeper and relatively unnoticed problem in this vein: the university system exerts enormous power in shaping the perspectives of the public through a variety of means. Yet, the academy is democratically unaccountable for all practical purposes. Moreover, as has been documented in a range of empirical work, it is politically homogeneous. As a result, I argue, this asymmetric power undermines the legitimacy of the political system, viewed as a whole. This can be seen from within three influential accounts of democratic legitimacy: republicanism, public reason liberalism, and consent theories. The paper concludes by exploring some potential remedies in the service of moving towards democratic legitimacy.

Liberal political morality prizes the freedom to enter and exit intimate associations, and romantic relationships are often treated as paradigmatic sites of this freedom. Yet when romantic partners are also coparents, exit can deprive children of established caregiving structures on which their welfare, security, and developing autonomy depend. This paper argues that children hold positive associational rights to the continuity of such structures once they have been conferred. These rights generate defeasible relational obligations for coparents to sustain a joint caregiving partnership, even at significant personal cost. Crucially, the obligations defended here are not grounded in biological parenthood or in mere interests in an intact family from the outset. They arise only in cases of deprivation, where a child's life has already been organized around a shared caregiving framework, and not in cases of mere absence. By distinguishing relational obligations from other parental duties, the paper develops a liberal yet child‐centered account of romantic exit, according to which children's claims to continuity can justifiably constrain adults' freedom to disassociate.

How do voters respond to a political scandal? Previous studies emphasize partisan motivated reasoning as a key factor in shaping responses to political scandals but offer mixed evidence. I argue that partisans are less likely to engage in motivated reasoning when two conditions are met: (1) clear evidence of severe misconduct and (2) clear responsibility attribution to an involved party. By analyzing an unexpected video release of the Partygate scandal in Britain during which a nationally representative survey was fielded, I find that even copartisans and independents show a decline in evaluation of government performance in handling COVID-19, feel less favorable toward the involved governing party, and report reduced intentions to vote for the party. In contrast, I find little evidence that supporters of the opposing party show a decline in these evaluations, likely due to prior negative expectations and floor effects. The findings highlight the limitations of partisan motivated reasoning among copartisans and voters’ intention to punish the involved party in the face of unambiguous evidence of government misconduct.

This paper examines white Americans’ attitudes toward redistribution in the United States. Prior research has identified key predictors of redistribution attitudes, including political ideology, racial prejudice, or resentment. In addition to these factors, a growing body of work highlights the role of perceived status threat. Our study builds on the status threat literature by investigating the impact of racialized loser perceptions on opinions towards redistribution. We rely on evidence from an original survey experiment conducted in the United States in 2019. Specifically, we find that whites who perceive themselves to be on the losing side of politics are more likely to oppose government involvement in redistribution, but only when the comparison to non-whites is made explicit. The effects of racialized loser perceptions are robust to controls for previously identified predictors such as ideology, racial attitudes, and party affiliation. We discuss the implications of our results for the rise of support for right-wing populist movements that champion white protectionism. Our paper contributes to past research by testing the effect of cross-racial comparisons on changes in support for redistribution and demonstrates that even subtle changes in the way the comparison is framed can boost white Americans’ anti-egalitarian positions on redistribution.

Personalism is a pervasive phenomenon in Latin American politics. This article examines the rise of Javier Milei in Argentina as a particular variety of electoral personalism in a country that has undergone a profound economic and social crisis. We argue that Milei combined self-promotion appeals (similar to recent cases like Nayib Bukele in El Salvador) with context-specific appeals (such as salient ideological rhetoric and moral content) to blame the crisis situation in Argentina on the Argentine political class, pejoratively depicted as the casta . To support our theoretical argument, we provide empirical evidence based on qualitative and quantitative text analyses of Milei’s public appearances and social media posts to identify the salience of each particular appeal in his presidential campaign. Finally, we use public opinion data to illustrate how Milei’s electoral discourse appealed to the Argentinean voter, which ultimately accounts for his electoral success.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for global diffusion. However, its ability to endure over time and become fully institutionalized remains more limited. This study addresses one of the most frequently cited explanations for PB’s instability: changes in the ruling party. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, we argue that it is not party turnover per se that leads to the discontinuation of PB, but rather the ideological orientation of such changes. To investigate this hypothesis, we draw on an original dataset covering 295 Spanish municipalities, including both cases of PB continuity and discontinuity. Our findings indicate that changes in the ruling party alone do not account for the interruption of PBs. Instead, the key determinant is the ideological direction of government change or continuity: PB is more likely to persist when left-wing parties remain in power or when transitions occur toward left-wing administrations.

Recent decades have witnessed substantial expansion in both international efforts to support the development of political parties as healthy organizations, and in academic comparative studies to understand how parties’ organizational choices affect political outcomes. Despite the similarities of the concerns, the overlap of these efforts has been modest. This article considers why these developments have failed to converge, pointing to different fundamental conceptions of how political parties function and what they are for. It then illustrates this gap by considering two areas of party operations (i.e. political party finance and intra-party democracy), showing the scarcity of research support for some major assumptions that justify specific party aid prescriptions. The article concludes by considering possible ways to bridge the practitioner-researcher gap in this field of study.

This study argues that election years shape whether majority ethnonationalist (MEN) organizations in European countries engage in ethnic riot and protest, with effects differing by party status. For MEN non-parties, elections highlight a good (votes) that they do not pursue, reducing incentives for ethnic riots and protests during election years. In contrast, for MEN parties, elections make votes more salient, increasing their incentive to employ such tactics. Using original data on 281 MEN organizations across 18 European countries, two-way fixed effects estimations show that for MEN non-parties, an election year is associated with a 3.40 percentage point decrease in the predicted probability of ethnic riot. In contrast, for MEN parties, election years are positively associated with riots. No clear interactive association is found for protests. The findings advance existing evidence on majority ethnonationalism and far right politics in Europe with evidence of organizational mobilization differences.

This article examines the institutionalization of democratic innovations within movement-parties by analyzing the longitudinal case of Barcelona en Comú (BComú), a party that emerged from Spain’s 15M movement and governed the city of Barcelona for two consecutive terms. While much scholarship suggests that participatory and deliberative structures inevitably erode under institutional pressures, this study argues that the trajectory of democratic innovation is more contingent and actor-driven. Drawing on fifteen in-depth interviews with mid-level party staff, complemented by internal documents and public materials, the article investigates how BComú navigated the tensions and trade-offs between participation, deliberation, and representation. Findings reveal that while BComú experienced the pull towards centralization, along with cadre depletion, and declining grassroots participation, it maintained reflexive organizational practices that slowed oligarchical drift and enabled periodic recalibration to reconstitute organizational legitimacy. The article argues that the durability of democratic innovations depends less on their initial adoption than on the party’s capacity to embed them procedurally and culturally across multiple organizational layers.

In advanced industrial democracies, politics has become heavily personalized. What are the implications of this process for research on, and the practice of, democracy? Some have called for a reconceptualization of the essence of modern democratic politics in a way that moves research away from the so-called party organization paradigm. We argue here for the continued relevance of (studying) party organizations. Shedding the theoretical baggage of the mass party ideal from the party organization paradigm, we maintain that, while political parties may structure elections less than in the past and have recently underperformed in safeguarding democratic norms and rules, personalization has actually increased their capacity in the parliamentary and governmental arenas. The party organization paradigm prompts us to problematize these contrasting developments and articulate normatively where exactly the shortcomings of current political parties lie when it comes to safeguarding liberal democracy.

Intra-party democratic innovations are on the rise around the world and burgeoning strands of research provide an institutional understanding of how political parties approach them. However, we still know little about how party members view democratic innovations and the benefits they can bring to the party. This article addresses this gap in the literature by mapping party members’ views on intra-party democratic innovations, and by identifying the areas where these innovations are welcome. It draws on semi-structured interviews with party members of parliamentary political parties in Romania. The results of our thematic analysis indicate that party members show considerably stronger support for deliberative practices compared to direct democracy. There is broad consensus across parties that deliberation can be used mainly for organization development and as electoral strategies but may be also suitable for internal communication and problem solving. Direct democracy is seen as contributing to organization development and as appropriate for internal communication.

Politicians engage in messaging in attempts to score points with their constituencies and, if possible, mobilize them in support of political outcomes. For members of the U.S. Congress (especially senators, who have a constitutionally designated role in staffing the U.S. Supreme Court), major court cases provide an ideal opportunity for this behavior. In this paper, we examine when senators communicate with the public about salient Court cases and how they employ legal rhetoric and legislative rhetoric when doing so. We argue that these behaviors depend on a legislator’s constituency, personal traits, and institutional position. We conduct two complementary analyses of rates of messaging about salient cases and the language used in abortion cases from 2012 to 2024 and find support for our argument. Our findings contribute to scholarly understanding of how legislators represent their constituencies, illuminate the sources of American attitudes toward the judiciary, and shed light on an understudied form of separation-of-powers interactions between two branches of American government.

Scholars have been quick to try to assess the consequences of the U.S. Supreme Court’s monumental ruling abrogating abortion rights in the U.S. ( Dobbs ), with several studies showing that the decision seems to have ushered in a new era of significantly diminished support for the Court. But important issues remain unresolved. Perhaps most important, how have racial minorities, especially African Americans, been affected by the Court’s ruling? Based on an unusually large and representative subsample of African Americans, I discover that a substantial proportion of Black people extend remarkably little legitimacy to the U.S. Supreme Court after Dobbs . Some of the difference between Black and White people seems to be associated with the abortion ruling (as I carefully document), but another portion has to do with much lower levels of support of the Court before Dobbs , and with weaker attachments to legitimacy-enhancing democratic values. I conclude that studies of the attitudes and values of minorities, while important in and of themselves, can also help researchers understand more general processes by which citizens update their institutional attitudes.

Does foreign aid improve human rights? Even though Western donors typically put human rights at the forefront of foreign aid, the influence of such assistance on human rights remains largely unknown. Against this backdrop, this study provides a theoretical framework and empirical assessment of how foreign aid influences the respect and promotion of human rights in recipient countries. Conceptualizing aid as a foreign policy tool, we provide a dynamic model of aid disbursement, emphasizing how foreign aid can positively be expected to influence the promotion of human rights in the pre-allocation (initial) as well as post-allocation (subsequent) phase(s). We propose two main mechanisms through which this occurs— conditionality (as a form of hard power) and norm diffusion (as a form of soft power). To test our theory, we provide a time-series cross-sectional analysis of 121 aid-receiving countries over a period of 20 years, 2002–2021. In line with our theoretical expectation, the analysis reveals a positive and statistically significant association between Official Development Assistance (ODA) from OECD/DAC countries and the protection of physical integrity and civil liberties, illustrating the ways in which the international community can indeed play an important and positive role in protecting and promoting human rights.

Partisan identity increasingly structures how Americans interpret the operation of democratic institutions, including the routine procedures meant to function impartially. This study examines how partisan identity shapes public evaluations of one such procedure, gubernatorial appointments to state supreme courts during competitive election years. Using a survey experiment in which respondents evaluated a hypothetical appointment under varied partisan conditions, we find that co-partisans express substantially greater support for the appointment procedure, while out-party respondents are more likely to oppose it. These effects appear regardless of respondents’ affect toward either party, suggesting that partisan identity, rather than sentiment, drives evaluations of this democratic process. Our findings indicate that support for these procedures is often conditional on partisan alignment, raising concerns about the durability of shared democratic norms.

Political institutions often provide rights and protections for particular groups (e.g., refugees, groups that faced historical discrimination). Who belongs to a given group, however, can be contested. We study the politics of social categorization by focusing on transgender women’s athletic participation in the United States. We offer a framework that integrates work on frames, social construction, and group categorization. We predict a substantial change in attitudes about transgender women’s athletic participation between 2019 and 2024—a period during which the issue became highly politicized with the emergence of an exclusion frame. We use unique cross-sectional data from those years to show that support for transgender women’s participation substantially dropped. Strikingly, among Republicans, the relationship between support for a non-discrimination policy (Title IX) and support for transgender women’s sports participation flipped from positive to negative—thus, support for a non-discrimination policy correlated with exclusion beliefs in 2024. The findings highlight how existing non-discrimination policies can become mechanisms of category exclusion when the contested group is framed and then perceived as a threat to long-standing stakeholders.

Sometimes politicians must take indelible public stances under unresolved uncertainty about an outcome they cannot control, for example, consider the minority on a proposal that is bound to pass. Counter to the expectations that party platforms converge, and that rational individuals balk at betting against one another, we show this can lead office motivated politicians with shared beliefs and policy preferences to adopt divergent positions. To illustrate the workings of our model, and to provide guidance on discerning whether it applies in a given situation, we apply it in the context of Chile's Constituent Assembly of .

Volden et al.'s study of the US House of Representatives found that congresswomen in the minority party exhibit greater legislative effectiveness than their male counterparts, while effectiveness levels are comparable in the majority party. This paper re‐examines the relationship between gender, majority party status, and legislative effectiveness within the diverse institutional contexts of US state legislatures. Using the State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) developed by Bucchianeri et al. for the period 1987–2018, we replicate and extend the original congressional analysis. Contrary to the findings at the national level, our analysis of over 80,000 legislator scores across 97 state legislative chambers reveals no measurable advantage in legislative effectiveness between women and men in the minority or majority party. Instead, we find that in most cases female state legislators are less effective than their male counterparts. These results suggest that the institutional dynamics shaping the conditions for women's legislative success may operate differently in state‐level versus congressional settings, highlighting the importance of context in studies of gender and lawmaking.

Parliamentary questions (PQs) are key instruments of legislative oversight and representation. However, research often treats these functions in isolation—overlooking important variation within the instrument itself. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on PQs with geographic references (geo‐PQs) and their use by government and opposition MPs. I argue that opposition MPs employ geo‐PQs to criticize the government and demonstrate local engagement, while government MPs use them to claim credit and sustain constituency ties. Employing automated geocoding techniques, I analyze PQs from Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. The results confirm the theoretical expectations: opposition MPs ask more geo‐PQs overall, but government MPs dedicate a higher share of their PQs to geographic content. Moreover, except in France, opposition MPs are significantly more likely to submit critical geo‐PQs. These findings reveal how geo‐PQs serve dual representational and oversight functions.

The European Union’s (EU) Cohesion Policy is one of the main instruments to tackle the economic struggle of left-behind regions, however, only little is known about the awareness and the opinion of citizens towards this regional policy. This article examines how awareness of EU regional policies and spending preferences varies across occupations. We argue that differences in awareness across occupations are attributable to skill and responsibility differences and divergent work logics. Our analysis of a harmonized Eurobarometer dataset ( N = 82,365) provides evidence for differences in EU funding awareness and spending preferences across occupational groups, which correspond to their own material interests. In addition, citizens indicate preferences for funding decisions to be made at the most local level.

This article analyses how and why individuals maintain or change their European solidarity over time using German panel data. I answer two questions: (1) Who maintains their level of European solidarity? (2) Do identity-based, value-based, or utilitarian approaches best explain change in European solidarity? I examine four dimensions of solidarity: territorial, fiscal, and welfare solidarity, and the support for European social citizenship. Despite COVID-19 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, 44–57% of German respondents maintained stable solidarity. Stability varied little across sociodemographic groups. Those who identified more with Europe and on the economic and transnationalist left were less likely to reduce their solidarity. Transnational political orientation is the main driver of intra-individual change in European solidarity. When individuals come to identify more with Europe, they increase their solidarity, whereas national identification has inconsistent effects. Utilitarian factors, including exposure to regional crises, show little effect on individual solidarity. The findings add nuance to identity-based and utilitarian explanations of how individuals develop and maintain European solidarity.

Discrimination by welfare bureaucrats in host countries poses significant administrative burdens for mobile European Union citizens’ social rights in practice. However, the relative importance of applicants’ identity and perceived effort therein is understudied. Combining discrimination and behavioral theory, we investigate how nationality and perceived effort affect bureaucratic discrimination. A choice-based conjoint survey experiment presents 2403 bureaucrats in Switzerland, Denmark, Ireland, and Spain with fictional information requests from French and Bulgarian citizens. The results of the experiment show that bureaucrats—particularly administrators with antimigration and right-wing attitudes—favor French citizens over Bulgarians. Preferential treatment was strongest for applicants whose language fluency and job-seeking activities indicate integration efforts. Bureaucratic discrimination is much more about what EU citizens do than who they are.

The COVID-19 pandemic confronted the European Union (EU) with a sanitary and an economic crisis. This study examines how the crisis affected party-level Euroscepticism in Portugal and Spain through an analysis of parliamentary speeches. We propose two competing hypotheses: the pandemic may have fostered unity, tempering Euroscepticism, or alternatively, amplified criticism in response to perceived shortcomings in the EU's crisis management. We argue that the prevailing pattern is conditioned by parties’ pre-existing orientations toward the EU. Drawing on an original dataset, we found an initial decline in Euroscepticism, though its magnitude and persistence varied across ideological and national contexts. The Portuguese radical left displayed the most pronounced and enduring Euroscepticism, reinforcing the view that pre-existing party positions were crucial in shaping responses during the pandemic.

We introduce a computational method for identifying delegating and constraining provisions in European Union (EU) laws. Leveraging the syntactic structures employed by legislators, we developed a set of extraction rules applied through a custom-built computational linguistics pipeline. We run through the pipeline more than 600,000 legal sentences that we extracted from 9319 laws adopted between 1958 and 2019. The application performs very well vis-á-vis human annotation and outperforms transformer models. The produced patterns of authority delegation and constraint resonate with our knowledge of the policymaking and history of the EU. Our approach provides valuable insights for designing transparent and adaptable rule-based computational linguistic methods of legal text analysis. We also release the comprehensively annotated dataset and the fine-tuned transformer models developed for this task.

Why do heavily biased media campaigns sometimes fail to achieve expected persuasive effects in electoral contexts? While compelling at the national level, the argument that pro-Leave media bias explains Brexit outcome struggles to account for places such as London and other urban areas, where majorities voted Remain despite exposure to Euroskeptic media. To shed light on this puzzle, this article applies the “filter hypothesis” to examine how interpersonal communication mediates media effects. We extend this framework by incorporating group pressure mechanisms simulating opinion conformity, and building an agent-based model that compares theoretical mechanisms: direct versus mediated media effects, varying conformity levels, and different thresholds for network homogeneity and opinion similarity perception. Our findings show that models incorporating both mediated effects and group pressure mechanisms best replicate observed voting patterns and improve explanatory power.