Investigators are often interested in how a treatment affects an outcome for units responding to treatment in a certain way. We may wish to know the effect among units that, for example, meaningfully implemented an intervention, passed an attention check or demonstrated some important mechanistic response. Simply conditioning on the observed value of the post-treatment variable introduces problematic biases. Further, the identification assumptions required by several existing strategies are often indefensible. We propose the treatment reactive average causal effect (TRACE), which we define as the total effect of treatment in the group that, if treated, would realize a particular value of the relevant post-treatment variable. By reasoning about the effect among the “non-reactive” group, we can identify and estimate the range of plausible values for the TRACE. We demonstrate the use of this approach with three examples: (i) learning the effect of police-perceived race on police violence during traffic stops, a case where point identification may be possible; (ii) estimating effects of a community policing intervention in Liberia, in communities that meaningfully implemented it; and (iii) studying how in-person canvassing affects support for transgender rights, among participants for whom the intervention would result in more positive feelings toward transgender people.

Most contemporary autocracies hold elections. Does the public value these elections? If so, do they value them enough to punish incumbents that subvert elections? We examine this question in contemporary Russia, examining whether individuals withdraw support from regime leaders when local elections are eliminated. Over the past 25 years, most Russian cities have replaced their directly elected mayors with appointed executives. This paper uses the largest data set on public opinion ever assembled on Russia—over 400,000 responses drawn from two decades by Russia's top polling agencies—to analyze how the elimination of elections in Russia's large cities has affected public attitudes toward the authorities. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, we find that election cancellation reduces support for President Vladimir Putin. This effect is stronger in settings with histories of robust electoral competition. This suggests that the public is more likely to punish incumbents for eliminating elections when individuals have experience with competitive elections.

Decentralization is often promoted as a means of improving public service delivery, strengthening accountability, and enhancing citizen engagement. However, its effects vary widely across contexts. This paper examines how decentralization reforms shaped attitudes toward public service provision in Ukraine. Using a unique panel survey from nearly 200 Ukrainian communities, we show that decentralization increased satisfaction with healthcare and education. Investigating the mechanisms behind this result, we demonstrate that in the Ukrainian case, decentralization improved public service provision not by promoting cleaner governance (i.e., less corruption) or greater spending, but rather because reformer communities – particularly in urban areas – used funds more effectively. Cross-national analysis of 28 European countries confirms that citizens in more decentralized systems report higher satisfaction with locally provided services. Our findings highlight the importance of local administrative capacity in realizing the benefits of decentralization, offering insights for both democratic reformers and post-conflict reconstruction efforts.

Mass mobilization is widely regarded as a key driver of democratic change, yet concerns about its declining impact are growing. We examine how the effectiveness of mobilization in prompting democratic transitions has varied over the period 1900–2019 using formal statistical models. The results reveal pronounced temporal heterogeneity: mobilization has a positive and significant effect on democratic transitions from the early 1980s to the mid-2010s, but no detectable impact before or after. Leader turnover and coup attempts have been more likely to follow mobilization up to the Arab Spring, yet the increasing impact of mobilization after the 1980s is unique to democratization. Trends in commonly cited structural conditions for democracy do not align with the observed variation in mobilization’s effectiveness. These findings challenge assumptions of time-invariant effects and highlight the importance of accounting for temporal variation in processes of democratization and political change.

Governance principles reflect procedural values that govern the means of implementing public policies. Using survey data from Italy and the United Kingdom, we explore the public’s orientations towards those principles. We model them as instrumental values in belief systems, and as components of a network of attitudes. We find that governance principles largely occupy their own community; their interdependence with each other is far greater than their dependence on any other values or attitudes. Public employment experience neither alters the internal integration of governance principles nor changes their relationship with the larger belief system. We observe low levels of dynamic constraint among governance value orientations and show evidence that higher-order values account for the greatest influence over them. They remain strikingly invariant to simulated shifts in other attitudes, though modestly more constrained in Italy than in the UK. Our results suggest that orientations towards transparency can be most strongly influenced by other beliefs.

With the term “decolonization” circulating widely and animating debates inside and outside the academy, how can we ensure that it retains analytic value? In this paper I show that the meanings that the term has acquired in practice complicate empirical analysis. Specifically, I contend that three problems emerge. First, the term’s usage in practical struggles leads a foregrounding of its normative power over analytic precision. Second, this tends to bracket ends, glossing any move away from colonial practices as decolonial, in turn affecting scholarly treatments. Third, the term’s usage often produces an analytic flattening, downplaying nuance, context, and historical specificity. Not inherent to the concept itself, these problems are stubbornly present, despite recent work that seeks to address them. To make the discussion concrete, I focus on political science interventions about a single world region: Central Asia. The relative newness of scholarly engagement with Central Asia’s colonial and decolonial experiences provides an opportunity for critical reflection.

Declining trends in civic participation and the growing success of anti-systemic parties reflect a crisis of democratic legitimacy unforeseen by popular readings of secularisation and modernisation theories. These readings expect the rise of rational, predominantly non-religious citizens and the parallel decline of conformist, religious citizens to strengthen democratic institutions. We update this popular approach, which is built on a dichotomy between the non-religious and the religious worldview, by adding a third worldview type: heterodox beliefs (eg in astrology, lucky charms, fortune tellers, and faith healing). Neither conventionally religious nor grounded in rational secularism, heterodoxy has survived and thrives in modern societies but remains overlooked by comparative political science. Heterodoxy reflects a culture of unhealthy scepticism, receptivity to unverifiable ideas and social atomism, and sustains unique patterns of electoral behaviour. Empirical analyses of the International Social Survey Programme (1991−2018) indicate that heterodoxy, unlike the other two core worldviews, favours both electoral apathy and anti-systemic party choice. The electoral effects of heterodoxy point to an alternative diagnosis of current challenges to democratic legitimacy.

Parties frequently target campaign promises on specific social groups, yet we lack evidence on whether such targeting yields greater electoral pay-offs than broad-based universalistic pledges. We address this gap with a pre-registered survey experiment fielded in Germany in 2024 ( N = 3,500). We expose respondents to a fictional electoral campaign scenario featuring posters promising additional public spending either to the general population (broad-based pledge), or to a specific group – parents, pensioners, or rural residents (group-targeted pledge) – and examine how voters respond. We theorize that group targeting should raise the salience of party-group linkages and therefore boost support among voters who (1) belong to the target group, (2) identify with this group, and/or (3) view it as deserving. At the same time, it may alienate others who perceive such pledges as unfair. We find no consistent evidence that group-targeted pledges outperform broad-based ones in generating electoral support – even among intended beneficiaries. Instead, responses to targeted appeals are strongly moderated by group belonging and perception: support remains stable or slightly lower among intended beneficiaries, but drops substantially among other respondents. These patterns suggest that rather than securing net electoral gains, group-targeted promises can provoke exclusion-driven losses that outweigh limited ingroup appeal. More broadly, the study highlights how identity and deservingness perceptions shape voter reactions to realistic campaign pledges – and how even appeals to normatively ‘deserving’ or majoritarian groups may risk narrowing rather than broadening electoral support.

Parties in all European countries at least partially rely on private donations to finance their activities, but gender gaps in donations remain underexplored. Investigating gaps in donation frequencies and amounts, as well as which parties are likely to receive donations from women, is crucial, as parties represent the interests of donors more than the interests of non-donors, opening an avenue of potential underrepresentation of women’s interests. This study addresses this gap, leveraging data from party finance reports from Italy, the UK, and Finland over time to investigate gender gaps in donation amounts, frequencies, and recipient parties. The results highlight that while gender gaps in donation frequency exist, these differences in how often women and men donate to parties do not directly translate into how much money they donate. Rather, there is large variation in donation amounts over time and across countries. Particularly in Finland, a highly gender-equal country, differences in donation amounts are marginal. Finally, the expectation that green and left parties are most likely to receive donations from women does not hold across all cases – while in all three countries green parties are most likely to receive donations from women, right-wing parties are not the least likely to receive donations from women in Finland and Italy.

What are the determinants of individual uptake of vaccination? Using original data from a survey fielded in September 2021 in Germany and the United Kingdom, this study looks at the impact of three factors on individual vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a first study using observational data, we look at individual trust in institutions and political ideology. In a second study, based on experimental data, we assess the impact restrictions for unvaccinated individuals in the form of ‘green pass’ policies have on the propensity to get vaccinated. Results from the first study show that trust in institutions and ideology are associated with vaccination uptake. Results from the survey experiment indicate that the ‘green pass’ policy scenario significantly increased willingness to get a booster shot for Germans, but not for UK respondents, due to a ceiling effect in the United Kingdom. We further ask whether the effects of trust and policy coercion ‘amplify’ or ‘compensate’ each other. We find that trust has a ‘compensation’ effect, whereby individuals not yet vaccinated are considerably more likely to do so if they trust political institutions. Trust also compensates for other policy measures, as trusting individuals are highly likely to get vaccinated with or without the ‘green pass’ policy incentive, whereas low-trust individuals are more likely under the ‘green pass’ scenario.

Do immigration policies impact long-term political integration? I argue that the interplay between admission requirements and post-admission rights of migrants is highly consequential in shaping key democratic attitudes of increasingly diverse societies. Migrant selectivity boosts democratic satisfaction and political trust only when combined with inclusive internal regulations, such as high security of status, easier pathways to settlement, and social rights. Analyzing Commonwealth migrants in the UK after WWII through difference-in-differences and interrupted time series models, I find that ‘watermelon regimes’ (strict entry with inclusive post-entry rights) show lasting positive effects. Cross-national analyses with European data support the findings that watermelon regimes outperform free movement and stricter policies. Selection and context mechanisms explain why watermelon regimes enhance migrants’ economic integration, leading to political support. The benefits and costs of adopting watermelon regimes are discussed.

Have people in Western societies become more aligned in their views on cultural issues? Although the idea of a growing cultural divide is widely discussed, we know surprisingly little about whether mass attitudes of this type have in fact become more coherent. Using European Social Survey data from 2002 to 2022, this study examines how closely attitudes toward environmental protection, immigration, homosexuality, international cooperation, and climate change move together across countries, a property known as constraint . Constraint is conceptualized as the degree to which these attitudes are interconnected, measured by the average absolute correlation among them. The results reveal a general increase in constraint across national contexts since 2012. Effect-size simulations suggest that this change is modest: if about 10% of respondents held fully coherent cultural attitudes in 2012, the share would be closer to 12% by 2022. This trend appears to be driven by right-leaning individuals, older cohorts, and the politically engaged (that is, partisans and those reporting high political interest). Additional analyses indicate that climate change has become the issue most tightly woven into broader cultural outlooks, suggesting that it is especially likely to ignite conflict and amplify cultural tensions.

Research from advanced democracies shows that political affiliations and contextual factors shape public justification of political violence, yet little is known about whether these patterns extend to developing democracies where institutional weakness and identity cleavages are more pronounced. This paper examines the cognitive foundations of citizens’ evaluations of political vigilantism in Ghana, drawing on social identity theory and the logic of public goods provision. Employing a preregistered survey experiment administered to social media users, I test how the nature of vigilante activity and political alignment jointly structure individuals’ justification of extralegal political action. The results show that citizens justify vigilantism when it is perceived to advance societal welfare. While support for vigilantism is influenced by political affiliation, this bias is conditional on its perceived consequences on collective welfare. Notably, even out-group vigilantism receives public support when the action is perceived to protect electoral integrity, whereas in-group favoritism diminishes when the act is deemed harmful to the electoral process. These findings reveal that in developing democracies such as Ghana, political identity shapes attitudes toward vigilante violence, but perceptions of social threat bound this effect.

Recent scholarship increasingly views the reemergence of the urban–rural divide in political behavior through the lens of social identity theory. Given this understanding of political divisions between cities and the countryside, it is crucial to investigate how urban and rural social groups are perceived, specifically, to what extent these groups are associated with entrenched stereotypes. Examining the urban–rural divide in people’s minds through a conjoint experiment, this paper sheds light on stereotypes of urbanites and ruralites in nine European countries. The results indicate that rural residents are typically viewed as Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant, working-class, older, and less educated. By contrast, typical urbanites are perceived as Europhile, pro-immigrant, upper-middle-class, younger, and university-educated. These perceptions are not held uniformly, however. Individuals tend to project their own characteristics onto others, perceiving those similar to themselves as more typical members of their place-based in-group. Likewise, a similar logic emerges regarding the relationship between urban–rural stereotypes and affect. While individuals tend to express warmer feelings toward those they perceive as typical members of their place-based in-group, these affective evaluations critically depend on whether individuals themselves align with the stereotypes in question. Overall, these findings provide systematic evidence on stereotyping along the urban–rural divide. By way of that, they further underscore the importance of a social identity perspective to political divisions between urban and rural residents.

Although most partisans are averse to political violence against the outgroup a small, unique fringe can have disastrous political consequences, shaping political divisions and fueling more antagonistic conflict. Building on the social identity approach and optimal distinctiveness theory, this paper theorizes that a need for uniqueness and a need to belong can interact to fuel violent partisanship. Across two original cross-sectional U.S. surveys (total N = 3,447), I find that partisans can balance the needs for uniqueness and belonging by becoming superior conformers to the group, differentiating themselves by their elevated levels of prototypicality. Thus, this study finds that when one’s need to belong to their group is high, need for uniqueness leads to support for partisan violence. This work suggests a motivational perspective on partisan radicalization, examining the roots of social influence processes underlying partisan intra group dynamics. Depending on the group context at any given time, need for uniqueness and need to belong can impoverish or enrich democracy.

Does permitting voters to select multiple candidates in majoritarian elections increase diversity among those elected? While majoritarian systems typically use single-vote ballots, research suggests that allowing multiple selections may increase the representation of women and racial minorities. However, empirical evidence regarding actual voter behavior remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a survey experiment that varied the number of selectable candidates from one to three in multimember local elections. The results revealed that, under the multiple-vote condition, respondents were more likely to alternate by gender, particularly in their second- and third-ranked choices, supporting the theory that multiple voting fosters more diverse representation. Nevertheless, men often emerged as the first-ranked choice, giving them an overall advantage at the aggregate level.

How do scapegoating narratives emerge, diffuse, and solidify within digital media ecosystems? This paper introduces an actor‐affect‐affordance (3A) model to explain how complex social problems become symbolically attributed to marginalized groups. This framework is applied to the rise of the “trans terrorism” narrative that followed the 2023 Nashville school shooting, which framed mass shootings as the product of an alleged “gender ideology epidemic,” focusing on discourse within a right‐wing alternative social media platform where this narrative in part crystallized. Findings offer new insight into the construction of exclusionary identities in the digital age, opening several avenues for future scholarship at the intersection of political psychology, digital communication, and cultural sociology.

Recent studies have highlighted the emotions individuals may experience in response to environmental crises, particularly climate anxiety. Despite a growing literature investigating eco‐emotions, further research is needed to identify the associated appraisals–especially moral constructs. This study qualitatively explores young adults' perspectives on environmental crisis, particularly looking at how environmental injustice and perception of political stakeholders are linked to specific emotions. It also examines how eco‐emotions may drive self‐reported pro‐environmental actions. Thirty French young adults (18–29) were interviewed. Sadness and anger were associated with injustice, while diverse emotions were associated with various political stakeholders: Anger was associated with institutions and “other people,” hope to non‐governmental organizations and anxiety to the media. The study also found that for two thirds of respondents, emotions appear to drive action, with positive emotions (hope, joy) and negative emotions (anxiety, anger and sadness) both having considerable influence. Among other elements, this study highlights how individuals' perception of different political stakeholders leads to a better understanding of their eco‐emotions. It also shows that positive emotions can be an equally significant driver of action as negative emotions.

Although previous research has shown that citizens of democratic nations tend to report higher well‐being, the psychological mechanisms underlying this association remain insufficiently understood. Guided by Self‐Determination Theory, the present study examined whether democratic functioning enhances well‐being in part through the satisfaction of autonomy, a basic psychological need. We distinguished between objective democratic functioning, as captured by standardized democracy indices, and individuals' subjective perceptions of living in a democracy. Data were drawn from three large‐scale cross‐national surveys. We tested the explanatory role of autonomy at three levels: between individuals (Study 1, 28 countries), between countries (Study 2, 33 countries), and within‐country change over time (Study 3, 92 countries). Between individuals, between nations and within nations across time, perceived democratic functioning was consistently associated with greater well‐being and lower ill‐being via enhanced autonomy. In addition, we found that these subjective perceptions only partially aligned with countries' objective democracy scores across continents. Findings underscore that the subjective experience of democratic functioning, more than objective democratic conditions, is crucial for supporting autonomy and, in turn, mental health. Implications are discussed in terms of how democratic governance is experienced across nations, alongside study limitations and directions for future research.

In The Democratic Marketplace , Lisa Herzog offers a damning indictment of democratic capitalism. Among other things, she argues that capitalism has led to increased inequality, fosters an unhealthy culture of competition, that it is bad for the environment, and that it is ultimately bad for democracy itself. To save democracy we must pursue various reforms: we need to address economic inequality; we must abjure the unsustainable pursuit of economic growth and instead democratically determine the functions of the economy; and we should give citizens more time for meaningful civic engagement. In this review essay I push back in defense of democratic capitalism, arguing that while Herzog overstates the negative aspects of capitalism, she also greatly understates its many benefits. Additionally, I show that her own distinctive proposals for how to democratize the economy face serious issues that should not be overlooked. Overall, expanding the scope of democratic politics is not as promising as many seem to think, while democratic capitalism is unjustifiably underappreciated.

Public threat perceptions in East Asia do not map neatly onto aggregate power or generalized rivalry sentiment, yet their cross-domain structure has received little systematic attention. This article examines how concerns across distinct issue domains are associated with perceived threats from China and the United States, distinguishing between symmetric domains, in which responsibility for managing a problem is plausibly shared by both powers, and asymmetric domains, in which responsibility is more closely tied to one. Using original cross-national survey data, we estimate seemingly unrelated regressions that jointly model the two threat outcomes. Concern about North Korea’s nuclear program is associated with higher perceived threat from both powers across Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, while climate concern shows a similar pattern in Japan and South Korea but not in Taiwan. By contrast, belief that COVID-19 was man-made is more strongly associated with China-threat perceptions, whereas dissatisfaction with Japan’s historical apologies is more closely linked to U.S.-threat perceptions in Japan and South Korea, with different substantive meanings in the two countries. The findings indicate that responsibility distributions across issue domains organize public threat perceptions and shape the domestic terrain of alignment politics under great-power rivalry.

We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) threaten democracy through their persuasive capabilities. Using two survey experiments ( N = 10,417) and real-world simulations, we compare the cost-effectiveness of LLM chatbots against traditional campaign tactics, taking into account both the “receive” and “accept” steps in the persuasion process. Our design advances prior research by assessing extended human-LLM interactions and measuring short- and long-term effects across three political domains. We find that while LLMs are comparably persuasive to campaign ads once seen, real-world impact depends on both message reception and acceptance. Simulations estimate LLM-based persuasion costs $48–$75 per voter versus $100 for traditional methods. However, traditional methods currently scale more effectively. While LLMs do not yet offer substantially greater potential for large-scale persuasion, this may shift as capabilities improve and techniques for scalable exposure become feasible.

Despite its place at the core of EU integration, support for the EU’s single market is under-investigated by European public opinion scholars. This paper uses novel survey data from eight EU member states to compare how utilitarian concerns, postmaterialist values and national identities shape popular views of the EU’s single market. Focusing on the freedom of movement for goods, workers, and services, we find that postmaterialist attitudes more consistently predict attitudes towards the single market than economic positioning. We thus contribute to the literature on attitudes towards European integration by showing that postmaterialist values and national identities matter not only for views of highly politicized issues like migration, but also for “bread-and-butter” policies like single market governance. These results are particularly surprising given that we would expect utilitarian expectations to be particularly prominent for these kinds of economic policies.

Presidential impeachment has traditionally been seen as a clear manifestation of accountability. Recently, however, the impeachment of some presidents has sparked public backlash. This article highlights the importance of elite affective and ideological polarization in explaining presidential impeachment. We theorize impeachment as a multi-hurdle process and focus on examining the determinants of overcoming two primary hurdles: a pro-impeachment lower house vote and removal from office. The article employs crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to examine 44 cases of successful and failed impeachment. The results uncover three types of impeachment: polarized, scandalized, and mobilized impeachments. Notably, elite polarization, be it affective or ideological, is the primary trigger of impeachment in several cases and the facilitator of impeachment in the presence of other triggers such as corruption scandals or mass mobilization. While both ideological and affective polarization facilitate a pro-impeachment vote in the lower house, it is affective polarization that drives removal from office primarily in the absence of a legislative shield. We use two illustrative cases to demonstrate polarized impeachment: Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021, and Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The findings withstand a wide range of robustness tests, including sensitivity ranges, consistency thresholds, fit-oriented robustness, and cluster analysis. Given the rise of affective polarization worldwide, presidential impeachment may be increasingly weaponized by polarized elites.

Growing concerns about affective polarization have led scholars to develop depolarizing interventions (i.e., experimental manipulations designed to reduce partisan animosity) with promising results in the United States. However, these interventions remain untested in Europe’s multi-party systems. This study adapts depolarization interventions highlighting commonalities among political parties and voters to the European context. We test these interventions in a 16-country experiment, featuring approximately 27,000 participants, conducted right before the 2024 European Parliament elections. Our results present three key findings. First, our interventions effectively increased perceptions of parties’ shared European and democratic ground. Second, their effects are conditional, influencing only non-far-right party supporters with pro-European and pro-democratic views. Third, despite successfully shifting perceptions, the interventions fail to reduce affective polarization. These findings contribute to the growing consensus that depolarization is difficult to achieve and extend it to the European context. In particular, they highlight the limitations of commonality-based interventions in multi-party systems, where heterogeneous partisan alignments make it harder to identify shared ground that resonates across political groups. More broadly, this paper challenges the generalizability of depolarization strategies tested in the United States and urges us to define the scope and conditions for interventions to depolarize effectively across diverse political contexts.

Which social groups do citizens view as deserving of beneficial policy? Research on welfare deservingness has long emphasized relatively homogeneous deservingness perceptions, raising concerns that groups widely seen as undeserving could be systematically disadvantaged in policymaking. More recent findings point to variation in deservingness perceptions across geography, time, and individuals. Building on these insights and on studies that examine specific groups in isolation, we claim that ideology systematically shapes divides in how social groups are perceived. Because left-wing and right-wing individuals prioritize different considerations—groups’ needs on the left, merit, reciprocity, and identity on the right—we expect them to differ in the level of deservingness attributed to most groups. Drawing on survey data collected among 5,541 German and 6,020 French citizens, we provide unique evidence on perceived deservingness for a broad range of politically salient target groups by adopting a cross-group perspective in two different contexts. Crossed random effects models depict the expected ideological divides for most groups. These divides create incentives for political parties to compete over “who gets what” and, thereby, to represent diverse interests including those of groups perceived as less deserving on average.

This article investigates the structural hybridization of technocracy and democracy in European governance. Moving beyond normative and binary accounts that frame the two as mutually exclusive, we conceptualize their relationship as a systemic, relational, internal, and processual dynamic. Building on this framework, we develop a typology of four ideal-type governance configurations – techno-dominant, demo-dominant, high-intensity hybrid, and low-intensity hybrid – which captures the co-evolution and institutional entanglement of democratic and technocratic logics. Empirically, we construct original composite indices of technocracy and democracy using V-Dem data, and apply them to 893 country-year observations across the EU27 and the United Kingdom (1989–2024). The findings reveal significant regional variation and temporally differentiated trajectories of hybrid governance, shaped in part by major crises. Our typology offers a replicable tool for classifying governance regimes and invites further inquiry into how hybrid forms condition democratic legitimacy, institutional resilience, and the evolving architecture of political authority in the twenty-first century.

Social actors frequently mobilise against hybrid regimes, yet efforts to block harmful projects or constrain executive overreach rarely succeed. This paper develops a framework for explaining and predicting when such regimes concede to civic demands, focusing on two dimensions: (1) the extent to which meeting a demand would threaten key pillars of the regime’s structural power; and (2) the degree to which an issue generates broad emotional resonance. Their configuration shapes the likelihood and form of concessions. The framework is tested through six campaigns between 2020 and 2024 in Serbia led by Move, Change, a major civic organisation opposing the Vučić regime. Across all six cases, the issue’s initial position in the two-dimensional matrix – and its movement over time – closely predicted regime behaviour. Low structural threat paired with high issue resonance tended to produce relatively swift concessions, whereas high-threat issues met sustained resistance. The paper advances research on authoritarian resistance by clarifying when civic pressure can meaningfully alter regime behaviour, while providing activists with a strategic planning tool for selecting and framing issues to maximise their leverage.

Party youth wings are a vital pipeline to power, but have been overlooked by gender scholars. We investigate the political socialization that youth wings offer their women members, focusing on gendered trends as regards two key political attitudes. We ask: Do women and men in youth wings differ in their acquisition of personal efficacy and electoral ambition? Using YOUMEM survey data from over 3,100 youth wing members in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, we find that women are more likely than men to report increased desire to influence party policy and stand as candidates – the latter especially in center-right youth wings. In addition, the more exposed members are to the youth wing, the larger the gender gaps in the acquisition of efficacy and ambition. Our results suggest that, insofar as women’s political socialization is concerned, youth wings can be forces of renovation within their parties.

What does violence against women in politics (VAWIP) look like in authoritarian regimes that are widely portrayed as stable and “peaceful”? Existing scholarship largely centers on democracies, leaving nondemocratic contexts understudied. This article addresses the gap by examining Kuwait, the Gulf’s most democratic monarchy, where women’s educational and professional gains are highlighted even as political contestation remains tightly controlled. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, and activists, we theorize VAWIP as a core mechanism of women’s exclusion, enabled by the collusion of hollow formal institutions and patriarchal kinship networks. In this patriarchal peace , overt physical repression is rare, but women are governed through psychological harassment, semiotic attacks, and economic pressure that constrain their resources, competence, and visibility. Conversely, male respondents report low-risk political careers. Our analysis extends VAWIP research beyond democracies, generating hypotheses on how regime type and kin-based networks shape nonphysical coercion in ostensibly peaceful authoritarian regimes.

When most of the world’s parliaments were created, women could not vote or be elected. Correspondingly, parliaments’ rules and infrastructure as well expectations of parliamentarians’ (MPs) performance were designed around masculine standards, including the assumption that MPs had no caretaking responsibilities. Scholars seeking explanations for women’s underrepresentation argue that parliaments remain unwelcoming to those with caretaking roles. As long as women continue to bear disproportionate household obligations, increasing women’s presence in elected office requires parliaments to adopt reforms to accommodate parents. We surveyed members of Germany’s national and state parliaments about their attitudes towards parenthood and politics and support for various parenthood accommodations. We find that gender rather than being a parent shapes how politicians perceive the challenge of reconciling politics and parenthood. But shared experiences among women do not automatically produce similar attitudes about policies to make parliaments family friendly. Party ideology and gender both predict support for parliamentary reforms.

The process of selecting candidates for representative assemblies is a key aspect of democratic governance. We examine how political parties, particularly in quasi-open list proportional representation systems like the Netherlands, weigh candidates’ previous electoral performance in renomination decisions. We propose that different kinds of parties weigh candidates’ popularity and their partisanship differently. Therefore, some parties are more sensitive to electoral performance. Specifically, we look at the differences between branches of national parties and independent local parties, where the latter may be more responsive to the electorate. We test our hypotheses on candidates running in 2018 and 2022 municipal elections in the Netherlands. This provides us with a rich dataset, covering more than 5000 parties running in more than 300 municipalities fielding more than 80,000 candidates while maintaining consistent societal and institutional contexts. Our study enhances our understanding to what extent parties prioritize candidates’ popularity, shedding light on the complexities of candidate selection and renomination decisions.

The Gallagher index is the most popular measure of disproportionality in political science. While many assume that it can range from 0 (perfect proportionality) to 1 (perfect disproportionality), I prove that its maximum value is constrained by the size of the party system. For any election with N V effective vote-winning parties, the Gallagher index cannot exceed ( N V + 1 ) / 2 N V . Given that party-system fragmentation has risen across developed democracies, researchers may sometimes wish to distinguish how disproportional an election was from how disproportional it could have been, given the size of the party system. As such, I propose a complementary index that runs from 0 to 1, no matter the degree of fragmentation.

We examine primary voters’ perceptions of climate change and their preferences for environmental policy, and how these differ from non-primary voters and shape electoral incentives. Drawing on survey data from several waves of the American National Election Study, we document a partisan asymmetry in how primary voters think about climate change. We show that Republican primary voters have been more likely to endorse climate denial or delay views across several election cycles, compared to those Republicans who do not take part in political primaries. Among Democratic primary voters, we find little difference between primary voters and non-voters in earlier elections but show both growing concern and policy support among primary voters in 2016 and thereafter. Our results provide insights into the electoral incentives that politicians face in primary elections and help explain the short-lived trajectories of recent climate policies that have been retrenched by Republican legislators whose electoral incentives lead them to oppose or veto climate policies that may still bring their own constituents benefits.

Well-resourced interest groups often have the upper hand in legislative processes. They can invest in professional lobbying, build personal relationships with lawmakers, and supply sophisticated technical and political information during policy deliberations. Nonetheless, interest groups that lack capacity to intensively lobby can seek influence in other ways, for example, by giving testimony or submitting position letters intermittently. We argue that legislators have incentives to pay attention to intermittent advocacy because it provides constituency perspectives that might not otherwise be available to legislators. Intermittent advocacy can be especially informative when done in conjunction with other groups. We leverage a unique opportunity to observe both professional lobbying and position letters on bills introduced in the California State Legislature, focusing on bills that address the impacts of climate change—an issue mobilizing a range of organized interests and posing great risks to modern society. We develop an index of interest group diversity and show that letters of support from a diverse set of small, less politically active groups increase the likelihood that a bill passes committee. Our fndings illuminate how advocacy tactics differ by organization type and demonstrate that groups that lack capacity to intensively lobby can influence legislative outcomes.

Supreme Court justices sometimes strategically use unanimity in an attempt to bolster the legitimacy of a court ruling and of the court itself. Do unanimous court rulings promote legitimacy? We pair evidence from three experiments based on real Supreme Court cases (including rulings on Donald Trump’s ballot eligibility) with observational analyses of the General Social Survey (1975–2024) to examine the influence of unanimity in more realistic environments than used in prior studies. Contrary to the belief that judicial consensus signals impartiality and bolsters legitimacy, we find that unanimity has little to no consistent effect on decision approval or broader evaluations of SCOTUS. Unanimity also does not reliably improve attitudes among people predisposed to disagree with the Court’s rulings. These findings challenge assumptions about judicial strategy and raise broader questions about the role of consensus in institutional legitimacy.

Solidarity between people of color (PoC) is known to mute divisions between racially stigmatized groups. Yet solidarity’s political origins remain highly unclear. We consider whether PoC solidarity responds to partisan dynamics that unfold before, during, and after presidential elections. A racially diverse Democratic Party requires cross-racial alliances to effectively coordinate during presidential campaigns. This implies that relations between partisanship and PoC solidarity should be sensitive to shifts in campaign contexts, which (de)escalate partisanship. Thus, depending on campaign context, partisanship might shape PoC solidarity, and solidarity might also affect partisanship. We evaluate these prospects with longitudinal data from two extensive survey panels of Asian, Black, Latino, and Multiracial adults, which spanned the 2024 presidential contest between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. Across panels, we detect an influence of partisanship on PoC solidarity, with no clear evidence for a reverse relationship between these variables. Critically, partisanship’s linkage to PoC solidarity strengthens in waves that are more proximate to election day. These dynamics are substantively similar across racially stigmatized groups, suggesting that solidarity between people of color is partly rooted in the salience of presidential campaigns and the incentives they provide to build cross-racial alliances.

How to address the grief that attends the inevitable loss in war of those we love? How to turn victims of war into heroes? How to resolve the agonizing choices that war imposes on us? Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis , the tale of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, and Pericles’s Funeral Oration as imagined by Thucydides were both written during the Peloponnesian War, and each points to the creation of stories told to assuage the grief that follows the loss of loved ones and to obscure the challenging moral choices that wars demand. Euripides’s characters are trapped by the moral ambiguities that plague our political decision-making and, through a startling conclusion to the play that recalls the language of Pericles’s Funeral Oration, they welcome the “vain myths” we introduce to make our wartime decisions seem painless and our moral dilemmas disappear. Only the mother Clytemnestra refuses to be lulled by the stories or disappear happily within the walls of her palace. The tragedian can give full voice to the complex role of those stories; the rhetoric of the political leader obscures the ambiguity and “vanity” of those myths. Given the wide familiarity with Pericles’s Funeral Oration, I devote most of my attention to Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and conclude with a discussion of Pericles’s famous speech.

Why do senators choose to talk about filibustering, a tool widely associated with obstruction and gridlock? This paper examines how senators strategically reference filibustering in official communications, focusing on two rhetorical frames: credit claiming and blaming. Using an original dataset of Senate press releases from the 109th through 118th Congresses, I show that filibuster rhetoric is structured primarily by party status: minority‐party senators claim credit for obstruction, while majority‐party senators assign blame. Individual‐level factors such as electoral safety and ideological extremity play a limited role. Contrary to expectations, filibuster credit claiming has declined over time, while evidence of increased blaming is mixed. Additional analyses show that these patterns persist across institutional contexts, including unified and divided government, respond to changes in filibuster rules for judicial nominations, and shift within senators as party control changes. Filibuster rhetoric serves as a strategic tool for signaling resistance and shifting blame.

State legislators play a key role in election administration, but have increasingly challenged the legitimacy of elections. Using a dataset of tweets from over 4200 state legislators, we examine the institutional, individual, and state‐level factors associated with legislators' propensity to make electoral fraud claims from 2019 to 2022, a period characterized by heightened criticism of status quo electoral procedure. We find that Republican partisanship, state polarization, serving in a state with a higher nonwhite population, and belonging to the state's upper chamber are correlated with more frequent election fraud tweets. Meanwhile, legislative professionalism, committee leadership, unified government, and being a female legislator are associated with making fewer fraud claims. By shifting attention from Congress to state legislatures—institutions that directly oversee election rules and administration—we identify correlates of public contestation of electoral procedure among subnational elites.

This study uses the learning management system (LMS) to track student engagement with a pedagogical intervention in a research methods course. The data were collected over 10 semesters to gauge whether students accessed the supplemental learning materials and whether those materials impacted their learning. I find that although the level of engagement and its effectiveness were mixed and varied by semester, engaging more with the supplemental materials did improve student performance overall. This research emphasizes the importance of measuring whether our interventions even reach their intended targets (i.e., students) and demonstrates the utility of the LMS as a data-collection tool for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research.

This study revisits Paula D. McClain and Joseph Stewart Jr.’s (1995) framework of competition and coalition among racial and ethnic minorities to analyze Black American responses to immigration in Chicago. It contends that contemporary perspectives reveal complicated solidarities, which are tensions between racial solidarity and material preservation shaped by globalization, neoliberal urban governance, and evolving political narratives. Using qualitative analysis of municipal documents, public debates, and media coverage, this article demonstrates that institutional neglect and racialized governance shape how Black communities interpret migrant inclusion. The findings extend McClain and Stewart’s (1995) framework by centering intra-Black diversity, structural inequality, and urban policy as key dimensions of race and immigrant politics in twenty-first-century America.

Despite growing attention to gender biases in student evaluations of teaching (SET) in political science, research on effective mitigation strategies remains limited. Given the reliance on SET as a dominant measure of teaching quality in higher education, this study investigates the impact of short-term bias mitigation prompts and prolonged exposure to gender-focused topics on SET. Using a survey experiment conducted in general education social science courses at a mid-sized, Midwestern nonprofit Catholic university, we found that bias mitigation prompts encouraged greater self-reflection, prompting students to critically evaluate their instructors and their own performance. This intervention appeared to reduce the advantages previously afforded to men instructors. However, exposure to gender topics revealed a complex dynamic: whereas gender-related courses are associated with higher SET ratings overall, this positive effect is significantly weakened for women instructors. Women teaching gender-related courses receive lower evaluations than would be expected based on the separate effects of course topic and instructor gender. Our findings underscore the complex interplay among faculty members’ gender, gender education, and persistent stereotypes.