Electoral reform efforts in the United States are widespread, yet little is known about how Americans evaluate alternative electoral systems or their consequences. We address this gap using conjoint and vignette experiments to study how Americans assess electoral reforms based on their implications for the number of parties and the degree of ideological polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives. Focusing on democratic voice, governability, and responsiveness, our designs emphasize party-system outcomes rather than technical institutional features that may be difficult for citizens to understand. We find that Americans are strongly averse to reforms that generate pronounced legislative polarization, even when it might be expected to enhance democratic voice. Findings pertaining to multipartism are more mixed, with some evidence that respondents respond positively to moderate departures from the two-party system. Perceived gains in voice and responsiveness do not generally compensate for losses in governability, except under arrangements that avoid polarization.

This article analyzes three kinds of privilege—roughly, the monopoly or near-monopoly of a prized social good by a group—in terms of the political barriers facing attempts to reform them. Extending previous work, it distinguishes among discrimination privileges, which are zero-sum and relative, benefiting some groups at others’ expense; monopolized social right privileges, involving goods enjoyed only by some that can and should be extended to all; and differential treatment privileges, involving disagreement over whether a good currently monopolized by some should be extended to all or to none. The political barriers to reforming discrimination privilege involve group interest; those to reforming monopolized social rights include privilege, ignorance, cost, priorities, policy uncertainty, and the psychological wage. Differential treatment privilege is complicated. An exercise in applied political realism, this article treats normative categories as political inputs rather than philosophical conclusions and seeks to demonstrate the insights enabled by doing so.

The literature on Political Business Cycles (PBCs) has suffered from two limitations, namely a dominant focus on government policies rather than outcomes that could influence voter behaviour, and a lack of attention to the relationship between PBCs and democratization. Using multiple fine-grained data on objective and subjective outcomes we examine the nature of PBCs in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region which has experienced substantial levels of democratization in recent decades. We demonstrate clear evidence for the existence of PBCs in Sub-Saharan Africa and that the nature of the PBC changes with democratization. Specifically, we show that PBCs in non-democracies focus more on the provision of private goods and less on public goods, with this reversing as countries democratize. These findings, which hold across data sources and are robust to various specifications, have important implications for our understanding of the link between elections and development outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

The puzzle posed by the lack of viable parties in Western democracies in the left-authoritarian quadrant of a two-dimensional space likely has demand- as well as supply-side explanations. This paper focuses on the demand side and argues that left-authoritarian voters are internally divided by the extent to which they combine two distinct non-economic preferences: views on the socio-political order (libertarian vs. authoritarian) and views on immigration (cosmopolitan vs. nativist). Leftwing citizens holding the resulting three preference bundles – left-authoritarian-nativist, left-libertarian-nativist, and left-authoritarian-cosmopolitan – have distinct and predictable partisan leanings. This complicates party entry into the left-authoritarian quadrant. Furthermore, existing parties can try to preempt party entry by appealing to a subset of left-authoritarian citizens. Nevertheless, the lack of left-authoritarian parties is likely a fleeting historical phenomenon.

The immigration debate is a major source of political conflict, yet little is known about how citizens themselves perceive it. This paper uses a survey experiment with open-ended questions to examine which arguments respondents attribute to their opponents, which they consider the strongest for the opposing side, and how both compare to the arguments opponents actually use. The study is conducted in Norway, a low-polarization, consensus-oriented context where relatively accurate and charitable interpretations of opponents’ reasoning might be expected. Still, the findings show that while many recognize legitimate arguments on the other side, they attribute considerably weaker arguments to their opponents. Text analysis reveals that their preferred counterarguments resemble opponents’ own more closely than those they attribute to them. This suggests that mutual understanding in the immigration debate is obstructed less by a failure to appreciate opponents’ arguments than a systematic misrepresentation of them.

Exclusionary attitudes are often justified by histories of conflict. A large body of literature explores how making in-group victimhood salient can affect attitudes towards out-groups. Much less, however, has been done to study how episodes in history that position the in-group as perpetrators may reduce or exacerbate animosity towards the victimized group. We fill this gap by studying antisemitism in contemporary Spain. Using a well-powered and pre-registered survey experiment, we prime respondents with the historical expulsion of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century. The effects of priming this historical episode are conditional on one’s degree of national attachment: respondents who are less attached to the Spanish nation express lower levels of antisemitism in response to the treatment, while those reporting high levels of attachment appear to exhibit a modest backlash. These results update our understanding of how majority populations confront histories that implicate their own group as perpetrators.

Political tolerance of others’ civil liberties is an essential and everyday condition of democratic politics without which citizens cannot engage constructively with those of different views. In this paper, we combine insights from political theory and political behaviour to develop and test the concept of ‘partisan intolerance’. We conceptualize partisan intolerance as the gap between a person’s willingness to interfere with contentious activities by in-partisans versus the same activities by out-partisans. Using two pre-registered experiments, we find high levels of partisan intolerance in Britain. Moreover, while partisan intolerance is not associated with abstract measures of political tolerance, we find a strong association with affective partisan polarization. Our findings thus suggest that increasing affective polarization among partisans is accompanied by a high degree of intolerance towards their opponents’ basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.

Why are electoral winners more willing to support democratic norm violations? Using a mediator blockage survey experiment in the United States, I find that winners endorse norm erosion due to heightened in-party favoritism following their party’s electoral victory. The experiment successfully manipulated in-party favoritism, the mediator, demonstrating that respondents exposed to a winning signal, suggesting their party is likely to secure both the presidency and control of Congress, exhibit greater in-party favoritism. This increase significantly predicts a greater tendency to perceive norm-eroding policies, such as banning protests or disqualifying candidates, as democratic and to support these policies. Additionally, winners are less likely to evaluate these policies through a lens of strategic political calculation, that is, whether these policies benefit their party directly or indirectly, challenging the prevailing view that winners tolerate norm violations for instrumental reasons.

In recent years, proposals for legislatures composed of ordinary citizens have attracted renewed attention. Political theorists have advanced diverse arguments for transferring legislative powers traditionally reserved for elected officials to randomly selected citizens, appealing to fairness, equality, and protection against corruption, as well as to improved representation and collective problem-solving. Yet these arguments hinge on a contested assumption: that citizens can competently legislate and resist capture by experts or interest groups. This paper examines the 2019–2020 French Citizens’ Convention for Climate (CCC) as a proof of concept for citizen lawmaking. Drawing on firsthand observations we argue that the CCC’s design effectively transformed its 150 members into de facto legislators. We develop the concept of the “citizen-legislator,” refining Mark Warren’s (2009) notion of the “citizen-representative,” and propose criteria for evaluating the quality of citizens’ legislative outputs. Finally, we identify the normative principle “citizens on top, experts on tap” as crucial to the Convention’s ability to preserve citizen autonomy and prevent capture. The CCC, we conclude, demonstrates the feasibility of involving ordinary citizens qua legislators in more inclusive and participatory forms of democratic governance.

The article reconstructs the missing debate between the Latin American theory of dependencia and the US theory of interdependence. It explores a set of central works in both schools of thought spanning 50 years of scholarship. It puts forward three main claims. First, dependencia shares a common interest with Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s Power and Interdependence in theorizing the consequences that stem from asymmetrical relationships. Second, this common interest fades away with the transition from Power and Interdependence toward neoliberal institutionalism. Third, following the 2008 financial crisis, interest in structural asymmetries has reemerged through a new generation of researchers who are engaging with dependencia, as well as through the critique that US scholars of “weaponized interdependence” make against neoliberal institutionalism. The paper concludes by outlining how a debate between recent scholarship on dependencia and weaponized interdependence would look against the backdrop of the “hierarchy turn” in international relations theory.

What makes politicians personally invested in climate issues? While we know which politicians speak on climate issues, we lack knowledge of whether they do so out of electoral reasons or being assigned to this issue by their party leaders or whether they are personally invested in these issues. I argue that young members of parliament (MPs) and MPs from green and progressive parties are more emotionally invested in climate issues and that the emotional investment in climate issues has increased over time for all MPs. I use data on the emotional engagement of MPs during their speeches in the German Bundestag from 2011 to 2020 measuring emotional engagement via vocal pitch. Analyzing within-MP variation, I find that MPs are overall more emotionally engaged when giving speeches mentioning climate issues and that this effect has increased substantially over time. Contrary to my expectations, I find no difference between MPs with a different age or party affiliation. These findings have important implications for understanding the drivers of the personal engagement of politicians with climate issues. They indicate that both support of climate action and opposition to it may increase emotional engagement.

What causes increased spending on family work policies? The empirical record suggests that increasing women’s representation leads to an increase in welfare spending when the representational increase reflects a legislative shift to the Left. Here, we argue that family work policy is an issue that spans the ideological spectrum, with women on the Left and Right more likely than their male counterparts to prioritize spending on policies that directly enable women’s presence in the formal labor force. The adoption of a gender quota that applies only in larger Italian municipalities enables us to causally evaluate whether greater women’s political representation translates into more spending on the provision of preschool education. Our findings support the argument that women’s descriptive representation can lead directly to women’s substantive representation, particularly when we focus on a policy area – in this case, pre-primary education – with shared implications for women across the political spectrum.

Whistleblowing is increasingly viewed as a valuable mechanism to root out misconduct and corruption, yet we know very little about the conditions under which it is used in political parties. Building upon literature from social psychology, this study argues that the decision to blow the whistle on party colleagues is the outcome of a trade-off between two basic moral values that are particularly acute in the case of politicians: fairness and loyalty. Using a novel pre-registered survey experiment with over 1,000 Swedish politicians, this paper establishes that priming values of fairness can increase a politician’s willingness to blow the whistle against fellow party members. However, priming values of loyalty has no effect on whistleblowing intentions relative to control conditions. Results also suggest that severe misconduct is more likely to be reported only when it was committed by an individual rather than the party collectively, and that the party’s inaction is the biggest cause of external whistleblowing. The results of this study have significant implications for our understanding of the impact of organisational cultures and accountability on the behaviour of politicians.

We are experiencing a crisis of trust in democracy. As elections become increasingly digitized, voters have grown uneasy with the digital infrastructure that underpins the electoral process. This study investigates how cyber threat narratives erode trust in the integrity of elections, and tests targeted interventions to counteract this effect. Using a pre-registered, two-wave survey experiment fielded during the 2024 election, we find that media coverage of cyberattacks significantly undermines perceptions of electoral integrity, an effect that spans party lines. Even cyberattacks unrelated to elections reduced trust in voting systems, suggesting that voters generalize digital insecurity. However, offering some hope, we also identify an intervention that counteracts the negative effect. By inoculating participants four weeks earlier with a short video describing election safeguards, participants maintained stable trust levels despite their later exposure to threatening content. These findings offer a new perspective on democratic trust in an age of digital elections.

Recent experimental studies have found that foreign shaming can be counterproductive, engendering more positive public opinion toward a target government. This paper shows that whether foreign shaming in fact leads to this kind of backlash is dependent on citizens’ exposure to the shaming. A modified participant preference trial finds that less nationalist Chinese citizens are significantly more likely to choose to read about American criticism of COVID-19 policies in China. While the criticism has no impact on those respondents who choose to read it, it significantly increases support for the Chinese government among those who choose not to. These findings demonstrate the importance of understanding which members of the public are exposed to international actions, and how campaigns to highlight these actions may make a backlash more likely.

Macro-level research finds that group-based inequalities are more likely than interpersonal inequalities to spark political conflict and instability. However, the individual-level mechanisms driving this relationship remain empirically underexamined. We test the central hypothesis that group-based disparities evoke stronger feelings and perceptions of injustice than interpersonal inequalities. Drawing on three preregistered priming experiments among disadvantaged groups in India (n = 1,600), South Africa (n = 1,600), and the United States (n = 3,000), we find limited evidence that intergroup inequality is perceived as more unfair and evokes stronger feelings of injustice than interpersonal inequality. Our findings question the view that ethnic inequalities are perceived as particularly unfair at the individual level, suggesting that their link to conflict may instead operate through other micro-level mechanisms.

Particularly in democracies like the United States, the effective use of expertise to inform better policy decisions depends on public buy‐in. One barrier to this is biased assimilation, wherein individuals evaluate expert‐based knowledge, and the experts who promote it, differently based on alignment with their existing policy attitudes. While biased assimilation effects are well‐established, less is known about whether attitude‐level attributes like moral conviction may moderate them, as well as whether this effect may spill over into more general attitudes toward science. Using a two‐wave survey experiment in a sample of U.S. adults, this study confirms biased assimilation effects, as well as a novel moderating effect such that biased assimilation is strongest when it comes to attitudes held with strong moral conviction. As the moralization of an attitude increases, so do evaluations of pro‐attitudinal scientific knowledge and expert recommendations, suggesting that moral conviction may make people less critical information consumers. However, I find little evidence that these dynamics carry over into general attitudes toward scientific knowledge and scientists, even among those with the strongest moral conviction. These findings should temper fears that moralization or the use of expertise in divisive policy issues will erode general public support for science.

Participation in ideologically motivated boycotts and buycotts (i.e., political consumerism) represents an increasingly important form of collective action. However, relatively few studies have investigated this phenomenon, and little is known about its psychological predictors. We tested whether group‐based psychological constructs—group identification and contribution guilt (i.e., guilt arising from the perception of having insufficient contribution to a cause)—predicted political consumerism in the context of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. Study 1, a large two‐wave prospective study ( N = 6014), found that identification with the radical faction of the protest movement and contribution guilt predicted future participation in boycotts and buycotts. Likewise, Study 2, a pre‐registered daily diary study ( N = 110), found that identification with the protest movement and contribution guilt regarding political consumerism significantly predicted actual political consumerism behavior. Together, this research provides ecologically valid evidence that group identification and contribution guilt are important predictors of political consumerism.

This article applies the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits (CPM) to predict electoral participation and party choice. Across three studies conducted on representative samples of Poles (total N = 2936), respondents reported their voting behavior in six elections held between 2011 and 2025 (covering parliamentary, presidential, and European contests). The results demonstrate that the CPM offers a comprehensive framework that not only outperforms the Big Five in predictive validity but also reveals the systemic psychological underpinnings of political behavior. Voter turnout was consistently driven by sectors responsible for social regulation and stability—Alpha‐Plus, Gamma‐Plus, and Delta‐Plus—whereas abstention was rooted in psychological withdrawal, distrust, and disharmony (Gamma‐Minus, Alpha‐Minus). Support for the liberal Civic Coalition (KO) reflected a desire for intellectual novelty and personal autonomy (Beta‐Plus, Delta‐Minus) anchored in social cooperation (Gamma‐Plus). Conversely, the Law and Justice party (PiS) strongly aligned with the “grievance politics” hypothesis, drawing its core support from sectors defined by ressentiment and hostility (Gamma‐Minus, Alpha‐Minus) rather than traditional conservatism (Delta‐Plus). However, the analysis also revealed that PiS successfully mobilized the stability‐oriented Alpha‐Plus sector, thereby forming a heterogeneous coalition of rebellious disruptors (Alpha‐Minus) and stability‐seeking rationalists (Alpha‐Plus). These patterns were largely consistent across the election cycles.

Economic sanctions are a critical tool of international diplomacy. Existing scholarship shows that citizens in democratic sender states value sanctions that are effective in producing policy concessions. However, they also seek to limit the adverse humanitarian consequences of sanction imposition. How do citizens trade off these objectives against each other? We develop a theory of sanctions preferences where citizens (1) value policy concessions, (2) hold humanitarian motivations and (3) hold beliefs about how policy change occurs in autocracies. We argue that citizens are conditional humanitarians – humanitarian concerns dominate effectiveness considerations only if policy concessions are unlikely. Results from a pre-registered willingness-to-pay experiment examining the preferences of German citizens on sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine confirm the predictions of our theory.

The Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues (S/GWI or GWI) at the United States Department of State was established in 2009 when Hillary Clinton served as U.S. Secretary of State during the administration of Barack Obama. S/GWI’s mandate was to promote the rights and empowerment of women and girls through U.S. foreign policy. During the administration of Joe Biden, Kat Fotovat (KF) served as Senior Bureau Official and, for two years, as Acting Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues. Rachel Wein (RW) was the Women, Peace, and Security Advisor, and Varina Winder (VW) served as Senior Advisor and Chief of Staff. In 2025, the Donald Trump administration eliminated S/GWI as well as the Ambassadorship. This is an edited and compiled version of three interviews that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 7, 2026; January 14, 2026; and January 30, 2026.

The Bureau on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) advanced democratic development around the globe, with a focus on building strong institutions and protecting citizens’ rights. Julie Denham (JD) served as Senior Advisor on Elections and Political Transitions. The gender team at DRG included Caroline Hubbard (CH) as Senior Gender Advisor and Team Lead, Rebecca Gordon (RG) as Senior Gender Specialist, Alessia Stewart (AS) as Gender Advisor, and Meg McClure (MM) as Coordinator of the Network for Gender Inclusive Democracy. In early 2025, the Donald Trump administration officially shut down USAID, including the democracy, human rights, and governance portfolio. This is an edited and compiled version of five interviews that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on December 16, 2025; January 9, 2026; January 15, 2026; January 27, 2026; and January 28, 2026.

Research on competition and policy diffusion has made important contributions to our understanding of how political and economic factors influence policy adoption and change. In the following article, I examine how the adoption of Indian gaming compacts between Tribes and state governments are influenced by proximity to surrounding Native nations over 30 years of legal existence. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988 created the legal framework for the adoption of Tribal gaming in the United States, requiring states and Tribes to sign compact agreements prior to opening “Las Vegas style” casinos subject to federal approval. Based on coding of more than 400 compact agreements from 1989 to 2019, this article explores how proximity to Tribes in neighboring states influences compact adoption and expansion in the U.S. I find that the number of neighboring gaming states with a Tribe close to the border has a positive impact on Indian gaming expansion, while decisions to adopt gaming for the first time are influenced by social learning from neighboring states. The results of this study suggest the dynamic way that Tribes as sovereign governments influence the policy diffusion process.

Core political values, which reflect abstract, prescriptive beliefs about humanity, society, and public affairs, have long been recognized as central elements in belief systems. Despite their demonstrated importance, for example, in structuring issue attitudes, evidence regarding their ability to shape partisanship is surprisingly under-examined, with limited evidence to date finding, in the United States, that partisanship structures core values, with little reciprocal influence. I reexamine this here, using panel data from the 2016-2020-2024 ANES. Overall, I find that ordinary Americans do indeed update their partisan attachments, to a substantively significant degree, in order to better align their party support with their core value orientations. I also find that this relationship is not confined to a politically sophisticated minority of the public. Importantly, I find that partisanship and values dynamically influence each other, rather than the former dominating the latter. These findings have important implications for collective understanding regarding mass belief systems, as well as for the nature and dynamics of American mass partisanship.

While interest group influences on U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been extensively studied, research on the role that litigants’ social identity group cues play in judicial ideology and decision-making is in its infancy. We hypothesize that justices will rely on both their policy preferences and group cues to decide cases. To test these hypotheses, we develop new measures of litigant social group identity, relying on both left-right ideology and political culture. We employ these measures using ideologies and political cultures advanced in one set of cases to predict those advanced in another set of cases between 1946 and 2001. As expected, we find that ideology, political cultural values, and litigant social group identities have both independent and interactive effects on judicial decisions, with group identities having a bigger impact among moderate justices.

Solidarity and fairness in allocating refugee protection responsibilities is a central challenge in European asylum governance. The Dublin Regulation, assigning responsibility primarily to first countries of entry, has been criticised for exacerbating unequal burdens to member states. Yet systematic evidence on how Dublin transfers affect the distribution of responsibilities remains scarce. This article analyses Dublin statistics from 2008 to 2024 using a distribution key based on member states’ size and wealth as normative benchmark. We assess whether Dublin transfers reduce or exacerbate asymmetries between member states. Contrary to common perceptions, Dublin transfers modestly reduce inequitable distribution of asylum responsibilities, resulting from geographic arrival patterns paired with partial implementation. These findings challenge prevailing critiques and offer insights for evaluating the EU's solidarity mechanism.

There has been a dramatic rise in voting for populist parties in Europe over the past thirty years. We assess the role of government labor market policy in dampening or provoking populist sentiment. Drawing from a panel of 134 elections from 1990 to 2021 and pooled cross-sectional data from eleven waves of the European Social Survey, we find evidence that populist parties fared worse where countries provided more robust income support to workers experiencing unemployment. The effect was stronger among those individuals who had experienced unemployment and among current and former trade union members. This suggests that the welfare cuts and labor-market reforms pursued since the early 2000's may have alienated vulnerable segments of the population and driven them toward populist parties.

The status of national minorities in Ukraine has become increasingly politicised, not only as Russia's justification for its invasions, but also due to Ukraine's bid for European Union membership. Minority rights reforms are central to EU accession, yet little is known about how EU-orientated citizens view policies of minority accommodation. We address this gap with an original quota-based online survey of 2100 respondents conducted in August 2023. Despite expectations that pro-EU orientations foster support for minority inclusion, we find the opposite: pro-European Ukrainians are opposed to diversity accommodations. These findings challenge assumptions about the normative influence of the EU in candidate states and raise critical questions about the coherence of EU enlargement policy, minority rights and post-conflict integration in Ukraine.

Mentoring programs are widely assumed to benefit women’s advancement in professional settings, including political science. However, causal evidence is scarce. We conducted a randomized evaluation of the American Political Science Association’s flagship women’s mentoring program for PhDs, the most rigorous evaluation in political science to date. The program consisted of a workshop followed by periodic small-group meetings. We randomized applicants to the program or a control group. We administered surveys pretreatment, immediately after the workshop, and two to seven years afterwards, collecting curriculum vitae and publication data during each wave. The program was rated positively by participants, increasing their sense of belonging in the profession at year 2, but otherwise had null effects. The results hold when we account for treatment uptake and strength; for various cohorts and time frames; and for a range of attitudes, behaviors, and publication metrics. More comprehensive reforms may be needed to make a long-term difference for women in academia.

Despite the centrality of tolerance and free expression to liberal democracy, little is known about the American public’s attitudes toward disruptive protest actions that suppress constitutionally protected speech. Drawing on a nationally representative survey, this article examines the acceptance of shouting down speakers, blocking audiences from attending events, and using violence to stop public speeches across two different question formats: (1) an abstract, “non-group” question; and (2) a “most-offensive-idea” question in which respondents evaluate tactics aimed at speech that they find personally offensive. Across both formats, Gen Z is significantly more accepting of shoutdowns, blockades, and violence than older cohorts. Ideological differences, however, depend heavily on the measurement approach, with liberals and conservatives diverging on the non-group questions but converging on the most-offensive-idea questions. Together, these results reveal a robust generational divide in permissiveness toward speech-suppressing protest and more conditional, context-dependent ideological differences.