We checked 31 political science journals on Friday, December 05, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period November 28 to December 04, we retrieved 39 new paper(s) in 16 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Reviewing fast or slow: A theory of summary reversal in the judicial hierarchy
Alexander V. Hirsch, Jonathan P. Kastellec, Anthony R. Taboni
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Appellate courts with discretionary dockets have multiple ways to review lower courts. We develop a formal model that evaluates the trade‐offs between “full review”—which features full briefing, oral arguments, and signed opinions—versus “quick review,” where a higher court can summarily reverse a lower court. We show that having the option of costless summary reversal can increase compliance by lower courts but also distorts their behavior compared to relying only on costly full review. When the higher court is uncertain about the lower court's preferences, the threat of summary reversal can lead an aligned lower court to “pander” and issue the opposite disposition to that preferred by the higher court. Access to summary reversal can therefore harm the higher court in some circumstances. Our analysis provides a theoretical foundation for growing concern over the U.S. Supreme Court's “shadow docket”—of which summarily reversals are a component—which has been empirically focused to date.
A drag on the ticket? Estimating top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on down‐ballot races
Kevin DeLuca, Daniel J. Moskowitz, Benjamin Schneer
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Campaign staff, journalists, and political scientists commonly attribute the poor performances of a party's down‐ballot candidates to low‐quality or extreme top‐of‐the‐ticket candidates, but empirical evidence on this conventional wisdom is scant. We estimate the effect of candidate quality and ideology in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections on co‐partisan vote shares in down‐ballot U.S. House races. While naive estimates imply that top‐of‐the‐ticket candidates influence down‐ballot outcomes, after accounting for correlations in candidate quality/ideology across offices, we estimate near‐zero statewide top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on U.S. House elections. We similarly observe near‐zero top‐of‐the‐ticket effects in the further‐down‐ballot settings of state‐legislative and county‐legislative elections. Overall, voters exhibit a strong capacity to discern differences in quality and ideology across offices and incorporate this information into their vote choice throughout the time period under investigation. However, in line with other research, this link between candidate quality/ideology and election outcomes has weakened considerably in recent years.

American Political Science Review

Replication of “Instrumentally Inclusive: The Political Psychology of Homonationalism” (Turnbull-Dugarte and López Ortega 2024)
DANIEL DE KADT
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Turnbull-Dugarte and LĂłpez Ortega (2024) argue that increasing exposure to sexually conservative ethnic out-groups causes instrumental support for LGBT+ rights among those predisposed to disfavor the ethnic out-group. The article presents results from two related experiments, one conducted in the UK and a follow up in Spain, where respondents were randomly assigned to read vignettes about anti-LGBT+ protests, and the identity of the protesters was varied. I outline a series of concerns with the article, primarily related to ad hoc empirical choices. The authors use weights (of undisclosed origin) that follow a peculiar bimodal distribution in the second study but use no weights in the first, and inconsistently use robust standard errors throughout. These choices create a pattern of statistically significant results consistent with their theory, a pattern that disappears when either choice is varied. Additional analyses show that, rather than supporting their theory, the second experiment contradicts it.

British Journal of Political Science

Defensible Democratic Meritocracy: A Competition-Based Account
Zhichao Tong
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The article offers a new defense of democratic meritocracy. Existing defenses of the hybrid regime have centered on ordinary citizens’ lack of sophisticated political knowledge and the importance of having particularly able individuals in charge of governing. But since electoral democracy also contains certain built-in mechanisms that, when combined with a functioning party system, are capable of reducing the cognitive burdens of average voters and empowering more competent individuals, such defenses fail to make a compelling case for democratic meritocracy. Specifically, they owe us a fully developed account of how those mechanisms of electoral democracy will be weakened by its other inherent features so that the hybrid regime becomes a desirable alternative. This article provides such an account by exploring how a well-designed democratic meritocracy can better avoid pathologies of unconstrained political competition that are not only troublesome in themselves but which also undermine electoral democracy’s ability to generate superior political outcomes.

Comparative Political Studies

The Archipelago Capitalism of Citizenship-By-Investment
Jelena DĆŸankić, Mira Seyfettinoglu, Ayelet Shachar, Maarten Vink, Luuk van der Baaren
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Citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programs, granting citizenship in return for financial payment or investment, have become a global phenomenon in recent years. The workings of these exceptional programs have caused controversy in real-life politics, ranging from protests, to the downfall of politicians, and to punitive bilateral and international measures. Even so, knowledge on why countries would put their citizenship up for sale has remained limited. This study combines insights from political science and legal theory to develop an original approach to understand states’ propensity to adopt investor citizenship policies as part of the offshore world, or the legal spaces of ‘archipelago capitalism’. We leverage a novel global longitudinal CBI dataset (1960–2023) to probe the empirical plausibility of this argument. In line with our expectations, we find that microstates, middle-income countries, and tax havens are more likely to implement CBI programs. CBI supply reflects a contemporary form of small state ingenuity.

Electoral Studies

Childhood poverty and political participation: The role of family, gender and economic mobility
Clara Weißenfels
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The rural-urban cleavage in US presidential elections: Stability and sudden change
Valentin Pautonnier, Ruth Dassonneville, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Richard Nadeau
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Burdens and gains. The association between house rent increases and voting in the city of Madrid
Álvaro Sånchez-García, Hugo Marcos-Marne
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Introduction to the Special Issue “The rural-urban divide in Europe: Assessing its impact on political attitudes and voting behavior”
Pedro Riera, Sigrid Roßteutscher
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International Organization

When Do Citizens Support Peace-Building? Economic Hardship and Civilian Support for Rebel Reintegration
Amanda Kennard, Konstantin Sonin, Austin L. Wright
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Key to the success of international peace-building efforts is the cooperation and support of civilian populations. Studies show that economic considerations shape combatants’ willingness to lay down their arms. We study a related but under-studied question: does economic hardship impact civilian support for conflict cessation? If reintegration of former combatants into productive economic sectors threatens civilians’ own incomes, then support for peace-building may diminish. We investigate localized effects of the 2015 Hindu Kush earthquake using individual-level survey data on support for Taliban reintegration. The earthquake reduced support for reintegration into disproportionately impacted economic sectors. We observe no effect for less impacted sectors. Results are robust to a battery of tests, including a novel spatial randomization leveraging geocoded fault lines corresponding to the universe of counterfactual earthquakes. Our findings provide new insight into the resolution of violent conflict: economic hardship may undermine civilian support for rebel reintegration.

Party Politics

The two faces of issue polarisation and their impact on party competition in Western Europe
William John Atkinson
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While polarisation is on the rise in Western Europe, there is little descriptive evidence about which issues divide voters and how. There are even fewer studies that seek to explain how party salience strategies respond to polarising issues. This study addresses these gaps, underscoring a conceptual distinction that is often missed in the literature on issue competition — namely, that issues can divide the electorate at large (‘general issue polarisation’), or according to the party they support (‘party issue polarisation’). Survey data about voter preferences in six Western European countries shows that the correlation between these two types of issue polarisation is weak. For example, while some cultural issues like soft drug policy and same-sex marriage are highly polarising in general, they do not divide supporters of opposing parties so much. Using party Twitter activity as the dependent variable, it is shown that parties put less emphasis on issues the more extreme voter preferences are, running contrary to predictions based on prior work. By contrast, issues higher in party polarisation received more attention. This study highlights the importance of taking a multidimensional approach to issue polarisation, and calls for more refined theories of how parties deal with polarising issues.
Promoting gender equality or co-opting feminism? Comparing actors in the European Parliament
Johanna Greiwe
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The European Parliament has established itself as a promoter of gender equality among European Union institutions. Yet, recent research has drawn a more nuanced picture pointing to the struggle over gender equality between different actors in the institution. Still, many facets of this struggle remain unexplored. This article links to the debate on the co-optation of feminism to shed further light on the opposition to gender equality in the European Parliament which appears in a pro-feminist guise. Analytically focusing on the meso- and micro-level, it applies a comparative research design, comparing political groups, national affiliation and individual Members of the Parliament. The results reveal further divisions among political groups, while highlighting the role of individual parliamentarians as driving forces of opposition. Crucially, they suggest the growing importance of right-wing, women MEPs in co-opting gender equality discourses.
A picture is worth a thousand words: Political party logos and logo change
Matthias Avina, Jae-Jae Spoon
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Virtually all political parties in Western Europe have a logo which is at the forefront of their promotional material. Despite their centrality to the party’s image, there has been little cross-national research on party logos. One likely reason for this is data limitations, as we have thus far lacked a comprehensive dataset on party logos. To fill this gap, this article introduces the “Political Parties Logos Database” (PPLD), the first comprehensive, cross-national database of party logos. In this article, we first introduce the PPLD and then use the database to empirically examine why parties change their logo. Drawing on seminal work on party change, we argue that parties change their logo after decreases in their electoral performance or changes in their party leader. Using the PPLD, we find little to no evidence that changes to a party’s electoral performance increases the probability of a party changing its logo. In contrast, we find strong evidence that changes to the party’s leader, moderated by the strength of the leader, predict party logo change. These results highlight the importance of party leaders for understanding party change while also demonstrating the utility of the PPLD.
Between ideology and politics: The foreign policy of Islamist political parties AlsabehTaghreed, Between Ideology and Politics: The Foreign Policy of Islamist Political Parties. London: I.B. Tauris, 2024. ÂŁ85.00 (hbk); x + 215 pp. ISBN 978-0-7556-5367-6.
Görkem Altınörs
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Banking on victory? Gender, campaign spending, and candidate nomination outcomes in Canada
Scott Pruysers, Rob Currie-Wood
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While candidate spending is a well-established predictor of electoral success in general elections, much less is known about the role of spending in intraparty elections. Drawing on a unique dataset of over 600 nomination contestants in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections, this study explores whether dynamics from the interparty arena also apply to the intraparty arena. We find that nomination contestant spending is positively associated with winning a party’s nomination. Contrary to expectations, however, we find no significant gender gap in total fundraising or spending: men and women raise and spend similar amounts. Nonetheless, we uncover consistent evidence of a gender gap in nomination fundraising effort, revealing that women candidates need twice as many donors to achieve the same fundraising results as men. Multivariate analyses confirm these patterns and further reinforce the notion that financial resources are a key determinant of political success not just in general elections but also in the earlier, intraparty, stages of candidate selection.

Perspectives on Politics

The Ideological Security Dilemma in International Relations: The Case of US–China Ideological Competition
Sungmin Cho
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Why does ideological competition between states intensify despite opportunities for coexistence? This article develops a theory of the ideological security dilemma to explain this puzzle. Like the military security dilemma, states may take defensive measures to safeguard the legitimacy of their own ideology, but these actions can be interpreted by others as ideological offensives aimed at weakening the legitimacy of rival ideologies. I test the theory through a process tracing of US–China ideological competition from 1991 to 2024. I find that although the United States initially hoped China would democratize voluntarily, democratizing China was not a central policy goal. Conversely, while China seeks global respect for its “China model,” actively exporting authoritarian ideology is not its goal either. Nevertheless, China perceives US efforts as aimed at regime change, prompting Beijing to promote the “China model” more assertively as a countermeasure to what it sees as a US ideological assault. This intensifies US fears of the global spread of authoritarianism and triggers further counteractions. This study integrates constructivist and realist approaches while drawing on insights from comparative politics on regime legitimacy and democratization.
Contra Schelling: The trap of Coercive Strategy in a Multinodal Era
Brantly Womack
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Thomas Schelling’s 1966 classic, Arms and Influence , became one of the major strategic works of the Cold War, and it remains the clearest argument for the implicit logic of American and Russian coercive forms of diplomacy. Schelling is incisive about the credibility of deterrence, but the credibility of leadership is reduced to the Cold War assumption that power is decisive. While the rise of China and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have rekindled interest in Schelling’s approach, the diffusion of agency and the interrelationship of issues in the current multinodal era have undermined the efficacy of hegemonic coercion. Rather than restoring Cold War bipolarity, the rise of China has created an asymmetric parity with the United States in which overlapping interdependencies inhibit the formation of camps. In the new era, the pursuit of strategic advantage by any state, large or small, must aim at securing its multidimensional welfare in a complex and unpredictable environment. The global powers are not hegemonic contenders, but rather the largest powers in a multinodal matrix of autonomous states in which each confronts uncertainty. A strategy based on coercion is likely to be less effective against its targets and more costly in its collateral effects. In a post-hegemonic era, Schelling’s premise that arms are the primary path to influence must be reexamined.

Political Analysis

Generic title: Not a research article
Survey Professionalism: New Evidence from Web Browsing Data – ERRATUM
Bernhard Clemm Von Hohenberg, Tiago Ventura, Jonathan Nagler, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Magdalena Wojcieszak
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Analyzing Political Text at Scale with Online Tensor LDA
Sara Kangaslahti, Danny Ebanks, Jean Kossaifi, Anqi Liu, R. Michael Alvarez, Animashree Anandkumar
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This article proposes a topic modeling method that scales linearly to billions of documents. We make three core contributions: i) we present a topic modeling method, tensor latent Dirichlet allocation, that has identifiable and recoverable parameter guarantees and sample complexity guarantees for large data; ii) we show that this method is computationally and memory efficient (achieving speeds over 3 $\times $ –4 $\times $ those of prior parallelized latent Dirichlet allocation methods), and that it scales linearly to text datasets with over a billion documents; and iii) we provide an open-source, GPU-based implementation of this method. This scaling enables previously prohibitive analyses, and we perform two real-world, large-scale new studies of interest to political scientists: we provide the first thorough analysis of the evolution of the #MeToo movement through the lens of over two years of Twitter conversation and a detailed study of social media conversations about election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Thus, this method provides social scientists with the ability to study very large corpora at scale and to answer important theoretically-relevant questions about salient issues in near real-time.
Measuring Politicians’ Public Personality Traits Using Computational Text Analysis: A Multimethod Feasibility Study for Agency and Communion
Lukas Birkenmaier, Clemens Lechner
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Citizens’ opinions about politicians are shaped by their perceptions of politicians’ personalities, characters, and traits. While prior research has investigated the traits voters value in politicians, less attention has been given to the traits politicians project in their public communication. This may stem from challenges in defining politicians’ public personality traits and measuring them at scale using computational text analysis. To address this challenge, we propose a computational approach that builds on public statements ( personality cues ) to infer politicians’ personalities from textual data. To do so, we operationalize two key political traits—agency and communion—using a theory-driven, domain-specific framework. We then compare various computational text analysis methods for extracting these traits from a large corpus of politicians’ parliamentary speeches, social media posts, and interviews. We validate our approach using a comprehensive set of human-labeled data, functional tests, and analyses of how prominently personality traits appear in the statements of German politicians and in the 2024 U.S. presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Our findings indicate that prompting based techniques, particularly those leveraging advanced models such as DeepSeek-V3, outperform supervised and semisupervised methods. These results point to promising directions for advancing political psychology.

Political Behavior

Affective States: Cultural and Affective Polarization in a Multilevel-Multiparty System
Dylan Paltra, Marius SĂ€ltzer, Christian Stecker
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Affective Polarization—the growing mutual dislike among partisan groups—has been identified as a major concern in democracies. Although both economic and cultural ideological divides contribute to ideological polarization, their affective consequences can differ. This paper argues that cultural polarization becomes especially consequential when mobilized by far-right parties. Using data from 116 elections in Germany’s 16 states (1990-2023), we combine more than 550 state-level manifestos with more than 150,000 survey responses to examine how party polarization translates into voter affect. Our analyses show that both economic and cultural polarization increase affective divides, but cultural disagreements fuel hostility only in the presence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Acting as a cultural entrepreneur, the AfD amplifies the emotional impact of cultural divisions such as immigration, employing affective rhetoric and provoking strong rejection from other parties and voters. These findings highlight the catalytic role of far-right parties in transforming ideological competition into affective polarization.
Misperceptions of Out-Partisan Anti-Deliberative Attitudes Shape Partisan Affective and Discursive Preferences
Edward Hohe
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Political Geography

Own, fund, and spill: Canada's ‘frontier-making state project,’ 1973–84
James Wilt
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Hosting as a border making process: Understanding the role of proximity in explaining the motivations of British hosts in the Homes for Ukraine scheme
Audrey Lumley-Sapanski, Kate Garbers
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Police use of force data collection issues in Florida: A minor critique
Adam Rose, Tyler McCreary, Miltonette Craig, April Jackson
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“The choice is none”: AI and the militarization of European research
Valentina Carraro
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(Un)Making mess at Europe's data borders: Order, control, critique
Claudia Aradau, Lucrezia Canzutti, Sarah Perret
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Political Psychology

Generic title: Not a research article
Issue Information
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Adult belief change: New theoretical and empirical perspectives special issue introduction
Katerina Manevska, Kaat Smets
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Belief change in later life is understudied as it goes against the well‐established idea that political attitudes are formed early on in life and remain mostly stable thereafter. Recently, some studies have emerged that address adult belief change. However, these studies are mostly descriptive and offer relatively little insight into how, for whom, and under which conditions adult belief change takes place. This special issue on adult belief change addresses new theoretical and methodological perspectives and sets the agenda for future research on this highly relevant theme. Together, the special issue contributions provide robust evidence for changing beliefs well into adulthood. This implies that attitudes are not as fixed or settled as previously thought. A better understanding of the processes of adult belief change is vital to understand the social and psychological aspects of national and international political developments, especially in the current context of ongoing political change. The works presented in this special issue form an important starting point for further advancing research in this direction.
A certainty‐weighted, belief‐based model of political attitudes: A Bayesian analysis of American public attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act
Gabriel Miao Li, Josh Pasek, Jon A. Krosnick
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This study proposes a novel, certainty‐weighted account of the process by which political beliefs shape political attitudes. Building upon expectancy‐value frameworks, this paper introduces belief certainty as a moderator of belief impact. A Bayesian partial‐pooling approach is used to test a model positing how beliefs about what the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act does and does not do relate to overall attitudes toward the law. This analytic method manages the complexity of multiple potentially correlated beliefs and evaluations by imposing a structural constraint to avoid multicollinearity and enable accurate estimation of parameters. Data from a nationally representative sample survey of American adults support the model's core propositions. Counterfactual simulations further reveal that belief certainty substantially amplifies the weight of both accurate and inaccurate beliefs, thereby intensifying attitudes and amplifying polarization. These findings highlight the role of belief certainty in shaping political judgments and offer a methodological pathway for researchers to model the interplay of multiple correlated political beliefs in an era of abundant—sometimes erroneous—information.
“I had to open my eyes”—A narrative approach to studying the process of adult belief change
Marcel van den Haak, Kamile Grusauskaite
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Why do people, socialized and sedimented in their political beliefs, change their convictions in adulthood? Belief change has a long history of research in the social sciences. Yet, in quantitative research, belief change is studied largely through cognitive and behavioral lenses, that, however valuable, struggle to capture how people themselves experience and narrate transformation and how this is made meaningful and sustained as a social process . Additionally, qualitative studies on belief change remain marginal in the field and are often confined to case‐specific analyses of radical conversions. In response to this gap, this paper develops a qualitative and narrative approach to studying belief change. First, we argue that belief change is biographically situated, culturally mediated and socially embedded. Then, we draw on two contrasting case studies—on turning towards conspiracy theories and gaining anti‐racist awareness through film—to find “master narratives” of belief change. We offer a framework that distinguishes three recurring narrative steps, rooted in cultural repertoires: retrospective constructions of past selves, narrations of transformation, and interpretations of present selves in relation to these transformations. This theoretical and methodological framework aims to contribute to the further understanding of belief change as not only an attitudinal shift but also a reworking of one's life story.
Advancing the interface between research and practice in sustainable development: A view from Political Psychology
James. H. Liu, Veronica Hopner, Orla Muldoon, Sammyh Khan
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Political Science Research and Methods

Re-examining the effects of Western sanctions on democracy and human rights in the 21 st century
Anton Peez
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Do economic sanctions negatively affect democracy and human rights in targeted countries? Although often intended to improve these outcomes, their record of doing so has historically been mixed at best. Most canonical studies cover the 1980s–1990s, but sanctions practice has since undergone major innovations following debates on humanitarian harm. Given this move toward ‘targeted’ sanctions, it stands to reason that sanctions may today be achieving their intended purposes. I take up policy and methodological innovations to re-examine the effects of Western sanctions seeking to improve democracy and human rights from 1990 to 2021. I find that negative effects persist, offering an important update to the empirical literature. Beyond this contribution, I present a template for replicating and extending country-year research in international relations (IR).
What can dual citizens teach us about political engagement?
Seyoung Jung, Younghyun Lee, Cara Wong
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While we witness historic changes taking place in the conception and practice of citizenship, we know little about the political consequences it may bring. What are the effects of citizenship, as a status and a process, on political engagement? To gain leverage in addressing this question, we draw on citizenship categories that combine birthplace and the number of citizenship held. We compare US-born dual citizens to both naturalized-dual citizens and US-born mono citizens, which allows us to distinguish between the potential effects of socialization and the additional legal status. The study analyses two large nationally representative samples, presenting the first look at dual citizens in the United States. Results indicate that among dual citizens, those born in the US tend to participate more in politics than immigrants who naturalized. Among US-born citizens, the political participation of dual and mono citizens varies depending on the type of political activity. The study contributes to theoretical discussions on the relationship between an evolving citizenry and democratic participation.
Partisan conflict in nonverbal communication
Mathias Rask, Frederik Hjorth
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In multiparty systems, parties signal conflict through communication, yet standard approaches to measuring partisan conflict in communication consider only the verbal dimension. We expand the study of partisan conflict to the nonverbal dimension by developing a measure of conflict signaling based on variation in a speaker’s expressed emotional arousal, as indicated by changes in vocal pitch. We demonstrate our approach using comprehensive audio data from parliamentary debates in Denmark spanning more than two decades. We find that arousal reflects prevailing patterns of partisan polarization and predicts subsequent legislative behavior. Moreover, we show that consistent with a strategic model of behavior, arousal tracks the electoral and policy incentives faced by legislators. All results persist when we account for the verbal content of speech. By documenting a novel dimension of elite communication of partisan conflict and providing evidence for the strategic use of nonverbal signals, our findings deepen our understanding of the nature of elite partisan communication.
Is ChatGPT conservative or liberal? A novel approach to assess ideological stances and biases in generative LLMs
Christina P. Walker, Joan C. Timoneda
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Extant work shows that generative AI such as GPT-3.5 and perpetuate social stereotypes and biases. A less explored source of bias is ideology: do GPT models take ideological stances on politically sensitive topics? We develop a novel approach to identify ideological bias and show that it can originate in both the training data and the filtering algorithm. Using linguistic variation across countries with contrasting political attitudes, we evaluate average GPT responses in those languages. GPT output is more conservative in languages conservative societies (polish) and more liberal in languages used in liberal ones (Swedish). These differences persist from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4. We conclude that high-quality, curated training data are essential for reducing bias.
Limited backlash? Assessing the geographic scope of electoral responses to refugees
Jeremy Ferwerda, Sascha Riaz
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Recent research suggests that local exposure to refugees does not increase support for far-right parties. We challenge this null result by drawing on granular data from Berlin in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis. While prior work in the German context has generally assumed that refugee exposure is exogenous at the local level, we demonstrate that refugee housing was disproportionately concentrated in neighborhoods with young, non-citizen residents. To address this selection bias, we harmonize in-person and mail-in precinct boundaries across elections and implement a difference-in-differences design with synthetic precincts. We find that localized exposure to refugee housing did increase support for the far-right in the 2017 federal elections. However, this backlash is geographically narrow in scope. Our findings nuance prior research by demonstrating that even if sociotropic concerns dominate electoral responses to the refugee crisis, voters’ responses are consistent with group threat theory at the local level.

PS: Political Science & Politics

When Ideology Trumps Deliberation: Evidence from Chile’s 2022 Constitutional Proposal – ADDENDUM
René Tapia
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Research & Politics

Strict voter identification laws and turnout: Differential effects by election type and adoption timing
Rivka Lipkovitz
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Voter identification (ID) requirements remain a contested policy issue in American elections, with existing research producing mixed findings about their causal effects on voter turnout. Using state-level turnout data from 1984 to 2020 and synthetic difference-in-differences to control for time-varying confounders and increase statistical power, I examine the impact of strict voter ID laws across presidential and midterm elections and between early-adopting and late-adopting states. In aggregate, the laws have no significant effect on turnout. However, the disaggregated analysis reveals heterogeneity that may explain the conflicting findings in the literature. In presidential elections, late-adopting states—those passing laws after 2008—experience a 2.7 percentage point decrease in turnout, while early-adopting states—those passing laws before 2008—are not significantly affected. For midterm elections, there is no evidence of decreased turnout; counterintuitively, the main analysis suggests an increase of 2.9 percentage points, with larger effects among early-adopting states, though this finding is not robust across all specifications. Overall, these results indicate no compelling evidence that strict voter ID laws consistently suppress or boost voter turnout. Rather, the modest and opposing impacts across contexts appear to net out to minimal aggregate effects on participation, consistent with research showing that electoral reforms often produce small equilibrium effects.
Presidential approval, party brands, and candidate quality in U.S. national elections
Carlos Algara, Byengseon Bae, Edward Headington, Hengjiang Liu, Bianca Nigri, Lisette Gomez
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This article considers (1) presidential approval, (2) party brand differentials, as measured by the generic ballot, and (3) the presidential candidate polling differentials during the general election campaign to forecast the 2024 U.S. presidential and congressional elections. While all these three mass public opinion variables are leveraged to forecast collective partisan election outcomes, we consider the variables together as theoretically distinct determinants of partisan fortunes at both the executive and legislative levels and make the following contributions. First, using novel time-series data of mass opinion since 1937, we show that all three variables are weakly correlated and thus distinct conceptual and empirical measures of mass public assessments of partisan stimuli. Second, we use these three mass opinion variables to specify a unified model of U.S. national elections which better predicts variation in electoral outcomes compared to the standard forecasting approaches, finding that congressional election outcomes are predicted by party brands while presidential elections are predicted by presidential approval and the presidential candidate polling differentials heading into election day. Lastly, we validate our forecasting model using out-of-sample and 2024 forecasting predictions against other standard forecasting approaches.

West European Politics

Ideology and policy design after Brexit: explaining the UK subsidy regime
Michelle Cini, Nieves PĂ©rez-SolĂłrzano BorragĂĄn, Mike Bolt
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