We checked 31 political science journals on Friday, September 12, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period September 05 to September 11, we retrieved 72 new paper(s) in 17 journal(s).

British Journal of Political Science

Rethinking Citizen Competence: A New Theoretical and Empirical Framework
Steven Klein, Ethan Porter
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Sceptics charge that ordinary citizens are not competent enough to sustain democracy. We challenge this assessment on empirical and theoretical grounds. Theoretically, we provide a new typology for assessing citizen competence. We distinguish the democratic values of reliability, accountability, and inclusive equality, mapping the different competencies implied by each. Empirically, we show that recent research, focused primarily on Americans but with some analogues in other regions, significantly undercuts common worries about citizen competence. We then delineate a solutions-oriented, theoretically-informed approach to studying citizen competence, one which would focus more on systemic rather than individual-level interventions.

Comparative Political Studies

Legacies of Repression and Resistance in Early 20 th Century Europe
Andrea Ruggeri, Laia Balcells, Patricia Justino
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Authoritarian and violent experiences affect the institutional settings of post-dictatorial regimes. However, we still lack a comprehensive knowledge on how local autocratic practices of violence, repression and control influence post-dictatorial subnational politics. This special issue aims to advance our understanding of the legacies of authoritarian political regimes. It focuses on the experience of several European countries before, during and immediately after WWII, a period of intense political turbulence in which citizens were subjected to both right- and left-wing dictatorships, where repression was often embedded in systems of governance. While many individuals collaborated with the repressive regimes, others resisted them, creating long-term variation in state-citizen relations across Europe. In this introduction, we review previous research on political legacies, present an analytical framework that distinguishes between two categories of legacies - congruence and alteration - and identify several types of legacies: persistency , discontinuity , creation , reactivation , transformation , substitution , and blunting .

Comparative Politics

Pathways to Authoritarian Capitalism
Ling S. Chen, Xiuyu Li, Kellee S. Tsai
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The global emergence of authoritarian capitalism warrants analysis of its features, economic pathways, and class basis. We argue that the timing of capitalism's establishment relative to authoritarianism affects the extent of state capture by business and the regime's stance towards labor. When capitalism preceded authoritarianism, autocracy arose from a “crisis of capitalism” in flawed democracies, either from fear of communist redistribution or backlash against neoliberalism in post-communist countries. These governments appealed to business and labor interests for electoral survival. Conversely, when authoritarianism preceded capitalism, late industrializing states with weak business and working classes pursued developmental agendas by exercising autonomy over capital and repressing labor. Understanding these historical pathways to authoritarian capitalism provides insight on contemporary democratic backsliding and right-wing populism in the U.S. and Europe.
From Maoism to MAGA: Embracing Democracy with Authoritarian Imprints
Sibo Liu, Shouzhi Xia, Dong Zhang
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Right-wing populism, notably Trumpism, has presented a formidable challenge to democracy. We explore the historical roots of Trumpism among the Chinese diaspora by analyzing nearly one million tweets from approximately 200 Chinese overseas opinion leaders between 2019 and early 2021. We develop a novel measure of authoritarian imprints, drawing on the usage of high-frequency words from the political discourse of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Leveraging computational text analysis, we identify both pro-Trump and anti-democratic stances in these tweets. Our analysis reveals that Chinese opinion leaders with strong authoritarian imprints are significantly more likely to support Trump and endorse anti-democratic actions, such as rejecting the 2020 presidential election result and advocating for unconstitutional means to overturn the result.

International Organization

From Cocaine to Avocados: Criminal Market Expansion and Violence
Chelsea Estancona, LucĂ­a Tiscornia
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Most of what we know about organized criminal violence comes from research on illicit narcotics markets. Yet criminal groups also fight to capture markets for licit commodities, as evidenced by Sicilian lemons and Mexican avocados. When do organized criminal groups violently expand into markets for licit goods? We argue that rapid increases in the share of a good’s export value create opportunities for immediate profit and future market manipulation. These opportunities lead to violence as groups expand their territorial holdings and economic portfolio. We provide subnational evidence of our mechanism using data on avocado exports from Mexico, and address reverse causality with Google Trends data on the popularity of web searches for “avocado toast.” We also provide cross-national evidence by combining data from the Atlas of Economic Complexity, V-Dem, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). We find that increases in a country’s share of global export value for agricultural goods are associated with more homicides—but only where organized criminal groups are present.
Can Status Competition Save the World? Grafting, Green Energy, and the Climate Crisis
Joshua Freedman
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In this article I argue that the climate crisis may emerge as a new arena for status competition among states, enabled through the grafting of decarbonization and green-energy policies onto the status order’s existing symbolic-materialist logic. Status is often thought of as a destabilizing force in world politics, as its pursuit so often pushes states toward violent and financially wasteful policies of social aggrandizement. But this belief elides two points: that the status order and its rules of membership and esteem are malleable and subject to change; and that the emergence of different and new status symbols can also push status-seeking toward more prosocial outcomes. Rather than see these changes as occurring through explicit normative transformation, however, I argue that the status order is most likely to change surreptitiously when entrepreneurs can graft new status symbols onto an order’s underlying tenets, thus concealing but also producing change. I apply this grafting theory to the climate crisis in arguing that (1) highly visible steps taken to effect the green-energy revolution can be legibly grafted onto the existing status order; (2) this grafting technique was already evident in the Biden administration’s increased framing of the climate as an arena of status competition against China; and (3) in an era of renewed great power rivalry, status competition may at least compel states to make the kinds of costly and needed investments in climate mitigation they eschewed earlier.
International State Building and Civilian Preferences: Experimental Evidence from Liberia
Cameron Mailhot, Sabrina Karim
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While often described as a unified process imposed by external actors on weak, conflict-ridden countries, international state building increasingly comprises a variety of actors involved in different ways in (re)building a diverse set of institutions. Civilian preferences are often excluded from this fragmented environment. We identify and explicate three dimensions along which postconflict state building meaningfully varies: the actor involved, the type of institution targeted, and the form of involvement. We then examine how variation along each dimension impacts civilians’ state-building preferences with two rounds of original survey experiments fielded in Liberia. We find that Liberians largely prefer state-building processes overseen by a subset of international actors; that they prefer state building focused on security-oriented institutions over non-security-oriented institutions; and that different forms of involvement in the process meaningfully influence their preferences. We also find that these preferences depend on civilians’ characteristics. Ultimately, we provide an initial, conceptual mapping of the diversified landscape of international state building, as well as an empirical “unpacking” of the conditions that may shape civilians’ preferences toward the process.

Journal of Conflict Resolution

A Call to Arms: How Rebel Groups Choose Their Recruitment Appeals
Michael J. Soules, Mark Berlin
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Why do some rebel groups mobilize around diverse grievances, while others organize around a narrow set of issues? Rebels can widen their recruitment pool by appealing to broader segments of society. However, groups that represent multiple interests are often plagued by infighting and low cohesion, as members disagree about which issues to prioritize. We contend that radical Islamist groups are more likely to recruit with more diverse claims than other rebel organizations. This is because radical Islamist organizations attempt to unite diverse interests through a shared religious identity and use disparate grievances to promote the idea that Islam is under threat. Moreover, the frequent adoption of transnational identities by radical Islamist groups often places them in conflict with local, regional, and international actors, widening the scope of organizational grievances. We find support for these arguments by leveraging novel data on the recruitment practices of 232 rebel movements across the world.

Journal of Experimental Political Science

Debunking NIMBY Myths Increases Support for Affordable Housing, Especially Near Respondents’ Homes
Carter Anderson, Ella Briman, Aidan Ferrin, Charlotte Hampton, Emelia Malhotra, Spriha Pandey, James Robinson, Lila Sugerman, Jesse VanNewkirk, Marina Wang, Jessica Yu, Bill Zheng, Brendan Nyhan
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Despite general public support, efforts to build affordable housing often encounter stiff resistance due to “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) attitudes, which are often rooted in false or unsupported beliefs about affordable housing and its impacts on surrounding communities. Would correcting these misperceptions increase support for building affordable housing? To answer this question, we conducted a preregistered survey experiment measuring how support for affordable housing in the U.S. varies at different distances from where respondents live (one-eighth of a mile away, two miles away, or in their state). Our results indicate that correcting stereotypes about affordable housing and misperceptions about its effects increase support for affordable housing. Contrary to expectations, these effects are often larger for affordable housing near the respondent’s home (rather than at the state level), suggesting that debunking myths about affordable housing may help to counter NIMBY attitudes.
What Drives Perceptions of the Political in Online Advertising?: The Source, Content, and Political Orientation
Laura Edelson, Dominique Lockett, Celia Guillard, Tobias Lauinger, Zhaozhi Li, Jacob M. Montgomery, Damon McCoy
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As digital platforms become a key channel for political advertising, there are continued calls for expanding regulation of digital political ads as a distinct content category. However, designing policies to meet these demands requires us first to decipher what the public perceives a “political” ad to be. In this article, we report two preregistered experiments to understand factors that drive public perceptions of what makes an ad political. We find that both advertiser-level cues and content-level cues play an independent role in shaping perceptions. To a lesser extent, participants also attribute political meaning to ads that clash with their own preferences. These patterns were replicated in a conjoint study using artificial ads and in an experiment using real-world ads drawn from the Facebook Ad Library. Our findings serve as an important benchmark for evaluating proposed definitions of political ads from policymakers and platforms.

Journal of Peace Research

Democratic elections and anti-immigration attitudes
Miguel Carreras, Sofia Vera, Giancarlo Visconti
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Democratic elections are ritualized and institutionalized processes that allow for the peaceful resolution of political disagreements and conflicts. However, electoral processes also serve as focal points in which right-wing political parties can adopt a negative (or xenophobic) discourse against immigrants and other minority groups in order to obtain political benefits (i.e. more electoral support). Left-wing parties are often better off abandoning the immigration issue and focusing on other policy areas during the campaign. As a result, anti-immigration narratives become more prominent during periods of election salience. In this article, we take advantage of the timing of the cross-national post-election surveys included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) to explore the effects of election salience on individuals’ anti-immigration attitudes. We find that immigration attitudes become more polarized just after an election has taken place. On the one hand, right-wing respondents exhibit more negative attitudes toward immigrants when the election is salient, but those negative views decrease as we move away from the election. On the other hand, left-wing respondents express lower levels of xenophobia immediately after the election, but their immigration views become more negative as time since the election increases. Surprisingly, these effects are only detectable in contexts where the immigration issue is less salient.

Legislative Studies Quarterly

Rhetorical and Revealed Opposition to Compromise Among Local and State Legislators
Melody Crowder‐Meyer
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Policymaking in democratic governments requires compromise, yet polarized legislators face mixed incentives around compromise. These incentives also vary by gender and party, with women and Democrats facing greater pressure to express support for compromise. I investigate how legislators handle this situation by revealing both how often legislators openly report supporting compromise and legislators' willingness to oppose compromise when they can do so in secret. Drawing on original surveys of local and state legislators, I find that many legislators rhetorically support compromise but oppose compromise surreptitiously. Further, while women and Democrats are equally or more likely than men and Republicans to report supporting compromise when asked directly, this pattern reverses with women and some Democratic legislators opposing compromise more than men and Republicans when they can do so secretly. Evidence suggests this is due, in part, to women and Democrats being more likely to seek office due to policy issue motivations.

Party Politics

Opening the gates, keeping the guards: How intra-party democracy shapes Women’s access to party leadership
Camila Montero
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Political parties are crucial gatekeepers to power, yet their internal structures often reproduce gendered inequalities. This study examines how specific institutional features –particularly distinct forms of intra-party democracy (IPD)– shape women’s descriptive representation in party leadership across 142 parties in 27 countries. Drawing on scholarship in party organization and descriptive representation, the study disaggregates both IPD into assembly-based (AIPD) and plebiscitary (PIPD) modes of participation, and leadership into two outcomes: women in top party roles and in national executive committees (NECs). Using multilevel regression and causal mediation analysis, the findings show that PIPD is associated with higher gender parity in NECs, but neither form of IPD directly predicts women’s access to top leadership. Instead, the gender composition of NECs mediates the effects of broader institutional variables—such as gender equality rules, women’s sub-organizations, and party ideology—on leadership outcomes. These results refine our understanding of how party institutions shape gendered access to power, highlighting the critical role of structural representation in advancing women’s leadership beyond formal democratic reforms.

Perspectives on Politics

Generic title: Not a research article
PPS volume 23 issue 3 Cover and Back matter
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Generic title: Not a research article
PPS volume 23 issue 3 Cover and Front matter
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Intersectional Solidarity: Black Women and the Politics of Group Consciousness. By Chaya Y. Crowder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. 177p.
Jessica D. Johnson Carew
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Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States
Paul Collier
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Response to Matthew Lassiter’s Review of The Long War on Drugs
Anne L. Foster
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A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People. By Kevin J. McMahon. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024. 384p.
Dave Bridge
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Challenging Inequality: Variation across Postindustrial Societies. By Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 376p.
Noam Lupu, Jonas Pontusson
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Film-Making the Nation Great Again: Audio-visualizing History in the Authoritarian Toolkit
Lisel Hintz, Jonas Bergan Draege
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How can populist authoritarian incumbents justify remaining in power when the golden age they promised remains unrealized? We argue that audiovisual products such as videos are particularly suited to enlivening the histories that so many populists evoke in seeking to legitimize their rule. Political science’s traditional focus on speech-based legitimation, however, leaves audiovisual tools largely overlooked. The few studies that do engage these tools test for audience effects, but the content itself and the political strategies behind its curation and dissemination remain undertheorized. By adding an audiovisual lens to studies of authoritarian legitimation, we identify a regime durability strategy we term selective revivification. We specify the cognitive and affective characteristics of videos that quickly communicate information-dense, emotionally evocative messages, arguing that they engagingly distill specific historical elements to portray incumbent rule as not just legitimate but also necessary. In advancing our argument, we construct an original dataset of all existing narration-based YouTube videos shared by six regime institutions in Turkey from the establishment of YouTube in 2005 to 2022 ( n = 134). We use quantitative analysis to identify when video usage emerges as a strategy, as well as patterns of dissemination and content elements. We then use intertextual analysis to extract common historical themes and production techniques. The audiovisual tools we specify and the selective revivification strategy they enable fill gaps in studies of authoritarian legitimation while adding to political scientists’ toolkits for wider inquiry.
Pushback: The Political Fallout of Unpopular Supreme Court Decisions. By Dave Bridge. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2024. 388p.
Kevin J. McMahon
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The Long War on Drugs. By Anne L. Foster. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023. 224p.
Matthew D. Lassiter
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Response to Simón Escoffier’s Review of Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in Sao Paulo and Johannesburg
Benjamin H. Bradlow
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Inequality, Redistribution, and the Global Surge in Populism
Anne Wolf, Kathrin Bachleitner, Sarah Bufkin
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Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education, and Public Service Delivery in Rural India. By Ashkay Mangla. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 440p.
Prerna Singh
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Response to Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens’ Review of Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality
Noam Lupu, Jonas Pontusson
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Yes Gawd! How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States. By Royal G. Cravens III. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2024. 244p. - Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics. By Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 223p.
Michele F. Margolis
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My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America. By Ruth Braunstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025. 256p.
Andrea Louise Campbell
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Response to Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontusson’s Review of Challenging Inequality: Variation across Postindustrial Societies
Evelyne Huber, John D. Stephens
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Response to Kevin J. McMahon’s review of Pushback: The Political Fallout of Unpopular Supreme Court Decisions
Dave Bridge
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Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States - Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States. By Lucy E. S. Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 232p.
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi
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Populist Discourse: Recasting Populism Research. By Yannis Stavrakakis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. 178p.
George Henry Newth
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Review Index
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Blame Shifting in Autocracies following Large-Scale Disasters: Evidence from Turkey
Edward Goldring, Jonas Willibald Schmid, Fulya Apaydin
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Large-scale disasters, particularly when handled poorly, often spark popular outrage and threaten an autocrat’s hold on power. Autocrats frequently employ blame-shifting strategies to redirect public anger and weather these storms. We examine whether blame shifting after a large-scale disaster helps or hurts an autocrat’s popularity through a mixed-methods research design in the electoral autocracy of Turkey in April–July 2023, following the February 2023 earthquakes. An online survey experiment ( n = 3,839) identifies the effects of blaming the aftermath of the earthquakes on the opposition, a force majeure, private construction companies, or a government minister, while focus groups explore the mechanisms behind these effects. We find that blaming the opposition or a force majeure leads to a backlash, especially among those more able to critically evaluate information. Focus groups reveal that these backlash effects are driven by voters’ dismay at electoral opportunism and the incumbent’s polarizing language following a large-scale disaster.
The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State. By Gina Vale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 288p.
R. Latham Lechowick
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Democratization and Taxation in the Global South
Anne Wolf, Justin Daniels
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The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs. By Matthew D. Lassiter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. 680p.
Anne L. Foster
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Response to Anne Foster’s Review of The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs
Matthew D. Lassiter
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Response to Benjamin Bradlow’s Review of Mobilizing at the Urban Margins : Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile
SimĂłn Escoffier
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Offshore Finance and State Power. By Andrea Binder. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023. 240p.
Cornelia Woll
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Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in Sao Paulo and Johannesburg. By Benjamin H. Bradlow. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2024. 256p.
SimĂłn Escoffier
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Response to Cornelia Woll’s Review of Offshore Finance and State Power
Andrea Binder
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Veiled Threats: Women and Global Jihad. By Mia Bloom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025. 228p.
Jytte Klausen
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Beyond Racial Capitalism: Cooperatives in the African Diaspora. Edited by Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Sharon D. Wright Austin, and Kevin Edmonds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 268p.
Emily Katzenstein
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Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States
Mick Moore
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Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets. By Cornelia Woll. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. 248p.
Andrea Binder
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Note from the Editors
Ana Arjona, Wendy Pearlman
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Response to Andrea Binder’s Review of Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets
Cornelia Woll
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Mobilizing at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile. By SimĂłn Escoffier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 250p.
Benjamin H. Bradlow
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Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States
Wilson Prichard
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Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States
Adrienne LeBas
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Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States
Lise Rakner
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The Politics of Sexual Minorities
Douglas Page
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The politics of sexual minorities has been an understudied topic in the political science discipline. Recent years have seen a growing body of scholarly research that examines these often marginalized people and their challenges when building communities. Sexual minorities whose sexualities differ from dominant sexual norms are conventionally conceived as stigmatized outsiders, which contributes to their social movements and identities. However, differences among sexual minorities concerning ideology, race, and lifestyle may (1) undermine group cohesiveness and (2) show how debates among sexual minorities reflect divisive society-wide debates on inclusiveness and belonging. The four works in this essay, which focus on American and European cases, make significant contributions to these debates.
International Relations Scholars, the Media, and the Dilemma of Consensus
Irene Entringer GarcĂ­a Blanes, Shauna N. Gillooly, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, Michael J. Tierney
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Over the last 15 years, scholars, universities, and foundations have promoted numerous efforts to link the scholarly and policy communities of international relations. Increasing evidence suggests that scholars are succeeding in getting their ideas and findings in the press, and their success bodes well for their ability to influence public and elite opinion. Despite these strides, we know little about when journalists may pick up on academic ideas and evidence or how they will report it in their stories. We seek to fill this gap. To explore the role of media as a conduit for academic knowledge, we surveyed more than 1,000 foreign policy journalists about their views on IR experts and expertise. We asked when, how, and how often respondents seek out IR scholars and scholarship in the course of their reporting. We also asked about the barriers to consuming peer-reviewed, scholarly research, if and how journalists interact with IR scholars on social media, and how IR scholars’ influence compares to that of scholars in other disciplines. Finally, we asked whether respondents cover a story differently if there is consensus among experts than if there is little agreement. In addition to providing empirical answers to these questions, we used our first-of-its-kind survey of foreign policy journalists to test several arguments from literature on the media and experts, including that journalists rely heavily on experts and expertise in developing and writing their stories, they rely more heavily on social science experts than other specialists, and they tend to inaccurately portray the level of consensus among the relevant experts. Our findings largely support these claims. First, foreign policy journalists often seek out IR experts and expertise for use in their stories, suggesting that the media acts as an important conveyor belt for academic knowledge. These journalists use academic expertise at several key stages, especially when researching background information. Second, foreign policy journalists, like journalists more generally, favor social science experts and expertise over experts from other disciplines. Finally, foreign policy journalists are no different than journalists overall in their tendency to create “false balance;” they underrepresent the degree of consensus among experts and oversample dissenters when scholars overwhelmingly favor a particular policy or interpretation of events.
Response to Dave Bridge’s Review of A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People
Kevin J. McMahon
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Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality. Edited by Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontusson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 350p.
Evelyne Huber, John D. Stephens
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Political Analysis

Generative AI and Topological Data Analysis of Longitudinal Panel Data
Badredine Arfi
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This article constructs an approach to analyzing longitudinal panel data which combines topological data analysis (TDA) and generative AI applied to graph neural networks (GNNs). TDA is deployed to identify and analyze unobserved topological heterogeneities of a dataset. TDA-extracted information is quantified into a set of measures, called functional principal components. These measures are used to analyze the data in four ways. First, the measures are construed as moderators of the data and their statistical effects are estimated through a Bayesian framework. Second, the measures are used as factors to classify the data into topological classes using generative AI applied to GNNs constructed by transforming the data into graphs. The classification uncovers patterns in the data which are otherwise not accessible through statistical approaches. Third, the measures are used as factors that condition the extraction of latent variables of the data through a deployment of a generative AI model. Fourth, the measures are used as labels for classifying the graphs into classes used to offer a GNN-based effective dimensionality reduction of the original data. The article uses a portion of the militarized international disputes (MIDs) dataset (from 1946 to 2010) as a running example to briefly illustrate its ideas and steps.

Political Geography

Generic title: Not a research article
Editorial Board
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Political Science Research and Methods

The non-linearity between populist attitudes and ideological extremism
Eduardo RyĂŽ Tamaki, Yujin J. Jung
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The relationship between populist attitudes and ideological orientations remains an area of considerable academic interest, yet much is still unknown about the ideological inclinations associated with populist attitudes. While many scholars acknowledge the link between populist attitudes and political ideology, existing studies often treat this relationship as either a given or a peripheral concern. This paper represents an initial exploration into the association between populist attitudes and political ideology. Utilizing data from the fifth wave (2016–2021) of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, which encompasses 43 countries and 52 elections, this study aims to uncover how this relationship manifests cross-nationally. By employing a variety of rigorous methodological models, including the Generalized Additive Model, our results reveal a nonlinear relationship between populist attitudes and political ideology. Specifically, we find that political ideology and populist attitudes exhibit a U-shaped nonlinear relationship and that ideological extremism and populist attitudes demonstrate an exponential nonlinear relationship. These findings emphasize the nuanced interplay between ideological positions and populist attitudes, providing a deeper understanding of how they intersect.
Legislators’ sentiment analysis supervised by legislators
Akitaka Matsuo, Kentaro Fukumoto
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The sentiment expressed in a legislator’s speech is informative. However, extracting legislators’ sentiment requires human-annotated data. Instead, we propose exploiting closing debates on a bill in Japan, where legislators in effect label their speech as either pro or con. We utilize debate speeches as the training dataset, fine-tune a pretrained model, and calculate the sentiment scores of other speeches. We show that the more senior the opposition members are, the more negative their sentiment. Additionally, we show that opposition members become more negative as the next election approaches. We also demonstrate that legislators’ sentiments can be used to predict their behaviors by using the case in which government members rebelled in the historic vote of no confidence in 1993.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Opening Up? Adoption of Open Science Practices in Democratic Innovation Research
Lala Muradova, Matt Ryan, Rafael Mestre, Masood Gheasi, George Bolton
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Innovations in deliberative and participatory democracy have been rapidly adopted by policy makers. Long-term success of democratic reform hinges on developing research through open, reproducible, and ethical standards that secure trust in findings. This study examines how Democratic Innovations (DI) scholars implement open science practices (OSP). We analyze empirical research published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and 2021. Our analysis reveals limited OSP use: less than 1% of research articles involve replication and approximately 3.5% provide full data access, despite an increase in the past decade to almost 8% of articles published in 2020. Open publishing has increased, reaching almost 50% of publications in recent years. The article concludes by discussing how OSP can contribute to improving the practice of DI and the policy effects of institutional design. Researchers who understand institutional design for inclusive collective action are best placed to make the changes required to promote open science.
Conflating Lobbying and PACs: The Surprisingly Low Overlap in Organizational Lobbying and Campaign Expenditures
Alexander C. Furnas, Timothy M. LaPira, Clare Brock
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This article investigates whether campaign contributions and lobbying are complementary, substitutive, or distinct forms of organizational political engagement. Our study reveals minimal overlap between organizations that engage in lobbying and those that make campaign contributions despite the perception that these activities are interchangeable forms of “money in politics.” Using comprehensive contribution and lobbying report data from 1998 to 2018, we find that most politically active organizations focus exclusively on either lobbying or making campaign contributions. Only a small percentage of organizations engage in both activities. This finding challenges the assumption that these forms of political activity are inherently linked. The majority of organizations engaged in political activity do so exclusively through lobbying. However, the top lobbying groups spend the most money and almost always have affiliated political action committees (PACs). Most lobbying money is spent by a small number of big spenders—organizations that also have affiliated PACs. Organizations that both lobby and make campaign contributions tend to be well resourced and rare.
The Unseen Scars of Experiential Learning: Secondary Trauma in Political Science Internships
Marty P. Jordan, Elinor R. Jordan, Lauren S. Foley
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Public service internships are a staple in contemporary political science curricula. Research shows that internships produce better thinkers, employees, and citizens. Yet, political science interns are on the frontlines in observing the firsthand trauma, stress, and mental health challenges of many people seeking support and services from government. In turn, students may internalize this stress and trauma, a phenomenon recognized as secondary traumatic stress (STS). This study addresses a significant gap in the discipline’s understanding of the frequency and severity of STS experienced by political science interns in their fieldwork. We relied on surveys and written assessments from students enrolled in internship courses at two public universities. We find that interns report increased exposure to STS at the end of the semester. Furthermore, STS vulnerability varies among interns, with higher incidence rates among those with a history of primary trauma, older students, and women. We outline coping strategies for students, propose adaptations to experiential learning to enhance support, and emphasize the need for further research on this issue.

Public Choice

Political and economic protests in authoritarian regimes
Austin M. Mitchell, Kana Inata, Masaaki Higashijima
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Why do some protests succeed at obtaining accommodation but other protests are repressed? The content of demands varies widely across protest events although prior research has not accounted for how the demands of protest movements influence outcomes. We construct a theoretical model to study how different types of protest demands impact whether a dictator accommodates or represses. The model explains that income levels of protesters influence the content of their demands, which in turn affect protest mobilization and effectiveness. Lower income classes join economic protests that dictators more often accommodate, but higher income classes join political protests that dictators tend to repress. The model also shows that dictators may be unable to deter limited protests from becoming mass mobilization events, even when there is no uncertainty in the strategic environment. We discuss how the argument explains patterns of protest and repression with illustrative cases across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Research & Politics

Silent suffering: Depression, perceived inequality, and political trust
Xing Chen, Xiaoxiao Shen
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Depression is a growing concern worldwide, yet its impact on political trust remains underexplored. Using a nationally representative panel survey from China, we find a robust negative association between depressive symptoms and political trust. This effect is amplified by perceptions of inequality, as individuals who see society as unfair are more likely to blame the government for their hardship. The effect is pronounced among potentially volatile groups like unemployed young males, whose tendency to externalize stress can translate distrust into social unrest. Crucially, the effect is also significant among groups traditionally considered better off such as public sector employees, who face intense pressures of ideological conformity in the workplace. This widespread “silent suffering” highlights a critical psychological pathway through which poor mental health, an increasingly pressing issue, can intensify social discontent and weaken regime stability.

The Journal of Politics

Generic title: Not a research article
Front Matter
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Bilingual Education Reduces Ethnic Outgroup Discrimination
Jeremy Siow
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Election Outcomes and The Digestion of Grievance
Nicholas Kuipers
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Do Primary Elections Exacerbate Congressional Polarization?
Anthony Fowler, Shu Fu
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Measuring Strategic Positioning in Congressional Elections
Colin Rafferty Case
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Repressed Memories: State Terror and the Street Politics of Memorialization
Yuri Zhukov
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Candidate Positions, Responsiveness, and Returns to Extremism
Mellissa Meisels
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Improving Compliance in Experimental Studies of Discrimination
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