We checked 31 political science journals on Friday, November 28, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period November 21 to November 27, we retrieved 69 new paper(s) in 21 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Filling the tax gap: How private donations compensate a faltering fiscal contract
Simone Paci
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Do individuals contribute to public service provision when others in the community shirk on their taxes? The long‐standing literature on conditional cooperation has widely documented a knock‐on effect of freeriding. I argue that individuals may turn to civil society as an alternative way to fund public services. First, I leverage a natural experiment in Slovakia, based on the timing of a naming‐and‐shaming tax policy. Communities exposed to a public disclosure of noncompliance donate 16% more. Second, I replicate this via a survey experiment, showing an increase in charitable giving of 9% as well as eroding faith in the tax system. Highlighting the role of altruism, donations increase the most among respondents who believe their town relies on public services. In a conjoint, treated respondents also preferred public donations, suggesting an additional reputation mechanism. Finally, cross‐country survey evidence bolsters external validity, showing a robust correlation between perceived tax cheating and local volunteering.

American Political Science Review

Threats and Commitments: International Tribunals and Domestic Trials in Peace Negotiations
GENEVIEVE BATES
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Does International Criminal Court (ICC) involvement affect the agreements parties to a civil conflict make, especially regarding matters of accountability? In this article, I argue that the ICC places a unique pressure on domestic elites negotiating peace in the wake of political violence. To avoid going to trial in the international arena, elites facing the threat of punishment have an incentive to agree to implement some form of domestic accountability, showing the Court that they can handle their own business. I evaluate my argument using data on the content of peace agreements negotiated between 2002 and 2019. I find that ICC involvement increases the probability that negotiators commit to accountability during peace processes. To explore potential mechanisms and more explicitly evaluate alternative explanations, I draw on case studies from Colombia and Sudan.
Attitudinal and Behavioral Legacies of Wartime Violence: A Meta-Analysis
JOAN BARCELÓ
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Understanding the legacies of wartime violence is essential for explaining postwar dynamics and informing policy. I present a meta-analysis of 172 quantitative studies across more than 50 countries, assessing the effects of wartime violence on 22 outcomes spanning four broad areas: (a) civic and political engagement, prosociality, and trust; (b) attitudinal hardening toward wartime enemies; (c) identification with one’s own wartime-aligned group; and (d) generalized attitudinal hardening. The analysis reveals mixed effects on engagement, prosociality, and trust: while violence increases some forms of participation, it does not promote voting, trust, or altruism. In contrast, wartime violence consistently heightens hostility toward former adversaries and strengthens in-group identification and favoritism. However, I find little evidence of broader hardening toward actors not directly involved in the conflict. These results challenge optimistic claims that war fosters cohesion and underscore the need for interventions that reduce intergroup hostility, rebuild cross group-trust, and support reconciliation.

Annual Review of Political Science

Non-Western Visions of International Order
Dylan M. H. Loh, Lucas de Oliveira Paes, AyƟe Zarakol
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The scholarship on the concept of order has been expanding within international relations. The continuous upheaval of world politics first triggered a broad debate on the resilience of the liberal international order (LIO), which then led to scholarship on alternative conceptions of order, especially outside of the West. This review focuses on this body of research on non-Western views of order. It is structured geographically, taking a tour of scholarship from and on East and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and Eurasia. Although each region has its own intellectual traditions, we observe that these views portray the LIO in a less idealized form, exposing its hierarchical and Western-centered nature. However, while pushing for more inclusive and plural arrangements, these critiques have not yet amounted to the articulation of radical alternative ordering projects.
Causal Inference, Agency, and the Problem of Inherent Endogeneity
Martin J. Williams
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Researchers often leverage exogenous variation in an independent variable in order to understand its effects, yet endogenous decision processes are central to many of the real-world phenomena we wish to understand. This review explores whether there are situations in which exogenous and endogenous variation in the same independent variable (e.g., a policy, treatment, or other action) may lead to different outcomes. I begin by laying out a conceptual framework for understanding these inherently endogenous causal processes, identifying three types of mechanisms through which they might arise and discussing their application to a range of empirical phenomena, such as institutional reform, community natural resource governance, and interstate conflict. I then suggest that learning about inherently endogenous causal processes requires researchers to place endogenous decision-making at the center of analysis rather than seeking to abstract away from it. I survey a range of methods (both positivist and nonpositivist) for doing so.
It Took a Village
Kathleen Thelen
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In my work I have tried to understand how political and political-economic institutions reflect and reinforce power asymmetries and how, therefore, the institutional context in which politics is played out shapes the outcomes that emerge. Over the course of my career, I moved away from the analysis of comparative statics (why different institutions produce different outcomes) to study the way in which institutions themselves evolve and change over time. While my early work centered on the political economy of the rich democracies in Europe, my focus has shifted and now centers on the study of the American political economy in comparative perspective, with an emphasis on corporate power and the role of the courts in the political economy.

British Journal of Political Science

The Politics of Imperial Nostalgia
Christopher Claassen, Daniel Devine
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In post-imperial European states, debates about imperial legacies – centred on issues such as colonial statues, police treatment of minorities, and school curricula – have intensified in recent years. Yet little systematic research examines public attitudes towards empire or their political impact. We develop a framework linking imperial nostalgia with political preferences and present findings from Britain using a national survey and conjoint experiment. First, we identify a distinct public opinion dimension on empire, ranging from nostalgic to critical. Second, we show that imperial nostalgia strongly predicts party evaluations and vote intentions, with effects comparable to those of immigration attitudes and left–right economic values. Finally, a conjoint experiment reveals that elite positions on empire influence voter preferences, but do so asymmetrically: right-wing opposition to criticism of the imperial past is stronger than left-wing support. These findings underscore the contemporary political relevance of imperial nostalgia in post-imperial Europe.
A Meta-Analysis of Attitudes Towards Migrants and Displaced Persons
Sigrid Weber, Nik Stoop, Peter van der Windt, Haoyu Zhai
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Since the 2010s, social scientists have increasingly conducted survey-experimental studies that explore what factors drive public attitudes towards migrants in host countries. We conducted a systematic meta-analysis of 118 such studies, comprising 428,881 respondents from fifty-three countries. We find that sociotropic economic concerns play a key role, with individuals being more welcoming towards migrants who contribute to the economy through their professional occupation, education, or language skills. In contrast, there is limited evidence that hosts evaluate migrants based on egocentric economic concerns. Cultural concerns are also important; notably, we uncover a persistent anti-Muslim bias. Humanitarian concerns shape attitudes as well – especially towards forcibly displaced migrants, who are generally viewed more favorably than economic migrants. Climate migrants place between conflict migrants and economic migrants in terms of public perception. Our meta-analysis raises several questions that remain unanswered in the literature, suggesting important directions for future research.
Decisive or Distracted: The Effects of US Constraint on Security Networks
Ha Eun Choi, Scott de Marchi, Max Gallop, Shahryar Minhas
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The rise of China as a global power has been a prominent feature in international politics. Simultaneously, the United States has been engaged in ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia for the past two decades, requiring a significant commitment of resources, focus, and determination. This paper investigates how third-party countries react to the United States’ preoccupation with these conflicts, particularly in terms of diplomatic co-operation and alignment. We introduce a measure of US distraction and utilize network-based indicators to assess diplomatic co-operation or alignment. Our study tests the hypothesis that when the US is distracted, other states are more likely to co-operate with its principal rival, China. Our findings support this hypothesis, revealing that increased co-operation with China is more probable during periods of US distraction. However, a closer examination of state responses shows that democracies distance themselves from China under these circumstances, while non-democracies move closer.
Rooting Equality: Testing the Effectiveness of Activist Frames Combating Homophobia in Zimbabwe
Phillip M. Ayoub, Adam S. Harris
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In a political wave that has been emulated across many African states, state-sponsored homophobia is being entrenched via draconian laws. Social movements grapple with countering these state-driven initiatives and altering ingrained anti-LGBTQ societal attitudes. Drawing on a survey experiment developed with guidance from Zimbabwean activists, this study tests the effectiveness of locally rooted messages that affirm queer indigeneity and contest claims that homosexuality is ‘un-African’. We find that ‘rooted’ messages incite no backlash, while an indigenous message reduces prejudice towards LGBTQ neighbors and a liberation message may increase support for LGBTQ-equal rights. These findings are important as they provide empirical support for effective strategies to combat anti-LGBTQ sentiments in challenging contexts. They also speak to broader political science debates on norm contestation and the limits of universal human-rights framing in nationalist and post-colonial contexts, demonstrating that activist-informed rooted messages offer a powerful alternative in shaping opinion on contested rights.

Comparative Political Studies

Illiberal Norms, Media Reporting, and Bureaucratic Discrimination: Evidence from State-Citizen Interactions in Germany
Stefanie Rueß, Gerald Schneider, Jan P. Vogler
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Recent research on the rise of radical right-wing parties highlights the activation of deeply rooted illiberal norms in society, including hostility toward marginalized groups. Negative media reporting on immigration may reinforce this trend. Although previous studies have examined the effect of far-right normalization on voting, little is known about its broader societal impacts. Therefore, we ask how regional variation in anti-immigrant sentiments interacts with negative reporting to shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats. Our theory posits that street-level bureaucrats are more likely to engage in discrimination if they work in areas with widespread anti-immigrant sentiments; a pattern that can be amplified by negative news on immigrants. To test our expectations, we conducted a preregistered survey experiment with 1400 German welfare caseworkers. Our findings reveal that regional norms significantly affect the likelihood of discrimination, especially after exposure to negative media frames. These results raise concerns about the impartiality of state institutions amidst rising illiberal norms.
Strong Partisans, Conditional Democrats? Partisanship and Reactions to Electoral Outcomes in Argentina
Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos, Carlos Meléndez
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Partisans who back self-interested illiberal measures jeopardize democracy. We explore important precursors of support for backsliding using survey and focus group data from severely polarized Argentina. First, we show that partisans construct regime stereotypes, depicting “friends” as democratic and “foes” as authoritarian. This offers fertile ground for justifying exclusionary policies. Second, through an experiment with post-election scenarios describing a party’s landslide victory we study whether partisan affect exacerbates emotional reactivity and/or shapes democratic values in the face of victory/defeat. All partisan groups are emotionally reactive, whereas democratic attitudes vary more among Kirchnerists/Peronists. This difference is due to the nature of their partisanship: unlike non-Peronists, Peronists/Kirchnerists profess a strong positive creed. Elections can therefore turn into moments of existential angst and loss becomes particularly intolerable. Overall, the results illuminate the emotional and attitudinal reactions that render partisan affect dangerous, allowing leaders to manipulate feeble democratic commitments in the event of defeat.

Electoral Studies

Political violence and invalid voting: A case study
Abelardo GĂłmez DĂ­az
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Amplifying the message? The effect of endorsements in primary elections
Alessio Albarello, Mayya Komisarchik
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Who is trusted to navigate the storm? Gendered leadership preferences in times of crisis
Lotte Hargrave, Jessica C. Smith, Viktor ValgarĂ°sson, Daniel Devine, Hannah Bunting, Caroline Leicht
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Campaign spending in mixed member proportional systems: How political and institutional context shapes party strategy
Dominic Nyhuis, Sebastian Block, Morten Harmening, Tilko Swalve
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Housing and electoral behaviour: The changing face of class voting in advanced democracies
Josh Goddard
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European Journal of Political Research

Redistribution between people and places: Conflict or consensus among rural and working-class voters?
Marta R. Eidheim
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Scholarship has often examined the views of rural and working-class voters separately. In this article, I propose that we gain a broader understanding of the political potential of left-behind voters by comparing these voter groups. Drawing on three survey experiments, I investigate these voters’ views on deservingness and redistribution. The findings show that both rural and working-class voters are more likely to believe that cities and the people living there receive a disproportionate share of public resources. Furthermore, they favor rural people and working people equally as recipients of government resources. Both groups are supportive of redistribution, particularly along class lines. The article highlights a consensus among these voters, implying a potential for parties to mobilize these voter groups around a redistributive program that addresses place and class-based disparities.
Studying honest answers to sensitive issues in politics New evidence on lobbying influence
Werner Pitsch, Georg Wenzelburger
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Studying lobbying influence in politics has been confronted with the challenge of gaining insights into processes that usually take place behind closed doors and about which honest answers from participants are difficult to obtain. Therefore, innovative methods of indirect measurement of lobby success – via text analysis or interviews – have been used to get at the hidden politics of lobbying. In this research note, we propose an additional technique to study lobby influence much more directly, the randomized response technique (RRT). This method has been successfully used to study doping in elite sports, for instance, but has been almost absent from political research in the past. The note presents the method and illustrates its applicability with a study of lobby influence in German Parliaments. The study reached out to 2386 present and to 850 former MPs (Members of Parliaments). The response dataset added up to 273 present and 160 former MPs, equaling response rates of 11.4% and 18.8% respectively. Despite these low response rates, it was nevertheless possible to estimate rates of lobby-friendly behavior among German MPs at comparably low rates of instruction noncompliance. Although the results should be interpreted cautiously due to the low response rate, the study demonstrates the viability of RRT surveys as a means to study sensitive issues in politics.
Who prioritises what? Determinants and measurement of voters’ issue prioritisation
Gefjon Off, Federico Trastulli
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Research agrees that the importance voters ascribe to political issues, ie individual-level issue salience, affects political behaviour. However, due to measurement limitations, we lack research on who considers which issues important. Specifically, the often-used most-important-problem/issue question complicates between-individual comparisons of issue salience. Using a rarely employed measurement of issue salience and data from six Western European countries, this research note explores the salience of different issues across different socio-demographic groups. Our exploratory findings suggest that different socio-demographic variables affect different issues’ salience across and within individuals over time. Further, we find that predictors of individual-level issue salience and attitudes frequently differ – highlighting the importance of analysing them separately. We call for research on individual-level issue salience using measurements that enable the study of its determinants and analysing predictors of salience and attitudes separately.
How generational replacement feeds the urban-rural divide: Evidence from Switzerland (1995–2023)
Reto Mitteregger, Lukas Haffert
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Conflicts about ‘place’ are increasingly shaping the politics of advanced democracies, and voters are ever more divided along the urban-rural divide. However, this does not mean that members of all generations are growing apart. Instead, the urban-rural divide is stronger among younger generations, who are slowly replacing older, less divided ones. To demonstrate this, we combine post-election surveys from Switzerland spanning 28 years with macro data on the municipality level to examine the role of different cohorts in the urban-rural divide using age-period-cohort logistic regressions. The results reveal that the role of place is stronger for newer cohorts, with more recently socialized urbanites holding more progressive immigration attitudes and preferring left-wing parties compared to earlier urban cohorts. In contrast, whereas newer cohorts in urban contexts are less likely to vote for the far-right than their older neighbors, this is not the case for the same cohorts in more rural places. The results help to understand the role of generational replacement in explaining the growing differences between urban and rural citizens in Europe.
When crisis meets election: Navigating blame and credit in a consensus democracy
CĂ©line Honegger
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How do elections affect credit-claiming and blame-shifting patterns in times of crisis? To answer this so far unanswered yet relevant question for crisis management, this study analyses government crisis communication in Germany’s consensus democracy, where federal elections took place in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirically, this study examines media conferences from January 2021 to December 2021, which reveal that the Minister of Health not only shifted responsibility and blame but also claimed credit – particularly before the election. He also opted for implicit rather than explicit forms of blame shifting within the political system and shifted responsibility to citizens. The strategies of citizen blaming and credit claiming were most frequent during the ‘federal emergency brake’ when responsibility was more centralised than in other moments of the pandemic. This research advances blame avoidance theory by combining situational factors (crisis and electoral pressure) and institutional moderators (form of government and governance structures) to explain credit-claiming and blame-shifting patterns. Overall, the findings of this study indicate that institutional factors can moderate blame games in particularly challenging situations when it is essential for political systems to address societal and underlying political problems instead of getting caught up in blame games.

International Organization

Reckoning with Reality: Correcting National Overconfidence in a Rising Power
Haifeng Huang
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Do the public in a rising authoritarian power overestimate their country’s reputation, power, and influence in the world? Excessive national overconfidence has both domestic and international consequences, but it has rarely been systematically studied. Using two studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and another conducted later, I show that the Chinese public widely and systematically overestimate China’s global reputation and soft power, even during a national crisis. Critically, informing Chinese citizens of actual international public opinion of China substantially corrects these perceptions. It also moderately alters their evaluations of China, its governing system, and their expectations for the country’s role in the world. These effects from simple information interventions are not fleeting, suggesting that overconfidence can be meaningfully corrected and triumphalism mitigated. The findings have both theoretical significance and important policy implications.
Population Displacement and State Building: The Legacies of Pashtun Resettlement in Afghanistan
David B. Carter, Austin L. Wright, Luwei Ying
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Population displacement is a prominent state-building strategy. Using either force or positive inducements, states sponsor the resettlement of racial, ethnic, or linguistic groups to consolidate territorial control. We evaluate the long-run consequences of large-scale displacement by analyzing a historical episode in Afghanistan: the relocation of Pashtun communities during the rule of Emir Abd al-Rahman. Using historical records, we reconstruct the map of relocated tribes to identify contemporary settlements that are connected to the original displaced settlements. We analyze novel, microlevel survey data on more than 80,000 subjects to study how contemporary attitudes about the central government and the Taliban as well as individuals’ identity salience differ across coethnic communities separated by the emir’s state-building effort. We argue that under conditions common to many historical cases, settlers develop regional political identities that are neither ethnocentric, nor pro-central-state, nor focused on national identity. We show that the long-term consequences of the state-led resettlement of Pashtuns to northern Afghanistan are stronger attachments to regional government and local institutions, along with greater hostility to the central government and the Taliban relative to Pashtuns in the south and east.

Journal of Conflict Resolution

Group Enrolment and Conflict Behavior
Gerald Eisenkopf, Torben Kölpin
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A large literature in psychology and economics suggests that enrolment into groups shapes conflict behavior, even if the groups lack a salient identity. Our experimental design systematically modifies group formation and prize sharing rules to explain behavioral differences between conflicts among individuals and intergroup feuds. Apart from rather high levels of conflict expenditure in all treatments, we find no specific evidence for outgroup hostility. Group formation induces conditional cooperation within the groups. The prize distribution rules have a strong aggregate impact. Proportional prize sharing in winning groups fosters expenditure while egalitarian prize-sharing – a staple of such experiments – induces the predicted free-rider effects. Overall, our results support inequality aversion rather than parochial altruism as an explanation for differences in expenditures between individual and group conflicts.

Journal of Peace Research

The conditions for reducing electoral violence through constitutional reform
Gudlaug Olafsdottir
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Constitution-making is promoted by the international community as a means to encourage democratization and peaceful politics. However, there is a dearth of studies investigating the conditions under which constitutional replacement can induce such positive outcomes. Notably, many constitutional reforms enhance the power of semi-autocratic leaders or institutionalize democratic backsliding. Since party representatives often participate as negotiators in constitution-making processes, and political parties are key perpetrators of electoral violence, this study suggests that constitutional reform can constrain electoral violence if the process involves negotiated agreement between political elites and the reform includes measures that increase executive constraints. I test this claim through a matched analysis of 155 constitutional reforms from 1946 to 2015. The analysis shows that constitutional replacements that result from negotiated agreements between representatives of distinct groups and constrain the executive’s ability to enact a state of emergency are associated with lower levels of ensuing government-perpetrated violence. By contrast, these measures have no association with electoral violence carried out by non-government actors, suggesting that reform of formal institutions may be less effective in constraining violence by other actors in society. The findings have significant implications for the design of constitution-making processes that promote peaceful government conduct while highlighting the need for alternative measures to constrain other electoral violence.

Legislative Studies Quarterly

Does It Matter What You Do (Or Only Who You Are)? On the Effects of Parliamentarians' Behavior on Vote Choice
Maxime Walder, Stefanie Bailer, Nathalie Giger
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Politicians differ in their policy positions, but also in their behavior in parliament and the constituency. While research has shown that personal characteristics of politicians matter for voter evaluation, we have little knowledge as to which activities inside and outside parliament have the greatest impact on voters' evaluation of their representatives. Based on survey experiments conducted in the UK, Poland, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, we show that voters clearly reward politicians for engaged behavior, in particular time spent in the constituency. These findings carry significant implications for the type of information conveyed to voters during election campaigns.

Party Politics

Within-country determinants of political party structures: Similarity-based analysis of Polish party statutes
Dariusz Stolicki, Beata Kosowska-GąstoƂ, Katarzyna Sobolewska-Myƛlik
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We seek to explain within-country determinants of political party structures. However, unlike most scholars in the field, who start with hypotheses connecting specific structural features with specific explanatory variables (e.g., ideology, party age), we instead seek to explain overall structural similarity in terms of such variables. This allows us to determine whether the latter have an effect on party structures, even if we have no a priori hypotheses about what exactly this effect is. In the paper, we first introduce a new measure of structural similarity of political parties, based on their formal institutional arrangements reflected in their statutes. Then, using a dataset of Polish party statutes, and following the similarity-based hypothesis testing approach, we verify hypotheses about party structures being determined by ideology, party age, time of observation, as well as legislative and electoral experience of party candidates.
From party programmes to climate policy: A comparative analysis of fossil fuel subsidy reform in OECD countries
Evan Drake
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Despite international commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, OECD countries exhibit substantial variation in subsidy levels. This study examines how governing party preferences and institutional context jointly shape subsidy policy across 28 OECD countries from 2010 to 2022. Integrating party manifesto data with fossil fuel subsidy levels in cabinet-year panels, the analysis reveals conditional relationships between governing party preferences and policy outcomes. Pro-environmental governments reduce subsidies primarily when holding parliamentary majorities, while market-liberal preferences show positive associations with subsidies under minority governance. Critically, the combination of environmental and market-liberal commitments produces the strongest subsidy reductions—but only within majority governments. This three-way interaction suggests that ‘green’ coalitions require institutional leverage to overcome entrenched fossil fuel interests and phase out fossil fuel subsidies. The findings demonstrate that neither ideology nor institutional capacity alone drives reform; both are necessary. These results help explain why OECD subsidy levels vary despite similar climate pledges, highlighting that translating electoral mandates into climate policy is contingent on both programmatic commitments and legislative control.
How do new parties shape policymaking in coalition governments? Bill timing in the Czech Republic and Slovenia
Marko Kukec
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The entry of new parties into governments is often met with skepticism concerning their ability of joint policymaking with established coalition partners. Upon assuming government responsibility, new parties are motivated to counteract such perceptions by demonstrating both their competence and cooperativeness. The article examines this double signaling strategy on the temporal dimension of legislation, by analyzing the timing of bill initiation in Czech and Slovenian cabinets between 2000 and 2022. The event history analysis of 1591 bills submitted by seven Czech cabinets and 1894 bills submitted by ten Slovenian cabinets suggests the presence of ‘competence signaling’ strategy in both countries, as new parties initiate their legislation sooner compared to established parties. The evidence of ‘cooperation signaling’ is limited to the Czech Republic, where the established party legislation is initiated more swiftly if salient for new parties. The results of this study contribute to the ongoing debate on the consequences of new parties for coalition governance.
A tale of conflicting principals: Candidate selection, party structure, and the politics of federal de/centralization
Joel Mendoza GĂłmez
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Centralization in federal countries can be explained by the incentives that a party’s selectorate generates for legislators. This paper examines how intra-party institutional structures shape federal decentralization by analyzing how Candidate Selection Decentralization (CSD) affects the vertical allocation of policy authority across 11 federations. Using within-country variation, I find a quadratic relationship between CSD and legislative decentralization. As CSD increases, legislators face Competing Principals Problems (CPP) between national leaders and subnational selectorates, weakening party cohesion. Yet this effect is non-linear: centralized selection fosters cohesion and centralization, while fully decentralized selection also reinforces centralization due to coordination failures. In contrast, intermediate levels of CSD—where subnational elites control nominations—empower state-level actors who promote decentralizing reforms in electorally or fiscally salient policy areas. These findings underscore the institutional role of intra-party rules in shaping the vertical distribution of power in federal systems.
The Netherlands Local Manifesto Project. Infrastructure for studying local party politics
Simon Otjes, Joes de Natris, Marijn Nagtzaam
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The Netherlands Local Manifesto Project (NLMP) collects manifestos of parties running in local elections in the Netherlands. It is not just the largest collection of party manifestos running in local elections in the world, but actually is the largest collection of party manifestos globally. This article introduces the NLMP: we briefly introduce the specificities of local government in the Netherlands. We then explain the structure of the data set and how it was collected. We illustrate its utility by looking at a simple example analysis that can be performed with it, examining the length of election manifestos in municipalities of different sizes. We conclude by sketching a broader research agenda.

Perspectives on Politics

Knowing Is Disturbing: Emotions and Public Attitudes toward Digital Control under Autocracy
Danqi Guo, Genia Kostka
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Digital technologies have transformed the way governments around the world maintain social and political order. However, the intrusive and often repressive nature of modern political control mechanisms, such as digital surveillance and digital censorship, is largely concealed from the public and becomes “normalized” by state propaganda, particularly in authoritarian regimes. Engaging with the political psychology literature on emotion, we examine how citizens respond emotionally to such control when exposed to relevant revealing information and how these emotions relate to shifts in attitudes toward authoritarian governments. Using a survey experiment and 50 in-depth interviews conducted in China, we find that exposure to revealing information about digital control slightly amplifies negative emotions but profoundly reduces positive emotions and significantly undermines public support for authoritarian digital governance. These effects are more pronounced in the context of digital surveillance than censorship and are most severe when individuals perceive control measures as personally targeted. Our findings underscore the political-psychological consequences of digital control, emphasizing the role of emotions in shaping public responses to digital authoritarianism based on new insights into the affective dimensions of digital repression.
Blending Truth and Lies: Using an Ethnographic Sensibility to Study Online Misinformation
Carolyn E. Holmes
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Ethnographic methods of all varieties contend with the idea of the “truth” of accounts and the meanings attached to them, as well as the importance of context in mitigating truth or falseness in how these accounts are presented. Discerning truth from lies and the purpose of both in the context of making meaning in a time and place is at the heart of the ethnographic enterprise. Because powerful images or messages evoke emotional reactions on social media or contributory websites like message boards, the relative accuracy of the representations they make is often less important than their reach and the ways they make and remake “reality” for their audiences. A picture or an image, even one attributed to a context or a meaning wholly independent of the context from which it emerged, becomes part of how people online see or experience an event. The context in which information is presented and the speakers or presenters of this information also condition its uptake and resonance. This paper argues that ethnography is uniquely suited to understand the effects and reach of decontextualized information and the ways it makes meaning, both on- and offline.

Political Behavior

Inclusionary and Exclusionary Preferences: A Test of Three Cognitive Mechanisms
Marika Landau-Wells, Kirsten O. Lydic, Joachim Kennedy, Benjamin G. Mittman, Todd W. Thompson, Akhil Gupta, Rebecca Saxe
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Exclusionary social policies take a significant toll on the mental and physical health of targeted groups. Support for specific exclusionary policies does not always align with general antipathy towards the targeted group, however. Does support for specific exclusionary policies rely on particular thought processes (i.e., cognitive mechanisms)? Does opposition? We investigate these questions through the lens of “bathroom laws” across two studies. In Study 1, we use functional neuroimaging to test three candidate cognitive mechanisms from the literature: (1) threat-related emotions (e.g., fear, disgust) supporting exclusionary preferences; (2) mentalizing (e.g., empathy, perspective-taking) supporting inclusionary preferences; and (3) self-regulation (e.g., aligning one’s behavior with one’s goals) supporting inclusionary preferences. Consistent with the intergroup conflict and prejudice literatures, we find evidence of a motivated self-regulation mechanism in bathroom law opponents. In Study 2, we investigate a possible source of this motivation using text analysis of open-ended policy preference justifications. We find that bathroom law opponents link their policy preference to a small number of specific values, particularly autonomy of action. Taken together, these studies point to a value-driven, motivational account of inclusionary preferences that reconciles puzzling patterns of public opinion, offers new levers for tolerance interventions, and provides some insight into the brain-basis of political behavior.
Partisan Reactions to Endogenous Election Timing: Evidence from Conjoint Experiments in Japan
Masaaki Higashijima, Naoki Shimizu, Hidekuni Washida, Yuki Yanai
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Stepping Up the Political Ladder: How the Burden of Fundraising Limits Candidate Entry
William Marble, Nathan Lee, Curtis Bram
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Advice Not Taken: Canadian Citizen Assemblies and Subsequent Referendums
Lewis Krashinsky, Christopher H. Achen
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Political Geography

The political geographies of AI and the manosphere
Constance Copley, Jason Luger, Lisa Thomas, Ozge Dilaver
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Seams of power: Migration, state capitalism, and the dual mobilities of European energy investment in Jordan
Kendra Kintzi
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The case for feminist electoral geography
Claire McGing, Lisa Keenan, Fiona Buckley
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Doing regions: multiplicity and singularization in the ontological politics of the Arctic
Vesa VÀÀtÀnen
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Organising at the margins: Spaces of worker resistance in late twentieth century Britain
Paul Griffin, Sarah Peck
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“Playing the Good Samaritan”: Rethinking securitization and care work through a politics of conviviality in Santiago, Chile
Nicholas Nikola GarcĂ­a Johnson
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Political Psychology

Examining the correspondence between political ideology and gun policy attitudes among Black and White people in the United States
Joy E. Losee, Gerald D. Higginbotham, Gaby C. Pogge, Liz Kerner, James A. Shepperd
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The present research examined whether political ideology corresponded with gun attitudes among people disproportionately experiencing gun violence—Black people in the United States. Across four studies ( N = 25,847) we found that race (Black vs. White) interacted with political ideology to predict gun attitudes, safety perceptions, and policy preferences. Among White participants, being more conservative corresponded with more positive gun attitudes, perceptions, and support for pro‐gun policies. Among Black participants, the relationship was weak or nonsignificant. Further, experience with gun violence also interacted with political ideology such that the relationship between gun attitudes, policy preferences and political ideology was weaker among participants who reported experience with gun violence compared with participants that reported no experience. These results have implications for the generalizability of the single‐item political ideology scale. This research also indicates that efforts to reduce gun violence focusing on reducing political polarization overlook that the polarization occurs largely among White people which may ultimately divert attention and resources from Black communities most impacted by gun violence.
The psychology of political attitudinal volatility
James Dennison
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The assumption that political beliefs are formed by early‐life socialization and psychological predispositions, leading to stability in adulthood, increasingly acts as a theoretical cornerstone in the literature. However, politics is replete with examples of attitudinal change; this article proposes that certain stable psychological predispositions are likely to foster volatility in attitudes and general cognition. Using British electoral panel data, it shows that social distrust, open‐mindedness, and tolerance for uncertainty are associated with greater volatility in attitudes to immigration, redistribution, European integration, environmentalism, capital punishment, and Scottish independence. Locus of control, need‐for‐cognition, empathy, and risk tolerance are associated only with volatility in attitudes to some issues. Age, education, household income, being male, and lower partisanship are all negatively associated with attitudinal volatility. Overall, this study suggests that attitudinal volatility itself constitutes a meaningful dimension of political behavior, rooted in stable psychological predispositions.
Religious‐based homonegativity as a function of the endorsement of traditional gender norms
P. J. Henry, Matthew Nielson, Jaime L. Napier
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Religious individuals tend to express negative attitudes toward members of the LGB population. The explanations for this relationship have mostly pointed to endorsement of conservative and authoritarian ideological systems. However, the theoretical perspective of sexuality‐as‐gendered proposes that beliefs about gender norms and gender role expectations play a primary role in explaining the relationship, given religious motivations for social control of men and women and views that LGB individuals violate traditional gender expectations. Using two data sets representing 80,000 individuals across more than 60 countries, we test mediation models to determine the relative role of these different ideological systems. While conservative and authoritarian belief systems consistently play an important mediating role between religiosity and homonegativity, on average neither is as strong cross‐nationally, or across religious groups, as beliefs about gender. The results show further support for the importance of beliefs about gender as a central ideological system in social and political worldviews.
Symbolic racism against black people among black and white Americans: A system justification account
Alexandra Suppes, Jaime L. Napier, P. J. Henry, Kodai Kusano
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Using three nationally representative, probability samples of Americans ( N s range from 848 to 20,728), we examined the endorsement of symbolic racism against Black people among both Black and White Americans through the lens of system justification. We found (1) endorsement of symbolic racism among Black Americans is not trivial and (2) acceptance of income inequality is a robust predictor of symbolic racism for all respondents, above and beyond political conservatism, ingroup and outgroup affect (Studies 1 and 3), racial stereotype endorsement (Study 2), desire for social dominance, and group consciousness (Study 3). Furthermore, the association between acceptance of inequality and symbolic racism is mediated by perceptions of system fairness for both Black and White respondents (Study 3). This large‐scale analysis suggested that both Black and White Americans have a motivation to perceive the system as fair, and this manifested in similar justifications of racial inequality, even when such beliefs are antithetical to group or self‐interests.

Public Choice

Preventing gerrymandering: a moving-knife algorithm to draw congressional districts
Steven J. Brams, Alex Bai, Yagnesh Patel
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Do constitutional unamendability rules make a difference?
Adam Chilton, Mila Versteeg
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Leaders often try to amend constitutions to remove checks on their powers. To help protect against such democratic erosion, constitutional drafters and jurists sometimes restrict constitutional amendments by: (1) specifying in the constitutional text that certain clauses or principles can never be changed (“Eternity Clauses”); (2) granting apex courts the power to review the procedural validity of amendment processes (“Amendment Review”); or (3) developing judicial doctrines that block amendments that change the constitution’s nature (“Unamendability Doctrines”). But are unamendability rules actually associated with differences in countries’ levels of democracy? We argue that Eternity Clauses are likely to emerge in conditions more conducive to protecting democracy, while court-created doctrines will emerge in conditions when democracy is under threat. We also hypothesize that enforcement is difficult because when would-be autocrats command enough political power to amend their constitution, it is hard for both courts and political actors to resist. We test this argument using data on countries’ unamendability rules and their levels of democracy. Across three research designs—cross-country comparisons, panel regressions, and event studies—we find some evidence that countries that adopt Eternity Clauses subsequently have higher levels of democracy, but this may be due to differences in countries’ democratization trends prior to adopting them. In contrast, we find little evidence that Amendment Review or Unamendability Doctrines are associated with differences in democracy levels. We do find that unamendability rules are associated with higher levels of constitutional replacement, suggesting that when amendments are not possible, undemocratic reforms might be pursued by writing a constitution from scratch. We supplement these quantitative findings with a case study of presidential term limit evasion, which shows that unamendability rules are rarely invoked to halt term limit amendments.
Political alignment and the distribution of investment subsidies: quasi-experimental evidence from Germany
Björn Bremer, Robin Hetzel
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How people understand voting rules
Antoinette Baujard, Roberto Brunetti, Isabelle Lebon, Simone Marsilio
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If individuals are to be empowered in their selection or use of a voting rule, it is necessary that they understand it. This paper analyzes people’s understanding of two voting rules: evaluative voting and majority judgment. We first distinguish three components of understanding in this context: how to fill in the ballot; how votes are aggregated; and how to vote strategically. To measure each component, we draw on results from a lab experiment on incentivized voting where participants are exogenously assigned single-peaked preferences and answer comprehension questions on the rules employed. We find that most participants understand how to fill in the ballot with both voting rules. However, participants’ understanding of vote aggregation under majority judgment is lower and, crucially, more heterogeneous. While some participants correctly understand its aggregation property, a sizable group fails to grasp it. We also observe no difference in voting behavior between evaluative voting and majority judgment: the data confirm the theoretical prediction that under evaluative voting there will be a high incidence of strategic voting through the use of extreme grades, but contradict the prediction that under majority judgment voters will vote less strategically. Finally, we find that with majority judgment, the better voters understand how votes are aggregated, the more they vote strategically, hence resulting in inequality in voter agency.
On the relative sequencing of internal and external rent-seeking contests
Indraneel Dasgupta, Dhritiman Gupta
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Corruption kills some people faster than others
Robert Gillanders, Vincent Tawiah
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Public Opinion Quarterly

An Audit of Social Science Survey Experiments
Tamkinat Rauf, Jan Gerrit Voelkel, James Druckman, Jeremy Freese
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Survey experiments have become a popular methodology for causal inference across the social sciences. We study the efficacy of survey experiment designs by analyzing 100 social science experiments—entailing more than 1,000 hypothesis tests—that were selected by experts via a competitive process and fielded on probability samples of US adults between 2012 and 2020. Inclusion in the analysis is only conditional on the experiment qualifying for data collection, and not in any way on study results or publication. Results show that less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported by the data, implying many more null findings than ostensibly appear in the published literature. We find that the largest predictor of positive experimental results was sample size. This is somewhat surprising, given that experimental studies typically take power considerations into account prior to data collection. In our data, the importance of sample size stemmed from small effect sizes across studies (perhaps smaller than researchers may have anticipated), highlighting a tension between commonly used power calculi and determining what constitutes a “meaningful effect.” We also find that moderation hypotheses were rarely significant, and that using multiple items for outcome measures did not affect results as expected. But indicators of research experience predicted higher rates of positive results, suggesting that there may be some room for optimizing experiment outcomes by minimizing design errors.
A Measurement Gap? Effect of Survey Instrument and Scoring on the Partisan Knowledge Gap
Lucas Shen, Gaurav Sood, Daniel Weitzel
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Research suggests that partisan gaps in political knowledge with partisan implications are wide and widespread in the United States. Using a series of experiments, we estimate the extent to which the partisan gaps in commercial surveys reflect differences in confidently held beliefs rather than motivated guessing. Knowledge items on commercial surveys often have guessing-encouraging features. Removing such features yields scales with greater reliability and higher criterion validity. More substantively, partisan gaps on scales without these “inflationary” features are roughly 40 percent smaller. Thus, contrary to some prior research, which finds that the upward bias is explained by the knowledgeable deliberately marking the wrong answer (partisan cheerleading), our data suggest that partisan gaps on commercial surveys in the United States are strongly upwardly biased by motivated guessing by the ignorant. Relatedly, we also find that partisans know less than what toplines of commercial polls suggest.

Research & Politics

Toxicity and U.S. Senate candidate Twitter messaging in the 2022 election
Jeffrey A. Stone
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Social media has had a transformative effect on politics and governance. While research into the consequences of social media use on politics and governance is mixed, elected officials and political candidates commonly use multiple social media channels to grow constituencies and draw attention to their agenda. A well-crafted social media strategy can further the perception of a candidate or elected official as credible, trustworthy, and able to effectively govern. However, research into social media has suggested that engagement is often driven by toxic and negative content, limiting the possibility of productive political discourse. Using a dataset of posts from 58 U.S. Senate candidates on Twitter, this study seeks to determine whether social media-based political communication during the 2022 election aligns with preexisting perceptions of toxicity. The results suggest that the toxicity of candidates’ Twitter-based political communication is mostly low, though temporal and group differences were found. This case study provides a basis for further investigation into candidates’ strategic use of social media.
From citizen input to a more egalitarian agenda: Public inquiries and the policy agenda
Hen Hana Kersenti Feldman, Ilana Shpaizman
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Public inquiries serve as a path for citizens to convey daily grievances directly to politicians, seeking resolutions. This paper examines their role as an information supply channel in the agenda-setting stage. Political agendas often exhibit socioeconomic bias, reflecting the interests of affluent groups, partly due to policymakers’ reliance on narrow information sources. We argue that exposing decision-makers to diverse, everyday citizen concerns through public inquiries contributes to a more equitable and inclusive political agenda. We test this argument using comprehensive data from Israel’s parliament, specifically examining the parliamentary Special Committee for Public Inquiries. We find that this committee’s agenda exhibits a high representation of issues concerning lower- and middle-class individuals. This finding has implications for how policymakers can broaden their agenda to address often-neglected issues and groups.
Revisiting name recognition and candidate support: Experimental tests of the mere exposure hypothesis
Costas Panagopoulos, Donald P. Green, Philip Moniz
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Often lacking adequate information to guide their votes, voters may be susceptible to subtle psychological influences, including name recognition. For decades, scholars have found that voters are more likely to cast ballots for candidates whose names they recognize. These arguments imply that exposure to little-known candidates’ names increases electoral support. But research has seldom demonstrated a causal effect consistent with this “mere exposure” hypothesis, particularly under real-world conditions. We conduct three sets of experiments exposing subjects to the names of challengers in a range of electoral contexts across the United States. Results yield little support for the hypothesis that exposure increases electoral support. As name recognition may be insufficient without party labels, we also conduct experiments providing the candidates’ party affiliations, again finding little evidence of an effect. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that candidates, particularly challengers, who merely make their names known will thereby win more votes.

The Journal of Politics

Why Do Citizens Support Ineffective Military Policing Policies? Evidence from Field and Survey Experiments in Colombia
Robert Blair, Michael Weintraub, Jessica Zarkin
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Ruling Party Personalism and Central Bank Independence
Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Yasin Shafi, Joseph Wright
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Ambition and Conflict in State Legislatures
Christian Fong, Michael Kistner
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The Electoral Effects of State-Sponsored Anti-LGBTQ Measures
Violeta Ines Haas, Konstantin Bogatyrev, Tarik Abou-Chadi, Heike KlĂŒver, Lukas Stoetzer
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The Ethnic Politics of Nature Protection in Africa
Stephen Dawson, Felix Haass, Carl MĂŒller-Crepon, Aksel Sundström
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Does the Style of Misinformation Condition its Effects? An Experiment in Brazil
Rodrigo FernĂĄndez Caba, Simon Chauchard, Fernando Mello
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Dynamic Impact of Legislative Gender Quotas on Female Representation in Cabinets
Dongil Lee
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The Politics of Disaster Prevention
Martin Gilens, Tali Mendelberg, Nicholas Short
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Military Power and Ideological Appeals of Religious Extremists
Luwei Ying
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West European Politics

Ethnic harassment and political engagement of immigrants in Europe
Mathijs Kros
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