We checked 31 political science journals on Friday, January 16, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period January 09 to January 15, we retrieved 39 new paper(s) in 15 journal(s).

American Political Science Review

Claimability in International Relations: Oil Discoveries, Territorial Claims, and Interstate Conflicts
KYOSUKE KIKUTA
Full text
Interstate conflict is rare not primarily because states settle disputes peacefully but largely because they have no serious dispute. To address this simple but oft-neglected reality, I provide a comprehensive measurement of states’ claimable areas. Focusing on three international norms that emerged after the world wars (territorial integrity, minority protection, and maritime sovereignty), I code geographical extents of states’ claimable areas for 1946–2024. I illustrate the usefulness of this dataset by applying it to oil and conflict. By leveraging the records of over 600,000 wildcat drills, natural experiments, and difference-in-differences, I demonstrate that fuel resources increased interstate conflicts only when discovered in areas claimable to multiple states. The extensive analyses of validity, heterogeneity, and mechanisms, as well as the “most-similar” case study, provide further evidence. These findings expand the emerging literature on territorial norms by providing comprehensive, rigorous, and contemporary evidence for claimability in international relations.

Electoral Studies

Corrigendum to ‘Does switching pay off? The impact of parliamentary party instability on individual electoral performance’ [Elect. Stud. Volume 99, February 2026, 103037]
Allan Sikk, Sona N. Golder, Raimondas Ibenskas, Paulina SaƂek-Lipcean
Full text
Effects of a politician’s reputation for providing electoral clientelism: A theory with evidence from Brazil
Eduardo Mello, Will Jennings, Lawrence McKay, Oto Montagner
Full text
Corrigendum to ‘Happy and glorious? The sometimes-unifying effects of the British monarchy’ [Elect. Stud. 96 (2025) 1-7 102961]
Braeden Davis, Yu-Shiuan Huang
Full text
Added, not selected: The limited electoral effectiveness of party elite interventions in candidate selection
Thomas DĂ€ubler, Theresa Reidy
Full text
Conflict on the campaign trail? How campaign effort and electoral competitiveness shape affective polarization
Justin Robinson, Ruth Dassonneville
Full text

European Journal of Political Research

The unifying magic of the unwaved flag: Do national identity primes reduce affective polarization?
Maria Nordbrandt, Gina Gustavsson, Karen N. Breidahl
Full text
It is often suggested that one way to reduce affective polarization is to remind citizens of a common in-group identity – such as the national one – to bridge partisan divides. Yet, to our knowledge, such a causal link has only been found in the United States, and even there, it has not been tested by exposure to the most common national symbol: the flag. Thus, we still do not know if such implicit yet ubiquitous reminders of national identity, rather than those that explicitly invoke national pride, are able to reduce affective polarization. In order to fill this research gap, we conducted a survey experiment in Sweden and Denmark in 2023/2024, two countries where national flags are omnipresent yet often ‘unwaved’. Using two versions of subtle flag treatments, our results show that in Sweden, subjects who were primed with a picture of the national flag showed lower levels of affective polarization measured as social distancing, but not in terms of trait stereotyping or party dislike. This effect was not mediated, however, by the strengthening of explicit national identity attitudes, such as national pride. These results suggest that flags need indeed not be explicitly waved in order to work their unifying magic.
After secularisation? A comparative analysis of religious cleavages in Western Europe
Martin Elff, Ruth Dassonneville, Kamil Marcinkiewicz
Full text
Religion has long been considered an important determinant of voting behaviour. However, the secularisation of Western societies has changed its role. Secularisation not only limits the political relevance of religion, it may also affect the nature of religious cleavages themselves. While extant literature suggests that differences between religious denominations are in decline, with regard to differences between religious and non-religious voters there are two divergent expectations, (1) that these differences are also in decline and (2) that there is an increased polarisation between the religious and the non-religious. For the latter expectation, evidence has already been found regarding the United States. In this paper, we examine whether a similar change can be observed in Western Europe. Combining data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and information on parties’ positions from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), we assess the nature of over-time changes in the connection between religion and the vote choice. The results point to an increased polarisation between members of a Christian church and the non-religious, however, we also find that non-Christians are more similar to the non-religious than to Christians. We also uncover a growing division between Catholics and Protestants that does not fit common expectations. These findings challenge earlier work on the political consequences of secularisation and lead to new research questions.

International Organization

Authoritarian Reforms and External Legitimacy
Calvert W. Jones
Full text
A growing body of work suggests that authoritarian regimes can enhance their external legitimacy by undertaking reform—from democratic or “pseudodemocratic” institutional changes at the domestic level to participation in international efforts to mitigate climate change. Yet the shared theoretical logic underlying this work has received surprisingly little empirical attention. This research contributes by offering findings from an iterative series of original survey experiments conducted over nationally representative samples of US citizens. Study 1 tested the foundational hypothesis—that reforms build external legitimacy—by adopting a simple independent groups design. Studies 2 and 3 subjected that hypothesis to harder tests via conjoint designs, and also evaluated extension hypotheses about when and in what sense “legitimacy” is gained. Across studies, the results consistently demonstrate that reforms (of a variety of types) do generate external legitimacy, offering both positive benefits as well as shielding benefits in keeping with theoretical arguments. The results also provide support for several new and previously undocumented findings concerning the role of reform type, type of legitimacy-derived gain, and the conditions under which such gains are more or less likely to accrue.
Making Bribery Profitable Again? The Market Effects of Suspending Accountability for Overseas Bribery – CORRIGENDUM
Lorenzo Crippa, Edmund J. Malesky, Lucio Picci
Full text

International Studies Quarterly

Cyber Chess: Using a New Panel Dataset to Identify Global Patterns in National Cybersecurity-Strategy Adoption
Nadiya Kostyuk, Jen Sidorova
Full text
Over the past two decades, nearly one hundred countries have adopted their first national cybersecurity strategies; however, the timing of these adoptions varies significantly. While a notable increase occurred after 2010, the catalysts behind this surge and the broader motivations driving countries to establish such strategies remain subjects of debate. Existing studies present conflicting arguments, drawing from diverse evidence and often focusing narrowly on specific countries or limited comparative analyses. This study addresses these debates by assembling the first comprehensive dataset, the National Cybersecurity Strategies (NCS) data, which covers the adoption of national cybersecurity strategies by 193 countries from 2000 to 2024. Our findings highlight the pivotal role of international-organization membership—and, to a lesser extent, military alliances and the cyber-threat environment—in driving adoptions. The NCS dataset not only equips researchers and policymakers with a valuable tool to study national cybersecurity strategies but also provides broader insights into the dynamics of policy diffusion across diverse issues, facilitating inquiry into broader international-relations questions.

Party Politics

Electoral mobilisation in turbulent times
Chendi Wang, Endre BorbĂĄth, Argyrios Altiparmakis
Full text
This symposium examines how European parties mobilize electorally in an era of recurrent crises and rapid political transformation. Building on the updated PolDem dataset, which tracks media coverage of national election campaigns across fifteen European countries from 1972 to 2023, the symposium investigates how issue salience, party positioning, and voter behaviour interact under turbulent conditions. The introduction situates the contributions around three core themes: (1) measuring and comparing party communication across media and manifestos; (2) mapping cross-national and longitudinal variation in political conflict lines; and (3) identifying the drivers of politicization across economic, cultural, and political dimensions. Together, the articles offer an integrated, content-based perspective on campaign dynamics that links short-term issue emphasis to long-term party-system structuration. The collection advances our understanding of how crises reshape electoral competition and democratic representation in Europe.
War in the campaign? Issue emphasis and issue salience during the 2022 French presidential campaign
Elie Michel
Full text
The outbreak of war in Ukraine 6 weeks before the 2022 French presidential election generated an exogenous geopolitical shock that disrupted the electoral campaign. This study investigates how candidates adapted their issue emphasis strategies in response to this crisis and whether their adjustments aligned with voter issue salience. Using a combination of media content analysis (PolDem dataset) and public opinion survey data (EnquĂȘte Electorale Française – EnEF), the study systematically examines issue emphasis for the six major candidates. The findings show that while candidates initially engaged with the Ukraine crisis, their emphasis on the issue declined over time, as economic concerns dominated the campaign agenda. The analyses confirm that mainstream candidates followed public issue salience more closely than challenger candidates, who engaged in selective issue emphasis strategies. Notably, Marine Le Pen, often classified as a challenger, behaved as a mainstream candidate, prioritizing economic issues over her traditionally owned themes such as immigration. These findings contribute to broader debates on issue salience, electoral shocks, and strategic campaign behavior, demonstrating that while external crises can momentarily disrupt campaign agendas, they do not necessarily redefine electoral competition.

Perspectives on Politics

Dilutive Drift: The Racial Impact of Low-Change Redistricting
Ursula Hackett
Full text
As America’s racial composition shifts, states that minimize changes to existing districts in successive redistricting cycles can entrench racial disparities in representation, a process I term dilutive drift. Using novel spatial measures of US House district change between successive congresses, I show that packing and cracking can occur passively, and not only through deliberate gerrymandering. States with long histories of racial exclusion, such as Alabama and Louisiana, make persistently fewer changes to their districts than other states. Minimal-change redistricting, I argue, can entrench unequal representation just as effectively as overt gerrymandering.
Defending the Status Quo: On Adaptive Resistance to the Electoral Gender Quotas. By Cecilia Josefsson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 280p.
VerĂłnica PĂ©rez-Bentancur
Full text
Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same Sex- Relationships. By Abigail Ocobock. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 257p.
Kimberly Martin
Full text
Staging Democracy: The Political Work of Live Performance. By Emily Beausoleil. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. 173p.
Tom Drayton
Full text
Female Masculinity and the Business of Emotions in Tokyo. By Marta Fanasca. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. 268p. - Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo’s Pink Economies. By Michelle H. S. Ho. Durham: Duke University Press, 2025. 203p.
Vera Mackie
Full text
We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality. By Jill Elaine Hasday. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. 312p.
Julie C. Suk
Full text
Supreme Bias: Gender and Race in U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings. By Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. CollinsJr., and Lori A. Ringhand. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. 290p.
Christine L. Nemacheck
Full text
Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum. By Carol Cleaveland and Michele Wasling. New York: New York University Press, 2024. 288p.
Roberta VillalĂłn
Full text

Political Analysis

Survey Quality and Acquiescence Bias: A Cautionary Tale
Andrés Cruz, Adam Bouyamourn, Joseph T. Ornstein
Full text
In this note, we offer a cautionary tale on the dangers of drawing inferences from low-quality online survey datasets. We reanalyze and replicate a survey experiment studying the effect of acquiescence bias on estimates of conspiratorial beliefs and political misinformation. Correcting a minor data coding error yields a puzzling result: respondents with a postgraduate education appear to be the most prone to acquiescence bias. We conduct two preregistered replication studies to better understand this finding. In our first replication, conducted using the same survey platform as the original study, we find a nearly identical set of results. But in our second replication, conducted with a larger and higher-quality survey panel, this apparent effect disappears. We conclude that the observed relationship was an artifact of inattentive and fraudulent responses in the original survey panel, and that attention checks alone do not fully resolve the problem. This demonstrates how “survey trolls” and inattentive respondents on low-quality survey platforms can generate spurious and theoretically confusing results.

Political Geography

Rethinking environmental governance for development: the blue Ɠconomy dispositif
Alex Midlen
Full text
Book review forum
Shae Frydenlund, Nicole T. Venker, Matthew Walton, Aye Lei Tun, Francesco Buscemi, Elliott Prasse-Freeman
Full text
Enduring crises, dynamic border work: Migration governance in Ventimiglia since COVID-19
Silvia Aru
Full text
Jennifer Hyndman's Managing Displacement, 25 years on
Yolanda Weima, Linn Biorklund, Pablo Bose, Karen Culcasi, Hanno Brankamp, Jennifer Hyndman
Full text

Political Science Research and Methods

Do party leaders influence roll-call voting in congress?
Anthony Fowler
Full text
Scholars typically assume that congressional party leaders whip their members and influence their voting behavior, but little evidence convincingly separates the effects of party leaders from the selection of members into parties. I find that a switch from a relatively moderate to a relatively extreme party leader causes rank-and-file members to cast more extreme roll-call votes (and vice versa). I further find that party leaders even influence the members who did not support their leadership bid, and rank-and-file members are less likely to cast partisan votes when there is no party leader. This study also sheds light on a historically anomalous period of Republican moderation, and it helps to explain the increase in congressional polarization over the past 50 years.
When can individual partisanship be tempered? Mass behavior and attitudes across the COVID-19 pandemic
Brandice Canes-Wrone, Jonathan T. Rothwell, Christos Makridis
Full text
How do partisan differences in mass behavior and attitudes vary across contexts? Using new individual-level panel data on the COVID-19 pandemic from 54,216 US adults between March 2020 and September 2021, we consider how partisan differences vary according to the personal costs and benefits of behaviors, their public symbolism, and elite-level policy choices. Employing various panel data estimators, including difference-in-differences, we evaluate how partisan gaps evolve across changes to the political and health contexts, including the national vaccine rollout, individual vaccination status, and within-state policy variation. We find partisan divides are substantial even in (ostensibly) apolitical domains, although they are tempered by higher net personal costs to actions, lower public symbolism, and elite policy choices that counter national party cues.
A Bayesian mixture model captures temporal and spatial structure of voting blocs within longitudinal referendum data
John O’Brien
Full text
The estimation of voting blocs is an important statistical inquiry in political science. However, the scope of these analyses is usually restricted to roll call data where individual votes are directly observed. Here, we examine a Bayesian mixture model with Dirichlet-multinomial components to infer voting blocs within longitudinal referendum data. This model infers voting bloc mixture within municipalities using state-level data aggregated at the municipal level. As a case study, we analyze the vote totals of Maine referendum questions balloted from 2008 to 2019 for 423 municipalities. Using a birth–death Markov chain Monte Carlo approach to inference, we recover the posterior distribution on the number of voting blocs, the support for each question within each bloc, and the blocs’ mixture within each municipality. We find that these voting blocs are structured by geography and largely consistent across the study period. The model finds that blocs exhibit both spatial gradients and discontinuities in their structure. Examining the statistical fit of the model, we uncover a small number of questions that show inconsistency with the statewide bloc structure and note that the content of these questions relates to specific regions. We conclude with possible statistical extensions, connections to other statistical frameworks in political science, and detail possible locations for model applications.

PS: Political Science & Politics

Climate Change, Governance Failures, and Public Administration
Aseem Prakash
Full text
How do insights from environmental politics of the 1970s–1990s inform our understanding of contemporary climate governance? I suggest that the governance response for addressing pollution problems of the 1970s–1990s was sequential. The first wave of governance interventions addressed market failures; the second wave targeted government failures. In contrast, climate governance seeks to correct both market and government failures simultaneously. Furthermore, unlike first-generation environmental problems, domestic and international factors together hinder progress on climate change. Theoretically, this article examines how governance failures are recognized and addressed, how and why backlashes arise, and which governance innovations are possible in contested policy spaces. Three lessons emerge. First, governance innovations should be sculpted with failure drivers in mind. Because political challenges stall climate progress, climate policy must address these political concerns. Second, governance innovations cannot be expected to deliver a perfect solution devised by a technocratic elite. Policy progress is uneven, slow, and incremental. Third, governance arrangements, even on arguably highly technocratic issues, require social and political licenses to operate. Instead of asking the public to “listen to science,” climate-policy advocates should listen to people and devise policies that the public views as improving their everyday lives.

Public Choice

Dysfunctional effects of altruism: an introduction to the symposium
Alain Marciano
Full text

Public Opinion Quarterly

Comparing Speech-to-Text Algorithms for Transcribing Voice Data from Surveys
Camille Landesvatter, Jan Behnert, Paul C Bauer
Full text
With the increasing frequency of surveys being conducted via smartphones and tablets, the option of audio responses for providing open-ended responses has become more popular in research. This approach aims to improve the user experience of respondents and the quality of their answers. To circumvent the tedious task of transcribing each audio recording for analysis, previous studies have used the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API to convert audio data to text. Extending previous research, we benchmark the Google Cloud service with state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems from Meta (wav2vec 2.0), NVIDIA (NeMo), and OpenAI (Whisper). To do so, we use 100 randomly selected and recorded open-ended responses to popular social science survey questions. Additionally, we provide a basic, easy-to-understand introduction on how the Whisper ASR system works as well as code for implementation. By comparing Word Error Rates, we show that for our data the Google Cloud ASR service is outperformed by almost all other systems, highlighting the need to also consider other ASR systems.
Republican Pushback on Patriotism-Linked COVID-19 Vaccine Messages: A Note on Moral Reframing
Stephanie L DeMora, Jennifer L Merolla, Brian Newman, Elizabeth J Zechmeister
Full text
Moral reframing theory suggests that messages that connect with fundamental values may soften resistance, especially when from a trusted source. We assess these expectations in opinion dynamics around US Republicans’ views on COVID-19 vaccines. Data are from a preregistered experiment in a national survey of Republicans (n = 3,058). Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three treatments or a control (no message) condition. Treated individuals received a message that connected vaccination to patriotism, a core conservative value, and this was attributed to a public health official (treatment 1), Republican voter (2), or Democratic voter (3). With the exception of those who were vaccinated and boosted, the message either had no effect or, more often, produced a backlash that led Republicans to express less favorable dispositions toward vaccination; backlash was stronger for messages sourced to a Democrat or public health official. Our conclusion discusses implications for moral reframing research and public health messaging.
Whose Party Is This? Explaining Perceptions of US Party Ideology
Seth B Warner
Full text
How do Americans perceive the parties ideologically? Using a multiverse analysis of 720 models, I observe how citizens’ ideological placement of the parties varied from 1990 to 2020 as a function of party ideologies at different levels: in Congress, in state legislatures, and in the electorate. Although public perceptions associate somewhat with elite ideology, more variation is attributable to how citizen-level partisans identify ideologically. This carries mixed implications. On one hand, partisan-ideological sorting in the electorate has made it easier for voters to see the difference between parties. On the other, it leads voters to see the parties as being more extreme than they would otherwise. These findings underscore the extent to which parties, beyond their governmental function, are social groups with norms that are fluid, identifiable, and politically impactful.

Research & Politics

Reducing affective polarization does not affect false news sharing or truth discernment
Carter Anderson, Oliver Byles, Joshua Calianos, Sade Francis, Chun Hey Brian Kot, Bennett Mosk, H. Nephi Seo, Julija Vizbaras, Brendan Nyhan
Full text
Why do people spread false news online? Previous studies have linked affective polarization with misinformation sharing and belief. Contrary to these largely observational findings, however, we show that experimentally improving people’s feelings about opposing partisans (versus members of their own party) has no measurable effect on people’s intentions to share true news, false news, or the difference between them, known as discernment. By contrast, we find evidence that a reminder of accuracy can modestly improve truth discernment among people who report sharing political news. These results suggest the need for a reexamination of the role of affective polarization in the dissemination of misinformation online.
Don’t answer me? A cautionary tale of personality traits and survey nonresponse
Adam J. Ramey
Full text
In recent years, there has been an explosion of research looking at the relationship between Big Five personality traits and political behavior. This boom has been driven by the development of brief inventories that can assess subjects’ traits in as few as ten questions. Despite these developments, subjects’ own propensity to complete the surveys may be driven by their personality traits. As a result, key findings in this literature may be plagued by selection bias. Using a new data collection effort, I show that subjects who are more Agreeable or Neurotic have systematically different propensities to complete surveys. This result in hand, I show how relationships between the Big Five and political behavior may change estimated relationships between the traits and behavior. These findings are a significant caution to scholars examining the Big Five and their effects on a variety of phenomena.
Which frame fits? Policy learning with framing for climate change policy attitudes
Molly Offer-Westort, Will Gruen, Carter Herron, Kaden Hyatt, Max Buford, Kevin Davis, Diego Fonseca, Mushkie Gurevich, Tiffanie Huang, Rocio Jerez, Quinn Liu, Obi Obetta, Miguel Orellana, James Passmore, Jack Qiu, Julian Rapaport, Iñigo Sanchez-Asiain Domenech, Fernando Sandoval, Jose A. Tandoc, Ravi Yalamanchili
Full text
How should climate policy be framed to maximize public support? We evaluate the effects of five distinct message frames—scientific, religious, moral, and two economic (efficiency and equity)—on support for climate change policy using a randomized experiment with over 2300 U.S. respondents. Moving beyond pairwise frame comparisons, we adopt a policy learning approach that identifies the most effective frame using cross-validated sample splitting, thereby avoiding selective inference. We find that the economic efficiency frame consistently yields the largest gains in policy support, outperforming both the control condition and all alternative frames, on average. While the effects of covariate conditional frame assignment were modest and not significantly different from assigning the best overall frame, we find consistent positive effects of the efficiency frame across partisan subgroups. Our findings offer methodological and substantive contributions: we highlight how policy-learning methods can be applied in experimental framing studies, and we offer specific evidence on the relative efficacy of alternative framing messages on support for several climate policies.

West European Politics

Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright Memorial Prizes 2025
Dorte Martinsen
Full text
The Ecologism/Productivism cleavage: reassessing the transformation of cleavage politics in Western Europe
Florent Gougou, Simon Persico
Full text