We checked 31 political science journals on Friday, January 30, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period January 23 to January 29, we retrieved 44 new paper(s) in 19 journal(s).

American Political Science Review

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PSR volume 120 issue 1 Cover and Front matter
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Generic title: Not a research article
PSR volume 120 issue 1 Cover and Back matter
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List of Reviewers
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Annual Review of Political Science

Fictive Politics
Reo Matsuzaki, Fabian Drixler, Anna Grzymala-Busse
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No systematic framework exists to analyze the different forms of fictions in politics. We develop the concept of fictive politics to illuminate how actors simulate selective, alternative, or entirely fictional representations of reality while dissimulating incompatible facts. We distinguish three ideal types: deceptions, where audiences are unaware that they are facing a fiction; veiled facts, where audiences suspect a fiction but choose not to probe it; and open fictions, where audiences are fully aware that they are witnessing a fiction. We show that fictions answer critical political needs, including maintaining systems of domination, managing conflicts between competing interests and values, and facilitating cooperation between state and society.

British Journal of Political Science

Three Is a Crowd: Information and Electoral Coordination in Argentina
AdriĂĄn Lucardi, AgustĂ­n Vallejo, GermĂĄn Feierherd
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Successful coordination around a Duvergerian equilibrium requires accurate and consistent information about parties’ expected electoral support. In practice, such information is often unreliable and rarely available at the local level, thus hindering voters’ coordination. In this paper, we leverage Argentina’s Open, Mandatory, and Simultaneous Primary Elections as a large-scale survey of voter preferences. Using data from 135 municipalities in the province of Buenos Aires (2011–23), we show that a narrower margin between the top-two placed parties in the primary increases both turnout and the proportion of positive votes in the general election, while decreasing electoral fragmentation. We further show that the second-placed party in the primary is substantially more likely to win the election than the third-placed one. Also consistent with theory, these effects are more pronounced (a) in concurrent elections; (b) in smaller municipalities; and (c) when the second-placed party is closer to the first-placed one.

Comparative Political Studies

Varieties of Communism
Dan Slater, Michael Bernhard
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Comparative politics has moved on from communism too quickly. Even as authoritarianism takes center stage in the subfield, the most important authoritarian regime type of the 20 th century has faded into a footnote. Proceeding in a similar spirit but with less sweeping ambition than the “Varieties of Capitalism” and “Varieties of Democracy” projects, this special issue and wider research agenda considers how communist regimes have differed both from other authoritarian regimes and from each other. Even while sharing certain ideological and institutional features that made them analytically distinctive, communist regimes historically emerged and evolved in very different contexts and in very different ways. Assembled essays on communist regimes in East Asia and Eastern Europe reveal the promise of bringing communism as a category back into our comparative conversations.
The Way Back After Backsliding: Public Opinion and the Restoration of Democracy
Kristian Frederiksen, Robb Willer, Michael Bang Petersen
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Abundant prior research has analyzed the mass public’s role in democratic backsliding. Comparatively little research has studied democratic restoration, the rehabilitation of democratic institutions following backsliding. We investigate this issue using the case of Poland, where the pro-democratic alliance led by Donald Tusk won the parliamentary election in 2023 after eight years of democratic backsliding under the Law and Justice party. A central concern is whether such an opportunity to restore democratic institutions fuels anti-democratic sentiment among vengeful winners and disappointed losers in a polarized society. Using panel survey data, we show that the election result did not exacerbate anti-democratic attitudes on either side. At the same time, survey experiments reveal that pro-democratic elites may jeopardize the winners’ benevolence by using an aggressive, confrontational restoration strategy. The findings may inform current and future endeavors to restore democratic institutions in Poland and other cases such as the United States.
Political Preferences, Policy Loss and Shifting Support for European Integration
Simon Hix, BjĂžrn HĂžyland
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What explains the relationship between political preferences and support for European integration? Why did people on the Left oppose, and Right support, European integration in the 1980s, but this pattern reverse in the 2020s? We argue that citizens evaluate European integration in a transactional way in terms of their assessment of EU policy outputs. If the European Union offers citizens policies in line with their political preferences, they support it. If not, they oppose it. We find support for this argument using individual level public opinion data ( n > 1,100,000) from all EU member states over almost 50 years (from the mid 1970s to the present) and novel approaches for measuring the left-right policy location of EU legislative outputs.
Fighting for a Better Life: Protests and Public Opinion in South Africa
Sigrid Alexandra Koob, Mogens K. Justesen
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How do civic protests affect public opinion? Protests may lead governments to address certain policy issues, but can also exert pressure on politicians by causing shifts in public opinion. We examine the effects of peaceful and disruptive protest on public opinion using evidence from South Africa, where citizens regularly use protests to express dissatisfaction with public services. First, we test the effects of protests on public opinion in a difference-in-differences design, using multiple waves of a nationwide survey matched to geo-coded protest data. Second, we use a survey experiment that randomly exposes respondents to images of disruptive or peaceful protests. Third, we run a conjoint experiment to disentangle the effects of the different dimensions of protest. We find that peaceful protest where protesters attribute blame for their grievances attract more sympathy and public support. However, under specific conditions, disruptive protests are capable of attracting sympathy and support from the public.

Comparative Politics

International Anti-Corruption Commissions: Explaining Institutional Design and Autonomy
Rachel A. Schwartz
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Political corruption is a leading governance challenge, yet governments often lack the will to tackle it and may use anti-corruption to undermine democracy. This dilemma has given rise to international anti-corruption commissions (IACCs), which rely on partnerships between international experts and domestic personnel. Why are some IACCs granted independence, while others are politically subordinate? Focusing on northern Central America, this article argues that where coalitions comprised of government insiders and domestic activists maintain a seat at the negotiating table, they use their agenda-setting capacities, expertise, and ability to raise the audience costs of incumbent maneuvers to dilute anti-corruption to ensure greater IACC independence. Additionally, struggles over IACC autonomy are influenced by transnational dynamics, as political leaders learn from one another how to limit anti-corruption enforcement.
Dynamic Preferences for Redistribution: Understanding Welfare Support in Argentina
Ayelén Vanegas
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Why can support for cash transfers decrease among beneficiaries when poverty is growing? This article argues that support for redistributive policies is dynamic and shaped by citizens’ evaluations of policy results. When beneficiaries feel cash transfers help them cope with hardship, support can increase. However, if recipients perceive these policies as insufficient in offsetting their economic situation, they may view them as ineffective in consistently alleviating poverty. Consequently, recipients may oppose expanding cash transfers while continuing to support deeper redistributive policies—such as education and job-training programs—that offer long-term economic improvement. Using a multi-method design that combines weighted difference-in-differences estimations, machine learning models, focus groups, and a novel face-to-face survey in Argentina, the findings show how preferences for redistribution can change in different contexts.

Electoral Studies

The myth of compensatory effects: How party organisation shapes women's representation in dual-candidacy mixed electoral systems
Heinz Brandenburg, Maarja LĂŒhiste
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European Journal of Political Research

Improving hate speech detection with large language models
Natalia Umansky, Maël Kubli, Ana Kotarcic, Laura Bronner, Selina Kurer, Philip Grech, Dominik Hangartner, Fabrizio Gilardi, Karsten Donnay
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Efforts to curb online hate speech depend on our ability to reliably detect it at scale. Previous studies have highlighted the strong zero-shot classification performance of large language models (LLMs), offering a potential tool to efficiently identify harmful content. Yet for complex and ambivalent tasks like hate speech detection, pre-trained LLMs can be insufficient and carry systemic biases. Domain-specific models fine-tuned for the given task and empirical context could help address these issues, but, as we demonstrate, the quality of data used for fine-tuning decisively matters. In this study, we fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini using a unique corpus of online comments annotated by diverse groups of coders with varying annotation quality: research assistants, activists, two kinds of crowd workers, and citizen scientists. We find that only annotations from those groups of annotators that are better than zero-shot GPT-4o-mini in recognizing hate speech improve the classification performance of the fine-tuned LLM. Specifically, fine-tuning using the highest-quality annotator group – trained research assistants – boosts classification performance by increasing the model’s precision without notably sacrificing the good recall of zero-shot GPT-4o-mini. In contrast, lower-quality annotations do not improve and may even decrease the ability to identify hate speech. By examining tasks reliant on human judgment and context, we offer insights that go beyond hate speech detection.
From context to congruence: Immigration salience and voter socialization
Leonardo Carella, Francesco Raffaelli
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This paper considers how issue salience environments affect long-term patterns of political choice via processes of political socialization. Drawing on the well-known ‘impressionable years’ hypothesis, we theorize that voters who grew up in high-immigration salience contexts subsequently exhibit higher levels of voter-party agreement on immigration (issue congruence). We find support for this hypothesis from two studies, which leverage cross-sectional variation within cohorts in exposure to immigration salience in voters’ formative years. The first employs congruence data from a survey of 10 European countries, linked to historical salience data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. The second is a within-country study, measuring salience and congruence from two long-running German public opinion survey series. The analysis suggests that growing up at times when immigration is high on the political agenda can have long-term consequences for the relationship between voters’ preferences on that issue and their political choices, shedding light on the mechanism behind ‘generational realignment’.
Enhancing public support for international sanctions: An information provision experiment
Jaroslaw Kantorowicz, Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko
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We examine whether different information frames affect how people perceive the domestic costs of sanctions and support sanctions. Using data from an information provision experiment in Germany and Poland, we demonstrate that people overestimate the costs of sanctions (Gross Domestic Product loss due to an energy embargo) in sending countries. Yet, this perception can be corrected through the provision of actual information, which in turn enhances the support for the sanction. Contrasting sanctions’ costs with other costs – Covid-19 costs and costs imposed on target countries – has no additional effect.
Voices of the party base: How supporters want established parties to respond to new parties
Dominik Duell, Lea Kaftan, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Jonathan B. Slapin, Christopher Wratil
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New parties have emerged across European democracies, forcing established parties to develop strategies to campaign against them. But how do supporters want their established parties to respond to these new parties? Using survey experiments in 14 European countries, we examine how party supporters react to responses their preferred parties might take to the rise of a hypothetical new party. Our results primarily highlight that voters care about substantive representation. They endorse accommodative responses towards a new party offering a policy they agree with. Thus, the extent to which party responses bind supporters to established parties is highly contingent on the distribution of policy positions among their supporters. Often, established parties must walk a precarious tightrope, balancing the need for unity with some degree of tolerance for dissent. Hence, our results explain why parties accommodate the position of new parties, despite recent evidence that doing so can be electorally detrimental.

Legislative Studies Quarterly

A Rich Woman's World? Wealth and Gendered Paths to Office
Rachel Bernhard, Andrew C. Eggers, Marko KlaĆĄnja
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We introduce and seek to explain a new and surprising fact about members of the US Congress: since at least the 1980s, Congresswomen have been substantially wealthier than Congressmen serving in the same party and decade. We articulate three mechanisms that could explain this gender wealth gap, and use new data on the backgrounds and families of members of Congress to evaluate each mechanism. We find no evidence that the wealth gap arises because districts likely to elect women also elect wealthier members, or because women had more lucrative pre‐Congressional careers. We do find evidence that the gap can be explained by women facing steeper challenges that wealth helps them overcome—particularly related to caregiving—and by Congresswomen's spouses earning more money than Congressmen's spouses. Our analysis sheds light on how obstacles facing ambitious women can lead to apparently counterintuitive advantages among the women who manage to succeed.

Party Politics

Polarising the Christian West: Us and them in far-right parties’ rhetoric
Lucienne Engelhardt
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Far-right communication often portrays a division between ‘the people’ and perceived antagonists, potentially fuelling intergroup tensions. A pivotal element is the politicisation of religion: in Christian-shaped regions, far-right parties invoke Christianity as part of Western identity – despite their weak religious ties and growing secularisation. This paradox raises questions about religion’s function in far-right discourse. I argue that far-right parties systematically use a conservative reading of Christianity as a demarcation tool – marking not only Islam but also cultural liberalism as incompatible with a Christian-framed ingroup. Using parliamentary data from Europe, I conduct automated text classification to identify religious markers and their co-occurrence with inclusionary–exclusionary rhetoric across countries and over time. Results reveal group-specific framing, distinct patterns of religious invocation compared to other parties, and links of these patterns to events. This study demonstrates how Christian narratives serve as rhetorical resources for boundary construction, challenging the cohesion of even secularised societies.

Perspectives on Politics

Cultural Roots of Prejudice: Cultural Scripts and the Reactivation of Antisemitism in Germany
Eylem Kanol, Max Schaub
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Negative out-group attitudes are often attributed to perceptions of competition or threat. We propose an alternative source: culture, conceptualized as cultural scripts—interconnected networks of meanings that link particular group identities to negatively connoted phenomena. Evidence comes from three studies on the reactivation of the cultural script of traditional antisemitism in Germany. We begin our analysis by isolating the cultural script through automated analysis of a corpus of antisemitic texts. Next, using survey data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic ( n = 17,800), we document an increase in antisemitism among Christian believers. This, we argue, is due to the pandemic activating the cultural script of traditional antisemitism, which links Judaism with the spread of disease. By means of an additional survey ( n = 2,000) and a concept association task, we demonstrate the presence of the cultural script in the minds of Christian believers. Two priming experiments explore how elements of the script can be triggered. Our work demonstrates the deep cultural roots of negative out-group attitudes and suggests a novel set of methods for studying them.
Rethinking the Deterrence-Disarmament Dichotomy: The Complex Landscape of Global Nuclear Weapons Preferences
Lauren Sukin, J. Luis Rodriguez, Stephen Herzog
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Backers of nuclear deterrence are thought to use strategic logic, while nuclear disarmament advocates are believed to embrace moral reasoning. Yet policy makers and diverse publics may hold both—ostensibly contradictory—preferences. Recent studies find that publics in Western democratic countries support the nuclear strikes underpinning long-standing conceptions of deterrence policy. But other scholarship indicates that these very same publics want to abolish nuclear arsenals. A lack of comparative analyses across the Global North and the Global South limits the generalizability of these claims. Does a categorical dichotomy between nuclear deterrence and disarmament really reflect global public views on the bomb? What explains a multitude of seemingly inconsistent scholarly results? In this reflection essay, we argue that deterrence and disarmament are not necessarily incompatible tools for reducing nuclear dangers. We point to several ways that individuals might simultaneously accommodate both pro- and antinuclear weapons policy positions. To investigate this proposition, we offer a new observational dataset on global nuclear attitudes from a survey we conducted in 24 countries on six continents ( N = 27,250). Unlike isolated studies of these phenomena, our data strongly confirm that publics do not subscribe to categorical views of nuclear weapons. This headline finding and novel dataset open new possibilities for studying nuclear politics.

Political Behavior

Conditions of Confinement: Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Political Participation?
Jacob Harris
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The Heterogeneous Associations of Rural Consciousness and Political Preferences
Trent Ollerenshaw
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Political Geography

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Editorial Board
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The spatial politics of green hydrogen: Speculative enactments, contested dynamics and alternative pathways in southern Chile
CristiĂĄn Flores FernĂĄndez
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Geonarratives of outer space: How astronaut memoirs narrate conquest
Darshan Vigneswaran, Enrike van Wingerden
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Civilian militia formation and protection against rebel violence: Evidence from Nigeria
Imrana Buba, Jana Krause
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Pursuing accountability under authoritarian rule: Thailand's National Human Rights Commission and community struggles for justice
Zali Fung
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Testing the liberal borders of the EU: (De)Constructing the right of asylum through informality
Francesca Fortarezza
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Political Psychology

Corruption erodes people's beliefs in morality and justice
Miguel R. Ramos, Marcelo Moriconi, Sibila Marques, Carla Branco
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In this research, we argue that corruption adversely affects individuals' perceived morality of politicians and their sense of justice, eroding some key values by which societies are guided. We further analyzed how the erosion of these key values might be negatively associated with people's well‐being. We found support for our contentions through multiple studies, including a cross‐national study comprising 82 countries surveyed over 32 years (Study 1, n = 210,207). This large‐scale study was further supported by two experimental studies (Studies 2 and 3, n = 449) elucidating the mechanisms and causality involved in these processes. Our findings showed that corruption leads individuals to ascribe lower morality to politicians, which in turn is associated with lower perceptions of justice. Our data show that this process is negatively associated with well‐being, contributing to a broader understanding of how corruption impacts individuals and societies.
The affective style of politics: Evidence from cross‐country surveys
Julie Hassing Nielsen, Dan MĂžnster
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We know that emotions matter in politics but less is known about the role of individual ways of processing and responding to emotions, that is, affective styles. Here we report on two surveys, exploring the relationship between affective style (i.e., the individual propensity to either tolerate, adjust, or conceal emotions) and social and political trust. We base our study on large‐n representative survey data from Denmark ( N = 1048) and the United States ( N = 1046), including the Affective Style Questionnaire (ASQ) battery of questions. We observe strong cross‐country similarities that adjusting positively correlates with trust, while concealing negatively correlates with trust. We furthermore show that affective style contributes novel explanatory power beyond personality traits. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on the role of emotions in politics, providing salient insights into individual ways of processing and responding to emotions and how that impacts politically salient outcome variables like trust.
Rebels without a cause: Collective narcissism and political contrarianism
Christopher M. Federico, Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, Tomasz Baran
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In this paper, we examine the relationship between collective and individual forms of narcissism and two contrarian political orientations that are oppositional and purposefully destructive—need for chaos and anti‐establishment orientation. In three studies (total N = 4144), we demonstrate that (1) national collective narcissism independently predicts higher need for chaos and anti‐establishment orientation, (2) non‐narcissistic ingroup satisfaction independently predicts lower levels of both contrarian orientations, (3) grandiose narcissism independently predicts higher need for chaos but not anti‐establishment orientation, and (4) vulnerable narcissism independently predicts higher levels of both outcomes. We provide evidence for these relationships in cross‐sectional regression analyses and in panel analyses that examine within‐person construct changes from before to after the 2023 Polish election and better account for time‐invariant confounders. Together, these findings suggest contrarian orientations may reflect a (frustrated) narcissistic demand to be recognized as better than others, both collectively and individually.

Political Science Research and Methods

Conditional relationships in dynamic models
Zach Warner, Garrett N. Vande Kamp, Soren Jordan
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Many political science theories posit empirical relationships that are conditioned by some moderating variable, which scholars model using a multiplicative interaction term in a regression. In recent years, scholars have begun using such terms in dynamic regression models with time series data. However, the lack of guidance on adding multiplicative interactions to these workhorse models exposes problems with the consistency of the estimator, model restrictions, and interpretation. This paper provides theoretical and practical guidance to address these problems. First, we define the conditions under which scholars can ensure consistent estimates when estimating relationships conditioned by a moderating variable in dynamic models. Second, we introduce a general model that makes no theoretical assumptions about precisely how conditional relationships unfold over time. Third, we develop a flexible approach for interpreting such models. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework with simulation evidence and an empirical application.
Inclusion to exclude: how femonationalism impacts policy preferences
Sophie Mainz
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How does femonationalism, defined as the selective invocation of gender equality to promote exclusionary anti-immigrant policies, affect citizens? While increasingly common across Western democracies, its impact on citizens’ preferences remains underexplored. This paper provides evidence from a preregistered survey experiment with 3,118 U.S. citizens, showing that femonationalist rhetoric can enhance opposition to pluralist policies in defense of progressive gender achievements. The effect is conditional on citizens’ prior immigration attitudes: anti-immigration individuals liberalize their gender views, while pro-immigration individuals demand stricter integration policies. The findings suggest that citizens are not consistent in their ideological preferences, especially when political elites frame liberal values as conflicting.
Forecasting the use of force: a word embedding analysis of China’s rhetoric and military escalations
Jackie S.H. Wong
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Is an autocracy’s official rhetoric a reliable proxy for forecasting military escalation? While the conventional hands-tying mechanism argues that official rhetoric binds leaders to stated positions and limits their ability to back down, recent scholarship on bluster suggests that autocracies may employ hawkish rhetoric to justify de-escalation ex-post. This study evaluates these competing perspectives by analyzing China’s official rhetoric and military behavior in the Taiwan Strait from 2016 to 2022. Employing a word-embedding approach, I construct an original Chinese-language lexicon capturing implicit threats from over two million state-media articles. I show that increases in China’s implicit threats toward Taiwan are associated with a higher likelihood of military escalation, implying that official rhetoric conveys predictive information rather than mere cheap talk.

Public Choice

The “Missing Sibling” effect: how China’s one-child policy reshaped grassroots voting
Peijie Wang, Youlang Zhang
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Can corruption indices lead to statistical discrimination? Experimental evidence from a within-country setting
Philipp Chapkovski
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Corruption indices can provide valuable insights into varying levels of misconduct across regions, but they may also encourage statistical discrimination by transferring group-level attributes onto individuals. This paper examines how information about within-country regional corruption affects perceptions and trust. Using a pre-registered online experiment, we matched participants with partners from three Russian regions that differ in their corruption rankings. Participants estimated how many individuals from each region would report a favorable outcome in a coin toss, and decided how much to trust them as first movers in a trust game. Knowing the corruption indices not only led participants to view individuals from more corrupt regions as more dishonest and less trustworthy, but this information also prompted them to see those from less corrupt regions as more honest and trustworthy. This widened the perceived differences in honesty and trustworthiness between residents from and less corrupt regions. When allowed to choose their sources of information, about half of the participants opted to view the corruption index, further magnifying these perception gaps. Our findings highlight how group-level corruption data can influence individual-level interactions and foster statistical discrimination.
Democracy and conflict: evidence from the New York Times
Jianwei Feng, Ping Zhang
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The paradox of judicial reforms in Latin America
Andrea Castagnola, Aníbal Pérez-Liñån
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Public Opinion Quarterly

Not So Sexually Modern After All: Homonegativity and Prejudice Against Open and Age-Gap Relationships
Alberto LĂłpez Ortega, AgustĂ­n Blanco Bosco
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How widespread is sexual liberalism in tolerant societies? Theoretical and descriptive evidence suggests an overall liberalization in societal views on topics such as women’s rights and homosexuality. Yet, relying on sexual norms theory, this study unveils persistent sexual prejudice. We differentiate between “normalized” sexual issues, like same-gender marriage, which have gained mainstream acceptance, and “nonnormalized” issues, such as nontraditional sexual practices and relationships, which remain stigmatized. Through a conjoint experiment in Catalonia, Spain, we investigate public attitudes toward adoptive parents with varying sexual orientations, relationship types, and age differences, confirming that discriminatory preferences are prevalent in contexts with low social desirability. By highlighting the continued prejudice against both normative and nonnormative sexual issues, this research contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of sexual attitudes and the challenges facing LGBTQ+ politics and rights.

Research & Politics

Deep canvassing with automated conversational agents: Personalized messaging to change attitudes
Molly Offer-Westort, Jiehan Liu, Nick Feamster, Kartik Garg, Nguyen Phong Hoang, Sudhamshu Hosamane
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We test a social media conversational agent for canvassing on the topic of anti-transgender prejudice, replicating and benchmarking treatment effects. In-person deep canvassing is the gold standard for durably changing attitudes on polarizing topics. However, door-to-door canvassing is costly, and many populations may not be feasibly reached in this manner. Campaigns are already conducting outreach using digital tools, including text messages and social media. If appropriately trained agents messaging over social media can achieve a fraction of the effect of in-person canvassing, canvassing may be scaled up to achieve large overall impacts at lower costs. Scripts used in this application are based on those used by transgender allies in the original study. To personalize messaging, the conversational agent uses natural language processing to detect conversational topics, and shares relevant pre-scripted messages of information and third-person experiences, encouraging respondents to engage in perspective-taking with respect to an outgroup. This study demonstrates the potential of automated social media messaging for deep canvassing, with possible applications by governments, public health agencies, and political organizations. Estimated effects are positive and significant under covariate adjustment and reweighting; due to important differential attrition, partial-identification bounds are also reported and include zero.

West European Politics

Dimension-specific party and public opinion responsiveness in the EU immigration acquis
Miriam Sorace, Natascha Zaun
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Homeownership and political efficacy: how housing wealth shapes whether people feel heard
Matthias Haslberger, Mads Andreas ElkjĂŠr, Ben Ansell
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World Politics

Citizens’ Views of Decision-Makers’ Roles: A Conjoint Experiment in Fifteen Countries
Davide Vittori, Sebastien Rojon, Jean-Benoit Pilet
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abstract: This article investigates whether citizens meaningfully distinguish between profiles of politicians—government ministers in particular—based on the paradigms of democracy that the ministers embody. Although previous research shows that sociodemographic characteristics and political beliefs influence voters’ candidate choices, research has paid little attention to whether candidates’ representational paradigms influence voters. Using a con-joint experiment conducted across fifteen Western and Eastern European countries, this study examines respondents’ preferences for candidates who embody six representational paradigms, which the authors derive from the literature. The findings reveal that citizens value candidates who represent the will of the people and do not belong to a particular political party, compared to those who are affiliated with political parties and are primarily accountable to a parliament. Moreover, the study demonstrates that trustful citizens prioritize candidates who embody a paradigm resembling the well-known responsible party model more than do distrustful citizens, and those with populist attitudes favor candidates with an instructed delegate paradigm and to a lesser extent, a technocratic paradigm.
Choosing Challengers: Opposition Party Success in Hard Times
Timothy Hellwig, Tonya K. Dodez
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abstract: Voters commonly respond to economic downturns by punishing incumbents. But what about the fate of the opposition? When assessing policymaker performance in tough times, do voters choose an established party with experience as head of government, or an inexperienced challenger? Research on the rise of challengers emphasizes issue opinions and elite strategies. The authors argue instead that perceptions of competence shape voter choices for incumbents, for main opposition options, and for challengers alike. Although selecting unproven challengers is risky, the authors predict that voters are more likely to take a chance when the duration of economic underperformance is long and the government’s tenure is short. Depressing the competence of dominant parties opens a window for parties that lack executive experience. A series of analyses provides evidence to support this argument. By showing that parties in opposition can be distinguished on competence grounds, the study’s findings widen the lens on how electoral accountability works.
Bringing Autocracy Home? How Migration to Autocracies Shapes Migrants’ Support for Democracy
Nikhar Gaikwad, Kolby Hanson, Aliz TĂłth
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abstract: Prior scholarship finds that migrants embrace democratic ideals and promote democracy back home, but this work focuses on migration to high-income Western democracies. How does moving to autocracies shape migrants’ democratic attitudes and behavior? Leveraging a field experiment facilitating migration from India to the Persian Gulf, the authors isolate the causal impact of migration on migrants’ political preferences. After migrating, treated individuals exhibited significantly higher trust in Indian democratic institutions and greater political participation—except for voting, which is difficult to do from abroad. Additionally, they were no more willing to trade democracy for economic growth than control group subjects. The treatment group’s political preferences stem from comparing their experiences under democratic and, as migrants, autocratic governments. The findings suggest that migrants value democracy for its political benefits, which outweigh preferences for higher economic development. This article clarifies the mechanisms by which migration shapes preferences for democracy and sheds light on how migration to autocracies shapes politics in sending regions more generally.
Transparency for Authoritarian Stability: Open Government Information and Contention with Institutions in China
Handi Li
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abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that authoritarian states bear a cost to social stability for disclosing information. This study investigates the effect of an increasingly common transparency initiative in authoritarian countries: open government information (ogi). By publishing policy information, ogi allows citizens to identify illegal government behavior. Drawing from the Chinese case, the author theorizes that although such policy transparency reveals whether governments violate laws, it encourages the use of institutional channels for resolving disputes. By redirecting popular discontent from the streets to institutions, such transparency initiatives foster social stability in autocracies rather than threatening it. Using online and in-the-field survey experiments about ogi on land-taking compensation, the author shows that policy transparency improves citizens’ preference for legal and political institutions and causes them to prioritize institutions over protest when they have grievances against the government. Multiple findings about the mechanisms suggest that policy information increases citizens’ perceived fairness of institutions in resolving their specific cases.
Aging Advanced Capitalist Democracies: The New Electoral Politics of Economic Stagnation
Tim Vlandas
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abstract: The population of advanced capitalist democracies (acds) has aged substantially in the last decades. Yet we know little about the consequences of aging for the electoral politics of economic performance. This article develops a novel theoretical framework linking aging to lower economic growth in four interrelated steps. First, elderly voters care more about pensions than other voters do, but less about policies related to child care, family, and education. Second, elderly voters are less likely to penalize governments for low growth and unemployment. Third, gray power pushes governments to protect the growing share of budgets allocated to pensions at the expense of more growth-enhancing policies, most notably social and public investments, while also weakening policy responsiveness during recessions. Fourth, this policy reallocation undermines economic growth. The author tests this theory using multilevel and fixed-effects regressions, an instrumental variable approach, and causal mediation analysis on micro- and macrolevel data across twenty-one acds from the 1960s onward. The results show that aging fundamentally alters the electoral politics of economic stagnation in acds.