We checked 30 political science journals on Friday, March 28, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period March 21 to March 27, we retrieved 64 new paper(s) in 19 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Why masses support democratic backsliding
Noam Gidron, Yotam Margalit, Lior Sheffer, Itamar Yakir
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Concerns over democratic backsliding have proliferated recently, as elected politicians have sought to undermine democratic checks and balances. This study examines the underpinnings of public support for democratic backsliding, delineating five theoretical explanations: personalistic leadership, affective polarization, populism, majoritarianism, and entanglement with the legal system. We test the explanatory power of these accounts within the Israeli context, leveraging panel survey data collected before and after the government announced its plan to curtail the courts. Results indicate that support for the plan is best explained by two forces: prior attachment to the leader heading the backsliding effort and animosity toward partisan opponents. Notably, populist attitudes are not associated with support for the government's plan. The theoretical framework and longitudinal research design help explain who supports democratic backsliding.
National identity after conquest
Christopher Carter, Daniel W. Gingerich
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Conquering powers routinely adopt state‐directed nationalization projects that seek to make the boundaries of the nation coterminous with the (newly expanded) boundaries of the state. To this end, they implement policies that elevate the economic status of individuals who embrace the occupier's national identity and discriminate against those who do not. This paper develops a formal model that illuminates when such policies succeed or fail. We show that the effectiveness of discrimination hinges on the perceived longevity of occupation. If occupier rule is expected to be short‐lived, discrimination will backfire, as dissident parents transmit the marginalized national identity to their children; intense intergenerational socialization more than compensates for the negative wealth effects of discrimination. If occupier rule is instead perceived to be long‐lasting, discrimination will achieve its intended aims. Case studies on the Chilean occupation of Tacna, Peru (1880–1929), and the Prussian occupation of Northern Schleswig (1866–1920) illustrate the logic.

American Political Science Review

The Train Wrecks of Modernization: Railway Construction and Separatist Mobilization in Europe
YANNICK I. PENGL, CARL MÜLLER-CREPON, ROBERTO VALLI, LARS-ERIK CEDERMAN, LUC GIRARDIN
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This paper uses the gradual expansion of the European railway network to investigate how this key technological driver of modernization affected ethnic separatism between 1816 and 1945. Combining new historical data on ethnic settlement areas, conflict, and railway construction, we test how railroads affected separatist conflict and successful secession as well as independence claims among peripheral ethnic groups. Difference-in-differences, event study, and instrumental variable models show that, on average, railway-based modernization increased separatist mobilization and secession. These effects concentrate in countries with small core groups, weak state capacity, and low levels of economic development as well as in large ethnic minority regions. Exploring causal mechanisms, we show how railway networks can facilitate mobilization by increasing the internal connectivity of ethnic regions and hamper it by boosting state reach. Overall, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the effects of European modernization on nation building.
Domestic Institutions, Geographic Concentration, and Agricultural Liberalization
IN SONG KIM, MEGUMI NAOI, TOMOYA SASAKI
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One of the persistent obstacles to trade liberalization is a government’s inability to commit and deliver compensation to trade losers. We argue that constitutional structures interact with the geographic profiles of industries to shape a government’s ability to commit to a compensation contract , defined as an interbranch contract whereby an executive branch promises compensation in exchange for legislative support for ratification. Our theory predicts that parliamentary systems are more likely to liberalize and compensate geographically concentrated industries because party leaders enforce a contract with a smaller number of legislators. Presidential systems are more likely to liberalize and compensate geographically diffused industries because legislature enforces a contract with a larger number of legislators. Using novel product-level data on agricultural trade liberalization and remote-sensed cropland in 38 democracies, we find evidence consistent with our argument. Qualitative studies of the sugar industry and interviews with policymakers provide further evidence.

British Journal of Political Science

International Border Restrictions During COVID-19 as Global Health Security Theatre
Catherine Z. Worsnop
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During outbreaks of diseases like cholera, HIV/AIDS, H1N1, and Ebola, governments often impose international border restrictions (for example, quarantines, entry restrictions, and import restrictions) that disrupt the economy without stopping the spread of disease. During COVID-19, international travel restrictions were ubiquitous despite initial World Health Organization recommendations against such measures because of their limited public health benefit and the potential for imposing a range of harms. Why did governments adopt these measures? This article argues and finds evidence that governments use international border restrictions as security theatre: ‘measures that provide not security, but a sense of it’. Quantitative analysis of original data on states’ first border restrictions during the pandemic suggests that behaviour was not just driven by the risk of COVID-19 spread. Instead, nationalist governments, which are likely to be attracted to policies associating disease with foreigners, were more likely to impose border restrictions, did so more quickly, and adopted domestic measures more slowly. A case study of the US further illustrates the security theatre logic. The findings imply that overcoming or redirecting governments’ attraction to security theatre could promote international cooperation during global health emergencies.
Working For Democracy: Poll Officers and the Turnout Gender Gap
Pau Vall-Prat, Toni Rodon
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What factors contribute to closing the turnout gender gap after female enfranchisement? In the wake of franchise expansion, we test whether being a poll officer—and hence being exposed to election management—boosted the politicisation and mobilisation of women. In the context of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1939), we exploit a lottery that assigned recently enfranchised women to be poll officers in the first election women were allowed to vote (1933). We use an original individual-level panel database and show that women randomly selected as polling officers were as likely to participate in subsequent elections than men, while the gender turnout gap persisted among the rest. Further analyses suggest that being poll officers made women more receptive to political organisations mobilisation strategies, and their presence had positive externalities by encouraging other women to participate. Our findings highlight the potential benefits of exposure to election engineering among groups previously excluded or less engaged with democracy.
Explaining peace during long and rapid power shifts: A theory of grand bargains
Mathias O. Frendem, Michael F. Joseph, William Spaniel
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Bargaining scholars predict rapid power shifts cause preventive war. But cases with rapidly shifting power often remain peaceful. To explain the dogs that don’t bark, we introduce instant, repeated, costly militarization into Powell’s (1999) conventional-weapons power transition model. First, we rationalize preventive war during long, slow, complete-information power shifts. Second, we find that where past research into conventional shifts predicts war, a grand bargain backed by the decliner’s threat of war emerges as a second equilibrium. Because war and a grand bargain both prevent power from shifting, declining powers deploy them under the same conditions. Our grand bargain survives war-causing hazards, and some latent shifts. It occurs after incremental militarization causes repeated appeasement-like concessions, and when power shifts are instant, slow or fast, and perfectly observed; suggesting conventional shifts induce grand bargains under surprising conditions. The Great Game’s end fits our grand bargain, but that British elites seriously considered war.
The Impact of Values on Issue Stances: Evidence from Panel Studies
Arjun Vishwanath
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Which predispositions drive voters’ policy attitudes? This article tests the role of political values as a driver of attitudes relative to two commonly posited sources – partisanship and symbolic ideology. Past work has found correlations between values and issue attitudes, but these cross-sectional studies have limited causal purchases. I test the effects of traditionalist and egalitarian values on issue stances using six ANES and GSS panel surveys from 1992 to 2020. I find that values drive within-voter changes in policy attitudes under a variety of specifications. Additionally, values shape attitudes on emergent policies, which I test using the cases of welfare reform in the 1990s and transgender policies in the 2010s. In all models, values have as large or larger effects on attitudes as that of partisanship or ideology. I conclude that values are a core predisposition which voters employ to make sense of policy issues.
Deliberation and Human Nature
Ramon van der Does
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Is It Still the Economy? Economic Voting in Polarized Politics
Thiago M. Q. Moreira
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How does polarized politics affect electoral accountability? In this paper, I investigate the impact of political polarization on two channels through which voters can sanction incumbents for poor policy outcomes: voting for the opposition and abstaining. Using presidential election results at the county level, I show that, under polarized environments, the number of voters punishing the incumbent party for poor economic performances decreases in both channels. Survey analyses confirm that as the perceived ideological distance between parties increases, partisans are less likely to (i) negatively evaluate the economy when their party holds the Presidency and (ii) among those who have a negative view of the economy, they are less likely to penalize their party for negative economic assessments. These results show that polarization affects economic evaluation and clouds the responsibility for economic conditions, decreasing voters’ willingness to sanction the incumbent party.
News Cycles and Satisfaction With Democracy: How the Pandemic Short-Circuited Media Polarization
Omar Hammoud-Gallego, Roberto S. Foa, Xavier Romero-Vidal
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During the coronavirus pandemic in the United Kingdom, media outlets shifted their focus from divisive political issues to more neutral topics like lifestyle, sports, and entertainment. This study explores how this change in media content relates to partisan divides in satisfaction with democracy. Using data from a representative survey of 201,144 individuals, we linked respondents’ perceptions of democratic performance to their daily media exposure. We did so by analysing 1.5 million tweets from British newspapers using a topic modelling algorithm to identify shifts in topic salience and sentiment using sentiment analysis. Our findings reveal a decline in partisan media exposure during the pandemic, associated with increased satisfaction with democracy at both individual and collective levels, and a narrowing of cross-party divides. These results contribute to discussions on affective polarization, the winner-loser gap in democratic evaluation, and media framing effects, highlighting the potential influence of depoliticized news coverage on democratic attitudes.

Comparative Political Studies

The Politics of Pessimism: Unfunded Public Goods as a Source of Right-Wing Populism
Torben Iversen, Alice Xu
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A major debate in political economy concerns whether right-wing populism is driven primarily by economic or cultural factors. This debate has proved challenging to resolve, because culture and economics covary. We leverage an economic shock induced by business lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic to isolate the impact of economic motivations. While lockdowns protected public health, they also imposed severe economic hardship, disproportionately affecting workers without college degrees. We argue in the U.S., those most exposed to the economic costs of lockdowns were more likely to shift support towards a populist president. Using a staggered difference-in-differences event study approach, we estimate the effect of state lockdowns on support for Donald Trump, finding a significant increase in Trump approval in states with high risk of downsizing. Our findings illustrate how right-wing populism can rise when the pursuit of “unfunded public goods”–such as public health, environmental sustainability, new technologies—has concentrated and uncompensated costs.
Compensation, Beliefs in State Intervention, and Support for the Energy Transition
Isabela Mares, Kenneth Scheve, Christina Toenshoff
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Transitioning away from carbon-intensive to renewable energy sources is one key lever through which countries can mitigate climate change. Governments have implemented interventionist policies that simultaneously seek to promote a transition to greener energy sources and shield producers and consumers from the costs of this change. We examine the impact of this enhanced role of the state on public opinion about environmental reforms. Using data from a survey containing multiple experiments fielded during the 2021 federal election in Germany, we show that policies of compensation that target households rather than firms and that have a progressive design increase support for electoral candidates who run on a pro-energy transition platform and for climate policy plans. We also show that beliefs in state intervention in the market have emerged as an important cleavage within the German mass public concerning environmental reforms because they shape assessments of the effectiveness and appropriateness of compensation.
Is There a Backlash Against Identity Politics? Experimental and Focus Group Evidence on the Conflict Over Gender-Neutral Language in Germany
Paul Marx
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Does gender-progressive value change prompt conservative backlash? This study combines survey-experimental and focus group data to examine how salient debates over gender-neutral language in Germany influence political alienation and voting intentions across different groups. Both studies consistently show widespread rejection of gender-neutral language. Despite aggressive public discourse, reactions remain surprisingly nonpolitical. Experimental exposure to a moralizing request to use gender-neutral language in a survey ( n = 6100) elicits negative reactions but no alienation. The treatment does decrease, however, vote intentions for the gender-progressive Greens, particularly among men. Rejection of gender-neutral language without political blaming also prevails in the twelve group discussions ( n = 64), regardless of gender or education. Polarizing conversation dynamics are rare. Hence, despite a conducive context of salience and politicization, there are no indications of crystallized backlash against progressive gender values. However, an intensification of negative attitudes over the one-year data collection period may signal early stages of backlash formation.

Electoral Studies

Linking individual electoral performance to the composition of elected bodies: A counterfactual-based approach
Oliver Huwyler
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The Swedish historical municipal council database
Abrar Bawati, Moa Frödin Gruneau, Josefine Magnusson, Johanna Rickne
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Partisan and non-partisan conspiracy theories’ diverging effects on political participation
Mert Can Bayar
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European Journal of Political Research

Urban–rural policy disagreement
SOPHIE BORWEIN, JACK LUCAS, TYLER ROMUALDI, ZACK TAYLOR, DAVID A. ARMSTRONG, KATHARINE MCCOY
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Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever‐widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized dataset of nearly 1000 policy issue questions across 10 distinct Canadian national election studies conducted between 1993 and 2021 ( N = 5.3 million), combined with a measure of the urban or rural character of every federal electoral district. This dataset allows us to measure urban–rural policy disagreement across a much larger range of policy issues and over a much longer time period than has previously been possible. We find strong evidence of urban–rural policy disagreement across a range of issues, and especially in areas of cultural policy, including questions relating to gun control, immigration and Indigenous affairs. We further find strong support for the ‘progressive cities’ hypothesis; in nearly all policy domains, urban residents support more left‐wing positions on policy issues than rural residents. However, we find no evidence these urban–rural policy divides have grown since the 1990s. Urban–rural policy disagreement, while large and meaningful, cannot explain the ever‐widening urban–rural political divide.
Why all these promises? How parties strategically use commitments to gain credibility in an increasingly competitive political landscape
MATHIAS BUKH VESTERGAARD
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Political parties face inherent risks when making election promises, as voters tend to penalize them for unfulfilled commitments. Nonetheless, parties make hundreds of promises. Why do parties engage in such precarious behaviour? I argue that parties employ a policy‐committing strategy when they need to increase the credibility of their policy programme and that they do so more today than previously because the political landscape has changed considerably in many Western democracies (time trend). Moreover, I expect parties to use the policy‐committing strategy more when they operate in a political arena with more competitors (system‐level factor), when they are a mainstream party (party‐level factor) and when they have increased the saliency of an issue (issue‐level factor). I test these four expectations with a unique, new dataset containing 330,850 quasi‐sentences coded from party manifestoes in 11 countries covering several decades of elections. Empirically, I find support for a time trend and show strong effects for the party‐level and issue‐level factors. However, a more competitive environment at the system level makes parties less, not more, likely to use the policy‐committing strategy. These results have important implications for party strategies, issue competition and policymaking in today's democracies.
The gendered long‐term consequences of automation risk on electoral behaviour: Evidence from Norway
BERNT BRATSBERG, HENNING FINSERAAS, PETER EGGE LANGSÆTHER, OLE ROGEBERG
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We examine long‐run effects of automation risk on turnout. We expect gendered negative effects because men's turnout is more sensitive to job loss and earnings, but negative effects might be offset by populist right‐wing mobilization on economic grievances. We rely on population‐wide administrative data to avoid well‐known biases in survey data. We find both men and women with high automation risk to suffer in the labour market, but automation risk is associated with lower turnout for men only. The negative association with turnout is weaker where the populist right is stronger, consistent with mobilization on economic grievances. Finally, we show experimentally that priming of automation risk produces null findings, suggesting that risks need to have material consequences to affect political behaviour. Our findings imply that technological change has contributed to the emergence of gender gaps in turnout and populist voting as well as the participation drop among the working class.

International Studies Quarterly

Public Support for Green, Inclusive, and Resilient Growth Conditionality in International Monetary Fund Bailouts
Mirko Heinzel, Andreas Kern, Saliha Metinsoy, Bernhard Reinsberg
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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently expanded its policy scope to include a broader set of policies to promote green, inclusive, and resilient growth. How does this expansion affect the support for the IMF and its loans among the populations of borrowing countries? We conducted a pre-registered survey experiment with 2,694 respondents from three borrower countries—Argentina, Kenya, and Pakistan. We show that support for IMF programs increases by approximately 24 percent compared to traditional programs when the IMF includes good governance, anti-poverty, climate change, and gender equality measures in its programs. Our results imply that people do not uniformly reject the imposition of policies of global governance institutions but have well-defined preferences over policy measures. Our findings contribute to debates on the backlash against international institutions by highlighting that citizens are willing to accept sovereignty intrusion when they push for policy goals aligned with their policy preferences.

Journal of Conflict Resolution

Crises and Consequences: The Role of U.S. Support in International Bond Markets
Lauren L. Ferry, Patrick E. Shea
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Sovereign default should theoretically lead to creditor punishment through higher borrowing costs or market exclusion. However, empirical evidence shows that punishment is inconsistent across defaulters. We argue that this disconnect can be explained by examining the role of geopolitical relationships, particularly with the United States. US support conditions expectations of both borrowers and creditors by providing a fiscal cushion and subsidized insurance. This dynamic incentivizes riskier financial behavior, increasing default likelihood. Paradoxically, post-default US support signals a greater ability to pay, reducing creditors’ incentives to punish. Using data on commercial defaults from 1970 to 2012, we find that states with higher levels of US support are more likely to restructure their debts. After restructuring, these states face lower borrowing costs and experience shorter periods of exclusion from bond markets. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the complex interplay between geopolitics and sovereign debt.

Journal of Theoretical Politics

Misaligned interests and the credibility of alleged support
Yu Mei
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When can a third party manipulate the bargaining dynamics between its protĂ©gĂ© and its adversary through diplomacy? I develop a formal model in which (1) the third party and its protĂ©gĂ© have misaligned interests, and (2) the disputants bargain simultaneously over two issue dimensions—one capturing common interests, the other capturing misaligned interests between the allies. The results show that when the protĂ©gĂ© and its patron have heterogeneous preferences for the disputed issues, the protĂ©gĂ© will not necessarily use the patron’s support in the way the patron wants. Foreign support increases the protĂ©gé’s bargaining leverage, and how the protĂ©gĂ© will use this increased leverage at the negotiating table directly affects the way the patron communicates. The existence of misaligned interests increases the credibility of the patron’s alleged support if the signal can potentially improve the protĂ©gé’s gains over both shared and misaligned interests with its patron.

Legislative Studies Quarterly

The Separation of Powers and Policymaking in the US States
Andrew M. O. Ballard, James M. Curry, Mary A. Kroeger
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Do the separation of powers dynamics in the United States affect policymaking outcomes? Scholars and observers of national politics have long expected that they do, but since there has been little meaningful variation in the constitutional separation of powers system, it has been difficult to conduct empirical assessments. We turn to the American states, were there is variation from state to state in separation of powers institutions. Drawing on a dataset of hundreds of thousands of bills introduced to state legislatures, and the case of North Carolina giving its governor veto power in 1997, we find evidence that greater separation of powers institutions generally relate to less legislative productivity and less partisan lawmaking. However, these findings are meaningfully conditioned by the presence or absence of divided government, and there is some variation from state to state.

Political Analysis

Priming Bias Versus Post-Treatment Bias in Experimental Designs
Matthew Blackwell, Jacob R. Brown, Sophie Hill, Kosuke Imai, Teppei Yamamoto
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Conditioning on variables affected by treatment can induce post-treatment bias when estimating causal effects. Although this suggests that researchers should measure potential moderators before administering the treatment in an experiment, doing so may also bias causal effect estimation if the covariate measurement primes respondents to react differently to the treatment. This paper formally analyzes this trade-off between post-treatment and priming biases in three experimental designs that vary when moderators are measured: pre-treatment, post-treatment, or a randomized choice between the two. We derive nonparametric bounds for interactions between the treatment and the moderator under each design and show how to use substantive assumptions to narrow these bounds. These bounds allow researchers to assess the sensitivity of their empirical findings to priming and post-treatment bias. We then apply the proposed methodology to a survey experiment on electoral messaging.

Political Behavior

When Do People View Discrimination as Morally Acceptable?
Ida Bruun NĂžrregaard
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Racial and ethnic discrimination is a strongly politicized issue. Across ideological divides, people discuss whether and why contemporary discriminatory practices are ethically and politically problematic. Whereas much empirical research has investigated the practical, social, and institutional boundaries and causes of discrimination, little research explores when and why people accept it. It may be that some discriminatory practices prevail because people find them morally acceptable. I therefore conduct two preregistered survey experiments to investigate which properties of discrimination influence people’s assessments. The results show that respondents are more willing to accept discrimination if they are informed that it reflects accurate statistical group differences. Respondents care little about the intention of the discriminator and pass harsh moral judgments on discriminators who rely on inaccurate understandings of group differences. These results suggest that rationalizing discrimination by appealing to accurate statistics can be misused to foster the acceptance of discriminatory practices.
How Cross-Cutting Ties Reduce Affective Polarization: Evidence from Latino Americans
Rongbo Jin, Samara Klar, Fabian G. Neuner, Mark Ramirez
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Is Satisfaction with Democracy Higher After Transitional Justice Trials?
Javier Padilla
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Equivalency Framing of Problems and Policy Solutions
Alexander Sahn, Laura Stoker, Amy E. Lerman
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When Push Comes to Shove: How Americans Excuse and Condemn Political Violence
Joseph B. Phillips, B. Kal Munis, Nicole Huffman, Arif Memovic, Jacob Ford
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What factors do Americans find most important when evaluating acts of political violence? Normatively, details regarding the violent act (e.g., the target and violence severity) should determine the punishment for political violence. However, recent work on polarization and identity suggests evaluations of political violence may depend on the perpetrator’s characteristics. In two pre-registered conjoint experiments, we vary both perpetrator characteristics and features of the violent act to discern the relative weight of act-centric and perpetrator-centric considerations. We find that even though the perpetrator’s characteristics (e.g., partisanship) do influence people’s punishment of political violence, the features of the act matter much more for citizen evaluations of political violence, on average. Though these findings can be interpreted as normatively negative given the perpetrator’s identities do influence punishment, the disproportionate effect of the violent act’s target and severity are normatively encouraging. 

Political Geography

“We pay with our life and our body:” Gendered and intimate geopolitics of vias Pa'l Norte
Linn Maria Biorklund
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Is green hydrogen really colonial? A commentary on Tunn et al. 2025
Benedikt Walker, Linus Kalvelage
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Political Psychology

Nothing to see here, move along! Illiberal contexts as catalyzers of authoritarian misperception of democratic quality
MĂĄrton Hadarics, PĂ©ter KrekĂł
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This study investigates the role of authoritarianism, a psychological characteristic at the individual level, in systemic democratic backsliding. Authoritarianism has been primarily regarded as a driver of nondemocratic changes through the establishment of illiberal and antidemocratic attitudes and preferences. However, our multinational study proposes an additional mechanism. By analyzing data from the European Social Survey, gathered from representative samples across 31 European countries, we demonstrate that authoritarianism can also foster a misperception of the quality of liberal democracy, making an illiberal context appear more democratic than it is in reality. Specifically, individuals with authoritarian tendencies tend to perceive the functioning of liberal democratic principles more positively in more illiberal countries, where the actual quality of liberal democracy is lower. This discrepancy between an illiberal, antidemocratic reality and its contrasting perception is identified as a motivated perceptual distortion, catalyzed by a negative antidemocratic context. This latter mechanism can indirectly contribute to institutional democratic decline, making voters with authoritarian attitudes less sensitive to the violations of democratic norms.
Strengthening national identities in Africa? Analyzing the impact of Ghana's National Service Scheme
Arnim Langer, Bart Meuleman, Maarten Schroyens, Lucas Leopold
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In order to avoid and overcome the manifold problems associated with weak nationalism in Africa, many African countries have introduced a range of nation‐building policies. However, only very few studies have systematically investigated whether and to what extent these policies have contributed towards promoting stronger national attachments. In this paper, we examine and assess the impact of one particular type of nation‐building intervention: i.e. national service programmes. More specifically, we analyse to what extent the national service programme in Ghana contributes towards advancing participants' feelings of national attachment. To evaluate the impact of this programme, we implement a quasi‐experimental research design with matching cohort control groups. The results of our study lend strong support to the presence of a national service effect. Our empirical analysis show that this positive national service effect is directly related to the frequency and quality of intergroup contact that NSS participants experienced during their national service deployment. As expected, the impact of national service is also highly dependent on participants' pre‐service level of national attachment: The increase in national attachment is smaller for respondents who scored higher on national pride before the start of their national service deployment.

Political Science Research and Methods

Foreign aid, FDI and the personalization of power in autocracies
Bernat Puertas, Abel EscribĂ -Folch
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This article examines the relationship between foreign aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) and the degree of personalism in dictatorships. We contend that aid leads to higher personalism since it is a windfall that accrues to the government and does not require cooperation from elites to obtain it. Contrarily, we posit that FDI is linked to lower levels of personalism because it reshapes elites’ incentives and influence as they may acquire new preferences, connections, and exit options, thus constraining dictators. Using data on Official Development Assistance (ODA) and FDI, and a latent index of personalism in autocracies, we find no robust evidence that ODA or FDI are correlated with personalism, but have some effect on some of the index’s components.
Climate regulation’s effects on businesses and public support for climate action
Anil Menon, Katie Nissen, Iain Osgood
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How do the effects of climate regulation on businesses impact public attitudes toward climate policy? While emissions intensity is the primary frame for understanding the effects of climate policy on business, theoretical scholarship and public discourse often emphasize that large firms will adjust to climate regulations easily while smaller firms will struggle. Because small businesses are sympathetic and large firms are unpopular, individuals who view climate regulation’s effects in line with this firm size account should be less likely to support climate change mitigation. To test this theory, we conduct an original survey of climate policy beliefs and then a survey experiment. We find evidence that distaste for large corporations increases opposition to climate action among people exposed to the idea that big companies can more easily navigate climate regulations than small companies. This work contributes to the literature on moral political economy and on the enduring difficulty of enacting effective climate change regulation within the United States.
Decentralization and ideology
Anna M. Wilke, Georgiy Syunyaev, Michael Ting
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Classic arguments about federalist governance emphasize an informational or learning role for decentralizing policy authority, but in practice, ideological outcomes frequently motivate this choice. We examine the role of ideology in the allocation of policy-making power by modeling a two-period interaction between an elected central executive and two local governments. Decentralization reduces the executive’s ability to set policy and control externalities but potentially insures against future policy reversals. In this environment, partial decentralization is a common outcome. Complete decentralization arises when executives are unlikely to be re-elected, party polarization is high, and institutional hurdles to policy-making are significant. These results help to clarify existing cross-national empirical findings on the determinants of centralization.
Does mainstream populism work? Populist rhetoric and the electoral fortunes of mainstream parties
Markus Kollberg
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Much work is concerned with the effects of mainstream parties accommodating the positions of populist radical right parties. Little is known about the role of political rhetoric in mainstream party responses to radical right challengers though. This is a significant gap given the evident shifts in mainstream party discourse across European democracies. Using a pre-registered survey experiment in Germany, I analyze how voters react when mainstream parties engage in populist rhetoric and adopt radical right issue positions. Theoretically, I propose that voters, particularly those with populist attitudes, may use populist rhetoric as a heuristic when evaluating parties. I find that, in line with spatial theories of voting, voters penalize or reward mainstream parties based on their adoption of radical right positions, but that the use of populist rhetoric does not significantly impact voter evaluations. These findings demonstrate the relevance of programmatic party strategies in mainstream-challenger competition and cast doubt on the effectiveness of populist rhetoric.
Challenger entry and electoral accountability
Jacob Morrier
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In this article, I study the effect of endogenous challenger entry on electoral accountability in the presence of adverse selection. To this end, I analyze a two-period electoral agency model wherein a potential challenger freely chooses whether to run for office. The effect of endogenous challenger entry on policy decisions in this model is ambiguous: depending on model parameters, it can worsen or ease policy distortions. Analogously, marginally increasing the cost of running for office can deepen or reduce these distortions. This uncertainty regarding the effect of endogenous challenger entry on policymaking leads to equally ambiguous welfare implications. Nonetheless, I identify conditions under which endogenous challenger entry improves policymaking and voter welfare. This suggests that, in some circumstances, imposing higher barriers to entry in elections can improve policymaking and voter welfare.

PS: Political Science & Politics

A Global Ranking of Research Productivity of Political Science Departments
Joan BarcelĂł, Christopher Paik, Peter van der Windt, Haoyu Zhai
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This article provides a global ranking of research productivity of political science departments. We collected data on 115,427 articles and 12,696 books—written in both English and other languages—from 5,586 faculty members in 178 departments in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. Departments are ranked in terms of citations to articles published by faculty members, impact factors of journals in which they published, and number of top publications in which they published. Results are presented for overall and more recent research productivity.

The Journal of Politics

Bottom Up? Top Down? Determinants of Issue-Attention in State Politics
Andreu Casas, Oscar Stuhler, Julia Payson, Joshua A. Tucker, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler
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The Minimal Effects of Making Local News Free: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Andrew Trexler
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Door to door campaigning in an electoral autocracy: Evidence from Hungary
Gabor Simonovits, Ferenc Szucs, Bence Hamrak
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The Gender Gap in Political Careers Under Proportional Representation
Tobias Nowacki
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West European Politics

Democratic standards in external differentiation: the area of freedom, security and justice
Maria Patrin
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World Politics

Welfare States in Wealthy Democracies
Jane Gingrich
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abstract: The contemporary study of the welfare state began, along with World Politics , in the immediate postwar era, inspired by the near-collapse of democracy and the crucial role envisaged for public spending in stabilizing it after war. Over the following decades key scholarly questions focused on the normal welfare politics of the era—distributive politics, the effects of government policy on growth, and the capacity of social policies to create their own political constituencies. In a new era of more uncertain democratic resilience, we may need to return to older questions: of the coercive function of the welfare state, of its ability/inability to conserve democracy, and of the weaknesses of welfare policies to maintain political support.
Mutually Assured Disruption: Globalization, Security, and the Dangers of Decoupling
Thomas J. Christensen
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abstract: The evolution of transnational production in the Asia-Pacific over the past few decades has been a force for peace. Critics of globalization and proponents of US-China economic decoupling advocate policies that would not only harm the global economy but would increase the likelihood of military conflict. This article focuses on the national security benefits of US-China economic engagement and the regional economic integration of East Asia. Government interventions to protect national security and build more resilience in supply chains are needed but should be limited in scope so as to avoid fundamental damage to the complex economic interdependence that has fostered growth and helped to deter war.
Adaptive Political Economy: Toward a New Paradigm
Yuen Yuen Ang
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abstract: The conventional paradigm in political economy routinely treats living, complex, adaptive social systems as machine-like objects. This treatment has driven political economists to oversimplify big, complex social processes using mechanical models, or to ignore them altogether. In development, this has led to theoretical dead ends, trivial agendas, or failed public policies. This article proposes an alternative paradigm: adaptive political economy. It recognizes that social systems are complex, not complicated; complexity can be ordered, not messy; and social scientists should be developing the concepts, methods, and theories to illuminate the order of complexity, rather than oversimplifying it. The author illustrates one application of adaptive political economy by mapping the coevolution of economic and institutional change. This approach yields fresh, important conclusions that mechanical, linear models of development have missed, including that market-building institutions look and function differently from market-sustaining ones.
Southeast Asia and World Politics
Thomas B. Pepinsky
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abstract: This essay reviews research on Southeast Asia that has appeared in World Politics , with a focus on articles published since the mid-1970s. Drawing on debates about the nature of the region that are commonly found within the field of Southeast Asian area studies, the essay identifies two axes along which Southeast Asian politics research varies: in its emphasis on the connectedness versus autonomy of the region, and in its focus on individual country experiences versus common regional dynamics. Characterizing the Southeast Asia–focused research in World Politics in this way helps us to understand more generally the relationship between area studies and political science over the past fifty years.
Historical State Formation within and beyond Europe
Lisa Blaydes, Anna Grzymala-Busse
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abstract: State formation is a critical concern for comparative politics. Much of the most influential literature has focused on the politically fragmented setting of early modern Europe, where warmaking fostered state consolidation and the development of institutions of representation and taxation. More recently, scholars have expanded this perspective by emphasizing the state-building implications of alternative forms of competition, interstate cooperation, and emulation, as well as the influence of a broader set of societal actors beyond belligerent rulers. The authors review recent scholarship on state formation that suggests that the canonical bellicist path is only one pathway to state consolidation, both in Europe and beyond. This article draws attention to the importance of geography and to new insights regarding the organization of state-society relations and the influence of regional and global economic engagements on state formation.
Global Governance: The Twin Challenges of Economic Inequality and Disinformation
Lisa L. Martin
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abstract: Modern international interactions are structured by institutions of global governance, both formal and informal. Most of these institutions are encompassed by the liberal international order. Like domestic institutions, these international institutions are challenged by the prevalence and depth of disinformation. The demand for disinformation, in turn, has been fed by the order's lack of attention to growing domestic economic inequality. Disinformation and inequality thus present twin challenges to global governance.
Government Responses to Climate Change
Evan Lieberman, Michael Ross
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abstract: Social scientists should be more deliberate in how they define and measure government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors highlight key distinctions among three dimensions of climate policy: the commitments made by governments, the actions that governments take, and the outcomes they produce. In turn, the authors detail the challenges of measuring these dimensions, and discuss the tradeoffs of alternative measurement strategies, including how well they meet the accepted standards for measurement validity. The authors also identify promising avenues for further research.
Democracy and Economic Growth: Theoretical Debates and Empirical Contributions
Joel W. Simmons
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abstract: Is democracy a boon for economic growth or a hindrance? This brief essay reviews the theoretical and empirical contributions to this age-old question and highlights some potentially fruitful avenues for future research.
Democratic Backsliding, Resilience, and Resistance
Rachel Beatty Riedl, Paul Friesen, Jennifer McCoy, Kenneth Roberts
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abstract: This article assesses two next-level questions in the study of democratic backsliding: democratic resilience and political polarization. It first advances a set of methodological decision points to improve clarity in contemporary debates surrounding democratic backsliding measurement and the possibility of identifying moments of democratic recovery. It then moves to a theoretical and empirical assessment of pathways by which democratic backsliding takes place, under what conditions, which specific actors are involved, and what opportunities exist for democratic recovery given sources of resilience and strategies of resistance. The authors examine the role of political polarization in backsliding and highlight the combined importance of political agency and institutional levers for regime outcomes. The authors argue that regime outcomes are not predetermined by antecedent conditions, and particularly not by the level of development.
Reflecting on the Past and Looking toward the Future: An Introduction to the 75th Anniversary Special Issue
Grigore Pop-Eleches
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abstract: This introductory essay to the 75th anniversary special issue of World Politics reflects on the intellectual trajectory of the journal in the context of the changes and continuities in the international political context over the last three quarters of a century. The essay highlights the journal's continued emphasis on asking important theoretical questions about domestic and international politics and on answering those questions with diverse methods. The last part of the essay provides a brief overview of the themes and arguments covered by the eighteen contributions to the special issue.
The Study of Political Conflict and Violence is Dead 
 Long Live the Study of Political Conflict and Violence! Resurrecting and Centering Government-Challenger Interaction
Christian Davenport
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abstract: The study of political conflict and violence has grown immensely over the past fifty years, but it has also fragmented as many now explore only single branches of the ever-larger tree. This article attempts to reflect on the paths that scholars have taken and discusses one particular path that could help to reunify the field. This path would provide key insights into what has transpired in the field as well as into how scholars should approach trying to understand the study of political conflict and violence moving forward.
Democracy, Autocracy, and the Politics of the COVID Pandemic
Grigore Pop-Eleches
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abstract: This essay discusses the challenges facing research on the politics of the covid pandemic by reviewing studies focusing on how regime type affected the nature and effectiveness of covid responses both by governments and the broader public, and how these responses, in turn, have shaped the politics of both democratic and authoritarian regimes. The essay highlights the importance of accounting for the changing nature of the pandemic over time, and of thinking carefully about the scope conditions of covid-related arguments and findings.
International Dimensions of Democratization
Jon C.W. Pevehouse, Caileigh Glenn
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abstract: Since the 1970s, international influences on democratization have received increasing attention from scholars and policymakers. Scholars pointed to multiple mechanisms by which international factors could influence the transition to and the consolidation of democracy. While the arguments mostly pointed to positive influences, the optimism of the post–Cold War era have given way to concern about international sources of authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. The authors provide a framework for thinking about what we know about international forces and democratization, outlining several unanswered questions. Several research challenges remain, including how to best assess mechanisms linking international processes and actors to democracy (and democratization); while others concern threats to those democratic transitions via democratic backsliding. The article concludes by calling for more integration of existing theoretical frameworks on international factors and democracy with the current wave of research on authoritarianism and democratic backsliding.
Land/Labor Ratios, Citizenship, and Migrants: Exploring the Hidden Links in the Political Economy of Immigration Regimes
Melle Scholten, David Leblang
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abstract: Within sovereign states citizenship is arguably the most important political marker of in- and outsiders. As a result, questions about who gets to reap the benefits of citizenship often result in distributional conflict. This conflict becomes inflamed when a country goes through a period of significant inward migration. Given that citizenship is so important and so contentious, from where do the rules governing its acquisition come? Our starting point is the acknowledgment that migrants are mobile labor. From this perspective, countries in which elites benefit from an increased supply of productive labor—that is, those with high land/labor ratios—will be more likely to adopt policies that attract migrants, such as easier naturalization rules, including birthright citizenship. We illustrate the plausibility of our argument with some statistical evidence and suggest some avenues to further explore this crucial question.
The Social Context of International Institutions
Christina L. Davis
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abstract: The social context of relations between states provides the foundation for cooperation within international institutions. In a departure from theories that focus on rational design of contracts and functional demand for institutions, increasingly scholars emphasize geopolitics. Both as a component of power and social context, geopolitics shapes multilateral cooperation. This article examines theories that bring new perspectives on cooperation as a process embedded within international society. It highlights innovative developments to include relational variables in empirical analysis to measure how geopolitical alignment between states impacts the design and effectiveness of international institutions. The relational politics that undergird multilateral cooperation also contribute to the proliferation of institutions as states build new clubs for cooperation.
Conflict: Trajectories and Challenges
Stathis N. Kalyvas
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abstract: How has the field of conflict studies evolved over the past three decades? This essay suggests an answer by posing three questions: Why do we study conflict? What do we understand as conflict? And how do we study conflict? The article proceeds with critical remarks, illustrated with articles that have appeared in World Politics during the past five years. It concludes by highlighting three key challenges for the future evolution of the field: the theoretically driven broadening of our understanding of conflict; the development of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical links between micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis; and a theoretically informed way of specifying the scope conditions that apply to findings.
The Comparative Politics of Inequality and Redistribution in Liberal Democracies
Jonas Pontusson
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abstract: Reviewing the debate on why governments have failed to compensate low- and middle-income citizens for rising income inequality, this essay argues for a perspective that integrates demand-side and supply-side considerations and treats income bias in policy responsiveness as variable across countries and over time.
The Evolving Study of Revolution
Mark R. Beissinger
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abstract: As the practice of revolution has evolved, so too have theories of revolution. Much of the current literature on revolutions focuses on contentious processes. But a need exists to take a more holistic approach—one that better incorporates history, thinks across divides in the literature, contemplates what precedes and follows revolution, and places revolutionary processes and the structural factors that underpin them into dialogue with one another.
Unleashing a Monster? Causes and Consequences of the Knowledge Economy in Advanced Capitalist Democracies
Torben Iversen
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abstract: The rise of economic inequality and right-wing populism in the last three decades has produced a lively debate about the relationship between democracy and advanced capitalism. A prominent view is that the troubles are rooted in the growing power of global capital and the rich, first reflected in the broad sweep of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and '90s. This view is a story about capitalism subverting democracy. This piece instead argues that it was democracy that transformed capitalism, and that this transformation laid the foundation for unprecedented prosperity. Yet it also unleashed inequalizing economic and political dynamics that are now proving difficult to reverse.