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

Philosophical accounts of discrimination distinguish the question of what discrimination is from the question of its wrongfulness. This article addresses these two questions in the context of anti-homeless hostile design of public spaces. Regarding the first question, all forms of anti-homeless hostile design amount to discrimination, with typical cases (for example, anti-homeless spikes or benches) being direct discrimination, but with some cases (for example, CCTV not intended to target the homeless) being indirect discrimination. Regarding the second question, it is argued that all major accounts of the wrongness of discrimination identify the usual, directly discriminatory hostile design as wrongful on account of its harmful or disrespectful character. Most accounts also consider the less common indirectly discriminatory hostile design to be possibly wrongful, especially given the severe disadvantages faced by the homeless in contemporary cities.

Politicians appeal to social groups to court their electoral support. However, quantifying which groups politicians refer to, claim to represent, or address in their public communication presents researchers with challenges. We propose a supervised learning approach for extracting group mentions from political texts. We first collect human annotations to determine the passages of a text that refer to social groups. We then fine-tune a transformer language model for contextualized supervised classification at the word level. Applied to unlabeled texts, our approach enables researchers to automatically detect and extract word spans that contain group mentions. We illustrate our approach in two applications, generating new empirical insights into how British parties use social groups in their rhetoric. Our method allows for detecting and extracting mentions of social groups from various sources of texts, creating new possibilities for empirical research in political science.

Disadvantaged minority groups can gain support for their cause by convincing majority members of their experienced adversity. We theorize and empirically test the efficacy of different types of evidence, varying in character (statistical versus personal) and ambiguity (manifest versus ambiguous), vis-à-vis raising majority members’ awareness of ethnic minority discrimination. Reflecting the combination of these two dimensions, we develop four treatments based on real evidence/stories and test several pre-registered hypotheses regarding their efficacy in two survey-experimental studies conducted in Denmark. We find that manifest types of evidence – from an audit study and a personal story exhibiting explicit discrimination – are the most effective in raising majority members’ awareness of ethnic minority discrimination. Further, the effect of the personal story extends to increased support for anti-discrimination policies and higher donations to an immigrant NGO, highlighting how personal stories can increase majorities’ awareness of and willingness to act on the adversity experienced by minorities.

Political scientists lack a generally accepted definition of bargaining complexity, and attempts to quantify the complexity of political negotiations as such are rare. We argue that bargaining complexity is best defined as the amount of choice facing the negotiating actors, and best operationalized as the entropy of the probability distribution across potential bargaining outcomes. We apply this general approach to 343 government formation processes in advanced democracies, predicting the selection probability of each potential government using a state-of-the-art government formation model that integrates both arithmetic factors based on the number and size of parties and interparty relations, such as ideological dispersion and pre-electoral coalitions. We then demonstrate how to use our measure to disentangle between different determinants of bargaining complexity. Lastly, we show that bargaining complexity is robustly related to how many potential governments and partners were considered but ultimately set aside during negotiations and to the resulting cabinet’s durability.

United Nations peacekeeping seeks to protect civilians from violence in conflict. The UN’s ‘hard’ power, in the form of armed units, has been found to be effective in civilian protection. However, the UN also wields ‘soft’ power in various ways, including such aid investments as Quick Impact Projects (QIPs) that seek to meet local needs, build confidence in the operation, and foster support for peace. Yet, we know little about the effect of QIPs in supporting peacekeeping objectives. We argue that QIPs are unique, as they disincentivize rebel groups from engaging in plunder and strategic violence against civilians to acquire resource benefits. Further, QIPs incentivize rebels to reduce violence against civilians out of concern for losing civilian support. We therefore expect that QIPs should reduce rebel attacks on civilians. We test this hypothesis with disaggregated data on QIPs and rebel attacks on civilians in Africa. The findings support our expectations.

Thousands of federal policies have been produced by coalitions of executive agencies over the last few decades. Despite this, little attention has been paid to why agencies collaborate. The decision among relatively autonomous agencies to collaborate and therefore cede some of their power demands theoretical attention. I argue that agencies form coalitions to overcome legislative oversight attempts by activating veto points and exploiting collective action problems in Congress. Using data on dozens of agencies over twenty-four years, I find that agencies form policy-making coalitions when it helps them activate veto points and exploit collective action problems among their overseers in Congress: namely, committee freeriding in oversight and legislative gridlock in lawmaking. These collective action problems, in turn, inhibit Congressional attempts to overturn bureaucratically led policies and therefore allow agency policies to stick. Agencies form coalitions actively in order to insulate their policies against congressional oversight.

Political participation has long been viewed as a social act. But the influence of social relationships on participation is often impossible to disentangle from the factors that select people into these relationships. To overcome this challenge, we study randomly assigned college roommates, thus reducing these selection biases and other confounds. We examine short-run social influence of roommates on voter participation in 2016 and longer-term effects in the 2018 and 2020 elections. We collected consent from over 2,000 first-year students, allowing us to obtain a matched voter file indicating which students voted and the public voting histories of students’ parents, an indicator of students’ pre-college political environment socialization. Our evidence suggests that roommates’ influence on turnout decisions rivals the association between students’ turnout and that of their parents. Yet this parity masks gender differences. For women, the effect of roommates is larger. For men, the student-parent association exceeds the roommate effect.

Should people be protected by law from discrimination on the grounds of political affiliation and belief? I argue that individuals’ democratic right to exercise political agency – which implies freedom of association and freedom to express one’s political belief – requires that individuals should not be vulnerable to being treated disadvantageously because of their political affiliation and belief. To accomplish this, the protectorate of discrimination law should be expanded where relevant to include that characteristic. Moreover, in contexts where political and specifically affective polarisation is severe, the risk of such treatment increases, further justifying the legal innovation. While this thesis has received almost no prior discussion in the literature on the normative justification of discrimination law, and is revisionary in the UK and the USA, this absence is striking both in a comparative legal context and especially given the centrality of these freedoms to democratic politics.

Misinformation has emerged as a key threat worldwide, with scholars frequently highlighting the role of partisan motivated reasoning in misinformation belief. Yet the mechanisms enabling the endorsement of misinformation may differ in contexts where other identities are salient. This study explores whether religion drives the endorsement of misinformation in India. Using original data, we first show that individuals with high levels of religiosity and religious polarization endorse significantly higher levels of misinformation. Next, to understand the causal mechanisms through which religion operates, we field an experiment where corrections rely on religious messaging, and/or manipulate perceptions of religious ingroup identity. We find that corrections including religious frames (1) reduce the endorsement of misinformation; (2) are sometimes more effective than standard corrections; and (3) work beyond the specific story corrected. These findings highlight the religious roots of belief formation and provide hope that social identities can be marshalled to counter misinformation.

Ethnicity and race are vital for understanding representation, yet individual-level data are often unavailable. Recent methodological advances have allowed researchers to impute racial and ethnic classifications based on publicly available information, but predictions vary in their accuracy and can introduce statistical biases in downstream analyses. We provide an overview of common estimation methods, including Bayesian approaches and machine learning techniques that use names or images as inputs. We propose and test a hybrid approach that combines surname-based Bayesian estimation with the use of publicly available images in a convolutional neural network. We find that the proposed approach not only reduces statistical bias in downstream analyses but also improves accuracy in a sample of over 16,000 local elected officials. We conclude with a discussion of caveats and describe settings where the hybrid approach is especially suitable.

Ageing populations and slower growth have compelled governments in mature welfare states to implement fiscal adjustments, but uncertainty persists about whether these measures have successfully curtailed the size of the welfare state. This letter documents that fiscal adjustments reduce social spending more effectively than previously thought. Using data from sixteen advanced economies between 1978 and 2018 and the narrative identification of adjustment plans, I estimate cumulative multipliers with local projections. I find that fiscal adjustments persistently lower social spending, including key components of social consumption and social investment. To explain why austerity does not shelter the welfare state, I present stylized facts about the timing and composition of adjustment plans. First, while public investment cuts concentrate at the beginning of the adjustment period, social consumption cuts accumulate over time. Second, large budget deficits and financial crises are frequent antecedents of the most ambitious fiscal reforms.

Recent elections around the globe have seen politicians increasingly adopt anti-corruption rhetoric, yet little is known about the conditions under which such appeals are effective. While existing literature has focused on the factors that mitigate electoral sanctions for corrupt politicians, it has often overlooked the relevance of anti-corruption efforts. This paper investigates the impact of anti-corruption promises on electoral support and perceived effectiveness in cleaning up government. Using an unforced conjoint experiment in corruption-prone Paraguay, I vary candidate profiles with different anti-corruption platforms, genders, and disciplinary records. The results reveal that anti-corruption appeals significantly influence electoral support. Concrete anti-corruption promises with specific policies are more persuasive, indicating citizens prefer substance over vague rhetoric. Surprisingly, a clean disciplinary record does not substantively enhance a candidate’s anticorruption appeal, and male candidates appear to benefit more from adopting anticorruption platforms. These findings illuminate under what conditions anti-corruption platforms are more effective. They highlight the importance of specific policy stands and reveal that having a history of corruption surprisingly does not damage the credibility of anticorruption advocates.

This study examines how unelected representation, where political activists make representative claims on behalf of self-articulated constituencies, shapes citizens’ feelings of representation. Through a cross-national conjoint experiment (Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Romania, N = 8279), we test three routes to representation: descriptive representation through demographic congruence, substantive representation through issue congruence, and psychological representation through personality-trait congruence and personality-ideology congruence. Results indicate that unelected representation makes people feel represented through these routes. Substantive representation has the strongest impact, followed by psychological representation and descriptive representation. We also find that contextual and individual factors influence how these routes operate. Ultimately, this paper presents a novel perspective on the effects of unelected representation, laying the groundwork for new empirical models of political representation that are firmly rooted in the conceptual innovations of constructivist theories. Unelected representation may have important implications for modern representative politics.

As extreme political views gain popularity and acceptability, the conditions under which media exposure to extreme right views contributes to this process, and strategies to counter media-induced persuasion and normalisation effects remain unclear. Using population-based survey experiments leveraging real-world interviews with extreme right activists on Sky News UK and Australia, we test whether media exposure leads to higher agreement with extreme right statements. We also test whether exposure affects perceptions of how many others agree with these statements. Our findings are consistent across both countries: exposure to uncritical interviews increases agreement with extreme statements and perceptions of broader support in the population. Testing the media strategy in the UK, we find that critical interviewing tarnishes the activist’s image and reduces effects, but still heightens perceived support for extreme statements. This study identifies a mechanism through which extreme political ideas spread and offers insights into media strategies to counteract persuasion and normalisation effects.

Scholars often use survey experiments to evaluate political messages’ persuasive effects, but messages developed in the lab do not always persuade in real-world campaigns. In this research note, we report three experiments on one central obstacle in lab-to-field messaging applications: getting people’s attention. We first analyze a large-scale direct mail campaign run by an established non-profit that promotes conservative solutions to climate change. In this experiment, postcards with messages based on extant survey-experimental research did not cause changes in key climate attitudes. In a follow-up survey experiment, identical postcards induced attitude change— Re but only when participants were required to pay attention to them. A final field experiment highlights the difficulty of inducing attention; in another real-world campaign, postcards with eye-catching scratch-off panels performed no better than standard postcards. These findings illustrate the crucial role of attention and the complexity of translating messages developed in survey experiments into effective real-world campaigns.

In two field experiments conducted in Mississippi and Florida, we present novel evidence about how emotions can be harnessed to increase voter turnout. When we inform respondents that a partisan villain would be happy if they did not vote (for example, a Gloating Villain treatment), we find that anger is activated in comparison to other emotions and turnout increases by 1.7 percentage points. In a subsequent field experiment, we benchmark this treatment to a standard GOTV message, the social pressure treatment. Using survey experiments that replicate our field experimental treatments, we show that our treatment links the act of voting to anticipated anger. In doing so, we contribute the first in-the-field evidence of how we can induce emotions, which are commonly understood to be fleeting states, to shape temporally distant political behaviours such as voting.

How does anti-immigrant rhetoric by mainstream politicians affect norms of tolerance? How does this compare to similar statements made by radical-right politicians? Drawing on experimental evidence, we find that statements by mainstream politicians lead to more norm erosion than similar statements by radical-right politicians. Subsample analyses suggest that this is because statements by mainstream-right politicians erode norm perceptions of right-wing individuals, while those by radical-right politicians induce backlash among left-wing individuals, who hold closer to the norm in place. The latter effect (backlash by the left) disappears when similar statements are made by mainstream right politicians. We argue that this difference occurs because mainstream politicians represent the views of a larger part of the population or have a higher status. Our results highlight the pivotal role of mainstream politicians in enforcing or eroding democratic norms, and that similar political statements can have different effects depending on their sender.

This paper departs from the ballot to examine dropout decisions in congressional elections from 1980 to 2022. I draw on an original dataset of 26,000 U.S. House candidates who were voted on in the primary or raised money but were not on the ballot. Moving beyond the ballot reveals new patterns of strategic candidate exit. While prior work focused on differences in the entry of experienced candidates, I find that experienced candidates who struggle to raise money are more likely to exit. In addition, the relationship between early fundraising and dropout decisions has changed dramatically over time. Experienced candidates who fail to make early fundraising inroads are far more likely to drop out today than in previous decades. The exit of experienced candidates has important implications for the choices that voters have. The findings provide new evidence of how money shapes the trajectory of campaigns well before the election.