Perhaps because scholars of political ambition have focused almost entirely on electoral ambition, the presence of elections has been thought to play a major role in shaping who expresses interest in public service. In this article, we examine whether the presence or absence of elections changes women’s political ambition. Using surveys of law students, federal bureaucrats, and the general public, we find the relationship between gender and ambition for elected office is similar to the relationship between gender and ambition for bureaucratic and judicial service. We show that, although women are deterred from public service by the elections that act as gateways to those opportunities, the effects of elections on gendered political ambition duplicate the effects of other components of public service. Rather than unique, elections are duplicative in their effects, reinforcing the relationship between gender and ambition rather than fundamentally changing who expresses ambition for public service.

Illiberal actors in Western democracies increasingly exploit the superficial defence of liberal values like gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights to demonize ethnic out-groups, portraying Muslims as inherently opposed to Western values. This paper investigates whether this stereotype reflects widespread public beliefs and asks: is the stereotypical view of the Muslim community as an illiberal ‘bogeyman’ endorsed by citizens? Leveraging an original double-list experiment design that minimizes sensitivity bias, we identify population-level estimates of this stereotype in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. Our cross-national results reveal a pervasive and ubiquitous stereotype of Muslims as a threat to LGBTQ+ communities across Western democracies. The implications of these findings are concerning as they signal that societal tolerance of ethnic out-groups across liberal democracies remains tainted by prejudicial stereotypes. The results also underscore the alarming electoral potential of far-right parties that exploit homonationalist and femonationalist stereotype-based threat perceptions to their political advantage.

Do climate change-related extreme weather events affect public concern, knowledge, and attention to climate change in China? Matching extreme weather events data from the Emergency Events Database with the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey, we first test whether people in prefectures with more extreme weather events consider climate change more damaging and have a better knowledge of it. We find no such associations. Moreover, we collect 2020 data on extreme whether events from local newspapers for five Eastern and Southeastern Chinese provinces and test whether these events increase public attention to climate change, measured by Baidu search volume index. No associations are found. Interestingly, in prefecture-days with more Covid cases, local population conducted more Baidu searches on climate change and the environment, supporting the ‘great reflection’ thesis, i.e., major shocks like the pandemic put a spotlight on fundamental challenges facing the humanity and have gotten us to reassess our priorities.

Does prosecuting perpetrators of repression under a dictatorship promote public support for human rights and the courts? We argue that convicting perpetrators in human rights trials reduces public acceptance of these violations. However, while convictions signal judicial efforts to end impunity, they may also call attention to the politicized process by which transitional justice begins. We estimate the effects of human rights trial verdicts on attitudes in Argentina, a country ruled by a military dictatorship from 1976–1983 that, twenty-five years later, initiated sweeping human rights trials for past repression. Using observational day-level opinion data from a survey fielded around the guilty verdict for one of the dictatorship’s top-ranking generals, we find the trial verdict increased the public’s rejection of torture and political killings. Yet belief in judicial fairness declined. These results suggest that trials solidify public commitments to human rights, but confidence in the judiciary is not a necessary condition for this effect.

How does party support for gender equality in the labour market affect the gender voting gap? A well-established argument from the literature on gender and political behaviour states that working women tend to vote for left-wing parties more than men because they are stronger supporters of the welfare state. However, no study has assessed whether parties’ welfare positions affect the gender voting gap. Leveraging three decades of public opinion data from sixteen Western democracies, I provide evidence in support of that claim: increases in women’s labour force participation are associated with higher female/male voter ratios for the left, but only when those parties strongly support gender-egalitarian policies in the labour market. These findings confirm and add nuance to the previous understanding of the gap: by focusing on public opinion, previous research overlooked party behaviour. Therefore, my evidence elevates the importance of party strategy in explaining gender differences in voting.

How does the deployment and withdrawal of UN peacekeepers affect local economic development in civil war countries? This study provides a large-N subnational analysis across UN peacekeeping operations that assesses their impact on the local economy both during deployment and after their withdrawal. We expect a positive association between UN peacekeeping and economic development. Besides providing a sizeable cash injection into the economy, peacekeepers can safeguard both the resumption of everyday economic exchanges at the grassroots level and the influx of aid and development projects. To test this, we combine subnational data on peacekeeping deployments with high-resolution data on nightlight emissions. Results from two-way fixed effects models, using matching, show that a more sizable peacekeeping presence can help boost economic activity in their area of operation. Importantly, we identify a slow but positive economic development in areas of deployment after peacekeepers withdraw, which is confirmed in a DiD estimation approach.

Do conflicts abroad affect trust at home? While we know that conflicts impact trust in warring countries, we lack evidence on whether people in neighbouring, but non-involved, countries are also affected. We address this question in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which represented a large shock to the security and economy of European countries. Our identification strategy uses the overlap between the timing of the Russian invasion and the European Social Survey fieldwork in eleven European countries. We find that the invasion increased respondents’ trust in their country’s politicians, political parties, and national parliament, as well as satisfaction with the government. Further analyses using other surveys and previous conflicts suggest this effect depends on proximity to the conflict and the political regimes of the attacked country. These findings contribute to our understanding of the complex and indirect effects of conflicts on domestic political trust.

Do voters pay attention to a party’s relationship with its party family? In this paper, I argue that transnational brands such as the party family label assigned to a party are a valuable tool for parties to use to distinguish themselves. In turn, voters can more accurately position parties on the left-right spectrum when the party embraces the ideological profile of the rest of its party family. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), the results confirm my expectations that the ideological alignment of party and party family shapes the accuracy of a voter’s perception of the party’s positions. My findings provide support for the argument that transnational brands can influence how domestic political parties are perceived. These findings have important implications for our understanding of voter responsiveness in an increasingly transnational political space the role of transnational political brands.

Partisan actors in the US have recently politicized trust in elections. In combination with partisan polarization, politicized election administration could undermine the peaceful transfer of power following elections. Can messaging about trust in elections break through partisan polarization? Partnering with election officials from Los Angeles County, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas, we conducted messaging experiments with nearly 8,500 Americans following the 2022 US midterm elections. We find that state and local election officials can be strongly effective at increasing trust in their own state elections. Our estimate suggests that one 30-second official message increases trust in elections by about one-fifth of the pre-treatment difference between Democrats and Republicans. Additionally, videos explaining protections on election integrity in Arizona and Virginia increase trust in elections outside the respondents’ own states. Our results suggest that election officials can break through partisan politics and play an important role in rebuilding trust in the democratic process.

Ideological polarization between political parties is essential for meaningful electoral competition, but at its extreme can strain democratic functioning. Despite a widespread recognition that multiple divides structure contemporary party polarization in Europe, its prevailing conceptualization and measurement remain one-dimensional. To resolve this tension, we introduce a novel, multidimensional approach to party polarization. Our main focus is on whether different ideological divides reinforce or crosscut each other. We calculate the effective dimensionality of a policy space using the correlation matrix of parties’ positions, which accounts for how the dimensions interrelate. Using both artificial data and positional estimates from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (1999–2019), we highlight the advantages of our approach and demonstrate that it is better able to capture the relationship between party polarization and mass partisanship. This study has important theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications for our understanding of polarization and democratic representation in a changing political landscape.

Most political systems consist of multiple layers. Yet datasets are predominantly situated at a single territorial tier, encouraging methodological nationalism, regionalism, and localism. We present three new integrated datasets that include electoral, institutional, ideological, and government composition data on the country and regional level (RD|CED, RED and RPSD). With this data, we cover 337 country elections on the regional level, 2,226 regional elections, and 2,825 regional cabinets in 365 regions of 21 countries from 1941 to 2019, accounting for 800 political parties and their ideological positions. Combined, these data complement and extend existing datasets and facilitate the study of political interaction across levels. Data are available at http://multi-level-cross-level-politics.eu/ or can be accessed through the Havard Dataverse repository. We conclude with an agenda for future cross-level studies.

A perennial issue of survey research is that some participants do not answer all questions. Interactive follow-up requests are a novel approach to this problem. However, research on their effectiveness is scarce. I present the most comprehensive study yet on the effects of interactive requests on item non-responses. Theoretically, I outline different pathways whereby follow-up requests may effectively increase response rates and improve data quality: reminding, motivating, instructing, monitoring, and sanctioning. To test my hypothesis that interactive requests increase item response rates, I conducted an online survey experiment in 2021 on diverse samples of around 3,100 respondents in ten countries worldwide. I find that follow-up requests generally increase response rates, although effects vary by country. Depending on the question and survey design, interactive requests reduce item non-responses by up to 47 per cent across countries, while not adversely affecting data quality. I thus recommend response requests to increase survey data efficiency.

We present results from a pre-registered, well-powered $(N \gt 3,000,000)$ text message get-out-the-vote (GOTV) experiment, conducted during the 2019 European Parliament election in Sweden. Our findings suggest that a simple text message increases the likelihood of voting by 0.3 percentage points. Half of this effect spills over to untreated household members while workplace spillovers are near zero. Subsequent analysis reveals that the direct treatment effect is noticeably stronger among individuals with below-average voting propensities. Interestingly, within this same group, the household spillovers are significantly negative. We speculate and provide some indirect evidence, that these negative spillover effects may stem from the text message reminder influencing the behaviour of voters already motivated to vote. Above all, we propose that an increase in early voting, as opposed to voting on Election Day, among treated individuals may weaken the mechanisms thought to explain spillover effects since voters are less likely to bring their family members with them when voting early.

In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is declining depends on the institution, country, and period in question. We clarify these issues and apply our framework to an empirical analysis that is unprecedented in geographic and temporal scope: we apply Bayesian dynamic latent trait models to uncover underlying trends in data on trust in six institutions collated from 3,377 surveys conducted by 50 projects in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019. We identify important differences between countries and regions, but globally we find that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades, whereas trust in ‘implementing’ institutions has been stable or rising.

Although far-right insurrections often catch worldwide attention, little is known about whether and how these autocratization events affect other countries. This article studies the spillover of a prototype of such coup attempts – the January 6th Capitol insurrection. I argue that a far-right insurrection abroad can trigger a transnational learning process, which increases the salience of the far-right’s anti-democratic potential. Consequently, due to shaming and changes in voting calculus, citizens are less likely to support a domestic far-right party. To test this expectation, I use two panel datasets in Western Europe fielded amid the Capitol insurrection. Both analyses show that the expressed support for domestic far-right parties decreased after this autocratization event. I discuss how these findings enrich the literature on autocratization, the far-right, and transnational learning.

How elected representatives think about public opinion affects the degree to which policies are congruent with the public’s policy preferences. This is especially true for politicians occupying leadership positions, their perceptions matter even more. Extant work concluded that politicians in general do not exhibit a high perceptual accuracy, but direct evidence of the relative accuracy of leaders’ perceptions of public opinion is missing. Drawing on surveys among politicians and citizens in four countries, this study examines the accuracy of the public opinion perceptions of leaders and backbenchers. Irrespective of how leadership is defined and operationalized – executive or party leadership, formal or informal leadership, current or past leadership – we find low perceptual accuracy levels among leading politicians. Compared to backbenchers, and although politicians themselves consider leaders to have a special nose for public opinion, leading politicians do not possess a special public opinion rating skill.

The participants in deliberative mini-publics are typically randomly selected; therefore, mini-publics are often marketed as representative of the wider population. However, in practice, mini-publics are unlikely to be fully representative due to their small size and non-response bias. I report the results of a pre-registered survey experiment designed to assess the implications of deviations from statistical representativeness for citizens’ legitimacy beliefs (N = 1,308). Consistent with prior research, I find that the involvement of a mini-public in democratic decision-making can lead to substantial increases in perceptions of process legitimacy; however, even minor biases in the composition of mini-publics substantially decrease those gains while larger biases can wipe them out entirely. The results of this study temper hopes that mini-publics offer an easy fix to perceptions of low democratic legitimacy.

Why do US voters allow politicians to hold the country’s economy hostage during debt ceiling negotiations? In this research note, we argue that ignorance and uncertainty over the consequences of a debt ceiling breach play a nontrivial role in public support for hard-line negotiating positions. In a pre-registered survey experiment, two weeks before the June 2023 deadline to raise the US debt ceiling, we show that providing credible information about the consequences of default increases support for concessions among both Democrats and Republicans. Further, more certain information about the consequences of a debt ceiling breach has a larger effect than less-certain information suggesting that the unpredictable consequences of the crisis also help explain voter reluctance to accept concessions. The findings have implications for understanding debt ceiling negotiations and other crisis bargaining situations where the public serves as a relevant third party.

Turnout buying is a mainstay of machine politics. Despite strong theory that selective incentives should spur turnout, meta-analyses of empirical studies show no effect, thus making machine politics seem irrational and unsustainable. I argue that the apparent failure of turnout buying is an artefact of common measurement decisions in experimental and observational research that lump together turnout buying, abstention buying, and vote-choice buying. Data generated using these compound measures include countervailing and null effects that drive estimates of the effects of each strategy toward zero. I show that machines have incentives to diversify their strategies enough to make compound measures substantially underestimate the impact of turnout buying. I propose simple alternative measurement approaches and show how they perform using new survey data and a constituency-level analysis of machine strategy in Mexico. Findings close the gap between theory and facts and reaffirm the rationality of machine politics.

Does shaming human rights violators shape attitudes at home? A growing literature studies the effect of shaming on public attitudes in the target state, but far less is known about its effect in countries initiating the criticism – that is the shamers. In this article, I theorize that when governments shame human rights violators they shape both government approval and human rights attitudes at home. Utilizing two US-based survey experiments, I demonstrate that by shaming foreign countries, governments can improve their image at home and virtue signal their dedication to human rights. At the same time, shaming can modestly shape tolerance towards certain domestic human rights violations. I consider the generalizability of my results through comprehensive supplementary analyses, where experimental insights are corroborated with cross-national observational data. Overall, my findings can provide valuable insight into governments’ incentives to engage in foreign criticism.