What are the repressive consequences of civil society participation in international human rights complaints mechanisms? Such mechanisms allow civil society actors to make governments’ human rights violations known to international organizations. International organizations can respond by ‘naming and shaming’ states. We expect that complaint-based shaming increases repression against civil society organizations (CSOs). In particular, governments exploit the specific and personalized information contained in complaint-based shaming to repress challengers and deter future complaints. We test our theory with three studies – (i) a cross-national analysis, (ii) a CSO-level analysis with original survey data, and (iii) a media-based analysis – using multiple identification strategies, including instrumental variables. Our evidence shows that shaming in response to complaints has detrimental effects for CSOs in both democracies and autocracies. Our findings highlight that personalized shaming creates the risk of targeted reprisals and call for reforms that take this risk more seriously.

Many countries struggle to heal the wounds caused by past governmental discrimination against minorities, a process sometimes made difficult by continuing instances of injustice. One tool to improve majority-minority relations is Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs), which document historical injustices. We collect data before and after the release of the Norwegian TRC report on the treatment of the Sámi and other national minorities, which allows us to investigate its effects on reconciliatory attitudes. We further leverage the unrelated outbreak of demonstrations against current injustices, allowing us to examine responses to both past and current injustices. We find greater support for some aspects of reconciliation, but mainly in areas with a small presence of national minorities. Our results show the limits of TRCs when current conflicts shape the interpretation of historical injustice.

This paper presents the first empirical analysis demonstrating how international security influences global data flows. Firms exchange data traffic to achieve fast, stable, and affordable access to digital infrastructure, driving digital interdependence. While international security shapes economic interdependence, the mechanisms linking the two – sanctions, tariffs, boycotts, and contracts – create little risk for Internet interconnection, which is commonly exempted from sanction and tariff regimes, not directly consumed by the public, and not enabled through traditional contracts. I theorize that international conflict generates cybersecurity externalities as state and non-state actors directly weaponize digital interdependence. Firms and their networks sit directly in the path of future conflicts. Leveraging network topographical measurements from computer engineering, I test whether conflict expectations increase states’ mutual reliance to move data. I find robust evidence that power politics shapes digital interdependence and use additional analyses to argue that externalities, rather than state preferences, drive this process.

This letter investigates the electoral effects of symbolic class signalling through ‘cultural consumption’ in contemporary politics. We explore how politicians referring to an activity related to class-specific ‘cultural consumption’ – drinking beer in a pub or listening to classical music with a glass of wine – appeals to voters. We argue that symbolic class signalling has gained in importance due to the political realignment along the cultural dimension, and we expect radical right parties to benefit most from it. Our conjoint survey experiment with 1,550 respondents in Switzerland in January/February 2023 confirms our expectation. While many voters are biased against politicians claiming to enjoy classical music and wine, politicians drinking beer in a pub appeal particularly to radical right working-class voters without tertiary education. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of symbolic politics and class identity in times of political transformation.

Harm reduction is one of the most controversial and widely discussed approaches in public health and social policy, addressing a broad range of pressing societal issues, including drug addiction, sex work, alcohol and tobacco use, and homelessness. Surprisingly, however, harm reduction has received very little philosophical scrutiny. In this article, I aim to fill this gap. First, I provide a systematic analysis of the core features and normative commitments of harm reduction. Second, I propose a novel, relational egalitarian justification for harm reduction. I argue that the provision of harm reduction services is not solely or primarily a matter of mitigating the negative consequences associated with high-risk behaviours. Rather, most fundamentally, it is the appropriate response to the status of vulnerable individuals as equal members of society.

Are political activists driven by instrumental motives such as making a career in politics or mobilizing voters? We implement two natural field experiments in which party activists are randomly informed that canvassing is i) effective at mobilizing voters, or ii) effective for enhancing activists’ political careers. We find no effect of the treatments on activists’ intended and actual canvassing behaviour. The null finding holds despite a successful manipulation check and replication study, high statistical power, a natural field setting, and an unobtrusive measurement strategy. Using an expert survey, we show that the null finding shifted Bayesian posterior beliefs about the treatment’s effectiveness toward zero. The evidence thus casts doubt on two popular hypothesized instrumental drivers of political activism – voter persuasion and career concerns – and points toward expressive benefits as more plausible motives.

How does anxiety influence voting behaviour? Whereas anxiety is usually treated as a unidimensional emotion, we highlight the multiplicity of socially contingent forms it can assume in response to societal threats. Different anxieties, we posit, can create distinct axes of political competition along which anxious voters exhibit widely varying preferences. We illustrate our argument with unique observational and experimental survey data from Spain’s COVID-19 crisis, showing that individuals anxious about the pandemic’s health consequences favoured parties advocating stringent lockdown restrictions, whereas individuals anxious about its economic disruption preferred parties opposing such measures. Analyzing municipality-level results from Madrid’s 2021 regional election, we additionally provide evidence that COVID-19 boosted support for pro-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its health effects and support for anti-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its economic impact. Our findings point to the importance of disaggregating complex emotional states for understanding the determinants of voting behaviour.

How do electoral outcomes affect campaign contributions? We argue that in contexts where personal connections to the candidate and investment motivations dominate ideology and partisanship as drivers of donations, two main factors shape donors’ future behaviour: 1) government benefits accrued by donors (for example, contracts) and 2) whether the supported candidate runs again in future elections. Using data from Colombian mayoral elections, a context with no re-election, weak parties, and non-ideological races, we find that donating to the winning candidate reduces the probability of donating in the next election. We further show that, among donors to the winner, those who receive a contract from the municipality are more likely to continue donating than those without contracts. The findings highlight the importance of personal loyalty to the candidate and the fulfilment of donors’ investment expectations determining campaign contributions in non-established democracies.

The existing literature shows that frequent elections depress electoral participation and contribute to the global decline in voter turnout. However, the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This paper investigates the sources of voter fatigue and hypothesizes that frequent elections make electoral abstention more acceptable to citizens. It tests the main hypothesis via an original pre-registered survey experiment fielded in five countries with a total sample size of 12,221 respondents. The results provide pioneering evidence on the psychological effects of election frequency. They confirm that high election frequency increases the social acceptability of electoral abstention and that this effect is proportional to the number of past elections. It can be equally observed among all major social groups, including politically engaged citizens and those who believe that voting is a civic duty. These findings hold major implications for our understanding of voter turnout and democratic institutional engineering.

Ethics guides for political science instruct researchers to avoid retraumatization of human subjects (for example, APSA 2022; Fujii 2012). Meanwhile, human subject research on sensitive topics, including violence and repression, has increased. This paper clarifies what is at stake when we talk about research participant distress and provides recommendations for handling concerns about trauma and retraumatization. It offers a new framework for trauma-informed political science research. This framework reflects the conclusions of the empirical literature on the risk of distress in different research settings as well as critical normative perspectives on consequentialist research ethics. In particular, it identifies two approaches for trauma-informed political science research: one for research in less vulnerable contexts and one for research with contexts that are vulnerable in terms of limited resources, ongoing suffering, and/or geopolitical instability. The framework details best practices for informed consent, debriefing, and more within each approach. The paper also addresses the special challenges of political violence research. While the literature suggests that retraumatization as such is rarely a major risk of research, the paper highlights that a narrowly defined concept of retraumatization can lead us to neglect other trauma-informed concerns.

While scholars document associations between competing parties’ policy disputes and citizens’ cross-party hostility, that is, affective polarization, we lack causal comparative evidence of how different types of ideological disagreements shape partisan affective evaluations. We investigate this issue with a priming experiment across ten Western publics, which prompts some respondents to answer questions inviting them to discuss debates over either cultural or economic issues versus a control group that receives a non-political prompt. Respondents in the economic and cultural priming conditions expressed greater distrust of out-partisans, and, among respondents who received cultural priming, those who discussed immigration in their open-ended responses expressed far more distrust towards opponents – an effect driven by right-wing respondents who discussed immigration. These findings provide comparative evidence that economic and cultural debates cause affective polarization, with immigration as a primary cultural driver.

This paper advances the study of democratic trajectories – whether democracies deepen, stagnate, erode or break down over time. We show that econometric panel models usually neglect cumulative effects, which are implicitly central to many theories of democratic change. Some important factors, such as economic growth, have cumulative effects that shape medium- to long-term regime trajectories. To overcome the limitations of conventional statistical estimators, we propose the use of latent growth curve models, which are better able to capture cumulative processes. We demonstrate the advantages of this approach by analyzing the trajectory of 103 democratic regimes inaugurated after 1974. Conventional estimators fail to predict democratic trajectories, while latent growth curve models properly capture cumulative effects.

Evidence suggests that politicians in advanced democracies are positively selected on characteristics relevant to their suitability for political office. Whereas stereotypes abound, much less is known about the quality of politicians in developing countries. Drawing on unique experimental and survey data on village-level politicians in West Bengal, India, we find some evidence of positive selection into office: elected politicians are more educated, motivated, and have greater integrity than their constituents. However, they also have lower cognitive ability and are more likely to come from politically networked families. Comparing first-timers with re-elected politicians, we observe that experienced politicians display somewhat more political knowledge and motivation than their inexperienced peers, but are also more likely to be wealthy and male. Our findings demonstrate that conclusions about politician quality depend critically on measurement choices and that there may be competing dimensions of politician quality in the developing world.

United Nations peacekeeping is an important instrument for maintaining international peace, but the mandates that peacekeeping operations are expected to implement are increasingly complex. This trend has consequences. We argue that certain member states are incentivized by the benefits of partaking in complex missions. These include ‘process’ benefits such as reimbursement payments, training, and reputation building. Specifically, non-democratic states are more likely to make greater contributions to missions with complex mandates than democratic states. In a global analysis of UN member peacekeeping contributions from 1990 to 2022, we show that as mandate complexity increases, non-democracies make larger contributions relative to democracies. While democracies do not shy away from supporting peacekeeping, they resist substantial contributions to the ambitiously mandated missions that they have often themselves promoted. These findings contribute to ongoing academic discussions about the challenge of recruiting sufficient resources to pursue peacekeeping while insisting on a liberal global order.

Are women legislators punished for not supporting women’s substantive policy interests? We test these gendered expectations. We marshal an original content analysis of cable news coverage and two survey experiments testing voters’ assessment of hypothetical legislators on the issues of abortion and equal pay. We find that voters rate both women and men legislators positively for supporting women’s issues and negatively evaluate legislators of both genders when they do not support women’s interests. We also find that women voters negatively evaluate women legislators who act against women’s interests at a greater rate than men voters. While we do not find evidence of voters holding women legislators to gendered expectations, we do find that legislators, regardless of their gender, have strategic incentives to promote women’s substantive representation. Our results suggest that voters care more about the substantive representation of women’s political interests than who supports those interests.

For decades, the business community has been viewed as a core constituency of the Republican Party. However, several factors, such as corporate prioritization of social values, changes in trade policy, and anti-business sentiment among Republican rank-and-file, suggest a coalitional shift is underway. Scholars have debated whether this shift is an illusion or is real. At the core of this debate is how businesses navigate two forms of organizational conflict: a) stakeholder cross-pressure and b) policy cross-pressure. To measure cross-pressure, we conduct an original survey of elite business leaders. Our evidence suggests a widespread view that companies are increasingly aligned with the Democrats, including in alignment on core policy priorities. When companies are cross-pressured, leaders perceive the company as leaning toward the Democrats. The potential decoupling of business from the Republican coalition represents one of the most significant changes in American politics in decades.

This study investigates the impact of inflation on the 2022 US mid-term elections, a period witnessing the resurgence of inflation as a major concern in the USA for the first time in decades. We develop a pre-registered survey with an embedded experiment to examine the political repercussions of rising prices. We find that individuals experiencing a higher personal inflation burden are more inclined to support Republican candidates. Our survey experiment further assesses the impact of partisan messaging leading up to the election, focusing on two primary narratives: government spending, as emphasized by Republicans, and corporate greed, highlighted by Democrats. The results indicate that attributing inflation to government spending decreases support for Democrats, whereas associating it with corporate greed undermines confidence in the Republicans’ ability to effectively manage inflation. Economic voting behaviour depends not only on objective economic conditions but also on how political parties subjectively frame these conditions.

Racial hate crimes against Asian Americans in the USA have recently risen. While many examined the domestic consequences of hate crimes, little is known about their impact on foreign public perception of the country. This study fills this gap by investigating how hate crimes in the USA influence attitudes toward the USA. Conducting a survey experiment in nine Asian countries, we found that exposure to information about hate crime incidents in the USA resulted in a significant increase in unfavourable views of the USA (−10.1pp), decreased confidence in the USA (−6.3pp), and increasingly negative perceptions of American democracy (−6.5pp), American ideas and customs (−11.0pp), and American people (−11.8pp). We also find that legislative actions can mitigate the negative effects of hate crime information. These findings underscore the global significance of addressing hate crimes in the USA for the country’s reputation and soft power.

Voters of governing parties are more satisfied with democracy than opposition voters, but the consequences of this winner-loser gap remain underexplored. We argue that electoral losers should be more supportive of referendums than electoral winners as representative democracy has failed electoral losers, whereas electoral winners aim to protect their party’s ability to govern without constraint. In addition, we theorize that affective polarization should strengthen this gap. Using cross-national survey data from thirteen European democracies, we find that electoral losers consistently show greater support for referendums than winners, and affective polarization amplifies this effect. Yet, the effect of affective polarization is solely attributed to a decrease in support for referendums among polarized election winners. These findings raise questions about the role of affective polarization in undermining the accountability mechanism between electoral winners and their parties. Concerns about electoral losers might be overstated and potentially overlook the democratic implications of electoral victory.

This article examines how authoritarian regimes use legislative institutions to coopt rival elites and induce policy cooperation. Theories of cooptation under authoritarianism emphasize two mechanisms: economic rents and policy concessions. Despite the persistence of these mechanisms in the literature, evidence of their effect on policy outcomes remains limited. In this paper, we develop a theory of legislative cooptation, or the intentional exchange of economic rents and policy concessions to legislators in exchange for policy cooperation. We test our theory using a novel dataset of 150,000 roll-call votes from the Kuwait National Assembly that spans the entirety of Kuwait’s legislative history. We leverage the regime’s participation in the legislature to establish a measure of legislative cooperation and use this measure to estimate the efficacy of mechanisms of cooptation in inducing conformity with its policy agenda. Both mechanisms effectively elicit cooperation: but they have different strategic and normative implications for our understanding of how representation emerges in non-democratic contexts.