How does right-wing terrorism affect electoral support for populist radical right parties (PRRPs)? Recent research has produced contrary answers to this question. We argue that only high-intensity attacks, whose motives and targets mirror PRRPs’ nativist agenda, are likely to generate a media backlash that dampens electoral support for PRRPs. We test this argument by combining high-frequency survey and social media data with a natural and survey experimental design. We find that right-wing terror reduced support for the radical right party Alternative für Deutschland after one of the most intense nativist attacks in recent German history. An analysis of all ninety-eight fatal right-wing attacks in Germany between 1990 and 2020 supports our argument. Our findings contribute to an understanding of how political violence triggers partisan detachment and have important implications for media responsibility in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.

Systematized information on the background of policymakers across long time-periods and all geographical regions of the world remains limited. In this article, we introduce Paths to Power (PtP), a new dataset on the educational, occupational, and social background of cabinet members. PtP contains detailed individual-level data – whenever identifiable – on 44,789 cabinet members across 141 countries in the period 1966-2021. This comprehensive dataset will be of relevance to numerous scholars (and others) interested in understanding politics and recent political history, and it enables a wide variety of new, empirically founded insights. We first present how the data is created and then discuss data quality and limitations. Next, we show how PtP is useful for researchers in diverse fields, including comparative politics, political sociology, gender studies, public administration, and international relations.

Amid declining public standing, many political parties seek to regain disaffected voters through various institutional strategies. One key approach is democratizing legislative candidate selection to grant party members or voters greater influence and signal improved responsiveness, transparency, and legitimacy. Yet does this strategy pay off electorally? The growing literature on this topic provides conflicting answers and limited evidence. We argue that more inclusive candidate selection does not have meaningful effects at the polls despite its merits. Whereas voters favor such procedures in principle, as some suggest, they underprioritize them in favor of other considerations when electing parties. We support this argument with observational and experimental data, including a matching difference-in-differences estimation of party performance across thirty-four democracies and a survey democracies and a survey experiment in three countries. This article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between party institutions and voter behavior in an age of eroding public trust and rising anti-establishment sentiment.

How do voters react to new political actors? Recent research suggests that radical right party success can provoke electoral backlash. We argue that such backlash is not exclusive to the radical right but can emerge whenever new political actors disrupt the status quo. With very distinct policy positions and behaviour, Green parties were early disruptors of post-war party systems in Europe. Using first-difference and difference-in-differences designs with voting records from Germany, we show that Green party success provoked a conservative backlash. After the Greens entered state parliaments, the Christian Democrats gained support. Using additional evidence from election surveys, we find that Green party success reinforces feelings of animosity among conservatives, mainly driven by disapproval of the Greens’ behaviour. These results highlight a broader pattern of backlash against new disruptive political actors. Our findings are especially relevant as polarization and party system fragmentation intensify across many established democracies.

It is widely believed that high inflation reduces the popularity of incumbents, and contributed to poor incumbent performance in recent elections in the United States and elsewhere. Existing research shows that voters’ inflation perceptions are associated with their evaluations of incumbent parties, but these observational studies cannot eliminate the possibility that the causal relationship runs the other way, where opposition to incumbent governments causes individuals to report higher price increases. To help overcome this inferential challenge, this study draws on a pre-registered experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey fielded just days before the 2024 US Presidential election. We find that priming Americans to think about inflation reduced support for the incumbent party. This effect is most pronounced among Independents and Democrats. These findings suggest that inflation likely contributed to the Democrats’ 2024 electoral defeat, and provide novel evidence that inflation has a causal effect on support for incumbent parties.

How do citizens evaluate the judiciary in the wake of politically salient rulings? I argue that judicial checks on the government shape citizens’ attitudes about judicial institutions at large, but these effects are driven by instrumental considerations, namely partisanship. In particular, my account suggests that judicial checks – as specific instances of interbranch conflict – provide citizens with instrumental information that shapes their beliefs about the broader judiciary. Thus, I hypothesize that court rulings limiting the government’s power will undermine support for the judiciary among individuals aligned with the incumbent, but increase support among opposition sympathizers. I test these expectations by exploiting the timing of two judicial decisions in Argentina (enacted by a lower court and the Supreme Court) that invalidated a highly salient judicial reform promoted by the government in 2013. Using data from a survey fielded before and after the court rulings, I show that the decisions significantly decreased government supporters’ trust in the judiciary, while opposition supporters increased their trust only following the Supreme Court ruling. Moreover, suggestive evidence provides support for the mechanism proposed by my account – that judicial checks expose citizens to information that is primarily instrumental. This article contributes to our knowledge of the determinants of public support for judicial institutions involved in interbranch conflicts.

A large literature has studied the effects of socialization under authoritarianism on political attitudes. In this research note, we extend this literature by demonstrating striking gender disparities in the post-transition persistence of these effects. We study the case of authoritarian indoctrination in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) using a regression kink design for causal identification. First, we draw on a unique survey fielded right before reunification to show that education under authoritarianism substantially reduced support for democratic capitalism and reunification with the West. In the second step, we triangulate multiple contemporary data sources to trace the persistence of these effects over time. More than two decades after the fall of the GDR, the attitudinal effects of authoritarian socialization persist only among men, but not women. Our results highlight considerable heterogeneity in the persistence of authoritarian legacies, raising critical questions about post-authoritarian ‘re-socialization’ and gendered adaptability.

Politicians’ presentation of self is central to election efforts. For these efforts to be successful, they need voters to receive and believe the messages they communicate. We examine the relationship between politicians’ communications and voters’ perceptions of their ideology. Using the content of politicians’ ideological presentation of self through social media communications, we create a measure of messaging ideology for all congressional candidates between 2018 and 2022 and all congressional officeholders between 2012 and 2022 along with voter perceptions of candidate ideology during the same time period. Using these measures, our work shows voters’ perceptions of candidate ideology are strongly related to messaging, even after controlling for incumbent voting behavior. We also examine how the relationship between politician messaging and voter perceptions changes relative to other information about the politician and in different electoral contexts. On the whole, voters’ perceptions of candidate ideology are strongly correlated with politician communications.

This article focuses on the effects of different communication modes – ‘contestatory’, ‘collaborative’, and ‘open’ (and two control groups – ‘information-only’ and a ‘placebo’ group) on reasoning and opinion formation in the context of conflictive collective decision problems. Focusing on two population-based survey experiments in Germany and Austria on the prioritization of health or freedom (Germany) and the introduction of mandatory vaccination (Austria) in the COVID-19 crisis, we find an important trade-off: while a contestatory and open mode enhances in-depth reasoning, a collaborative mode promotes constructive thinking. Regarding opinion formation, we find that when societal polarization is not extreme, communication modes do not matter for opinion (de-)polarization; here, the exposure to information is all that is needed to move minds. In highly polarized situations, however, open communication is the only way to communicatively reach out to people. Our results contradict both advocates of a contestatory and collaborative renewal of public discourse.

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.