Economic development and accompanying structural changes of the economy create new opportunities, however not everywhere and not for everyone. Development increases the demand for skilled labor, improving their welfare perceptions, but low-skilled workers feel more insecure and worse off economically. This adverse effect results from a mismatch between local labor demand and individual skill sets. To measure the development levels of people's local environments, I combine geocoded Afrobarometer data and night lights. Bayesian multilevel analysis confirms that the highly skilled are economically most dissatisfied in lagging areas, while the low-skilled are less satisfied in highly developed environments. These findings emphasize the importance of local conditions for welfare perceptions and show the unequal effect of development leaving behind large parts of the population.

Social connections between individuals can profoundly impact their political behavior. A growing body of research on legislative politics examines how spatial proximity to fellow legislators affects voting behavior within the institution. However, studies that examine this question often suffer from a fundamental identification problem in which proximity effects may reflect actual behavioral diffusion between members or, instead, homophily, in which legislators of a similar political feather flock together. We overcome this observational equivalence by exploiting a unique random seating lottery for seating assignments in the world's oldest existing parliament, Iceland's national legislature, Alþingi. Utilizing this naturally occurring randomization, we employ spatial analyses of more than 20,000 estimates of spatial dependence and find little evidence that seating proximity leads to similar voting behavior by members in this legislative context.

Affective polarization between partisans is potentially troubling for liberal democracy. Hence, recent research has focused on how affective dislike between partisans can be reduced. Using a survey experiment in Austria, we test whether elite signals matter. Respondents exposed to fictional news stories implying that their in-party might form a coalition with an out-party show reduced dislike toward supporters of that out-party. Our experiment also shows that coalition signals can influence out-party affect even if neither of the two parties signaling cooperation are an in-party. We conclude that cooperation between rivals has an important role in reducing affective polarization.

Voters use salient issues to inform their vote choice. Using 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES) data, we analyze how short-, medium-, and long-term issues informed the vote for president in the 2020 election, which witnessed record-setting participation. To explain the dynamics of presidential vote choice, we employ a voter typology advanced by Key (1966). Specifically, compared to standpatters, who in 2020 registered the same major party vote as in 2016, we find that new voters in 2020 and voters switching their preferences from 2016 cast their ballots in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. In the end, President Donald Trump was denied reelection by new voters and vote switchers principally because certain issues had a notable effect in moving their presidential preferences in the Democratic direction.

Even in the best-designed experiment, noncompliance can complicate analysis. While the intent-to-treat effect remains identified, randomization alone no longer identifies the complier average causal effect (CACE). Instrumental variables approaches, which rely on the exclusion restriction, can suffer from high variance, particularly when the experiment has a low compliance rate. We provide a framework which broadens the set of design and analysis techniques political science researchers can use when addressing noncompliance. Building on the growing literature about the advantages of ex-ante design decisions to improve precision, we show blocking on variables related to both compliance and the outcome can greatly improve all the estimators we propose. Drawing on work in statistics, we introduce the principal ignorability assumption and a class of principal score weighting estimators, which can exhibit large gains in precision in low compliance settings. We then combine principal ignorability and blocking with a simple estimation strategy to derive a more efficient estimation strategy for the CACE. In a re-evaluation of a study on the effect of GOTV on turnout, we find that the principal ignorability approaches result in confidence intervals roughly half the size of traditional instrumental variable approaches.

Liberalization is a perennial topic in politics and political science. We first review a broad scholarly debate, showing that the mainstream theories make rival and contradictory claims regarding the role of political parties in (de)liberalization reforms. We then develop a framework of conditional partisan influence, arguing that and under what conditions parties matter. We test our (and rival) propositions with a new dataset on (de)liberalization reforms in 23 democracies since 1973 covering several policy areas. Methodologically, we argue that existing quantitative studies are problematic: They rely on time-series cross-section models using country-year observations; but governments do not change annually, so that the number of observations is artificially inflated, resulting in incorrect estimates. We propose mixed-effects models instead, with country-year observations nested in cabinets, which are nested in countries and years. The results show under what conditions parties matter for (de)liberalization. More generally, the paper argues that mixed-effects models should become the new standard for studying partisan influences.

Survey experiments that investigate how voting procedures affect voting behavior and election outcomes use hypothetical questions and non-representative samples. We present here the results of a novel survey experiment that addresses both concerns. First, the winning party in our experiment receives a donation to its campaign funds inducing real consequences for voting. Second, we run an online experiment with a Dutch national representative sample (N = 1240). Our results validate previous findings using a representative sample, in particular that approval voting leads to a higher concentration in votes for smaller parties and strengthens centrist parties in comparison to plurality voting. Importantly, our results suggest that voting behavior is not affected by voting incentives and can be equally reliably elicited with hypothetical questions.

This paper contributes to the conflicting literature about indirect rule by delivering a new theoretical explanation for the persistent effects of indirect rule on contemporary provision of public goods. It looks at a single region of India which has areas that historically experienced both direct and indirect rule. The theoretical mechanism focuses on the principal-agent problem and the incentives that it produces for local leaders. Unlike local princes, colonizers were under stricter oversight and had to be more accountable to the top due to the obligations to extract resources. A spatial regression discontinuity design is used to compare directly and indirectly ruled territories. The empirical results show that indirect rule has predominantly long-term negative effects on the provision of selected public goods.

Stereotypes of the two parties play an important role in political cognition, and a range of recent studies have examined the content and effects of partisan stereotypes. However, little work has studied change in partisan stereotypes over time. We address this question by comparing data on stereotypes of partisans collected before and after the Trump presidency, a time when we might expect individuals' images of the two parties to undergo significant change. Using a structural topic model, we compare responses to open-ended questions asking respondents to list words describing members of the two parties from 2016 and 2021. We find that partisan stereotypes in the 2021 sample are less group- and issue-based and focused more on personal traits. These results suggest that, during the Trump era, members of the mass public came to see the parties in more personalized, character-focused terms, potentially contributing to affective polarization.

We argue that education's effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We examine Senegal, a stable but developing democracy where presidential over-reach threatened to weaken democracy. For causal identification, we use a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits variation in the intensity of a major school reform and citizens’ ages during reform implementation. Results indicate that schooling increases interest in politics and greater support for democratic institutions—but no increased political participation in the aggregate. Education increases political participation primarily when democracy is threatened, when support for democratic institutions among educated individuals is also greater.

Are cues from party leaders so important that they can cause individuals to change their own issue positions to align with the party's position? Recent work on the importance of party cues suggests they do, especially given the literature on partisanship as a strong and persistent group identity. However, in this paper we test the limits of those partisan cues. Using a unique two-wave panel survey design we find that the effect of party cues is moderated by the prior level of importance individuals place on an issue. We find that when a person believes an issue area to be more important, party cues are less likely to move that citizen's position, particularly when the cue goes against partisan ideological norms. Our results show evidence that an individual's own issue positions—at least the important ones—can be resilient in the face of party cues.

Analyses of US panel surveys from 1992 to 1996 have found extremity in political values was associated with increased affective polarization, but that affective polarization was not associated with changes in value extremity during this period (Enders and Lupton, 2021). This note reevaluates the relationships between political value extremity and affective polarization using a 2016–2020 panel survey. Replicating Enders and Lupton's analytical procedures as closely as possible with this more recent sample, I find value extremity is sometimes associated with increased affective polarization. In contrast to Enders and Lupton (2021), however, affective polarization is strongly associated with increased value extremity between 2016 and 2020. These findings suggest that the relationships between political values and affective polarization may have changed since the 1990s, and that values are now influenced by Americans' evaluations of salient political objects, such as parties, presidential candidates, and ideological groups.

Regression models with log-transformed dependent variables are widely used by social scientists to investigate nonlinear relationships between variables. Unfortunately, this transformation complicates the substantive interpretation of estimation results and often leads to incomplete and sometimes even misleading interpretations. We focus on one valuable but underused method, the presentation of quantities of interest such as expected values or first differences on the original scale of the dependent variable. The procedure to derive these quantities differs in seemingly minor but critical aspects from the well-known procedure based on standard linear models. To improve empirical practice, we explain the underlying problem and develop guidelines that help researchers to derive meaningful interpretations from regression results of models with log-transformed dependent variables.

Despite considerable progress, inequality between countries remains at staggering levels. However, we know surprisingly little about demand for international redistribution in the Global South. This is unfortunate as it hinders our understanding of the pressures governments experience to cooperate internationally. Therefore, this paper studies perceptions of international inequality and attitudes toward international aid, an important instrument for redistribution, in Kenya, a major recipient of aid. It features an SMS-based survey experiment, in which respondents are treated with information about international income differences. It is found that most respondents underestimate these differences and that providing accurate information lowers inequality acceptance. However, this does not translate into demand for aid. The findings question often-made assumptions about the popularity of aid and call for further investigation of other internationally redistributive policies.

A growing body of evidence indicates the public is less committed to democracy than conventional wisdom long held. One possibility is that many in the public have internalized the norm that democracy is “good” but that such support is not firmly held. An implication of this reasoning is that because there is an expectation to express support for democracy, responses will be influenced by the presence of an interviewer due to social desirability effects. In this note, we examine the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies—in each year, a portion of respondents were interviewed via the internet while others were interviewed face-to-face. We identify a politically relevant difference between the two survey modes: those interviewed face-to-face express greater satisfaction with democracy. Indeed, the difference we identify is similar in magnitude to the difference typically observed between electoral winners and electoral losers. Our result is robust to different measurement and estimation strategies. While levels of satisfaction are influenced by the presence of an interviewer, a followup analysis indicates that the relationship between satisfaction and winner–loser status is similar across modes.

Citizens often support politicians who vote against their parties in parliament. They view rebels as offering better representation, appreciate expressive acts, take rebellion as a signal of standing up for constituents, or see rebels as defending their moral convictions. Each explanation has different implications for representation, but they have not yet been tested systematically against one another. We implement survey experiments on nationally representative samples in the UK, Germany, France, and Italy to assess whether voters treat rebellion as a cue for better representation or infer positive character traits implying a valence advantage. Policy congruence does not drive voters’ preference for rebels. However, voters do associate positive traits with rebel MPs, even if they do not feel better represented by them.

Despite a renewed interest in the health of the US administrative state, the absence of meaningful time-series measures of bureaucratic capacity hinders the testing of core theories of bureaucratic and executive politics. Using over 190 million personnel records, I estimate 5590 yearly policymaking-capacity scores for 261 unique agencies from 1998 to 2021. These measures provide an invaluable tool as either an independent or dependent variable in studies of administrative policymaking. To illustrate the value of these measures, I test longstanding theories about the relationship between bureaucratic autonomy and capacity. In contrast with emerging survey research, this study demonstrates that agencies with higher levels of structural independence have higher levels of policymaking capacity.

Across a series of experiments, I show that racial threat from a stereotypically nonthreatening racial minority group, Asian Americans, has a direct impact on white Americans' views of discrimination toward the group. When white Americans learn the group is growing, they feel a distinct racial threat which decreases support for the idea that Asian Americans experience discrimination while simultaneously increasing support for policy which actively discriminates against Asian Americans. I show this concept to be portable over context, examining support for discriminatory policy toward Asians in education policy and COVID-19 policy. I conclude by discussing the implications for how racial threat can drive more racial conflict while simultaneously decreasing the perception that this discrimination is occurring.