This contribution starts by presenting the three main approaches that political scientists use to analyze labor market vulnerability. We proceed to discuss various operationalizations of labor market vulnerability. We examine how they relate to the three theoretical approaches and we evaluate the consistency between theory and measurement. Finally, we recommend three measures that political scientists should deploy when analyzing the effect of labor market vulnerability on political preferences. We point out what each of these variables captures and what methodological challenges should be taken into account when using them.

This article evaluates the reliability of sensitivity tests. Using Monte Carlo methods we show that, first, the definition of robustness exerts a large influence on the robustness of variables. Second and more importantly, our results also demonstrate that inferences based on sensitivity tests are most likely to be valid if determinants and confounders are almost uncorrelated and if the variables included in the true model exert a strong influence on outcomes. Third, no definition of robustness reliably avoids both false positives and false negatives. We find that for a wide variety of data-generating processes, rarely used definitions of robustness perform better than the frequently used model averaging rule suggested by Sala-i-Martin. Fourth, our results also suggest that Leamer’s extreme bounds analysis and Bayesian model averaging are extremely unlikely to generate false positives. Thus, if based on these inferential criteria a variable is robust, it is almost certain to belong into the empirical model. Fifth and finally, we also show that researchers should avoid drawing inferences based on lack of robustness.

Researchers in different social science disciplines have successfully used Facebook to recruit subjects for their studies. However, such convenience samples are not generally representative of the population. We developed and validated a new quota sampling method to recruit respondents using Facebook advertisements. Additionally, we published an R package to semi-automate this quota sampling process using the Facebook Marketing API. To test the method, we used Facebook advertisements to quota sample 2432 US respondents for a survey on climate change public opinion. We conducted a contemporaneous nationally representative survey asking identical questions using a high-quality online survey panel whose respondents were recruited using probability sampling. Many results from the Facebook-sampled survey are similar to those from the online panel survey; furthermore, results from the Facebook-sampled survey approximate results from the American Community Survey (ACS) for a set of validation questions. These findings suggest that using Facebook to recruit respondents is a viable option for survey researchers wishing to approximate population-level public opinion.

Changes in voters' behavior and in the campaign strategies that political parties pursue are likely to have increased the importance of campaigns on voters' electoral choices. As a result, scholars increasingly question the usefulness and predictive power of structural forecasting models, that use information from “fundamental” variables to make an election prediction several months before Election Day. In this paper, we empirically examine the expectation that structural forecasting models are increasingly error-prone. For doing so, we apply a structural forecasting model to predict elections in six established democracies. We then trace the predictive power of this model over time. Surprisingly, our results do not give the slightest indication of a decline in the predictive power of structural forecasting models. By showing that information on long-term factors still allows making accurate predictions of electoral outcomes, we question the assumption that campaigns matter more now than they did in the past.

We examine the causal effect of legislative activity on private benefits, which have been largely neglected by previous research in legislative studies. By relying on a natural experiment in New Zealand, where randomly selected Members of Parliament (MPs) are given the opportunity to propose legislation, we find evidence for a causal relation between proposing a (successful) bill and the private benefits MPs receive, in terms of gifts and payments for services. We conclude that the allocation of private benefits depends on legislative performance.

To understand the relationship between place and politics, we must measure both political attitudes and the ways in which place is represented in the minds of individuals. In this paper, we assess a new measure of mental representation of geography, in which survey respondents draw their own local communities on maps and describe them. We use a panel study in Canada to present evidence that these maps are both valid and reliable measures of a personally relevant geographic area, laying the measurement groundwork for the growing number of studies using this technology. We hope to set efforts to measure “place” for the study of context and politics on firmer footing. Our validity assessments show that individuals are thinking about people and places with which they have regular contact when asked to draw their communities. Our reliability assessments show that people can draw more or less the same map twice, even when the exercise is repeated months later. Finally, we provide evidence that the concept of community is a tangible consideration in the minds of ordinary citizens and is not simply a normative aspiration or motivation.

This article explores empirically how different types of labor market inequality affect policy preferences in post-industrial societies. I argue that the two main conceptualizations of labor market vulnerability identified in the insider–outsider literature are complementary: labor market risks are shaped by both labor market status—whether an individual is unemployed, in a temporary or permanent contract—and occupational unemployment—whether an individual is in an occupation with high or low unemployment. As a result, both status and occupation are important determinants of individual labor market policy preferences. In this paper, I first briefly conceptualize the link between labor market divides, risks and policy preferences, and then use cross-national survey data to investigate the determinants of preferences.

Personalist regimes are more reliant on natural resource rents than other models of autocracy, but the direction of causation is unclear. Resource wealth could finance patronage and allow leaders to skip construction of institutionalized systems of rule, leading to more personalized autocracies. Conversely, personalist leaders may increase resource extraction, since diversifying the economy could increase the power of rivals. I use data on the degree of personalism and level of oil income to disentangle these interpretations. The results show that increases in oil income are associated with subsequent increases in personalism within autocracies. Since personalist regimes are less likely to successfully democratize, the results also provide important evidence as to why oil impedes democracy.

Existing research shows that survey respondents are sensitive to the source of information about political corruption and respond more strongly to information from more credible sources. This behavior occurs more frequently among the politically sophisticated. In a nation-wide survey in Argentina, we successfully replicate results originally found in a study in Brazil. In addition, we examine whether citizens process information about corruption differently depending on their partisan identities. At odds with our initial expectations, we find that copartisans, opposition partisans, and other/non-partisans distinguish between information sources in very similar ways. These results suggest that even though partisanship affects baseline assessments of political candidates, citizens of all types are sensitive to the credibility of information they receive about political corruption.

Across disciplines, scholars strive to better understand individuals’ milieus—the people, places, and institutions individuals encounter in their daily lives. In particular, political scientists argue that racial and ethnic context shapes attitudes about candidates, policies, and fellow citizens. Yet, the current standard of measuring milieus is to place survey respondents in a geographic container and then to ascribe all that container's characteristics to the individual's milieu. Using a new dataset of over 2.6 million GPS records from over 400 individuals, we compare conventional static measures of racial and ethnic context to dynamic, precise measures of milieus. We demonstrate how low-level static measures tend to overstate how extreme individuals’ racial and ethnic contexts are and offer suggestions for future researchers.

Using data from the World Values Survey, we analyze the extent to which value consensus exists within countries. To do this, we introduce a statistical model which allows us to generate country-level measures of cultural heterogeneity. Our statistical approach models each country as a mixture of subcultures that are shared across the world. Our results demonstrate that value consensus varies substantially across countries and regions.

The political relevance of labor market insecurity has been questioned because (a) insider-outsider divides were considered to be a divide within the low-skilled and politically less active working class and (b) labor market insecurity runs through the middle of the household. Outsiders might therefore align their preferences with those of insiders. This contribution provides, first, evidence that labor market insecurity extends well into the higher-skilled middle class, in particular to high-skilled young adults and high-skilled women. Second, the contribution sheds light on the “household question”, that is the question whether mixed households dampen the political relevance of labor market insecurity. If labor market insecurity is concentrated in specific social groups (young adults, women) that tend to cohabit with secure insiders, the political relevance of labor market insecurity might depend on whether or not outsiders align their preferences with those of the household. In this contribution, I discuss recent work on the relevance of the household in translating labor market divides into preferences divides presenting recent work that shows that the household does not render insider-outsider divides politically irrelevant. In sum, insider-outsider divides have all the potential to become politically relevant.

Does government party support decline in a monotonic fashion throughout the legislative cycle or do we observe a u-shaped “electoral cycle effect”? Moving beyond the study of midterm election results, this is the first comparative study to assess the cyclical pulse of government party support in parliamentary democracies based on voting intention polls from 171 cycles in 22 countries. On average, government parties lose support during the first half of the electoral cycle, but at most partially recover from their initial losses. Under single-party government and when prime ministers control cabinet dissolution, support tends to follow the previously assumed u-shaped pattern more strongly. Finally, we find that government parties hardly recover from early losses since the 2000s.

Until recently, researchers who wanted to examine the determinants of state respect for most specific negative rights (i.e., physical integrity and empowerment rights) needed to rely on data from the CIRI or the Political Terror Scale (PTS). The new Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset offers scholars a potential alternative to the individual human rights variables from CIRI. We analyze a set of key Cingranelli–Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project and V-Dem negative rights indicators, finding unusual and unexpectedly large patterns of disagreement between the two sets. First, we discuss the new V-Dem dataset by comparing it to the disaggregated CIRI indicators, discussing the history of each project, and describing its empirical domain. Second, we identify a set of disaggregated human rights measures that are similar across the two datasets and discuss each project’s measurement approach. Third, we examine how these measures compare to each other empirically, showing that they diverge considerably across both time and space. These findings point to several important directions for future work, such as how conceptual approaches and measurement strategies affect rights scores. For the time being, our findings suggest that researchers should think carefully about using the measures as substitutes.

Despite its many contributions, a central problem in the dualization debate is conceptual overstretching, as we will argue in this short comment. The term “dualization” has been used to describe different processes, which are often subsumed under this heading: the rise of atypical employment, increasing labor market stratification in general, or the partial deregulation of welfare state policies and institutions. This multitude of usages weakens the utility of dualization as a theoretical concept. In the next section, we briefly look at the evolution of the dualization debate on the micro level before we proceed to the macro level. In the concluding section, we speculate about the future of dualization as a concept for describing welfare state transformations.

Political scientists use expert surveys to assess the latent features of political actors. Experts, though, are unlikely to be equally informed and assess all actors equally well. The literature acknowledges variance in measurement quality but pays little attention to the implications of uncertainty for aggregating responses. We discuss the nature of the measurement problem in expert surveys. We then propose methods to assess the ability of experts to judge where actors stand and to aggregate expert responses. We examine the effects of aggregation for a prominent survey in the literature on party politics and EU integration. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we demonstrate that it is better to aggregate expert responses using the median or modal response, rather than the mean.

Many citizens express an intention to vote but then fail to follow through on their motivation. It is well known that impulsiveness contributes to unsound behaviors with adverse individual consequences like smoking, overeating, and undersaving. I apply these findings and theory to political participation and argue that present bias is also likely to limit collective behaviors. Those who desire to act are challenged by impulsiveness in following through on their motivation. In a nationally representative survey merged to administrative records, those with present bias are around ten points less likely to vote. Importantly, those with present bias are less likely to vote even after expressing pre-election intention to do so. Along with a formal decision-theoretic model of turnout with present bias, the results provide a new framework to reason about the choice to vote, an alternative interpretation of the over-report of turnout, and have implications for policy approaches to promote individual action in the public interest.

Survey research shows that voters know very little about politics. Left unexamined is whether political knowledge is a distinct type of knowledge when compared to other subjects. We seek to establish a baseline by putting political knowledge into a broader context. We show that our respondents’ knowledge about politics is similar in construction to their knowledge about other subjects, such as shopping, sports, popular culture, geography, economics, and the rules of the road. We conclude that knowledge of politics largely resides on the same dimension as other knowledge topics, implying that knowledge of politics is not a unique construct.

The growing research on post-industrial labor market inequality bears a strong—yet widely misunderstood—relevance for the literature on electoral realignment. In this contribution, I contend that the assumption of “labor market outsiders” being equal to “globalization/modernization losers” is largely mistaken. Rather, atypical work and unemployment is most widespread among service workers, whose primary electoral choice is to abstain from voting. This implies that the ongoing reconfiguration of European party systems—through the rise of right-wing populist parties—is driven by skilled and routine workers in the manufacturing sector (the traditional “insiders”). Hence, the rise of right-wing populist parties reflects a political mobilization of the formerly well-protected industrial working class, rather than of labor market outsiders.

The welfare state literature argues that Social Democratic party representation is of key importance for welfare state outcomes. However, few papers are able to separate the influence of parties from voter preferences, which implies that the partisan effects will be overstated. I study a natural experiment to identify a partisan effect. In 1995, the Labour Party (Ap) in the Norwegian municipality of Flå filed their candidate list too late and could not participate in the local election. Ap was the largest party in Flå in the entire post-World War period, but have not regained this position. I use the synthetic control method to study the effects on welfare spending priorities. I find small and insignificant partisan effects.