Citizens do not directly observe democratic backsliding and, as a result, may hesitate to respond to subversion. We develop a model of third-party oversight bodies, such as the media or courts, that detect and assess actions that may be subversive to democracy and inform citizens. Oversight deters subversion, disciplines incumbents, and enables corrective actions by providing credible information about ambiguous incumbent behavior to citizens. However, when the oversight body is contested, citizens may doubt the intent behind its criticisms. When the oversight body is cautious in its criticisms, it elicits negative inferences about its intentions, what we term a fake news effect. The consequences are severe, undermining oversight and enabling backsliding. Democratic accountability depends on reliable sources of information and elected officials’ commitment to upholding norms of conduct.

Voters must often resolve dilemmas between choosing their favorite candidate and the one likeliest to win an election. Researchers know surprisingly little about how voters even conceptualize electability, let alone make these decisions. We use two novel survey experiments to evaluate how voters trade off policy agreement and electability in their decisions. The first experiment presents respondents with policy agreement between themselves and candidates and candidates’ electability rankings on the same scale, allowing us to directly compare. We show that while making electability information salient modestly reduces support for candidates with limited prospects, respondents remain primarily policy-motivated. Additionally, we show that respondents actually construe electability as a signal about a candidate’s qualifications rather than as a signal about getting votes.

Economic and geospatial drivers of conflict are established, yet aggregate analyses often obscure subnational risk patterns. This study develops a high-resolution risk methodology for fragile, resource-rich states by combining spatial econometrics with the greed-grievance framework. Using a Bayesian approach based on integrated nested Laplace approximation and stochastic partial differential equations, we examine how socio-economic development, natural resources, energy infrastructure, and 14 spatial variables shape four conflict typologies in Nigeria between 1997 and 2023. Results show that wealth reduces conflict risk, while ethnic fractionalization and proximity to resources have actor-specific effects. Petroleum endowments and power infrastructure increase organized rebel and militia activity, whereas ethnic dynamics mainly drive riots. Predictive risk maps support infrastructure planning, supply chain risk mitigation, and targeted stabilization policies.

Does permitting voters to select multiple candidates in majoritarian elections increase diversity among those elected? While majoritarian systems typically use single-vote ballots, research suggests that allowing multiple selections may increase the representation of women and racial minorities. However, empirical evidence regarding actual voter behavior remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a survey experiment that varied the number of selectable candidates from one to three in multimember local elections. The results revealed that, under the multiple-vote condition, respondents were more likely to alternate by gender, particularly in their second- and third-ranked choices, supporting the theory that multiple voting fosters more diverse representation. Nevertheless, men often emerged as the first-ranked choice, giving them an overall advantage at the aggregate level.

How do political lotteries affect choices and outcomes? We study the monthly lotteries used to assign all legislators to deliberation committees in 19th century Belgium. We focus on the period of democratization around the entry of a new, third, and Socialist party. We ask whether random, more extensive exposure to certain MP types affected voting over all roll-call votes between 1892 and 1902, i.e. debating more Socialists, more incumbents, or more of those from majority Flemish-speaking districts. We find small but significant exposure effects on rebelling against the party majority, against the deliberative ideal but along government-opposition logic. Legislatures may similarly limit lottery’s potential today.

This study jointly considers two opportunistic behaviors among political incumbents that may be triggered by electoral uncertainty—policy myopia and policy moderation—which hitherto have been the focus of separate research traditions. We evaluate their prevalence in economic policy-making among Swedish local governments, using a new measure of electoral competitiveness, capturing the incumbent government’s re-election probability, for which plausibly exogenous variation is generated by exploiting national-level polls. We find a substantial moderating effect of competitiveness on incumbents’ tax rate decisions—shifting policy towards the political center—but little evidence of policy myopia, whether in taxation, budget balance, or public investment. Corroborated by evidence from a politician survey, these findings caution against the popular understanding of democratic policy-making as inherently short-sighted.

We demonstrate that the impact of descriptive representation on citizens’ perceptions of democratic processes varies with levels of representation and the nature of the issue decided. In a survey experiment, a committee decides on three policies that disproportionately impact women, but vary in whether individuals perceive them as moral or conferring targeted benefits. Our findings show that citizens associate descriptive representation with fairness. However, perceptions of some decisions, e.g., abortion, strongly improve with women’s equal and over-representation. On other issues—those perceived as offering women a targeted benefit—women’s over-representation reduces perceptions of fairness. These findings highlight the importance of exploring the interaction between decision-making body composition and policy agenda when seeking to understand citizens’ views of democratic policymaking.

How can we measure the effects of campaign events? We estimate how voters respond to a prominent campaign scandal—Donald Trump being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records—using data from a large, eight-wave panel study with waves fielded before, during, and after the verdict. We find the trial had virtually no effect on Trump supporters, even those who reported their support was conditional on an acquittal. We compare this precisely estimated null to estimates from popular cross-sectional methods, which fail to replicate it. The “change” question format estimates a 6% increase in support, while the “counterfactual” survey experimental design estimates a 10% decrease. We formalize the estimands each method estimates and discuss implications for the event study literature.

Machine translation (MT) is an essential tool in many multilingual computational text analysis applications. However, relying on commercial services like Google Translate or DeepL limits reproducibility and can be expensive. This paper assesses the viability of a reproducible, transparent, and affordable alternative: open-source MT models. We ask whether using open-source MT models instead of commercial services substantially changes the measurements obtained from multilingual corpora by extending an influential study by de Vries et al. and contributing an original study focusing on Transformer-based supervised text classification. Our findings reveal negligible differences in results between the two MT approaches, suggesting that open-source MT models are highly valuable tools for multilingual text analysis.

Tax evasion is a significant challenge in many African countries where motivations for tax compliance remain poorly understood. This study investigates whether donations to community goods undermine individuals’ willingness to pay state taxes, particularly where community donations are common and public goods scarce. Using a survey experiment in Kenya, we examine the relationship between community donations and tax compliance attitudes, factoring in access to public goods, government fairness, transparency, and enforcement. Findings indicate that community donations reduce tax compliance attitudes, whereas improved access to public goods enhances positive attitudes toward taxes and trust in government. This suggests that perceptions of a fair exchange with the government can be more important than enforcement.

Using a regression discontinuity design, we examine the causal impact of far-right parties’ first-time entry into Swedish municipal politics on the inclusion of candidates from groups frequently targeted by their rhetoric, namely immigrants and sexual minorities. Leveraging validated candidate data, we find that far-right entry has a negative effect on the share of immigrant candidates within mainstream parties. However, this average effect masks important differences across parties. Left-wing parties respond by increasing immigrant recruitment, resulting in a net increase in immigrant representation on ballots. In contrast, right-wing parties reduce their share of immigrant candidates, largely due to limited recruitment of new candidates. These findings highlight how far-right legislative presence shapes the recruitment and retention of minority candidates in democratic politics.

The literature on American politics widely agrees that early victories in U.S. presidential primaries are pivotal for securing the nomination, a belief that underpins the front-loading behavior of states. However, demonstrating this success-breeds-success effect is challenging because unobserved candidate qualities could independently link early victories to later success. To address this, we used a regression-discontinuity design, focusing on variations near the victory threshold. Our analysis shows that conclusions about early states rely heavily on limited observations around the cutoff. If any inference is to be drawn, it is that winning in Iowa or New Hampshire has no lasting impact on subsequent contests, nor does winning on any election day affect outcomes on the next. These findings question the presence of momentum effects for winners in the primaries.

Interethnic marriage is commonly employed as an indicator of social cohesion. However, intermarriages are a reflection of both preferences and opportunities. If we are to interpret intermarriage rates as indicators of people’s willingness to cross group boundaries, we must find a way of controlling for exposure to out-group members in local marriage markets. In this Note, I exploit census data from Zambia to demonstrate how this can be done. The findings, which reveal significant differences across estimates that do and do not control for local exposure to out-group members, underscore a significant weakness in common approaches. The findings also point to important substantive implications for understanding changes in social cohesion in Zambia—and likely other African societies—over time.

Both academic researchers and political pundits have generally accepted two over-time features of persuasion by partisan media: that the persuasive effects of partisan media might be temporary and decay quickly after a single exposure, and that these effects accumulate from multiple exposures. That effects decay may serve to ameliorate concerns about the broad impact of such media on partisan polarization. Yet the assumption that persuasive effects accumulate may raise larger concerns from real-world repeat exposure. To explore these possibilities, we implement a novel set of multiwave experiments that allow us to examine concerns about media effects over time. We present estimates from three studies suggesting that the persuasive effect of exposure to just a short article or video clip can persist for up to a week. In contrast to this persistence, our results suggest that an experiment adequately powered to detect the cumulative effect from multiple doses of partisan media—let alone one powered to detect cumulative effects among subgroups of the population—would require an unrealistic number of respondents. These cumulative effects are thus difficult to test in an experimental setting with limited resources.

Progressive parties often advocate pro-immigration policies but do not attract equal support from all immigrant groups. Why is this the case? This study examines immigrants’ support for green parties, a key progressive party family in Western Europe. Our findings reveal that immigrants from established democracies are more likely to support green parties compared to those from (post-)authoritarian regimes. We attribute this disparity to socialization: Individuals from established democracies, where post-materialist values and environmental politics are more prominent, are more attuned to green issues. This heightened salience influences their political preferences after migration. Using entropy balancing on cross-national European surveys, we document this green support gap and provide evidence for our proposed mechanism. These results inform debates on how political preferences travel across contexts and the socialization effects of political institutions.

District-based elections are a central feature of local governance throughout the United States. Prior work has explored whether district-based elections impact racial/ethnic descriptive representation in local office; much less is known about the impacts of local district-based elections on other dimensions of representation. We consider another such dimension: socioeconomic class. To explore how district-based elections shape the composition of locally elected officials on class dimensions, we focus on city councils and study the dramatic shift towards district-based elections in California in the 2010s. We construct a statewide mapping of newly drawn council districts; we also draw on rich and partially hand-collected data on council candidates and members. We find that district-based elections increase the share of candidates and council members from lower-income and higher renter share neighborhoods, and lead to fewer members with business backgrounds.

Inter-party communication is crucial in representative democracies, facilitating information exchange and dialogue among political parties. Despite its importance, research on this topic remains limited due to lacking conceptual clarity and challenges in large-scale measurement. This article offers a comprehensive definition of inter-party communication as public communication by parties about others, with a positive, neutral, or negative stance, focusing on collaboration, policy, or personal issues. To effectively measure this phenomenon, we introduce a novel transformer-based approach capable of automatically classifying large volumes of text. Case studies on coalition signals in Germany and negative campaigning in Austria demonstrate its effectiveness. The study deepens our understanding of party competition, advances methods of automated text classification, and enables new research on political communication.

Why would a strong authoritarian state choose not to enforce its own policy? We extend the theory of forbearance to autocracies, highlighting its distinct incentives and characteristics. Using China’s social insurance policies as a case study, we argue that promotion-driven local officials under intense interjurisdictional competition allow firms to evade payroll taxes to boost economic performance and advance their careers. This effect is most significant among domestic private firms and foreign firms. We conduct one of the first systematic analyses of firm-level social insurance contributions in an authoritarian context, supplemented by individual-level survey data. Our findings show that bureaucratic forbearance of China’s social insurance policies has a pro-business bias, undermining the policies originally designed to address inequalities during market reforms.

Scholars know little about participation in consultative events such as town halls, and even less about newer modalities, such as telephone town halls. We study participation in such events with a large, randomized field trial in which Australian voters received varying invitations to a telephone town hall with their representative. In addition to invitations framed prospectively or retrospectively, a control condition provided no rationale for participation. Surprisingly, the control group had higher acceptance rates than retrospective for both events, and for prospective in May. After accounting for this, treatment groups remained on the call longer, significantly for prospective in July. We see no differences by gender, but the youngest cohort had higher acceptance rates in the prospective condition than in the control for both events.