The US major-party presidential nominating conventions are an essential platform for a political party’s branding and messaging for upcoming presidential and congressional elections. The conventions also can provide revenue and media attention to their host cities and, consequently, convention fundraising has grown substantially in recent decades. Convention fundraising rules were changed in 2014, tripling the limit for contributions to a party’s campaign funds and removing limits on contributions to host-city committees. Although we do not expect these changes to affect individual donors, we expect corporations, banks, and labor unions to have taken advantage of these new rules. Elections since 2014, however, have been unusual in many ways—for instance, in the relationship between the nominees and their parties and, in 2020, the public health precautions required to hold conventions. This study examines developments in political-party convention fundraising since 2014, focusing on the relationships among candidates, their parties, and the cities where conventions have been held. To make this determination, funding reports were collected for the 2000–2024 election cycles. The article explores changes in the characteristics of convention donors—their other contributions and their relationships to candidates, party committees, and host cities—and notes variations that might be attributable to the nominees or the host cities. It considers whether the new convention-funding rules have matured sufficiently that it is possible to make broad claims about the effects of the rules themselves.

Civic engagement benefits both participants and society, but what motivates young adults to decide to become civically engaged? A cost-benefit analysis concludes that resumé-building is a major motivator for young adult civic engagement participation because it has more visible short-term impacts compared to social or community motivators. Using a preregistered survey experiment and follow-up focus groups fielded to college students, I demonstrate that respondents exposed to a treatment describing the social benefits of civic engagement are significantly more willing to increase their civic engagement. Counter to expectations, career benefits are—at best—a secondary motivating factor. These results suggest that civic engagement does not appear to be inherently beneficial to young adults. Non-profit organizations and educators should consider ways to draw attention to the social benefits of civic engagement as a method of attracting additional program interest.

Innovations in deliberative and participatory democracy have been rapidly adopted by policy makers. Long-term success of democratic reform hinges on developing research through open, reproducible, and ethical standards that secure trust in findings. This study examines how Democratic Innovations (DI) scholars implement open science practices (OSP). We analyze empirical research published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and 2021. Our analysis reveals limited OSP use: less than 1% of research articles involve replication and approximately 3.5% provide full data access, despite an increase in the past decade to almost 8% of articles published in 2020. Open publishing has increased, reaching almost 50% of publications in recent years. The article concludes by discussing how OSP can contribute to improving the practice of DI and the policy effects of institutional design. Researchers who understand institutional design for inclusive collective action are best placed to make the changes required to promote open science.

Using a rolling cross-section survey of 54,000 voters conducted between mid-October and mid-December, a panel survey of 6,000 voters interviewed in both October and December, and surveys of 1,400 local political elites and officials conducted in both October and December, this study characterizes how confidence in the accuracy of national elections changed with the projected election of President Trump on Election Day. Among voters, Republican confidence immediately increased by 31 percentage points (123% change) and Democrats’ confidence declined by 12 percentage points (16% change) such that the confidence among partisan voters was almost identical by mid-December. The most polarized partisans exhibited the largest confidence changes. Among local political elites, the increase in Republicans’ confidence mirrored the increase among Republican voters (106% change), but the confidence among Democratic political elites remained high throughout. These findings highlight troubling concerns for sustaining a shared confidence in the accuracy and legitimacy of future elections.

In 2023, a constitutional amendment that would remove male-only pronouns and replace them with gender-neutral nouns in the state constitution was proposed in South Dakota. Policy changes related to gender pronouns are a sensitive and politically charged issue, particularly in more conservative states such as South Dakota. In April 2024, several months before the vote, we conducted a survey experiment with 727 registered voters in South Dakota to investigate whether providing an additional explanation about the proposed changes in the amendment affected South Dakotans’ support for the proposal. We found that Republicans were less supportive of the proposal across all conditions. The results also showed that participants who were given an explanation of the proposed changes were more supportive of the proposal than those to whom it was described as only introducing gender-neutral language, particularly among women, Independents, and Republicans. Overall, we found that the attitudes toward the proposal were structured along partisan lines and that providing additional information about the proposed changes increased popular support.

Current political developments worldwide illustrate that research on democratic backsliding is as important as ever. A recent exchange in Political Science & Politics (February 2024) highlighted again that the measurement of democracy remains a challenge. With many democracy indicators consisting of subjective assessments rather than factual observations, trends in democracy over time could be due to human biases in the coding of these indicators rather than empirical facts. This article leverages two cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) for the coding of democracy indicators from the V-Dem project. With access to huge amounts of information, these models may be able to rate the many “soft” characteristics of regimes at substantially lower costs. Whereas LLM-generated codings largely align with expert coders for many countries, we show that when these models deviate from human assessments, they do so in different but consistent ways. Some LLMs are too pessimistic and others consistently overestimate the democratic quality of these countries. Although the combination of the two LLM codings can alleviate this concern, we conclude that it is difficult to replace human coders with LLMs because the extent and direction of these attitudes is not known a priori.

Student debt heavily shapes the life decisions and outlook of those living with it. This article examines the relationship between undergraduates’ views of President Joe Biden’s actions on student debt and their support for him in the 2024 election prior to his dropping out of the race. Using a representative survey from a large private university in the Northeast, we assess how student views of Biden’s handling of student loan relief correlated with voting intentions among registered student voters. Our analysis reveals that students who believed the Biden administration adequately addressed student debt were significantly more likely to support him compared to those who believed he had done too little. Additionally, our findings suggest that whereas increased student debt relief could have bolstered Biden’s support among liberal and very liberal students, its impact on moderate and conservative students was more limited. This study highlights the electoral implications of student debt relief policies, particularly in shaping young voters’ preferences, and it underscores the potential for targeted economic benefits to influence voter behavior in a highly polarized political environment.

Research has linked the authoritarian personality with support for political violence, including violence against the government. However, support for political violence is simultaneously a measure of and an outcome of the authoritarian personality, and one key component (submission to authority) is the antithesis of one key measure of political violence (violence against authority). This article makes three contributions. First, we accentuate the importance of using exogenous measures of the authoritarian personality when estimating its effect on support for political violence. Second, leveraging data from an original survey and the American National Election Studies, we find that the relationship between authoritarianism and support for violence is conditional: it can be positive, negative, or null, depending on who is in control of government and the specificity of political-violence measures. Third, we argue that another concept—the securitarian personality—might better predict support for violence. Access to firearms—which we argue is downstream from securitarianism—consistently predicts support for political violence.

With a larger and more diverse set of countries than Cuzán and Heggen (2023a) studied, this article completes a general path of incumbencies that was partially traced by their “cruise and crash” model of the cost of ruling. The missing piece is a bump in the share of the vote in the party’s first reelection. The electoral “bonus” holds more or less steadily until the crash, at which point the vote plunges about 20% below the original win. The analysis suggests that the path of the vote in long-term incumbencies follows a general pattern that is shaped like an inverted asymmetrical letter U or W.

This goal of this article is to improve our understanding of Morocco’s instrumentalization of migration and border management to pressure Spain. We analyze the literature on critical security studies and North–South relations. This study’s contribution, resulting from the theoretical approach of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies and the Spanish–Moroccan border-crisis case study, is twofold. First, it decenters the study of security and international relations from the dominant concerns with Western interests and policy priorities. Second, it documents a paradigm shift in the study of North–South relations, highlighting the agency of the Global South. This agency, evident in the case of Morocco, indicates that smaller state actors have the capacity to gain leverage over bigger state actors and that they are not merely recipients of the policies of the Global North. Proof of this is Morocco’s successful instrumentalization of the border crisis to obtain Spain’s explicit recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

It is overdue for political science to consider the names of nation-states, the discipline’s primary unit of analysis and the world’s largest, richest, and most powerful actors. I begin this analysis by examining the descriptors used in formal country names, including empire, kingdom, Islamic, republic, democratic, socialist, and people’s. I analyze country names as independent variables, hypothesizing that they have value as signals of political characteristics. To test my hypotheses, I turn to the Varieties of Democracy dataset. I use fixed-effects panel regressions to examine whether countries’ descriptors correlate with the characteristics they name. I find that except for the democratic descriptor, all other descriptors are surprisingly accurate. This is the first step toward developing an understanding of names in political science as well as adding a new tool for comparative politics.

Although women leaders assume prominent national offices in the United States (and the world), one of the well-established specializations in political science and psychology (i.e., leadership studies) is inundated with male-centric benchmarks. This research often relies on a reference group to develop leaders’ profiles in comparison to other elites. They are predominantly populated, however, with male leaders. This article suggests a remedy and introduces a women leaders reference group for operational code analysis, which is a quantitative approach measuring leaders’ beliefs about politics. We gathered American women leaders’ speeches from the Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication. Using an automated content analysis, we developed a norming group exclusively for American female politicians in national politics. Whereas our findings indicate noticeable differences and suggest similarities with existing reference groups, we aspire to initiate a conversation and hope that more data will follow and shed more light on women leaders. This reference group can serve as a crucial tool in providing contextualized political-personality profiles of American women leaders and also provide an illustrative example to bridge leadership and gender studies in advancing the study of women leaders in the United States (and beyond).

German federal elections have long drawn international attention due to the country’s economic influence and its pivotal role in the European Union. Over time, forecasting these elections has evolved into a sophisticated discipline, incorporating diverse models and refined methodologies to improve accuracy. Since 2013, PS: Political Science & Politics has played a key role in tracking these developments by publishing three special symposia dedicated to forecasting German elections (Jérôme 2013, 2017; Jérôme and Graefe 2022). This 2025 symposium marks the fourth installment, continuing a tradition of providing scholars with a platform to share insights and reflect on the field’s ongoing expansion.

Contrary to the dominant literature on autocracies, this article argues and demonstrates that dictators, in addition to being office-seeking, often are driven by policy-seeking motivation—that is, broader beliefs and ideology. The empirical investigation enlists new original data, based on obituaries, about dictators’ political motives. The dataset contains information on 297 deceased dictators who held power at some point during the period 1945–2008. The results reveal that the dictators had a variety of different motives for being in power. Many were strongly ideologically motivated, several were primarily motivated by money and power ambitions, and others held power to create stability and democratize. Thus, dictators’ motives seem to be substantially more diverse than typically assumed, and the data make it possible to measure motivation. This is key to investigating the direct as well as the conditional impact on political dynamics in autocracies.

This article forecasts the German Federal Election of 2025. We used our previous forecasting models to provide national-level forecasts for party-vote shares and district-level outcomes for candidate votes. We show that the combination of both models allowed us to calculate forecasts for both coalition majorities in Parliament and “vacant districts” under recent electoral reforms.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in white Americans’ support for the Great Replacement Theory (GRT), the xenophobic conspiracy theory that posits that political elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to bring in “obedient” voters who will vote for them and who will eventually replace native white citizens. This conspiracy theory has been publicly endorsed by several conservative political figures and prominently featured in conservative media outlets, most notably Fox News. This article uses the American Multiracial Panel Study to investigate whether exposure to Fox News is associated with support for the GRT. We find clear and consistent evidence that whites who receive their political news from Fox News are significantly more likely to support core tenets of the GRT than those who do not. We consider our results as evidence of the continued influence of elite rhetoric on public opinion and the unique impact of Fox News on the nature and origins of white public opinion about immigration and the nation’s demographic future.

In this article, we predict the result for the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in the upcoming February 2025 German Bundestag election. We develop a parsimonious state-level forecasting model that relies on four variables measuring the state-level political, economic, and social contexts and the national popularity of the CDU/CSU chancellor candidate. Our model is based on Bundestag elections from 1972 to 2021, and we use the most recent values of our measures to generate the forecast. Our model predicts that the CDU/CSU will win between 31.5% and 34.6% of the vote share in the upcoming election.

This article explores how the 2024 Trump campaign persistently invoked the so-called “great replacement” narrative to promote a politics of racial fear. As the article details, this messaging relied upon the mutability of the replacement narrative – highlighting a supposed plot by the Democratic Party to “import voters” from Latin America in order to corrupt the democratic process. This strategy yielded a variety of civic costs. By foregrounding the language of democracy, the campaign laundered xenophobic fears for widespread consumption. More broadly, the article details how this episode illustrates a core strategy of far right media politics: to capture and repurpose the civic language of liberal democracies to serve illiberal aims.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” said humorist and social critic Mark Twain. Simply put, history often follows recurring cycles, enabling us to identify patterns that will likely repeat. Such supposed steadiness should bode well for prediction. Nevertheless, regarding structural election forecasts, most projections rely on short-term political fundamentals measuring macroeconomic performance or government or leader popularity. In this contribution, we take a structural approach but eschew any macroeconomic or popularity measure and instead rely on historical and structural patterns to predict the 2025 German Federal Election. Using seemingly unrelated regression, our model predicts the vote share of Germany’s two largest blocs—the Union and the SPD—and All Others combined across 19 elections between 1953 and 2021 with solid accuracy (correctly predicting the winning bloc three out of four times), creating circumstances to assume that political history may be a helpful guide as to how the 2025 contest may pan out. Our ex ante central projection for the 2025 German federal election foresees a cliffhanger race, with point estimates suggesting that the Union and the SPD will win 26% of the vote each and All Others 48%, departing from the dominant narrative of the opinion polls of a clear CDU/CSU plurality vote victory and substantial losses for the SPD. The political history model suggests that the formation of another grand coalition is possible.

Much is known about the factors that shape partisan campaign activism in the United States and other democracies. In contrast to this voluminous literature, political scientists have given relatively little attention to an emerging phenomenon in contemporary party politics: the mobilization via “emigrant party branches” of partisans living outside of the territorial borders of their native country. We address this gap in the literature through an analysis of Democrats Abroad—the official overseas arm of the US Democratic Party—during the 2024 election cycle. Drawing from an original two-wave panel survey of party members, we demonstrate that some of the forces that prompt campaign activism in the domestic United States hold for partisans overseas. At the same time, factors pertaining to the migration experience and settlement in another country also affect engagement in American campaigns. Most notably, we find that overseas Democrats who become integrated into the party system of their residential country are more likely to participate in American elections from the distance. This finding contributes a fresh perspective to models of political transnationalism and “campaign spillover” in electoral research—that is, the impact that partisan engagement in one context has on subsequent involvement in separate domains.