Social scientists often compare survey responses before and after important events to test how those events impact respondent beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. This article offers a formal analysis of such pre-event/post-event survey comparisons, including designs that seek to reduce bias using quota sampling, rolling cross-sections, and panels. Our analysis distinguishes major sources of bias and clarifies the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each approach. We then introduce a modified panel design—the dual randomized survey—to reduce bias in cases where asking respondents to complete the same survey twice could impact their Wave 2 responses. Our formalization of bias and novel research design improve scholars’ ability to study the causal impact of events through surveys.

Most research on political identities studies how individuals react to knowing others’ political allegiances. However, in most contexts, political views and identities are hidden and only inferred, so that projected beliefs and identities may matter as much as actual ones. We argue that individuals engage in motivated political projection: the identities people project onto target individuals are strongly conditional on the valence of that target. We test this theoretical proposition in two pre-registered experimental studies. In Study 1, we rely on a unique visual conjoint experiment in Britain and the USA that asks participants to assign partisanship and political ideology to heroes and villains from film and fiction. In Study 2, we present British voters with a vignette that manipulates a subject’s valence and solicits (false) recall information related to the subject’s political identity. We find strong support for motivated political projection in both studies, especially among strong identifiers. This is largely driven by negative out-group counter-projection rather than positive in-group projection. As political projection can lead to the solidification of antagonistic political identities, our findings are relevant for understanding dynamics in group-based animosity and affective polarization.

Our understanding of politics often relies on the ideological placement of political actors—ranging from scaling legislative roll-call voting in the United States to text-based classifications of political parties in Europe. A particularly thorny problem remains estimating individual positions in legislatures with strong partisan discipline. We improve upon recently developed measurement strategies and propose a novel approach for estimating legislators’ ideological positions: an expert survey in which respondents compare pairs of representatives on a left-right dimension. The innovation of our approach lies in the combination of four particular features. First, we rely on political youth leaders who are insightful and easy to recruit. Second, the rating task does not involve numeric scaling and consists of simple pairwise comparisons. Third, we efficiently and automatically detect informative comparisons to reduce the cost and length of the survey without compromising our estimates. Fourth, we use a Bayesian Davidson model with random effects to generate an ideological position for each legislator. As an empirical illustration, we estimate the placement of the 709 members of the 19th German Bundestag. Several validity tests show that our model captures variation within and across political parties. Our estimates offer a thorough benchmark to validate alternative measurement strategies. The presented measurement strategy is flexible and easily extendable to diverse political settings because it can capture comparisons among political actors across time and space.

This paper puts forward a theoretically derived measure of firm-level political influence defined over a sample of firms from a diverse set of countries, permitting new inferences into state-business relations. We derive this measure from original surveys of 27,613 firms in 41 countries, which include information on several interactions with political actors. Using a Bayesian item response theory measurement model that incorporates non-ignorable missing data, we estimate influence scores that incorporate survey data on diverse mechanisms by which firms attempt to obtain influence. From the measurement model, we learn that membership in a business association contains the most positive information about a firm’s influence, while bribes, state ownership, firm size, and a reliance on collective lobbying tend to be substitutes for influence in equilibrium. Empirically, we are able to show for the first time how such influence is distributed across different types of political regimes using a measurement model, leading to intriguing hypotheses about how the costs and benefits of political activity structure corporate influence-seeking.

In this article, I study the effect of endogenous challenger entry on electoral accountability in the presence of adverse selection. To this end, I analyze a two-period electoral agency model wherein a potential challenger freely chooses whether to run for office. The effect of endogenous challenger entry on policy decisions in this model is ambiguous: depending on model parameters, it can worsen or ease policy distortions. Analogously, marginally increasing the cost of running for office can deepen or reduce these distortions. This uncertainty regarding the effect of endogenous challenger entry on policymaking leads to equally ambiguous welfare implications. Nonetheless, I identify conditions under which endogenous challenger entry improves policymaking and voter welfare. This suggests that, in some circumstances, imposing higher barriers to entry in elections can improve policymaking and voter welfare.

In this study, we examine the interactions among elections by considering two parties competing in simultaneous elections, where each party fields candidates in every election. We model these interactions through voters’ utility functions, influenced not just by the policies proposed in a specific election but also by those in concurrent elections. The benchmark result indicates that all candidates adopt positions more polarized than those predicted by the Calvert–Wittman model. This shift occurs because candidates leverage the policy stance of their counterparts in co-partisan elections to pursue policies more aligned with their preferences. In multidistrict elections, candidates from areas with strong ideological leanings deviate further from the median voter's stance at the national level. Moreover, this interaction effect may select candidates with more extreme ideology into the local elections.

Scholars disagree as to whether Americans’ attitudes toward local issues are structured ideologically and whether these are related to national policy ideology. We use two surveys of American adults to assess whether and to what extent Americans' local policy attitudes exhibit a similar structure as do national policy attitudes. We find that items asking about local policy are just as likely to reflect a latent dimension of policy preferences as those asking about national policy. Additionally, when local and national items are scaled separately, those scales are highly correlated. Our findings indicate that attitudes toward many local issues are aligned with national ideology. A smaller subset of attitudes about local issues appears distinctively local and possibly structured by non-ideological cleavages.

How do the effects of climate regulation on businesses impact public attitudes toward climate policy? While emissions intensity is the primary frame for understanding the effects of climate policy on business, theoretical scholarship and public discourse often emphasize that large firms will adjust to climate regulations easily while smaller firms will struggle. Because small businesses are sympathetic and large firms are unpopular, individuals who view climate regulation’s effects in line with this firm size account should be less likely to support climate change mitigation. To test this theory, we conduct an original survey of climate policy beliefs and then a survey experiment. We find evidence that distaste for large corporations increases opposition to climate action among people exposed to the idea that big companies can more easily navigate climate regulations than small companies. This work contributes to the literature on moral political economy and on the enduring difficulty of enacting effective climate change regulation within the United States.

The Cox duration model serves as the basis for more complex duration models like competing risks, repeated events, and multistate models. These models make a number of assumptions, many of which can be assessed empirically, sometimes for substantive ends. We use Monte Carlo simulations to show the order in which practitioners assess these assumptions can impact the model’s final specification, and ultimately, can produce misleading inferences. We focus on three assumptions regarding model specification decisions: proportional hazards (PH), stratified baseline hazards, and stratum-specific covariate effects. Our results suggest checking the PH assumption before checking for stratum-specific covariate effects tends to produce the correct final specification most frequently. We reexamine a recent study of the timing of GATT/WTO applications to illustrate our points.

There are two prominent but seemingly contradictory symbols of how Asians are racialized domestically within the United States: “yellow peril” and “model minority.” How do these two racial tropes relate to each other? What effects do they have on the formation of support for race-targeted public policy? In this paper, we propose and empirically test that racialized resentment toward Asian Americans and the congratulatory framing of them as a model minority are both salient in the minds of the American public, reflecting the complexity of prejudices toward Asians in American society. Utilizing two original survey-based measures of anti-Asian resentment and the model minority stereotype, we empirically demonstrate the interconnection between the two racial tropes and highlight the key demographic and dispositional correlates of these multi-faceted contemporary racial attitudes toward Asian Americans. We then show that the two racial tropes, both independently and by interacting with each other, significantly shape racial public policy preferences in the United States.

This article presents an original database on international standards, constructed using modern data gathering methods. StanDat facilitates studies into the role of standards in the global political economy by (1) being a source for descriptive statistics, (2) enabling researchers to assess scope conditions of previous findings, and (3) providing data for new analyses, for example the exploration of the relationship between standardization and trade, as demonstrated in this article. The creation of StanDat aims to stimulate further research into the domain of standards. Moreover, by exemplifying data collection and dissemination techniques applicable to investigating less-explored subjects in the social sciences, it serves as a model for gathering, systematizing, and sharing data in areas where information is plentiful yet not readily accessible for research.

Do ideologically extreme candidates enjoy fundraising advantages over more moderate candidates? Extant work documents a relationship between candidates’ positions and campaign contributions subnationally and in donor surveys, yet identification challenges have hampered investigation in the congressional context. I employ a close primaries regression discontinuity design to examine how “as-if random” nominations of extreme versus moderate House candidates influence general election contributions from individual donors and corporate political action committees (PACs) from 1980 to 2020. Results at both the nominee and contributor levels demonstrate that corporate PACs financially penalize extremists, while individual donors respond similarly to extreme and moderate candidates. These findings contribute to ongoing debates regarding the extent and nature of campaign contributors’ role in congressional polarization.

Do more restrictive voter identification (ID) laws decrease turnout? I argue that in the 2018 London Local elections this was the case. Bromley was the only London borough to pilot a more restrictive ID scheme. The scheme was assessed by the Electoral Commission and Cabinet Office but lacked a good estimate for the impact on turnout. Applying a synthetic difference-in-difference (DID) methodology, which has several benefits compared to traditional DID methods, to turnout data from 2002 to 2018 I show that turnout was between 4.0 and 5.0% points lower than otherwise would be expected. This indicates more restrictive ID laws can meaningfully limit turnout which has implications for future elections if governments chose to implement a more restrictive regime.

We analyze a formal model of social contact and discrimination in the context of policing. Officers decide how to interact with members of two social groups while working and while socializing. The officers do not fully distinguish between their experiences of crime across these two contexts (“coarse thinking”), so they end up with excessively positive views of groups they socialize with and excessively negative views of those they police. This creates dual feedback loops as officers choose to socialize more with groups they view favorably and over-police those they view as “more criminal.” Interventions that induce positive contact with an overpoliced group can mitigate the officer’s discriminatory policing. However, this beneficial effect only persists if the policy intervention creates sustained positive contact. Our results provide a novel theoretical microfoundation for the contact hypothesis and highlight why effects of many policy interventions aimed at increasing positive contact may be short-lived.

The extent to which legislators pursue their privately held preferences in office has important implications for representative democracy and is exceedingly difficult to measure. Many models of legislative decision-making tacitly assume that members are willing and able to carry out the wishes of their constituents so as to maximize their reelection prospects and, in so doing, relegate their personal preferences. This project explores this assumption by examining the role that members’ place of birth plays in shaping legislative behavior, apart from other politically relevant factors like partisanship. We find that birthplace exerts an independent influence on members’ voting behavior. Using a variety of geographic measures, we find that members who are born in close proximity to one another tend to exhibit similar patterns in roll call voting, even when accounting for partisanship, constituency attributes, and a variety of other determinants of voting. We also demonstrate in a secondary analysis that the agricultural composition of members’ birthplace influences their support for agricultural protection. Our findings suggest that members’ personal history shapes the representational relationship they have with their constituents.

What explains the geography and timing of contestation in civil war? We propose a theory of opportunistic rebel tactics, in which insurgent commanders react to temporary shifts in the local balance of power to attack the state. We argue that these opportunistic strikes are enabled by two jointly necessary factors: (1) negative fluctuations in local repressive state capacity and (2) the expectation of civilian compliance with rebel incursions. We evaluate this argument on data from the Colombian civil war. Leveraging exogenous variation in local state capacity caused by landslide-induced road closures, we find that short-term negative shocks to repressive capacity increase the likelihood of insurgent-state clashes. However, this effect does not hold when local communities harbor strongly anti-insurgent attitudes, suggesting that state capacity and civilian behavior jointly shape rebel strategy and that popular opposition can substitute for state strength.

This article examines the relationship between foreign aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) and the degree of personalism in dictatorships. We contend that aid leads to higher personalism since it is a windfall that accrues to the government and does not require cooperation from elites to obtain it. Contrarily, we posit that FDI is linked to lower levels of personalism because it reshapes elites’ incentives and influence as they may acquire new preferences, connections, and exit options, thus constraining dictators. Using data on Official Development Assistance (ODA) and FDI, and a latent index of personalism in autocracies, we find no robust evidence that ODA or FDI are correlated with personalism, but have some effect on some of the index’s components.

This paper demonstrates how Bayesian reasoning can be used for an analog of replication analysis with qualitative research that conducts inference to best explanation. We overview the basic mechanics of Bayesian reasoning with qualitative evidence and apply our approach to recent research on climate change politics, a matter of major importance that is beginning to attract greater interest in the discipline. Our re-analysis of illustrative evidence from a prominent article on global collective-action versus distributive politics theories of climate policy largely accords with the authors’ conclusions, while illuminating the value added of Bayesian analysis. In contrast, our in-depth examination of scholarship on oil majors’ support for carbon pricing yields a Bayesian inference that diverges from the authors’ conclusions. These examples highlight the potential for Bayesian reasoning not only to improve inferences when working with qualitative evidence but also to enhance analytical transparency, facilitate communication of findings, and promote knowledge accumulation.

Many studies argue that the World Bank grants favorable loan conditions to allies of its powerful principals. These studies typically use the count of conditions as a proxy for how demanding loans are on borrowers, even though some conditions are more difficult to comply with than others. We propose a new operationalization: a measure of conditionality stringency in Bank loans constructed using Latent Semantic Scaling. Using this new measure, we find little evidence of a generalizable influence of powerful principals. Instead, the stringency of loan conditions is associated with bureaucratic assessments of risk. To facilitate future research, we provide a new dataset of World Bank loan condition texts and our measure of text stringency for all loans in the dataset.

Lobbying expenditures are widely used as a proxy variable for measuring lobbying activity. However, the validity of this approach has rarely been examined and existing justifications do not account for heterogeneity in expenditure formats across types of lobbyists. I address the question using unique lobbying disclosure data from Wisconsin, where lobbying organizations report both expenditures on lobbying-related activities and lobbyists’ hours worked. Strong overall correlations between changes in expenditures and hours worked within organization–lobbyist dyads indicate that lobbying expenditures can serve as a reasonable proxy. However, caution is warranted due to substantial heterogeneity, with contract lobbyist relationships exhibiting weaker correlations than in-house relationships. I conclude by providing suggestions to improve empirical analyses that rely on lobbying expenditures.