What democratic institutions and practices do citizens prioritize, and how responsive are their preferences to competing concerns such as economic and physical security? We explore this through a conjoint experiment with over 35,000 respondents across thirty-two countries – spanning democracies and autocracies – who evaluate hypothetical countries varying in democratic features, cultural characteristics, economic prosperity, and physical security. Our findings reveal that citizens consistently prioritize free and fair elections, highlighting their salience as a core democratic value. However, executive constraints appear less central to citizens’ preferences, especially when set against the promise of economic prosperity. These patterns hold across a wide range of national and individual contexts. The results suggest that while elections remain symbolically and substantively important, many citizens are responsive to appeals that frame strong, unconstrained leadership as a pathway to economic prosperity – an emphasis often seen in electoral authoritarian regimes.

How does tax regressivity at the top affect public support for taxation? In this article, we run an information provision experiment in the United States with a quota-representative sample of around 4,000 people and randomly present respondents with factual information about total tax rates by income group. We find that informing respondents that the superrich pay lower total tax rates than other people not only increases support for raising taxes on the rich but also lowers support for taxing the middle class. Our results highlight an important hidden cost of tax regressivity at the top: if left unaddressed, it risks undermining public support for broad-based taxation.

Do perceived foreign policy failures shape assessments of a country’s leadership in the eyes of international observers? We explore the consequences of foreign policy failures using global reactions to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some argue that a poorly executed withdrawal heightened concerns about America’s soft power and image abroad. Others believe that the negative consequences of the withdrawal were exaggerated. To adjudicate between these claims, we compile public opinion surveys across 24 countries containing over 17,000 respondents. Analyzing perceptions of US leadership before and after the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021, we find that the Afghanistan withdrawal had a substantive negative impact on global perceptions of US leadership. However, we observe no corresponding evidence that the attractiveness of great powers is ‘zero-sum’: decreases in favorability towards the United States were not paralleled by increases in the perceived attractiveness of alternatives to US leadership like Russia and China.

Political representation is challenged by social acceleration, the rise of populism, and electoral volatility. Politicians’ need for prioritizing time and energy is acute and consequential for democracy. Voters’ preferences constitute one democratically relevant standard for guiding such priorities. However, current research mainly focuses on voters’ preferences for representatives’ personality traits or policy outcomes, which are hard for an individual politician to control. This study provides a conceptual framework for analyzing politicians’ task priority by separating functional legislative tasks from relational representative tasks, and employs this framework in surveys among Danish, German, UK, and US voters. Analyses of open-ended answers, time allocations, and conjoint experiments show that voters assign higher importance to functional tasks compared to relational tasks. The framework offers a new approach to studying political representation in practice, and the results provide guidance for how politicians should prioritize scarce resources for political representation in a high-speed, volatile political context.

In recent decades, support for the far right has surged in many countries. One common explanation for this is that far-right support is a backlash against left-wing governments and their policies. We investigate the causal effect of the partisan make-up of governments on the electoral results of far-right parties. Evidence from over-time comparative data and a quasi-experimental analysis based on a regression discontinuity design in Spain indicates that far-right parties benefit electorally when the current government is on the left. In further analyses, we employ a novel regression discontinuity design (RDD)-based sampling strategy to examine original individual-level survey data from Spanish municipalities close to the discontinuity cutoff. These data show that the likely mechanism underlying the backlash effect is an ideological shift to the right among the electorate when left-wing parties govern. Overall, the far right benefits more when the mainstream left governs than when the mainstream right does.

Legislative oversight is an important element of the relationship between parliament and government. However, little research explores how the characteristics of ministers incentivize MPs to oversee some more thoroughly than others. This article studies whether and why the oversight activities of parliamentarians are shaped by ministers’ gender. We argue that legislators control women ministers more tightly than men due to stereotypical competence ascriptions and perceptions of lower trustworthiness of women. Studying original data for five European democracies since 1990, we show that legislators ask more written and oral questions to women compared to men ministers. Moreover, we underpin the causal mechanisms behind this pattern using semi-structured interviews with thirty-two parliamentarians inquiring about a specific replacement in that country. Revealing gender bias in legislative oversight has broader implications for women in government and parliamentary democracies.

Successful coordination around a Duvergerian equilibrium requires accurate and consistent information about parties’ expected electoral support. In practice, such information is often unreliable and rarely available at the local level, thus hindering voters’ coordination. In this paper, we leverage Argentina’s Open, Mandatory, and Simultaneous Primary Elections as a large-scale survey of voter preferences. Using data from 135 municipalities in the province of Buenos Aires (2011–23), we show that a narrower margin between the top-two placed parties in the primary increases both turnout and the proportion of positive votes in the general election, while decreasing electoral fragmentation. We further show that the second-placed party in the primary is substantially more likely to win the election than the third-placed one. Also consistent with theory, these effects are more pronounced (a) in concurrent elections; (b) in smaller municipalities; and (c) when the second-placed party is closer to the first-placed one.

Do voters want representatives who share their race, ethnicity, or partisanship? We examine this question with a focus on Asian Americans who face trade-offs between descriptive (that is, Asian American or ‘pan-ethnic’) and partisan representation, as well as trade-offs involving ‘co-ethnic’ (for example, Korean for Korean) and ‘cross-ethnic’ (for example, Indian for Korean) descriptive representation. Across two experiments, we find that when Asian Americans are asked about collective representation in Congress, they prioritize more co-ethnic and pan-ethnic legislators over co-partisan legislators. However, in a competitive electoral setting, they often trade off race/ethnicity for partisanship. Asian Americans are only willing to cross party lines to vote for a co-ethnic candidate, but never for a cross- or pan-ethnic candidate. These findings shed light on the importance of considering heterogeneous preferences along ethnicities within the same racial ‘in-group’, such as Asian Americans, a heavily understudied and heterogeneous group in American politics.

Political news consumption is highly uneven today: few people consume from news outlets directly, while many encounter news incidentally through social media and aggregators. Because outlets depend on direct consumers for revenue, they respond primarily to this core audience’s preferences. Several contemporary styles of news coverage—which emphasize partisan conflict, employ specialized jargon, engage in predictive analysis, and use clickbait language—are attractive to core consumers, but may also make news less accessible for others. In a pre-registered survey experiment (n = 2,233), I show that, relative to a public interest style that prioritizes key information about policy and democratic norms, typical news styles weaken post-exposure recall of key news information—that is, they are under-informative. Recall penalties are especially severe for those with lower baseline political engagement, yet still affect highly engaged consumers as well. This study shows that contemporary approaches to news coverage broadly under-serve the public by inhibiting political learning.

Scholars and political observers, alike, have associated political polarization with the weakening of democratic norms and the undermining of accountability, as partisans trade off the public interest against in-group loyalty. We probe how in-group bias shapes support for collective goods in actual high-stakes settings in an especially polarized democracy. Conducting survey experiments in Poland, we examine two scenarios: electoral integrity during the 2023 parliamentary election that could have entrenched authoritarian rule and national security after Russia’s 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Our findings show pronounced partisan bias undermining support for electoral integrity – approximately 40 per cent of party supporters with an average level of partisanship supported rerunning an election when their party unexpectedly lost – but less bias in judgments about national security, raising the possibility that individuals may view democracy as more of an instrumental than an intrinsic good.