Within-person changes in racial attitudes influence presidential vote switching in the United States, but not all forms of racial attitude change are equally consequential. An analysis of a three-wave panel of American National Election Studies respondents from 2016, 2020, and 2024 contrasts two types of racial attitude change: perceptions of discrimination against Black Americans and relative racial affect (the difference in warmth toward white versus Black Americans). First, difference and fixed-effects models, which leverage within-person variation, reveal that decreases in perceived discrimination predict movement toward the Republican presidential candidate and shifts in relative racial affect show no association with vote choice. Reverse causality tests reinforce a directional effect from attitudinal change to vote change. There is minimal evidence that those who switched from voting for a Democrat to a Republican shift their racial attitudes in response. These findings demonstrate that dynamic grievance about racial injustice is a key driver of partisan realignment, highlighting that cognitive assessments of discrimination, rather than general racial affect, are central to understanding changes in electoral behavior.

We possess a limited understanding of Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and political attitudes. Previous research has mainly focused on explaining Indigenous electoral abstention and has faced constraints, mainly because of small sample sizes. Drawing on data from both the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, which encompass an unprecedented number of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis respondents, we explore Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and attitudes toward public spending at the federal level in Canada. We show that while Indigenous respondents remain more likely to consider abstention, they can also be more supportive of third parties than their non-Indigenous counterparts and adopt views spanning the traditional left–right ideological spectrum. These findings encourage a redefinition of the expectations regarding the political behaviors and attitudes of Indigenous Peoples in order to fully engage with diverse political cultures.

We hypothesize that the public assesses U.S. Supreme Court nominees in light of the contemporaneous Court’s partisan composition. In a preregistered conjoint experiment (n = 9,895), we find that Democrats and Republicans weigh nominee partisanship more heavily when their party is losing the Court and less heavily when their party already enjoys a secure majority. Consistent with affective polarization and threat-based political psychology, however, they care just as much about partisanship when the Court is split as when the other party enjoys a strong majority – even though the new Justice would swing the Court only in the former scenario.

The Speaker of Parliament is potentially a highly influential actor in parliamentary politics. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how they make decisions. In many parliaments, they, for instance, choose who gets to speak in question time. By examining a unique data set from the Netherlands, which lists all proposed oral questions and which ones were selected to be asked in parliament, this paper examines the considerations of the Speaker when selecting questions. This gives a unique insight into their considerations in general. Our central question is as follows: under what conditions are Speakers more likely to select an oral question? We look at the following three options: the neutral arbiter that seeks to treat all parties fairly; the partisan Speaker who defends the interests of their own party; and the asset of the coalition that protects the unity of the governing coalition. Our analyses indicate that Speakers are more likely to block questions that would drive a wedge in the coalition and are more likely to accept questions that meet established norms of urgency and importance.

Previous studies indicate that in the United States, the effects of climate change disproportionately impact communities of color. Accordingly, we would expect racial/ethnic minorities to express greater concern over the environment than white Americans. However, racial/ethnic minorities are not monolithic. Therefore, we examine how intersectional identities within racial groups by partisanship and gender shape attitudes on the environment using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey and the Climate Change in the American Mind (cross-sectional study 2008-2022). Our findings indicate that racial/ethnic minorities are more supportive of policies to combat climate change and are more likely to believe in climate change than white Americans. Latine and Asian American/Pacific Islanders also exhibit higher levels of anxiety about climate change compared to white Americans. In terms of intersectional identities, we find consistent partisan differences for Latine and White individuals, whereas gender and racial identity are inconsistent.

Political tolerance of others’ civil liberties is an essential and everyday condition of democratic politics without which citizens cannot engage constructively with those of different views. In this paper, we combine insights from political theory and political behaviour to develop and test the concept of ‘partisan intolerance’. We conceptualize partisan intolerance as the gap between a person’s willingness to interfere with contentious activities by in-partisans versus the same activities by out-partisans. Using two pre-registered experiments, we find high levels of partisan intolerance in Britain. Moreover, while partisan intolerance is not associated with abstract measures of political tolerance, we find a strong association with affective partisan polarization. Our findings thus suggest that increasing affective polarization among partisans is accompanied by a high degree of intolerance towards their opponents’ basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.

Ideological diversity has long characterized the Black community, yet this diversity has historically manifested as political homogeneity in electoral participation. While Black men vote for Democratic candidates at lower rates than Black women, they continue to support Democrats at higher rates than Latino, Asian, and white men and women. Despite their comparatively high turnout, Black men are frequently scapegoated for Democratic losses, even while the party has acknowledged Black women’s loyalty. We argue that Black men’s political leanings reflect a complex interplay of gendered, racial, and ideological forces, particularly their attitudes toward Black women, white men, and broader policy concerns. We also argue that, compared with Black women, Black men disproportionately use Black-led podcasts as counterpublics, spaces outside mainstream consciousness to discuss issues internal to the Black community. Using content analysis of Black male–hosted podcasts from 2014–2025 and data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), we show that Black men’s Democratic party support, although not as strong as Black women’s, remains robust. We introduce the Black Patriarchy Index, which captures dimensions of hostile sexism, bootstrap racial uplift ideology, and rejection of intersectional solidarity. Our findings demonstrate that the modest but significant rise in conservatism among Black men relative to Black women can be partially explained by higher scores on this index, illustrating how Black men’s conservative attitudes shape political ideology and party loyalty within the Black electorate.

Previous research has shown that the perception of party positions changes when they are in government. To what extent does this also apply to populist radical parties? Including radical actors in a coalition gives some legitimization to their views and normalizes them; therefore, they might be perceived as ideologically more moderate. However, the reactions to government inclusion might be different for supporters of populist radical parties compared to other voters. Hence, this paper aims to examine if populist radical parties that are included in a government coalition are perceived as ideologically more moderate and whether partisanship moderates this effect. A time-series cross-sectional analysis of the public perception of governing populist radical parties in 29 elections across 20 European countries shows that they are not always seen as more moderate when in office. This paper contributes to the study of coalition heuristics and populists in power and has important consequences for our understanding of party mainstreaming.

What explains how the public views government responses to hostage crises? Existing research has explored how incident-level factors shape public opinion of hostage recovery, but we know less about which Americans support recovery – and why. In this article, we explore how individual-level factors shape public support for bringing captives home. We argue that support for hostage recovery reflects partisan, ideological, and emotional factors. Drawing on two large, national surveys of the American public, we show how Americans’ partisanship, broader foreign policy attitudes, and other personal traits predict willingness to support a range of hostage recovery activities, including negotiations, ransom payment, prisoner exchanges, and military rescue missions. We find that foreign policy internationalists are much more likely to support recovery compared to isolationists, though ‘militant’ and ‘cooperative’ internationalists prefer different recovery options. While broad, bipartisan majorities support recovery efforts, Republicans are significantly less supportive of making concessions to bring captive Americans home – partisan differences that are exacerbated when recovery is proposed by an out-party president. Finally, we show that respondents with children are more supportive of recovery than non-parents, a result we attribute to the emotional pleas made by captives’ parents. This paper explores the domestic politics of international threat, revealing the individual determinants of support for recovery.

Do voters take into account the deaths of family members and close friends when evaluating the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic—particularly when that response is problematic or even negligent—as in the case of Mexico under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) administration? Using data from the 2021 Mexican Election Study, this research shows that opposition partisans who lost close friends or relatives to COVID-19 are more likely to evaluate the government’s response to the pandemic negatively. In contrast, National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) partisans do not hold accountable their co-partisan government. They are no more likely to evaluate the government’s response negatively, even when they experience the same losses. Experimental evidence further shows that MORENA partisans do not lower their evaluations of government performance after being informed about the country’s high COVID-19 mortality. They are also more likely to underestimate the number of COVID-19 deaths in the country, even after being presented with official mortality figures. These findings underscore how partisanship can cloud accountability, leading some voters to dismiss objective information and to judge government performance primarily through the lens of partisan loyalty. Partisanship can distort the accountability mechanism at the core of retrospective voting even during a major health crisis.

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.

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.

Since the adoption of the Charter, scholars have argued that Parliament defers to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) on questions of constitutional law. This is surprising given Canada’s previous history of parliamentary supremacy, Parliament’s enforcement of Court decisions and cognate findings internationally that show how elected officials can constrain high courts. Accordingly, we develop a theory of how Parliament influences the constitutional decision-making of the Supreme Court. Specifically, we argue that the Supreme Court will be less likely to grant leave to appeal in cases where it might disagree with Parliament to avoid any policy costs associated with that disagreement. Using a dataset of statutes reviewable between 1968 and 2020, we find that judicial review is less likely when the SCC faces a counterpartisan Parliament, and that judicial review increases under copartisan Parliaments when Parliament is less likely to oppose Court decisions.