Low and uneven turnout is a serious problem for local democracy. Fortunately, one simple reform—shifting the timing of local elections so they are held on the same day as national contests—can substantially increase participation. Considerable research shows that on-cycle November elections generally double local voter turnout compared with stand-alone local contests. But does higher turnout mean a more representative electorate? On that critical question, the evidence is slim and mixed. We combine information on election timing with detailed microtargeting data that includes voter demographic information to examine how election timing influences voter composition in city elections. We find that moving to on-cycle elections in California leads to an electorate that is considerably more representative in terms of race, age, and partisanship—especially when these local elections coincide with a presidential election. Our results suggest that on-cycle elections can improve local democracy.

Although prior scholarship has made considerable progress in measuring politicians’ positions, it has only rarely considered voters’ or activists’ perceptions of those positions. Here, we present a novel measure of U.S. senators’ perceived ideologies derived from 9,030 pairwise comparisons elicited from party activists in three 2016 YouGov surveys. By focusing on activists, we study a most-likely case for perceiving within-party ideological distinctions. We also gain empirical leverage from Donald Trump’s nomination and heterodox positions on some issues. Our measure of perceived ideology is correlated with nominate but differs in informative ways: senators with very conservative voting records were sometimes perceived as less conservative if they did not support Trump. A confirmatory test shows these trends extended into 2021. Even among activists, perceived ideology appears to be anchored by prominent people as well as policy positions.

Online intermediaries such as social network sites or search engines are playing an increasingly central role in democracy by acting as mediators between information producers and citizens. Academic and public commentators have raised persistent concerns that algorithmic recommender systems would negatively affect the provision of political information by tailoring content to the predispositions and entertainment preferences of users. At the same time, recent research indicates that intermediaries foster exposure to news that people would not use as part of their regular media diets. This study investigates these unresolved questions by combining the web browsing histories and survey responses of more than 7,000 participants from six major democracies. The analysis shows that despite generally low levels of news use, using online intermediaries fosters exposure to nonpolitical and political news across countries and personal characteristics. The findings have implications for scholarly and public debates on the challenges that high-choice digital media environments pose to democracy

India, the world’s largest democracy, has been experiencing a democratic decline. Since coming to power in 2014 and winning reelection in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have become increasingly illiberal and authoritarian. The rule of law has deteriorated, rights and liberties have been curtailed, and scholars and the media have been silenced. If electoral constraint, constitutional design, judicial independence, and a free press haven’t slowed India’s march toward illiberalism, what can? In November 2020, India’s farmers began a highly organized protest against the government. In this research note, I ask, how has this protest protected Indian democracy from further degradation, and has it radically altered India’s political future? I argue that the farmers’ protest provides an alternative vision of democracy, one rooted in radical egalitarianism. Protesting farmers have actualized the spirit of dissent enshrined in the Indian constitution by holding the current government accountable to it.

Are citizens willing to tolerate violations of democratic rules and norms by competent political leaders? I examine this question employing well-powered conjoint experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Mexico, and South Korea. The findings yield good as well as bad news for democracy. I find that undemocratic behavior by political candidates decreases voter support, whereas candidate competence increases support. Contrary to expectations, the effects of undemocratic behavior and competence do not interact. This means that competent candidates are sanctioned for violating democratic principles but also that support for undemocratic candidates increases with their competence. These findings can help explain the successes and failures of undemocratic political leaders around the world: although these leaders can gain support by appearing to be competent, competence does not make citizens tolerate undemocratic behavior entirely.