Research has found that asset accumulation is associated with vote preferences, with those with a high number and value of assets being more likely to vote for centre-right parties. Yet the bulk of this literature often falls short of accounting for alternative mechanisms that could be driving this relationship. In this letter, we investigate the association between patrimony and the vote longitudinally, assessing the effects of within-person changes in patrimony on party support. Drawing on an 11-year panel from Britain, our results indicate that patrimony, whether measured by the number of assets one owns or the total value of these assets, is unrelated to support for the Conservative Party. This finding is solid against several robustness tests. Our data analysis suggests that patrimonial voting in Britain – as identified in prior research – may be driven primarily by pre-existing differences between asset owners and non-owners rather than the assets themselves.

A large body of literature indicates that partisan-motivated reasoning drives resistance to political persuasion. But recent scholarship has challenged this view, suggesting that people don’t always resist uncongenial information, and even when they do, it is not clear why. In this article, I present two survey experiments that examine when and why partisans selectively dismiss uncongenial information. The findings show that, in the absence of affective triggers, partisans were persuaded by both congenial and uncongenial information. But when randomly induced to feel adversarial, they became more dismissive of uncongenial information and ultimately disagreed more, not less, after considering the same information. These results (1) identify a crucial condition that provokes resistance to political persuasion; (2) demonstrate partisan-motivated reasoning more clearly than previous studies; and (3) underscore the importance of the quality of elite-level political discourse in determining the quality of citizen-level opinion formation.

Existing research argues that malapportionment primarily favours rural areas, resulting in conservative biases of electoral systems. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the study of apportionment processes by identifying the institutional design under which malapportionment may favour other regions. Because of the geographical sorting of non-citizen residents, we argue that regions with high shares of non-citizen residents benefit from population-based apportionment, whereas the spatial sorting of non-citizens does not affect malapportionment in the case of citizen-based apportionment. Empirically, we use sub-national data from ten advanced democracies to forward evidence that differences in apportionment mechanisms and district-level shares of non-citizen residents systematically influence malapportionment. Our findings suggest that the impact of malapportionment on political representation and public policies may be more heterogeneous than previously thought.

We investigate how sexism and harassment affect political candidates’ preferences for political positions by deploying a conjoint experiment among political candidates in the 2021 Danish local elections. We find that, compared to men candidates, women candidates experience far more sexism and harassment, and assess their risk of victimization as being far higher. Correspondingly, the conjoint experiment reveals that women candidates state stronger preferences for equal working environments in politics than men, while holding similar preferences for formal working conditions like political positions, remuneration, and workload. Substantively, women’s willingness to lower their remuneration and increase their workload to avoid sexism in politics is more than double the size of men’s willingness. Our approach provides us with highly accurate descriptions of candidates’ preferences for political jobs, which are often assumed rather than measured directly. This lets us quantify the magnitude of an important working condition in politics with significant repercussions for women.

Received wisdom in political science holds that informed citizens are better able to develop coherent, stable policy preferences. However, past research fails to differentiate between the effects of information and cognitive ability. I show that, for people with low levels of ability, consuming more political information predicts lower levels of ideological constraint and response stability. This effect is driven by relatively technical issues, suggesting that attempts to inform the electorate may backfire by overwhelming some voters. More broadly, these results suggest that an increasingly saturated information environment may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, differences in political sophistication.

Why do some areas experience lower voter turnout even under compulsory voting systems? This paper examines the impact of migration turnover – encompassing both in- and out-migration – on voter turnout across communities. While past research has focused on migrant/non-migrant differences or in-/out-migration separately, we propose that both migratory movements tend to decrease political participation due to increased transaction and social costs. Using surveys and a new panel dataset combining census and voting records from over 5,000 Brazilian municipalities, we identify a robust negative association between local migratory turnover and voter turnout. This relationship holds across various time frames, levels of aggregation, analytical approaches, and variable definitions. Individual-level data analyses further corroborate these results. Additional tests suggest social costs constitute a key mechanism deterring turnout. These findings highlight the need to consider the broader consequences of population mobility for democratic processes and representation, particularly in areas experiencing higher levels of turnover.

How does a politician’s gender shape citizen responses to performance in office? Much of the existing literature suggests that voters hold higher expectations of women politicians and are more likely to punish them for malfeasance. An alternative perspective suggests that voters view men politicians as more agentic and are, therefore, more responsive to their performance, whether good or bad. Using an online survey experiment in Argentina, we randomly assign respondents to information that the distribution of a government food programme in a hypothetical city is biased or unbiased, and we also randomly assign the gender of the mayor. We find that respondents are more responsive to performance information – both positive and negative – about men mayors. We find little evidence that respondents hold different expectations of malfeasance by men versus women politicians. These results contribute to our understanding of how citizens process performance information in a context with few women politicians.

It is often argued that when legislators have personal vote-seeking incentives, parties are less unified because legislators need to build bonds of accountability with their voters. I argue that these effects depend on a legislator’s ability to cultivate a personal vote. When parties control access to the ballot and the resources candidates need to cultivate personal votes, they can condition a legislator’s access to these resources on loyalty to the party’s agenda. I test this theory by conducting a difference-in-differences analysis that leverages the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform. This reform introduced the possibility of consecutive reelection for state legislators, increasing their incentives to cultivate personal votes. I study unity in position-taking and voting behaviour of Mexican state legislators from 2012 to 2018. To analyze position-taking, I apply correspondence analysis to a new dataset of over half a million legislative speeches in twenty states. To study voting, I analyze over 14,500 roll-call votes in fourteen states during the same period. Results show that reelection incentives increased intra-party unity, which has broad implications for countries introducing electoral reforms aiming to personalize politics.

Why do Islamists regularly win elections in the Middle East? Why, for instance, did Ennahda perform well in every election in Tunisia’s democratic era (2011–2021)? I argue that regular interactions in mosques allow Islamists to build deeper ties and greater trust with their supporters than secular parties can. Post-election, this trust also allows Islamists to better sell their performance and justify their compromises, contributing to re-election as well. I test this infrastructure advantage in Tunisia in two ways. First, an original survey shows that mosque attendance strongly correlates with voting for Ennahda in the 2019 elections and that this correlation is driven by greater trust in Ennahda. Second, a dataset of Tunisia’s 6,000 mosques shows that sub-nationally, mosque density strongly correlated with Islamist vote share in the 2011, 2014, and 2019 elections. Overall, these results help us understand the continued victories of Islamist political parties even in contexts of poor performance.

The description of the long-run historical development of parliamentarism has presented an empirical and methodological challenge because it is only loosely related to constitutional writings. This article offers a solution. Using a wide variety of historiography, I collect data on government terminations in eleven West European states from the establishment of national parliaments until today. To describe the evolution of parliamentarism, I apply a Bayesian learning model that estimates institutional development as the change in current expectations about interactions grounded in past experience. The result is the first long-run continuous description of parliamentarism at the country level, which suggests that parliamentarism in many cases was established later than hitherto believed. In general, it is an institution of the Postwar period. The finding that unelected heads of state in several countries influenced government terminations well into the twentieth century also has implications for ideas about democratization.

How does China use development finance to gain influence in international organizations? Leveraging the exogenous rotation of ASEAN and African Union Chairmanship, I estimate the effect of regional leadership on Chinese commitments. Results suggest that Chinese projects are politically motivated only when the lending and recipient entities are linked to the Chinese and host governments. Governments that assume the Chair received seven times more commitments from Chinese government agencies relative to non-Chair years, a $90 million increase for the average project. By contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that Chinese banks act as agents of Beijing. Moreover, I find a consistent null relationship between temporary UN Security Council status and Chinese finance, unlike established findings about Western donors, suggesting that China is deliberately seeking regional influence. These results underscore the importance of considering the specific actors involved in China’s economic statecraft.

When the world’s leading human rights advocates violate international norms, how does this affect support for those norms around the world? Rather than diffusing norm breaking across borders, I argue that authoritarian states’ propaganda about liberal states’ violations may increase the salience of human rights norms in places where those norms are normally censored. Focusing on American racial discrimination, I find that the Chinese Communist Party publicizes American human rights violations on to its citizens for strategic political reasons. Through two survey experiments I show that while exposure to news about American discrimination does provide substantial propaganda benefits to the regime, it also makes Chinese respondents more supportive of minority rights and more critical of their own country’s respect for those rights. The study shows how prominent violations of international norms may be an underappreciated means of strengthening global public support for those norms.

Which predispositions drive voters’ policy attitudes? This article tests the role of political values as a driver of attitudes relative to two commonly posited sources – partisanship and symbolic ideology. Past work has found correlations between values and issue attitudes, but these cross-sectional studies have limited causal purchases. I test the effects of traditionalist and egalitarian values on issue stances using six ANES and GSS panel surveys from 1992 to 2020. I find that values drive within-voter changes in policy attitudes under a variety of specifications. Additionally, values shape attitudes on emergent policies, which I test using the cases of welfare reform in the 1990s and transgender policies in the 2010s. In all models, values have as large or larger effects on attitudes as that of partisanship or ideology. I conclude that values are a core predisposition which voters employ to make sense of policy issues.

During the coronavirus pandemic in the United Kingdom, media outlets shifted their focus from divisive political issues to more neutral topics like lifestyle, sports, and entertainment. This study explores how this change in media content relates to partisan divides in satisfaction with democracy. Using data from a representative survey of 201,144 individuals, we linked respondents’ perceptions of democratic performance to their daily media exposure. We did so by analysing 1.5 million tweets from British newspapers using a topic modelling algorithm to identify shifts in topic salience and sentiment using sentiment analysis. Our findings reveal a decline in partisan media exposure during the pandemic, associated with increased satisfaction with democracy at both individual and collective levels, and a narrowing of cross-party divides. These results contribute to discussions on affective polarization, the winner-loser gap in democratic evaluation, and media framing effects, highlighting the potential influence of depoliticized news coverage on democratic attitudes.

What factors contribute to closing the turnout gender gap after female enfranchisement? In the wake of franchise expansion, we test whether being a poll officer—and hence being exposed to election management—boosted the politicisation and mobilisation of women. In the context of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1939), we exploit a lottery that assigned recently enfranchised women to be poll officers in the first election women were allowed to vote (1933). We use an original individual-level panel database and show that women randomly selected as polling officers were as likely to participate in subsequent elections than men, while the gender turnout gap persisted among the rest. Further analyses suggest that being poll officers made women more receptive to political organisations mobilisation strategies, and their presence had positive externalities by encouraging other women to participate. Our findings highlight the potential benefits of exposure to election engineering among groups previously excluded or less engaged with democracy.

During outbreaks of diseases like cholera, HIV/AIDS, H1N1, and Ebola, governments often impose international border restrictions (for example, quarantines, entry restrictions, and import restrictions) that disrupt the economy without stopping the spread of disease. During COVID-19, international travel restrictions were ubiquitous despite initial World Health Organization recommendations against such measures because of their limited public health benefit and the potential for imposing a range of harms. Why did governments adopt these measures? This article argues and finds evidence that governments use international border restrictions as security theatre: ‘measures that provide not security, but a sense of it’. Quantitative analysis of original data on states’ first border restrictions during the pandemic suggests that behaviour was not just driven by the risk of COVID-19 spread. Instead, nationalist governments, which are likely to be attracted to policies associating disease with foreigners, were more likely to impose border restrictions, did so more quickly, and adopted domestic measures more slowly. A case study of the US further illustrates the security theatre logic. The findings imply that overcoming or redirecting governments’ attraction to security theatre could promote international cooperation during global health emergencies.

How does polarized politics affect electoral accountability? In this paper, I investigate the impact of political polarization on two channels through which voters can sanction incumbents for poor policy outcomes: voting for the opposition and abstaining. Using presidential election results at the county level, I show that, under polarized environments, the number of voters punishing the incumbent party for poor economic performances decreases in both channels. Survey analyses confirm that as the perceived ideological distance between parties increases, partisans are less likely to (i) negatively evaluate the economy when their party holds the Presidency and (ii) among those who have a negative view of the economy, they are less likely to penalize their party for negative economic assessments. These results show that polarization affects economic evaluation and clouds the responsibility for economic conditions, decreasing voters’ willingness to sanction the incumbent party.

Bargaining scholars predict rapid power shifts cause preventive war. But cases with rapidly shifting power often remain peaceful. To explain the dogs that don’t bark, we introduce instant, repeated, costly militarization into Powell’s (1999) conventional-weapons power transition model. First, we rationalize preventive war during long, slow, complete-information power shifts. Second, we find that where past research into conventional shifts predicts war, a grand bargain backed by the decliner’s threat of war emerges as a second equilibrium. Because war and a grand bargain both prevent power from shifting, declining powers deploy them under the same conditions. Our grand bargain survives war-causing hazards, and some latent shifts. It occurs after incremental militarization causes repeated appeasement-like concessions, and when power shifts are instant, slow or fast, and perfectly observed; suggesting conventional shifts induce grand bargains under surprising conditions. The Great Game’s end fits our grand bargain, but that British elites seriously considered war.

In many authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held in which the opposition can potentially defeat the incumbent. How do ordinary citizens perceive the integrity of elections in such regime environments? We argue that government supporters adopt the incumbent’s narrative to consider elections fair and legitimate. By contrast, opposition supporters regard elections in such systems as biased and not meaningful. We provide evidence from large cross-country public opinion data and the unexpected 2018 Turkish snap election announcement to examine long- and short-term patterns of perceived electoral integrity. We find that the partisan gap in perceived electoral integrity is more substantial under electoral authoritarianism than under democratic rule. The partisan gap grows in autocratizing political systems, and these perceptions are mostly stable in the short term, even at times of radically increased salience of electoral competition. Our study yields implications for the dynamics between elites and citizens in autocracies in which elections remain a critical source of regime legitimacy.