Vast research on immigration lumps together native citizens' attitudes toward two different groups: the immigrant stock of non-naturalized resident aliens, and the immigrant flow, that is, the future arrival of foreigners seeking to enter and live in the country. Does popular opposition to immigration distinguish between the two, and if so, how? This article analyzes theoretically the reasons the stock and flow might induce different views among natives, and presents experimental evidence from the United States showing that natives are systematically more accepting of the former. The analysis indicates that this ‘stock premium’ partly stems from a sense of moral obligation toward people residing in the country. Replicating two widely cited experiments, the study shows that the stock–flow distinction has important implications for the interpretation of earlier findings on immigration attitudes, and for understanding voter preferences regarding policies designed to curtail immigration.

This article contributes to the recent research on Brexit and public opinion formation by contending that the determinants of the referendum results should be evaluated against the background of wider public security concerns. The British public has long regarded terrorism as a top concern, more so than in any other European country. Terrorist attacks on UK soil raised voters' awareness of security issues and their saliency in the context of the EU referendum. The study finds that locations affected by terrorist violence in their proximity exhibit an increase in the share of pro-Remain votes, particularly those that experienced more sensational attacks. Using individual-level data, the results show that in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, citizens are more likely to reconsider the security risks involved in leaving the EU.

This paper examines the relationship between the coming of the railroads, the expansion of primary education, and the introduction of national school curricula. Using fine-grained data on local education outcomes in Sweden in the nineteenth century, the paper tests the idea that the development of the railroad network enabled national school inspectors to monitor remote schools more effectively. In localities to which school inspectors could travel by rail, a larger share of children attended permanent public schools and took classes in nation-building subjects such as geography and history. By contrast, the parochial interests of local and religious authorities continued to dominate in remote areas school inspectors could not reach by train. The paper argues for a causal interpretation of these findings, which are robust for the share of children in permanent schools and suggestive for the content of the curriculum. The paper therefore concludes that the railroad, the defining innovation of the First Industrial Revolution, mattered directly for the state's ability to implement public policies.

How does globalization affect politics? One of the most controversial aspects of globalization is offshoring, when manufacturing operations and business functions move abroad. Although voters generally dislike offshoring, it remains unclear how moving jobs abroad impacts democratic elections. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, the author finds that incumbent government parties lose more votes in municipalities where a local plant moved production abroad between elections than in municipalities that did not experience such an event. The result holds across various time periods, different incumbent parties and diverse types of elections. In both national and regional elections, voters punish incumbent government parties when a local firm moves production abroad. Incumbent parties' vote shares fall as the number of jobs lost due to offshoring increases. In multiparty governments, voters disproportionately punish the largest coalition party for offshoring. The results of an original survey administered in Spain verify the importance of offshoring for voters' retrospective evaluations of incumbents.

Scholars have examined the role that negative stereotypes play in electoral discrimination against minority candidates. Incorporating literature on in-group favoritism, the author argues here that some degree of this discrimination can be explained instead by voters holding positive stereotypes of majority candidates and discriminating in their favor. Based on the results of an original moderation-of-process survey experiment carried out in Italy, the study provides evidence of electoral discrimination pertaining to immigrant-origin candidates, concentrated among right-wing citizens. It finds that stereotypes have little mediating effect on discrimination against candidates with a migration background; rather, the primary role played by stereotypes is in discrimination in favor of majority candidates, that is, positive bias that reserves electoral benefits to them. The relevance of in-group favoritism is corroborated by the finding that large segments of the Italian voting population hold distinctively positive stereotypes of majority candidates without also negatively stereotyping immigrant-origin candidates.

This study leverages population registry data from Sweden to examine whether immigrants who live in areas with a high concentration of ethnic minorities are more or less likely to be nominated for political office. It exploits a refugee placement program in place in Sweden during the late 1980s and early 1990s that restricted refugees' opportunities to freely choose their place of residence. The article presents evidence that immigrants who live in areas with a high ethnic density are less likely to be nominated for political office. The findings have important implications for local integration policies as well as refugee placement policies, as many countries consider local context when resettling refugees.

Does enhanced descriptive representation lead to substantive representation? Legislators who share descriptive features with disadvantaged groups do not necessarily represent their group interests. Instead, Members of Parliament (MPs) strategically choose when to engage with the policy topic of their corresponding groups. MPs represent their respective group at the beginning of their career because it confers credibility when they have no legislative track record and few opportunities to demonstrate expertise. These group-specific efforts are replaced by other legislative activities at later stages of their careers. The authors apply this theoretical expectation across four disadvantaged groups – women, migrants, low social class and the young – and thereby offer a broad perspective on descriptive representation. Their sample consists of a unique data base that combines biographical information on German MPs with topic-coded parliamentary questions for the period 1998 to 2013. The study demonstrates the diminishing value of representing the disadvantaged across different types of MPs.

How do parties decide when to campaign on valence issues given high degrees of uncertainty? Although past studies have provided evidence of transnational emulation of parties' position-taking strategies, these findings do not directly apply to saliency strategies. Moreover, the exact diffusion mechanism remains largely elusive. Based on the issue saliency literature, this study develops novel theoretical propositions and argues that conscious learning enables parties to infer the relative utility of emphasizing consensual issues during an electoral campaign. The proposed theory gives rise to different expectations at the domestic and transnational levels because of the distinct logic of issue competition. By analyzing environmental issue emphasis in party manifestos, the authors find direct transnational dependencies and indirect spillover effects among the parties' saliency strategies. They identify conscious learning, rather than mere imitation or independent decision making, as the diffusion mechanism at work. Yet, in line with saliency-based theories, electoral competition mutes the diffusion of electoral strategies domestically.

There has been a lively debate about the economic and cultural-based drivers of support for populism. This article argues that economic concerns matter, but that they are realized through the relative gains and losses of social groups. Using new survey items in a large representative survey administered in Britain, it shows that citizens' economic assessments of the ethnic minority out-group – in relation to the group's situation 12 months ago and to assessments of the economic conditions of the white British in-group – are a predictor of support for Brexit. The results, which are robust to prior referendum vote, immigration attitudes and cultural sentiment, extend across income groups and national identity strength. Extending the analysis to a comparison of geographic in- and out-groups between local communities and London lends additional support to the argument. The implications of relative group-based economics are important for understanding Brexit and the economic sources of support for populism more broadly.

Given the prevalence of riots throughout human history, the lack of normative theorizing about them compared to other forms of political violence is striking. The author hypothesizes that this is due to riots' extra-institutionality. Riots are extra-public because they involve the participation of crowds, rather than institutionalized groups such as parties or social movements. They are extra-state because they violate the state's monopoly on violence. Riots are extra-legal because they constitute a form of unlawful assembly. They are also extra-parliamentary because they operate outside the normal legislative process. This article considers justifiable reasons to resist each of these foundational institutions, and proposes provisional criteria for a justifiable riot. The author concludes by urging political theorists to further examine the normative dimension of riots.

Holding elected officials accountable for their behavior in office is a foundational task facing citizens. Elected officials attempt to influence this accountability process by explaining their behavior with an eye toward mitigating the blame they might receive for taking controversial actions. This article addresses a critical limitation in the literature on elite explanation giving and accountability: the absence of attention to conflicting information regarding the official's behavior. The study shows across three pre-registered survey experiments that explanations are ineffective when other speakers offer counter-explanations that focus on the official's potential ulterior motives. It further demonstrates that this occurs even when the counter-explanation comes from a partisan source with low credibility. These results imply that elected officials enjoy less leeway for their actions than existing work allows, and highlight important tensions concerning the relationship between elite behavior and accountability processes.

Prior research suggests that partisanship can influence how legislators learn from each other. However, same-party governments are also more likely to share similar issues, ideological preferences and constituency demands. Establishing a causal link between partisanship and policy learning is difficult. In collaboration with a non-profit organization, this study isolates the role of partisanship in a real policy learning context. As part of a campaign promoting a new policy among local representatives in the United States, the study randomized whether the initiative was endorsed by co-partisans, out-partisans or both parties. The results show that representatives are systematically more interested in the same policy when it is endorsed by co-partisans. Bipartisan initiatives also attract less interest than co-partisan policies, and no more interest than out-partisan policies, even in more competitive districts. Together, the results suggest that ideological considerations cannot fully explain partisan-based learning. The study contributes to scholarship on policy diffusion, legislative signaling and interest group access.

Does exposure to cyber terrorism prompt calls for retaliatory military strikes? By what psychological mechanism does it do so? Through a series of controlled, randomized experiments, this study exposed respondents (n = 2,028) to television news reports depicting cyber and conventional terror attacks against critical infrastructures in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel. The findings indicate that only lethal cyber terrorism triggers strong support for retaliation. Findings also confirm that anger bridges exposure to cyber terrorism and retaliation, rather than psychological mechanisms such as threat perception or anxiety as other studies propose. These findings extend to the cyber realm a recent trend that views anger as a primary mechanism linking exposure to terrorism with militant preferences. With cyber terrorism a mounting international concern, this study demonstrates how exposure to this threat can generate strong public support for retaliatory policies, depending on the lethality of the attack.

Scholars have long noted that couples are more likely to vote compared to individuals who live alone, and that partners' turnout behavior is strongly correlated. This study examines a large administrative dataset containing detailed information about validated turnout and the timing of individuals moving in together, and finds evidence of a substantial and robust increase in turnout after cohabitation. The study exploits the fact that two-voter households moving in together right before an election are comparable to those moving in together right after the election. Depending on the model specification, turnout increases by 3.5 to 10.6 percentage points in the months after taking up cohabitation. Voters are mobilized regardless of their own and their cohabitant's turnout behavior in a previous election. The results are robust to several robustness checks, including benchmarking with singles who move to mitigate the cost of moving in the analysis. The results highlight the importance of social norms and the household's essential role as a proximate social network that increases turnout.

This study examined if and for whom prosecution of politicians for hate speech undermines support for the legal system and democracy. Three research designs were combined to investigate the case of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who was convicted for hate speech against minorities in 2016. First, an experiment showed that observing a guilty verdict decreased support among ‘assimilationists’ who oppose the multicultural society. This deterioration of support was found among the entire group of assimilationists, regardless of whether they voted for Wilders. Secondly, a quasi-experiment demonstrated that assimilationists who were interviewed after Wilders' conviction indicated less support than those who were interviewed before the verdict and compared to a pre-test. Thirdly, a nine-year panel study suggested that these effects accumulate into long-term discontent. This case therefore demonstrates that hate speech prosecution can damage the democratic system it is intended to defend.

Whether citizens are better represented by politicians ‘like them’ has been the subject of much debate and analysis. Yet, this scholarship has largely ignored the 1 in 5 people who are disabled and experience economic, social and political marginalization. Linking voter and candidate data from the 2015 British general election, this study examines whether disabled citizens are better represented by disabled elites. It analyses the effects of disability on both preferences and preference congruence. The findings reveal that disabled citizens and candidates are more supportive of healthcare and general public spending, even within parties. At the same time, the views of disabled citizens are rarely more congruent with the positions of disabled candidates than those of non-disabled candidates, except on healthcare spending. The study provides ground-breaking insights into the role of disability in policy preferences and political representation while also highlighting broader implications of how the descriptive–substantive representation link is analysed.

This article scrutinizes the relationship between collective nostalgia and populism. Different populist figures utilize nostalgia by referring to their country's ‘good old’ glorious days and exploiting resentment of the elites and establishment. Populists instrumentalize nostalgia in order to create their populist heartland, which is a retrospectively constructed utopia based on an abandoned but undead past. Using two original datasets from Turkey, this study first analyzes whether collective nostalgia characterizes populist attitudes of the electorate. The results illustrate that collective nostalgia has a significantly positive relationship with populist attitudes even after controlling for various independent variables, including religiosity, partisanship, satisfaction with life and Euroscepticism. Secondly, the study tests whether nostalgic messages affect populist attitudes using an online survey experiment. The results indicate that Ottoman nostalgia helps increase populist attitudes. Kemalist nostalgia, however, has a weak direct effect on populist attitudes that disappears after controlling for party preference.

People often fail to make the choices that best satisfy their preferences. The design of the social environment inevitably makes some choices easier than others. According to Libertarian Paternalists, these facts justify governments nudging people towards better choices through changes to the so-called choice architecture. This is a form of means paternalism. However, the social environment affects not only people's choices or means, but also the preferences they adopt in the first place. Call this the problem of ‘preference architecture’. This article argues that preference architecture constitutes a fundamental challenge to the justificatory basis of Libertarian Paternalism. More generally, it explores when, if ever, government paternalism that influences preference formation can be justified. While Libertarian Paternalism cannot provide a satisfactory answer, the author defends a contractualist account of paternalism based on a notion of primary goods and democratic deliberation.

Comparative analyses of party policy diffusion are only just emerging. To better understand the conditions under which diffusion occurs, this article argues that three heuristics – availability, representativeness and anchoring – shape parties' efforts to gather information (from elsewhere), leading to differing diffusion effects. The study operationalizes the outcome as textual similarity of party manifestos in nineteen Western democracies from 1960 to 2016, applying a text-as-data approach and machine translation. Analyzing dyads, it assesses how commonalities and sender/receiver attributes impact diffusion. It finds that there is little room for cross-border diffusion as successful parties stick to their old program. Beyond the still-prevailing domestic context, ‘learning from cultural reference groups’ in a region is most important. In addition, diffusion appears within EP factions and transnational party organizations independently of the success/loss of the sender. The analysis thus sheds light on (un-)favorable conditions for party policy diffusion and paves the way for future studies applying machine translation and quantitative text analyses.