We present results from a pre-registered, well-powered $(N \gt 3,000,000)$ text message get-out-the-vote (GOTV) experiment, conducted during the 2019 European Parliament election in Sweden. Our findings suggest that a simple text message increases the likelihood of voting by 0.3 percentage points. Half of this effect spills over to untreated household members while workplace spillovers are near zero. Subsequent analysis reveals that the direct treatment effect is noticeably stronger among individuals with below-average voting propensities. Interestingly, within this same group, the household spillovers are significantly negative. We speculate and provide some indirect evidence, that these negative spillover effects may stem from the text message reminder influencing the behaviour of voters already motivated to vote. Above all, we propose that an increase in early voting, as opposed to voting on Election Day, among treated individuals may weaken the mechanisms thought to explain spillover effects since voters are less likely to bring their family members with them when voting early.

Do voters pay attention to a party’s relationship with its party family? In this paper, I argue that transnational brands such as the party family label assigned to a party are a valuable tool for parties to use to distinguish themselves. In turn, voters can more accurately position parties on the left-right spectrum when the party embraces the ideological profile of the rest of its party family. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), the results confirm my expectations that the ideological alignment of party and party family shapes the accuracy of a voter’s perception of the party’s positions. My findings provide support for the argument that transnational brands can influence how domestic political parties are perceived. These findings have important implications for our understanding of voter responsiveness in an increasingly transnational political space the role of transnational political brands.

Ideological polarization between political parties is essential for meaningful electoral competition, but at its extreme can strain democratic functioning. Despite a widespread recognition that multiple divides structure contemporary party polarization in Europe, its prevailing conceptualization and measurement remain one-dimensional. To resolve this tension, we introduce a novel, multidimensional approach to party polarization. Our main focus is on whether different ideological divides reinforce or crosscut each other. We calculate the effective dimensionality of a policy space using the correlation matrix of parties’ positions, which accounts for how the dimensions interrelate. Using both artificial data and positional estimates from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (1999–2019), we highlight the advantages of our approach and demonstrate that it is better able to capture the relationship between party polarization and mass partisanship. This study has important theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications for our understanding of polarization and democratic representation in a changing political landscape.

Illiberal actors in Western democracies increasingly exploit the superficial defence of liberal values like gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights to demonize ethnic out-groups, portraying Muslims as inherently opposed to Western values. This paper investigates whether this stereotype reflects widespread public beliefs and asks: is the stereotypical view of the Muslim community as an illiberal ‘bogeyman’ endorsed by citizens? Leveraging an original double-list experiment design that minimizes sensitivity bias, we identify population-level estimates of this stereotype in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. Our cross-national results reveal a pervasive and ubiquitous stereotype of Muslims as a threat to LGBTQ+ communities across Western democracies. The implications of these findings are concerning as they signal that societal tolerance of ethnic out-groups across liberal democracies remains tainted by prejudicial stereotypes. The results also underscore the alarming electoral potential of far-right parties that exploit homonationalist and femonationalist stereotype-based threat perceptions to their political advantage.

How does the deployment and withdrawal of UN peacekeepers affect local economic development in civil war countries? This study provides a large-N subnational analysis across UN peacekeeping operations that assesses their impact on the local economy both during deployment and after their withdrawal. We expect a positive association between UN peacekeeping and economic development. Besides providing a sizeable cash injection into the economy, peacekeepers can safeguard both the resumption of everyday economic exchanges at the grassroots level and the influx of aid and development projects. To test this, we combine subnational data on peacekeeping deployments with high-resolution data on nightlight emissions. Results from two-way fixed effects models, using matching, show that a more sizable peacekeeping presence can help boost economic activity in their area of operation. Importantly, we identify a slow but positive economic development in areas of deployment after peacekeepers withdraw, which is confirmed in a DiD estimation approach.

Does prosecuting perpetrators of repression under a dictatorship promote public support for human rights and the courts? We argue that convicting perpetrators in human rights trials reduces public acceptance of these violations. However, while convictions signal judicial efforts to end impunity, they may also call attention to the politicized process by which transitional justice begins. We estimate the effects of human rights trial verdicts on attitudes in Argentina, a country ruled by a military dictatorship from 1976–1983 that, twenty-five years later, initiated sweeping human rights trials for past repression. Using observational day-level opinion data from a survey fielded around the guilty verdict for one of the dictatorship’s top-ranking generals, we find the trial verdict increased the public’s rejection of torture and political killings. Yet belief in judicial fairness declined. These results suggest that trials solidify public commitments to human rights, but confidence in the judiciary is not a necessary condition for this effect.

This article describes the Global Legislators Database, a new cross-national dataset on the characteristics – party affiliation, gender, age, education, and occupational background – of nearly 20,000 national parliamentarians in the world’s democracies. The database includes 97 electoral democracies with comprehensive information on legislators who held office in each country’s lower or unicameral chamber during one legislative session in 2015, 2016, or 2017. The GLD is the largest individual-level biographical and demographic database on national legislators ever assembled, with a wide range of potential applications. In this article, we provide multiple types of validity checks of the GLD to document the integrity of the data. We also preview three potential applications of the dataset and note other possible uses for this one-of-a-kind resource for studying representation in the world’s democracies.

One common explanation for ethnicized politics and limited national identification in Africa lies with colonial boundaries. Europeans frequently divided ethnic groups as they divvied territory in the nineteenth century; this might have long-run repercussions, as individuals prioritize ties with coethnics in neighboring states rather than with non-coethnic co-nationals. Contra these expectations, we argue that divided groups should have weaker attachments to their ethnicity than non-divided groups will, because partition particularly disrupted pre-existing traditional institutions of governance and exchange within these groups. We argue that partition weakened traditional authorities and, consequently, ethnic identities through three mechanisms: (1) administrative shifts that reduced traditional authorities’ power; (2) limitations on leaders’ capacity to raise revenues; and (3) exacerbating intra-group divisions among co-ethnics living on different sides of the borders. We test this using georeferenced data from rounds 3-6 of the Afrobarometer and find support for our argument. These results are robust to different measures of the extent to which an ethnic group was split and various considerations of ethnic groups’ local and national demographic and political power. Our findings have important implications for studies of the legacies of colonialism and identity politics in Africa today.

How does cognitive household labour – the ‘mental load’ involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs – influence decisions about whether and how to participate in public life? Studies suggest women take on the vast majority of this load, yet the impact of these private sector inequalities on participation in public life is underexplored. To make progress on these questions, we contribute new causal evidence about the effect of prompting respondents to think about their own mental loads in a survey experiment fielded to employed British parents. Our main argument is that priming the mental load will crowd out interest in political and labour market participation. In line with expectations, our survey experiment finds a strong negative effect of mental load priming on intentions to engage in politics and at work. Our results offer new insights about the continuing relevance of household-based inequalities to gender equality in public life.