Do coders of political texts incorporate prior beliefs about parties’ issue stances into their coding decisions? We report results from a coding experiment in which ten coders were each given 200 statements on immigration that were extracted from election manifestos. Party labels in these statements were randomly assigned (including a control category without party cues). Coders were more likely to code a statement as pro-immigration if it was attributed to the Greens and less likely choose the anti-immigration category if it was attributed to the populist radical right. No effect was found for mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right. The results also suggest that coders resort to party cues as heuristics when faced with ambiguous policy statements.

Collecting network information on political elites using conventional methods such as surveys and text records is challenging in authoritarian and/or conflict-ridden states. I introduce a data collection method for elite networks using scraping algorithms to capture public co-appearances at political and social events. Validity checks using existing data show the method effectively replicates interaction-based networks but not networks based on behavioral similarities; in both cases, measurement error remains a concern. Applying the method to Nigeria illustrates that patronage—measured in terms of public connectivity—does not drive national oil companies appointments. Given that theories of elite behavior aim to understand individual-level interactions, the applicability of data using this technique is well-suited to situations where intrusive data collection is costly or prohibitive.

Travel bans were a globally prevalent policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, travel bans against China and European countries proved a broadly popular mitigation tool among Americans. Why did Americans support COVID-19 travel bans? We fielded two novel survey experiments, surveying 3000 American citizens across five waves (between March 2020 and March 2021). In randomizing the country of origin of those potentially subject to travel ban measures, we find consistent evidence that racial attitudes drive support for travel bans. The strength of this relationship varies across political parties and across hypothetical target countries but is not explained by objective caseloads that change across countries and over the course of the pandemic.

Moving past the conventional focus on ministerial portfolios, this paper investigates how coalition governments allocate and share ministerial responsibility for individual policy issues. Sharing responsibility induces coalescing parties to collaborate on policy issues, which addresses the problem of ministerial autonomy. Consequently, I argue that incumbent parties in coalition governments share ministerial responsibility for contentious and salient policy issues. This claim is corroborated based on a newly elicited dataset of over 30,000 ministerial policy responsibilities from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The findings have important implications for scholarship on coalition governments, as they demonstrate that incumbent parties can use the design of ministerial portfolios itself to insulate a coalition compromise from partisan deviations.

In the context of recent economic and financial crisis in Europe, questions about the power of the core executive to control fiscal outcomes are more important than ever. Why are some governments more effective in controlling spending while others fall prey to excessive overspending by individual cabinet ministers? We approach this question by lifting the veil of collective cabinet responsibility and focusing on intra-cabinet decision-making around budgetary allocation. Using the contributions of individual cabinet members during budget debates in Ireland, we estimate their positions on a latent dimension that represents their relative levels of support or opposition to the cabinet leadership. We find some evidence that ministers who are close to the finance minister receive a larger budget share, but under worsening macro-economic conditions closeness to the prime minister is a better predictor for budget allocations. Our results highlight potential fragility of the fiscal authority delegation mechanism in adverse economic environment.

The onset of intrastate conflict has two requisite conditions: that prospective insurgents have an incentive to rebel, and that the state lacks the capacity to deter such a rebellion. We outline a simple rationalist argument grounded in gains from economic growth—to both individual income and state revenue—to argue that modernization has the potential to affect the likelihood of civil conflict through both of these conditions. The shift away from a rent-seeking economy affects opportunity costs for rebellion by increasing the cost of recruitment, broadening the time horizon for gain, and decreasing looting possibilities. On the state side, modernization increases state military, economic, and institutional capacity, allowing governments to deter rebellion. We construct an index of modernization from World Bank data and apply a strategic model to explore the effect of modernization on both states and rebels simultaneously. We find that the modernization process describes an arc that may increase the likelihood of unrest in the early stages, but has long-term stabilizing effects.

What explains minority language recognition in dictatorships? In this paper, we argue that minority language groups in authoritarian regimes are more likely to have their languages recognized when their interests are represented by a party in the legislature. Moreover, the level of recognition is greater. We test this argument using original group-level and time-variant measures of minority party in legislature and minority language policies for all Asian dictatorships from 1980 to 2000. The results are robust even when we shift the analysis to the country level globally and account for possible spurious correlations.

Are the social networks of legislators affected more by their political parties or their personal traits? How does the party organization influence the tendency of members to work collectively on a day-to-day basis? In this paper, I explore the determinants of the relationships of legislators in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. I use exponential random graph models to evaluate the relative influence of personal traits versus party influence in generating legislator relationships. Despite a focus on personalism in Brazil, the analysis reveals that the effects of political parties on tie formation are roughly equal to the effects of personal traits, suggesting that networks may make political parties much more cohesive than contemporary literature would lead us to believe.

Is populism electorally effective and, if so, why? Scholars agree that populism is a set of people-centric, anti-pluralist, and anti-elitist ideas that can be combined with various ideological positions. It is difficult, yet important, to disentangle populism from its hosting ideology in evaluating populism's effectiveness and its potential conditional effects on the hosting ideology. We conduct a novel US conjoint experiment asking respondents to evaluate pairs of realistic campaign messages with varying populism-related messages and hosting policy positions given by hypothetical primary candidates. Although party-congruent policy positions are expectedly much more popular, we find that none of the populist features have an independent or combined effect on candidate choice.

This paper presents a new approach for studying temporal sequences across ordinal variables. It involves three complementary approaches (frequency tables, transitional graphs, and dependency tables), as well as an established adaptation based on Bayesian dynamical systems, inferring a general system of change. The frequency tables count pairs of values in two variables and transitional graphs depict changes, showing which variable tends to attain high values first. The dependency tables investigate which values of one variable are prerequisites for values in another, as a more direct test of causal hypotheses. We illustrate the proposed approaches by analyzing the V-Dem dataset, and show that changes in electoral democracy are preceded by changes in freedom of expression and access to alternative information.

Changes in voters' behavior and in the campaign strategies that political parties pursue are likely to have increased the importance of campaigns on voters' electoral choices. As a result, scholars increasingly question the usefulness and predictive power of structural forecasting models, that use information from “fundamental” variables to make an election prediction several months before Election Day. In this paper, we empirically examine the expectation that structural forecasting models are increasingly error-prone. For doing so, we apply a structural forecasting model to predict elections in six established democracies. We then trace the predictive power of this model over time. Surprisingly, our results do not give the slightest indication of a decline in the predictive power of structural forecasting models. By showing that information on long-term factors still allows making accurate predictions of electoral outcomes, we question the assumption that campaigns matter more now than they did in the past.

Using data from the World Values Survey, we analyze the extent to which value consensus exists within countries. To do this, we introduce a statistical model which allows us to generate country-level measures of cultural heterogeneity. Our statistical approach models each country as a mixture of subcultures that are shared across the world. Our results demonstrate that value consensus varies substantially across countries and regions.

Duverger’s Law suggests that two parties will dominate under first-past-the-post (FPTP) within an electoral district, but the law does not necessarily establish two-party competition at the national level. United States is unique among FPTP countries in having the only durable and nearly pure, two-party system. Following this observation, we answer two questions. First, what contributes to the same two parties competing in districts all across the country and at different levels of office? Second, why is the US two-party system so durable over time, dominated by the same two parties? That is, “Why two parties?” As an answer, we propose the APP: ambition, the presidency, and policy. The presidency with its national electorate and electoral rules that favor two-party competition establishes two national major parties, which frames the opportunity structure that influences party affiliation decisions of ambitious politicians running for lower offices. Control over the policy agenda helps reinforce the continuation of a particular two-party system in equilibrium by blocking third parties through divergence on the main issue dimension and the suppression of latent issue dimensions that could benefit new parties. The confluence of the three factors explains why the United States is so uniquely a durable two-party system.

To what extent can civil rights NGOs protect ethnic minorities against unequal treatment? We study this question by combining an audit experiment of 1260 local governments in Hungary with an intervention conducted in collaboration with a major Hungarian civil rights NGO. In the audit experiment we demonstrated that Roma individuals were about 13 percent-points less likely to receive responses to information requests from local governments, and the responses they received were of substantially lower quality. The intervention that reminded a random subset of local governments of their legal responsibility of equal treatment led to a short-term reduction in their discriminatory behavior, but the effects of the intervention dissipated within a month. These findings suggest that civil rights NGOs might face substantive difficulties in trying to reduce discrimination through simple information campaigns.

Policy in coalition governments (a) depends on negotiations between parties that (b) continue between elections. No extant means of predicting policy—bargaining power indices, vote shares, seat shares, polling, veto players or measures of electoral competitiveness—recognizes both of these facts. We conceptualize, estimate and validate the first dynamic measure of parties’ bargaining leverage intended to predict policy and politics. We argue that those parties with the greatest leverage in policy negotiations are those with the highest probability of participating in an alternative government, were one to form. Combining a large set of political polls and an empirical coalition formation model developed with out-of-sample testing, we estimate coalition inclusion probabilities for parties in a sample of 21 parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency over four decades. Applications to government spending and to the stringency of environmental policy show leverage from coalition inclusion probabilities to be strongly predictive while the primary alternatives—vote shares, seat shares and polls—are not.

While longstanding theories of political behavior argue that voters do not possess sufficient political knowledge to hold their elected representatives accountable, recent revisionist studies challenge this view, arguing that voters can both follow how their representatives vote and use that information intelligently. We apply the revisionist account to the study of Supreme Court nominations in the modern era. Using survey data on the nominations of Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, we ask whether voters can and do hold senators accountable for their votes on Supreme Court nominees. While our results for Thomas are ambiguous, we find strong evidence for accountability in the cases of Sotomayor and Kagan. In particular, we show that voters on average can correctly recall the votes of their senators on these nominees, and that correct recall is correlated with higher levels of education and political knowledge. We then show that voters are more likely to both approve of and vote to re-elect their senator if he or she casts a vote on Sotomayor and Kagan that is in line with voters’ preferences. Finally, we show this effect is quite sizable, as it rivals the effect of agreement on other high-profile roll call votes. These results have important implications for both the broader study of representation and for understanding the current politics of Supreme Court nominations.

Governments’ party identifications can indicate the types of economic policies they are likely to pursue. A common rule of thumb is that left-party governments are expected to pursue policies for lower unemployment, but which may cause inflation. Right-party governments are expected to pursue lower inflation policies. How do these expectations shape the inflation forecasts of monetary policy bureaucrats? If there is a mismatch between the policies, bureaucrats expect governments to implement, and those that they actually do, forecasts will be systematically biased. Using US Federal Reserve Staff’s forecasts we test for executive partisan biases. We find that irrespective of actual policy and economic conditions forecasters systematically overestimate future inflation during left-party presidencies and underestimate future inflation during right-party ones. Our findings suggest that partisan heuristics play an important part in monetary policy bureaucrats’ inflation expectations.

Are individuals in violent contexts reluctant to tackle corruption for fear of future violence? Or does violence mobilize them to fight corruption? We investigate these questions looking at the effects of fear and violence stemming from the Mexican Drug War on attitudes toward corruption. We conducted two surveys before the 2012 Mexican presidential election. First, as part of a nationally representative survey, we find a positive correlation between fear of violence and willingness to accept corruption in exchange for lower levels of violence. To disentangle causal effects, we conducted a follow-up survey experiment in Greater Mexico City where we manipulated fear over the Drug War. We find that individuals within this context are not easily scared. Those who received a common fear-inducing manipulation do not report higher levels of fear and are less willing to tolerate corruption. Conversely, we find strong evidence that individuals who have been victims of crime are more likely to report both higher levels of fear and willingness to accept corruption if it lowers violence. Our findings suggest that voters are more strategic and resilient in the face of violence than many extant theories of political behavior suggest.

The possibility that actors strategically condition their behavior on partially unobservable factors poses a grave challenge to causal inference, particularly if only some of the actors whose behavior we analyze are at risk of experiencing the outcome of interest. We present a crisis bargaining model that indicates that targets can generally prevent war by arming. We then create a simulated data set where the model is assumed to perfectly describe interactions for those states engaged in crisis bargaining, which we assume most pairs of states are not. We further assume researchers cannot observe which states are engaged in crisis bargaining, although observable variables might serve as proxies. We demonstrate that a naïve design would falsely (and unsurprisingly) indicate a positive relationship between arming and war. More importantly, we then evaluate the performance of matching, instrumental variables, and statistical backwards induction. The latter two show some promise, but matching fares poorly.

We exploit the act of the conservative Greek government (2004–2009) to fiddle the books as a natural experiment in order to document a causal link between government spending and electoral fragmentation and identify the mechanism via which it operates. The retrospective revision of Greece’s deficit figures just before the 2010 regional elections constituted an information shock, which generated expectations for reduced pork-barrel spending. We decompose the resulting effect and uncover the main mechanism taking place: rent-seeking voting and patronage (client-voters abandoning the dominant parties due to less expected rents). We find that expected spending cuts caused a steep decline (increase) in the electoral support for dominant parties (fragmentation). This effect is significantly more pronounced in patronage-intense regions. Using the size of public sector as a proxy for patronage (Hicken 2011), we find that support for dominant parties declined differentially by 5 percentage points more on those regions. That is, at least one in six voters that abandoned the big parties did so out of purely opportunistic motivations. Overall, our work highlights the importance of institutional constraints in affecting electoral and political power-sharing.