Why do high-income earners support higher levels of income redistribution in some countries than in others? I argue that differences in the social insurance design have consequences for fairness considerations and that this matters for preference formation. Flat-rate systems provide social benefits in equal amounts to everyone in need, while earnings-related systems provide benefits in relation to previous earnings. In the case of income loss, earnings-related systems maintain unfair income differences, while flat-rate systems equalize unfair income differences between the rich and the poor. Cross-national patterns reveal that support for redistribution among the rich is higher in income-maintaining welfare states. For a strict test of my fairness argument, I conduct a laboratory experiment and show that participants reduce inequality more if given endowment differences are maintained in the case of loss.

How do technocrat ministers affect governance under autocracy? Autocrats frequently appoint non-partisan actors with technical competencies to bureaucratic leadership roles. Though their competencies might predict positive performance in office, these ministers are also dependent on the regime for their position and should thus demonstrate loyalty to its interests. I test this in the context of horizontal accountability to the legislature, using data on more than 27,000 legislative requests submitted to ministries in Morocco. I use both exact matching and difference-in-differences analyses to show that technocrat ministers are more than 25 percentage points less likely to respond to legislative queries than partisan cabinet members. The results imply that outside (partisan) participation in government strengthens weak institutions of executive oversight. They also cast doubt on the presumption that technocrat participation in government is universally beneficial to governance.

This note seeks to understand the extent of the disruptions to international relations caused by pandemics, focusing on one globally-endemic disease: malaria. We posit that longstanding diseases such as malaria have the potential to undermine the political ties of nation states, as well as the many benefits of these connections. Our argument is tested empirically using both directed-dyadic and monadic data, while incorporating methods that account for endogeneity and other relevant concerns. We find that the geographic malaria rates of a country not only serve to historically discourage foreign governments from establishing diplomatic outposts on a country's soil, but also lead to an aggregate decrease in the total diplomatic missions that a country receives. We then discuss the current implications of these findings.

We estimate how asset prices respond to a range of political shocks, including changes in a country's economic stewardship, national elections, coup d'états, wars, and terrorist attacks. Using an event study approach and daily prices from the Buenos Aires exchange (Argentina) between 1967 and 2020, we find that stock-market volatility increases in the days immediately following major policy-shifting events. These results hold irrespective of whether returns are measured in nominal terms, in local consumption units, or in US dollars. The most significant increase in post-event risk is associated with irregular government turnovers. Volatility also increases in the days immediately following a defeat in an international war, national elections, and changes in the country's economic stewardship. No changes in stock-market volatility occur, however, after terrorist attacks or when the date of a new administration's inauguration is publicly known and determined sufficiently far in advance.

I rely on data from 31,754 electoral districts in the United States from 1834 until 2016 to explore how the nationalization of politics occurs within districts. I argue that in the early stages of the American democracy local concerns were more prominent in the distant districts from the capital city than in the nearby districts, and therefore the number of parties was greater in the former than in the latter. However, these differences vanished after the New Deal, when authority was centralized. Nationalization reduced the number of parties everywhere, but above all in the most distant district from Washington, D.C.

Do the choices of city leaders matter for local economic conditions? While existing literature focuses on how the preferences of local officials influence city policy, we argue that the managerial skill of local leaders should condition their ability to achieve their goals. We conduct an original phone survey of over 300 mayors and city managers across the USA to learn about their management practices. Using a two-way fixed effects design that holds fixed a rich battery of individual and city-level characteristics, we examine how changes in leadership affect economic growth, a common goal for local officials. We find that when local leaders employ the “best practices” of organizational management, their cities grow across a range of indicators. These results are strongest for the subset of leaders who mention a growth-related goal for their time in office, suggesting that managerial skill allows local leaders to more effectively achieve their objectives.

How do rebels choose among available tactics during civil war? How do they substitute one tactic for another? Although previous studies address these questions, they narrowly focus on the presence or absence of substitution. Differentiating the varieties of substitution, however, is critical. How rebels respond to their tactical environment—including weather conditions—depends on the type of substitution. I formally derive three types of substitution and test them by exploiting weather-induced exogenous variation in rebels' tactical costs for ground and marine violent activities. The analysis of daily panel data in 31 coastal conflict countries indicates that rebels substitute violent ground activities for maritime piracy but not vice versa. This asymmetry cannot be explained without differentiating substitution types.

Security forces are one of the main targets of political violence. This paper examines the effect of their casualties on electoral outcomes. Between two general elections in 2015, Turkey experienced a series of attacks that killed 153 members of its security forces. Based on the as-if random assignment of their funerals across the country, I estimate that government vote share increases in the funeral places of security force terror victims. However, in the localities with recurring funerals, it decreases by a similar percentage. These non-linear changes provide strong evidence for the rally theory.

Survey experiments that investigate how voting procedures affect voting behavior and election outcomes use hypothetical questions and non-representative samples. We present here the results of a novel survey experiment that addresses both concerns. First, the winning party in our experiment receives a donation to its campaign funds inducing real consequences for voting. Second, we run an online experiment with a Dutch national representative sample (N = 1240). Our results validate previous findings using a representative sample, in particular that approval voting leads to a higher concentration in votes for smaller parties and strengthens centrist parties in comparison to plurality voting. Importantly, our results suggest that voting behavior is not affected by voting incentives and can be equally reliably elicited with hypothetical questions.

We demonstrate how few-shot prompts to large language models (LLMs) can be effectively applied to a wide range of text-as-data tasks in political science—including sentiment analysis, document scaling, and topic modeling. In a series of pre-registered analyses, this approach outperforms conventional supervised learning methods without the need for extensive data pre-processing or large sets of labeled training data. Performance is comparable to expert and crowd-coding methods at a fraction of the cost. We propose a set of best practices for adapting these models to social science measurement tasks, and develop an open-source software package for researchers.

Prominent arguments hold that African states’ geography limits state capacity, impedes public service provision, and slows economic development. To test this argument, I collect comprehensive panel data on a proxy of local state capacity, travel times to national and regional capitals. These are computed on a yearly 5 × 5 km grid using time-varying data on roads and administrative units (1966–2016). I use these data to estimate the effect of changes in travel times to capitals on local education provision, infant mortality rates, and nightlight emissions. Within the same location, decreases in travel times to its capitals are robustly associated with improved development outcomes. The article advances the measurement of state capacity and contributes to understanding its effects on human welfare.

Whether democratic and non-democratic regimes perform differently in social provision policy is an important issue to social scientists and policy makers. As political regimes are rarely changing, their long-term or dynamic effects on the outcome are of concern to researchers when they evaluate how political regimes affect social policy. However, estimating the dynamic effects of rarely changing variables in the analysis of time-series cross-sectional data by conventional estimators may be problematic when the unit effects are included in the model specification. This article proposes a model to account for and estimate the correlation between the unit effects and explanatory variables. Applying the proposed model to 18 Latin American countries, this article finds evidence that democracy has a positive effect on social spending both in the short and long term.

Political scientists relying on observational data face substantial challenges in drawing causal inferences. A particularly problematic threat to inference is the unobserved confounder. As a means to assess this threat, we introduce simultaneous sensitivity analysis to the political science literature. As an application, we consider the potentially confounded relationship between Supreme Court justice voting and oral argument quality. We demonstrate that this relationship is sensitive to the presence of a confounder, to a degree that threatens inference, and explore the confounder both theoretically and empirically. More generally, we show how sensitivity analysis can guide inquiry related to a covariate that cannot be directly measured.

A Hawthorne effect found in election studies is that pre-election survey participation increases voter turnout. Using the Swedish National Election Studies, Granberg and Holmberg (1992) showed evidence in support of this effect. However, their findings have been criticized and more recent studies have failed to find any treatment effect of pre-election survey participation (cf. Mann 2005). This study re-examines an updated version of Granberg and Holmberg's time-series cumulative data file covering eight additional election studies (for a total of 14 election studies from 1960 to 2010). These studies have an experimental component, since half of the sample was randomly assigned to be interviewed before the election and the other half after the election. By comparing validated turnout in the pre-election sample with the post-election sample, it is possible to estimate the causal effect of survey participation on voter turnout. The results show that participating in the pre-election survey indeed has a significant and positive effect on voter turnout. Moreover, this article evaluates whether the treatment effect is unevenly distributed in the population. Results show that citizens with a low propensity to vote are more affected by taking part in election studies than citizens with a high propensity to vote. The study also estimates the long-term effects of survey participation. Results show that participating in an election survey can have significant effects on voter turnout several years later.

Political security is often viewed as a necessary precondition for rulers to develop property-protecting legal institutions. I argue that because these institutions can build political support and generate revenue, domestically insecure rulers may also invest in them. I test this argument using newly collected 12th-century data on the operation of the nascent English common law system. Leveraging the 1192 shipwreck and subsequent kidnap of Richard I as an exogenous shock to domestic political security, I find that the catastrophe appears to have prompted the English Royal Court's short-term deployment to raise political support in areas vulnerable to rebellion. I present suggestive evidence that this effect in vulnerable areas persisted into the medium-term, and appears to have expanded to the rest of the country. Drawing on this and other evidence of changes in Royal Court funding, activity, and organization between 1184 and 1203, I argue that the shock may have helped to bring about a permanent increase in the Court's capacity and accessibility. These findings are relevant to studies of the common law and the political economy of legal institutions generally.

Researchers commonly employ multinomial logit (MNL) models to explain individual-level vote choice while treating “abstention” as the baseline category. Though many view abstainers as a homogeneous group, we argue that these respondents emerge from two distinct sources. Some nonvoters are likely to be “occasional voters” who abstained from a given election owing to temporary factors, such as a distaste for all candidates running in a particular election, poor weather conditions, or other temporary circumstances. On the other hand, many nonvoters are unlikely to vote regardless of the current political climate. This latter population of “routine nonvoters” is consistently disengaged from the political process in a way that is distinct from that of occasional voters. Including both sets of nonvoters within an MNL model can lead to faulty inferences. As a solution, we propose a baseline-inflated MNL estimator that models heterogeneous populations of nonvoters probabilistically, thus accounting for the presence of routine nonvoters within models of vote choice. We demonstrate the utility of this model using replications of existing political behavior research.

Why do so many voters in African countries vote for minor ethnic parties instead of unifying into a powerful multi-ethnic opposition coalition? I present a model that demonstrates that as the incumbent devotes more resources to programmatic goods, which voters can access regardless of how they voted, the opportunity cost of voting for a sincerely preferred, but losing, candidate decreases. I provide experimental and cross-national observational evidence that voters are more likely to support a minor party as they perceive more or more valuable goods being distributed programmatically. Those who perceive poor distribution, or only clientelist distribution, instead vote strategically for a major opposition party. In general, support for minor parties increases along with positive outcomes and approval of the incumbent.

Deceiving citizens is typically considered the main political motive behind the spread of fake news. Accordingly, strategies to debunk fake news, such as fact-checking, have been suggested to combat it. However, the spread of fake news persists despite these debunking strategies. We propose an alternative but underexplored motive behind the spread of fake news: Fake news aims not only to deceive citizens but also to induce media skepticism. To support our claim, we present a stylized formal model of media skepticism and demonstrate that the incentive to spread fake news persists even if citizens are not deceived by disinformation coming from fake news. Our model highlights the dilemma embedded in fact-checking.

This paper seeks to identify factors that may lie behind the tendency for parliamentary governments to form primarily from one side of the left-right spectrum and to adopt non-centrist policy positions. Because of measurement limitations as well as the inherent complexity of the processes involved, this exploration is undertaken through simulation experiments. The new software created for these experiments allows the potential impact of a wide variety of factors, including voter and party motivations and distributions, policy space dimensionality, and constraints on government formation, to be assessed. Although the results cannot tell us what fosters non-centrism in the real world, they do reveal some factors that appear to be conducive to that end and thus serve as a guide to further research on this neglected topic.