Research in legislative politics suggests that the desire to get reelected encourages legislators to “bring home the pork”—by delivering electorally rewarding, targeted spending. This is particularly true where the electoral system encourages incumbents to cultivate a personal vote. We analyze how Philippine Senators spend their Constituency Development Fund (CDF) and using the staggered elections to identify variation in reelection status, we show that senatorial reelectionists do not always bring home the pork. Because Philippine Senators are elected by plurality-at-large voting by the national electorate, they tend to spend their CDF allotments closer to elections but avoid allocating them disproportionately to their local strongholds. These findings illustrate how electoral rules can deter targeted spending but lead legislators to find alternative ways to build a personal vote.

Economic and health crises have profound political consequences for public support for social policy, historically setting in motion a massive expansion of governmental programs. Is demand for social protection likely to increase among citizens exposed to risk in an era in which populist messages are prominent? We show that this depends critically on the precise targets that populists evoke as enemies of the people. We distinguish between two types of political rhetoric deployed by populist politicians in their claims to represent the authentic people—one opposing the authority of domestic elites, including technocrats, and one attacking foreigners. We examine the extent to which each rhetorical strategy reduces or enhances popular demand for social policies by randomly exposing Americans to these frames as part of a public opinion survey conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results show that the two messages have different consequences for support for redistribution among respondents exposed to risk: populist anti-foreign rhetoric that blames foreign countries for the onset of the pandemic increases demand for expansion of social protection compared to populist anti-elite rhetoric.

Prominent recent work argues that support for democracy behaves thermostatically—that democratic erosion boosts democratic support while deepening democracy yields public backlash—and further contends that there is no evidence for the classic argument that democracy itself increases democratic support over time. Here, we document how these conclusions depend on subtle choices in measurement coding that constitute “researcher degrees of freedom”: analyses employing alternative reasonable choices provide little or no support for the original conclusions. The fragility of the statistical results demonstrates that researcher degrees of freedom in measurement must be taken seriously and that the question of the relationship between democratic institutions and democratic support remains unsettled.

Research has shown that presidents tend to benefit local level copartisans when distributing resources, which can improve the provision of public goods, such as security. Considering that fear of crime is among the main concerns of citizens worldwide, we examine whether alignment affects criminality. Drawing on rich administrative data from Chile and a regression discontinuity design in close electoral races, we study the impact of alignment on a broad set of crimes against the person and property-related. We show that aligned municipalities experience a significant reduction in crimes that both affect property and occur in public. As a potential mechanism, we find that aligned municipalities receive more projects to improve urban infrastructure, thus making public spaces less vulnerable to crime.

Time preferences may explain public opinion about a wide range of long-term policy problems with costs and benefits realized in the distant future. However, mass publics may discount these costs and benefits because they are later or because they are more uncertain. Standard methods to elicit individual-level time preferences tend to conflate risk and time attitudes and are susceptible to social desirability bias. A potential solution relies on a costly lab-experimental method, convex time budgets (CTB). We present and experimentally validate an affordable version of this approach for implementation in mass surveys. We find that the theoretically preferred CTB patience measure predicts attitudes toward a local, delayed investment problem but fails to predict support for more complex, future-oriented policies.

Can democracies attract and elect politicians who are both high-ability and from diverse backgrounds? Using data covering the entire Danish population, including every candidate for local and national elections in 1990–2015, we explore the selection of political candidates. We show that Danish candidates and elected politicians have higher ability than the voters they represent, that selection on ability reflects individual skills rather than social background, that politicians are selected from economically diverse backgrounds, and that there is no substantial trade-off between ability and representation. Furthermore, we utilize a major structural reform, which significantly reduced the number of municipalities in Denmark, to show that increased political competition did not affect politicians’ ability, economic background, or the trade-off between the two.

We investigate the American public's attitudes over an integral component of judicial behavior: the legal principles judges employ when making decisions. Our theoretical perspective argues that political preferences shape individuals’ attitudes over how judges apply legal principles, mirroring ideological divisions expressed by political elites and judges. Using an original battery of questions, we find high support across all Americans for the use of certain, well-established legal principles, but stark differences in how liberals and conservatives evaluate the use of more controversial principles. In a survey experiment, we find that agreement (disagreement) between an individual's attitudes over the use of legal principles and the reasoning contained in a Supreme Court opinion is associated with increased (decreased) support for the Court decision.

Political science research frequently models binary or ordered outcomes involving related processes. However, traditional modeling of these outcomes ignores common data issues and cannot capture nuances. There is often an excess of zeros, the observed outcomes for different actors are inherently related, and competing actors may respond to the same factors differently. This paper extends existing models and develops a zero-inflated multivariate ordered probit to simultaneously address these issues. This model performs better than existing models at capturing the true parameters of interest, estimates the nature of the related processes, and captures the differences in actors’ decision-making. I demonstrate these benefits through simulation exercises and an application to party behavior in Mexico.

I study how the quality of information affects politician selection in a two-candidate model where voters want to vote for the best candidate but also for the winner. Voters receive private and public signals about candidates’ relative valence. Public information has a stronger effect on equilibrium outcomes because voters use it to infer other voters’ beliefs. Contrary to what might be expected, more precise public information does not always benefit the better candidate’s electoral prospects: when voters’ private information is precise enough, improving public information hurts the better candidate’s electoral prospects. The model provides a rationale for the prevalence of large swings in voter sentiment in close elections, and for front-runner candidates’ tendency to avoid face-to-face television debates with the underdog.

The welfare state literature argues that Social Democratic party representation is of key importance for welfare state outcomes. However, few papers are able to separate the influence of parties from voter preferences, which implies that the partisan effects will be overstated. I study a natural experiment to identify a partisan effect. In 1995, the Labour Party (Ap) in the Norwegian municipality of Flå filed their candidate list too late and could not participate in the local election. Ap was the largest party in Flå in the entire post-World War period, but have not regained this position. I use the synthetic control method to study the effects on welfare spending priorities. I find small and insignificant partisan effects.

A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress’ efforts to limit federal courts’ jurisdiction are principally related to courts’ workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inquiry by testing the hypothesis of a negative relationship between public support for the Supreme Court and jurisdiction-stripping legislation. Contrary to prior studies, the authors find a positive relationship between Americans’ confidence in the Supreme Court and jurisdiction stripping. This result indicates the need for additional research on the interactions among public opinion, federal courts, and Congress.

Economic sanctions are a policy tool that great powers frequently use to interfere with domestic politics of another state. Regime change has been a primary goal of economic sanctions over the past decades. This article studies the relationship between leader-contingent sanctions—sanctions that are designed to impede the flow of revenue to a specific leader—and violent political conflict in target countries. I build a theoretical model to illuminate two mechanisms by which leader-contingent sanctions destabilize a regime—the Depletion Mechanism and the Instigation Mechanism. The Depletion Mechanism works when sanctions mechanically deplete the government's resources so that it becomes unable to buy off domestic opposition even by making the largest possible offer. The Instigation Mechanism implies that as sanctions decrease the benefit of negotiated settlement relative to war, the government may strategically choose to repress rather than buy off the opposition even when it is able to do so. Leader-contingent sanctions lead to bargaining failure by rewarding the opposition for revolt while reducing the government's ability and willingness to appease the opposition.

Survey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach causal inference. This may account for conflicting findings in published research.

Here, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design situated in Romania, where students who pass a national baccalaureate exam are uniquely qualified to enter university. We find that university attendance causes more liberal party preferences along the cultural dimension of party politics—though not along the economic or left-right dimensions of party conflict.

As international trade flourishes, Americans can choose from an increasing number of foreign products even at their local grocery stores, allowing consumers to directly experience the consequences of globalized trade in a simple and intuitive way that does not require much political expertise. Yet, most prior scholarship on political consumerism assumes that consumers are aware of the political and economic implications of their choices at the checkout lane. We move away from this assumption, focusing instead on more fundamental psychological predispositions such as ethnocentrism that may guide daily consumer choices. Using a discrete choice conjoint experiment, we show that Americans, on average, exhibit ethnocentric consumer preferences, with demand for products falling as they are produced in more culturally and ethnically distant places. Additionally, we show that this effect is more pronounced among those with higher levels of ethnocentrism. Our results provide evidence for a “naïve” form of political consumerism.

With the increasing nationalization of politics, federal politicians have interacted more and more with subnational actors. In particular, the president and governing party have provided selective policy and spending benefits to same-party jurisdictions in order to increase their influence in subnational politics. As a significant amount of federal grants is allocated directly to city governments, we analyze the effects of the federal-city relationship in the federal grant process. Specifically, we examine the effects of the president–mayor party alignment on the allocation of federal block and project grants to 568 medium and large cities from 2005 to 2020 using a two-way (city and year) fixed-effects model. We find that the president favors co-partisan mayors in the distribution of federal grants, specifically co-partisan mayors from (a) secure party cities, (b) cities in states where the governor is also a co-partisan, and (c) secure party cities in states where the governor is also a co-partisan. Digging deeper, we find this form of presidential particularism is almost exclusively a Democratic pursuit.

Stereotypes of the two parties play an important role in political cognition, and a range of recent studies have examined the content and effects of partisan stereotypes. However, little work has studied change in partisan stereotypes over time. We address this question by comparing data on stereotypes of partisans collected before and after the Trump presidency, a time when we might expect individuals' images of the two parties to undergo significant change. Using a structural topic model, we compare responses to open-ended questions asking respondents to list words describing members of the two parties from 2016 and 2021. We find that partisan stereotypes in the 2021 sample are less group- and issue-based and focused more on personal traits. These results suggest that, during the Trump era, members of the mass public came to see the parties in more personalized, character-focused terms, potentially contributing to affective polarization.

In this paper I borrow Roger Myerson’s game-theoretic model on incentives for the success of democracy, adapt the model to an experimental setting, derive testable predictions from it, and test those predictions in the laboratory. Results show that (i) corrupt leaders are replaced more often in federal democracies than in centralized ones; (ii) in the centralized case subjects converged to an equilibrium in which leaders act responsively and are reelected; (iii) honest presidents are reelected at the same rate in both institutional designs, and (iv) the president acted less responsively in the decentralized case. I also run robustness checks and test for the effect of the language used in the experiment. The data show that the results are robust with regards to experimental choices.

Most authoritarian countries censor the press. As a response, many opposition and independent news outlets have found refuge on the Internet. Despite the global character of the Internet, news outlets are vulnerable to censorship in cyberspace. This study investigates Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on news websites in Venezuela and details how news reporting is related to DoS attacks in an attempt to censor content. For this empirical test, I monitored 19 Venezuelan news websites from November 2017 until June 2018 and continuously retrieved their content and status codes to infer DoS attacks. Statistical analyses show that news content correlates to DoS attacks. In the Venezuelan context, these news topics appear to be not only on protest and repression but also on opposition actors or other topics that question the legitimacy of the regime. By establishing these relationships, this study deepens our understanding of how modern technologies are used as censorship tools.

Studies of political persuasion often use an exogenous encouragement as an instrument for persuasive messaging. However, for some people, such encouragement is insufficient, while for others, it is unnecessary. These individuals are excluded from methods that only estimate a treatment effect among compliers. Using the marginal treatment effect framework, we extend research finding that exposure to West German television increases support for communism. We find that, because of self-selection, for those who watch West German TV regardless of signal quality, i.e. always-takers, cutting off West German television would have increased support for communism. Our extrapolation shows that media choices reinforce, rather than mollify, political preferences.

The revolving door is a potential mechanism of private influence over policy. Recent work primarily examines the revolving of legislators and their staff, with little focus on the federal bureaucracy. To analyze decisions to turnover into lobbying, we develop an argument emphasizing the (1) policy expertise acquired from federal employment; (2) the proximity of employees to political decision-making; and (3) the agency policymaking environment. Leveraging federal personnel and lobbying data, we find the first two factors predict revolving whereas the policymaking environment has an inconsistent impact. We highlight the importance of studying selection into lobbying for estimating casual effects of lobbyist characteristics on revenue and contribute to the literature on bureaucratic careers and the nature of private influence in policymaking.