Recent studies provide evidence that the absence of a no-confidence procedure in presidential systems is crucial for understanding why the allocation of portfolios does not follow the same pattern in both parliamentary and presidential democracies. In this study, I argue that distinctions within presidential systems must be used to explain the substantial variation in the allocation of portfolios to presidential parties. I theorize that when the president is more dependent upon the legislature to make and enact policies, the balance of power in presidential cabinets is more likely to reflect the balance of power in the legislature. In this case, the presidential cabinet can resemble the proportional cabinets usually formed in parliamentary systems. With new data from 20 presidential democracies worldwide spanning more than 70 years, the results support the expectation of a greater formateur's advantage when presidents have greater institutionally-granted powers to influence the policy agenda in the legislature.

This study investigates how individuals may develop more or less strong beliefs in the indivisibility of a disputed territory and how such beliefs may influence their policy preferences toward resolving the dispute. Using a survey experiment in Japan, we find that historical ownership strengthens respondents’ beliefs in territorial indivisibility. Furthermore, those who hold the strongest belief in territorial indivisibility are much less likely to support bilateral negotiation and more likely to support contentious policies, including but not limited to military actions. Finally, we explore external validity of the findings by analyzing respondents who had a real dispute in mind during the survey with China, South Korea, and Russia, respectively.

When analyzing data, researchers are often less interested in the parameters of statistical models than in functions of these parameters such as predicted values. Here we show that Bayesian simulation with Markov-Chain Monte Carlo tools makes it easy to compute these quantities of interest with their uncertainty. We illustrate how to produce customary and relatively new quantities of interest such as variable importance ranking, posterior predictive data, difficult marginal effects, and model comparison statistics to allow researchers to report more informative results.

More than half of the current members of the US Congress served in their state legislature prior to holding federal office. We quantify the relationship between state legislative service and career progression to Congress. Using close elections for exogenous assignment of political experience across otherwise similar candidates, we show that serving in the state legislature more than doubles an individual's probability of eventually contesting a Congressional seat relative to a similar candidate who lost in a comparable election; it also doubles the individual politician's probability of eventually winning a Congressional seat. State legislatures thus create national politicians out of otherwise marginal political entrants. We then show that the effect of state legislative service on career progression is larger in more professionalized legislatures, highlighting the role of institutions in facilitating political career progression. Our results hold important implications for representation and accountability, and confirm that prevailing institutions can affect political selection via career progression.

Digital literacy is receiving increased scholarly attention as a potential explanatory factor in the spread of misinformation and other online pathologies. As a concept, however, it remains surprisingly elusive, with little consensus on definitions or measures. We provide a digital literacy framework for political scientists and test survey items to measure it with an application to online information retrieval tasks. There exists substantial variation in levels of digital literacy in the population, which we show is correlated with age and could confound observed relationships. However, this is obscured by researchers’ reliance on online convenience samples that select for people with computer and internet skills. We discuss the implications of these measurement and sample selection considerations for effect heterogeneity in studies of online political behavior. We argue that there is no universally applicable formula for selecting a given non-probability sample or operationalization of the concept of digital literacy; instead, we conclude, researchers should make theoretically informed arguments about how they select both sample and measure.

Political actors often interact spatially, and move around. However, with a few exceptions, existing political research has analyzed spatial dependence among actors with fixed geographic locations. Focusing on fixated geographic units prevents us from probing dependencies in spatial interaction between spatially dynamic actors, which are common in some areas of political science, such as sub-national conflict studies. In this note, we propose a method to account for spatial dependence in dyadic interactions between moving actors. Our method uses the spatiotemporal histories of dyadic interactions to project locations of future interactions—projected actor locations (PALs). PALs can, in turn, be used to model the likelihood of future dyadic interactions. In a replication and extension of a recent study of subnational conflict, we find that using PALs improves the predictive performance of the model and indicates that there is a clear relationship between actors’ past conflict locations and the likelihood of future conflicts.

Research on Russian troll activity during the 2016 US presidential campaign largely focused on divisive partisan messaging. Here, we document the use of apolitical content—content that could counteract mobilization efforts and escape detection in future campaigns. We argue this resembled techniques used by autocratic regimes domestically, in “flooding” social media with entertainment content to distract from and displace mobilizing messaging. Using automated text analysis and hand coding to construct a timeline of IRA messaging on Twitter, we find left-leaning trolls posted large volumes of entertainment content in their artificial liberal community and shifted away from political content late in the campaign. Simultaneously, conservative trolls were targeting their community with increases in political content. This suggests the use of apolitical content might be an overlooked strategy to selectively manipulate levels of attention to politics.

This study explores the consequences of legislative turnover for the hiring of lobbyists and influence of interest groups. We argue that lobbyists develop durable relationships with lawmakers in assemblies with low turnover. Such relationships allow lobbyists to attract clients. We use a new, state-level measure of multi-client lobbying to show that legislative turnover and multi-client lobbying are inversely related: decreases in turnover are correlated with more multi-client lobbying. In a second set of analyses, we find that legislative term limits are associated with less multi-client lobbying. Since multi-client lobbying poses risks to the representation of individual interests and magnifies the effects of resource differences between interests, our results suggest that turnover may help more diverse interests to achieve political influence.

This research note investigates how mainstream party strategies affect the success of radical right parties (RRPs). It is a widespread view that mainstream party accommodation of radical right core issue positions would reduce the radical right's success. Empirical evidence for this claim, however, remains inconclusive. Using party level data as well as micro-level voter transitions between mainstream and RRPs, we re-evaluate the effectiveness of accommodative strategies and also test whether they work contingent on specific conditions, e.g., the newness of radical right challengers or the existence of a cordon sanitaire. We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. Our findings have important implications for the study of multi-party competition as they challenge what has become a core assumption of this literature: that accommodative strategies reduce niche party success.

Is terrorism effective as a tool of political influence? In particular, do terrorists succeed in affecting their targets’ attitudes, and how long does the effect last? Existing research unfortunately is either limited to small samples or does not address two main difficulties: issues of endogeneity and the inability to assess the duration of the effect. Here, we first exploit the exogeneity to the selection process of the success or failure of an attack as an identification mechanism. Second, we take advantage of the random allocation of survey respondents to interview times to estimate the duration of the impact of terrorist events on attitudes. Using survey data from 30 European democracies between 2002 and 2017, we find first that terrorism affects people's reported life satisfaction and happiness—a proxy for the cost of terrorism in terms of utility. However, we also find that terrorist attacks do not affect respondents’ attitude toward their government, institutions, or immigrants. This suggests that terrorism is ineffective at translating discontent into political pressure. Importantly, we also find that all effects disappear within less than two weeks.

Exploring if/how lobbying patterns differ by political regime, this paper uses data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys with about 29,000 firms across 83 country/years to test the hypothesis that this political activity should be greater in democracies. Considering a variety of democracy indicators and different lobbying measures, it finds strong support for this expected positive relationship. It then employs these data to consider the trade and currency policy preferences of firms within the special interest channel, comparing democracies with non-democracies. These results show a greater percentage of exporting firms, a lesser percentage of import-competing firms, and a greater percentage of non-tradable firms within the democratic special interest channel, helping to build a lobbying-based explanation for why democracies tend to have more open trade policies and more flexible exchange rate regimes.

Citizens that tend to experience political exclusion are often more supportive of direct and participatory forms of decision-making. We empirically verify two competing explanatory logics for such high support: the “anti-establishment” logic, which expects politically excluded citizens to unconditionally express more support than their fellow citizens for democratic innovations (DIs); and the “instrumental” logic, which expects politically excluded citizens to only express more support for DIs than other citizens when these innovations offer procedural control and favorable outcomes. Based on a conjoint analysis of Dutch citizens' preferences for participatory budgeting, we find no support for the anti-establishment logic and partial support for the instrumental logic. We show how measures of citizens' own feelings of exclusion help to explain the results.

Even though social investment is highly popular, welfare state recalibration remains an uphill battle. When resources are scarce in times of austerity, welfare recalibration involves multidimensional trade-offs. Existing research primarily studied preferences toward individual policies or trade-offs in specific policy fields, failing to capture citizens’ overall social policy priorities. Using two novel survey experiments in three European countries, we show that citizens have clear social policy priorities: pensions and education enjoy a high, family policies a medium, and labor market policies a low priority. However, policy constituencies differ in their relative priorities. Our findings suggest that welfare state recalibration is difficult because trade-offs are unpopular, and distributive conflicts in mature welfare states are mainly about distributing resources to specific social groups.

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.

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.

While the structure of party competition evolves slowly, crisis-like events can induce short-term change to the political agenda. This may be facilitated by challenger parties who might benefit from increased attention to issues they own. We study the dynamic of such shifts through mainstream parties’ response to the 2015 refugee crisis, which strongly affected public debate and election outcomes across Europe. Specifically, we analyse how parties changed their issue emphasis and positions regarding immigration before, during, and after the refugee crisis. Our study is based on a corpus of 120,000 press releases between 2013 and 2017 from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We identify immigration-related press releases using a novel dictionary and estimate party positions. The resulting monthly salience and positions measures allow for studying changes in close time-intervals, providing crucial detail for disentangling the impact of the crisis itself and the contribution of right-wing parties. While we provide evidence that attention to immigration increased drastically for all parties during the crisis, radical right parties drove the attention of mainstream parties. However, the attention of mainstream parties to immigration decreased toward the end of the refugee crisis and there is limited evidence of parties accommodating the positions of the radical right.

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.

The rise of populist forces in Western democracies is often linked to representation failures. However, to date we lack causally identified evidence for the effect of parties’ representation on populist attitudes. We address this lacuna through a survey experiment conducted in 12 European Union countries involving 23,257 subjects. Our experiment manipulates citizens’ perceptions of being represented by national parties in the 2019 European elections campaign, and identifies the effect of perceived representation on populist attitudes. The results reveal that poor representation increases populist attitudes in respondents that did not express such attitudes pretreatment, but has no effect among those who were already populist. We demonstrate that this effect is primarily due to parties’ representation failures triggering citizens’ anti-elite sentiment.