This study examines how intra-party competition relates to the content of electoral promises during campaigns. Drawing on campaign brochures from 1,394 candidates in South Korea’s multi-member districts, this study constructs a supervised text-based measure of particularistic appeals—geographically targeted promises used to cultivate a personal vote. The analysis reveals a clear contrast: the copartisans-to-magnitude ratio (C:M) is positively associated with particularistic messaging, while the widely used copartisans-to-expected-seats ratio (C:E) lacks explanatory power. The two measures thus yield divergent results, and the findings provide partial support for the argument that intra-party competition is associated with personal-vote strategies in candidate-centered elections. By combining quantitative text analysis with candidate perspectives, this study offers an empirical test of how candidate-centered incentives relate to campaign messaging in local elections.
Autocracies postpone elections for political control, but we lack an understanding of how voters respond to election postponement in autocracies. This paper argues that election postponement motivates voter turnout across partisan groups, because voters see the postponement as a sign of regime weakness and increased electoral competitiveness. Evidence from a survey experiment in Hong Kong demonstrates that reminder messages about election postponement motivate various partisan groups to turn out, an effect robust to whether and how the message is framed. While the turnout effect is larger when the message’s narrative aligns with the subject’s partisanship—such as the propaganda and intimidation frames for government supporters and the electioneering frame for opposition supporters—all postponement reminder messages have an average turnout effect, with no significant differences across partisan groups. These findings suggest that election postponement is consequential in shaping citizens’ political behavior, with crucial implications for election turnout and authoritarian stability.
Do Americans hold refugees in higher regard than immigrants? If so, why? We theorize that refugees activate humanitarian concerns and perceptions of deservingness, while immigrants trigger threat perceptions and competition, leading to divergent mental associations toward each group. We investigate these questions with a nationally representative online survey experiment fielded in 2024 that contrasts Americans’ attitudes toward refugees and immigrants using both open- and close-ended questions. Open-ended mentions reveal that refugees trigger themes of involuntariness, conflict, and humanitarianism, while immigrants elicit themes of domestic politics, fairness, and threat. Close-ended responses indicate that Americans view immigrants as more competent and more agentic than refugees, and they associate refugees and immigrants with different reasons for coming to the United States. Despite these differences in beliefs, respondents report no significant differences on warmth stereotypes, group affect, or policy preferences. Thus, while Americans do possess some divergent beliefs about refugees and immigrants, ultimately these are distinctions without a difference when it comes to group affect and policy opinions.
Research finds that citizens evaluate the election result of their preferred party more favourably than those of other parties. However, little is known about whether favourable electoral outcome assessments extend to political elites, or about how to reduce such favouritism. We hypothesize that incumbents and candidates for political office evaluate election outcomes even more favourably than citizens, and that such favouritism diminishes if people are asked to reflect on criteria for evaluating electoral success or receive information about the actual election outcome. Using large-scale data from parallel pre-registered surveys including experiments on representative samples of citizens and politicians/candidates running in the Danish 2021 local elections, we uncover substantial favouritism in election outcome evaluation among citizens and to an even greater extent among the elite. Our reflection treatment does not alter favouritism, while providing information to citizens about electoral outcomes reduces favouritism. These findings speak to important debates on polarisation and democratic support.
Coalition politics presents a major challenge for citizens. Not only do they need to know the parties’ policy profiles, but also who the parties are willing to collaborate with. This task is becoming increasingly difficult as new coalition patterns emerge across Western Europe. Coalition politics may therefore be a major source of frustration for citizens, leading to a sense that politics is too complex to understand, that is, a sense of limited internal political efficacy. Surprisingly, we know little about whether this is actually the case. We analyze this question using a four-wave panel survey during and after the Danish 2022 general election, an unusually complex election where several parties defied traditional coalition structures. Despite this complexity, we demonstrate that Danish citizens gained more internal efficacy during this episode because they learned about the relevant facts. Yet, we find no evidence that people who learned similar facts in the post-government formation period felt more efficacious in response. This suggests that knowledge of coalition politics is critical for citizens’ internal efficacy, but only when complex coalition dynamics are on the agenda.
