Voters must often resolve dilemmas between choosing their favorite candidate and the one likeliest to win an election. Researchers know surprisingly little about how voters even conceptualize electability, let alone make these decisions. We use two novel survey experiments to evaluate how voters trade off policy agreement and electability in their decisions. The first experiment presents respondents with policy agreement between themselves and candidates and candidates’ electability rankings on the same scale, allowing us to directly compare. We show that while making electability information salient modestly reduces support for candidates with limited prospects, respondents remain primarily policy-motivated. Additionally, we show that respondents actually construe electability as a signal about a candidate’s qualifications rather than as a signal about getting votes.
Economic and geospatial drivers of conflict are established, yet aggregate analyses often obscure subnational risk patterns. This study develops a high-resolution risk methodology for fragile, resource-rich states by combining spatial econometrics with the greed-grievance framework. Using a Bayesian approach based on integrated nested Laplace approximation and stochastic partial differential equations, we examine how socio-economic development, natural resources, energy infrastructure, and 14 spatial variables shape four conflict typologies in Nigeria between 1997 and 2023. Results show that wealth reduces conflict risk, while ethnic fractionalization and proximity to resources have actor-specific effects. Petroleum endowments and power infrastructure increase organized rebel and militia activity, whereas ethnic dynamics mainly drive riots. Predictive risk maps support infrastructure planning, supply chain risk mitigation, and targeted stabilization policies.
Does permitting voters to select multiple candidates in majoritarian elections increase diversity among those elected? While majoritarian systems typically use single-vote ballots, research suggests that allowing multiple selections may increase the representation of women and racial minorities. However, empirical evidence regarding actual voter behavior remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a survey experiment that varied the number of selectable candidates from one to three in multimember local elections. The results revealed that, under the multiple-vote condition, respondents were more likely to alternate by gender, particularly in their second- and third-ranked choices, supporting the theory that multiple voting fosters more diverse representation. Nevertheless, men often emerged as the first-ranked choice, giving them an overall advantage at the aggregate level.
How do political lotteries affect choices and outcomes? We study the monthly lotteries used to assign all legislators to deliberation committees in 19th century Belgium. We focus on the period of democratization around the entry of a new, third, and Socialist party. We ask whether random, more extensive exposure to certain MP types affected voting over all roll-call votes between 1892 and 1902, i.e. debating more Socialists, more incumbents, or more of those from majority Flemish-speaking districts. We find small but significant exposure effects on rebelling against the party majority, against the deliberative ideal but along government-opposition logic. Legislatures may similarly limit lottery’s potential today.
This study jointly considers two opportunistic behaviors among political incumbents that may be triggered by electoral uncertainty—policy myopia and policy moderation—which hitherto have been the focus of separate research traditions. We evaluate their prevalence in economic policy-making among Swedish local governments, using a new measure of electoral competitiveness, capturing the incumbent government’s re-election probability, for which plausibly exogenous variation is generated by exploiting national-level polls. We find a substantial moderating effect of competitiveness on incumbents’ tax rate decisions—shifting policy towards the political center—but little evidence of policy myopia, whether in taxation, budget balance, or public investment. Corroborated by evidence from a politician survey, these findings caution against the popular understanding of democratic policy-making as inherently short-sighted.
We demonstrate that the impact of descriptive representation on citizens’ perceptions of democratic processes varies with levels of representation and the nature of the issue decided. In a survey experiment, a committee decides on three policies that disproportionately impact women, but vary in whether individuals perceive them as moral or conferring targeted benefits. Our findings show that citizens associate descriptive representation with fairness. However, perceptions of some decisions, e.g., abortion, strongly improve with women’s equal and over-representation. On other issues—those perceived as offering women a targeted benefit—women’s over-representation reduces perceptions of fairness. These findings highlight the importance of exploring the interaction between decision-making body composition and policy agenda when seeking to understand citizens’ views of democratic policymaking.
How can we measure the effects of campaign events? We estimate how voters respond to a prominent campaign scandal—Donald Trump being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records—using data from a large, eight-wave panel study with waves fielded before, during, and after the verdict. We find the trial had virtually no effect on Trump supporters, even those who reported their support was conditional on an acquittal. We compare this precisely estimated null to estimates from popular cross-sectional methods, which fail to replicate it. The “change” question format estimates a 6% increase in support, while the “counterfactual” survey experimental design estimates a 10% decrease. We formalize the estimands each method estimates and discuss implications for the event study literature.
Machine translation (MT) is an essential tool in many multilingual computational text analysis applications. However, relying on commercial services like Google Translate or DeepL limits reproducibility and can be expensive. This paper assesses the viability of a reproducible, transparent, and affordable alternative: open-source MT models. We ask whether using open-source MT models instead of commercial services substantially changes the measurements obtained from multilingual corpora by extending an influential study by de Vries et al. and contributing an original study focusing on Transformer-based supervised text classification. Our findings reveal negligible differences in results between the two MT approaches, suggesting that open-source MT models are highly valuable tools for multilingual text analysis.
Using a regression discontinuity design, we examine the causal impact of far-right parties’ first-time entry into Swedish municipal politics on the inclusion of candidates from groups frequently targeted by their rhetoric, namely immigrants and sexual minorities. Leveraging validated candidate data, we find that far-right entry has a negative effect on the share of immigrant candidates within mainstream parties. However, this average effect masks important differences across parties. Left-wing parties respond by increasing immigrant recruitment, resulting in a net increase in immigrant representation on ballots. In contrast, right-wing parties reduce their share of immigrant candidates, largely due to limited recruitment of new candidates. These findings highlight how far-right legislative presence shapes the recruitment and retention of minority candidates in democratic politics.
Tax evasion is a significant challenge in many African countries where motivations for tax compliance remain poorly understood. This study investigates whether donations to community goods undermine individuals’ willingness to pay state taxes, particularly where community donations are common and public goods scarce. Using a survey experiment in Kenya, we examine the relationship between community donations and tax compliance attitudes, factoring in access to public goods, government fairness, transparency, and enforcement. Findings indicate that community donations reduce tax compliance attitudes, whereas improved access to public goods enhances positive attitudes toward taxes and trust in government. This suggests that perceptions of a fair exchange with the government can be more important than enforcement.
The literature on American politics widely agrees that early victories in U.S. presidential primaries are pivotal for securing the nomination, a belief that underpins the front-loading behavior of states. However, demonstrating this success-breeds-success effect is challenging because unobserved candidate qualities could independently link early victories to later success. To address this, we used a regression-discontinuity design, focusing on variations near the victory threshold. Our analysis shows that conclusions about early states rely heavily on limited observations around the cutoff. If any inference is to be drawn, it is that winning in Iowa or New Hampshire has no lasting impact on subsequent contests, nor does winning on any election day affect outcomes on the next. These findings question the presence of momentum effects for winners in the primaries.
Interethnic marriage is commonly employed as an indicator of social cohesion. However, intermarriages are a reflection of both preferences and opportunities. If we are to interpret intermarriage rates as indicators of people’s willingness to cross group boundaries, we must find a way of controlling for exposure to out-group members in local marriage markets. In this Note, I exploit census data from Zambia to demonstrate how this can be done. The findings, which reveal significant differences across estimates that do and do not control for local exposure to out-group members, underscore a significant weakness in common approaches. The findings also point to important substantive implications for understanding changes in social cohesion in Zambia—and likely other African societies—over time.
Both academic researchers and political pundits have generally accepted two over-time features of persuasion by partisan media: that the persuasive effects of partisan media might be temporary and decay quickly after a single exposure, and that these effects accumulate from multiple exposures. That effects decay may serve to ameliorate concerns about the broad impact of such media on partisan polarization. Yet the assumption that persuasive effects accumulate may raise larger concerns from real-world repeat exposure. To explore these possibilities, we implement a novel set of multiwave experiments that allow us to examine concerns about media effects over time. We present estimates from three studies suggesting that the persuasive effect of exposure to just a short article or video clip can persist for up to a week. In contrast to this persistence, our results suggest that an experiment adequately powered to detect the cumulative effect from multiple doses of partisan media—let alone one powered to detect cumulative effects among subgroups of the population—would require an unrealistic number of respondents. These cumulative effects are thus difficult to test in an experimental setting with limited resources.
District-based elections are a central feature of local governance throughout the United States. Prior work has explored whether district-based elections impact racial/ethnic descriptive representation in local office; much less is known about the impacts of local district-based elections on other dimensions of representation. We consider another such dimension: socioeconomic class. To explore how district-based elections shape the composition of locally elected officials on class dimensions, we focus on city councils and study the dramatic shift towards district-based elections in California in the 2010s. We construct a statewide mapping of newly drawn council districts; we also draw on rich and partially hand-collected data on council candidates and members. We find that district-based elections increase the share of candidates and council members from lower-income and higher renter share neighborhoods, and lead to fewer members with business backgrounds.
Inter-party communication is crucial in representative democracies, facilitating information exchange and dialogue among political parties. Despite its importance, research on this topic remains limited due to lacking conceptual clarity and challenges in large-scale measurement. This article offers a comprehensive definition of inter-party communication as public communication by parties about others, with a positive, neutral, or negative stance, focusing on collaboration, policy, or personal issues. To effectively measure this phenomenon, we introduce a novel transformer-based approach capable of automatically classifying large volumes of text. Case studies on coalition signals in Germany and negative campaigning in Austria demonstrate its effectiveness. The study deepens our understanding of party competition, advances methods of automated text classification, and enables new research on political communication.
Scholars know little about participation in consultative events such as town halls, and even less about newer modalities, such as telephone town halls. We study participation in such events with a large, randomized field trial in which Australian voters received varying invitations to a telephone town hall with their representative. In addition to invitations framed prospectively or retrospectively, a control condition provided no rationale for participation. Surprisingly, the control group had higher acceptance rates than retrospective for both events, and for prospective in May. After accounting for this, treatment groups remained on the call longer, significantly for prospective in July. We see no differences by gender, but the youngest cohort had higher acceptance rates in the prospective condition than in the control for both events.
Recent scholarship has emphasized methodological innovations to mitigate preference falsification in public opinion data, yet systematic scrutiny of bias in regression analyses remains limited. Drawing on analyses of political trust in China, we offer three key insights. First, determining the direction of social desirability bias in regression estimates—whether over- or underestimation—is challenging ex ante. Second, analyses of two nationally representative Chinese surveys, one incorporating a list experiment, cast doubt on the purported positive effect of social welfare expansion on political trust. Extending beyond social welfare and the Chinese case, we find similar biases when regressions rely on direct questions. Third, we show that certain identification strategies can partially mitigate regression bias when direct questions are unavoidable.
Understanding how political information is transmitted requires tools that can reliably and scalably capture complex signals in text. While existing studies highlight interest groups as strategic information providers, empirical analysis has been constrained by reliance on expert annotation. Using policy documents released by interest groups, this study shows that fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) outperform lightly trained workers, crowdworkers, and zero-shot LLMs in distinguishing two difficult-to-separate categories: informative signals that help improve political decision-making and associative signals that shape preferences but lack substantive relevance. We further demonstrate that the classifier generalizes out of distribution across two applications. Although the empirical setting is domain-specific, the approach offers a scalable method for expert-driven text coding applicable to other areas of political inquiry.
Do anti-elitist parties behave differently in parliament than other parties? Existing evidence is inconclusive: some studies suggest that anti-elitist parties do not show a shared voting pattern as this is mainly structured by their left- or right-wing ideology. Others suggest that these parties vote against legislation more often. In order to address this question, we develop a new method that allows one to look at different explanations of voting concurrently while also taking into account characteristics of the vote. We find that anti-elitist parties do vote in a similar way and different from other parties, but only on legislative votes. As such, we present a major step forward in our understanding of and methodological approach to parliamentary voting behavior.
Many political science theories posit empirical relationships that are conditioned by some moderating variable, which scholars model using a multiplicative interaction term in a regression. In recent years, scholars have begun using such terms in dynamic regression models with time series data. However, the lack of guidance on adding multiplicative interactions to these workhorse models exposes problems with the consistency of the estimator, model restrictions, and interpretation. This paper provides theoretical and practical guidance to address these problems. First, we define the conditions under which scholars can ensure consistent estimates when estimating relationships conditioned by a moderating variable in dynamic models. Second, we introduce a general model that makes no theoretical assumptions about precisely how conditional relationships unfold over time. Third, we develop a flexible approach for interpreting such models. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework with simulation evidence and an empirical application.
