Contrary to the dominant literature on autocracies, this article argues and demonstrates that dictators, in addition to being office-seeking, often are driven by policy-seeking motivation-that is, broader beliefs and ideology. The empirical investigation enlists new original data, based on obituaries, about dictators' political motives. The dataset contains information on 297 deceased dictators who held power at some point during the period 1945-2008. The results reveal that the dictators had a variety of different motives for being in power. Many were strongly ideologically motivated, several were primarily motivated by money and power ambitions, and others held power to create stability and democratize. Thus, dictators' motives seem to be substantially more diverse than typically assumed, and the data make it possible to measure motivation. This is key to investigating the direct as well as the conditional impact on political dynamics in autocracies.
German federal elections have long drawn international attention due to the country’s economic influence and its pivotal role in the European Union. Over time, forecasting these elections has evolved into a sophisticated discipline, incorporating diverse models and refined methodologies to improve accuracy. Since 2013, PS: Political Science & Politics has played a key role in tracking these developments by publishing three special symposia dedicated to forecasting German elections (Jérôme 2013, 2017; Jérôme and Graefe 2022). This 2025 symposium marks the fourth installment, continuing a tradition of providing scholars with a platform to share insights and reflect on the field’s ongoing expansion.
Using a rolling cross-section survey of 54,000 voters conducted between mid-October and mid-December, a panel survey of 6,000 voters interviewed in both October and December, and surveys of 1,400 local political elites and officials conducted in both October and December, this study characterizes how confidence in the accuracy of national elections changed with the projected election of President Trump on Election Day. Among voters, Republican confidence immediately increased by 31 percentage points (123% change) and Democrats' confidence declined by 12 percentage points (16% change) such that the confidence among partisan voters was almost identical by mid-December. The most polarized partisans exhibited the largest confidence changes. Among local political elites, the increase in Republicans' confidence mirrored the increase among Republican voters (106% change), but the confidence among Democratic political elites remained high throughout. These findings highlight troubling concerns for sustaining a shared confidence in the accuracy and legitimacy of future elections.
This article analyzes how Poland's Law and Justice (PiS) weaponized migration anxiety as a populist strategy during the 2023 general elections. Using a comparative qualitative case-study approach (George and Bennett 2005), the article examines how PiS leveraged anti-immigration rhetoric to mobilize voters, deepen social polarization, and legitimize its governance. The study draws comparisons with Hungary's 2016 referendum on European Union (EU) refugee quotas to explore how populist governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) use fear-based narratives to consolidate power. It also demonstrates how PiS emulated Viktor Orb & aacute;n's 2022 strategy of holding a referendum alongside parliamentary elections to retain power. The study finds that PiS framed migration as an existential threat, using the referendum as a tool to divert attention from democratic backsliding. This strategy mirrored Orb & aacute;n's use of anti-immigration campaigns to strengthen his electoral support and resist EU pressures. By expanding on the concept of "populist polarizing referendum," the study contributes to research on populist electoral strategies, institutional manipulation, and the role of migration-related fear in political mobilization. It highlights the broader implications of such tactics for democracy and governance in the CEE region, demonstrating how populist leaders instrumentalize migration crises to sustain electoral dominance.
This article examines the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of teaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amid rising global polarization and campus tensions. We report on a cross-institutional course taught concurrently at Middlebury College (United States) and Yeditepe University (Turkey) after October 7 that was designed to address affective polarization and dehumanization through dialogic education. Drawing on mixed methods including pre- and post-semester surveys, student reflections, and podcast projects, we assess the impact of dialogic practices such as structured dialogue, active listening, and engagement with Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. Our findings indicate that dialogic classrooms (1) deepen historical and analytical understanding of the conflict, (2) foster empathy and curiosity, (3) mitigate polarization even in politically divided contexts, and (4) humanize opposing perspectives without erasing convictions. These results underscore the value of dialogic pedagogy for teaching contentious topics across sociopolitical boundaries and suggest its adaptability to other polarizing issues in political science.
This article describes a novel series of classroom simulations for teaching Graham Allison's (1971) three seminal models of foreign policy decision making (i.e., the Rational Actor Model, the Organizational Process Model, and the Bureaucratic Politics Model) and demonstrates the effectiveness of those simulations. The simulations utilize the commercially available board game, 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. The game is a close approximation of the Rational Actor Model. The author developed two additional rule variants to represent the Organizational Process Model and the Bureaucratic Politics Model. The effectiveness of the simulations was evaluated with both a survey and a quiz administered to a treatment section that experienced the simulations and a control section that did not. The results indicate that the simulations are effective pedagogical tools associated with higher student excitement and enjoyment of the material, higher quiz scores, and an increased ability to self-assess understanding of the material.
This goal of this article is to improve our understanding of Morocco's instrumentalization of migration and border management to pressure Spain. We analyze the literature on critical security studies and North-South relations. This study's contribution, resulting from the theoretical approach of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies and the Spanish-Moroccan border-crisis case study, is twofold. First, it decenters the study of security and international relations from the dominant concerns with Western interests and policy priorities. Second, it documents a paradigm shift in the study of North-South relations, highlighting the agency of the Global South. This agency, evident in the case of Morocco, indicates that smaller state actors have the capacity to gain leverage over bigger state actors and that they are not merely recipients of the policies of the Global North. Proof of this is Morocco's successful instrumentalization of the border crisis to obtain Spain's explicit recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara.
This article reflects on the first 10 years of the Southwest Workshop for Mixed Methods Research (SWMMR), which was created to foster methodological pluralism and rigor in political science and related fields. Since its founding, SWMMR has helped to develop mixed methods research while prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and mentorship. The article highlights the annual workshop's role in building an intellectual community while supporting early-career scholars, women, and those from underrepresented backgrounds. We also document SWMMR's contributions to certain methodological debates through sustaining a supportive space for collaborative growth in political science.
In many contemporary migration societies, an increasing percentage of residents do not have suffrage. This also holds true for the city of Vienna. In the 2020 municipal elections, almost a third of the Viennese population was excluded from suffrage; this rate of exclusion had doubled since 2000 (Mokre and Ehs 2021, 716). At the same time, Vienna has a long history of deliberative practices and experiments. A first deliberative experiment dates back to 1990, when a “Forum City Constitution” was initiated by the City Council to discuss the reform of citizens’ participation (Haas et al. 2024, 20). This forum did not lead to concrete political effects, and the deliberative turn reached Vienna only after 2000. Other deliberative practices have been introduced over time. Many of these instruments allow for the participation of the entire resident population irrespective of individuals’ voting rights; however, most of them are neither legally prescribed nor legally binding. These are the most inclusive instruments, and many of them allow people who ordinarily lack voting rights to participate. Normatively, this inclusion can be evaluated positively for two reasons: (1) some form of inclusion of the whole population in democratic decision making is desirable (Bauböck 2001; Gherghina, Mokre, and Mișcoiu 2021); and (2) deliberative practices arguably improve the quality of democracies by broadening inclusion, increasing the efficacy of political decisions, and contributing to civic education (Gherghina and Jacquet 2023, 504).
Deliberative practices have gradually become part of the political discourse, policies, and governance, particularly over the last 30 years in the Republic of Türkiye (Şahin 2024b). However, this period also coincides with a rise in competitive authoritarianism through centralization and regime change (Ergenç and Yüksekkaya 2024; Esen 2021). As debates continue regarding the mechanisms of representative democracy and basic human rights, the ruling party, AKP, presents deliberation as a tool for legitimizing its power, whereas opposition parties see it as a means by which to uphold democratic rights. Despite the wide use of deliberation-related terminology, effective and innovative deliberative examples remain scarce (Tansel 2018).
Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) are a specific form of deliberative mini-publics that are increasingly used to address complex policy challenges, especially in climate governance (Boswell, Dean, and Smith 2023; Smith 2024; Willis, Curato, and Smith, 2022). They involve randomly selected citizens who deliberate and provide policy recommendations (Curato 2021). However, their implementation and uptake largely depend on political parties and elites, which may perceive these novel instruments as challenging their authority (Elstub and Escobar 2019; Setälä 2017). Given the growing use of deliberative mini-publics by representative institutions (Paulis et al. 2021), research has explored their interaction with political parties (Gherghina 2024; Gherghina, Soare, and Jacquet 2020a).
Existing research on Chile's 2022 constitution-making process primarily explained the negative referendum outcome through individual-level factors. The role of political parties in responding to the product of deliberation has been widely overlooked. This article addresses that gap by examining party reactions to the draft constitution, a proposal aligned with the left-wing constitutional project of New Latin American Constitutionalism. Although the proposal embodied this project, party responses proved far more ambivalent, especially in the center-left, where party endorsement often was conditional. This ambivalence weakened the approval campaign and proved decisive in the referendum's rejection. The analysis underscores that partisan ideology matters in deliberative constitution-making.
In recent decades, deliberative practices have increasingly been used around the world by local, regional, and national institutions (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2018; Gherghina, Soare, and Jacquet 2020; Michels 2011). In Romania, most examples of deliberative practices revolve around local-level practices, including participatory budgeting and citizen councils, and focus on how they function and influence the communities (Gherghina and Tap 2021; Schiffbeck 2019).
Deliberative democracy is used increasingly around the world and experiences relevant public support across several countries. However, political parties remain generally reluctant to engage in deliberation. This symposium explains why some parties engage with deliberative practices whereas others disregard them in several countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. The symposium contributes theoretically to the literature by proposing analytical frameworks that explain parties' approaches toward deliberative practices. The symposium's empirical contribution lies in the identification of several variables that have been understudied so far in the research about parties and deliberation, including competition gains, organizational conflicts, and information deficit.
Participatory budgeting (PB) was first implemented in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in 1989 as a measure to reduce poverty and decrease child mortality. Since then, it has spread all over the world. It empowers citizens in political action, increases their awareness of the social and political shortcomings of their communities, and allows them to decide how a part of the local budget should be spent. Despite these benefits, people generally rarely engage with PB when it is offered. With the exception of a few studies (Gherghina, Tap, and Traistaru 2023), we do not yet know what makes individuals abstain from participating in this process.
Recent debates have raised concerns about how academia and policy makers alike rely on country experts when trying to understand the politics of authoritarian regimes. This study argues that one possible source of bias is the experts' network of affiliations and interactions with one another and that we therefore should make the social background and networks of country experts more transparent. We implemented this by examining experts on contemporary Chinese politics using a nomination process to establish a list of 2,200 such experts. We find that US-based and US-educated male academics continue to form the core of this community but that younger cohorts appear to be more diverse in terms of educational background, gender, and geographic location. Our findings provide not only the first analysis of the global China Watcher community but also speak to current debates about the reliability of aggregated expert assessments.
Research has linked the authoritarian personality with support for political violence, including violence against the government. However, support for political violence is simultaneously a measure of and an outcome of the authoritarian personality, and one key component (submission to authority) is the antithesis of one key measure of political violence (violence against authority). This article makes three contributions. First, we accentuate the importance of using exogenous measures of the authoritarian personality when estimating its effect on support for political violence. Second, leveraging data from an original survey and the American National Election Studies, we find that the relationship between authoritarianism and support for violence is conditional: it can be positive, negative, or null, depending on who is in control of government and the specificity of political-violence measures. Third, we argue that another concept-the securitarian personality-might better predict support for violence. Access to firearms-which we argue is downstream from securitarianism-consistently predicts support for political violence.
In 2023, a constitutional amendment that would remove male-only pronouns and replace them with gender-neutral nouns in the state constitution was proposed in South Dakota. Policy changes related to gender pronouns are a sensitive and politically charged issue, particularly in more conservative states such as South Dakota. In April 2024, several months before the vote, we conducted a survey experiment with 727 registered voters in South Dakota to investigate whether providing an additional explanation about the proposed changes in the amendment affected South Dakotans' support for the proposal. We found that Republicans were less supportive of the proposal across all conditions. The results also showed that participants who were given an explanation of the proposed changes were more supportive of the proposal than those to whom it was described as only introducing gender-neutral language, particularly among women, Independents, and Republicans. Overall, we found that the attitudes toward the proposal were structured along partisan lines and that providing additional information about the proposed changes increased popular support.
Higher educational cooperation has long been central to China’s foreign relations. This article examines the political ramifications of the exodus of international students from China during the COVID-19 pandemic. China introduced some of the world’s most restrictive entry requirements for international travelers, forcing most international students at Chinese universities to study remotely between the Spring semesters of 2020 and 2022. This affected the 221,700 foreign students who were enrolled in Chinese universities, 81,600 of whom were from African countries (Mulvey 2021; UNESCO 2022). Travel restrictions were barely eased until late in the spring semester of 2022, and the border was finally opened for most students during the fall semester of 2022 (Liu and Peng 2024). Some students missed five semesters of in-person classes, and others gave up on their studies in China altogether. Thousands of students campaigned globally for the right to travel to China, attend classes in person, and get the educational experience they had envisioned.
In the complex landscape of early twenty-first-century geopolitics, racial ideologies and the concept of the “color line” continue to shape international relations. Charles Henry Pearson, in his seminal work National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), introduced the idea of “unchangeable limits of the higher races,” theorizing that European “higher races” are bound by natural and climatic constraints that prevent them from fully dominating regions populated by “lower races,” such as Africans, Chinese, Indians, and Indigenous peoples. Pearson predicted that these lower races would eventually outnumber and challenge European dominance, reflecting a deterministic view of global racial dynamics.
