Voters' ability to assess the performance of elected leaders is central to theories of democratic accountability. I extend theories of retrospective voting by considering the influence of political discussion. Using a panel survey of Brazilian respondents, I examine the relationship between political disagreement in voters' conversation networks and changes in candidate support across party lines during President Lula da Silva's first term. I find that Brazilians with more disagreeing conversation partners are substantially more likely to update their views and support different candidates going into the next election. Further, I find suggestive evidence that network disagreement reduces support for Lula by producing more negative evaluations of his performance. The results indicate that conversation networks play a significant but underappreciated role in retrospective evaluations of elected leaders.
This study investigates the attitudinal consequences of election occurrence, focusing on political trust and efficacy. While prior research has examined how electoral outcomes shape citizens' views, less is known about whether elections themselves influence political attitudes. Leveraging the quasi-experimental variation created when some prefectures deviated from Japan's unified electoral cycle in 2023, we compare survey responses collected before and after the elections across prefectures that shared a nationwide electoral environment but differed in whether residents had the opportunity to participate. The findings show that elections do not significantly affect political efficacy but do enhance political trust when high-salience gubernatorial contests coincide with local council elections. Subgroup analyses reveal that these trust-enhancing effects are concentrated among lower-educated and lower-income citizens, suggesting that elections may narrow participatory inequalities, even if they do not generate a self-reinforcing cycle of participation. By shifting attention from electoral outcomes to electoral occurrence, this study advances understanding of how elections shape political attitudes and engages with debates on second-order elections that emphasize variation in the salience of contests. The results underscore the symbolic and substantive roles of elections in sustaining democratic legitimacy and highlight how the visibility of elections can reinforce political trust.
Candidate selection procedures are often cited as a reason for the underrepresentation of women. This article focuses on the role of party members, who have become more influential as candidate selection procedures have grown more inclusive. While theory often assumes a negative relationship between inclusivity and representativeness, empirical findings are mixed. Using a ranked conjoint experiment among Dutch party members, this study examines how party members evaluate and rank candidates under different selection settings. I find no evidence that more inclusive selection procedures lead to less gender-balanced candidate lists. Party members show a preference for women candidates but place even greater weight on incumbency and party activity. As access to these resources remains unequally distributed, women still face an indirect disadvantage in candidate selection.
Ideological cues can shape pop culture preferences - for instance, being told that a given artist is a liberal should normally increase likeability towards them amongs. In light of the increasing political advocacy role of entertainers across the globe, it is however surprising that little evidence exists about the reverse mechanism - that is, that learning about the political leaning of an artist that we appreciate affects our own political leaning. This research note presents novel experimental evidence suggesting that such mechanism might also be at play. We leverage the results of a novel experimental study conducted on a sample of American respondents in February 2024 (N = 1,821) in which we manipulated cues about the political leaning of two major pop stars, Taylor Swift and Kanye West, and assessed whether the saliency of such cues shapes musical and political preferences. Results provide preliminary support the idea that political cues can affect musical preferences, which is not surprising, but also that musical cues can in turn, under certain circumstances, affect political preferences and attitudes.
Many studies have examined how the rise of radical right parties influences the general tone of legislative debates, particularly how mainstream parties tend to demonize and disengage from these parties through specific rhetoric and strategies. However, less attention has been given to their growing electoral success and how this affects speeches aimed at them in parliamentary debates. This study argues that hostility toward a radical right party is influenced by its electoral success relative to a mainstream party in their respective district. Using a combination of a dictionary approach and word-embedding techniques, I analyze the emotional tone of speeches directed at Sweden Democrats from 2010 to 2022. Results indicate that center-right legislators' tone becomes less confrontational when SD's vote share increases relative to their own party in the previous election. Additionally, I find that SD's longer presence in parliament improves mainstream right MPs' tone toward them and that their legislative incumbency amplifies the impact of SD's relative gains on negativity. Overall, the study explains why center-right representatives, concerned about vote loss, might strategically avoid criticizing the radical right.
Voter turnout patterns are influenced by both individual values and systematic factors including election laws. For many years, US state legislatures engaged in bipartisan efforts to enact election laws designed to increase voter turnout by making voting easier. Beginning about 50 years ago, however, many US legislatures have enacted a series of new voting laws that make voting more difficult and restrict voter turnout. These include laws requiring voters to produce more rigorous identification documents to register and vote, and laws eliminating or significantly restricting voting by mail (VBM). Research indicates that partisanship and self-interest variables have powerful effects on attitudes toward voting laws. In this study we seek to understand how civic values that extend beyond the self variously reinforce or moderate public attitudes toward voting laws. We propose that civic duty and trust (both interpersonal and institutional) condition partisan and self-interest based attitudes toward voting laws (e.g. voter ID, vote by mail). Findings indicate that institutional trust is significantly associated with less support for voter ID and greater support for mail-in voting. Civic duty and interpersonal trust were not significantly associated with the dependent variables in the fully specified model.
This study examines the relationship between sleep patterns and various forms of political participation. Building on prior work, which mostly focused on the association between sleep duration and voter turnout, this study investigates a broader spectrum of political actions, such as attending political conventions, contacting public officials, and expressing political opinions on social media. Drawing on data from a longitudinal survey of 800 respondents in Israel, our findings suggest that shorter sleep duration positively correlates with higher levels of political engagement and interest. These findings challenge the conventional notion that inadequate sleep reduces civic participation. Furthermore, the study uncovers a potential connection between longer sleep duration on free days and more liberal political views. This research contributes to our understanding of the complex interplay between sleep habits and political engagement, highlighting the need for further investigations of this emerging field.
Although youth often constitute a significant portion of a country's population, they remain underrepresented in national parliaments around the world. While previous research has highlighted some of the causes and effects of youth underrepresentation, we aim to examine the unexplored relationship between compulsory voting and youth representation. We hypothesize that because youth electoral turnout should equalize with older adult's electoral turnout under compulsory voting, parties will have an incentive to nominate more young candidates, which should also lead to more youth representatives. We test this stipulation using a unique dataset with nearly 500 elections in democracies from 1945 to 2024. Empirically, we find a null relationship between compulsory voting and higher youth representation. For the larger literature on youth representation, this implies that compulsory voting is not the panacea that can render parliaments more representative with society in terms of their age representation.
Overestimating voter turnout in surveys is a persistent issue that leads to misreporting and obscures important demographic differences. A split-sample experiment in the Danish National Election Study 2022 tested the effect of probing for non-voting, reducing overreporting by two percentage points. However, a substantial 10-percentage-point gap remains compared to actual turnout, largely attributable to self-selection bias. This bias further diminishes clear distinctions in turnout across gender, age, education, country of origin and marital status when comparing survey-reported data to population-validated and sampling frame-validated turnout data. These findings underscore the importance of using actual validated turnout data whenever possible and highlight the limited effectiveness of probing for non-voting in mitigating turnout overestimation.
In general, older individuals have higher voter turnout. In many countries, however, the youngest citizens are not the least likely to vote. Nonetheless, it is difficult to estimate the causal effect of first-time voting on turnout because many factors change with age. This study exploits a natural experiment in Japan. The proportion of first-time voters in a municipality can be estimated by the time from the latest local election to the current national election. In Japan, the timing of the latest local election can be regarded as randomly decided. Thus, scholars only have to regress the turnout of the youngest generation on the estimated share of the first-time voters to estimate the first-time voter boost. The results show that the first-time voter boost is 10.9 percentage points.
The Trump-Hitler comparison has generated considerable debate in the United States, yet we know far less about how Europeans respond to such a salient historical analogy. This study addresses that gap using nationally representative online surveys fielded in December 2024 in Austria, Denmark, and Spain. We treat responses to the Trump-Hitler item not as an assessment of historical equivalence, but as a political judgment about a highly charged analogy that can function as an authoritarian-warning signal for some citizens and as an illegitimate or defamatory escalation for others. Descriptively, perceptions vary significantly across countries, with Spain showing the highest endorsement of similarity and Austria the lowest. Multivariable models indicate that political ideology is the strongest and most consistent predictor: left-leaning respondents are more likely to endorse the analogy, while those sympathetic to far-right parties are substantially more likely to reject it. Cross-national gaps are partly explained by compositional differences in observed covariates, but a residual remains. Overall, the findings advance research on historical analogy in public opinion by showing how partisan motivated reasoning and nationally embedded memory environments jointly structure endorsement, rejection, and uncertainty around salient historical analogies.
Misinformation poses an important challenge for democracy, yet political debates appear to have polarized citizens' perceptions and responses to misinformation. In a first experiment administered during the 2021 Canadian federal election, respondents were asked how acceptable it is for politicians to spread false information on climate change and COVID-19 for randomly assigned purposes. While most citizens considered misinformation unacceptable, opposing government action on these issues and having a right-wing ideology were associated with greater tolerance. I investigate these ideological differences further using observational and experimental data collected during the 2022 Quebec provincial election. I demonstrate that right-wing citizens are less likely to believe in the existence of an impartial truth, more indifferent to misinformation, and less supportive of measures to combat it than left-wing citizens. These patterns may partly reflect perceptions on the right that public discourses about misinformation are biased against them. The findings suggest that combatting misinformation has become a negatively valenced concept on the right and highlight how the politicization of misinformation debates can influence our ability to respond to it.
Though it seems normatively desirable to have representatives who can competently author and pass legislation, previous works have failed to find a direct connection between an incumbent's legislative effectiveness score and their vote share. While some of this is due to the complexity of the information environment, I argue that there may also be tradeoffs with ideological distance that have yet to be considered. Using experimental data from a large-scale national survey, I test how legislative effectiveness, shared partisanship, and ideological distance all interact to shape voters' assessments. I find that when evaluating members from the opposite party, the value of effectiveness significantly diminishes as ideological distance increases. When looking at cases where the respondent and the representative share the same party, however, I fail to find a significant interaction between effectiveness and distance. These latter findings offer an individual-level complement to works showing that effectiveness can be advantageous in the primary context, while the former add an important nuance to our understanding of how the value of certain non-ideological attributes can vary across individuals.
We examine how citizens update their economic assessments using a real-world event: the Japanese government's release of official GDP data. While prior research shows that subjective evaluations correlate with macroeconomic indicators, the mechanisms through which new information changes public opinion remain unclear. To address this gap, we fielded an original survey that compared Japanese respondents' economic views immediately before and after the February 2020 release of quarterly GDP figures, which reported a larger-than-expected decline in growth. Respondents surveyed after the release expressed significantly greater pessimism, particularly on the retrospective-sociotropic and prospective-egotropic dimensions. However, not all groups updated to the same degree. Individuals who regularly engaged in marketplace activities - through employment, financial investments, or supermarket shopping - showed smaller changes, consistent with having more accurate priors. The moderating effect of shopping is especially notable, suggesting that everyday market interactions can provide valuable insights into the broader economy. Taken together, these findings indicate that official statistics can shape public opinion, but their influence is conditional on the informational resources individuals bring to bear.
The performance of parties in elections does not necessarily reflect the level of support they enjoy among the electorate. Election outcomes depend on how voter preferences are aggregated, and the choice of the electoral method can have a greater impact than the preferences themselves. As a corollary of this finding, election results may be positively or negatively correlated with voter evaluations of parties, or they may be uncorrelated. Using short-term and long-term data from Germany, this paper demonstrates that voter preferences and party performance are interconnected in parliamentary elections under a PR voting system. Our findings challenge widely held narratives about the crisis of social democratic parties and the alleged rise in support for right-wing parties.
