We examine the effectiveness of electoral propaganda in an autocracy, using Russia as a unique setting. Exploiting the unexpected release of a pro-regime propaganda video about Vladimir Putin shortly before the presidential election, we conducted a field experiment by randomly promoting the video to voters via a telephone survey and measuring self-reported voting behaviour after the election. Our results show that the pro-regime treatment successfully mobilized offline media consumers to vote for Putin, but failed to persuade online media users, and even backfired among respondents dissatisfied with the regime. Using electoral statistics for all major Russian cities and instrumenting public interest in the propaganda video with rainfall, we find a positive, albeit moderate, causal effect of the video on Putin’s vote share. As an alternative treatment, we used a viral anti-corruption video by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which consistently undermined regime support among both offline and online media consumers.
Which social groups do political parties appeal to? This is an important question, yet a lack of comparative data has constrained research. To address this gap, we introduce the Parties’ Social Group Appeals (PSoGA) Database, which includes two novel datasets covering 791 election manifestos from 139 parties across Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom from 1970 to 2025. This article outlines the methodology for constructing and validating the datasets, demonstrates compatibility with policy-focused resources like MARPOR, and highlights key aspects. This database provides researchers with unprecedented insight into representation dynamics across space and time by documenting the groups that parties speak about and appeal to.
Why are electoral winners more willing to support democratic norm violations? Using a mediator blockage survey experiment in the United States, I find that winners endorse norm erosion due to heightened in-party favoritism following their party’s electoral victory. The experiment successfully manipulated in-party favoritism, the mediator, demonstrating that respondents exposed to a winning signal, suggesting their party is likely to secure both the presidency and control of Congress, exhibit greater in-party favoritism. This increase significantly predicts a greater tendency to perceive norm-eroding policies, such as banning protests or disqualifying candidates, as democratic and to support these policies. Additionally, winners are less likely to evaluate these policies through a lens of strategic political calculation, that is, whether these policies benefit their party directly or indirectly, challenging the prevailing view that winners tolerate norm violations for instrumental reasons.
The immigration debate is a major source of political conflict, yet little is known about how citizens themselves perceive it. This paper uses a survey experiment with open-ended questions to examine which arguments respondents attribute to their opponents, which they consider the strongest for the opposing side, and how both compare to the arguments opponents actually use. The study is conducted in Norway, a low-polarization, consensus-oriented context where relatively accurate and charitable interpretations of opponents’ reasoning might be expected. Still, the findings show that while many recognize legitimate arguments on the other side, they attribute considerably weaker arguments to their opponents. Text analysis reveals that their preferred counterarguments resemble opponents’ own more closely than those they attribute to them. This suggests that mutual understanding in the immigration debate is obstructed less by a failure to appreciate opponents’ arguments than a systematic misrepresentation of them.
Exclusionary attitudes are often justified by histories of conflict. A large body of literature explores how making in-group victimhood salient can affect attitudes towards out-groups. Much less, however, has been done to study how episodes in history that position the in-group as perpetrators may reduce or exacerbate animosity towards the victimized group. We fill this gap by studying antisemitism in contemporary Spain. Using a well-powered and pre-registered survey experiment, we prime respondents with the historical expulsion of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century. The effects of priming this historical episode are conditional on one’s degree of national attachment: respondents who are less attached to the Spanish nation express lower levels of antisemitism in response to the treatment, while those reporting high levels of attachment appear to exhibit a modest backlash. These results update our understanding of how majority populations confront histories that implicate their own group as perpetrators.
Spatial inequalities in human capital are reshaping the politics of high-income democracies. However, comparative research on the political consequences of spatial inequality is constrained by a lack of data that is geographically detailed and cross-nationally comparable. This letter introduces the Regional Human Capital Database (RHCD), an open-access dataset covering 60,000 units in twenty wealthy democracies from the 1980s onward. The RHCD offers disaggregated data on educational attainment, demographics, urban structure, and voting, enabling analysis of within-region variation with unprecedented precision. We explain the construction of the dataset, including extensive checks to ensure reliability and validity. Our analysis demonstrates its value by showing growing urban-rural divides in educational attainment across countries with differing institutions and links between human capital and populist-right voting even within economically dynamic cities. The RHCD advances comparative research on the spatial dimensions of political change, offering a vital resource for scholars across political science and beyond.
Within political institutions insulated from money in politics and domestic electoral considerations, to what extent are non-state actors able to influence regulations? Many international organizations (IOs) are composed only of state members, but their regulations have far-reaching consequences for non-state actors. This paper sheds new light on the influence of non-state actors, particularly firms, on regulations, with a focus on the case of OECD tax evasion regulations. I argue that firms and industry associations work to build positive reputations with bureaucrats through broad-based and high-quality written public comments to further their policy preferences. I present evidence that bureaucrats make decisions in line with these expectations through quantitative analysis of a new dataset of 3,349 OECD public comments, natural language processing methods, and thirty-three in-depth interviews. The results indicate that stakeholder engagement may be a double-edged sword: while intended to democratize access to the policy-making process, even these fora are susceptible to strategic firm behavior. However, while well-resourced firms and associations are at an advantage in having their voice heard in the creation of regulations, smaller firms that invest substantially in the process can have an outsized influence. International taxation also represents a substantively important case of non-state actor influence given the successful co-ordination of 147 countries on new tax regulations.
Prior work has often studied how focusing events---in particular police killings of unarmed people---affect citizens' attitudes. Do focusing events also affect citizens' behaviors---changing the scope of conflict by incorporating prospective voters into the political system? We take as an empirical case the murder of George Floyd. Using nationwide voter file data from the U.S. ($N$ $\approx$ 200 million), we leverage regression discontinuity in time methods to show Floyd's murder noticeably increased voter registration. These effects are present across many individual subgroups---both on the left and the right---and geographic locations. Floyd's untimely death sparked many people from previously marginalized backgrounds to register, but simultaneously also increased registrations among the politically advantaged---thus mitigating any impact on the partisan balance of power. In short, high profile traumatic events like Floyd's death do not appear to disproportionately advantage groups seeking reforms to change the circumstances surrounding his death.
Beyond its role in nation and state building, I argue that standard language promotion enables autocrats to increase citizens' satisfaction with the government by expanding the reach of propaganda. Drawing on large-scale surveys supplemented by original interviews, I test this argument in China, which has successfully promoted a common language, putonghua, in recent decades. By leveraging cross-cohort, cross-locality variations in exposure to putonghua at school following a major language reform in 2001, I find that greater exposure to putonghua increases government satisfaction. Individual-level evidence highlights a potential mechanism: increased consumption of television political news, a key channel for state propaganda delivered exclusively in putonghua. This study has implications for state-society communications and authoritarian control.
Women politicians report that social media abuse harms their personal and professional lives. However, prior text-based research finds that men receive more general online hostility than women - except among the most visible politicians. I hypothesize that backlash to perceived gender-role violations - such as public visibility - will include distinctly gendered content, such as slurs and references to appearance. Using a novel and replicable method, I analyze hostile and gendered language in three million social media mentions of US state representatives. I find that hostility towards visible women differs from men in content, not volume. Visible women face similar volumes of generic hostility but twice as much gender-specific abuse as men. This pattern holds across two alternate measures of perceived conformity to traditional gender roles: legislator tone and the presence of women in the chamber. Incorporating gendered content into text-based analyses reconciles discrepancies between observational and self-reported data and validates women politicians' reports.
Many models of domestic politics in international relations presume that political elites correctly perceive public preferences, even as a growing body of research in political behavior calls this assumption into question. Leveraging seven paired surveys of 4,852 foreign policy elites and 13,687 members of the American public from 2004-24 on twenty-four different questions, we show elites systematically misperceive public opinion in foreign policy, misperceiving the public as more isolationist and inward-looking than it actually is. We replicate this finding with a paired experiment showing that elites effectively underestimate the public's responsiveness to cues from international organizations, and that elites with isolationist stereotypes underestimate public approval the most. These dynamics - which operate predominantly through stereotyping, rather than projection - have important implications for the study of political elites, public opinion about foreign policy, and efforts to test theoretical models of domestic politics in international relations using public opinion data alone.
Free and open public debate is a cornerstone of democratic representation, yet many politicians refrain from participating in policy debates. This study examines how political violence contributes to such silencing and whether it disproportionately affects historically marginalized groups. Using a unique Swedish politician survey (five waves, N = 43,000), we analyze whether violence reduces marginalized politicians’ participation in debates and whether it disproportionately silences debates challenging hegemonic male interests. We find that women and immigrant-background politicians are significantly more likely than their counterparts to report withdrawing from public debates because of violence and to avoid a broader range of topics. Women are particularly likely to refrain from debates on gender equality, while immigrant-background politicians are not more likely to avoid immigration debates. These chilling effects suggest that violence can narrow the range of voices present in policy debates, potentially diminishing marginalized groups’ ability to represent constituents and reinforcing hegemonic men’s political dominance.
It has long been argued that paying politicians higher salaries should help decrease corruption. However, the empirical evidence is mixed, partly due to the large variation in contexts, research designs, conceptual definitions and measures of corruption, and the predominance of case studies with potentially limited generalizability. To alleviate these challenges, we evaluate uniformly defined and validated corruption risk indicators from an original dataset of more than 2.4 million government contracts in eleven EU countries, covering more than half of the European Union population and gross domestic product. To aid causal identification, we exploit sizable changes in salaries of local politicians tied to population size across close to 100 discrete salary thresholds. Applying fixed effects estimators, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we consistently find that better-paid local politicians (by about 15 per cent on average) oversee less risky procurement contracts, by a third to one standard deviation on our measure of corruption risk.
How does technological change affect social policy preferences? We advance this lively debate by focusing on the role of dual vocational education and training (VET). Existing literature would lead us to expect that dual VET increases demand for compensatory social policy and magnifies the effect of automation risk on such demands. In contrast, we contend that dual VET weakens demand for compensatory social policy through three non-mutually exclusive mechanisms that we refer to as (i) material self-interest; (ii) workplace socialization; and (iii) skill certification. We further hypothesize that dual VET mitigates the association between automation risk and social policy preferences. Analyzing cross-national individual data from the European Social Survey and national-level data on education systems, we find strong evidence for our argument. The paper advances the debate on social policy preferences in the age of automation and sheds new light on the relationship between skill formation and social policy preferences.
This research note investigates how the involvement of firms in American politics has developed over the past two decades. The central question is whether individual firms have become more active lobbyists compared to business associations in the US Congress over this period. Different subdisciplines in political science have various expectations regarding the evolution of firm lobbying. We test which perspective is most accurate. To evaluate the hypotheses, we use a novel dataset comprising approximately 180,000 instances of lobbying activity by different types of interest organizations across a wide range of sectors and issues. In our analyses, we trace both the relative activity of firms versus business associations and their centrality in lobbying networks. While most theoretical models in the literature suggest a rise of firm lobbying activity, our results highlight a strikingly stable pattern of firm lobbying activity and centrality within the US political system over the past two decades.
Disinformation poses a serious threat to democracy, yet regulating it risks infringing on freedom of speech. This article defends the democratic legitimacy of regulating disinformation by distinguishing it from two similar forms of speech: ‘false opinion’ and ‘toxic persuasion’. I argue that disinformation, as deliberate falsehoods intended to manipulate citizens’ political judgment, does not merit protection. Regulation, on this account, is normatively legitimate and desirable when it safeguards citizens’ ability to function as meaningful decision makers in the democratic common world. I then propose a dual-track model to identify removable content. Paired with regular review, transparency obligations, and an appeal process, this framework offers principles that help democracies to balance between protecting expressive freedom and resisting disinformation.
Business interests have often stymied progress on climate policy, raising the question of the source of business opposition to decarbonization policy. We bring intertemporal trade-offs into the study of business and climate change to build new theory on the relationship between firm ownership and policy opposition. Climate policy confronts companies with an intertemporal trade-off: incur costs today for gains in the future. Firms with short-term owners face pressure to maximize short-term profits, making them unable to undertake this trade-off. They therefore oppose climate policy. We test our argument using a dataset of US firms and an original firm-level measure of climate policy opposition. Firms most exposed to short-term capital oppose policy more than observably similar firms with long-term ownership. Our theory develops the microfoundations of long-term policy making. The greater an economy’s exposure to impatient capital, the more business opposition policy makers are likely to face in adopting long-term policies.
This article challenges the view that war and interdependence are inherently incompatible by examining how combatants manage collective institutions during conflict. Using the internet as a case of such an institution, we show that belligerents selectively preserve or disrupt mutual access based on battlefield conditions. Disruption is more likely during mobile offensives, which offer greater operational freedom, while static or constrained operations incentivize maintaining interdependence for co-ordination, intelligence, or deception. Drawing on geolocated data from internet outages in the Russia-Ukraine war (2022-3) and qualitative evidence from this conflict and the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflicts (2020, 2023), we find that the disruption likelihood declines as battlefield constraints increase. These findings reveal how interdependence can serve as a tactical asset rather than merely a casualty of war. This has important implications for understanding the relationship between institutions and conflict, as wartime strategies shape not only battlefield outcomes but also prospects for post-war peace building.
Political philosophers writing about civil disobedience have tended to neglect the anxiety of the state about such disobedience. I identify three components of state anxiety - Contagion, Fragility, Value - concerning the contagiousness of disobedience, and the fragility and value of public institutions. I argue that state anxiety can be substantiated or specious, depending on the plausibility of Contagion and Fragility. It can also be significant or trivial, depending on the plausibility of Value. Finally, and focusing on John Rawls' influential discussions of civil disobedience, I show how political philosophizing can mirror state anxiety about disobedience and, in doing so, bolster it.
Electoral integrity has come under increasing pressure in the United States. Evidence shows that voters rarely ‘punish’ anti-democratic behavior if doing so implies voting for opponents. However, such electoral defection sets a high bar for detecting voter alienation. Here, I complement the analysis of partisans’ willingness to forego democracy’s rules with a more pliable measure of support: partisan attachments. Three preregistered survey experiments offer a nuanced picture of partisans’ tolerance for electoral subversion. On the one hand, few partisans will defend democracy by voting against their party. On the other hand, electoral violations alienate the party base and can even reduce animosity towards the opposing party, indicating that parties cannot undermine elections with impunity. Finally, the evidence suggests that partisans mainly update partisan attachments when the information is sponsored by a co-partisan source, indicating that credible linkage institutions may play a crucial role in shaping accountability.
