This study examines the relationship between electoral systems and electoral integrity across a panel of 1,641 elections held in 141 countries over the period 1832–2024. Employing a correlated random-effects framework, which simultaneously recovers within-country estimates equivalent to fixed effects and between-country estimates capturing stable structural differences, the analysis reveals that proportional representation is associated with short-run reductions in electoral integrity within countries over time, reflecting administrative complexity, diffuse accountability costs, and the institutional turbulence that typically accompanies electoral system transitions. Yet countries with persistently proportional electoral systems exhibit substantially higher electoral integrity in cross-national comparison, reflecting the long-run co-evolution between proportional representation institutions and integrity-sustaining democratic infrastructure. These divergent effects cannot be recovered by cross-sectional or pooled analyses, which conflate two opposing mechanisms. The study shows that while proportional representation ultimately benefits electoral integrity when its full range of benefits is materialized in the process of co-evolution with democracy, the short-term transitional effects should not be overlooked.
Why do citizens sometimes accept undemocratic actions by political leaders? Building on growing debates about citizens’ democratic attitudes, we examine whether support for executive power grabs is associated not only with citizens’ partisan alignment but also with their perceptions of government performance and animosity toward political opponents. South Korea’s sudden declaration of martial law in December 2024 offers a unique real-world case for examining this question. Using original survey data collected 1 month after the incident from 1,500 respondents, we find that individuals with positive views of the economy, particularly incumbent supporters, are more likely to endorse the stated justifications for martial law. Hostility toward the opposition is also associated with higher endorsement among incumbent supporters and with a weaker observed relationship between economic evaluations and democratic accountability. Our findings suggest that even in established democracies, public support for democratic norms may be fragile in times of crisis—especially under deep polarization and when citizens view the executive as effective.
It is well-documented that Americans perceive conditions more favorably when their preferred party is in power. This study considers a second, more subtle, but potentially impactful partisan bias: that the governing party’s policy reputations lead voters to perceive better conditions on the issues it “owns.” In US politics, voters trust Democrats more on environmental, healthcare, education, and safety net issues while Republicans are favored on immigration, crime, defense, and keeping taxes low. In two studies, I observe whether these reputations also impact perceptions when each party is in power. First, I analyze hundreds of survey toplines from Gallup Trends, dating from 1956 to the present, about public perceptions on a variety of party-owned policy areas. Second, to leverage greater variation in control of subnational government, I analyze seven surveys that ask about state-level conditions as well. While results from the former analysis are only suggestive, both approaches point toward an association between the governing party and how citizens assess conditions on the issues it owns.
Racial minorities voted for Trump at higher rates in 2024 than in previous elections, prompting renewed interest in the factors driving minority vote choice. Here, we focus on Asian Americans, the fastest growing single-race group in the United States. Bridging theories of economic voting and race-centered explanations, we present a comprehensive, up-to-date account of Asian American vote choice through the Trump era. We analyze the 2024, 2020, and 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Surveys to assess indicators of Trump support over time among Asian Americans, with comparative analysis of Black, Latino, and White voters ( N = 24,061). We find that economic considerations shaped vote choice in 2024 among Asian Americans, and all other racial groups. Linked fate remained associated with lower Trump support among Asian Americans in 2024, indicating that race continued to matter even years after the peak of anti-Asian hate. In comparison, linked fate also shaped opposition to Trump among Black voters but not Latinos in 2024. Throughout the Trump era, racial resentment among non-Black racial groups and anti-immigrant sentiment among all racial groups consistently predicted greater Trump support, including Asian Americans, despite their predominantly immigrant-origin backgrounds. This research contributes to growing scholarship that addresses conservatism among minoritized communities.
Recent years have witnessed renewed calls for reparations to advance racial equality in the United States. In response, a number of localities and institutions of higher education have provided reparations to the descendants of slaves. However, the policy remains controversial as evidenced by a clear racial divide characterized by overwhelmingly White opposition to reparations and strong majorities of African Americans supporting the provision of cash payments to the descendants of slaves. While much attention has been paid to empirical explorations of White opinion, in this paper we investigate the determinants of African American opinion, with a particular focus on the influence of measures of economic self-interest and linked fate in structuring African American opinion. Using data from two large national surveys of Americans, we find consistent evidence that linked fate is a strong and consistent predictor of African American support for reparations, while self-interest is a weaker and less consistent predictor, controlling for a wide array of political, socioeconomic, and attitudinal factors. These findings are reinforced by quantitative and qualitative content analysis of open-ended responses by African Americans to the question why they support reparations. Our results suggest that African Americans’ views on reparations are more strongly associated with the well-being of the African American community and less to do with the individual economic benefits of the policy.
Can messages targeted to underrepresented groups increase their participation in politics? We predict that mobilization messages highlighting a politically relevant group identity will increase participation among racial/ethnic minorities. However, responsiveness to such appeals should vary depending on the strength of one’s identity with that group. We test these predictions by conducting a two-wave panel survey that randomly assigns get-out-the-vote (GOTV) messages that appeal to either racial/ethnic identities or a less politicized identity (state identity). We compare the effects of these messages to a standard GOTV message or one that encourages recycling. We find that racial/ethnic identity appeals increase participation among minorities with weaker group identities, who are initially less inclined to participate. Therefore, such appeals help close the gap in participation between those with weak versus strong identities. These findings indicate that messages highlighting a politically relevant group identity can sometimes be effective at increasing participation among underrepresented groups.
Scholars increasingly use linked fate, or the idea that one’s own destiny is tied to the success of one’s group, to explain LGBTQ political participation and voting behavior. However, unlike most other identities referenced in linked fate questions, “LGBTQ” is a coalitional identity that explicitly recognizes distinct constituent subgroup identities (such as “lesbian”). To what extent do sexual and gender minority individuals express linked fate with the broader coalitional identity as opposed to narrower subgroup identities? We use data from three separate pre-registered survey experiments conducted in the US, Canada, and the UK. We show that sexual and gender minority respondents express at least as much linked fate with the coalitional identity as with their own specific sexual and/or gender identities. Indeed, in Canada and the UK, our evidence suggests that LGBTQ coalitional identity elicits higher levels of linked fate than narrower subgroup identities. These results imply that LGBTQ coalitional linked fate is useful for explaining LGBTQ political behavior.
Hundreds of US cities have switched from single choice to ranked choice voting (RCV) systems. In allowing voters to rank multiple candidates and eliminating fears of wasting votes on less viable candidates, RCV purports to improve both political expression and representation. Realizing this potential, however, depends on voters' willingness and ability to use their rankings. We assess these outcomes by conducting a survey with an embedded experiment during real-world elections for multiple municipal offices using RCV. We examine whether citizens' propensity to rank multiple candidates and choose like-minded candidates (spatial voting) vary with the prestige of local offices and in response to endorsements. Political expression and spatial voting are substantially lower in elections for comptroller and city council relative to mayor. Endorsements from unions and issue advocacy groups improve both outcomes for these lower-level offices. Our results highlight differences in the efficacy of RCV across local elections and illustrate how endorsements can help citizens navigate these challenging settings.
How do the increasing numbers of women in state legislatures change the legislative behavior of women and men? To answer this question, I analyze bill introductions and effectiveness in 49 U.S. state legislatures. I find that in upper chambers with high numbers of women, women are the primary sponsors of fewer bills than men. However, when taking primary and cosponsorship together, women continue to contribute to more bills than men legislators in both chambers. This relationship is somewhat dependent on party, especially in places with many women, where the difference in bill contributions is greater between Democratic women and men than Republican women and men. I find fewer gender differences in state legislative effectiveness scores, but women in upper chambers with few women tend to be more effective than men. I conclude that having more women in office does influence legislator behavior.
The role of foreign aid in diffusing democratic values remains inconclusive. At the same time, membership in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), containing a strong aid or transfer component, is associated with increasing democracy in their member states. This paper explores the impact of membership and loans of a particular type of IGOs, regional multilateral development banks (MDBs), on democracy diffusion in recipient member-states during the period of 1972-2008. Using a newly assembled database of MDB membership and lending, we find that membership in the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and in the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development are both associated with an increase in democracy. By contrast, membership in other regional MDBs-African, Asian, and Inter-American Banks-saw mainly negative effects on democracy scores during the Cold War. Our results indicate that the impact of MDBs on democracy diffusion is highly dependent on the particular regional context, the MDB, and the historical period.
Supreme Court justices sometimes strategically use unanimity in an attempt to bolster the legitimacy of a court ruling and of the court itself. Do unanimous court rulings promote legitimacy? We pair evidence from three experiments based on real Supreme Court cases (including rulings on Donald Trump's ballot eligibility) with observational analyses of the General Social Survey (1975-2024) to examine the influence of unanimity in more realistic environments than used in prior studies. Contrary to the belief that judicial consensus signals impartiality and bolsters legitimacy, we find that unanimity has little to no consistent effect on decision approval or broader evaluations of SCOTUS. Unanimity also does not reliably improve attitudes among people predisposed to disagree with the Court's rulings. These findings challenge assumptions about judicial strategy and raise broader questions about the role of consensus in institutional legitimacy.
This article theorizes costly commitments in autocracies. Populist leaders who ascend to power through anti-establishment appeals confront a strategic dilemma between consolidating winning coalitions and maintaining the loyalty of their selectorate. Rooted in rhetoric that delegitimizes political parties, such leaders face constraints to regime institutionalization as their popular base remains resistant to formal party structures. Costly commitments occur where autocratizing leaders commit to their ideological messages to sustain popular support, which compromises the formation of ruling parties as instruments of elite cooptation. The 2021 executive takeover in Tunisia illustrates this dilemma emerging from incompatible incentives to commit to ideological narratives and forming a ruling party. We adopt a multi-method approach to discuss contemporary Tunisian politics as a theory-generating case study. To this aim, we leverage qualitative interviews with party officials, legislative election candidates, and members of Saied’s electoral campaign along with data from an original, nationally representative phone survey in Tunisia, and available public opinion data. Following Kais Saied’s move against the democratic order, elites engaged in party initiatives in support of his political project. Yet, Kais Saied rebuffed these advances, choosing to rely on the popular anti-party sentiment that had contributed to his rise to power.
Despite decades of efforts to overcome a lack of diversity on the federal judicial bench, Article III judges remain unrepresentative of the general population and the legal profession. Building on evidence of a gender gap in confidence and ambition across a range of political and non-political contexts, we ask whether gendered aspects of the position and process discourage women from considering and pursuing vacancies on the U.S. district and circuit courts. Using a survey of over 500 legal professionals, we find that men and women self-assess their qualifications differently, particularly for circuit court positions. Similarly, women report lower levels of ambition for pursuing federal district and circuit court positions. However, there are no gender differences for reported steps towards pursuing a federal court position, nor in reported levels of encouragement from others to pursue these roles. These findings contribute to our understanding of the enduring underrepresentation of women on the federal bench and suggest that gendered socialization may be contributing to leaks in the judicial pipeline.
Supreme Court nominations culminate in nearly 24-7, multi-day coverage of the nominee and elected officials discussing the nominee’s views, qualifications, and the Supreme Court. Scholars show that these events shape public attitudes. In this paper, we argue that nominee evaluations, which are largely a function of partisanship, have a significant and enduring effect on public approval of the Court. As a result, we contend that the effect of partisanship on Court approval is mediated through nominee support. To test this, we utilize nationally representative CES data from the last five nominations that included hearings, including over-time data for three of the nominations. We analyze these data using causal mediation analysis shortly after the nominations, and again one to four years later. Our results confirm our theoretical expectations: much of the effect of partisanship on Court approval is transmitted through the support of recent nominees, and the nominee effects often last for years.
We examine primary voters’ perceptions of climate change and their preferences for environmental policy, and how these differ from non-primary voters and shape electoral incentives. Drawing on survey data from several waves of the American National Election Study, we document a partisan asymmetry in how primary voters think about climate change. We show that Republican primary voters have been more likely to endorse climate denial or delay views across several election cycles, compared to those Republicans who do not take part in political primaries. Among Democratic primary voters, we find little difference between primary voters and non-voters in earlier elections but show both growing concern and policy support among primary voters in 2016 and thereafter. Our results provide insights into the electoral incentives that politicians face in primary elections and help explain the short-lived trajectories of recent climate policies that have been retrenched by Republican legislators whose electoral incentives lead them to oppose or veto climate policies that may still bring their own constituents benefits.
This article examines how asylum decisions in European Union member states are shaped by the tension between administrative assessment and government preferences. Moving beyond the conventional binary distinction between protection and rejection, it focuses on the choice between different protection statuses (refugee, subsidiary, and national statuses) which entail distinct rights and long-term settlement implications. Building on insights from public administration and executive politics, the article develops an explanatory model in which governments seek to steer asylum outcomes in line with their preferences on immigration but are constrained by administrative evaluations of claim merit and public scrutiny. Empirically, the article tests the mechanism on first-instance asylum decisions across EU member states using seemingly unrelated regression models. The findings show that government preferences significantly influence how protection is allocated across statuses, particularly when public scrutiny is low. Under high public salience, restrictive governments are constrained to grant refugee status where claims are well-founded but pursue their preferences by curbing subsidiary protection, while more permissive governments apply protection criteria more stringently. National protection emerges as highly responsive to government preferences. This article advances a more nuanced understanding of asylum governance as a negotiated outcome between legality, political responsiveness, and public accountability.
Well-resourced interest groups often have the upper hand in legislative processes. They can invest in professional lobbying, build personal relationships with lawmakers, and supply sophisticated technical and political information during policy deliberations. Nonetheless, interest groups that lack capacity to intensively lobby can seek influence in other ways, for example, by giving testimony or submitting position letters intermittently. We argue that legislators have incentives to pay attention to intermittent advocacy because it provides constituency perspectives that might not otherwise be available to legislators. Intermittent advocacy can be especially informative when done in conjunction with other groups. We leverage a unique opportunity to observe both professional lobbying and position letters on bills introduced in the California State Legislature, focusing on bills that address the impacts of climate change-an issue mobilizing a range of organized interests and posing great risks to modern society. We develop an index of interest group diversity and show that letters of support from a diverse set of small, less politically active groups increase the likelihood that a bill passes committee. Our fndings illuminate how advocacy tactics differ by organization type and demonstrate that groups that lack capacity to intensively lobby can influence legislative outcomes.
Existing scholarship has increasingly recognized that strong partisanship does not inevitably produce out-party hostility-yet the scope and consistency of this decoupling across multiple measures of affective polarization remains underexamined. In this study, we revisit the relationship between partisan strength and affective polarization using original national survey data across three established measures: feeling thermometers, trait attributions, and social distance. We provide systematic, multi-measure evidence that the empirical linkage between partisan strength and out-party hostility is weaker and more heterogeneous than much of the literature implies. Substantial variation in out-party hostility exists at every level of partisan strength-even among the strongest partisans. We further show that ideological and issue-attitude strength meaningfully predict which strong partisans become most hostile toward the out-party. These results extend prior work by demonstrating that the decoupling of partisanship and hostility is robust across measurement approaches, and they highlight the importance of distinguishing partisanship's constructive democratic functions from its corrosive forms.
Border fortifications are a common tool for states to deal with mass migration and security concerns, encouraging scholars to understand the causes and consequences of these changes. We ask how individuals’ distance to state borders and the level of fortifications at that border influences public opinion on immigration. We argue that those who live closer to borders have increased interaction with migrants, which makes them more supportive of open migration policies. However, border fortifications serve as a mediating factor for this relationship, with greater fortifications increasing perceived cultural distance between the resident and migrant, furthering the gap in immigration attitudes. Using data from the Integrated Values Survey, we find that greater distance from the border decreases favorability towards migrants, but overall, fortifications do not. However, we find evidence indicating that border fortifications moderate the influence of border distance. Lastly, we do find that depending on the topic at hand, border distance and border fortifications can serve as either a moderator or amplifier of the role of ideology in immigration attitudes. These findings highlight the role of border fortifications and geography in immigration attitudes, complicating the existing literature while highlighting the role of the state in influencing public opinion.
When do group identities shape political attitudes and behavior? Despite a rich interdisciplinary literature on social identity, several of its insights are seldom applied to political science, leaving scholars vulnerable to incomplete or mistaken inferences about political behavior. I curate these insights to develop a unifying theory of Descriptive and Substantive Identity. Using the case of LGBTQ politics, where effects should be particularly difficult to detect, the results support the predictions: once activated, identity has important effects on political outcomes above and beyond standard predictors like partisanship, ideology, and race. Among LGBTQ respondents, and in a heavily Democratic sample, those who internalize their group membership were 6 points more likely to vote for Joe Biden. Among non-LGB people, strong feelings toward gays and lesbians—positive or negative—produce large differences in attitudes and behavior, as Allies were 8 points more likely to vote for Biden than were Enemies. Scholars should account for social context, strength of group attachment, and affect when analyzing political behavior. These insights have the potential to better explain when group memberships are consequential, and when minoritized groups are most likely to be politically successful.
