Is diversifying groups enough for minority views to shape decisions?
American politics offers citizens many opportunities to deliberate together on matters of common concern. Public meetings, local boards, and juries…
Vaccinate Grocery Workers First to Protect Everyone
The Covid-19 pandemic crash-tested governments’ ability to protect their citizens in an emergency—a test many spectacularly failed. After fumbling every…
Can bias in political nomination processes explain why ethnic minorities are underrepresented in politics?
The importance of representation in politics Ethnic minorities are underrepresented in parliaments worldwide. A lack of representation can lead to…
Does Ethnic Inequality Affect Democracy?
Few social science relationships have generated as much interest as that between socioeconomic inequality and democracy. For example, recent discussions…
How does local independent media shape public opinion in Africa?
How the media shapes people’s views on political and social issues is a vital question for scholars and the public…
Endogenous Political Trust and Electoral Accountability
Various empirical studies have investigated the causes and consequences of political distrust. They found that politicians’ actions, such as corruption,…
Disaster Relief Over Climate Action: Voter Preferences After the 2021 German Floods
Does exposure to extreme weather events increase public demands for climate action and support for climate-focused parties like the Green…
Accountability Deficits in Public Goods Provision: Lessons from India’s Rural Roads Program
Introduction Citizens in low- and middle-income countries often grapple with inadequate access to basic public goods and services such as…
The Impact of Distant Wars on Nationalism: Lessons from Spain
How public opinion responds to wars and other crises has intrigued scholars for years. Previous studies have made it clear…
Political Representation of Public Sector Employees
A long-standing academic debate relates to whether or not public employees differ fundamentally from private-sector workers in terms of their…
The Consequences of Partisan Behavior in Congress: Insights from the Director Labor Market
Image: Jessica Rodriguez Rivas // wikimedia.org What are the consequences of highly partisan behavior in Congress? While scholars have explored…
Facilitating Development: How Facilitation Workshops Improve Bureaucratic Performance
A well-informed, knowledgeable bureaucracy is a necessary precondition for effective policy design and implementation. Unfortunately, real-word bureaucracies fall well-short of…
Evaluating Claims of Intersectionality
While not universal, it remains a common refrain that one can’t or shouldn’t evaluate claims of intersectionality with an interaction…
Improving Citizen-Police Cooperation Using Hotlines: A Simple, Inexpensive Intervention
All around the world, police departments rely on information from citizens to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. While officers…
How Do Leaks Affect Political Decisions?
Leaks of confidential information are pervasive in politics and a recurring topic in public debate. Roughly speaking, they come in…
Love Thy (Elected) Neighbor? Residential Segregation, Political Representation and Local Public Goods
There is a growing body of evidence showing the importance of neighborhood context in shaping the long-run life outcomes of…
Perspective Taking Through Partisan Eyes: Empathy, Partisanship, and International Cooperation
Classic theories of international relations suggest that conflict results from states’ inability to consider security issues from one another’s perspectives.…
Give me a week to give up my freedoms
Newspaper headlines at Waterloo station on July 7 2005. Image: Ellywa // wikimedia.org It is well established that terrorist attacks…
Americans Seek Ideological—Not Identity—Congruence in Judges
In March 2022, the Senate Judiciary Committee held confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. As the first Black woman…
So you think you can tell significant from insignificant differences?
Making research findings accessible “[S]tudents, public officials, and scholars should not need to understand phrases like “coefficient,” “statistically significant,” and…
Political Empowering Through Employment: Impact of the World’s Largest Workfare Program on Indian Women
Women wait in queues to cast their votes outside a polling station during the 2019 Indian general election. Image: Anuwar…
Does politics affect the uptake of social policies?
We study whether political preferences affect the uptake of social programs, and find that supporters of the party or the…
The Political Price Authoritarians Pay for Misdeeds
Democracies are littered with imprints from their authoritarian pasts. Authoritarian-era successor parties and politicians often remain on the scene and…
Strategically Ambiguous Identities
Electoral incentives shape candidates’ decisions to cultivate certain group identities. Dan Posner, for example, famously showed how Zambian candidates respond…
George Floyd’s Murder Decreased Support for Local Police Budgets
The phrase “defund the police” entered the public imagination in summer 2020, as the nation became engulfed in social unrest…
Dominant Personality and Politically Inexperienced Presidents Challenge Term Limits
Presidents from all around the world are reforming the constitutions of their countries to extend their terms in office. This…
Sending refugees to rural areas might not be such a bad idea after all
Noormuhammad Noori, a resident of the Kyyjärvi asylum seeker reception centre, stands with social services director Päivi Peltokangas and the…
The Surprising Stability of Asian Americans´ and Latinos´ Partisan Identities in the Early Trump Era
The above illustration is a work by Hanifa Abdul Hameed,created for a Vox article. America’s changing racial demographics raise new…
Which Feelings Make Us Vote? It’s Not What You Think
Feelings play a crucial role in motivating people to act, and this includes political action. Emotions like anger and enthusiasm…
Compulsory Voting Diminishes the Relationship Between Winning and Satisfaction With Democracy
Compulsory voting is used in over two dozen countries and regions. Chile recently reinstated mandatory voting after just over a…
Distributing “Get Out of Jail Free” Cards
To put it mildly, government wouldn’t work very well if people didn’t have to obey the laws they oppose. And…
On the Importance of Independent Evidence: A Reply to Graham et al.
Do college football games influence U.S. elections? Healy, Malhotra, and Mo (2010) found that college football outcomes are correlated with…
Official start of Registered Reports
From today on through September 2023 the Journal of Politics offers a new article type: Registered Reports. A Registered Report…
Media Ownership as a Political Investment
The massive flow of money into politics has generated widespread concerns about its impact on political equality. Political campaigns’ increased…
The Peaceful Transfer of Power and Social Contract
Concentrating the legitimate use of organized violence, and entrusting its use to a single individual, is generally considered to be…
Do Pandemics Matter for Electoral Outcomes?
A defining feature of democracy is that voters reward or punish incumbents at the ballot box in response to the…
The Primary Path for Turning Legislative Effectiveness into Electoral Success
Effective lawmakers are the workhorses of the U.S. Congress, but does this legislative effort translate into electoral success? That is,…
Are Intuitions Reliable Enough for Political Theorising?
Political theorists have a number of different tools in their methodological toolkits. A great deal of political theorising is done…
Our Corporate Overlords
On the front cover of one of its 2016 issues, The Economist depicted Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the guise…
Making Non-Voters Pay: Prices as an Alternative to Compulsory Voting
In most democracies, including the USA and UK, voting is voluntary. This usually results in low and unequal electoral turnout,…
Governments use international organizations to hide contentious foreign policies
It is an open secret in international politics that governments sometimes use money to buy political support from other governments.…
Machine Learning for Small-Area Survey Measures
We propose a method to estimate sub-national public opinion from national survey data. Our approach extends the current gold-standard, multilevel…
Who’s afraid of ideals? A defence of ideal theory
What is often referred to as ‘ideal theory’ in political philosophy, represented by theorists like John Rawls, is under attack…
The Social Dynamics of Collective Action
Social unrest often begins suddenly and spreads quickly. How does social unrest diffuse? This is the question we address in…
International terrorism decreases public support for refugee resettlement, but not for long
In November 2015, the Syria-based Islamic State terrorist organization perpetrated a large series of attacks in Paris, France, at a…
When Control of Redistricting is at Stake, State Ruling Parties Engineer Narrow Majorities in State Legislatures
In a new paper titled “Can the Party in Power Systematically Win a Majority in Close Legislative Elections? Evidence from…
The President that Appoints Judges Matters for Civil Rights
How important is political ideology to the way judges decide cases? Are judges merely “politicians in robes,” or are they…
Appeals Judges Only Rely on Ideology When Reviewing Judges They Don’t Know Well
When the media reports on federal judges, it often refers to the presidents who appointed them. This tendency reflects that…
How State and Protester Violence Affect Protest Dynamics
Though formal and empirical research has established the importance of large protests, their dynamics remain less understood. Empirical investigations have…
Partisan Enclaves and Information Bazaars: Mapping Selective Exposure to Online News
Today, the US media market is both “high choice” and fragmented. This situation stands in stark contrast to the information…
Audits strengthen electoral accountability in South Africa
Does information about government performance and corruption shape voter behaviour? Canonical theories of retrospective accountability suggest that it should, as…
Due Diligence: How Irreversibility Risks Shape Senate Delay in the Confirmation of U.S. Federal Executive Nominees
In fiscal year 2020, the U.S. federal executive branch employed approximately 97.07% of civilian employees (excluding those employed in The…
Why Consolidating Executive Budgetary Powers Benefitted Both the President and Congress: Reconsidering the Importance of the U.S. Budget and Accounting Act of 1921
A known critical element of executive authority involves how power is allocated among the president and administrative agencies. Less appreciated…
The Morning After: Minister Purges after Failed Coup Attempts in Dictatorships
Coup attempts are frequent events: Since 1945, there have on average been around 7 coup attempts each year. This is…
Like parent, like child: both social and genetic factors account for parent-child similarities in voter turnout
One of the most robust empirical facts in the political science literature is that children resemble their parents along with…
How Humiliation Motivates War
International relations theories often assume that actors make military conflict decisions unemotionally, weighing the costs and benefits as a computer…
Do Major-Power Interventions Encourage the Onset of Civil Conflict?
Major-power interventions in civil wars are extremely common: since the 1950s, close to half of the civil conflicts involve a…
How Petitioning is Linked to the Origins and Development of Standing Committees
Standing committees play a crucial role in the work of modern legislatures. A casual glance at recent news headlines makes…
Do Politicians Discriminate Against Constituents with an Immigration Background?
In this year’s German federal election campaign, voters with an immigrant background, who constitute ten percent of the electorate, played…
Agricultural comparative advantage explains US legislators’ support for trade agreements
In a new paper at the Journal of Politics, “Agricultural Comparative Advantage and Legislators’ Support for Trade Agreements”, Francesco Amodio, Leonardo…
Fighting Propaganda with Censorship
What happens when a government attempts to shut down one of the most popular social media platforms to combat foreign…
Unleashing Political Power: How Competition Shapes Participation
Political power is a crucial driving force, shaping decision-making, access to resources, and social interactions. While this power struggle unfolds…
Why is there “responsible party government” in the UK but not the US?
Responsible parties are conventionally defined as those capable of announcing their legislative goals and then passing them on the strength…