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The JOP´s Political Science Blog

The JOP´s Political Science Blog

  • Main Page
  • About Us
  • Write for JOP Blog
  • Privacy Policy
  • Note on Accessibility
  • Legal Notice
Image: National Archives via pingnews.com
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Politicians who succeed by failing

Fig. 1: Ares et al. (2024)
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How public attitudes on social policy are more logical than we think

Image: Castillo-Quintana (2024)
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What reduces drug-trafficking-related violence?

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Are the Oppressed Morally Entitled to Resort to Disruption and Violence? Public Reason and the Problem of Incivility

Lame-duck governments disrupt the bureaucracy and service delivery before leaving office: Evidence from Brazil
Fig. 1: Toral (2024)
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Lame-duck governments disrupt the bureaucracy and service delivery before leaving office: Evidence from Brazil

Political turnover is central the theory and practice of democracy. Yet, previous research on how turnover impacts governance and development…

The far-right and the military
Fig. 1: Villamil et al. (2024)
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The far-right and the military

In late 2022, the German government arrested two dozen people who were alledgedly involved in the planning of a far-right…

Does the age of first vote affect future voting and political attitudes? Our evidence says no.
Fig. 1: Jessen et al. (2024)
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Does the age of first vote affect future voting and political attitudes? Our evidence says no.

Political scientists have long debated whether the experience of voting for the first time at a young age has long-lasting…

How to be humble in antiracist politics
Fig. 1
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How to be humble in antiracist politics

The struggle against racism is, in part, a struggle against ignorance. For centuries, African American political thinkers have condemned specious…

The Benefits of Being Neighbors with a Local Politician
Fig. 1: Folke et al. (2024)
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The Benefits of Being Neighbors with a Local Politician

Local politicians often make decisions about building new housing projects. Even though towns need more housing to solve shortages and…

Chinese Overseas Investments and the Busting of U.S. Sanctions
Fig. 1: Biglaiser et al. (2024)
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Chinese Overseas Investments and the Busting of U.S. Sanctions

The past twenty years suggest that China wants to increase its economic and political reach at the expense of the…

Enfranchisement and Representation: Italy’s 1912 Quasi-Universal Suffrage Reform
FIg. 1: Larcinese (2024)
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Enfranchisement and Representation: Italy’s 1912 Quasi-Universal Suffrage Reform

Party affiliation and personal social background are powerful explanatory variables of politicians’ policy preferences. But do voting rights affect the…

Politics, Not Expertise, Drove the Origins of the Administrative State
Fig. 1: University of Michigan (1912)
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Politics, Not Expertise, Drove the Origins of the Administrative State

Two upcoming decisions by the Supreme Court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, may…

The Political Feasibility of Carbon Taxes: How Do Pocketbook and Distributional Concerns Affect Citizens’ Preferences for Carbon Taxation?
Fig. 1: Beiser-McGrath & Bernauer (2024)
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The Political Feasibility of Carbon Taxes: How Do Pocketbook and Distributional Concerns Affect Citizens’ Preferences for Carbon Taxation?

In the realm of climate policy, carbon taxation stands out as an economically important yet politically contentious instrument. Despite widespread…

Does the Size of Legislatures Matter? Lessons from Brazil
Fig. 1: Frey 2024)
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Does the Size of Legislatures Matter? Lessons from Brazil

Many countries have recently seen an increase in the public debate around the optimal size of their legislatures. Advocates for…

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Hope in the Face of Disappointment: The 2011 Egyptian Revolution and Its Aftermath

Has it all been in vain? Ten years after the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, little seems to be left…

The Relationships between Political Survival and Crisis Initiation Differ for Hawks and Doves
Fig. 1: Carter (2023)
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The Relationships between Political Survival and Crisis Initiation Differ for Hawks and Doves

Contemporary research on political leaders explains their decisions as driven by their desire to remain in power or their personal…

How Do We Know What We Know? Learning from Monte Carlo Simulations
Fig. 1: Hopkins et al. (2023)
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How Do We Know What We Know? Learning from Monte Carlo Simulations

Political Scientists often test their hypotheses using quantitative methods. When new methods are proposed, researchers are interested in how they…

How Does the Presence of Others Affect Survey Responses on Ethnic Politics?
Fig. 1: Malik & Siddiqui (2023)
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How Does the Presence of Others Affect Survey Responses on Ethnic Politics?

Across much of the Global South, in-person surveys remain a primary means by which researchers collect data on political opinions.…

Is diversifying groups enough for minority views to shape decisions?
Fig. 1: Karpowitz et al. ((2023)
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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
Fig. 1: Chyzh (2023)
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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?
Fig.1: Carlsson et al. (2023)
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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?
Fig. 1: Leipziger (2023)
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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?
Fig. 1: Green et al. (2023)
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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
Fig. 1: Kasamatsu and Kishishita (2023)
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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
Fig. 1: Hilbig and Riaz (2023)
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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
Fig. 1: Goyal (2023)
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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
Fig. 1: Balcells et al. (2023)
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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
Fig. 1: Geys et al. (2023)
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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
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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
Image: Christian Schnettelker
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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
Image: Block et al. 2023
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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
Image: Nanes et al. 2023
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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…

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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
Image: Joneikifi // wikimedia.org
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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
Image: Mohamed Hassan
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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
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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
Image: Mohamed Hassan
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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…

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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
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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?
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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
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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…

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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
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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
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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
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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
Credit to Hanifa Abdul Hameed for Vox
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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
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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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Our Corporate Overlords

On the front cover of one of its 2016 issues, The Economist depicted Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the guise…

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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,…

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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.…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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How Humiliation Motivates War

International relations theories often assume that actors make military conflict decisions unemotionally, weighing the costs and benefits as a computer…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Fighting Propaganda with Censorship

What happens when a government attempts to shut down one of the most popular social media platforms to combat foreign…

Politicians who succeed by failing
Image: National Archives via pingnews.com
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Politicians who succeed by failing

Politicians bemoan when their policy proposals fail. They blame the other side and institutions that generate legislative gridlock. But are…

How public attitudes on social policy are more logical than we think
Fig. 1: Ares et al. (2024)
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How public attitudes on social policy are more logical than we think

Voters’ Opinions on Welfare Policy Reform Might Be More Logical Than We Think When it comes to the topic of…

What reduces drug-trafficking-related violence?
Image: Castillo-Quintana (2024)
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What reduces drug-trafficking-related violence?

What reduces drug-trafficking-related violence? This pressing question naturally arises among policymakers and security experts as marginalized communities—both in developed and…

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Are the Oppressed Morally Entitled to Resort to Disruption and Violence? Public Reason and the Problem of Incivility

Can one justify the use of disruption and violence to pursue political change while remaining committed to the ideal of…

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What’s wrong with the idea of letting virtuous elites rule? On the problem of instability in Confucian meritocracy

Democracy has faced significant challenges in recent times. Donald Trump, a well-known populist, won the U.S. presidential election and was…

Should They Stay or Should They Go? Deportations and Migrants’ Remittances
Fig. 1: Smoldt et al. (2024)
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Should They Stay or Should They Go? Deportations and Migrants’ Remittances

Migrants’ Remittances and the Host Country          Billions of dollars cross national borders every day. These financial flows take different forms…

Arms and the Disadvantage of Technological Backwardness
Fig. 1: Hariri & Wingender (2024)
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Arms and the Disadvantage of Technological Backwardness

Sometimes technological backwardness is a blessing. A backward country doesn’t need homegrown science to invent a new technology or domestic…

Rebel governance and violent politics when rebels win war
Fig. 1: Liu (2024)
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Rebel governance and violent politics when rebels win war

In August 2023, the ruling party of Zimbabwe—the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)—won the national elections once again. This…

Misperceptions about Migrants’ Political Ideology Drives Rejection
Image: Zhou (2024)
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Misperceptions about Migrants’ Political Ideology Drives Rejection

Anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise in many countries.  Often, we assume that this rhetoric is based on racism or…

Propaganda That Sells: How State Media Turn Partisan
Fig. 1: Shirikov (2024)
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Propaganda That Sells: How State Media Turn Partisan

Political scientists have often debated the role of propaganda in autocracies. For some, propaganda is primarily a tool of persuasion,…

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