Despite 97 per cent of scientists agreeing on anthropogenic global warming, the remaining 3 per cent play a critical role in keeping the debate about climate consensus alive. Analysis of climate change contrarians from multi-signatory documents reveals 3 per cent of signees to be climate experts, while the remaining 97 per cent do not meet expert criteria and are also involved with organizations and industries who make up the climate change countermovement. The data also reveal most contrarians to be aged sixty-five or older. As a result, we explore other factors (for example, collective memories and ideological views) that may have also contributed to expert and non-expert views.

Despite evidence that women win when they run for office, the number of women in the US House of Representatives has not increased substantially. I argue that women win when they run because women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in locations where they are most likely to win. While strategic behavior is a necessary condition for increasing women's representation in office, it is not a sufficient condition. Analyzing regularly scheduled elections between 1992 and 2014, I demonstrate that women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in elections where they are most likely to win. However, the electoral opportunities for women are far from “gender neutral” and are shaped by the parties. Democratic and Republican women are most likely to emerge as candidates in districts where they are likely to win the primary and general elections; however, Republican women face even more constrained electoral opportunities.

Research shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, which should help women in some electoral contexts and hurt them in others. Yet, most research examines a single context at a time—usually US national elections, where partisanship is strong—and employs surveys and experiments, raising concerns that citizens’ responses may not reflect how they actually vote. By analyzing returns from thousands of nonpartisan local elections, we test whether patterns of women's win rates relative to men's match expectations for how the electoral effects of gender stereotyping should vary by context. We find women have greater advantages over men in city council than mayoral races, still greater advantages in school board races, and decreasing advantages in more conservative constituencies. Thus, women fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. These effects are most pronounced during on-cycle elections, when voters tend to know less about local candidates.

We investigate the prevalence and correlates of sexism in the British political context, using a measure of ambivalent sexism that distinguishes between hostile and benevolent sexist attitudes. Drawing on original data from two nationally representative online surveys, we find that more than half of the population hold some sexist attitudes and that these are predicted by gender, education, religiosity and authoritarian values. We demonstrate that the most significant division in sexist attitudes within the British electorate falls along political rather than gender lines, with men and women expressing more similar views about sexism than either Conservative and Labour voters, or Leave and Remain supporters. We also find that endorsing hostile sexism is associated with voting Conservative in the 2019 general election, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and political values. Our findings reveal that sexism is important for political competition in contexts where gender is not obviously salient.

Research on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.

Past the half-century mark of Converse's (1964) field-defining essay, the nature of political ideology in the mass public and how it has changed in response to partisan polarization remains enigmatic. To test the ideological structure of US public opinion, I develop and implement a Bayesian dynamic ordinal item response theory model. In contrast to static scaling procedures, this method allows for changes in the mappings between issue attitudes and the underlying ideological dimension over time. The results indicate that over the last forty years, mass attitudes on a range of long-standing policy controversies better fit a unidimensional ideological structure. As among elites, the left–right dimension has come to encompass a wide range of policy, partisan, and value divides in the mass public. Further, these trends hold for voters at all levels of political sophistication. Widespread conflict extension appears to be a defining feature of mass polarization in contemporary US politics.

In this study, I investigate how information made available by the introduction of television affected the importance of the national economy in the context of US presidential elections from 1944 to 1964. Using the fact that television stations were introduced in counties across the United States at different points in time, I assess the effect of television on economic voting using a difference-in-differences design. I first show that television stations spent more time covering national politicians than did local newspapers in the 1960 presidential election. More national news increased the salience of the national economy in presidential elections. There was no evidence that television affected prospective pocketbook voting.

Political campaigns frequently emphasize the material stakes at play in election outcomes to motivate participation. However, field-experimental academic work has given greater attention to other aspects of voters' decisions to participate despite theoretical models of turnout and substantial observational work signaling that a contest's perceived importance affects the propensity to vote. We identify two classes of treatments that may increase the material incentive to participate and test these messages in a large-scale placebo-controlled field experiment in which approximately 24,500 treatment letters were delivered during Connecticut's 2013 municipal elections. We find some evidence that these messages are effective in increasing participation, as well as that some of them may be more effective than typical nonpartisan get-out-the-vote appeals. While these results remain somewhat preliminary, our findings have important implications for our understanding of how voters decide whether to participate and how best to mobilize citizens who would otherwise sit out elections.

What effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

This article studies the persistent effects of past agrarian inequality on contemporary voting preferences. Although Western European countries became industrial (and later post-industrial) economies, the political effects of the agrarian cleavage are still visible in those countries in which the agrarian issue was dominant in the interwar period (the industrial laggards). Looking at the spatial variation in voting patterns in the fifteen elections held in Spain since 1977, we show through mediation analysis that areas with high historical agrarian inequality have higher levels of leftist vote. We examine two transmission channels: one economic (related to backwardness); the other political (related to family transmission of political allegiances). A survey analysis provides evidence in favour of family transmission. A brief exploration of other cases confirms the general argument: a similar effect is found in Italy (an industrial laggard), but not in England (an early industrializer).

Why do incumbents enjoy an electoral advantage in some political settings but suffer from a disadvantage in others? We propose a novel explanation linking variation in incumbency effects with exogenous commodity shocks. While voters attempt to sanction incumbents for economic performance, changes in commodity prices affect their evaluations and condition the electoral fortunes of incumbents vis-à-vis challengers. We test our argument in Brazilian municipalities, combining a plausibly exogenous measure of variation in commodity prices with a close election regression discontinuity design. Our results show that increases in the price of agricultural commodities greatly enhance the prospects of incumbents, while negative shocks exacerbate their incumbency disadvantage, especially in rural municipalities. Further investigation suggests that commodity shocks do not operate via voter learning about candidate quality, changes in the pool of candidates, shifts in voter preferences, or strategic elite investments. Instead, we find suggestive evidence that commodity shocks affect voters' evaluations through their effect on local economic growth.

Access to information about candidates' performance has long stood as a key factor shaping voter behaviour, but establishing how it impacts behaviour in real-world settings has remained challenging. In the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections, unpredictable technical glitches caused by the implementation of biometrics as a form of identification led some voters to cast ballots after official tallies started being announced. In addition to providing a source of exogenous variation of information exposure, run-off elections also enable us to distinguish between different mechanisms underlying the impact of information exposure. We find strong support for a vote-switching bandwagon effect: information exposure motivates voters to abandon losing candidates and switch support for the frontrunner – a finding that stands in the second round, when only two candidates compete against each other. These findings provide theoretical nuance and stronger empirical support for the mechanisms underpinning the impact of information exposure on voter behaviour.

Citizen participation in decision making has been widely lauded as a method for improving societal outcomes. Deliberative discussion, in particular, is believed to be more transformative than a mere aggregation of individual preferences, leading to more socially optimal decision making and behavior. I report the results from a laboratory experiment with 570 subjects in Nairobi, directly testing the effect of participation in deliberative group decision making on collective outcomes. Participants engage in a group task to earn compensation toward a shared group fund. Randomly assigned treatments vary according to whether decision making over the task to be completed involves: (1) external assignment; (2) non-deliberative majority voting; or (3) consensus through deliberative discussion. I find that deliberation improves collective decision making. Deliberation is also associated with changes in preferences, greater agreement with decision outcomes, and greater perceived fairness. Evidence for behavior change is weaker, but there is some support for further research into the relationship between preference change and behavior change.

How does violence during civil war shape citizens' demand for state-provided security, especially in settings where non-state actors compete with the state for citizens' loyalties? This article draws on Hobbesian theory to argue that in post-conflict countries, citizens who were more severely victimized by wartime violence should substitute away from localized authorities and towards centralized ones, especially the state. The author tests the theory by combining two original surveys with existing media and non-governmental organization data on wartime violence in Liberia. The study shows that citizens who were more severely affected by violence during the Liberian civil war are more likely to demand state-provided security, both in absolute terms and relative to non-state alternatives. More sporadic collective violence in the post-conflict period does not reverse this substitution effect. Also consistent with Hobbesian theory, citizens who were more severely victimized are more fearful of threats to peace almost a decade later.

From public health to political campaigns, numerous attempts to encourage behavior begin with the spread of information. Of course, seeding new information does not guarantee action, especially when it is difficult for receivers to verify this information. We use a novel design that introduced valuable, actionable information in rural Uganda and reveals the intermediate process that led many in the village to hear the information but only some to act on it. We find that the seeded information spread easily through word of mouth via a simple contagion process. However, acting on the information spread less easily; this process relied instead on endogenously created social information that served to vet, verify, and pass judgment. Our results highlight an important wedge between information that a policy intervention can best control and the behavior that ultimately results.

In authoritarian regimes, repression encourages private actors to censor not only themselves, but also other private actors—a behavior we call “regime-induced private censorship.” We present the results of a correspondence experiment conducted in Russia that investigates the censorship behavior of private media firms. We find that such firms censor third-party advertisements that include anti-regime language, calls for political or non-political collective action, or both. Our results demonstrate the significance of other types of censorship besides state censorship in an important authoritarian regime and contribute to the rapidly growing literature on authoritarian information control.

There is an emerging consensus that international intervention can secure peace by helping combatants resolve commitment problems following civil wars. But how do interveners accomplish this? Some suggest that intervention primarily works through military coercion, while others propose non-military instruments. We build on the existing literature to theorize that interveners commonly condition political, economic, and legal incentives on compliance with peace processes. Despite a rich literature on intervention, scholars have only started to test the underlying instruments. This article takes a critical step toward this end, examining peacekeeping missions led by the United Nations from 1989 to 2012. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we show military coercion is neither commonly used nor necessary to ensure peace. Missions that employ conditional incentives—on which we collect original data—are consistently correlated with a reduced risk of conflict recurrence, even when controlling for observed selection effects, and regardless of whether they are also authorized to use military coercion.

Scholars often use language to proxy ethnic identity in studies of conflict and separatism. This conflation of language and ethnicity is misleading: language can cut across ethnic divides and itself has a strong link to identity and social mobility. Language can therefore influence political preferences independently of ethnicity. Results from an original survey of two post-Soviet regions support these claims. Statistical analyses demonstrate that individuals fluent in a peripheral lingua franca are more likely to support separatism than those who are not, while individuals fluent in the language of the central state are less likely to support separatist outcomes. Moreover, linguistic fluency shows a stronger relationship with support for separatism than ethnic identification. These results provide strong evidence that scholars should disaggregate language and ethnic identity in their analyses: language can be more salient for political preferences than ethnicity, and the most salient languages may not even be ethnic.

How do politicians with coercive linkages govern? This article relies on original data on militia-linked mayors in Colombia from 1988 to 2015 derived from 42,000 pages of Colombian Supreme Court sentencing documents. Using a regression discontinuity design, it examines the governance records of militia-tied mayors who won the elections by a narrow margin. It finds that being ruled by a militia-linked mayor significantly reduces levels of insecurity and crime, but has pernicious effects on the provision of other public goods, especially education. I theorize that these politicians' (perverse) comparative advantage on security, combined with their crowding out of social spending, engenders these outcomes. I evaluate these mechanisms with data on the nature of paramilitary–mayor alliances, police reinforcements, municipal budgets, politicians' Twitter feeds, and in-depth interviews with paramilitary commanders and politicians. The article has implications for understanding the effects of voting for politicians with coercive ties on the quality of governance and democracy.

Presidents' unilateral sway over policy is of global concern to scholars, practitioners and the general public. While pending actions provoke media speculation about how much authority presidents have to change policy without legislatures, scholarship has yet to systematically measure presidential discretion across areas of public policy. This study surveys an interdisciplinary panel of scholars, using discrete choice experiments to estimate the latent level of discretion that US presidents have in fifty-four policy areas. Consistent with models of delegation and unilateralism, these measures confirm that presidents have more discretion in foreign affairs, and that discretion promotes executive action. This approach presents the opportunity to examine differences in presidential discretion and public perceptions of presidential power, and can be applied beyond the US case.