Through an innovative analysis of audio recordings of plenary speeches, Dietrich, Hayes, and O'Brien (2019) find that women in the U.S. House of Representatives speak with greater emotional intensity about women than other issues. With vocal pitch as a new measure of personal issue commitment, the finding suggests that women legislators' efforts to work on behalf of women result from intrinsic motivation. I ask whether the same is true in an alternative parliamentary setting, the German Bundestag, where personal preferences play a very different role due to strict party discipline. The answer is yes. Analyzing audio and text data from more than 30,000 speeches in the Bundestag between 2011 and 2020, I find that women in the Bundestag address women more frequently and with greater emotional intensity than men. The results suggest that women legislators are more emotionally invested in women-related issues than men.

Bølstad and Dinas (2017) propose a model of spatial voting, based on social identity theory, that suggests supporting a candidate/policy on the other side of the ideological spectrum has a disutility that is not accounted for by common spatial models. Unfortunately, the data they use cannot speak directly to whether the disutility arises because individuals perceive their ideology as a social identity. We present the results of an experimental study that measures the norm against crossing the ideological spectrum; tests the cost of doing so, controlling for spatial effects; and demonstrates that this cost increases with the salience and strength of identity norms. By demonstrating the norm mechanism for the disutility of crossing the ideological spectrum, we provide strong support for B&D's model.

Government competence in delivering outcomes is often regarded as foundational to political trust. However, in this article, a different competence dynamic is proposed; specifically, whether political trust is related to government efficiency in achieving promised policy objectives. This article argues that when policy objectives are polarizing, the effect of efficiency on political trust is conditional on whether individuals support or oppose the objective. Using the case of Brexit, where the promised policy objective of leaving the European Union was polarizing, it is hypothesized that Leave voters relative to Remain voters became more trusting in cases of efficiency and less trusting in cases of inefficiency. The predictions are supported through a difference-in-differences analysis of unique real-world data over time from the British Election Study. The findings have important implications for our understanding of Brexit and also inform how political trust relates to government competence in the case of polarizing political issues.

With a proliferation of scholarly work focusing on populist, far-left, and far-right parties, questions have arisen about the correct ways to ideologically classify such parties. To ensure transparency and uniformity in research, the discipline could benefit from a systematic procedure. In this letter, we discuss how we have employed the method of ‘Expert-informed Qualitative Comparative Classification’ (EiQCC) to construct the newest version of The PopuList (3.0) – a database of populist, far-left, and far-right parties in Europe since 1989. This method takes into account the in-depth knowledge of national party experts while allowing for systematic comparative analysis across cases and over time. We also examine how scholars have made use of the previous versions of the dataset, explain how the new version of The PopuList differs from previous ones, and compare it to other data. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of The PopuList dataset.

The literature on populist attitudes frequently makes one of two assumptions: populist attitudes are either stable or unstable. However, few studies have examined these diverging assumptions empirically. We use panel data collected over six panel waves between 2017 and 2021 in Germany to assess the stability of populist attitudes. Integrating inter-individual stability (variable-centred) and intra-individual stability (individual trajectories), we find that populist attitudes are neither fully stable (trait) nor fully flexible (state). For example, some respondents constantly changed their view on populism while the attitudes in one out of three individuals remained stable. We also explore empirical consequences and find that populist attitudes are more closely linked to vote choice when they are stable. Accordingly, we argue for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of populist attitudes, both at the variable and individual levels, where these attitudes are stable and consequential for only a subset of individuals.

Traditional research on political parties pays little attention to the temporal focus of communication. It usually concentrates on promises, issue attention, and policy positions. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising, given that voters respond to nostalgic rhetoric and may even adjust issue positions when policy is framed in nostalgic terms. This article presents a novel dataset, PolNos, which contains six text-based measures of nostalgic rhetoric in 1,648 party manifestos across 24 European democracies from 1946 to 2018. The measures combine dictionaries, word embeddings, sentiment approaches, and supervised machine learning. Our analysis yields a consistent result: nostalgia is most prevalent in manifestos of culturally conservative parties, notably Christian democratic, nationalist, and radical right parties. However, substantial variation remains regarding regional differences and whether nostalgia concerns the economy or culture. We discuss the implications and use of our dataset for studying political parties, party competition, and elections.

Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments. We find no evidence that candidates of colour are disadvantaged in state legislative general elections relative to narrowly nominated white candidates from the same party. These findings challenge the leading explanations for the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority groups, with implications for candidate selection across the United States.

Are young people less likely to punish undemocratic behaviour? I employ experimental data from five studies, ten countries, and seventeen unique country-year samples to reassess the proposition that young people are less committed to democracy than older people. The studies consist of four conjoint and one vignette experiments, which permit estimating an interaction between undemocratic candidate behaviour and respondent age on voting intentions. I find the interaction between undemocratic behaviour and age is negative – such that punishment of undemocratic behaviour increases with age – in all studies and almost all country samples. Moreover, the interaction is approximately linear and statistically significant in the pooled sample and most studies. Thus, young people are less likely to sanction undemocratic behaviour than older people. This letter contributes with the hitherto most comprehensive empirical contribution on age differences in commitment to democracy judging from punishment of undemocratic behaviour.