What factors contribute to closing the turnout gender gap after female enfranchisement? In the wake of franchise expansion, we test whether being a poll officer—and hence being exposed to election management—boosted the politicisation and mobilisation of women. In the context of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1939), we exploit a lottery that assigned recently enfranchised women to be poll officers in the first election women were allowed to vote (1933). We use an original individual-level panel database and show that women randomly selected as polling officers were as likely to participate in subsequent elections than men, while the gender turnout gap persisted among the rest. Further analyses suggest that being poll officers made women more receptive to political organisations mobilisation strategies, and their presence had positive externalities by encouraging other women to participate. Our findings highlight the potential benefits of exposure to election engineering among groups previously excluded or less engaged with democracy.

During outbreaks of diseases like cholera, HIV/AIDS, H1N1, and Ebola, governments often impose international border restrictions (for example, quarantines, entry restrictions, and import restrictions) that disrupt the economy without stopping the spread of disease. During COVID-19, international travel restrictions were ubiquitous despite initial World Health Organization recommendations against such measures because of their limited public health benefit and the potential for imposing a range of harms. Why did governments adopt these measures? This article argues and finds evidence that governments use international border restrictions as security theatre: ‘measures that provide not security, but a sense of it’. Quantitative analysis of original data on states’ first border restrictions during the pandemic suggests that behaviour was not just driven by the risk of COVID-19 spread. Instead, nationalist governments, which are likely to be attracted to policies associating disease with foreigners, were more likely to impose border restrictions, did so more quickly, and adopted domestic measures more slowly. A case study of the US further illustrates the security theatre logic. The findings imply that overcoming or redirecting governments’ attraction to security theatre could promote international cooperation during global health emergencies.

Bargaining scholars predict rapid power shifts cause preventive war. But cases with rapidly shifting power often remain peaceful. To explain the dogs that don’t bark, we introduce instant, repeated, costly militarization into Powell’s (1999) conventional-weapons power transition model. First, we rationalize preventive war during long, slow, complete-information power shifts. Second, we find that where past research into conventional shifts predicts war, a grand bargain backed by the decliner’s threat of war emerges as a second equilibrium. Because war and a grand bargain both prevent power from shifting, declining powers deploy them under the same conditions. Our grand bargain survives war-causing hazards, and some latent shifts. It occurs after incremental militarization causes repeated appeasement-like concessions, and when power shifts are instant, slow or fast, and perfectly observed; suggesting conventional shifts induce grand bargains under surprising conditions. The Great Game’s end fits our grand bargain, but that British elites seriously considered war.

How does polarized politics affect electoral accountability? In this paper, I investigate the impact of political polarization on two channels through which voters can sanction incumbents for poor policy outcomes: voting for the opposition and abstaining. Using presidential election results at the county level, I show that, under polarized environments, the number of voters punishing the incumbent party for poor economic performances decreases in both channels. Survey analyses confirm that as the perceived ideological distance between parties increases, partisans are less likely to (i) negatively evaluate the economy when their party holds the Presidency and (ii) among those who have a negative view of the economy, they are less likely to penalize their party for negative economic assessments. These results show that polarization affects economic evaluation and clouds the responsibility for economic conditions, decreasing voters’ willingness to sanction the incumbent party.

In many authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held in which the opposition can potentially defeat the incumbent. How do ordinary citizens perceive the integrity of elections in such regime environments? We argue that government supporters adopt the incumbent’s narrative to consider elections fair and legitimate. By contrast, opposition supporters regard elections in such systems as biased and not meaningful. We provide evidence from large cross-country public opinion data and the unexpected 2018 Turkish snap election announcement to examine long- and short-term patterns of perceived electoral integrity. We find that the partisan gap in perceived electoral integrity is more substantial under electoral authoritarianism than under democratic rule. The partisan gap grows in autocratizing political systems, and these perceptions are mostly stable in the short term, even at times of radically increased salience of electoral competition. Our study yields implications for the dynamics between elites and citizens in autocracies in which elections remain a critical source of regime legitimacy.

How does rising access to the Internet shape elections in low-income democracies? In a controversial, overturned election in Malawi, I show how online exposure can reduce incumbency advantages and improve election administration. Leveraging geocoded polling station returns and the expansion of 3G coverage in a difference-in-differences setting, I show that ruling party vote share and election irregularities decline in areas newly exposed to the Internet. This is robust to a series of specifications, including matching on pre-treatment characteristics and adjusting for polling station complexity. To examine mechanisms, I turn to interviews and focus group discussions with voters, party figures and election officials. These reveal that opposition groups used social media to campaign and organise, online platforms expanded the reach of civic education efforts, and election staff used WhatsApp to coordinate on polling day. The paper contributes to the literature on information technology, party strategy, and election administration in low-income settings.

Intergroup attitudes and identity ties can shape foreign policy preferences. Anti-Muslim bias is particularly salient in the USA and the UK, but little work assesses whether this bias generalizes to other countries. We evaluate the extent of anti-Muslim bias in foreign policy attitudes through harmonized survey experiments in thirteen European countries (N=19,673). Experimental vignettes present factual reports of religious persecution by China, counter-stereotypically depicting Muslims as victims. We find evidence of anti-Muslim bias. Participants are less opposed to persecution and less likely to support intervention when Muslims, as opposed to other religious groups, are persecuted. However, this bias is not present in all countries. Exploratory analyses underscore that pre-existing intergroup attitudes and shared group identity moderate how group-based evaluations shape foreign policy attitudes. We provide extensive cross-national evidence that anti-Muslim bias is country-specific and that social identity ties and intergroup attitudes influence foreign policy preferences.

Why do citizens fail to punish political candidates who violate democratic standards at the ballot box? Building on recent debates about heterogeneous democratic attitudes among citizens, we probe how divergent understandings of democracy shape citizens’ ability to recognize democratic transgressions as such and, in turn, affect vote choice. We leverage a novel approach to estimate the behavioural consequences of such individual-level understandings of democracy via a candidate choice conjoint experiment in Poland, a democracy where elections remained competitive despite an extended episode of backsliding. Consistent with our argument, we find that respondents who adhere less strongly to liberal democratic norms tolerate democratic violations more readily. Conversely, voters with a stronger liberal understanding of democracy are more likely to punish non-liberal candidates, including co-partisan ones. Our study identifies political culture, particularly the lack of attitudinal consolidation around liberal democracy, as a missing variable in explaining continued voter support for authoritarian-leaning leaders.

Does the EU’s performance compared to neighboring countries influence public support? Using a benchmarking approach, we argue that people compare their country’s performance within the EU to that of a non-EU country, shaping their attitudes. The COVID-19 vaccine rollout in 2020 provides an ideal test case, as governments launched vaccination programs at different speeds. The UK began weeks before EU countries, allowing us to examine its impact on EU support. Using an Unexpected Event during Surveys Design (UESD) with Eurobarometer data, we find that the UK’s early rollout significantly reduced specific policy support for the EU but did not consistently affect diffuse support. Our findings offer key insights into attitudes toward European integration and performance evaluations.

One of the most important global political developments is the current wave of autocratization. Most research identifies this as an executive-led process, while others highlight the role opposition actors play in resisting it. We combine this work into a common framework asking, how (anti-)democratic are party systems? Party-system literature emphasises and measures policy differences, while we conceptualise party systems’ democratic positions highlighting to what extent divergent regime preferences are prevalent across parties. To estimate this dimension, we introduce the Party-System Democracy Index (PSDI), capable of tracking regime preferences across party systems from 1970 to 2019 across 178 countries and 3,151 country-years. We implement well-established content, convergent, and construct validity tests to confirm the PSDI’s reliability. Finally, we also show that the PSDI is an important predictor for regime changes in either direction and that changes in the PSDI can signal a looming regime change. This work provides a new framework for studying regime changes and contributes to the renewal of the party-systems literature.

All regimes require supporters to govern and survive. We discuss the concept of a ‘regime support group’ and present and validate measures from an extensive dataset recording different features of such groups. This Regime Support and Opposition Groups (ReSOG) dataset covers approximately 2,000 political regimes from almost 200 countries, across 1789–2020. Drawing on the knowledge of about 1,000 country experts, we estimate the size and main geographical location of regime support coalitions and key opposition actors. We also map the social basis of regime support coalitions and opponents, using a 14-category scheme covering various social groups. These data provide a unique quantitative history of the social underpinnings of regimes in the modern era. Using them, we show and discuss the broadening of support coalitions over time, especially in autocracies, the rise of major urban groups, and the relative decline of rural elites in politics, globally.

Public sector worker absence has been cited as a reason for the poor performance of public services. This paper argues that the differential attention politicians pay to public services over their tenure cycle can explain levels of absenteeism. Using the case of teachers in India, teachers and politicians are embedded in a dynamic principal-agent relationship that allows for absenteeism when electoral incentives are not salient and results in increased accountability when they are. I constructed a panel of all schools across India between 2006 and 2018, employed an event study design, and found that teacher absenteeism decreases the year before an election and is higher the year after an election. I found inconsistent effects in the private sector, lending support for a channel of political control in the public sector. Political interference has an effect on bureaucratic performance, and relationships between public sector workers and politicians can ameliorate absenteeism.

Across the world, women continue to be underrepresented in parliaments. As gatekeepers to candidate lists, party leaders are in a pivotal position to promote gender balance. But do party elites consider women’s underrepresentation when deciding who to nominate? Leveraging a large-scale conjoint experiment with 1,389 party elites in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, we find that the more underrepresented women are in candidate lists, the better the chances of women aspirants. Awareness of women’s underrepresentation influences selectors for whom promoting gender equality may be a less crystallized priority: centrists and men. Women’s underrepresentation also reinforces preferences for women aspirants among those for whom gender equality may be a core value (left-wing and women selectors) but does not affect those for whom opposing gender equality may bring electoral advantages (right-wing party elites). Our findings shed light on the potential role that signalling underrepresentation may have on party elites’ selection of women aspirants.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the gap in age-adjusted mortality rates between people living in Republican and Democratic counties expanded; people in Democratic counties started living longer. This paper argues that political partisanship poses a direct problem for ameliorating these trends: trust and adherence in one’s personal doctor (including on non-COVID-19 related care) – once a non-partisan issue – now divides Democrats (more trustful) and Republicans (less trustful). We argue that this divide is largely a consequence of partisan conflict surrounding COVID-19 that spilled over and created a partisan cleavage in people’s trust in their own personal doctor. We then present experimental evidence that sharing a political background with your medical provider increases willingness to seek care. The doctor-patient relationship is essential for combating some of society’s most pressing problems; understanding how partisanship shapes this relationship is vital.

Political communication on immigration is often highly moralized, with parties making claims to fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. Yet, what drives parties to use this rhetoric remains unexplored. Contributing to research on parties’ positional shifts on immigration, this study examines their strategic use of moral language in immigration discourse. To this end, we develop multilingual moral dictionaries to analyze parliamentary immigration speeches from eight Western democracies over six decades. While party-level factors do not explain moral language use, increased elite polarization on the issue is associated with greater moralization among all parties. Qualitative analysis shows that moral language is used overwhelmingly to attack political opponents, highlighting its divisive nature. These findings serve as a corrective to the notion that extreme, anti-immigrant, opposition parties are the main drivers of the moralization of immigration; instead, the broader political climate crucially shapes party incentives to (de)moralize.

We identify women’s revealed preferences for legislative proposals to investigate substantive representation of women. We then examine whether female or male politicians in parliament are more responsive to revealed female preferences using data on 47,527 decisions made by all 777 Swiss parliamentarians between 1996 and 2022. Holding party and constituent preferences constant, our results show differences in the substantive representation of women between female and male politicians for legislative proposals related to social policies. For all policies unrelated to social issues, we find that female politicians are no more responsive to female preferences than male politicians. Heterogeneity analyses show that differences in the substantive representation of women by male and female politicians on social policy issues do not depend on the socialization of the politicians, or the underlying political incentives and constraints.

How do episodes of post-conflict violence affect public support for peace? I argue that political messaging about who or what is to blame can influence how violence affects attitudes towards peace agreements. I test this argument in Colombia, a country which has experienced violence after a 2016 peace agreement, and where rival political camps debate whether government failures or noncompliance by rebels is to blame. In an experiment with 1466 respondents in conflict and non-conflict zones, I paired news about post-conflict violence with information supporting these competing messages. I find that emphasizing rebel culpability reduced support for peace agreements, but emphasizing poor government implementation did not have a strong countervailing effect. A probe of the mechanisms suggests that while emphasizing rebel culpability increased perceptions that rebels alone were to blame, emphasizing government implementation failures led respondents to conclude that both parties were to blame, limiting the effectiveness of this message.

LGBTQ+ individuals often display consistent political behaviour despite being internally diverse. We theorize about the importance of group-based heuristics to understand this cohesiveness by proposing the concept of LGBTQ+ linked fate. First, we argue that LGBTQ+ linked fate is stronger among privileged individuals within the LGBTQ+ community (white, cisgender, gays/lesbians) and among those whose life experiences have made their LGBTQ+ identity salient. Then, expanding on social identity theory, we posit that individuals with greater LGBTQ+ linked fate are more likely to hold group-based political attitudes and voice these preferences through electoral participation. We provide support for these claims using a novel oversample of ∼2,000 LGBTQ+ Americans from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. We show that stronger LGBTQ+ linked fate is associated with higher voter turnout, leaning ideologically liberal, and identifying with the Democratic Party. This study contributes to understanding group identity, solidarity, and political behaviour among marginalized communities.

One common explanation for ethnicized politics and limited national identification in Africa lies with colonial boundaries. Europeans frequently divided ethnic groups as they divvied territory in the nineteenth century; this might have long-run repercussions, as individuals prioritize ties with coethnics in neighboring states rather than with non-coethnic co-nationals. Contra these expectations, we argue that divided groups should have weaker attachments to their ethnicity than non-divided groups will, because partition particularly disrupted pre-existing traditional institutions of governance and exchange within these groups. We argue that partition weakened traditional authorities and, consequently, ethnic identities through three mechanisms: (1) administrative shifts that reduced traditional authorities’ power; (2) limitations on leaders’ capacity to raise revenues; and (3) exacerbating intra-group divisions among co-ethnics living on different sides of the borders. We test this using georeferenced data from rounds 3-6 of the Afrobarometer and find support for our argument. These results are robust to different measures of the extent to which an ethnic group was split and various considerations of ethnic groups’ local and national demographic and political power. Our findings have important implications for studies of the legacies of colonialism and identity politics in Africa today.