Existing research offers competing predictions as to whether election outcomes affect the future political behavior of individual supporters. Drawing on a dataset of millions of donors across thousands of candidates in different races, this study analyzes a series of regression discontinuities to estimate the effect of donating to a barely winning candidate as opposed to a barely losing one. It finds that winning donors were substantially more likely to donate in the future to that same office type. These effects are large and occur even when their original candidate was not up for re-election. The results show that the consequences of election outcomes extend beyond control of a particular seat, and affect the future behavior of ordinary citizens.

Drawing on evidence from the 2011 Egyptian uprising, this article demonstrates how the use of two social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – contributed to a discrete mobilizational outcome: the staging of a successful first protest in a revolutionary cascade, referred to here as ‘first-mover mobilization’. Specifically, it argues that these two platforms facilitated the staging of a large, nationwide and seemingly leaderless protest on 25 January 2011, which signaled to hesitant but sympathetic Egyptians that a revolution might be in the making. It draws on qualitative and quantitative evidence, including interviews, social media data and surveys, to analyze three mechanisms that linked these platforms to the success of the January 25 protest: (1) protester recruitment, (2) protest planning and coordination, and (3) live updating about protest logistics. The article not only contributes to debates about the role of the Internet in the Arab Spring and other recent waves of mobilization, but also demonstrates how scholarship on the Internet in politics might move toward making more discrete, empirically grounded causal claims.

What is the nature of the experience of risk? Risk can impose distinctive burdens on individuals: making us anxious, impairing our relationships and limiting our ability to plan our lives. On the other hand, risky situations are sometimes exciting, liberating and even empowering. The article explores the idea that risk can result in benefits for the individuals who bear it. Specifically, we evaluate John Tomasi’s claim that the experience of economic risk is a precondition of individual self-respect. Philosophical claims about the social bases of self-respect such as Tomasi’s have not been subjected to sufficient empirical scrutiny. The article exemplifies an alternative approach, by integrating philosophical argument with the analysis of large-scale survey data. Whilst Tomasi’s claim has force in some contexts, evidence from the economic domain shows that risk tends to undermine rather than to support self-respect.

The correlation between ideology and partisanship in the mass public has increased in recent decades amid a climate of persistent and growing elite polarization. Given that core values shape subsequent political predispositions, as well as the demonstrated asymmetry of elite polarization, this article hypothesizes that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism moderate the relationship between ideology and partisanship in that the latter relationship will have increased over time only among individuals who maintain conservative value orientations. An analysis of pooled American National Election Studies surveys from 1988 to 2012 supports this hypothesis. The results enhance scholarly understanding of the role of core values in shaping mass belief systems and testify to the asymmetric nature and mass public reception of elite cues among liberals and conservatives.

This article explores the origins of youth engagement in school, community and democracy. Specifically, it considers the role of psychosocial or non-cognitive abilities, like grit or perseverance. Using a novel original large-scale longitudinal survey of students linked to school administrative records and a variety of modeling techniques – including sibling, twin and individual fixed effects – the study finds that psychosocial abilities are a strong predictor of youth civic engagement. Gritty students miss less class time and are more engaged in their schools, are more politically efficacious, are more likely to intend to vote when they become eligible, and volunteer more. Our work highlights the value of psychosocial attributes in the political socialization of young people.

Why do some government formation periods end after a few days, while others last for several weeks or even months? Despite the rich literature on government formation, surprisingly little is known about the underlying bargaining processes. This article introduces a new dataset on 303 bargaining attempts in nineteen European democracies to analyse the duration of individual bargaining rounds. The study hypothesizes that (1) preference tangentiality, (2) ideological proximity, (3) incumbency and (4) party leadership tenure decrease the duration of coalition bargaining. Employing a copula approach to account for the non-random selection process of the observations, it shows that these actor-specific factors matter in addition to systemic context factors such as post-election bargaining and party system complexity. These findings highlight the need to consider both actor-specific and systemic factors of the bargaining context to explain government formation.

Why do citizens choose to comply in democracies, even when coercion is limited? Existing answers focus on contractual trust or expected payoffs. I show that a different pathway exists in the ethical pull of the nation. A large literature in political theory argues that special communities, such as the nation, can instill an ethical obligation to the collective welfare, even in the absence of formal rules. I argue that when the identities of one’s nation and the state are seen as closely linked, this national obligation is politicized towards the state and motivates a sense of citizen duty to comply. Through statistical modeling and a pair of experiments in South Korea versus Taiwan – two otherwise similar democracies that contrast in nation-state linkage – I show that this ethical pathway is likely real and highly contextual. The findings help us better understand the varied bases of citizen compliance in democracies.

Why do political parties present vague positions? We suggest that voter polarization provides them incentives to present either clear or vague positions, and the choice between these two is determined by the priority of an issue for the parties. We find that facing voter polarization, Western European political parties present clearer positions on an issue when it is a prime issue for them, but blur their positions when it is a secondary issue. Then, position blurring gives different implications to party systems with different degrees of issue dimensionality (such as American vs Western European party systems). The results also imply that political parties will respond to ongoing voter polarization on economic and immigration issues differently in the clarity of their position.

Parties and politicians want their messages to generate media coverage and thereby reach voters. This article examines how attributes related to content and sender affect whether party messages are likely to get media attention. Based on content analyses of 1,613 party press releases and 6,512 media reports in a parliamentary, multiparty context, we suggest that party messages are more likely to make it into the news if they address concerns that are already important to the media or other parties. Discussing these issues may particularly help opposition parties and lower-profile politicians get media attention. These results confirm the importance of agenda setting and gatekeeping, shed light on the potential success of party strategies, and have implications for political fairness and representation.

How are defense co-operation and economic co-operation related? To answer this question, this article analyzes the coevolution of defense co-operation agreements (DCAs) and government-to-government loans. It argues that governments pursue two distinct sets of interests. At the bilateral level, governments use issue linkages and side payments to encourage spillover from defense co-operation to economic co-operation, and vice versa. That is, governments’ bilateral interests in DCAs and loans are largely complementary. However, at the network level, interests may diverge. Specifically, governments use DCAs to build clubs of like-minded defense collaborators or ‘security communities’, while they use loans to impose asymmetric forms of political authority or ‘hierarchies’. In some contexts, these network-level interests are, like bilateral interests, complementary. For example, defense partners rely on loans to co-ordinate their foreign policies and better respond to security threats, and debtors rely on lending patterns to identify suitable defense partners. In other cases, however, these interests strongly conflict. For example, governments that are highly active in the loan network are especially likely to rely on asymmetric exercises of political authority, which is incompatible with the network-level goal of using DCAs to establish communities of defense collaborators. Similarly, governments that are highly active in the DCA network are, due to their complex multilateral political commitments, less vulnerable to the asymmetric influences that loans enable. To empirically test these claims, the study develops a longitudinal model of multiplex network coevolution. Overall, the results show that while economic and defense co-operation often reinforce one another, they sometimes conflict in unexpected ways.

Why do unthreatening social groups become targets of state repression? Repression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people is especially puzzling since sexual minorities, unlike many ethnic minorities, pose no credible violent challenge to the state. This article contends that revolutionary governments are disproportionately oppressive toward sexual minorities for strategic and ideological reasons. Since revolutions create domestic instability, revolutionaries face unique strategic incentives to target ‘unreliable’ groups and to demonstrate an ability to selectively punish potential dissidents by identifying and punishing ‘invisible’ groups. Moreover, revolutionary governments are frequently helmed by elites with exclusionary ideologies – such as communism, fascism and Islamism – which represent collectivities rather than individuals. Elites adhering to these views are thus likely to perceive sexual minorities as liberal, individualistic threats to their collectivist projects. Statistical analysis using original data on homophobic repression demonstrates that revolutionary governments are more likely to target LGBT individuals, and that this effect is driven by exclusionary ideologues. Case study evidence from Cuba further indicates that the posited strategic and ideological mechanisms mediate the relationship between revolutionary government and homophobic repression.

Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for party polarization in government. This study uses a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008–14 to show that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank-and-file voters in their party. These similarities do not vary according to the openness of the primary. These results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.

Can crime victimization increase support for iron-fist crime-reduction policies? It is difficult to assess the political effects of crime, mainly because of the presence of unmeasured confounders. This study uses panel data from Brazil and strategies for reducing sensitivity to hidden biases to study how crime victims update their policy preferences. It also examines survey data from eighteen Latin American countries to improve the external validity of the findings. The results show that crime victims are more likely to support iron-fist or strong-arm measures to reduce crime, such as allowing state repression. Affected citizens are also found to value democracy less, which might explain their willingness to accept the erosion of basic rights in favor of radical measures to combat delinquency. These findings reveal that exposure to crime can change what people think the state should be allowed to do, which can have important political implications.

Under what conditions does peacekeeping reduce one-sided violence in civil wars? This article argues that local sources of violence, particularly ethnic geography, affect peacekeeping effectiveness. Existing studies focus on the features of individual missions, yet curbing one-sided violence also depends on peacekeepers’ capacity to reduce the opportunities and incentives for violence. Moving from the idea that territorial control is a function of ethnic polarization, the article posits that peacekeepers are less effective against one-sided violence where power asymmetries are large (low polarization) because they (1) create incentives for escalation against civilians and (2) are less effective at separating/monitoring combatants. The UN mission in Sierra Leone from 1997 to 2001 is examined to show that UN troops reduce one-sided violence, but their effectiveness decreases as power asymmetries grow.

Governing elites often ratify human rights treaties, even when their policies do not align with those treaties’ obligations. This article argues that this can be explained by the fact that executives anticipate the potential challenges these treaties could raise vis-à-vis their domestic policies and enter different types of reservations when they ratify to head them off. The types of reservations they use depend on key characteristics of the executive’s policies and practices, as well as its relationship with the legislative and judicial branches. Domestic actors can raise different types of challenges against the executive depending on variations in these key factors. The types of reservations executives use will therefore vary depending on the specific challenges ratification raises for them. Using an original dataset of the reservations states entered on human rights treaties registered with the United Nations, and employing an event history analysis, this study shows that the particular challenges treaties present for executives in different types of states help explain variation in how they use reservations when they ratify human rights treaties.

The Cox proportional hazards model is a commonly used method for duration analysis in political science. Typical quantities of interest used to communicate results come from the hazard function (for example, hazard ratios or percentage changes in the hazard rate). These quantities are substantively vague, difficult for many audiences to understand and incongruent with researchers’ substantive focus on duration. We propose methods for computing expected durations and marginal changes in duration for a specified change in a covariate from the Cox model. These duration-based quantities closely match researchers’ theoretical interests and are easily understood by most readers. We demonstrate the substantive improvements in interpretation of Cox model results afforded by the methods with reanalyses of articles from three subfields of political science.

Several studies provide evidence of group-centric policy attitudes, that is, citizens evaluating policies based on linkages with visible social groups. The existing literature generally points to the role of media imagery, rhetoric and prominent political sponsors in driving group-centric attitudes. This article theorizes and tests an alternative source: exposure to rising local ethnic diversity. Focusing on the issue of crime, it first develops a theoretical account of how casual observation in the local context can give rise to ethnic stereotypes. Then, using two large, nationally representative datasets on citizen group and policy attitudes linked with registry data on local ethnic diversity, each spanning 20 years, it shows that crime attitudes become more strongly linked with immigration attitudes as local ethnic diversity rises. The results suggest that the typically emphasized ‘top-down’ influence on group-centric attitudes by elite actors is complemented by ‘bottom-up’ local processes of experiential learning about group–policy linkages.

How do political rights influence immigrant integration? This study demonstrates that the timing of voting rights extension plays a key role in fostering political incorporation. In Norway, non-citizens are eligible to vote in local elections after three years of residency. Drawing on individual-level registry data and a regression discontinuity design, the study leverages the exogenous timing of elections relative to the start of residency periods to identify the effect of early access to political institutions. It finds that immigrants who received early access were more likely to participate in subsequent electoral contests, with the strongest effects visible among immigrants from dictatorships and weak democracies. It also observes evidence consistent with spillover effects for other aspects of political engagement. These findings suggest that early access to voting rights influences subsequent trajectories of immigrant incorporation, in particular among immigrants from less developed states who may otherwise face high integration barriers.

Several theoretical perspectives suggest that when individuals are exposed to counter-attitudinal evidence or arguments, their pre-existing opinions and beliefs are reinforced, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes known as ‘backlash’. This article formalizes the concept of backlash and specifies how it can be measured. It then presents the results from three survey experiments – two on Mechanical Turk and one on a nationally representative sample – that find no evidence of backlash, even under theoretically favorable conditions. While a casual reading of the literature on information processing suggests that backlash is rampant, these results indicate that it is much rarer than commonly supposed.

This study maps the general lines of semi-presidential research with regard to theory, topics and methods. It identifies research gaps and provides recommendations for future studies. The review includes a general screening of 327 publications covering the period 1970–2015, and a close reading of sixty-five selected publications. The findings suggest that the inconsistent use of regime type definitions has limited the possibilities for generalizations. The study tracks the influence of some seminal articles, as well as the recent trend of focusing on the role and powers of the president. The article calls for more studies beyond Europe, and suggests that the field would benefit from including Historical and Normative Institutionalism. Finally, it suggests the need for studies on public administration that are relevant to the functioning of semi-presidential government.