This article revisits the foundations of prior research on the effects of plebiscitarian selection mechanisms on candidates' electoral strength. While previous studies do not nest political parties' decision making, the authors argue that party primary effects entail the interdependence of party procedures for candidate selection. The article assesses the validity of the two approaches. Using original data from seven parties and 296 regional elections in Canada, Germany and Spain, and from sixty-two pre-election polls in Germany and Spain, it shows that, other things equal, primary-selected candidates are not stronger than those selected by other procedures. However, there is evidence of a penalty for parties that do not select candidates by primary when their main rival does, in particular when the primary election is not divisive and is held closer to the general election.

This article proposes a new statistical method to measure persuasion within small groups, and applies this approach to a large-scale randomized deliberative experiment. The authors define the construct of ‘persuasion’ as a change in the systematic component of an individual's preference, separate from measurement error, that results from exposure to interpersonal interaction. Their method separately measures persuasion in a latent (left–right) preference space and in a topic-specific preference space. The model's functional form accommodates tests of substantive hypotheses found in the small-group literature. The article illustrates the measurement method by examining changes in study participants' views on US fiscal policy resulting from the composition of the small discussion groups to which they were randomly assigned. The results are inconsistent with the ‘law of small-group polarization’, the typical result found in small-group research; instead, the authors observe patterns of latent and policy-specific persuasion consistent with the aspirations of deliberation.

Most of what is known regarding political socialization treats parent–child concordance as evidence of transmission. This direct-transmission approach remains agnostic regarding how socialization occurs, whether traits have a role in a child's ability to identify and understand their parent's values or their motivation to adopt their parents’ values. This article advances a perception-adoption approach to unpack these microprocesses of socialization. The authors test their model using three independent studies in the United States that together comprise 4,852 parent–child dyads. They find that the transmission of partisan orientations from parent to child occurs less than half the time, which is qualitatively different from the generally held view. More importantly, the findings provide a greater understanding of how key predictors facilitate the political socialization process. Specifically, politicization improves child perception, but has no role in the child's motivation to adopt parental values. Closeness and parental value strength influence children to want to be like their parents, but do nothing to improve children's ability to recognize their parents' values. And education, previously thought to have little role in transmission, does not influence a child's ability to understand their parent's affiliation, but appears to make children more likely to reject whatever they believe it to be.

We investigate how emotions, threat perceptions and past violence influence foreign policy attitudes via a survey experiment in Georgia. Using a stratified sample across areas with differential exposure to the conflict and the presence of internally displaced persons, we randomly assign respondents to receive emotional primes about Russian aggression in the region. We find that exposure to violence, as well as simply being primed about past Russian aggression, both increase the perceived threat from Russia, and to a lesser extent anger towards Russia. Individuals who receive the primes are more supportive of a hardline foreign policy. In contrast, we find that exposure to violence does not have a direct effect on foreign policy attitudes, but increases hardline attitudes indirectly, through increased anger and threat. Taken together our results provide evidence that reminders of past violence have different effects than direct exposure to violence on foreign policy attitudes.

To promote good governance, citizens can inform governments directly and routinely about the implementation of policies and the delivery of public services. Yet citizens lack incentives to provide information when they do not expect governments to be responsive, and citizen disengagement in turn often prevents governments from providing public goods effectively. In two field experiments, we studied potential remedies to this dilemma related to solid waste services in Uganda. We randomly assigned reporters to be recruited by community nomination and to be recognized by community leaders in an attempt to select for and motivate information sharing. We also randomly assigned reporters to hear from the government about how their reports were used to make real improvements to waste services. Community nominations and public announcements did not increase reporting. However, responsiveness boosted participation over several months for reporters who had been recruited earliest and had been reporting longest, highlighting the critical role of timely government responsiveness in sustaining information flows from citizens.

This article examines the theoretical connections between identity and linked fate, extending the latter concept across three countries and four types of (potential) identity groups. This belief, that what happens to one's ethnic group, religious group, region, or class shapes one's own life chances, is an understudied middle ground between ideational and material drivers of political attitudes. The study uses experimental and observational analyses to show that the strength of individuals' beliefs in linked fate and that belief's consequences vary in systematic and predictable ways. From the very material effect of labor market uncertainty to the highly ideational effect of regional identity, linked fate is a cognitive bridge between two very different kinds of social–psychological experiences that can (and should) be applied across a wide range of countries and groups.

Public faith in politicians and associated systems of governance is desperately low. At the same time, public opinion of politicians is characterized by a vernacular of psychological accusations pertaining to greed, self-interest and careerism. This article tests the verity of these claims by comparing quantitative data on the Basic Human Values (Schwartz 1992) of 106 UK Members of Parliament (MPs) and 134 unsuccessful parliamentary candidates with data collected from the British public in the seventh wave of the European Social Survey. It explores (a) how politicians differ psychologically from those they govern and (b) how personality characteristics such as basic values inform candidate emergence. The study finds that politics is a profession few ‘ordinary’ people care to enter. MPs attribute significantly more importance to Self-Transcendence values than the comparatively conservative population they govern, but the relative importance they ascribe to Power values seems to have an equally strong predictive effect on candidate emergence.

This article explains a surprising wave of lethal attacks by drug cartels against hundreds of local elected officials and party candidates in Mexico, 2007–2012. These attacks are puzzling because criminal organizations tend to prefer the secrecy of bribery over the publicity of political murder. Scholars suggest that war drives armed actors to attack state authorities in search of protection or rents. Using original data on high-profile attacks in Mexico, the authors show that war need arguments underexplain violence. Focusing on political opportunities, they suggest that cartels use attacks to establish criminal governance regimes and conquer local governments, populations and territories. The study presents quantitative and qualitative evidence showing that cartels took advantage of Mexico's political polarization and targeted subnational authorities who were unprotected by their federal partisan rivals. Cartels intensified attacks during subnational election cycles to capture incoming governments and targeted geographically adjacent municipalities to establish control over large territories. The findings reveal how cartels take cues from the political environment to develop their own de facto political domains through high-profile violence. These results question the widely shared assumption that organized criminal groups are apolitical actors.

What are the causes and consequences of systematic measurement error in violence measures drawn from media-based conflict event data? More specifically, how valid are such event data for geocoding and capturing election violence? This study examines sub-national variation in election violence and uses original data from domestic election monitor surveys as a comparison to widely used sources of event data. The authors show that conventional data under-report events throughout the election cycle, particularly in sparsely populated areas and outside anticipated violence hotspots. Moreover, systematic measurement error of media-based event data for measuring election violence can generate significant relationships where none exist, and can result in different effect magnitudes. The article suggests areas for future research and indicates ways in which existing work on election violence may have been affected by systematic measurement error.

Empirical studies show that many governments gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers. This article investigates governments’ strategies to provide ethnic favors in Africa. Recent studies of ethnic favoritism find that presidents' ethnic peers and home regions enjoy advantages, yet cannot disentangle whether goods are provided to entire regions or co-ethnic individuals. This article argues that local ethnic demography determines whether governments provide non-excludable public goods or more narrowly targeted handouts. Where government co-ethnics are in the majority, public goods benefit all locals regardless of their ethnic identity. Outside of these strongholds, incumbents pursue discriminatory strategies and only their co-ethnics gain from favoritism. Using fine-grained geographic data on ethnic demographics, the study finds support for the argument's implications in the local incidence of infant mortality. These findings have important implications for theories of distributive politics and conflict in multi-ethnic societies.

In recent years centrist-liberal parties, such as the German Free Democratic Party (FDP) in 2013 and the British Liberal Democrats in 2015 and 2017, suffered enormous electoral defeats. These defeats highlight a prominent puzzle in the study of party competition and voting behavior; the empty center phenomenon. That is, empirical evidence suggests that most parties do not converge to the median voter's position, despite the centripetal force of the voters’ preference distribution. Using survey data from Canada, Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom, this article shows that deterioration of centrist parties’ valence image is followed by a collapse of their vote shares. Using mathematical simulations, this article shows that centrist parties have limited strategic opportunities to regain their support. Differently from other parties, centrist parties cannot alter their policy platforms to compensate for their deteriorated valence image. These results have important implications for political representation and voters–elite linkages.

This article explores the effect of explicitly racial and inflammatory speech by political elites on mass citizens in a societal context where equality norms are widespread and generally heeded yet a subset of citizens nonetheless possesses deeply ingrained racial prejudices. The authors argue that such speech should have an ‘emboldening effect’ among the prejudiced, particularly where it is not clearly and strongly condemned by other elite political actors. To test this argument, the study focuses on the case of the Trump campaign for president in the United States, and utilizes a survey experiment embedded within an online panel study. The results demonstrate that in the absence of prejudiced elite speech, prejudiced citizens constrain the expression of their prejudice. However, in the presence of prejudiced elite speech – particularly when it is tacitly condoned by other elites – the study finds that the prejudiced are emboldened to both express and act upon their prejudices.

Scholars have long debated the positive and negative consequences of an aware public for the quality of governance in modern liberal democracies. This article extends this debate to the context of constitutional review by exploring how public awareness can limit the effective exercise of review by courts lacking strong public support. Incorporating aspects of both the legitimacy and separation of powers theories on judicial power, the author argues that public awareness weakens the efficacy of such unpopular courts by creating an electoral incentive for governments to defy adverse rulings, even when doing so may lead to punishment from other institutional stakeholders. The article develops a simple formal model that identifies how and under what conditions public awareness can influence an unpopular court's decision making. An analysis of rulings issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union finds support for the model's empirical implications.

How do politicians with influence over public works programs balance their incentives to gain electoral support with their proclivities for rent seeking? This article argues that government elites in parliamentary systems manage this trade-off by concentrating rent-seeking opportunities in their own hands while facilitating efficient public goods provision in the constituencies of their more junior partisan colleagues. Analyses using fine-grained data on road construction in India based on a variety of causal inference strategies support the argument. While ruling party legislators showed higher levels of road provision in their constituencies regardless of ministerial status, road projects in ministers’ constituencies showed higher levels of rent seeking than those in the constituencies of other ruling party legislators. Moreover, consistent with the mechanism, ruling party legislators’ diminished access to rent-seeking opportunities appears to be largely driven by the influence of co-partisan ministers. The findings illuminate how politicized distribution can sometimes mitigate inefficiencies in infrastructure provision.

Would giving party leaders more influence in primary elections in the United States decrease elite polarization? Some scholars have argued that political party leaders tend to support centrist candidates in the hopes of winning general elections. In contrast, the authors argue that many local party leaders – especially Republicans – may not believe that centrists perform better in elections and therefore may not support nominating them. They test this argument using data from an original survey of 1,118 county-level party leaders. In experiments, they find that local party leaders most prefer nominating candidates who are similar to typical co-partisans, not centrists. Moreover, given the choice between a more centrist and more extreme candidate, they strongly prefer extremists: Democrats do so by about 2 to 1 and Republicans by 10 to 1. Likewise, in open-ended questions, Democratic Party leaders are twice as likely to say they look for extreme candidates relative to centrists; Republican Party leaders are five times as likely. Potentially driving these partisan differences, Republican leaders are especially likely to believe that extremists can win general elections and overestimate the electorate's conservatism by double digits.

Recent political contests across Europe and North America have been propelled by a wave of populist, anti-immigrant resentment, and it was widely expected that these populist victories would further fan the flames of xenophobia. This article reports the results of an experiment around the Brexit referendum, designed to test how populist victories shape anti-immigrant attitudes. The study finds that anti-immigrant attitudes actually softened after the Brexit referendum, among both Leave and Remain supporters, and these effects persisted for several months. How could a right-wing, populist victory soften anti-immigrant attitudes? The authors use causal mediation analysis to understand this ‘populist paradox’. Among Leavers, a greater sense of control over immigration channelled the effects of the Brexit outcome onto anti-immigrant attitudes. Individuals' efforts to distance themselves from accusations of xenophobia and racism explains the softening of attitudes towards immigration observed among both Leavers and Remainers.

Do female leaders amplify the voices of other women in politics? The author addresses this question by examining parliamentary debates in the UK House of Commons. In the context of a difference-in-differences design that exploits over-time variation in the gender of cabinet ministers, the article demonstrates that female ministers substantially increase the participation of other female MPs in relevant debates, compared to when the minister is male. It also uses a measure of debate influence, based on the degree to which words used by one legislator are adopted by other members, to show that female ministers also increase the influence of female backbenchers. To explore the mechanisms behind these results, the author introduces a new metric of ministerial responsiveness and shows that female ministers are significantly more responsive than their male counterparts to the speeches of female backbenchers.

According to the ‘Madman Theory’ promoted by Richard Nixon and early rationalist scholars, being viewed as mentally unstable can help a leader coerce foreign adversaries. This article offers the first large-N test of this theory. The author introduces an original perception-based measure of leaders' reputations for madness, coded based on news reports, and analyzes its effect on both general deterrence and crisis bargaining. The study also tests several hypotheses about the conditions under which perceived madness is expected to be more or less helpful. The author finds that perceived madness is harmful to general deterrence and is sometimes also harmful in crisis bargaining, but may be helpful in crisis bargaining under certain conditions. The analysis suggests that the harmful effect of perceived madness results from a commitment problem.

There is an emerging drive to define a new praiseworthy governance goal: a goal that not only implies addressing corruption but going further to establish institutions that are truly worthy of trust. That goal is ‘public integrity’. However, most current accounts of public integrity adopt an ‘officer-first’ approach: defining public integrity primarily as a quality of individual public officers, and only derivatively, if at all, as a quality of public institutions themselves. This article argues that this approach is flawed. Analysing the current debate, it identifies the need to define a role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour for public officers. However, it is only possible to define this role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour by referring to a public officer's contribution to the overall moral ideal of her institution. Assuming that this ideal itself is a form of public integrity, it then follows that such institutional integrity must be defined ‘first’ in order to then define a public officer's praiseworthy contribution to it second. Substantively, this article argues that ‘public institutional integrity’ is an institution's robust disposition to pursue its purpose efficiently, within the constraints of legitimacy, consistent with its commitments. ‘Public officer integrity’ is the robust disposition of an officer to support the integrity of her institution, within the course of her duties, to the best of her abilities.

This article examines party sorting, elite cue and ideological polarization accounts of polarization dynamics. The study tests their differing expectations about trends in redistributive ideological polarization and partisan polarization in the British case using repeated cross-section and panel data. The authors reject party sorting accounts, which require ideology to be stable and changes in party support to drive partisan polarization, because they find that ideology trends with elite polarization and that ideological change causes partisan polarization. The authors reject elite cue accounts, which maintain that it is mainly partisans’ ideology that follows elite polarization, because they find virtually identical trends for initially ideologically similar non-partisans too. The study thus finds support for an ideological polarization account in which changes in elite polarization are associated with general changes in citizen redistributive ideology.