Can emphasis on shared religion reduce out-group prejudice? To explore this question, we conducted a survey experiment on the effect of religious primes on Turkish citizens’ attitudes and behavior toward Syrian refugees in Istanbul and Gaziantep. We used a factorial design to compare the independent and interactive effects of primes emphasizing refugees’ Sunni or Muslim identity and a factual statement on the economic cost of the refugees. We find that religious primes increase respondents’ level of donations to a charity supporting Syrian refugees and certain attitudinal measures of support for the refugees. We also uncovered a differential impact among the Sunni and Muslim primes and found that the statement of economic cost removed the pro-refugee effect of religious primes.

Previous studies identified several domestic factors that may influence a country’s level of structural coup-proofing, i.e., counterbalancing strategies that shall prevent internal groups from seizing power via a coup d’état. We suggest that a country’s level of counterbalancing is also affected by such policies in what we term countries’ “peer groups.” When deciding the appropriate level of counterbalancing, rulers may be affected by external information flows from a “peer group” with similar structural coup-risk characteristics (institutions) or a similar coup-risk experience (coup history). Using maximum likelihood spatial lag models and data in 1976–2005, we find that leaders learn from and emulate counterbalancing in other states, but rather only through an “experiential peer group.”

As part of a general inquiry into mental mechanisms that operate outside conscious awareness, experimental psychology has recently established the presence and importance of “implicit attitudes.” The purpose of our paper is to compare the roles played by implicit and explicit prejudice in politics. Relying on two national surveys of the American electorate that included standard measures of implicit and explicit prejudice, we provide a systematic comparison of prejudice’s political effects: for the candidates Americans choose, the policies they favor, the assessments they make of government performance, and the racialized information they absorb. We find that implicit and explicit prejudice provide radically different pictures of racial politics in America.

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to examine how different rules for re-selecting the leader of a group affects how that leader builds a winning coalition. Leaders play an inter-group game and then distribute winnings from that game within their group before standing for re-selection. The results of the experiment show that leaders of groups with large winning coalition systems rely heavily on distributing winnings through public goods, while leaders of groups with small winning coalition systems are more likely to target specific citizens with private goods. Furthermore, the experiment shows that supporters of small coalition leaders benefit from that support in future rounds by receiving more private goods than citizens that did not support the leader. Meanwhile, citizens that support a large coalition leader do not benefit from this support in future rounds. Therefore, small coalition leaders target individual citizens to maintain a coalition over time in a way not possible in a group with a large winning coalition. Finally, in the experiment, small coalition leaders increased their payoffs over time, suggesting that once power has been consolidated, small coalition leaders narrow their coalition.

Researchers commonly employ multinomial logit (MNL) models to explain individual-level vote choice while treating “abstention” as the baseline category. Though many view abstainers as a homogeneous group, we argue that these respondents emerge from two distinct sources. Some nonvoters are likely to be “occasional voters” who abstained from a given election owing to temporary factors, such as a distaste for all candidates running in a particular election, poor weather conditions, or other temporary circumstances. On the other hand, many nonvoters are unlikely to vote regardless of the current political climate. This latter population of “routine nonvoters” is consistently disengaged from the political process in a way that is distinct from that of occasional voters. Including both sets of nonvoters within an MNL model can lead to faulty inferences. As a solution, we propose a baseline-inflated MNL estimator that models heterogeneous populations of nonvoters probabilistically, thus accounting for the presence of routine nonvoters within models of vote choice. We demonstrate the utility of this model using replications of existing political behavior research.

This paper examines the effects of survey mode on patterns of survey response, paying special attention to the conditions under which mode effects are more or less consequential. We use the Youth Participatory Politics survey, a study administered either online or over the phone to 2920 young people. Our results provide consistent evidence of mode effects. The internet sample exhibits higher rates of item non-response and “no opinion” responses, and considerably lower levels of differentiation in the use of rating scales. These differences remain even after accounting for how respondents selected into the mode of survey administration. We demonstrate the substantive implications of mode effects in the context of items measuring political knowledge and racial attitudes. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for comparing data obtained from surveys conducted with different modes, and for the design and analysis of multi-mode surveys.

We propose a new standard for evaluating the performance of electoral democracies: the correspondence between citizens’ party preferences and the party composition of governments that are formed after elections. We develop three criteria for assessing such correspondence: the proportion of citizens whose most preferred party is in government, whether the party that is most liked overall is in government, and how much more positively governing parties are rated than non-governing parties. We pay particular attention to the last criterion, which takes into account how each citizen feels about each of the parties as well as the intensity of their preferences. We find that proportional representation systems perform better on the first criterion. Majoritarian systems do better on the other two.

Coalition parties have to reconcile two competing logics: they need to demonstrate unity to govern together, but also have to emphasize their own profile to succeed in elections. We argue that the electoral cycle explains whether unity or differentiation prevails. While differentiation dominates at the beginning and the end of the legislative term in close proximity to elections, compromise dominates the middle of the term when coalition governments focus on enacting a common policy agenda. To test our theoretical claims, we draw on an innovative quantitative text analysis of more than 21,000 press releases published by coalition parties from 2000 until 2010.

This article considers the hypothesis that the positive actions taken by members of Congress (MCs) influence citizens’ evaluations of them, their party, and Congress as an institution. We begin with a look at the available cross-sectional survey data on contact with legislators and legislator and institutional approval. Their legislative responsiveness appears to have a small spillover effect on institutions. However, when we employ a unique panel design that controls for prior levels of opinion and avoids recall bias, we find no evidence of spillover effects. Overall, we find that constituents who received a response from their own MC evaluate that representative more positively than those who did not receive a response, but legislator responsiveness does not predict evaluations of the MC’s political party or the Congress.

Within research on the political influence that social network members exert on one another, some studies rely on information obtained directly from different members in the network separately (self-reported measures), while others rely on information obtained from one key informant within the social network (measures based on perception). We investigate the difference between these self-reported and perceived measures by analyzing the correspondence of voting intentions within the family. On the one hand, we examine this correspondence using information obtained from only one family member. On the other hand, we use the self-reported measures obtained from all family members separately. We use data from the Parent-Child Socialization Study (PCSS), a survey conducted among 2,085 mothers, fathers and children in the Flemish region of Belgium (2012). Our analyses suggest that using perceptual measures could lead researchers to different or even opposite conclusions than using self-reported measures from all individual respondents.

Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for estimating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on estimating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes and strong party discipline, which tends to make voting a strategic rather than a sincere indication of preferences. By contrast, legislative speeches are relatively unconstrained, as party leaders are less likely to punish MPs for speaking freely as long as they vote with the party line. Yet, the differences between roll call estimations and text scalings remain essentially unexplored, despite the growing application of statistical analysis of textual data to measure policy preferences. Our paper addresses this lacuna by exploiting a rich feature of the Swiss legislature: on most bills, legislators both vote and speak many times. Using this data, we compare text-based scaling of ideal points to vote-based scaling from a crucial piece of energy legislation. Our findings confirm that text scalings reveal larger intra-party differences than roll calls. Using regression models, we further explain the differences between roll call and text scalings by attributing differences to constituency-level preferences for energy policy.

Primary elections in the United States have been under-studied in the political science literature. Using new data to estimate the ideal points of primary election candidates and constituents, we examine the link between the ideological leanings of primary electorates and the ideological orientation of US congressional candidates. We use district-level data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and ideal point estimates for congressional primary election candidates to examine the role of primary electorate ideology in the selection of party nominees. We find that more extreme Republicans are more likely to win their party’s primary and that Republican and Democratic candidates are responsive to different electoral constituencies.