The COVID-19 pandemic is an unparalleled global crisis. Yet, despite the grave adversity faced by citizens, incumbents around the world experienced a boost in popularity during the onset of the outbreak. In this study, we examine how the response to the COVID-19 outbreak in one country affected incumbent support in other countries. Specifically, we leverage the fact that the first country-wide lockdown on European soil, in Italy on 9 March 2020, happened during the fieldwork of surveys conducted in four other European countries, France, Germany, Poland and Spain. This allows us to examine how an event abroad that alerted citizens to an imminent crisis—prior to a similar domestic government response—influenced incumbent support. Our results indicate a crisis signal effect of Italy's COVID-19 lockdown, as support for the incumbent increased domestically in other European countries after the lockdown. Importantly, these findings suggest that incumbents can benefit from a crisis unfolding in other countries, even when their own performance in response to the same crisis is not yet fully clear. They illustrate the importance of developments abroad for incumbent approval and the difficulty facing citizens seeking to disentangle performance signals from exogenous shocks.

Most formal models of valence competition add a single, separable and unweighted component to the standard one-dimensional utility function of voters. This article presents the results of a conjoint analysis experiment in which respondents were asked to choose between two candidates whose profiles vary along five attributes. Four of these traits behave like valence or policy issues as expected, but one, which has been employed in recent formal and empirical works, does not. Moreover, policy and valence are not separable. They interact at least in some cases, taking a competency form whereby the marginal impact of valence on voters’ choice is conditional on candidates’ policies. This result lends support to recent studies that have found more extensive valence voting under ideological convergence. Finally, policy trumps valence in awkward choices. Respondents even prefer corrupt candidates with similar policy views to honest ones with different opinions, despite integrity being declared the most important attribute.

What effect does moving to all-mail elections have on participation? On one hand, all registered voters automatically receive a ballot to return by mail at their convenience. On the other hand, the social aspect of the polling place, and the focal point of election day, is lost. Current estimates of the effect of all-mail elections on turnout are ambiguous. This article offers an improved design and new estimates of the effect of moving to all-mail elections. Exploiting cross-sectional and temporal variation in county-level implementation of all-mail elections in Washington State, we find that the reform increased aggregate participation by two to four percentage points. Using individual observations from the state voter file, we also find that the reform increased turnout more for lower-participating registrants than for frequent voters, suggesting that all-mail voting reduces turnout disparities between these groups.

Where do partisans get their election news in the contemporary media environment? We track the online news consumption of a national sample during the 2016 presidential campaign. We find levels of partisan isolation in news exposure are two to three times greater than in prior studies, although the absolute level of isolation remains modest. The partisan divide for election-related news exceeds the divide for non-political news. This tendency of partisans to follow like-minded news providers occurs despite the relatively small differences in the partisan slant of the content offered by the majority of sources they visited. Finally, we find that partisans who gravitated to congenial news providers did not shift their evaluations of the presidential candidates during the campaign.

Researchers in different social science disciplines have successfully used Facebook to recruit subjects for their studies. However, such convenience samples are not generally representative of the population. We developed and validated a new quota sampling method to recruit respondents using Facebook advertisements. Additionally, we published an R package to semi-automate this quota sampling process using the Facebook Marketing API. To test the method, we used Facebook advertisements to quota sample 2432 US respondents for a survey on climate change public opinion. We conducted a contemporaneous nationally representative survey asking identical questions using a high-quality online survey panel whose respondents were recruited using probability sampling. Many results from the Facebook-sampled survey are similar to those from the online panel survey; furthermore, results from the Facebook-sampled survey approximate results from the American Community Survey (ACS) for a set of validation questions. These findings suggest that using Facebook to recruit respondents is a viable option for survey researchers wishing to approximate population-level public opinion.

Are individuals accurately informed about their place in the income distribution? Despite the importance of accurate information about one’s placement in the income distribution for many models of redistribution, this assumption remains untested. We present survey data and an embedded experiment where we inform some individuals their true place in the income distribution. We then assess the impact of such information on tax progressivity preferences. We find that individuals have considerable error regarding their self-placement in the income distribution. Revealing to individuals their true placement affects progressivity preferences for individuals who learn they are poor, and for individuals whose prior is that they are poor. These results have implications for information assumptions of redistribution models of comparative political economy and contribute to our understanding of tax preferences, an understudied dimension of redistribution preferences.

We develop a theory of how an authoritarian regime interactively uses information manipulation, such as propaganda or censorship, and policy improvement to maintain social stability. The government can depict the status quo policy more popularly supported than it actually is, while at the same time please citizens directly by enacting a costly reform. We show that the government’s ability of making policy concessions reduces its incentive to manipulate information and improves its credibility. Anticipating a higher chance of policy concessions and less information manipulation, citizens are more likely to believe the government-provided information and support the regime. Our model provides an explanation for the puzzling fact that reform coexists with selective information disclosure in authoritarian countries like China.

In spatial econometrics, W refers to the matrix that weights the value of the spatially lagged variable of other units. As unimportant as it may appear, W specifies, or at least ought to specify, why and how other units of analysis affect the unit under observation. This article shows that theory must inform five crucial specification choices taken by researchers. Specifically, the connectivity variable employed in W must capture the causal mechanism of spatial dependence. The specification of W further determines the relative relevance of source units from which spatial dependence emanates, and whether receiving units are assumed to be identically or differentially exposed to spatial stimulus. Multiple dimensions of spatial dependence can be modeled as independent, substitutive or conditional links. Finally, spatial effects need not go exclusively in one direction, but can be bi-directional; recipients can simultaneously experience positive spatial dependence from some sources and negative dependence from others. The importance of W stands in stark contrast to applied researchers’ typical use of crude proxy variables (such as geographical proximity) to measure true connectivity, and the practice of adopting standard modeling conventions rather than substantive theory to specify W. This study demonstrates which assumptions these conventions impose on specification choices, and argues that theories of spatial dependence will often conflict with them.

Although attention to populism is ever-increasing, the concept remains contested. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of populism research and identifies tendencies to a conflation of host ideologies and populism in political science through a two-step analysis. First, we conduct a quantitative review of 884 abstracts from 2004 to 2018 using text-as-data methods. We show that scholars sit at “separate tables,” divided by geographical foci, methods, and host ideologies. Next, our qualitative analysis of 50 articles finds a common conflation of populism with other ideologies, resulting in the analytical neglect of the former. We, therefore, urge researchers to properly distinguish populism from “what it travels with” and engage more strongly with the dynamic interlinkages between thin and thick ideologies.

How does media influence beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? While many scholars have studied the effect of media on social and political outcomes, we know surprisingly little about the channels through which this effect operates. I argue that two mechanisms can account for its impact. Media provides new information that persuades individuals to accept it (individual channel), but also, media informs listeners about what others learn, thus facilitating coordination (social channel). Combining a field experiment with a plausibly natural experiment in Mexico, I disentangle these effects analyzing norms surrounding violence against women. I examine the effect of a radio program when it is transmitted privately versus when it is transmitted publicly. I find no evidence supporting the individual mechanism. The social channel, however, increased rejection of violence against women and increased support for gender equality, but unexpectedly increased pessimism about whether violence would decline in the future.

Scholarly interest in the role of emotion in accounting for how people react to political figures, events, and messages has escalated over the past two plus decades in political science and psychology. However, research on the validity of the measurement of subjective self-report of emotional responses is rather limited. We introduce here a new measurement approach, a “slider” format and compare it with the long used “radio button” item format. We assess the reliability and validity of these two approaches to the measurement of affect. The study examines self-report measures of emotion to three generated news stories about terrorist threats. We report that both measurement formats are able to extract the expected threefold affect structure from a ten affect word battery. The slider format is, however, modestly more reliable, and more efficient in time to complete, has the ability to limit missing data, and generates continuous data that is less truncated than data derived from the radio button format. Finally, we report on three tests of construct validity. Both approaches exhibit equivalent results on two of those tests. However, the radio button format does poorly on one test of construct validity, that on the anticipated relationship between anxiety and interest in novel information. We present an assessment of two methods for measuring emotional reactions to stimuli such as political issues, political figures, or events. Both methods are suitable for use in online surveys or computer-driven experiments. The traditional method utilizes labeled “radio buttons” that enable a participant in a study to select by clicking on one of an array of typically five response options, ranging from lower to higher of some identified affect term (e.g., how angry one might feel). Second, the slider method offers a participant the ability to move an “arrow” up or down to indicate how much (up) or little (down) they feel. The goal of both measures is to ascertain the level of a targeted emotion, i.e., how little or how much, say anger. The slider method has been specifically developed to be used with participants using a computer. The slider approach falls within the category of visual analog scales. This method for measuring affective responses to stimuli of whatever sort has not hitherto been examined to determine its reliability and validity. The literature on the reliability and validity of these measurement strategies is thin and we found no studies including an explicit comparison.

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.

Retrospective voting is a central explanation for voters’ support of incumbents. Yet, despite the variety of conditions facing American cities, past research has devoted little attention to retrospective voting for mayors. This paper first develops hypotheses about how local retrospective voting might differ from its national analog, due to both differing information sources and the presence of national benchmarks. It then analyzes retrospective voting using the largest data set on big-city mayoral elections between 1990 and 2011 to date. Neither crime rates nor property values consistently influence incumbent mayors’ vote shares, nor do changes in local conditions. However, low city-level unemployment relative to national unemployment correlates with higher incumbent support. The urban voter is a particular type of retrospective voter, one who compares local economic performance to conditions elsewhere. Moreover, these effects appear to be present only in cities that dominate their media markets, suggesting media outlets’ role in facilitating retrospective voting.

Party competition is largely about making policy promises to voters. We argue that the clarity of the expressed policy position may be equally important. If blurred messages toward different audiences and therefore ambiguous positions can attract votes from different groups, parties have incentives to present ambiguous rather than clear-cut policy platforms. We present a formal model of multi-party competition with stochastic voting where party leaders make strategic choices on both the position and the level of ambiguity of their platforms. Leaders respond to the demands of two principals, the general public and party core constituencies. We derive two hypothesis on the location and ambiguity of party platforms and provide initial tests of these hypotheses in a comparative setting in 14 Western European democracies gathering data on voter and party left-right positions from Eurobarometer surveys and electoral manifestos. Ambiguity of party profiles is estimated using a variant of Wordscores on a newly established data set of electoral manifestos. We find that platforms become more ambiguous as the preferences of the two principals diverge. Our findings imply that ambiguity can be a winning strategy for parties, especially in settings with strong partisan lines.

Although politicians’ personal attributes are an important component of elections and representation, few studies have rigorously investigated which attributes are most relevant in shaping voters’ preferences for politicians, or whether these preferences vary across different electoral system contexts. We investigate these questions with a conjoint survey experiment using the case of Japan’s mixed-member bicameral system. We find that the attributes preferred by voters are not entirely consistent with the observed attributes of actual politicians. Moreover, voters’ preferences do not vary when asked to consider representation under different electoral system contexts, whereas the observed attributes of politicians do vary across these contexts. These findings point to the role of factors beyond voters’ sincere preferences, such as parties’ recruitment strategies, the effect of electoral rules on the salience of the personal vote, and the availability of different types of politicians, in determining the nature of representation.

Political scientists often attempt to exploit natural experiments to estimate causal effects. We explore how variation in geography can be exploited as a natural experiment and review several assumptions under which geographic natural experiments yield valid causal estimates. In particular, we focus on cases where a geographic or administrative boundary splits units into treated and control areas. The different identification assumptions we consider suggest testable implications, which we use to establish their plausibility. Our methods are illustrated with an original study of whether ballot initiatives increase turnout in Wisconsin and Ohio, which illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of causal inferences based on geographic natural experiments.

When and why ethnic groups rebel remains a central puzzle in the civil war literature. In this paper, we examine how different types of inequalities affect both an ethnic group’s willingness and opportunity to fight. We argue that political and economic inter-group inequalities motivate ethnic groups to initiate a fight against the state, and that intra-group economic inequality lowers their elite’s costs of providing the necessary material and/or purposive incentives to overcome collective action problems inherent to rebel recruitment. We therefore predict that internally unequal ethnic groups excluded from power and/or significantly richer or poorer relative to the country’s average are most likely to engage in a civil war. To assess our claim empirically, we develop a new global measure of economic inequality by combining high-resolution satellite images of light emissions, spatial population data, and geocoded ethnic settlement areas. After validating our measure at the country- and group level, we include it in a standard statistical model of civil war onset and find considerable support for our theoretical prediction: greater economic inequality within an ethnic group significantly increases the risk of conflict, especially if political or economic inequalities between groups provide a motive.

Contemporary dictionary-based approaches to sentiment analysis exhibit serious validity problems when applied to specialized vocabularies, but human-coded dictionaries for such applications are often labor-intensive and inefficient to develop. We demonstrate the validity of “minimally-supervised” approaches for the creation of a sentiment dictionary from a corpus of text drawn from a specialized vocabulary. We demonstrate the validity of this approach in estimating sentiment from texts in a large-scale benchmarking dataset recently introduced in computational linguistics, and demonstrate the improvements in accuracy of our approach over well-known standard (nonspecialized) sentiment dictionaries. Finally, we show the usefulness of our approach in an application to the specialized language used in US federal appellate court decisions.

Significant scholarship indicates that female legislators focus their attention on “women’s issues” to a greater extent than do male lawmakers. Drawing on over 40 years of bill sponsorship data from the US House of Representatives, we define women’s issues in terms of those sponsored at a greater rate by women in Congress. Our analysis reveals that most (but not all) of the classically considered women’s issues are indeed raised at an enhanced rate by congresswomen. We then track the fate of those issues. While 4 percent of all bills become law, that rate drops to 2 percent for women’s issues and to only 1 percent for women’s issue bills sponsored by women themselves. This pattern persists over time—from the early 1970s through today—and upon controlling for other factors that influence bills success rates. We link the bias against women’s issues to the committee process, and suggest several avenues for further research.

Political preferences in the United States are highly correlated with population density, at national, state, and metropolitan-area scales. Using new data from voter registration records, we assess the extent to which this pattern can be explained by geographic mobility. We find that the revealed preferences of voters who move from one residence to another correlate with partisan affiliation, though voters appear to be sorting on non-political neighborhood attributes that covary with partisan preferences rather than explicitly seeking politically congruent neighbors. But, critically, we demonstrate through a simulation study that the estimated partisan bias in moving choices is on the order of five times too small to sustain the current geographic polarization of preferences. We conclude that location must have some influence on political preference, rather than the other way around, and provide evidence in support of this theory.