How well do existing survey instruments differentiate between opinions that affect individual behavior and opinions that don't? To answer this question, we randomly assigned U.S. respondents to one of three survey instruments: Likert items (Likert), Likert items followed by personal importance items (Likert+) and Quadratic Voting for Survey Research (QVSR), which gives respondents a fixed budget to buy “favor” or “oppose” votes, with the price for each vote increasing quadratically. We find that, relative to Likert, both Likert+ and QVSR better identify people who care enough about an issue to act in opinion-congruent ways, with QVSR offering the most consistent improvement overall. Building on these results, we show how conclusions regarding the relationship between policy opinions and self-interest can differ across measurement strategies.

The Big-Issue Model predicts election outcomes based on voters’ perceptions of candidates’ ability to handle the most important issue. It provided accurate forecasts of the 2012 US presidential election. The results demonstrate the model's usefulness if one issue clearly dominates the campaign, such as the state of the economy in the 2012 election. It is also particularly valuable if economic fundamentals disagree, a situation in which forecasts from traditional political economy models suggest high uncertainty. The model provides immediate feedback to political candidates and parties on the success of their campaign and can advise them on which issues to assign the highest priority.

This paper proposes a framework of immigrant acceptance that accounts for both group-level and individual-level characteristics and conducts a novel test of the cultural threat hypothesis. Immigrants’ individual traits are conceptualized as secondary to their identity-based claims. The empirical strategy leverages a set of survey experiments conducted in the extreme rentier state of Qatar, where naturalization poses tangible negative financial consequences for citizens by expanding the pool of government welfare beneficiaries. Findings demonstrate that citizens are willing to share citizenship with a narrow ethnic in-group while individual cultural and economic attributes are lower-order determinants influencing economically vulnerable citizens. Importantly, answers to direct survey measures are at odds with these findings, demonstrating their susceptibility to social desirability bias.

This article puts forward an explanation of the resilience of corruption by arguing that this phenomenon offers net gains to a much larger share of the population than just corrupt government officials. Corruption is modeled as a solution to an allocation problem for a generic government good G. The defining features of this solution are the existence of a market for G when it is not supposed to exist, and the fact that, in that market, contracts cannot be enforced by an outside agent and transactions are usually secret. Corruption redistributes welfare toward ‘insiders’ who share some natural connection to the government and to other insiders. Corruption also redistributes welfare toward those who are skilled at imposing negative externalities.

Why do some declining industries receive more compensation through protectionist policies than others, even without actively engaging in lobbying? How does the political representation of industries affect their chances for protectionist relief? This paper argues that political parties seek to optimize electoral returns through the strategic allocation of distributive benefits generated by trade barriers. The inter-industry structure of protection is thus explained by the interaction between industries’ trade preferences and political characteristics. Using data on protection and subnational employment for US industries and district-level election outcomes in the 1990s, this paper finds that the concentration of industries in competitive constituencies not only increases their chances of receiving higher tariffs, but also magnifies the marginal effect of comparative disadvantage on tariff and nontariff protection.

Current thinking on the origins and size of the welfare state often ignores household relations in which people may depend on others for income or have dependents themselves. The influence of “dependency status” on individuals’ political preferences is unknown. We report results from a laboratory experiment designed to estimate the effect of dependency on preferences for policies that insure against labor market risk. Results indicate that (1) willingness to vote in favor of a social insurance policy is highly responsive to unemployment risk, (2) symmetric, mutual dependence is unrelated to support for insurance, but (3) asymmetric dependence (being dependent on someone else) increases support for social insurance. We connect our lab results to observational survey data and find similar relationships.

There is a continuing debate over the political importance and durability of partisan attachments in European multi-party systems. Drawing on a nationally representative five-wave panel, we provide a longitudinal test of the power of partisanship in Italy over the course of the tumultuous 2013 national elections. We find that a strong partisan affiliation measured as a social identity two years prior to the election promoted system stability by increasing support for the in-party and inhibiting electoral support for the insurgent Five Star Movement (M5S). In contrast, non-partisans, especially highly educated ones, were more likely than partisans to vote for M5S. Our results illustrate the role of partisanship in stabilizing multi-party systems amid crisis.

Governments can grant political concessions to induce quasi-voluntary compliance with taxation, yet empirical evidence probing the taxation–representation connection remains inconclusive. We contend that this association remains valid but it is primarily confined to business elites in nondemocratic regimes because the same wealth that exposes them to state predation also incentivizes them to endorse tax policies that offer greater political representation. We test our argument by evaluating preferences for hypothetical tax reforms in separate samples of business elites and ordinary citizens in China. We find that business elites show stronger preference than nonelites for tax policies that include advances in political representation. We explore various mechanisms for our results and find support for government credibility, tax ownership, and tax salience considerations.

Under closed-list proportional representation, a party's electoral list determines the order in which legislative seats are allocated to candidates. When candidates differ in their ability, parties face a trade-off between competence and incentives. Ranking candidates in decreasing order of competence ensures that elected politicians are most competent. Yet, party lists create incentives for candidates that may lead parties not to place their best candidates at the top of the list. We examine this trade-off in a game-theoretical model in which parties rank their candidates on a list, candidates choose their campaign effort, and the election is a team contest for multiple prizes. We analyze how the candidates’ objectives, voters’ attention and media coverage, incumbency, the number of parties competing in the election, and the electoral environment influence how parties rank candidates.

Technological change often increases demand for high-skilled jobs, with low-skilled losers turning to the populist right in response. The political effects of technological change that increases demand for low-skilled workers are largely unknown. The growth of the salmon fish-farming industry in rural Norway improved the labor-market situation for low-skilled workers, and we find that support for the populist right-wing party increased in municipalities that benefitted from the industry growth. The electoral change is due to a right-wing shift on the economic, but not the cultural dimension. Our results support political economy frameworks that point to lower demand for state interventions after positive labor market shocks, but raise the question of in what contexts support for populism will decline.

What allows autocratic political elites to coordinate with each other and check dictators? Earlier work assumes that elite coordination becomes easier as dictators share more power. I argue that, even when power-sharing is pervasive, a lack of cohesiveness can rob regime members of their influence over dictators. Conflicting interests can leave seemingly powerful elites unable to agree on when or how to challenge the dictator. I develop a measure of elite collective action based on this framework. It documents not only how much power elites have, but also the obstacles they would need to resolve to work together. In doing so, it better describes the relationship between autocrats and their ruling coalition, and its added nuance allows it to recover findings that current measures miss. By paying closer attention to the cohesion of autocratic elites, this paper explains why some dictators can rule tyrannically without retribution, and why weaker elites can still constrain powerful autocrats.

Inverse probability weighting is a common remedy for missing data issues, notably in causal inference. Despite its prevalence, practical application is prone to bias from propensity score model misspecification. Recently proposed methods try to rectify this by balancing some moments of covariates between the target and weighted groups. Yet, bias persists without knowledge of the true outcome model. Drawing inspiration from the quasi maximum likelihood estimation with misspecified statistical models, I propose an estimation method minimizing a distance between true and estimated weights with possibly misspecified models. This novel approach mitigates bias and controls mean squared error by minimizing their upper bounds. As an empirical application, it gives new insights into the study of foreign occupation and insurgency in France.

This paper explores how factional competition shapes local media's coverage of negative political news. Employing news reports that appeared in Chinese national and local newspapers (2000–2014) coupled with data on the networks of elites, we find that local bureaucrats connected to strong national leaders tend to criticize members of weaker factions in politically damaging news reports. These adverse reports indeed harm the promotion prospects of the province leaders reported on in the articles, weakening the already weak factions and expanding the relative power of the strong factions. Our findings suggest that the loyalty-based competitive behaviors of political elites further tilt an already uneven playing field across political factions and facilitate power concentration in China.

The lobbying activity of interest groups has been overlooked as a contributing factor to legislative party polarization in the United States. Using bill-level data from Congress and three state legislatures, I show floor votes on bills lobbied by more non-profit interest groups are more polarized by party. The state legislative data demonstrate the robustness of the relationship between lobbying and polarization, showing it is not an artifact of party agenda control, salience, or bill content. Increased lobbying from these groups in recent years helps explain high levels of partisan polarization in Congress and an uneven pattern across the state legislatures.

Ethnic movements continue to challenge state governments globally, with many ethnic conflicts revolving around the status of groups’ territories. Yet, politically mobilized ethnic groups vary considerably in their territorial demands: some press for increased autonomy or even outright secession, while others do not make such demands at all and prefer integration in the existing state. What explains this divergence in ethnic group demands with respect to the group's territorial status? We argue that the expected benefits of ethno-regional autonomy or secession compared to integration in a centralized state differ across distinct segments within the group as a function of three structural factors: heterogeneity in the group's income sources, cultural divisions, and territorial fragmentation, leading to disagreement over self-determination demands between different political organizations representing the same ethnic group. We test our argument using an expanded version of the Ethnic Power Relations–Organizations (EPR-O) dataset. Our pre-registered study finds support for one of our hypotheses: heterogeneity in groups’ income sources increases disagreement over self-determination demands. This finding sheds new light on the structural sources of internal divisions within ethno-political movements.

A growing body of evidence indicates the public is less committed to democracy than conventional wisdom long held. One possibility is that many in the public have internalized the norm that democracy is “good” but that such support is not firmly held. An implication of this reasoning is that because there is an expectation to express support for democracy, responses will be influenced by the presence of an interviewer due to social desirability effects. In this note, we examine the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies—in each year, a portion of respondents were interviewed via the internet while others were interviewed face-to-face. We identify a politically relevant difference between the two survey modes: those interviewed face-to-face express greater satisfaction with democracy. Indeed, the difference we identify is similar in magnitude to the difference typically observed between electoral winners and electoral losers. Our result is robust to different measurement and estimation strategies. While levels of satisfaction are influenced by the presence of an interviewer, a followup analysis indicates that the relationship between satisfaction and winner–loser status is similar across modes.

This research note extends the confrontational approach to estimating party policy positions by providing a way to estimate uncertainty associated with the measurements. The confrontational approach is a flexible method of determining party policy positions, which is ideally suited to measure parties’ positions on issues that are specific to a country or period in time. We introduce a method of estimating the uncertainty of confrontational estimates by restating the approach as a special case of an item response theory, opening up the possibility of using the confrontational approach not only as a descriptive tool but also as a means of testing hypotheses on party policy preferences. We illustrate our model using analysis of the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election and the 2009 European elections.

This paper sheds new light on the drivers of civil service reform in US states. We first demonstrate theoretically that divided government is a key trigger of civil service reform, providing nuanced predictions for specific configurations of divided government. We then show empirical evidence for these predictions using data from the second half of the 20th century: states tended to introduce these reforms under divided government, and in particular when legislative chambers (rather than legislature and governor) were divided.

This study analyzes how migrants affect their host country's foreign policy toward their home country by measuring their influence on bilateral emergency aid. I develop the argument that besides political lobbying and the targeting of aid by the donor country, migrants affect emergency aid by providing a linkage between the countries and increasing the salience of a disaster abroad. The empirical analysis shows that the location and size of a country's diaspora is an important predictor of emergency aid flows after natural disasters. Interaction effects provide support for the linkage argument: while the diaspora effect does not increase with the host country's level of democracy, it is strongest with the least severe and most distant disasters.

Existing literature examines the effectiveness of civilian oversight in reducing police misconduct. However, little-to-no quantitative research explores possible adverse consequences of this accountability mechanism. Utilizing time series analysis of administrative data on aggregate monthly civilian complaints and police behavior in the largest American city, this article offers evidence of racial inequality in police response to civilian complaints. For White civilians, complaint against the police abates subsequent police stops. For Black civilians, complaint is associated with subsequent intensification of police stops. This intensification only follows complaints against White officers, is conditional upon officer knowledge of the complaint, is confined to stops involving greater officer discretion to perform the stop, and is only observed in police precincts with large Black populations.