Spatial/spatiotemporal interdependence—that is, that outcomes, actions or choices of some unit-times depend on those of other unit-times—is substantively important and empirically ubiquitous in binary outcomes of interest across the social sciences. Estimating and interpreting binary-outcome models that incorporate such spatial/spatiotemporal dynamics directly is difficult and rarely attempted, however. This article explains the inferential challenges posed by spatiotemporal interdependence in binary-outcome models and recent advances in their estimation. Monte Carlo simulations compare the performance of one of these consistent and asymptotically efficient methods (maximum simulated likelihood, using recursive importance sampling) to estimation strategies naïve about (inter-) dependence. Finally, it shows how to calculate, in terms of probabilities of outcomes, the estimated spatial/spatiotemporal effects of (and response paths to) hypotheticals of substantive interest. It illustrates with an application to civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Scholars often use voting data to estimate central bankers’ policy preferences but consensus voting is commonplace. To get around this, we combine topic-based text analysis and scaling methods to generate theoretically motivated comparative measures of central bank preferences on the US Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) leading up to the financial crisis in a way that does not depend on voting behavior. We apply these measures to a number of applications in the literature. For example, we find that FOMC members that are Federal Reserve Bank Presidents from districts experiencing higher unemployment are also more likely to emphasize unemployment in their speech. We also confirm that committee members on schedule to vote are more likely to express consensus opinion than their off schedule voting counterparts.

The Cox proportional hazards model is a popular method for duration analysis that is frequently the subject of simulation studies. However, no standard method exists for simulating durations directly from its data generating process because it does not assume a distributional form for the baseline hazard function. Instead, simulation studies typically rely on parametric survival distributions, which contradicts the primary motivation for employing the Cox model. We propose a method that generates a baseline hazard function at random by fitting a cubic spline to randomly drawn points. Durations drawn from this function match the Cox model’s inherent flexibility and improve the simulation’s generalizability. The method can be extended to include time-varying covariates and non-proportional hazards.

The growing research on post-industrial labor market inequality bears a strong—yet widely misunderstood—relevance for the literature on electoral realignment. In this contribution, I contend that the assumption of “labor market outsiders” being equal to “globalization/modernization losers” is largely mistaken. Rather, atypical work and unemployment is most widespread among service workers, whose primary electoral choice is to abstain from voting. This implies that the ongoing reconfiguration of European party systems—through the rise of right-wing populist parties—is driven by skilled and routine workers in the manufacturing sector (the traditional “insiders”). Hence, the rise of right-wing populist parties reflects a political mobilization of the formerly well-protected industrial working class, rather than of labor market outsiders.

How does public diplomacy shape global public opinion? In this note, we theorize that positive public diplomacy that emphasizes aid and friendship works, while negative messages that criticize international rivals are ineffective. We conduct an experiment, to our knowledge the first of its kind, that randomly exposes Indian citizens to real Twitter messages from Chinese diplomats. We find that positive messages emphasizing aid and friendship improve perceptions of China, even in times of escalating violent conflict. However, messages from so-called “Wolf Warrior” diplomats that harshly criticize the United States are ineffective and can backfire in times of crisis. We argue public diplomacy can be a useful tool for global powers, but that domestic political pressures have pushed some diplomats, like China's Wolf Warriors, toward nationalist messages that do not appeal to foreign audiences.

The nonverbal display of confidence is strongly associated with leadership and power. However, its importance for the persuasiveness of campaign messages has not been explored. How important is showing confidence for a political candidate’s ratings? How does confidence condition the effect of the quality of a candidate’s arguments? This article addresses these questions using an innovative experimental approach that makes it possible to better isolate the impact of the candidate’s nonverbal confidence and the quality of his message. While both of these aspects influence voters’ perceptions of the candidate’s electability and qualifications, the nonverbal dimension matters more when it comes to electability. This research contributes to the study of nonverbal communication in elections by expanding the focus of inquiry beyond the effect of pure emotions (happiness or anger) and facial traits.

Research shows that government-controlled media is an effective tool for authoritarian regimes to shape public opinion. Does government-controlled media remain effective when it is required to support changes in positions that autocrats take on issues? Existing theories do not provide a clear answer to this question, but we often observe authoritarian governments using government media to frame policies in new ways when significant changes in policy positions are required. By conducting an experiment that exposes respondents to government-controlled media—in the form of TV news segments—on issues where the regime substantially changed its policy positions, we find that by framing the same issue differently, government-controlled media moves respondents to adopt policy positions closer to the ones espoused by the regime regardless of individual predisposition. This result holds for domestic and foreign policy issues, for direct and composite measures of attitudes, and persists up to 48 hours after exposure.

Literature on the compensation hypothesis overwhelmingly concentrates on either the macro or micro level of the relationship between globalization and welfare spending. This paper explicitly addresses this shortcoming by using individual citizens and country-specific characteristics in a hierarchical model framework. We start by examining individual’s context-conditional reactions to actual economic globalization and welfare generosity; after which, we make the effect of actual economic globalization (welfare generosity) conditional on whether the individual is a globalization winner or loser. In contrast to theoretical expectations, our results indicate that actual economic globalization does not affect people’s perception in the manner expected by the compensation hypothesis. However, individuals display more positive attitudes toward globalization if welfare state generosity is proxied using government spending on active labor market programs.

Academics and policymakers recognize that there are serious costs associated with systemic corruption. Stubbornly, many countries or regions remain stuck in a high-corruption equilibrium—a “corruption trap.” Most existing theories concentrate on mutually reinforcing expectations of corrupt behavior among a fixed set of bureaucrats or politicians, implying that changing such expectations can lead to lower corruption. We develop models that more fully characterize the political nature of corruption traps by also analyzing the behavior of voters and entrants to politics, as well their interaction with incumbent politicians. We show that corruption traps can arise through strategic behavior of each set of actors, as well as through their interrelations. By linking politician, voter, and entrant behavior, we provide an explanation for why simply trying to change expectations among one set of actors is likely insufficient for eliminating corruption traps.

Position change is an essential feature of political competition. Implicitly, policy change on an issue dimension is often equated with opinion change on specific issues within that dimension. However, in addition to opinion-based policy change, we highlight that parties and candidates can change their overall position by increasing their emphasis on certain opinions within that issue dimension (emphasis-based policy change). Using party manifesto data, we find that parties differ in their use of each type of policy change based on aspects of party organization, particularly the relative power of leaders and activists. Leader-dominated parties are more likely to engage in opinion-based policy change, also in reaction to systemic policy shifts. In contrast, activist-dominated parties tend to change their overall position in reaction to systemic shifts by emphasizing certain positions more. Our approach links salience-based to spatial models of party competition and has broader implications for how we study party competition.

Many, especially low-skilled workers, blame globalization for their economic woes. Robots and machines, which have led to job market polarization, rising income inequality, and labor displacement, are often viewed much more forgivingly. This paper argues that citizens have a tendency to misattribute blame for economic dislocations toward immigrants and workers abroad, while discounting the effects of technology. Using the 2016 American National Elections Studies, a nationally representative survey, I show that workers facing higher risks of automation are more likely to oppose free trade agreements and favor immigration restrictions, even controlling for standard explanations for these attitudes. Although pocket-book concerns do influence attitudes toward globalization, this study calls into question the standard assumption that individuals understand and can correctly identify the sources of their economic anxieties. Accelerated automation may have intensified attempts to resist globalization.

The rise of populist forces in Western democracies is often linked to representation failures. However, to date we lack causally identified evidence for the effect of parties’ representation on populist attitudes. We address this lacuna through a survey experiment conducted in 12 European Union countries involving 23,257 subjects. Our experiment manipulates citizens’ perceptions of being represented by national parties in the 2019 European elections campaign, and identifies the effect of perceived representation on populist attitudes. The results reveal that poor representation increases populist attitudes in respondents that did not express such attitudes pretreatment, but has no effect among those who were already populist. We demonstrate that this effect is primarily due to parties’ representation failures triggering citizens’ anti-elite sentiment.

Numerous empirical studies of the relationship between popular support for Islamism and support for democracy and violence have yielded inconclusive results. We suspect that this is largely because scholars have not operationalized support for Shari`a in ways that capture the concept’s multi-dimensionality. In this paper, we employ data derived from a carefully designed survey instrument that casts unique insights into how Pakistanis imagine a Shari`a-based government. We find that formalizing an Islamic government as one that implements Shari`a by providing services and security for its citizens is positively associated with support for democratic values, whereas conceptualizing it as one that implements Shari`a by imposing hudud punishments and restricting women’s public roles is positively associated with support for militancy. These results suggest that it is important to understand how individuals within a particular context construe a Shari`a-based government, and future empirical work should take this.

How do changes in Election Day polling place locations affect voter turnout? We study the behavior of more than 2 million eligible voters across three closely-contested presidential elections (2008–2016) in the swing state of North Carolina. Leveraging within-voter variation in polling place location change over time, we demonstrate that polling place changes reduce Election Day voting on average statewide. However, this effect is almost completely offset by substitution into early voting, suggesting that voters, on average, respond to a change in their polling place by choosing to vote early. While there is heterogeneity in these effects by the distance of the polling place change and the race of the affected voter, the fully offsetting substitution into early voting still obtains. We theorize this is because voters whose polling places change location receive notification mailers, offsetting search costs and priming them to think about the election before election day, driving early voting.

Political scientists use expert surveys to assess the latent features of political actors. Experts, though, are unlikely to be equally informed and assess all actors equally well. The literature acknowledges variance in measurement quality but pays little attention to the implications of uncertainty for aggregating responses. We discuss the nature of the measurement problem in expert surveys. We then propose methods to assess the ability of experts to judge where actors stand and to aggregate expert responses. We examine the effects of aggregation for a prominent survey in the literature on party politics and EU integration. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we demonstrate that it is better to aggregate expert responses using the median or modal response, rather than the mean.

Various strands of literature in comparative politics suggest that there is a differential impact of the type of government and their supporting legislative coalitions in parliamentary democracies, for example, in terms of their size and ideological heterogeneity, and on their potential to induce policy change. Most studies in this area focus on governments as agenda-setters, possibly neglecting the role of parliaments as a further key actor in policy making. In this article, we address the broader question as to how patterns of conflict within parliament effect legislative activity of governments and parliamentary actors. Through a simultaneous analysis of the success and event history of over 12,000 legislative bills in three parliamentary systems and one semi-presidential system from 1986 until 2003, we show how the interplay of actor motivations and institutional settings has a discriminating impact on the potential of both the government and parliament to induce policy change.

This contribution starts by presenting the three main approaches that political scientists use to analyze labor market vulnerability. We proceed to discuss various operationalizations of labor market vulnerability. We examine how they relate to the three theoretical approaches and we evaluate the consistency between theory and measurement. Finally, we recommend three measures that political scientists should deploy when analyzing the effect of labor market vulnerability on political preferences. We point out what each of these variables captures and what methodological challenges should be taken into account when using them.

Consensual-pluralistic institutional features of representative democracies have traditionally been associated with satisfaction with democracy (SWD). However, more recent studies report contradictory results on the effects of some of these institutional determinants on SWD. This article confirms these puzzling findings by showing that electoral proportionality increases SWD while other pluralistic factors such as government fractionalization produce the opposite effect. We illustrate this duality of counteracting effects by expanding the number of cases under study to different regions of the world in a comprehensive time-series cross-sectional sample of 58 democracies between 1990 and 2012. In the second part of the paper, we are able to reconfirm these findings at the individual level by employing survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.

Voter turnout in second-order elections is on a dramatic decline in many modern democracies. This article investigates how electoral participation can be substantially increased by holding multiple of these less important elections simultaneously. Leading to a relative decrease in voting costs, concurrent elections theoretically have economies of scale to the individual voter and thus should see turnout levels larger than those obtained in any stand-alone election. Leveraging as-if-random variation of local election timing in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of concurrent mayoral elections on European election turnout at around 10 percentage points. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we show that the magnitude of the concurrency effect is contingent upon district size and the competitiveness of the local race.

Models testing interactive and quadratic hypotheses are common in Political Science but control strategies for these models have received little attention. Common practice is to simply include additive control variables, without relevant product terms, into models with interaction or quadratic terms. In this paper, we show in Monte Carlos that interaction terms can absorb the effects of other un-modeled interaction and non-linear effects and analogously, that included quadratic terms can reflect omitted interactions and non-linearities. This problem even occurs when included and omitted product terms do not share any constitutive terms. We show with Monte Carlo experiments that regularized estimators, the adaptive Lasso, Kernel Regularized Least Squares (KRLS), and Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) can prevent the misattribution of interactive/quadratic effects, minimize the problems of efficiency loss and overfitting, and have low false-positive rates. We illustrate how inferences drawn can change when relevant product terms are used in the control strategy using a recent paper. Implementing the recommendations of this paper would increase the reliability of conditional and non-linear relationships estimated in many papers in the literature.