What explains the geography and timing of contestation in civil war? We propose a theory of opportunistic rebel tactics, in which insurgent commanders react to temporary shifts in the local balance of power to attack the state. We argue that these opportunistic strikes are enabled by two jointly necessary factors: (1) negative fluctuations in local repressive state capacity and (2) the expectation of civilian compliance with rebel incursions. We evaluate this argument on data from the Colombian civil war. Leveraging exogenous variation in local state capacity caused by landslide-induced road closures, we find that short-term negative shocks to repressive capacity increase the likelihood of insurgent-state clashes. However, this effect does not hold when local communities harbor strongly anti-insurgent attitudes, suggesting that state capacity and civilian behavior jointly shape rebel strategy and that popular opposition can substitute for state strength.

Many recent applications of the “Unexpected Event during Survey Design” (UESD) analyze single cases of frequently occurring events. In this research note, I question the generalizability of research findings obtained this way and demonstrate the empirical benefits of the “Multiple Unexpected Events during Survey Design” (MUESD). I conduct 15 large-scale replications (total N = 101,940) of a new UESD analyzing the effects of Mediterranean shipwrecks on immigration attitudes. Previous research suggests that such events drastically reduce anti-immigration attitudes among the European public, presumably through an empathy-based mechanism. However, after 15 of the most lethal shipwrecks since 2013, anti-immigration attitudes were reduced in only one case of exceptionally high salience and to a much lesser degree than originally found.

Do more restrictive voter identification (ID) laws decrease turnout? I argue that in the 2018 London Local elections this was the case. Bromley was the only London borough to pilot a more restrictive ID scheme. The scheme was assessed by the Electoral Commission and Cabinet Office but lacked a good estimate for the impact on turnout. Applying a synthetic difference-in-difference (DID) methodology, which has several benefits compared to traditional DID methods, to turnout data from 2002 to 2018 I show that turnout was between 4.0 and 5.0% points lower than otherwise would be expected. This indicates more restrictive ID laws can meaningfully limit turnout which has implications for future elections if governments chose to implement a more restrictive regime.

Most research on political identities studies how individuals react to knowing others’ political allegiances. However, in most contexts, political views and identities are hidden and only inferred, so that projected beliefs and identities may matter as much as actual ones. We argue that individuals engage in motivated political projection: the identities people project onto target individuals are strongly conditional on the valence of that target. We test this theoretical proposition in two pre-registered experimental studies. In Study 1, we rely on a unique visual conjoint experiment in Britain and the USA that asks participants to assign partisanship and political ideology to heroes and villains from film and fiction. In Study 2, we present British voters with a vignette that manipulates a subject’s valence and solicits (false) recall information related to the subject’s political identity. We find strong support for motivated political projection in both studies, especially among strong identifiers. This is largely driven by negative out-group counter-projection rather than positive in-group projection. As political projection can lead to the solidification of antagonistic political identities, our findings are relevant for understanding dynamics in group-based animosity and affective polarization.

Panel surveys and phone-based data collection are essential for survey research and are often used together due to the practical advantages of conducting repeated interviews over the phone. These tools are particularly critical for research in dynamic or high-risk settings, as highlighted by researchers’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, preventing high attrition is a major challenge in panel surveys. Current solutions in political science focus on statistical fixes to address attrition ex-post but often overlook a preferable solution: minimizing attrition in the first place. Building on a review of political science panel studies and established best practices, we propose a framework to reduce attrition and introduce an online platform to facilitate the logistics of survey implementation. The web application semi-automates survey call scheduling and enumerator workflows, helping to reduce panel attrition, improve data quality, and minimize enumerator errors. Using this framework in a panel study of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, we maintained participant retention at 63 percent four and a half years after the baseline survey. We provide guidelines for researchers to report panel studies transparently and describe their designs in detail.

Mexico's war on drugs is increasingly characterized by small, local groups rather than large cartels. This research note introduces new data developed from a narcoblog—a citizen journalism website—on more than 450 criminal organizations operating in Mexico between 2009 and 2020. I use the data to test prominent theories of fragmentation, providing suggestive evidence that drug war policies contributed to a more complex conflict: kingpin removals were correlated with the emergence of smaller groups; profit opportunities (in this case, fuel theft) then attracted these organizations to new territories. This research contributes to our understanding of criminal control and informs debates over violence reduction policies.

Can autocratic governments influence foreign media? This study finds that political pressures from autocrats can motivate the media in democracies to tone down their negativity. Exploiting China's sudden expulsion of American journalists in March 2020, I show that US news outlets targeted by the expulsion adopted a more positive tone toward China in their subsequent coverage, compared to outlets that were not targeted. Further analyses confirm that the observed pattern is not due to unexpelled outlets presenting more negative coverage of China, and that the expulsion has similar chilling effects on media outlets that could have been affected. The findings highlight the overt threats autocracies pose to media freedom, a fundamental pillar of democratic societies.

The standard measure of authoritarianism asks respondents about desirable qualities in children. Although these questions are gender-neutral, respondents may differ in the gender of the child in their heads when answering. The items also may tap into gendered expectations about boys' and girls' behavior. We conducted three experiments that randomly assigned respondents to be asked about a child, a boy, or a girl in the items. We compare the means, measurement properties, and correlation between authoritarianism and other important variables across the conditions. Asking respondents about a girl creates significant differences in the level and measurement of authoritarianism, which is partially driven by the respondents' sexism. There are, fortunately, few other significant differences in the correlates of authoritarianism.

This article presents an original database on international standards, constructed using modern data gathering methods. StanDat facilitates studies into the role of standards in the global political economy by (1) being a source for descriptive statistics, (2) enabling researchers to assess scope conditions of previous findings, and (3) providing data for new analyses, for example the exploration of the relationship between standardization and trade, as demonstrated in this article. The creation of StanDat aims to stimulate further research into the domain of standards. Moreover, by exemplifying data collection and dissemination techniques applicable to investigating less-explored subjects in the social sciences, it serves as a model for gathering, systematizing, and sharing data in areas where information is plentiful yet not readily accessible for research.

Do external threats increase American bipartisanship? We subject this question to an experimental test. Leveraging the Biden and Trump administrations’ similar characterization of the China threat, we exposed American respondents to real-world primes about security threats from China, while randomizing the messenger of such primes. We find that the threat primes—regardless of the partisan identity of their messenger—boosted Democrats’ and Republicans’ support for assertive foreign policy in a largely parallel manner, thereby failing to reduce preference polarization. Importantly, there were no measurable changes across multiple indicators of affective polarization. These findings clarify the limits of external threats in uniting Americans, while also challenging recent perspectives that external threats—often colored by elite rhetoric—will further polarize the American public.

We argue that more female candidates on the ballot will decrease the gender participation gap at the polls. We test this hypothesis with data from Italian local elections between 2008 and 2020, taking advantage of a 2012 law requiring at least a third of local council candidates to be women in localities with 5000+ inhabitants. Exploiting the exogenous geographic variation and timing in the implementation of the electoral reform, we evaluate the effect of this exogenously driven variation in women's candidacy on the gendered voting gap. We find a significant and substantively strong causal relationship between the share of women on the ballot and the gendered gap, driven by an increase in women's, but not men's, participation at the polls.

In a time of unprecedented displacement, hostility toward refugees is widespread. Two common strategies refugee advocates pursue to counter hostility and promote inclusion are perspective-getting exercises and providing information that corrects misperceptions. In this study, we evaluate whether these strategies are effective across four outcomes commonly used to measure outgroup inclusion: warmth toward refugees, policy preferences, behavior, and beliefs about a common misperception concerning refugees. Using three studies with nearly 15,000 Americans, we find that information and perspective-getting affect different outcomes. We show that combining both interventions produces an additive effect on all outcomes, that neither strategy enhances the other, but that bundling the strategies may prevent backfire effects. Our results underscore the promise and limits of both strategies for promoting inclusion.

Our understanding of politics often relies on the ideological placement of political actors—ranging from scaling legislative roll-call voting in the United States to text-based classifications of political parties in Europe. A particularly thorny problem remains estimating individual positions in legislatures with strong partisan discipline. We improve upon recently developed measurement strategies and propose a novel approach for estimating legislators’ ideological positions: an expert survey in which respondents compare pairs of representatives on a left-right dimension. The innovation of our approach lies in the combination of four particular features. First, we rely on political youth leaders who are insightful and easy to recruit. Second, the rating task does not involve numeric scaling and consists of simple pairwise comparisons. Third, we efficiently and automatically detect informative comparisons to reduce the cost and length of the survey without compromising our estimates. Fourth, we use a Bayesian Davidson model with random effects to generate an ideological position for each legislator. As an empirical illustration, we estimate the placement of the 709 members of the 19th German Bundestag. Several validity tests show that our model captures variation within and across political parties. Our estimates offer a thorough benchmark to validate alternative measurement strategies. The presented measurement strategy is flexible and easily extendable to diverse political settings because it can capture comparisons among political actors across time and space.

Since the end of World War II, the US government has spent nearly $4 trillion on humanitarian, economic, and military assistance to other countries. Despite the myriad benefits of such programs, mass support has long been lacking. Here, I argue that low citizen trust in government can help us to understand why. Using cross-sectional and panel survey data from the United States, I find a positive and substantively significant relationship between political trust and support for government spending on foreign aid. Overall, these findings underscore the relevance of political trust and further illustrate the drivers of U.S. public opinion toward foreign aid, something that has implications for whether America should turn inward or continue its long-standing role of global leadership.

Are people's priorities associated with their income and education levels? There is a long history in political science of claims that priorities are driven by economic interests, but also that low-income and low-education people fail to prioritize their economic interests. In this paper we use measures of revealed importance from [Sides J, Tausanovitch C and Vavreck L (2023) The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the hallenge to American Democracy. Princeton University Press.] to evaluate the priorities of high- and low-income/education voters with respect to 44 different policies. It is well known that there are substantial differences in the preferences of people with lower incomes or education levels and people with higher incomes or education levels, but conditional on preferences we find very small differences among education and income groups in terms of priorities. Like high-income and high-education voters, lower-income and education voters care most about the major issues of the day. They do not care systematically more or less than other voters about policies that expand social welfare, redistribution, or labor rights.

We demonstrate how few-shot prompts to large language models (LLMs) can be effectively applied to a wide range of text-as-data tasks in political science—including sentiment analysis, document scaling, and topic modeling. In a series of pre-registered analyses, this approach outperforms conventional supervised learning methods without the need for extensive data pre-processing or large sets of labeled training data. Performance is comparable to expert and crowd-coding methods at a fraction of the cost. We propose a set of best practices for adapting these models to social science measurement tasks, and develop an open-source software package for researchers.

The remuneration of MPs affects who engages in politics. Even if average returns to office are positive, as found in all other studies, some officeholders’ returns are likely negative. Further, the timing of returns to office is crucial as politicians often enjoy delayed compensation like lucrative pensions. Utilizing administrative data for parliamentary candidates in Denmark from 1994 to 2015, we estimate first-time runners’ earnings and total income returns to office. Based on total income, practically all elected MPs experience economic gains during their first term. Computations of life-cycle returns reveal that the 25 percent highest earning candidates (pre-office) have no long-term economic gain from winning. Generally, considering the distribution and timing of returns to office improves studies of how office-holding is economically rewarded.

Do citizens evaluate quota and non-quota politicians similarly? Do voters perceive quota-elected politicians as less competent and autonomous? Despite the proliferation of gender quotas, it remains unclear how citizens view female quota politicians compared to their non-quota male and female counterparts. This is particularly important in electoral systems where competitive and reserved seats both exist. We conducted a vignette experiment in Morocco where we randomized information about how politicians were elected and their legislative behavior. We find no evidence that voters evaluate quota women as less competent than non-quota male and female politicians. Our data demonstrate partial support for the argument that quota women are perceived as pawns of their parties, although information about legislative behavior can mitigate this perception.

In this study, we examine the interactions among elections by considering two parties competing in simultaneous elections, where each party fields candidates in every election. We model these interactions through voters’ utility functions, influenced not just by the policies proposed in a specific election but also by those in concurrent elections. The benchmark result indicates that all candidates adopt positions more polarized than those predicted by the Calvert–Wittman model. This shift occurs because candidates leverage the policy stance of their counterparts in co-partisan elections to pursue policies more aligned with their preferences. In multidistrict elections, candidates from areas with strong ideological leanings deviate further from the median voter's stance at the national level. Moreover, this interaction effect may select candidates with more extreme ideology into the local elections.

There are two prominent but seemingly contradictory symbols of how Asians are racialized domestically within the United States: “yellow peril” and “model minority.” How do these two racial tropes relate to each other? What effects do they have on the formation of support for race-targeted public policy? In this paper, we propose and empirically test that racialized resentment toward Asian Americans and the congratulatory framing of them as a model minority are both salient in the minds of the American public, reflecting the complexity of prejudices toward Asians in American society. Utilizing two original survey-based measures of anti-Asian resentment and the model minority stereotype, we empirically demonstrate the interconnection between the two racial tropes and highlight the key demographic and dispositional correlates of these multi-faceted contemporary racial attitudes toward Asian Americans. We then show that the two racial tropes, both independently and by interacting with each other, significantly shape racial public policy preferences in the United States.