We study the effect of compulsory civic duty on turnout. We take advantage of a natural experiment in Spain, where electoral officers are selected through a lottery and being an electoral officer is compulsory for those drafted. We analyze whether acting as an officer changes turnout and attitudes in subsequent elections. Our findings show that compulsory civic duty has a strong short-term and positive effect on electoral participation, but has no impact on political attitudes. The positive effect of the civic duty treatment, however, fades after a few months. Our results have implications for theories about civic duty and the formation of political habits.

With the increasing nationalization of politics, federal politicians have interacted more and more with subnational actors. In particular, the president and governing party have provided selective policy and spending benefits to same-party jurisdictions in order to increase their influence in subnational politics. As a significant amount of federal grants is allocated directly to city governments, we analyze the effects of the federal-city relationship in the federal grant process. Specifically, we examine the effects of the president–mayor party alignment on the allocation of federal block and project grants to 568 medium and large cities from 2005 to 2020 using a two-way (city and year) fixed-effects model. We find that the president favors co-partisan mayors in the distribution of federal grants, specifically co-partisan mayors from (a) secure party cities, (b) cities in states where the governor is also a co-partisan, and (c) secure party cities in states where the governor is also a co-partisan. Digging deeper, we find this form of presidential particularism is almost exclusively a Democratic pursuit.

Anemic demand for local news has contributed to an industry crisis. We consider whether local elections, which highlight the ability of local television stations and newspapers to provide information that is unavailable from national news outlets, increase local media use. While we show these elections are a time of increased attention to local politics in the news and among the public, we also find local media outlets do not benefit from this when considering behavioral news use measures. Relative to news outlets in cities without an election, local television remains substantively unchanged during local elections. Newspaper website traffic is largely stable, although it falls slightly the month after an election. In both cases these differences are small, even when considering close races and those happening off the federal election cycle. This shows limits on the ability of salient local political events to motivate local news use.

We revisit Arunachalam and Watson's contention that a person's physical height may be used as instrument for income because it affects economic well-being solely by causing more conservative political preferences among people who are taller. To evaluate whether other early-life and genetic factors might serve as mechanisms connecting height and political preferences, we analyze a unique data source that includes political, economic, and demographic data on same-gender siblings. Models that include fixed effects for siblings provide a strong test of the Arunachalam and Watson thesis. We find that height is not a consistent predictor of political preferences once shared sibling characteristics are controlled in this way, raising doubt about whether height can in fact be used as an instrument for income.

Regression models with log-transformed dependent variables are widely used by social scientists to investigate nonlinear relationships between variables. Unfortunately, this transformation complicates the substantive interpretation of estimation results and often leads to incomplete and sometimes even misleading interpretations. We focus on one valuable but underused method, the presentation of quantities of interest such as expected values or first differences on the original scale of the dependent variable. The procedure to derive these quantities differs in seemingly minor but critical aspects from the well-known procedure based on standard linear models. To improve empirical practice, we explain the underlying problem and develop guidelines that help researchers to derive meaningful interpretations from regression results of models with log-transformed dependent variables.

This research note builds upon a number of important articles published in a variety of outlets concerning the population ecology of interest groups. Importantly, Lowery and Gray (1995), Nownes (2004), and Nownes and Lipinski (2005) empirically demonstrated the dependence on the density of pre-existing, similar groups when predicting new group formations. In this letter, I add to this research by modeling the density of ideologically divergent reproductive rights groups as well as offer supporting evidence for the popular Energy-Stability-Area model. The former is a novel consideration in the field of population ecology which primarily examines ideologically similar groups. I show that density dependence is at play among these polarized groups. I also provide insight into counter-mobilization movements of group formation by empirically demonstrating which groups are initial movers versus reactionary formers. In doing so, I raise important questions for researchers concerned with the emergence, longevity, and impact of interest groups over long periods of time. Finally, this research provides some insight into the expectations of group formation behavior in light of the landmark Dobbs decision.

Analyses of US panel surveys from 1992 to 1996 have found extremity in political values was associated with increased affective polarization, but that affective polarization was not associated with changes in value extremity during this period (Enders and Lupton, 2021). This note reevaluates the relationships between political value extremity and affective polarization using a 2016–2020 panel survey. Replicating Enders and Lupton's analytical procedures as closely as possible with this more recent sample, I find value extremity is sometimes associated with increased affective polarization. In contrast to Enders and Lupton (2021), however, affective polarization is strongly associated with increased value extremity between 2016 and 2020. These findings suggest that the relationships between political values and affective polarization may have changed since the 1990s, and that values are now influenced by Americans' evaluations of salient political objects, such as parties, presidential candidates, and ideological groups.

Deceiving citizens is typically considered the main political motive behind the spread of fake news. Accordingly, strategies to debunk fake news, such as fact-checking, have been suggested to combat it. However, the spread of fake news persists despite these debunking strategies. We propose an alternative but underexplored motive behind the spread of fake news: Fake news aims not only to deceive citizens but also to induce media skepticism. To support our claim, we present a stylized formal model of media skepticism and demonstrate that the incentive to spread fake news persists even if citizens are not deceived by disinformation coming from fake news. Our model highlights the dilemma embedded in fact-checking.

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.

An extensive theoretical and practitioner literature addresses the drivers and consequences of transformation of violent rebel actors during conflicts. However, measurement challenges constrain large-N empirical study of the effects and consequences of such transformations. This Research Note introduces a strategy to identify periods of transformation and change in the operation of non-state armed militant groups via computational text analysis of trends in reporting on activities. It presents the measurement approach and demonstrates scalability to a corpus of more than 200 militant groups operating from 1989 to 2020. The study concludes by extending a recent analysis of the impacts of uncertainty on conflict termination. An online Appendix demonstrates the advantages and drawbacks of the measurement through a series of case studies.

Although influential models of public opinion hold that group sentiments play an important role in shaping political beliefs, they often assume that group attitudes stem from socialization and are thus exogenous to politics. We challenge this assumption, arguing that group attitudes may themselves be the consequence of political views. Across three survey experiments that each uses a unique social group–issue pair, we consistently demonstrate that attitudes toward groups are influenced by information about the groups' policy views. These findings persist even when accounting for potential partisan signaling. Altogether, these results show that group sentiments should not be regarded as wholly exogenous to policy concerns and suggest that the use of group-based heuristics can be consistent with instrumental models of public opinion.

Survey researchers testing the effectiveness of arguments for or against policies traditionally employ between-subjects designs. In doing so, they lose statistical power and the ability to precisely estimate public attitudes. We explore the efficacy of an approach often used to address these limitations: the repeated measures within-subjects (RMWS) design. This study tests the competing hypotheses that (1) the RMWS will yield smaller effects due to respondents' desire to maintain consistency (the “opinion anchor” hypothesis), and (2) the RMWS will yield larger effects because the researcher provides respondents with the opportunity to update their attitudes (the “opportunity to revise” hypothesis). Using two survey experiments, we find evidence for the opportunity to revise hypothesis, and discuss the implications for future survey research.

Whether a topic is seen in a moral or moral-emotional light has significant political implications. Yet, we lack knowledge about the process of moralization: Who defines the way topics are communicated about? Where prior research has investigated the relative power of different actors to place a topic on the agenda or shape opinions, we study who sets the moral and moral-emotional tone of debate. To do so, we zoom in on immigration discourse in Germany and analyze fine-grained social media data from politicians, political parties, newspapers, and members of the public over a period of more than four years. After employing a transformer model to identify moral and moral-emotional appeals, we use structural vector autoregression models to demonstrate the important role of radical-right challengers in shaping public discourse in a negative moral-emotional direction. The results inform theories of moralization and political entrepreneurship.

Prominent recent work argues that support for democracy behaves thermostatically—that democratic erosion boosts democratic support while deepening democracy yields public backlash—and further contends that there is no evidence for the classic argument that democracy itself increases democratic support over time. Here, we document how these conclusions depend on subtle choices in measurement coding that constitute “researcher degrees of freedom”: analyses employing alternative reasonable choices provide little or no support for the original conclusions. The fragility of the statistical results demonstrates that researcher degrees of freedom in measurement must be taken seriously and that the question of the relationship between democratic institutions and democratic support remains unsettled.

Concerns over free riding in NATO are widespread. An intuitive approach to analyzing free riding is treating it as a systematic pattern of spatial interdependence between the allies: how does a NATO member's defense spending react to changes in other allies' military expenditures? While recent work has found statistically significant free riding (negative spatial interdependence in the outcomes), it suffers from important limitations. First, this research does not adequately account for temporal dependence. Second, it does not quantify the effect of interest. Accounting directly for temporal dependence provides a meaningfully distinct perspective on the within-alliance dynamics, demonstrating that the spatiotemporal effect of free riding is, in fact, more substantial than its short-run effect, challenging inferences of static spatial models. We discuss the relevant practical and theoretical implications.