A number of important studies have documented gender gaps in the effectiveness or performance of individual representatives. Yet whether these differences are observable when it comes to responsiveness to public opinion is unclear. In this article, I examine the degree to which representatives use social media to dynamically respond to shifts in issue salience among the electorate. After combining nearly 400 bi-weekly repeated public opinion surveys from YouGov asking voters about their issue priorities, I trained a large language model to classify the universe of elected U.S. and UK representatives’ social media messages on Twitter to the same issues. Findings reveal that women representatives demonstrate greater responsiveness than their male counterparts to shifts in issue salience according to both women and men constituents. Despite an overall bias toward male constituents, female representatives play a crucial role in narrowing the gender gap by consistently aligning their attention with the issues prioritized by female constituents. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of elite-voter responsiveness but also underscore the substantive benefits that women representatives provide for all constituents.

Regimes do not change consistently across territorial levels. There has been progress in understanding national democratic erosions and subnational regimes, but barring a few exceptions, these research strands have not engaged in a thorough dialogue. To bridge this gap, I contend that when democracy advances in one territorial level, but erodes in another, we observe multilevel regime decoupling (MRD). Using global data from the Varieties of Democracy project, I examine the 1990–2022 period, showing that the proportion of decoupled cases increased from 20% in the 1990s, to 43% in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Preliminary regression analyses and a descriptive exploration of Italy, South Africa, India, and the United States indicate the non-deterministic influence of structural factors and the potentially pivotal role of courts in facilitating decoupled change. Considering these findings, renewed data collection efforts and an actor-centred approach are needed to strengthen our understanding of the varieties of (de)coupled regime change that have become common over the last decade. Given that regimes across territorial levels increasingly move in separate directions, future assessments of autocratization and democratic change need to embed territorial considerations in their analysis to remain informative about citizens’ real-world experiences on the ground.

Across the world, political parties are incorporating social movement strategies and frames. In this study, we pivot from the dominant focus on party characteristics to analyze drivers of support for movement parties in six European countries. We report results from a choice-based conjoint survey experiment showing that contrary to previous research, movement party voters favor neither candidates who are institutional outsiders nor those who actively participate in protests. Candidate policy positions are the most important driver of the vote for movement parties. Movement party voters, additionally, prefer candidates who either display anti-elitist sentiments or who want to ensure the smooth running of the current political system. These insights invite renewed attention to movement parties as an electoral vehicle whose voters prioritize decisive policy change.

How can public opinion change in a pro-immigration direction? Recent studies suggest that those who support immigration care less about it than those who oppose it, which may explain why lawmakers do not enact pro-immigration reforms even when voters are pro-immigration. To see if the personal issue importance of immigration can be changed, I conducted a probability-based, nationally representative US survey experiment (N = 3,450) exposing respondents to verifiable arguments about the broad national benefits of expanding legal immigration and the costs of not doing so. Using new measures of issue importance, my descriptive results show that only one-fifth of voters who prioritize the issue have a pro-immigration preference. Furthermore, while anti-immigration respondents prioritize policies regarding law enforcement and (reducing) future immigration, pro-immigration respondents prioritize (helping) immigrants already here. The experimental results confirm that the provided arguments raised immigration’s importance among pro-immigration voters but did not backfire by mobilizing anti-immigration voters. Contrary to expectations, the arguments increased pro-immigration policy preferences, but did not change voters’ subissue priorities within immigration or their willingness to sign a petition. Overall, the treatment was effective beyond changing minds by shifting stated issue positions and priorities in a pro-immigration direction. It can thus be used in a nontargeted information campaign to promote pro-immigration reforms.

Pernicious polarization is an antagonistic Us versus Them division, where the other group is perceived as an existential threat. It is often intertwined with the erosion of democratic norms and institutions. Although studies on polarization abound, there are still some blind spots to be filled. Our contribution is the focus on the mesolevel of civil society and the theoretical development of (de)polarization mechanisms at this level. Empirically, we study think tanks, a special type of civil society organization, in the context of democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland. The analysis is based on 53 interviews with Hungarian and Polish think tankers conducted between 2020 and 2022. We contend that through a shift in perceptions of Us, Them, and the middle ground, think tanks contribute to both polarization and depolarization. Rather than being passive receptors of polarization dynamics, we showcase think tanks’ agentic roles as they emerge through these three mechanisms and through think tanks resorting to specific patterns of discourse and interactions.

When do political transitions lead to greater inclusion for groups historically excluded from power? Scholars and policymakers often assume the answer is simple: a transition will result in more inclusion when it ends in democracy. Yet this answer is incomplete at best, since many democracies systematically exclude women, particular ethnic groups, or lower economic classes from power. Using data on political transitions around the world from 1945 to 2014, this study shows that a political transition’s initiating force critically shapes post-transition political inclusion. When transitions are initiated through unarmed civil resistance campaigns they achieve greater advances in inclusion relative to other types of transition. We propose three mechanisms to explain this effect: civil resistance leads to greater continued mobilization and civic activism among the historically excluded, provides greater opportunities for elites from historically excluded groups to rise to positions of leadership in new regimes, and forges more pluralistic norms of political behavior.

What challenges do researchers encounter in authentically engaging with the field site and academia when certain aspects of their true identities diverge from the established norms within those domains? Using the case of female political scientists who conduct research on gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa, I highlight the ethical, logistical, and epistemological challenges of carrying out research in a politically and socially closed context. Few studies have investigated how the research process and the knowledge it produces are affected by the intertwinement of authoritarianism and patriarchy, and by the researcher’s positionality within this context. This study fills this gap by drawing upon interviews with feminist political scientists who were born and raised in the region but are based in Western academic institutions to examine the impact of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and the researchers’ insider/outsider positionality on the research process. The analysis shows three key findings. First, researching gender politics is a contentious topic that places researchers on the radar of the state. For scholars who are originally from the region, the issue is compounded by the fact that they are sometimes viewed as traitors by the regime in their country of origin, which accuses them of tarnishing the image of the government and scrutinizing its gender policies. Second, within the wider society, the politics of representation also impose certain limitations and expectations on female scholars. Such limitations include gendered restrictions on their access and mobility in the field. Finally, feminist researchers share how the knowledge they produce, which centers social justice demands, is not always valued in the discipline of political science. The article contributes to this discipline by expanding our understanding of the interplay between identity politics, fieldwork practices, and knowledge production in complex political and social settings.

Every complex organization is sometimes marked by preference heterogeneity, disagreement, and conflict. Within political parties, such frictions are traditionally viewed negatively, while recent research has started to perceive them more positively. How might such contradictory evaluations be explained? Through a three-step conceptual analysis we (1) identify two analytical perspectives on intraparty friction, one rooted in a primarily structural conception of parties, one in a primarily behavioral conception; and (2) specify a minimal definition of intraparty friction, which underpins a hierarchical concept structure to (3) suggest a way to resolve contradictions in the consequences attributed to intraparty frictions. Structuralist accounts often view frictions as negative due to a more demanding conceptual threshold, suggesting different types and levels of risk taking by conflict partners. Conversely, behavioralist perspectives see friction more often as beneficial because they focus on expressed disagreement without necessitating an organizational response. Our conceptual tools have important implications for research on membership organizations generally.

From 1972 to 1991, a network of Chicago Police detectives used torture to force confessions from over 100 criminal suspects. Almost all were Black men, and many were wrongly convicted, some for capital offenses. I synthesize insights from comparative research on human rights, state abuse, and police violence in democracies to explain why, for nearly two decades, liberal institutions in Chicago failed to stop the torture. I argue that the nature of state violence in this case—targeting marginalized individuals uninvolved in political activity—intensified the practical, affective, and informational obstacles that are inherent to activating liberal institutions—courts, elected officials, media, and civil society—to fulfill their roles as rights enforcers. Applying these literatures to a type of case they typically overlook—a wealthy liberal democracy—contributes to understanding why state violence persists in such states and why it tends to concentrate on marginalized populations.

This article explores the strategic decision making of armed groups during war-to-peace transitions—critical time frames during which militant leaders must reconcile their commitment to armed survival with the imperative of postwar civilian conversion. We specify the internal organizational risks rebel groups confront, as well as the menu of strategies from which they select, in navigating the uncertainty inherent in these perilous periods. Our approach broadens the analysis of war-to-peace transitions, offering new insights into the question of why rebels sometimes successfully integrate into postconflict politics, economies, and society, while at other times they forgo participation in the postconflict state. It represents the first step in a wider research program—one that promises to open a number of new directions in the study of insurgent organizations, transitional societies, and postwar outcomes.

We examine the effects of the Nobel Peace Prize on the support for women’s rights groups to highlight the roles of the positive symbolic action, “prize and praise,” in international relations. Based on psychological theories, we argue that the Nobel Peace Prize increases the support for women’s rights activists by reassuring, persuading, and pressuring people across the world. We substantiate the claim by exploiting the as-if random assignment of interviews around the announcements of the Nobel Peace Prizes. The analyses indicate that when the prize was awarded to women’s rights activists, it increased people’s trust in women’s organizations. The analysis of mechanisms implies that the prize pressured conservative people to amend their attitudes. We also explore macro-level implications, finding that the prize decreased violence against women. However, these changes are short-lived. These results imply that symbolic actions entail real-world changes; however, the question of how to sustain these changes remains.