Many families, despite need and eligibility, struggle to meet programme deadlines to retain critical benefits. When families fail to complete programme recertification on time, they lose needed support. While scholars have tested behavioural theories like chunking, implementation intention, and loss framing to promote programme uptake, less is known about how well-designed communications can promote continuity through successful recertification, especially where recertification entails a significant administrative burden. Further, scant evidence guides how best to frame recertification deadlines. In a randomised trial with government partners (n = 3,539), we find that sending a reminder letter informed by these behavioural theories increased the number of families maintaining participation by 14 per cent. Further, anchoring people to a deadline month may suffice to thread the motivational needle: overcoming procrastination without lowering self-efficacy by anchoring them to a specific day. Adopting the most effective letter in Washington, DC, would lead 766 more families to participate uninterrupted each year.

Many recorded roll calls in Congress each year are votes on bills that have no chance of becoming law, or are purely symbolic, or are procedural without policy content. Yet models of voting and measurement models of member preferences make assumptions that vote choices are largely about utility derived from policies. We consider the possibility that votes plausibly connected to policy and votes not plausibly connected to policy may have different data-generating processes and rely on different utility functions. Substantively, similarity across different contexts for policy change implies an importance of messaging over policy. Methodologically, similarity across these contexts is necessary to avoid biasing estimates of member preferences. We find that members’ voting patterns are highly stable across contexts in which policy change is credible and not credible. This indicates that existing measures of ideal points are likely not dramatically biased by the inclusion of policy-irrelevant votes.

Research finds that social media platforms’ peer-to-peer structures shape the public discourse and increase citizens’ likelihood of exposure to unregulated, false, and prejudicial content. Here, we test whether self-reported reliance on social media as a primary news source is linked to racialised policy support, taking the case of United States Muslims, a publicly visible but understudied group about whom significant false and prejudicial content is abundant on these platforms. Drawing on three original surveys and the Nationscape dataset, we find a strong and consistent association between reliance on social media and support for a range of anti-Muslim policies. Importantly, reliance on social media is linked to policy attitudes across the partisan divide and for individuals who reported holding positive or negative feelings towards Muslims. These findings highlight the need for further investigation into the political ramification of information presented on contemporary social media outlets, particularly information related to stigmatised groups.

A common finding in the literature is that social investment policies are broadly popular among citizens but still politically difficult to implement. This article provides a partial answer to this puzzle by exploring the fiscal trade-offs associated with such a recalibration. Based on survey data from eight Western European countries, it first explores citizens’ fiscal policy preferences with regard to the preferred size of the public sector and the distribution of spending across different subsectors. These preferences are then shown to be significantly associated with attitudes towards fiscal trade-offs regarding the expansion of social investment policies. The results reveal a political dilemma for policy-makers keen on expanding social investment: People who traditionally support a large public sector and more welfare state spending tend to oppose redistributing spending towards social investment, whereas support for such a recalibration is higher among those who have a sceptical view on public spending.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a globally spread—but differently timed—implementation of school closures and other disruptive containment measures as governments worldwide intervened to curb transmission of disease. This study argues that the timing of such disruptive interventions reflects how governments balance the principles of precaution and proportionality in their pandemic decision-making. A theory is proposed of how their trade-off is impacted by two interacting institutional factors: electoral democratic institutions, which incentivise political leaders to increasingly favour precaution, and high state administrative capacity, which instead makes a proportional strategy involving later containment measures more administratively and politically feasible. Global patterns consistent with this theory are documented among 170 countries in early 2020, using Cox models of school closures and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. Corroborating the theorised mechanisms, additional results indicate that electoral competition prompts democratic leaders’ faster response, and that this mechanism is weaker where professional state agencies have more influence over policymaking.

One of the reasons for which corruption is so difficult to eradicate is because the actors involved are skilled in adapting their behaviour to changing institutional landscapes. However, surprisingly little is known about how corruption displacement functions across multiple levels of government. Using novel multilevel data on a political scandal in Italy and a Difference-in-Differences estimation strategy, I provide within-country evidence that a sudden increase in accountability for national deputies can impact negatively upon the behaviour of local-level public officials and politicians. In treated districts, where there is an increase in the indictment rate of national deputies, local-level corruption increases significantly as compared to nontreated districts. My results show how, in contexts characterised by systemic corruption, changes intended to enhance accountability can trigger a series of mechanisms within the political machine that exploit different levels of government.

When considering taking over public projects, executives assess their perceived credit-claiming opportunities against potential blame attribution. The balance of these perceptions may shift under crisis. Meanwhile, the literature has mostly explored project uptake in delegation contexts when decisionmakers hold certain control powers over delegees, but not when such controls are absent. Amid one of the largest migrant crises worldwide, we conducted a survey experiment with 238 sitting Colombian mayors. We explore issue visibility, salience of project beneficiaries, and policy stage (formulation versus implementation) as drivers of mayors’ preferences for project uptake or cession to upper-level governments. Results reveal mayors are less likely to cede implementation to the national government when presented with a more visible project. Neither visibility nor beneficiaries’ salience affects mayoral preferences for project formulation on its own. However, mayors are less likely to delegate both formulation and implementation when beneficiaries are more salient to their constituents.

It is widely acknowledged that poor government policy performance undermines public trust in government. However, there has been insufficient study of how citizens attribute responsibility to different levels of government within an authoritarian unitary context. Inquiry is needed to assess the ways government performance in various policy domains affects central–local political trust. This study uses the case of China to addresses these questions. Results show that, in particular, local governments risk losing public trust for corruption. Nevertheless, the central government loses public trust due to unsatisfying economies. Both local and central governments lose public trust for poor performance regarding environmental protection, food safety problems, public health, and primary/middle school education. The central government cannot always avoid blame, depending on different policy issues. The results indicate that the perceived administrative responsibility of different levels of government affects citizens’ evaluations of the performance of the central and local governments as well as their political trust.

Studies of multi-level blame avoidance strategies generally assume that (1) governments prefer to shift responsibility to other levels and (2) an unclear distribution of formal responsibilities complicates blame allocation to a single actor. Considering the temporal location of such strategies – in anticipation or as a reaction to adverse events – the article tests these assumptions. Drawing on the case of air quality policy in Mexico City, the article uses causal process tracing to develop the mechanism leading to an anticipatory strategy and its unfolding. If the distribution of responsibilities on connected policy instruments is clear and major political actors share power, then government levels from different parties engage in a joint anticipatory strategy to avoid crisis and keep stability. The mechanism breakdown leads to reactive behaviour and policy change. Contextual changes redistributing power can destabilise the arrangements, leading to reactive blame games, fostering policy change.