Which predispositions drive voters’ policy attitudes? This article tests the role of political values as a driver of attitudes relative to two commonly posited sources – partisanship and symbolic ideology. Past work has found correlations between values and issue attitudes, but these cross-sectional studies have limited causal purchases. I test the effects of traditionalist and egalitarian values on issue stances using six ANES and GSS panel surveys from 1992 to 2020. I find that values drive within-voter changes in policy attitudes under a variety of specifications. Additionally, values shape attitudes on emergent policies, which I test using the cases of welfare reform in the 1990s and transgender policies in the 2010s. In all models, values have as large or larger effects on attitudes as that of partisanship or ideology. I conclude that values are a core predisposition which voters employ to make sense of policy issues.

The Forum Augustum represents one of the most important examples of the public and material dissemination of Augustan ideology. This paper offers a new model for understanding how the Forum's spatial and architectural design communicated that ideology. Departing from scholarly emphasis on the Forum's statuary programme, it examines how the Forum's spaces set up a series of contrasts that structured visitors’ experiences. In the porticoes, the extensive statue programme granted viewers a wide range of choices about what they could see. In the central square and hemicycles (exedrae), however, visitors were compelled by the paucity of material to encounter certain images and ideas. This argument shows a new way of understanding the Forum, where movement into and between certain spaces structured how Augustan ideology was communicated, received, and understood.

Xi Jinping's frequent references to Mao Zedong, along with Xi's own claims to ideological originality, have fueled debate over the significance of Maoism in the PRC today. The discussion recalls an earlier debate, at the height of the Cold War, over the meaning of Maoism itself. This paper revisits that earlier controversy, reflected in arguments between Benjamin Schwartz and Karl Wittfogel, with an eye toward their contemporary relevance.

This study investigates how former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) tried to reproduce and reinforce their conservative and nationalist ideologies from 2012 to 2020. Conducting critical discourse analysis on official statements, speeches, and remarks at press conferences highlights the strategies that Abe and his sympathizers used to promote and legitimize the idea of “Take back Japan (Nippon wo torimodosu).” This study also elucidates the implications of the party's efforts to reproduce and disseminate its campaign slogan in official narratives.

The January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capital was an eye-opening moment for many Americans. With the 2024 election cycle in swing, members of the Democratic Party are using January 6th as a rallying call for the need to protect democracy. But were the events of January 6th viewed equally among liberals? We argue that the events of January 6th resonate for a particular demographic well-informed liberal White voters. We argue that liberal minority voters will feel the racial undertones of January 6th more than White liberals. Furthermore, we examine how voters of different races viewed the events of January 6th and how views on race relations impact their perceptions of January 6th. We find that White liberals are less angry about race relations in the aftermath of January 6th, and while they viewed January 6th as an insurrection and blamed Trump and Republicans in Congress for their role, they are less likely to say that racism and White Supremacy motivated the insurrectionists. This paper indicates that race plays a key role in political perceptions, even among those who hold similar political ideologies.

Most political systems consist of multiple layers. Yet datasets are predominantly situated at a single territorial tier, encouraging methodological nationalism, regionalism, and localism. We present three new integrated datasets that include electoral, institutional, ideological, and government composition data on the country and regional level (RD|CED, RED and RPSD). With this data, we cover 337 country elections on the regional level, 2,226 regional elections, and 2,825 regional cabinets in 365 regions of 21 countries from 1941 to 2019, accounting for 800 political parties and their ideological positions. Combined, these data complement and extend existing datasets and facilitate the study of political interaction across levels. Data are available at http://multi-level-cross-level-politics.eu/ or can be accessed through the Havard Dataverse repository. We conclude with an agenda for future cross-level studies.

Liberals experience more distress than conservatives. Why? We offer a novel explanation, the social support hypothesis. Maintaining social support and avoiding exclusion are basic human motivations, but people differ in their sensitivity to the threat of social exclusion. Among people high in the personality trait neuroticism, exclusion easily triggers feelings of vulnerability and neediness. The social support hypothesis translates this to politics. Concerned with their own vulnerability, we find that neurotic people prefer policies of care – social welfare and redistribution – but not other left-wing policies. Specifically, it is anxiety – the facet of neuroticism tapping sensitivity to social threats – that drives this link. And it is only for people experiencing exclusion that anxiety predicts support for social welfare. Our results come from two experiments and four representative surveys across two continents. They help to resolve the puzzle of liberal distress while providing a new template for research on personality and politics.

We use instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama 3, MiXtral, or Aya to position political texts within policy and ideological spaces. We ask an LLM where a tweet or a sentence of a political text stands on the focal dimension and take the average of the LLM responses to position political actors such as US Senators, or longer texts such as UK party manifestos or EU policy speeches given in 10 different languages. The correlations between the position estimates obtained with the best LLMs and benchmarks based on text coding by experts, crowdworkers, or roll call votes exceed .90. This approach is generally more accurate than the positions obtained with supervised classifiers trained on large amounts of research data. Using instruction-tuned LLMs to position texts in policy and ideological spaces is fast, cost-efficient, reliable, and reproducible (in the case of open LLMs) even if the texts are short and written in different languages. We conclude with cautionary notes about the need for empirical validation.

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.

Anthony D. Smith, in one of his earlier, less debated, works – Nationalism in the 20th Century (1979) – examines phases of nationalism in the modern era, suggesting that nationalism has taken various forms before and during the 20th century. He argues that nationalism’s adaptability is at the core of its persistence, adapting to changing situations such as fascism and communism. As a result of this adaptability, nationalism still flourishes today. This article applies Smith’s theory to explore the interplay between cultural and material factors in the evolution of nationalism in Ireland. It identifies five ideological phases – revolutionary nationalist, protectionist, liberalising, neoliberal, and ecological – to which nationalism has adapted, and within which nationalism has influenced various aspects of Irish society. These phases are situated within a broader ideological and material context, analysing obliquely the Irish language (a core element of Irish nationalism), and related to changing processes of individualization.