Comparative Politics

This article tests the ‘mismatch’ idea that online contexts make political talk more hostile because human psychology is tuned to face-to-face interaction. Across eight cross-national surveys and experiments (N=8,434) the authors find limited evidence for mismatch effects or major behavioral changes online. Instead, hostility is concentrated among status-seeking individuals who are similarly hostile offline and online; online interactions feel harsher partly because such behavior is more visible online.

A clear cross-national pattern emerges: economic crises tend to disproportionately benefit the political right rather than the left.

To what extent do citizens prefer living in a democracy over other markers of good governance or personal well-being? This study tests whether people trade off democratic institutions for outcomes such as safety, wealth, or access to services.

Populism increases affective polarization not only among its supporters but also among non-supporters. The effect on non-supporters grows as the level of populism in a country increases, producing a two-way dynamic: partisan identity tied to populist parties heightens interpersonal animosity, and rising national populism amplifies polarization across the electorate.

The authors study how members of regional cabinets in Italy move between levels of government or leave politics, using an original dataset to test whether political‑institutional or personal factors shape those career trajectories. The study focuses on ordinary‑statute Italian regions and compares upward moves (to national or European posts), downward moves (to provincial or municipal offices) and exits from politics.

This article asks how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) represent Syrian and Ukrainian refugees and whether implicit hierarchies of race and gender shape those representations. Drawing on Critical Securitisation Theory, the authors compare discursive patterns to test a hypothesis that stigmatisation based on race and gender affects EU representations of refugees. The manuscript reports a computational comparison of EP speech acts to see when refugees are cast as urgent threats and when speech enables de‑threatening or protective framings.

This paper asks how well states implement recommendations from temporary national truth commissions, focusing on 11 Latin American cases and using existing coded data to measure compliance. It contributes by applying a multilevel ordered logistic model to recommendation-level implementation data and assessing which recommendation types and contextual factors are associated with higher or lower compliance.

This paper investigates macropartisanship in five democracies, exploring its causes across multiparty systems.

How do periods of conflict and peace shape women's empowerment worldwide? Existing work shows gender inequalities can increase the risk of armed conflict, but attention to the reverse direction is uneven. Some scholars argue that militarization and external threat entrench male dominance; others contend warfare can upend gender hierarchies. This study traces how both the anticipation of war and the lived experience of war alter women’s opportunities for influence.

Despite claims of representing all citizens equally, democratic systems often fail to extend healthcare benefits proportionally across different health statuses. This research investigates whether healthier individuals receive preferential treatment through political representation compared to those with chronic conditions or disabilities.

This paper examines how different countries responded to Uber, a disruptive new service.

New research challenges a long-standing assumption within political science: that measuring individuals' knowledge of the exact seat distribution among parties is too complex for surveys. This article tackles this question directly, asking whether survey researchers can successfully gauge citizens' understanding of partisan legislative representation.

New research introduces the Global Media Freedom Dataset, a long-awaited resource addressing historical gaps in measuring press constraints. This dataset, covering 196 countries from 1948 to 2012, now enables scholars to rigorously examine media freedom correlates and test enduring assumptions.

The comparative politics field has long held that working-class citizens' underrepresentation in global political offices does not matter. This article argues this view is flawed.

Recent advances in tools for systematic text analysis are opening new research possibilities across the social sciences. For comparative politics—where interest often centers on non-English or multilingual corpora—those advances can be hard to access. This article maps practical issues that arise at every stage of multilingual text work and emphasizes how standard procedures change across languages.

Electoral forensics aims to flag anomalies in election results that might signal fraud, but disagreement persists over which tools work best and no standard method exists to combine multiple indicators. Forensic efforts also often ignore country-specific features that could improve diagnosis.

Article Title: Social Structure and Electoral Behavior in Comparative Perspective: The Decline of Social Cleavages in Western Europe Revisited