Do voters punish women legislators for failing to support women’s substantive policy interests? The authors test whether voters hold gendered expectations—expecting women lawmakers to champion women's issues more than men—and whether those expectations affect electoral evaluations.
This article explains the pretrain–finetune paradigm for transformer language models and shows how applied political scientists can use it to classify political text with relatively little labeled data and modest computation. The author frames mechanisms behind pretraining and finetuning, addresses common misconceptions about costs and complexity, and demonstrates the approach by identifying toxic language in conversation threads that follow U.S. Senators’ tweets. An online tutorial accompanies the article to help nontechnical scholars adopt the workflow.
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 examines how Italian political parties positioned themselves on the European Union's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, focusing on four response dimensions: sanctions on Russia, military support for Ukraine, EU enlargement to include Ukraine, and reception of Ukrainian refugees. The study combines theory-driven expectations from cleavage politics, the inverted U curve and differentiated politicisation with an inductive reading of parties' social-media output to assess whether party family or Europeanist/Eurosceptic divides better explain variation in party stances.
This article asks how a century of scholarship in the journal Public Administration has evolved in topics, methods and geography, and offers a systematic, data-driven portrait of the field using bibliometrics and natural language processing. The authors map thematic change across five eras of the journal, identify 63 linguistic clusters of research, and characterize shifts in disciplinary influence, geographical settings and methodological orientations without making causal claims beyond the descriptive evidence.
This study asks whether a change of government altered interest groups’ ability to attain policy preferences in Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), comparing the Conte Draft with the Draghi Plan. Using public statements from 20 main Italian interest groups, the authors present a within-case longitudinal comparison of how groups appraised the NRRP across the two versions.
This study examines how ordinary citizens define terrorism following violent incidents. Despite ongoing public debates and political science frameworks, there's been little exploration into the average American's understanding of terrorism.
This study examines how direct xenophobic attacks impact identity portfolios in African nations.