Descriptive Representation

Americans often prefer local news, yet its trustworthiness is debated. This paper investigates why this preference persists despite concerns about media credibility. We propose that people use a news outlet's local orientation as a shortcut for assessing quality. Using survey experiments and real-world polling data, we find two key patterns: unfamiliar outlets trusted more when they signal local focus; reliable sources sometimes distrusted less if lacking local cues. These findings highlight how the "local cue heuristic" maintains trust in media even amidst misinformation challenges. Critically, this advantage suggests why actors might package biased political content as community news to gain traction and spread misleading information under the guise of local reporting. Our analysis shows both the unique position of local journalism within public discourse and the risks when reliable heuristics meet unreliable providers or changing political contexts.

Proportional representation (PR) systems—especially closed-list PR—tend to have a higher share of women in politics than majoritarian systems, yet progress toward gender parity has been slow and uneven. This study examines whether single-occupant offices that function as career stepping stones create hidden majoritarian barriers to women's advancement.

Does switching to ranked choice voting (RCV) change who runs in local elections—how many candidates, how diverse they are, and how competitive they are?

Many governments and organizations invest in voter education to increase women's political representation. However, in single-member district contests where clientelism pushes voters to back the most viable candidates, messages that spotlight discrimination against women can unintentionally undercut support by signaling lower electability. Messages that emphasize women candidates' electoral viability and political successes are expected to be more effective.

This study investigates how the timing of local elections affects the electoral success of minority candidates and the overall descriptive composition of local officeholders.

This article tests whether working-class citizens are less personally inclined to run for elected office—i.e., whether social class gaps exist in nascent political ambition.

Ongoing global debates over statues, street names, symbols, and textbooks raise questions about how different historical representations shape political life. Theoretical expectations hold that inclusive (and, conversely, exclusive) historical portrayals can alter marginalized group members’ sense of centrality to the nation, their entitlement to speak for it, and their likelihood of seeking leadership.

This letter asks whether historically marginalized legislators — specifically women, disadvantaged racial–ethnic groups, and younger adults — are systematically more leftist than their counterparts, and whether their inclusion shifts party ideology. Drawing on three decades of individual-level elite data from Latin America, the authors compare the ideological positions of MPs from marginalized and dominant groups and assess whether increased inclusion predicts subsequent party ideological change. The contribution is a careful corrective to a common assumption about elite ideology using multi-country longitudinal data.

This article builds a new database of physician members of the U.S. Congress (PMCs) and links those biographical data to lawmaking activity to examine whether PMCs differ from other members in sponsoring and passing health policy. The authors assemble information on PMCs' years served, gender, and party affiliation since 1921 and merge those data with measures of lawmaking activity from 1973 onward, then compare PMCs to other members on health-policy sponsorship and success. The study's central contribution is a systematic, comparative description of PMCs' legislative behavior and effectiveness on health issues, reported with qualifications about the scope and time coverage of the merged data.

Descriptive representation can strengthen democracy by making party organizations more inclusive. The central theory is that parties retain and promote incumbents according to gendered criteria, which creates disproportionate incentives for women to recruit party members. At the same time, gendered resource inequalities reduce women’s access to the patronage networks and resources typically used for recruitment. Faced with these constraints, women respond by recruiting more women—because it lowers recruitment costs, fits role expectations, and makes credit claiming easier.

Local government meetings are often seen as venues for community input, but who actually speaks up? This study compiles a novel dataset by coding thousands of citizen comments from planning and zoning board discussions about housing development. We then link these individuals to voter files to analyze their local political participation patterns.

Does disability status influence political representation? Linking voter and candidate data from the 2015 British general election, new research explores whether disabled citizens are better represented by disabled elites.

The debate around all-women police stations (AWPS) and women's access to justice continues. This article examines the impact of AWPS on Indian law enforcement outcomes, specifically testing whether they help address gender-based violence.

This article asks whether voter bias helps explain the near absence of politicians who are publicly HIV-positive. Using original nationally representative survey experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the authors estimate how voters respond to hypothetical candidates with HIV and explore explanations for any observed penalty.

Does the racial makeup of candidates influence campaign contributions? New data on 27 million donors reveals minorities contribute at lower rates than their population shares. However, this study finds that when minority candidates run for US House seats, they increase overall minority giving without harming fundraising competitiveness.

Recent scholarship suggests that African presidents often target co-ethnics with patronage, especially in non-democratic contexts. This study proposes a connection between presidential ethnic identity change and shifts in citizens' self-identification. Using survey data from fourteen African countries during periods of presidential transitions, the research demonstrates that when there is an ethnic transition (i.e., changing to a different ethnic group), the proportion of respondents identifying with that new ruling ethnic group increases significantly.

Does shared ideology mean more trust in a president? This analysis reveals an asymmetry: U.S. conservatives show greater trust and legitimacy for presidents from the opposing party compared to liberals, challenging conventional polarization assumptions.

This study investigates the relationship between daytime racial diversity exposure among white Americans and its impact on public opinion. Using survey data combined with workplace location information, we analyze how encountering Black workers during waking hours influences attitudes.

New research reveals a surprising finding about gender and legislative responsiveness. Contrary to expectations, women outperform their male counterparts in constituency service — even after accounting for the extra policy work they engage in.

Businesses long suspected that their industry ties could shape government agendas, but academic research largely overlooked this possibility until now. Focusing specifically on the insurance sector and its unique influence via the Insurance Information Institute dataset,

Party support significantly influences primary election outcomes in Congress. But does this influence show bias based on race or gender? This study examines whether party preferences differ for minority and women candidates during congressional primaries.

The electoral campaign leading up to the European Parliament elections significantly changes voter priorities. National allegiances become less central, while European issues gain prominence in voters' decision-making processes.

In many contemporary urban spaces, political information is unevenly distributed across neighborhoods. This might exacerbate political inequality because residents often talk with others similar to themselves. However, the study finds that specific media content diffused through everyday conversation helped low-education residents gain factual knowledge and close spatial gaps in knowledge. Using a six-wave panel survey between 2002 and 2006 across fifty Brazilian neighborhoods, multilevel models show that while conversations were more frequent among highly educated residents, they had the greatest impact on reducing specific political knowledge gaps among those with less education. The findings reveal this effect, but also indicate that these discussions slightly widened social perceptions of general knowledge differences between education levels.

This study reveals a significant communication disparity between constituents and their elected representatives, particularly based on racial identity. Using an innovative field experiment design in Maryland's multimember districts, researchers provided opportunities for residents to contact their actual representative whose race was randomly assigned. The findings show that both Black and white constituents significantly decreased their likelihood of communicating with representatives not matching their own race.