Why are women and people of color underrepresented in U.S. politics? This article introduces strategic discrimination—when voters hesitate to support candidates due to fear of others objecting to their identity. Through three experiments, the author demonstrates that this phenomenon exists and significantly impacts real-world elections.
This article examines the relationship between candidate visits and campaign donations during the turbulent 2016 US Presidential Election. Using original survey data collected from voters across battleground states, we analyze how face-to-face interactions influenced donation behavior.
Analysis tests how providing local teachers' union endorsement information affects voter support for school board candidates and then compares that effect to other familiar drivers of vote choice. The study also examines real-world endorsement decisions by unions to understand the motives behind support.
This study asks whether strict voter identification (ID) laws affect voter turnout in the United States and whether effects differ by election type and by when states adopted these laws. Using state-level turnout from 1984–2020 and a synthetic difference-in-differences approach to address time-varying confounders and improve power, the paper compares aggregate and disaggregated effects across presidential versus midterm elections and between early- and late-adopting states. The central contribution is evidence that aggregate effects are close to zero but that heterogeneous, modest impacts appear in some contexts and may help reconcile mixed prior findings.
New research explores how depressive symptoms affect political participation across democracies.
Political parties struggle to recruit volunteers and to broaden the demographic makeup of activists. This research partnered with a major Dutch party to test whether outreach mode affects members’ willingness to sign up as volunteers. The central contribution is experimental evidence comparing personal phone calls that allowed members to voice opinions with emails, using two field experiments run before the 2021 national and 2022 municipal elections.
This paper asks whether the threat of adverse policy change—specifically the prospect of Democratic control of the White House or salient mass shootings—shifts the behavior of gun owners, measured through background checks for firearm purchases. The authors contribute by merging records on mass-shooting incidents with gun-purchase background-check counts from 2006–2020 and using quasi-experimental timing variation to compare responses across different presidential outcomes and administration periods.
This paper asks whether voters reward or punish incumbents after natural disasters differently depending on the official’s party. Using Hurricane Sandy and longer-term historical data on U.S. presidential contests, the authors evaluate whether pre-existing partisanship conditions electoral responses to disaster damage and relief.
* Research Focus and Argument:* This article explains how opposition elites can win space in authoritarian elections by using symbolic ideological appeals—campaign messages that portray candidates as allies of broader ideological movements. The theory of "endogenous opposition" argues that these symbolic appeals allow opposition politicians, especially from minority groups, to attract cross-group voters and then act as genuine opponents of the ruling family once in the legislature.
This article asks whether U.S. leaders time arms transfers to autocratic states for electoral advantage during presidential election years. Using several empirical tests, the author documents an electoral cycle in arms deals with autocracies, connects those deals to increases in defense contract awards in swing U.S. states, and investigates process mechanisms. The analysis examines how timing shifts after regime change, the role of U.S. allies in driving the autocratic arms-deal cycle, and the correspondence between platforms sold in arms deals and platforms that generate swing-state defense contracts. The author frames these findings as evidence that an electoral motivation helps explain patterns of U.S. security cooperation with autocratic partners, while preserving the observational limits of the study.
This paper asks whether the U.S. Electoral College (EC) produces unusually close, disputable presidential outcomes and reports a quantitative assessment using existing empirical election models. The authors apply novel combinations of empirical election models drawn from several sources to estimate the probability of “close” outcomes and to compare those probabilities under the EC versus plausible popular‑vote alternatives. Their central contribution is an explicit claim—based on these model applications—that the EC both generates and increases the likelihood of razor‑thin margins.
This article asks whether living through elections that unseat heads of government — “electoral turnovers” — affects citizens’ long-term support for democracy. Using a large merge of international surveys and historical election records, the author traces how many turnovers each respondent experienced across their life and uses cohort comparisons to estimate whether exposure predicts democratic support. The contribution is a broad, cross-national assessment that highlights how recent and repeated turnovers, especially after long incumbencies, relate to higher reported support for democracy.
* The Question:* Does supporting a minority cabinet hurt a party’s electoral prospects? Existing work suggests support parties can influence policy while avoiding the electoral costs of joining government. This argument is qualified: it holds only for support parties without written, formal agreements because informal support is less visible to voters.
Foreign revolutions can ignite protests abroad and force political elites to respond. Rather than focusing only on policy tools like repression or co-optation, this paper shows that democratic politicians also use speeches strategically: they invoke foreign revolutions to attract voters who fear revolutionary contagion.
This study analyzes 31 countries from 1918 to 2017, tracing the electoral fortunes of social democratic parties through newly compiled national election results. By combining this dataset with extensive economic and social variables, we identify two primary drivers behind these parties' success: public-sector spending levels and manufacturing sector size.
Title: The Limits of Partisan Loyalty
The choices party leaders make about forming electoral coalitions shape the alternatives voters face. Existing knowledge is limited about the tradeoffs coalitions impose on potential partners, how coalitions change the strategic responses of competing parties, and their net effect on election outcomes.
Over the past three decades, competitive elections are linked to higher rates of forest loss. Forest protection is a long-term public good, while clearing provides short-term private benefits that can be delivered to targeted voters. In contested races, politicians appear to trade access to forested land—for small-scale farming or timber use—for electoral support, producing measurable increases in deforestation.
This study asks how political parties divide attention across the past, present and future in campaign communication and whether incumbency shapes emotive rhetoric across these temporal dimensions. Using supervised machine learning to label temporal focus, the author analyzes 621 party manifestos from nine countries spanning 1949–2017 and describes the share of manifesto text devoted to each temporal category. The contribution is a systematic, cross-national description of parties' temporal rhetorical emphasis and how statements about past and present relate to differences in sentiment between incumbents and opposition.
In the 2018 election cycle, STEM candidates surged into congressional races. This study profiles nearly 200 such candidates and examines factors influencing their electoral outcomes.
This research asks whether moving local production abroad (offshoring) affects electoral outcomes for incumbent government parties. Using a difference-in-differences approach and an original Spanish survey, the author studies municipalities where a local plant relocated production abroad and compares electoral outcomes to municipalities without such events. The paper's central contribution is evidence that voters punish incumbent government parties in places that experienced offshoring, with larger vote declines where more jobs were lost and distinct patterns in coalition governments.
This study explores how voter depression influences political outcomes.
This study explores why women are less likely than men to run for elected office. Researchers conducted a laboratory experiment where they controlled incentives and manipulated electoral contexts.
This study asks whether distance between party and voter on EU positions affects party support, and whether the effect depends on how salient EU politics are. Focusing on the party–voter dyad, the authors analyze patterns of EU issue voting in first-order national elections in five countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) between 2017 and 2018, combining CHES, public opinion surveys, and Twitter data to construct distance and salience measures. The article reports that EU party positions appear to influence voting preferences and that EU salience moderates that relationship, while preserving the article’s stated qualifications about scope and measurement.
Discover how prejudice activation influenced presidential voting in the U.S. during a pivotal election year.
The 17th Amendment fundamentally changed senator accountability by introducing direct election. This shift exposed senators to a less attentive public on foreign policy, weakening congressional constraints on presidential power. We analyze this relationship using historical data showing how piecemeal adoption of the amendment influenced delegations of authority.
New research reveals a simple predictive model using state-level presidential approval and economic conditions accurately forecasted the winner of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. Using readily available data on presidential approval ratings and state unemployment rates, this study demonstrates how these variables alone can anticipate electoral outcomes with remarkable accuracy.
While female candidates face unique challenges during election campaigns, new research reveals surprising levels of voter support for them when facing threats. This paper examines how voters respond to female candidates' presence and performance under conditions perceived as risky.
This paper asks whether parties in power can systematically win a slender majority of seats in close legislative elections — a pattern the authors call “precise control.” Using U.S. state assembly elections, the study tests for discontinuities at the 50% seat-share cutoff in outcomes that should be smooth if there is no deliberate manipulation: the density of seats won and which party previously held a majority. The central contribution is evidence that precise control exists, but primarily in high-stakes state elections that determine control over congressional redistricting, suggesting it is a strategic option used when stakes are large rather than a universal feature of state contests.
This study investigates how terror attacks impact voting behavior across U.S. elections from 1970 to 2016.
In this study, we examine how well prediction markets captured public sentiment during the unprecedented events of the 2020 US Presidential election. Using data from the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), a long-standing experimental asset market for political forecasting, our analysis reveals that despite widespread disruptions caused by COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, economic recession fears, and nationwide protests, these markets continued to provide surprisingly accurate predictions across multiple electoral levels.
Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are increasingly common in political science because the treatment assignment mechanism is known and observable. To argue that an RD design is credible, researchers typically run two standard falsification checks: continuity in a pretreatment covariate's regression function and continuity in the density of the forcing variable. Both of these conventional checks use a null hypothesis of no difference at the cutoff.
Does exposure to the refugee crisis increase support for extreme-right parties? This study leverages a sudden refugee surge on Aegean islands to provide causal evidence that brief, visible inflows changed electoral outcomes before the September 2015 Greek election.
This article examines how voters perceive their own political knowledge. Contrary to what many assume, people frequently underestimate their understanding—or overestimate it—of complex political topics.
The intersection of ideology and gender is reshaping political representation in the United States. This study explores how female candidates' ideological positions influence voter behavior and election outcomes.
Campaign contributions significantly influence voter behavior, according to new research analyzing millions of donors across thousands of elections. Using regression discontinuity design, researchers discovered that supporters of narrowly defeated candidates often switch parties in future elections. This effect is substantial and occurs regardless of whether the original candidate faces reelection or not. The findings suggest campaign donations may have unexpected consequences for democratic processes.
Ballots often list candidates in specific positions (e.g., top vs bottom). Does this position affect voter choice?
Existing survey methods struggle to efficiently capture state-level polling data, making it costly and sparse. This article addresses this gap by combining 1,200 polls from the 2012 US presidential election with over 100 million political tweets.
Boosted decision trees are widely used in machine learning but remain underused in political science, despite offering many useful properties for prediction. This article explains how one variant—AdaBoosted decision trees (ADTs)—can be applied to social science forecasting and demonstrates its value on several familiar political prediction problems.
Do natural disasters help or hurt incumbents at the ballot box? Prior work offers conflicting answers: Achen and Bartels (2002, 2016) argue that voters punish incumbents indiscriminately after disasters, while other studies find voters reward or punish officials according to the quality of relief efforts. The literature’s focus on contemporary cases may shape these divergent conclusions.
This paper introduces novel approaches for analyzing temporal sequences in ordinal variables. The research explores three complementary methods—frequency tables, transitional graphs, and dependency tables—to investigate causal precedences between political variables.
This article critically assesses how media content and exposure were previously linked in political science research. The author argues that earlier conclusions drawn from 'Who's Afraid of Conflict?' do not hold due to the study's specific operationalization choices. Using a refined methodology, they demonstrate both conflictual and non-conflictual news exposure yield identical substantive results regarding electoral behavior. Beyond questioning the role of conflict framing in elections, this piece advances methodological debates within media studies by integrating individual-level measures with traditional observational approaches.
New evidence suggests that electoral fraud persists in Mexican elections despite the country's democratic progress.
Article Title: Social Structure and Electoral Behavior in Comparative Perspective: The Decline of Social Cleavages in Western Europe Revisited