Global performance indicators such as democracy ratings shape foreign policy, aid, and investment—and many rely on expert assessments that are often treated as objective. This article examines whether and how the national identity of raters influences those assessments.
Major national sporting events can boost pride but potentially worsen attitudes toward refugees. This paper investigates how a narrow Kenyan victory in the 2019 Africa Cup football match affects resource allocation preferences and views on refugee contributions to diversity among Kenyans.
This study compares party systems inside bicameral legislatures by using newly available data on upper‑chamber elections. It examines two dimensions of inter‑chamber similarity: partisan congruence (how similar party composition is between lower and upper chambers) and a new measure, nationalization congruence (how similar the geographic or national reach of parties is across the two chambers). The analysis traces how these forms of congruence vary across countries and over time and links them to the power of the upper chamber (symmetry).
This study demonstrates how increased connectivity eroded local media resources, leading to more partisan electorates. Consequently, US legislators shifted towards prioritizing national interests over constituency concerns—a move traditionally viewed as politically risky.
This paper investigates whether the arrival of railroads affected the state’s ability to implement national school policy in nineteenth-century Sweden by making school inspectors more able to monitor remote schools. Using fine-grained local education data, the authors compare communities reachable by rail to those that were not and assess differences in school permanence and curricular content. The paper argues for a causal interpretation for at least some outcomes, and presents more tentative evidence on curricular change.
Using the 2016 American National Election Study, the authors examine how Americans’ perceptions of immigrant threat and the strength of their American identity jointly relate to vote choice in the 2016 presidential election. Grounded in social identity theory, the paper tests whether perceptions of immigrant threat are more likely to translate into support for Donald Trump among those with stronger American identity, and conversely whether American identity’s effects on vote choice are activated by threat perceptions. With survey data from ANES, the authors report that immigrant-threat perceptions and American identity magnify each other’s effects: threat perceptions have larger associations with support for Trump among respondents with stronger American identity, and American identity has stronger associations with vote choice when respondents perceive greater immigrant threat.
How do competitive elections in Africa affect ethnic versus national identity? This paper examines how political competition influences group loyalties, attitudes toward perceived discrimination, and social trust across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using survey data from seventeen countries over fourteen years, we analyze six rounds of data collected during election periods with varying levels of competitiveness.