Political Behavior

This article develops a theory of perceived victimhood and uses nationally representative survey data to identify two forms—an egocentric sense of being a victim and a system-directed blaming orientation. Both forms appear across partisan, ideological, and sociodemographic groups and correlate with candidate preferences and racial attitudes while remaining distinct from constructs like collective narcissism and relative deprivation. An experiment shows some campaign rhetoric can increase feelings of victimhood and change subsequent attitudes and behavior.

Many political scientists measure dispositions—like populism, conspiracism, racism, and sexism—using agree/disagree statements, but that format can produce acquiescence bias that inflates endorsement rates. This article asks how acquiescence affects criterion validity and evaluates common remedies. Drawing on 160 tests and an internal meta-analysis, the authors examine how bias changes estimated relationships between constructs and assess balanced scales and measurement models as potential solutions. They end with design advice and recommendations for redesigning several popular measures of political and psychological dispositions.

This study asks how white identity varies across individuals and responds to sociopolitical disruptions, using in-depth interviews with white residents of Minneapolis and Saint Paul between 2020 and 2023 to develop a grounded typology of white identifiers. The central contribution is a three-type classification that links variation in awareness and positional framing to the 2020 uprising as an "epistemic disruption" that changed the salience of whiteness for many participants, with different temporal patterns of response.

This study asks whether reducing affective polarization — people’s negative feelings toward opposing partisans — causally changes intentions to share true or false political news online. Using an experimental approach, the authors report that improving feelings toward out-party members relative to one’s own party produced no measurable change in intentions to share true news, false news, or in the gap between them (truth discernment). They also test an accuracy reminder and find modest evidence that such a prompt can improve truth discernment for respondents who report sharing political news. The paper argues these experimental results call for reexamining the assumed causal role of affective polarization in misinformation spread, while preserving the conditional and limited nature of the observed effects.

This study asks whether respondents’ Big Five personality traits predict their propensity to complete surveys, and how such nonresponse could bias estimated links between personality and political behavior. Using a new data collection effort and replication data, the author reports that Agreeableness and Neuroticism are associated with systematic differences in survey completion and shows how these patterns can alter observed relationships between the Big Five and political behavior. The brief highlights a methodological caution for researchers who use very brief personality inventories in political science.

This paper asks how voters form policy preferences in nonpartisan contexts by studying residential zoning reform. The author reports fieldwork on a Menlo Park, California zoning initiative and argues that local campaign messages combined ideological information with nonpartisan group cues. The paper then assesses generalizability by documenting similar information in other California zoning campaigns and conducting a survey experiment with Democratic homeowners to test how that information affects opinion.

This study asks whether empathy for racial outgroups predicts greater opposition to state-level voting restrictions, and whether that relationship depends on awareness that such laws are racially targeted. Using multiple national surveys from 2018–2024, the authors examine links between outgroup empathy, political sophistication, and attitudes toward a suite of laws that increase the burden on eligible voters after Shelby County v. Holder.

This paper asks whether local government policy priorities shape women’s decisions to run for office and offers evidence on how municipal spending patterns relate to women’s emergence as candidates. Using Brazilian municipal-level variation, the authors link policy outputs and communal spending to the number and composition of entrants, arguing that women’s interest in running varies across place and time rather than being uniform.

This article asks which long-standing predispositions actually move voters' policy attitudes: core political values or more commonly cited anchors like partisanship and symbolic ideology. It focuses on two specific value orientations—traditionalist and egalitarian—and asks whether these values lead voters to change their issue stances over time, including on new issues that emerge in public debate.

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.

Existing research on women’s descriptive representation has mainly looked for positive effects—such as increases in political engagement or greater legitimacy for policy outcomes. Trends in representation, however, have rarely been treated as causes of resentment. While a male backlash to rising representation has been theorized, women may also become discontent if they perceive their representation as stagnating.

Disaster responses are political, but can citizens make useful decisions that help other people? This study uses an experimental economic game that simulates disaster choices to test whether people are willing and able to prevent disasters for others when options are complex and vary in risk. The authors report that players paid to help, invested in learning, and could identify which options were most useful across conditions, suggesting that people sometimes make costly, useful decisions on behalf of others.

This work examines whether personal health vulnerability helps explain votes for right-wing populist parties across developed European democracies.

Scholars often assume informal workers in Latin America vote less and tilt rightward, but prior empirical results vary. This article synthesizes the quantitative evidence by conducting meta-analyses on the universe of previous studies that link labor informality to voting outcomes, estimating average effects for turnout and vote choice and exploring conditions that modify those effects.

This research asks whether two kinds of political rhetoric—sanitized language that obscures war casualties and dehumanizing language that devalues groups—shape public support for U.S. foreign interventions. Using two experiments, the author investigates whether these rhetorical strategies change emotional reactions and thereby shift people toward more hawkish foreign policy attitudes. The brief summarizes the research question, the experimental approach reported in the abstract, and the qualified findings the author presents about emotional mechanisms and attitude change.

This paper investigates whether belief systems, often considered rigid frameworks in political analysis, can exhibit dynamic adaptability. The question—do static belief system measurements capture their true influence?—has profound implications for understanding how ideology evolves and impacts political processes.

This research investigates how remittance recipients' political behavior differs based on their home countries' development contexts.

Stalin's coercive agricultural policy, known as 'Terror by Hunger,' caused widespread starvation in Ukraine during 1932-1934. This study investigates its political legacy using micro-level data on eight decades of local behavior.

Political experiments that aim to test how specific emotions shape behavior often produce collateral shifts in other emotions. Those collateral effects make it hard to attribute outcomes to a single emotion. This letter proposes using causal mediation analysis to separate the direct and indirect pathways linking emotion manipulations to political behavior.