Political Ideology

The revived men’s movement, known as the “manosphere,” has grown in prominence and influence and has been linked to multiple violent incidents, including mass shootings that targeted women. Despite these real-world harms and the manosphere’s tactics directed at women, feminism, and gender equality—including threats and violence—political science has given the phenomenon limited attention. This theory-building paper addresses that gap by both describing the manosphere and theorizing which subgroups are likeliest to resort to violence.

New research challenges the long-held assumption of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), which posits that moral intuitions drive political ideology.

This study examines whether the quality and ideology of top-of-the-ticket candidates in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races affect co-partisan vote shares in down-ballot U.S. House contests. The question addresses a widespread belief among campaign staff, journalists, and political scientists that weak or extreme top-ticket candidates harm their party’s lower-ballot performance.

The American National Election Study regularly asks respondents to place themselves on an "Extremely Liberal" to "Extremely Conservative" scale (LibCon). Responses to this routinely included question increasingly contain valid and useful information for a wide range of political analyses.

How Markets Shape Values and Political Preferences: A Field Experiment

Across Europe, the Istanbul Convention — a treaty aimed at combating violence against women — has become a central battleground over gender and sexual equality. Right-wing forces mobilize nationally and transnationally to defend traditional values and oppose so-called “gender ideology,” while progressive actors push back to protect women’s rights. The result is uneven ratification: many states have ratified the Convention, while several have not.

* 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 study tests whether the COVID-19 pandemic shifted citizens’ ideological beliefs about the role of government—motivated by prior work showing major crises (wars, depressions) can reshape mass attitudes. Original panel data from the United Kingdom were used to observe changes in the same respondents’ views before and after the pandemic.

This paper reexamines the physiological correlates of political ideology through replication studies, alternative data analyses, and methodological recommendations.

Question and Theory: Why do individuals join civil wars? Quantitative literature has largely emphasized material incentives, while qualitative, historical, and ethnographic studies point to nonmaterial, ideological motives. A formal model of recruitment is developed in which potential fighters trade off ideological commitment against material payoffs when deciding whether to enlist.

A new, long-run measure of legislative effectiveness captures a member’s ability to propose and advance bills on important topics and spans both chambers from 1873 to 2010. The dataset incorporates all 1.1 million introduced bills, creating opportunities to study legislative institutions and behavior across multiple congressional eras.

Concerns about democracy's fragility in Western nations intensified after studies revealed a worrying susceptibility among citizens to authoritarian appeals. Using World Values Survey data from fourteen democracies and recent samples from Canada/U.S., researchers uncovered distinct ideological patterns regarding acceptance of authoritarian rule.

A new, scalable measure of party ideology uses the descriptive tags found in political parties' Wikipedia infoboxes. By treating those tags as signals under a simple tag-assignment model, the approach places both parties and ideology labels in a shared spatial scale.

New research challenges the idea that negativity biases predict political ideology. Using televised news and static images across six continents,

Populism's appeal often relies on broad ideological commitments, but its roots extend deeper into complex political ideas.

Political parties, politicians, and media increasingly reference narcissism in relation to politics. However, systematic research on this topic was lacking until now.

This study investigates how online social networks affect political tolerance in post-coup Egypt. Analyzing real-time tweet data across elite and non-elite networks, we find an unexpected relationship: greater ideological diversity on Twitter is associated with lower levels of political intolerance. This correlation persists even after longer exposure to diverse feeds over time.

This article examines the relative impact of religiosity and personality traits on political ideology. Through comprehensive analysis, it demonstrates that religious factors hold greater explanatory power than individual characteristics when accounting for ideological positioning.

This article asks three related questions about political speech in the classroom:

Does a party's ideology affect its standing among voters? This study suggests that ideological moderation enhances perceived competence. We find that parties leaning left or right are viewed as less willing to compromise and more prone to simplistic solutions, reducing their appeal for competence.

Measuring how people view politicians is complicated because respondents often use survey response scales differently (differential item functioning). The classic Aldrich and McKelvey (1977) approach corrects for scale use but does so by assuming every respondent perceives political stimuli identically. This study introduces a new modeling approach that keeps the Aldrich–McKelvey framework but adds anchoring vignettes, enabling adjustment for scale use without forcing identical perceptions across respondents.

Trained neural word-embedding models were applied to large-scale parliamentary corpora from Britain, Canada, and the United States. The embeddings used are the coefficients from neural-network models that predict word use in context, augmented with political metadata to link language directly to party affiliation.

New research investigates how increasing ideological polarization among American political elites influences public attitudes and behaviors.

New findings challenge the core assumptions of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). First, Individual-Level Variability shows substantial changes in moral foundations over time. Second, Political Change Disconnect, longitudinal studies find little evidence these changes predict shifts in political orientations. Third, Heritability Question, twin study data suggests minimal heritability for moral foundations. These results raise fundamental questions about MFT's explanatory power for political ideology.

Political language shapes civic discourse, and social media lets ordinary users adopt elite rhetoric. Standard ideological text-scaling tools break down on the short, informal posts typical of platforms such as Twitter, preventing meaningful individual-level inference.

A growing set of measures aims to place incumbent and nonincumbent congressional candidates on a single ideological scale, offering the promise of new tests of accountability and representation. This paper evaluates how well six recent candidate-orientation measures actually capture the same underlying concept.

Sensitive survey answers are hard to study because truthful responses cannot be directly observed when some people misreport. This paper introduces a statistical solution that makes it possible to identify respondents who give one answer inside a list experiment but reply differently when asked the same question directly.

This study applies joint scaling methods to comparable items from three large-scale surveys to place voters, parties, and politicians from multiple Latin American countries onto a single, common ideological space. The common-space approach enables direct comparison of political actors across disparate surveys and national contexts.

Do citizens favor the use of force less often against countries that share their ideological orientation? This article tests a domestic–international nexus beyond the democratic peace: the authors propose a “left‑wing peace” and a “right‑wing peace,” where respondents are less willing to use force against foreign states that match their own left‑ or right‑wing ideology. The study argues this pattern arises from out‑group bias and that rising polarization amplifies the effect.