Political Representation

This paper asks whether political factors—especially perceptions that older generations dominate politics or that one is personally excluded because of age—are associated with ageism toward older people. Using original survey data from Italy, South Korea, and the United States, the authors examine links between two kinds of political grievance (general concerns about older generations’ political dominance and personal feelings of age-based exclusion) and both explicit and implicit measures of ageism.

How do different types of MPs in mixed-member proportional systems signal territorial ties in public communication? This study examines whether directly elected (district) MPs and list MPs in Germany differ in the geographic focus of their social-media posts, introducing a two-dimensional measure that captures both how local referenced places are and how deprived those places are. The paper combines computational place extraction with deprivation linkage to compare the self-presentation of all members of the 19th German Bundestag on Twitter and Facebook.

Which social groups do political parties appeal to, and how can such appeals be compared across countries and time? This article introduces the Parties’ Social Group Appeals (PSoGA) Database, a new resource that documents which groups parties speak about and appeal to, covering manifestos from multiple Western European countries across 1970–2025. The contribution is methodological and data-focused: the authors describe dataset construction, validation, and compatibility with existing policy-focused coding projects.

Does voter perception treat female candidates' ambition differently than male ones?

This article presents two complementary datasets mapping the Italian political class: a census-style dataset of individual-level characteristics for more than 20,000 elected representatives across levels of government, and a large survey of sitting politicians’ attitudes collected between September 2020 and January 2021. The combined resource aims to support research on democratic representation by documenting who holds office in Italy and how those officeholders view elections, participation, public opinion and policy issues.

Autocratic environments give regime-linked candidates informal access to power, while opposition legislators lack those backdoor channels. The argument presented is that formal, institutional authorities tailored to constituency service allow opposition politicians to supply the goods voters expect — leveling the playing field in competition for public support.

This article explores how citizens in authoritarian states evaluate their leaders. The authors analyze Gallup World Poll data spanning 140 countries between 2006 and 2016, revealing regime-specific drivers of political approval. In brutal dictatorships, repression may cause preference falsification, but in milder informational autocracies, greater repression actually predicts lower leader ratings. Citizens' perceptions of economic performance align with objective indicators across both regimes, though not perfectly accurate. Public safety concerns also boost approval under authoritarian rule. The study finds that media censorship boosts leader ratings significantly only in autocracies—and only when citizens don't recognize it. In informational autocracies where elections occur, leadership changes drive rating surges—but reelected leaders see limited approval gains compared to democratic counterparts.

This article explores when radical parties gain electoral support.

This article examines electoral discrimination against candidates with roots in other countries.

This study investigates whether the relationship between political responsibility and electoral accountability is truly causal or shaped by adaptive strategies tied to specific policies.

Spatial voting theory assumes electorates base candidate choices on well-structured policy preferences. Behavioral research contends these preferences are often unstructured and inconsistent.

New democracies often face pressure from former authoritarian elites, who threaten exposure of past secret collaborations unless politicians agree to their demands. This study argues that lustration policies—revealing such collaborations—can prevent this blackmail by enabling elected representatives to be responsive to constituents without fear of retribution. Our analysis shows the effectiveness of lustration depends on its severity and whether revealing information would harm dissidents-turned-politicians.

This article investigates how severe economic crises affect political representation in public communication within the Eurozone. Drawing on a novel approach using over 140,000 machine-coded news events from eleven countries between 2001 and 2011, it reveals that economic downturns lead to a compression of party relationships with societal actors.

Did high-yield seeds help opposition parties gain power? This paper examines how agricultural technology influenced political representation - specifically weakened single-party dominance through strengthening excluded farmers.

In electorally contested regimes, incumbent parties often rely on clientelism to maintain power. This article examines how the role of clientelism evolves with a party's increasing tenure. Analyzing data from Afrobarometer and partisan turnover records reveals that longer party duration enhances clientelism's effectiveness in bolstering support through club goods and patronage. This occurs because extended rule facilitates bureaucratic politicization, essential for sustained clientelist exchanges. The findings offer insights into dominant-party dynamics under electoral contestation.

This paper examines direct democracy institutions to reveal their disparate effects on citizens' political support.

Party systems in modern democracies appear robust due to a dynamic interplay between entropy and structure.