Article summary
Does disability status influence political representation? Linking voter and candidate data from the 2015 British general election, new research explores whether disabled citizens are better represented by disabled elites.
Does disability status influence political representation? Linking voter and candidate data from the 2015 British general election, new research explores whether disabled citizens are better represented by disabled elites.
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 article explores how human values interact with cognitive sophistication in political decision-making. The study employs experimental methods and statistical analysis to demonstrate that individuals' moral frameworks significantly influence their ability to process complex political information, challenging conventional assumptions about rational choice models.
Understanding why leaders vary in their commitment to collective defense requires examining the role of business experience.
Defense cooperation agreements (DCAs) and government-to-government loans are linked by more than just surface similarities. This article explores how these two forms of economic-cooperation coexist yet can sometimes clash on deeper levels.
Do higher salaries attract more working-class politicians? This article examines the relationship between political pay and economic diversity in state legislatures.
Electoral accountability theories suggest voters penalize legislators who fail to represent their districts. A study examined whether state legislators face consequences for unpopular roll-call votes or poor ideological representation.
This paper examines the surprisingly straightforward numerical factors that underpin legislative decision-making processes.
Citizens rely on party cues to navigate complex political information, but when elected officials deviate from the party line, these shortcuts can backfire. Using data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), this analysis examines voter knowledge about their senators' policy positions across seven high-profile roll-call votes. Results reveal a counterintuitive pattern: politically interested citizens are most knowledgeable when their senator aligns with party—but also become the most misinformed segment of the public when the senator deviates, demonstrating a significant drawback to heuristic use in political settings.
This paper examines why democratic states tend to win international crises. It tests multiple theories about democratic political systems against a dataset of 422 conflicts from 1918-1994.
When deliberating cases, the U.S. Supreme Court often reshapes issues by answering unraised questions or ignoring presented ones.