A complete census was compiled of every tenure-track (TT) faculty member in the 122 PhD-granting political science departments in the United States to identify which graduate programs place faculty into the discipline's research universities.
This study asks whether partisan differences among U.S. local police officers translate into different enforcement behavior. The authors merge personnel rosters from 99 of the 100 largest local U.S. agencies with voter files to measure police partisanship and then use detailed operational data from Chicago and Houston to compare actions of Democratic and Republican officers facing comparable situations. They report that police are generally more Republican than their jurisdictions, but that after correcting for multiple comparisons there are minimal detectable differences in on‑the‑ground enforcement by partisan affiliation. The authors do, however, document consistent racial differences: in Chicago, Black and Hispanic officers make fewer stops and arrests, and in both Chicago and Houston Black officers use force less often; additionally, in Chicago White Democrats make more violent‑crime arrests than White Republicans. The abstract frames these findings cautiously and emphasizes limits to detectable partisan effects despite partisan composition differences.
This study asks whether different debriefing styles in misinformation experiments change participants' beliefs, attitudes toward the study, and perceptions of transparency. Using a preregistered experiment in the United States, the authors compare no debriefing, a general warning debriefing, and a specific debriefing that includes fact‑checks and source links to see which approaches correct misperceptions without unduly increasing skepticism.
Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard asks how voters evaluate incumbents when economic outcomes are distributed unevenly across social groups. The paper revisits the idea of retrospective economic voting—where voters reward or punish incumbents for past performance—but shifts the focus from national aggregates to voters’ social in-groups. This matters because if voters judge incumbents by how their own group fares relative to the nation, electoral incentives will shape not only overall economic policy but its distribution.
In the early 21st-century contest for influence in Africa, this study asks whether foreign aid translates into soft power: do Chinese and U.S. aid flows generate public affinity for donors and their values?
Does women's representation influence democratic legitimacy? A survey experiment tested this with a U.S. sample.
This paper develops and provides software for a class of spatial hierarchical (multilevel) models for binary outcomes, motivated by situations where outcome dependence arises both from diffusion among lower-level units and from spatially structured unobserved group effects. The authors propose two model variants—one that treats unobserved group effects as spatially independent and another that treats them as spatially dependent—and use a Bayesian estimation approach. They evaluate performance with Monte Carlo simulations and illustrate the approach by analyzing causes of civil rights protests in the United States in the 1960s.
This research uses conjoint experiments conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom to test whether voters discriminate against candidates with disabilities. Candidates were presented with attributes that varied, including the presence of physical or sensory impairments, and respondents chose between competing profiles.
This article asks whether U.S. public willingness to use force to defend allies depends on allies’ own defense investments. Using four survey experiments on samples of the U.S. public, the author examines how information about improvements in allied military capabilities affects respondents’ support for U.S. intervention and the perceived need for U.S. action. The study contributes evidence about how alliance burden‑sharing shapes public opinion and the possible domestic constraints it creates for alliance bargaining.
This article introduces State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for state legislators across 97 legislative chambers over recent decades, measuring who actually advances public policy in the American states.
This paper asks whether a high-profile focusing event — the murder of George Floyd — changed citizens’ political behavior by bringing new prospective voters into the system. Using nationwide voter file data for the United States, the authors apply a regression discontinuity in time design and provide replication code for their analysis. They focus on changes in new voter registrations around the event and examine how effects vary across subgroups.
This article asks whether U.S. leaders time arms transfers to autocratic states for electoral advantage during presidential election years. Using several empirical tests, the author documents an electoral cycle in arms deals with autocracies, connects those deals to increases in defense contract awards in swing U.S. states, and investigates process mechanisms. The analysis examines how timing shifts after regime change, the role of U.S. allies in driving the autocratic arms-deal cycle, and the correspondence between platforms sold in arms deals and platforms that generate swing-state defense contracts. The author frames these findings as evidence that an electoral motivation helps explain patterns of U.S. security cooperation with autocratic partners, while preserving the observational limits of the study.
This paper asks whether the U.S. Electoral College (EC) produces unusually close, disputable presidential outcomes and reports a quantitative assessment using existing empirical election models. The authors apply novel combinations of empirical election models drawn from several sources to estimate the probability of “close” outcomes and to compare those probabilities under the EC versus plausible popular‑vote alternatives. Their central contribution is an explicit claim—based on these model applications—that the EC both generates and increases the likelihood of razor‑thin margins.
This article introduces a clear typology that separates election administration harms into three categories: individual, electoral, and systemic. The typology demonstrates why ballot design is a particular vulnerability in administering elections and helps clarify the different stakes when errors occur.
When thinking about political ambition, we often focus on elected officials and career politicians.
Local government meetings are often seen as venues for community input, but who actually speaks up? This study compiles a novel dataset by coding thousands of citizen comments from planning and zoning board discussions about housing development. We then link these individuals to voter files to analyze their local political participation patterns.
News coverage often signals the positions of party elites, but does exposure to those signals in everyday reporting actually shape public policy opinions? Prior experiments using artificial stimuli commonly find strong partisan cueing—partisans adopt leaders' stances—but real news typically offers richer policy information and more subtle or ambiguous cues that may not produce the same effects.
Nearly 1,000 officer-involved killings occur each year in the United States. This analysis documents large and racially disparate effects of these events on the educational and psychological well-being of Los Angeles public high school students.
This article by KĂĄre Vernby, Nazita Lajevardi, and Moa MĂĄrtensson examines whether anticipated discrimination helps explain why racial and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in Western politics. If minorities expect they will not be welcomed in political roles, that expectation could reduce their willingness to run for office and thereby shape who becomes a candidate and an elected official.
This study investigates cultural versus economic conservatism across ninety-nine nations using survey data.
This research investigates whether feminist policies increase women's political representation in contemporary American politics.
Voter turnout among incarcerated individuals remains a critical issue in democratic societies. This study examines voting rates using unique data sources from two US states.
This study investigates how economic self-interest, particularly during times of economic insecurity, influences Americans' attitudes towards redistributive policies, class disparities, and racial equality.
This article asks whether voter bias helps explain the near absence of politicians who are publicly HIV-positive. Using original nationally representative survey experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the authors estimate how voters respond to hypothetical candidates with HIV and explore explanations for any observed penalty.
A quantitatively predictive logical model is presented that links deductive logic to electoral outcomes, producing an explicit mathematical formula that estimates the probability a minority candidate will run in a district and the probability that the candidate will win.
This paper provides the first causal estimates of how presidential judicial appointments shape outcomes in federal district court civil rights cases. Using an original dataset of about 70,000 cases and nearly 200 judges, the analysis examines whether assignment to a Democratic- or Republican-appointed judge changes the likelihood of settlement, dismissal, or other outcomes.
Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) has proliferated, yet average claims contain less information than before. This study examines 812 disputes from 1987 to present.
This article explores why housing construction has become increasingly difficult in expensive cities despite widespread support for expanding supply. Using two original surveys—an exit poll of 1,660 San Francisco voters from the 2015 election and a national survey with over 3,000 respondents—the study provides experimental measurements of NIMBYism.
Immigration debates often lump together non-naturalized residents (stock) and future arrivals (flow), but new research shows native Americans differentiate between them significantly.
Political interest is widely seen as a sign of democratic health.
In response to Kurt Weyland's optimistic assessment of American democracy, this article challenges his conclusion that the United States is immune to democratic reversal. Using a set-theoretical approach similar to Weyland's but incorporating broader structural factors like inequality and racial cleavages, we demonstrate potential pathways toward democratic backsliding.
This research examines the dynamic relationship between Americans' belief in the American Dream—an optimistic vision rooted in national ethos—and their perceptions of its attainability. While many continue to support the concept itself, we analyze how public confidence changes over time.
Recent findings suggest the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program responds 1.7-3.3 times more effectively than previously estimated, offering insights into redistributing gains from trade integration.
This paper examines how the timing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) disbursements affects crime, focusing on grocery-store crime and theft. Two policy-driven sources of variation identify how spreading out benefit receipt changes short-term criminal activity.
A new wave of polarization across American society raises an important question: does partisanship extend its influence beyond politics into our everyday economic lives? This research explores that very question through three distinct field experiments.
High incarceration rates in America affect political participation, especially among those eligible to vote.
Does American-style door-to-door canvassing work as well in Europe? This article examines existing U.S. and European research, combining studies from six countries including two new Danish experiments.
High school attendance influences political preferences later in life, particularly through economic impacts. Using a generalized difference-in-differences design and leveraging variation in U.S. state dropout laws across cohorts, this study finds that raising the minimum school age reduces Democratic partisan identification by about 15 percentage points among affected individuals.
This paper examines how modifications to early voting policies affected voter turnout during the 2016 general election in North Carolina.
Title: The Political Consequences of Policing: Evidence from New York City
New research explores how personal connections to civil society organizations (CSOs) can buffer the negative effects of incarceration on political participation beyond traditional voting. Using data from Chicago, this study reveals a counterintuitive finding: while involuntary criminal justice contact generally reduces all forms of political engagement, prior involvement with CSOs strengthens nonvoting political activities among those who've been incarcerated—even in states that restore the franchise immediately after release. The findings challenge simplistic assumptions about civic disengagement post-incarceration and suggest complex pathways to sustained political influence outside electoral processes.
This article examines voter registration rates among transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, despite legal frameworks prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity.
This study investigates the relationship between societal tolerance levels and protest activity across American metropolitan areas.
Measuring political power is challenging, but newspaper coverage may offer insight. A novel approach leverages nearly 50 million historical pages from U.S. newspapers (1877-1977). We created a 'word frequency' measure to track attention given to various actors and offices across thousands of papers. This method effectively captures power dynamics by showing where politics is discussed.
Federal systems incentivize strategic polluter placement. US data reveals major facilities are disproportionately located downwind of state borders, a pattern especially strong for toxic emitters.
Michele Margolis and Michael Sances investigate whether—and how—partisan identity shapes an ostensibly apolitical behavior: voluntary donations to charitable organizations. The study asks whether Democrats and Republicans differ in how much they give to charity, and which mechanisms (religious practice, ideological views about government, or status signaling) account for any difference. Understanding these links matters for debates about the social roots of political identity and the broader consequences of political polarization in the United States.
Most studies of candidate race assume that the way race is signaled—by a label/name or by a photo—does not meaningfully change results. That assumption goes largely untested. This study asks whether signaling candidate ethnicity with ethnic labels and names produces different effects than signaling ethnicity with ethnically identifiable photos and names.
War increases public interest in politics, but how does the loss of human lives specifically influence electoral behavior? This research explores whether combat casualties heighten mortality salience, a psychological concept where reminders of death increase focus on worldview defense. We hypothesize that this heightened awareness strengthens political values like patriotism and ideology, making voting seem more important. Using cross-national data from 23 democracies over five decades plus survey data from the United States and United Kingdom during recent conflicts, we find mounting casualties correlate with increased voter turnout across established democracies.
Rainfall is widely used as an as-if random shock in political science and economics, but county-level rainfall assignment is highly correlated across space. Because this clustered assignment does not align with clear unit boundaries, conventional variance estimation for rainfall effects on political outcomes is challenging and may understate uncertainty.
Existing approaches to measuring political disagreement from text perform well only on narrowly selected texts that discuss the same issues in the same style. This article presents the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific position scores from the entire legislative speech corpus and for producing detailed, time-varying measures of speech polarization and politically loaded language.
Individuals may join contentious collective action for social approval from their ingroup.
Do so-called "fair trade" preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that emphasize labor protections actually prompt partner countries to improve labor rights — and if so, when and how do those improvements occur? Moonhawk Kim investigates whether partner governments act in advance of negotiations or signing to strengthen labor protections in order to become more attractive PTA partners.
Economic sanctions are a common foreign-policy tool, yet scholars and practitioners doubt their effectiveness in changing target behavior. One alternative explanation is that sanctions serve a symbolic domestic function: they allow leaders to signal toughness without committing to costly measures. Taehee Whang tests whether sanctions deliver such domestic political benefits in the United States and why that matters for understanding foreign-policy choices.
An analysis reveals the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida during the 2000 presidential election significantly contributed to erroneous voting for Reform candidate Pat Buchanan.
This study asks whether politicians’ “public personality” traits—specifically agency and communion—can be measured at scale from their public statements using computational text analysis. The authors propose a theory-driven, domain-specific operationalization of agency and communion and compare multiple computational approaches to extract these traits from a large corpus that includes parliamentary speeches, social media posts, and interviews. They validate their approach with human-labeled data, functional tests, and targeted analyses of German politicians and the 2024 U.S. presidential debate featuring Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The paper reports that prompting-based techniques, especially with advanced models like DeepSeek-V3, performed better than supervised and semisupervised alternatives, while noting this is a multimethod feasibility study rather than a definitive measurement standard.