Wang’s Picnic
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Weekly issue

Wang's Picnic (2026/08/15)

Updated journals
46
Articles
112

This week, 46 journals published 112 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

American Journal of Political Science Journal of Peace Research Political Theory
British Journal of Sociology Journal of Political Economy Politics and Religion
Contemporary Political Theory Journal of Political Science Education Post-Soviet Affairs
Discourse & Society Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Public Choice
East European Politics Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Public Opinion Quarterly
Economic Sciences Research in PNAS Legislative Studies Quarterly Qualitative Sociology
European Political Science Review Local Government Studies Representation
European Sociological Review Nations and Nationalism Social Forces
Gender & Society Nature Reviews Psychology Social Problems
Government Information Quarterly Parliamentary Affairs Social Science Quarterly
Government and Opposition Party Politics The Journal of Legislative Studies
International Journal of Transitional Justice Perspectives on Politics The Quarterly Journal of Economics
International Political Science Review Philosophy & Public Affairs West European Politics
Japanese Journal of Political Science Political Communication 人文及社會科學集刊
Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Science Research and Methods
Journal of Information Technology & Politics Political Studies

📚 American Journal of Political Science

📄 (Non)belonging and (un)freedom

This article centers on the concept of “belonging” to argue that belonging and freedom are fundamentally related, and that this relationship cannot be easily captured in formal terms alone. I contend that experiences of incomplete belonging among citizens deserve attention from political science because, in addition to their more obvious challenge to equality, they also erode freedom, even in the context of robust formal guarantees. Citizens perceived as not fully belonging are more likely to eschew behaviors or opinions they know can exacerbate the likelihood of being perceived as interlopers. But although this challenge to individual freedom may be by itself worrisome, I focus on the ways in which some citizens’ unequal belonging undermines collective freedom—what Hannah Arendt calls political freedom—by confining some people's sincere expressions to narrow public spaces, limiting pluralism, and depleting the public space of opportunities for deliberation and political action.

📄 Global harms, local profits: How the uneven costs of natural disasters affect support for green political platforms

Large‐scale fires are becoming increasingly common due to climate change. While conventional wisdom suggests that firsthand experiences with natural disasters foster green coalitions by raising awareness of environmental degradation, we propose an alternative view: Natural disasters can heighten the perceived trade‐off between economic development and environmental policies. This study examines the case of Brazil, where large‐scale fires, by clearing natural vegetation, create new opportunities for land grabbing and the expansion of agriculture and livestock production. Using satellite, administrative, and electoral data, we provide evidence that large‐scale fires increase support for green candidates only in municipalities that are unlikely to reap economic benefits from fires. Survey data further indicate that voters prioritize environmental protection over economic growth only when they stand to receive limited or no benefit from the newly cleared land. Our findings suggest that the potential for natural disasters to foster green coalitions is contingent upon distributive concerns.

📄 Endogenous coalition formation in policy debates

Political actors form coalitions around their joint normative beliefs in order to influence the policy process on contentious issues such as climate change or population aging. Policy process theory maintains that learning within and across coalitions is a central predictor of policy change but has yet to explain how policy learning works. This article explains the formation and maintenance of coalitions by focusing on the ways actors adopt policy beliefs from other actors in policy debates. A policy debate is a complex social system in which temporal network dependence guides how actors contribute ideological statements. Belief adoption matters in three complementary ways: bonding , which exploits cues within coalitions; bridging , which explores new beliefs outside one's perimeter; and repulsion , which reinforces polarization between coalitions and cements their belief systems. We formalize this theory of endogenous coalition formation in policy debates and test it on a micro‐level empirical data set.

📄 Durable majority gerrymanders: Where partisan gerrymandering can displace democracy

We develop the concept of, and estimation tools for, durable majority gerrymanders : electoral district maps drawn to reduce an opposing political party's probability of winning a majority in a legislative chamber. Directly interpretable, forward‐looking, and motivated by the democratic principle that a party in power should have some chance of losing it, this measure provides new insights into the role of redistricting in state legislative elections. We show that, when map drawers are unconstrained, the ability to create durable majorities is so widespread that at least one party in every state can draw a map where a majority of legislative districts withstand almost any likely future electoral swing. Enacted maps are less durable due to a combination of underlying geography, voter partisanship, and state‐level guidelines. This paper provides the theoretical framework and empirical tools to understand which gerrymandered maps enable state‐level majorities to emerge and to endure.

📚 British Journal of Sociology

📄 Playing the Game: <i>Illusio</i> and the Cultural Normalisation of Shadow Education in Greece and Beyond

Shadow education has become a defining feature of contemporary schooling systems, yet dominant explanations continue to emphasise access, market expansion, and examination pressure. This article advances a sociological account of how shadow education becomes culturally normalised within contexts formally committed to public educational equality. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of illusio , I conceptualise Greece as a dialectically hybrid neoliberal–traditionalist educational field, in which market logics of optimisation and competition interact with moral obligations of family sacrifice, kinship duty, and educational honour. The article draws on a qualitatively driven mixed‐methods study conducted in rural Pella, Greece, combining an online survey of 110 individuals who had completed secondary education within the previous five years with 24 semi‐structured interviews (14 students and 10 tutors). Survey findings informed participant selection and identified broader participation patterns, while interviews examined how tutoring became culturally meaningful and morally necessary. The findings show that shadow education functions as a culturally expected norm across all capital positions. However, inequality is reproduced less through differential participation than through the quality, prestige, and strategic convertibility of tutoring. I argue that this produces a distinct mechanism of symbolic violence within universal participation, whereby unequal pedagogic infrastructures are misrecognised as stronger work ethic, greater seriousness, and deserved merit. Comparatively, Greece emerges as a familistic Southern European mass‐participation shadow education regime, where neoliberal educational rationalities are culturally re‐encoded through kinship obligation and welfare fragility. More broadly, the article contributes to debates on educational inequality by showing how marketised hierarchies become culturally experienced as necessary, legitimate, and deserved.

📚 Contemporary Political Theory

📄 Hegel on History, Politics and Philosophy

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 Property disobedience as protest: rethinking political nonviolence

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 Moral autopsy: truths, secrets, and the judicial afterlives of communist secret service archives

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Discourse & Society

📄 The strategic self: Functional differentiation of first-person singular reference in presidential nomination speeches

This study examines how presidential candidates construct multifaceted political identity through first-person singular pronouns in U.S. nomination acceptance speeches from 1944 to 2020. Employing Systemic Functional Linguistics as the analytical framework, the research identifies six functionally distinct roles of ‘I’ through corpus analysis of 2613 instances across 38 speeches, each role characterized by specific combinations of process type and temporal orientation. These roles address three rhetorical imperatives that candidates must navigate simultaneously: establishing authority, building credibility, and articulating vision. Analysis indicates the persistence of all six roles across the 76-year period, while their distribution remains closely comparable across party lines, suggesting they reflect demands intrinsic to the acceptance speech rather than partisan preference or individual style. This study provides a replicable approach for analyzing functional differentiation in pronoun usage, connecting grammatical features with communicative functions and identity construction in political discourse.

📄 Climate whataboutism at work: How Danes discursively redirect responsibility for action

This study contributes to research on climate delay discourse with a scrutiny of climate whataboutism using membership categorization analysis. It builds upon a corpus of written and oral Danish conversations and debates about climate action and policy. The corpus includes actors representing the political sphere, interest groups, and private individuals. Climate whataboutism is designed by comparing two adaptable membership categories with one another: higher-emitting members of category X versus lower-emitting members of category Y, which speakers usually identify with. Speakers deploy various discursive and conversational resources to maximize the contrast between the two membership categories. Overall, climate whataboutism is produced to convey that local climate action is pointless, either in friendly situations where participants confirm one another, or in more antagonistic situations where participants defensively respond to arguments for taking action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The paper discusses why it is important to understand the mechanism of climate whataboutism and other kinds of delay discourse, not least when used among populations with very high carbon footprints per capita.

📚 East European Politics

📄 How far will citizens go for transborder ethnic kin? Public support for kin-state policies in Serbia

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Economic Sciences Research in PNAS

📄 The effectiveness of green place-based industrial policy: Evidence from the Inflation Reduction Act

  • Author(s): Joep Keuzenkamp, Jacopo Mazza, Bob Rijkers, Katherine Stapleton
  • Link: Read the article
Governments across the globe are turning to place-based industrial policies to make the green transition more equitable and politically palatable. The United States’ Inflation Reduction Act exemplifies this approach through its “Energy Community” provisions, which offer additional tax incentives for clean energy projects in regions reliant on fossil fuels. We use spatially granular data on renewable energy investment, employment, and voting, and document that these incentives substantially increased local solar investment, but we do not find significant impacts on wind investment, job creation, or political preferences. Estimated abatement costs are well below the social cost of carbon and lower than those of other major U.S. climate policies. The results suggest that place-based green industrial policies can effectively direct clean energy investment toward disadvantaged regions, but their capacity to generate broader local economic or political benefits may be limited.

📄 The relationship between officer misconduct and convictionless arrests

This paper examines whether officers with high prior alleged misconduct are more likely to make convictionless arrests (arrests that result in no or dismissed charges or where the defendant is found not guilty). Using the Chicago Police Department’s rotational duty calendar to obtain plausibly exogenous variation in the set of officers assigned to work on a particular day, we find that high-misconduct officers make statistically significantly more arrests for nonindex crimes and in situations involving high officer discretion, compared to their no-misconduct peers. Our findings also suggest that downstream legal actors, such as prosecutors and judges, may be partially “correcting” these arrests.

📄 Scientific production in the era of large language models: Outcome-triggered treatment timing and spurious event-study dynamics

  • Author(s): Thomas Renault, Antonin Bergeaud, Clément Bosquet
  • Link: Read the article
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific writing, but their effect on individual productivity is difficult to identify because adoption is rarely directly observed. [K. Kusumegi et al. , Science 390 , 1240–1243 (2025)] infer adoption from the first paper detected as LLM-assisted and report large productivity gains after adoption. We show that this treatment-timing rule mechanically generates positive event-study dynamics even in the absence of any causal effect. Because high-output months are more likely to produce a detected paper, treatment assignment becomes intrinsically linked to productivity. Using reconstructed arXiv data, we show that random treatment assignments, neutral-keyword triggers, inverted treatment, and pre-ChatGPT placebo periods all generate similar dynamics. Simulations with no treatment effect also reproduce the same posttreatment patterns reported in K. Kusumegi et al. , Science 390 , 1240–1243 (2025). Our results demonstrate that first-detection timing alone creates spurious evidence of productivity gains from LLM adoption.

📄 Illegal firearms markets: Transaction patterns, evolving sources, and importance in criminal misuse

In the United States, the legal status of the 30 to 40 million annual firearms transactions is defined by state and federal regulations. These regulations primarily aim to reduce criminal misuse while preserving access for the large majority of adults who lack a serious criminal record or are otherwise proscribed from possession. Illegal firearms transactions are embedded in the “formal market”—sales, mostly of new guns, by licensed retail dealers required to screen purchasers and maintain records—and the “informal market,” where any of the 80 million gun owners may act as a source. A growing fraction of illegal transactions involve privately made firearms, fabricated from commercial kits or additive manufacturing techniques. The firearms used by proscribed people are diverted from the legal supply chain, in some cases by professional intermediaries (thieves, straw purchasers, scofflaw dealers, home fabricators). Subsequent redistribution may involve professional brokers and traffickers. Most such enterprises are small in scale, with organized criminal groups serving primarily as customers rather than distributors. Compared with the drug trade, the illegal gun market is smaller and more exposed to law enforcement. For proscribed buyers, transaction costs are highly differentiated, varying based on the local prevalence of guns, state regulations and enforcement, and individual connections. While preventing dangerous people from obtaining guns is intrinsically difficult in a regime designed for broad accessibility to most adults, regulations can substantially affect illegal commerce, and some regulations reduce criminal use.

📄 A budding science of illegal markets

Illegal markets create untold societal and environmental harm, but they have attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. This paper explores illegal markets as a class of objects. It considers similarities and differences across markets, with particular attention to nine: human smuggling, commercial sex, firearms, money laundering, illegal fishing, international wildlife trafficking, counterfeit goods, drugs, and tobacco products. These nine markets display enormous variation, stemming in part from differences in the “physics” of the good or service they provide. Other differences can be seen as adaptations to different policy and enforcement pressures. Some markets have changed in fundamental ways over recent decades, while others remain more stable. The overall rate of true innovation is not necessarily high, but most appear quick to adopt innovations that are created by the larger economy such as cryptocurrencies, secure communications, and dark web distribution. Low rates of investment in research and development, branding, and marketing along with simultaneous high rates of adaptability may be a natural outgrowth of these markets being dominated by relatively small organizations. It is hypothesized that one can group the common illegal markets into those that: 1) Supply goods stolen from a common heritage, either natural (illegal fishing, wildlife trafficking, illegal mining) or cultural (antiquities); 2) Supply goods or services to people committing crimes beyond just consuming the banned products (guns, money laundering); 3) Undermine an authority’s rights (smuggling humans across borders, counterfeiting goods, tax-evading cigarettes); and 4) Supply products that harm the user and/or seller (drugs, commercial sex, gambling, raw milk).

📄 Stability and turbulence in illegal drug markets

This article provides a primer on illegal drug markets, with a focus on the structure and nature of these markets and the enterprises involved. The markets for illegal drugs are large, with annual retail expenditures likely exceeding $100 billion in the United States alone. Many drugs are easy to produce, and their high value-to-weight ratios make them attractive to smugglers. Some features of illegal drug markets have been quite stable, such as the small size of retail purchases, in part because most sales are to people who use frequently and typically do not buy in bulk. Between production and consumption, most of these substances cross multiple borders—and often continents—and the mark-ups along the supply chain continue to be substantial. But there have been major changes over the past 15 y. While illegally manufactured synthetic drugs are not new, the proliferation of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids created an overdose crisis in North America and has other countries on high alert. The internet has also made producing and accessing a wide range of drugs and their precursor chemicals easier. The emergence of cryptocurrencies has created new opportunities to hide transactions and launder the proceeds. In addition to highlighting the stability and turbulence in these markets, this article offers ideas for future research and emphasizes the need for monitoring purity-adjusted drug prices, which is critical for understanding supply changes and evaluating interventions in these markets.

📄 The money laundering market: An economic analysis

Criminals launder their proceeds from crime, either themselves or by paying a professional, to disguise the link between the criminal, the crime, and the proceeds. This allows the criminal to spend the proceeds more freely and lowers the chance of receiving unwanted attention from the authorities. This paper investigates the structure and dynamics of the understudied market for money laundering services. The analysis reveals that this illegal market is demand-driven and fragmented, with different forms of laundering, each requiring different steps with varying levels of risk. High search costs, specialized money launderers, and uncertainties lead to local monopolies. Demand tends to be relatively inelastic because criminals eventually need laundering services to spend their proceeds. Local monopolies, inelastic demand, and poor information flows lead to relatively high prices for laundering. Trust issues and two-sided asymmetric information lead to a market with relationships that tend to last longer than generally expected in illegal markets.

📄 Casting light on the workings of illegal fishing markets

  • Author(s): Philippe Le Billon, Zelda Ladefoged, U. Rashid Sumaila
  • Link: Read the article
About 3.5 million fishing vessels ply the world’s oceans, providing livelihoods and food for millions of people. Sound management is key to fisheries’ sustainability, but illegal fishing, along with fishing overcapacity generally and environmental change, are putting many fisheries at risk. Illegal fishing is a globally pervasive yet unevenly distributed phenomenon, manifesting in diverse forms across both small-scale and industrial-scale fleets, the latter accounting for about 82 to 93% of the 8.4 to 15.4 million metric tons global annual illicit marine wild fish seafood trade valued at US$6.2 to 12.2 billion. The massive rise in fishing effort since 1950 has not been matched by adequate regulations and enforcement, especially for industrial-scale fishing in the waters of developing countries. About two-thirds of the illicit trade by value originates from fishing grounds in West Africa (27%), East Asia (24%), and Southeast Asia (16%). Remote sensing and AI technologies are improving detection of illegal fishing, but enforcement remains an issue given its high costs and the relative ease of laundering illegal catch through transshipments at sea, poorly regulated ports, and fraudulent documentation along seafood supply chains. Illegal fishing markets require multilayered policy responses grounded in transparency, international cooperation, and socioeconomic justice. Proposed measures, ranging from mandatory electronic vessel identification and subsidy reform to artisanal fishery protections and stronger port controls, warrant further research into their implementation and effectiveness.

📄 Illegal markets for cigarettes and e-cigarettes

This paper discusses the long-standing illegal markets for cigarettes and the more recently emerged illegal markets for e-cigarettes. We identify three distinctive market fundamentals that help explain many features of the illegal markets. First, in contrast to some illegal goods, many countries have sizable legal markets for cigarettes and e-cigarettes alongside the illegal markets. In 2024, tobacco products generated almost $1 trillion in revenues; e-cigarettes generated $26 billion dollars. It is estimated that illegal markets account for about 10 percent of global cigarette consumption. Second, the illegal markets have arisen to evade high excise taxes that increase prices and regulations that restrict the availability of desirable features of legal products. The taxes and regulations have been adopted as public health measures with the goal of reducing tobacco consumption; however, these same policies drive the formation of illegal markets. Third, demand-side linkages mean that taxation, regulatory, and enforcement policies targeted at legal and illegal markets for cigarettes will affect legal and illegal markets for e-cigarettes, and vice versa. The connection between the markets means regulatory policy for one product can drive consumers both to the illegal market for the product and to the legal and illegal market for the other product.

📄 The illegal market for sex in the United States: Insights from economic research

The illegal market for sex in the United States generates significant economic activity yet remains understudied due to its illegality and clandestine nature. This paper synthesizes existing empirical evidence documenting aspects of market structure, impacts of regulation, and notable changes over time. Criminalization, while intended to suppress the market, often exacerbates harms by displacing activity underground, increasing violence against sex workers, and elevating disease transmission risks. Natural experiments, including decriminalization episodes in Rhode Island and policy shifts in Europe, reveal that decriminalization can reduce sexually transmitted infections and violence against women. Additionally, technological shifts-particularly the rise of online platforms due to the internet-have reshaped market organization. These findings challenge conventional legal and moral frameworks and underscore the need for evidence-based policymaking to guide effective regulation of sex markets.

📄 How illegal wildlife trade adheres to and defies conventional market behavior

Illegal wildlife markets comprise a complex global economy generating criminal profits while harming biodiversity and livelihoods. The negative externalities from biodiversity loss, ecosystem destabilization, and zoonotic disease risk may be orders of magnitude larger than the multibillion dollar annual total market value. Despite decades of international policy attention, fundamental economic characteristics of these markets remain poorly understood. We suggest distinguishing three categories of illegally traded wildlife products based on product durability and intended use: luxury durable goods, nondurable products processed to be food or medicine, and live or perishable exotic pets and plants. Through case studies of elephant ivory, pangolin scales, and succulent plants, we characterize market organization, pricing structures, supply network architecture, and regulatory vulnerabilities across product types. Our analysis suggests illegal wildlife markets exhibit economic characteristics distinguishing them from other illegal markets, including biological production constraints creating absolute supply limits, opportunistic supply networks exploiting existing legal trade infrastructure, and extreme markup structures leaving harvesters with a fraction of final retail value. We conclude by proposing the concept of Accelerating Demand for Novel or eXclusive Assets, or AD NOXA, which describes how scarcity may paradoxically increase rather than decrease the appeal of consuming certain wildlife markets. This paradox creates feedback loops that may drive species toward extinction, despite—or because of—protective regulations and fundamentally limits the effectiveness of supply-side interventions. Policy responses may be more effective when they integrate supply-side enforcement with demand reduction strategies tailored to the distinct characteristics of illegal wildlife markets.

📄 Economic integration and upward mobility in Brazil

  • Author(s): Radu Barza, Edward Glaeser, César A. Hidalgo, Martina Viarengo
  • Link: Read the article
Are cities in emerging economies poverty traps or engines of opportunity? We use 13 y of linked employer–employee data covering all formal workers in Brazil to explore the mechanisms through which agglomeration promotes mobility for initially poor workers. We find that the cities that appear to enable more upward mobility in Brazil’s south are characterized by greater mixing of skilled and unskilled labor than similarly sized cities with less mobility in the north, where skilled workers disproportionately concentrate in the public sector. These findings suggest that the benefits of urbanization stem not only from the size of the agglomeration or its level of formal schooling but also from the social organization of production.

📚 European Political Science Review

📄 Macrodiscontent across countries

  • Author(s): Haofeng Ma, Jeongho Choi, Yuehong Cassandra Tai, Yue Hu, Frederick Solt
  • Link: Read the article
Public discontent with the political system has become an increasingly salient concern in recent years, with the argument that it undermines democratic stability and effective governance. Nevertheless, the understanding of the nature, trends, and drivers of political discontent remain debated, largely reflecting the constraints from available survey data and items in the construction of measurement. This article takes advantage of state-of-the-art latent-variable modeling to aggregate survey responses and a comprehensive collection of survey data to generate dynamic comparative estimates of public political discontent (PPD) for 136 countries and regions over 56 years (1968–2023). These PPD scores are validated with responses to the individual source-data survey items that were used to generate them as well as the democratic evaluation survey item that was not used in our estimation. Next, a cross-national and longitudinal analysis of PPD in advanced democracies (i.e., OECD countries) highlights that PPD has been on a rising trend, rather than merely trendless fluctuations. Our results reveal that these increased discontents are largely attributable to worsening economic conditions, including low average income, slow growth, and high unemployment rates.

📄 Voting for populism? How ‘populist’ labels affect support for candidates

Many consider the rise of populism to be a major threat to liberal democracy today. At the same time, voters have given considerable support to such parties and politicians, with their average vote-share quadrupling in the last thirty years. Thus, while research realizes the potential hostility populism poses to the polity at large, it is unclear what connotations of the ideology exist to voters. Do voters recognize they are voting for a politician considered to be averse to democracy? Do they simply not care? I field a randomized survey experiment of 2099 respondents in the United Kingdom to measure (1) the effect labeling a politician ‘populist’ may have on their level of support, and (2) voters’ perception of the link between populism and democracy. Results suggest voters’ perception of ‘populist’ labels are largely dependent on the candidate’s left-right ideology, as well as the level of populist ideology of the voter.

📚 European Sociological Review

📄 Who deserves protection? Deservingness, intergroup contact, and public support for gig workers’ rights

The rapid expansion of platform-mediated gig work has intensified debates over whether gig workers should receive social and employment rights comparable to those of standard employees. Yet, despite its high political salience, we know little about how citizens evaluate gig workers’ entitlement to such protections. Gig work, especially in ride hailing and food delivery, is often precarious, with a lack of control at work, weaker contribution records, and overrepresentation of migrant workers—aspects that previous research has identified as central to welfare deservingness judgments. This makes deservingness a particularly relevant lens for analysing public support for gig workers’ rights. With a pre-registered factorial vignette experiment in a six-country survey (Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom), we examine the general population’s willingness to pay for ride-hailing gig workers’ improved rights. We find that support for improved rights closely follows core deservingness dimensions: workers perceived as in need, showing effort on the job and lacking control receive higher support, whereas migrant status and low reciprocity reduce it. Yet, deservingness cues explain only part of the variation. Exploratory analyses show that frequent use of gig services and personal ties with gig workers associate with a higher willingness to pay, showing the relevance of intergroup contact.

📚 Gender & Society

📄 <i>Aguantar</i> , Gendered Expectation, and the Limits of Safety in Rural Michoacán

This article examines aguantar , the moral expectation that women endure suffering, as a form of gendered governance in rural Michoacán, Mexico. Drawing on 26 qualitative interviews with women, including trans women, the study conceptualizes endurance not as resilience but as a moral infrastructure that organizes belonging, safety, and respectability amid structural neglect and endemic violence. Aguantar transforms abandonment into obligation, making women’s immobility both a condition of virtue and a mechanism of control. The analysis traces the moral life cycle of endurance (its apprenticeship in girlhood, enactment in adulthood, and collapse into either resignation or departure) to reveal how moral systems repair themselves through exhaustion, and expose themselves through rupture. These findings advance feminist theories of gender and governance by showing how immobility functions as affective labor that sustains social order when institutions fail. Endurance emerges as both virtue and violence: It provides coherence through suffering while concealing structural harm. Recognizing aguantar as moral governance reorients feminist analysis from resistance to complicity, illuminating how patriarchal order survives through women’s ethical participation in their own containment.

📚 Government Information Quarterly

📄 Digital platforms and regulatory coordination patterns in China: Network evidence from Nanjing's “181” integrated emergency management system

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Government and Opposition

📄 Rethinking Pathways of Autocratisation and Democratic Resilience in Comparative Perspective

  • Author(s): Nic Cheeseman, Marie-Eve Desrosiers, Edem E. Selormey
  • Link: Read the article
This review article examines the rise of democratic resilience as a central concept in the comparative study of regime stability and change. Over the past decade, resilience – understood not simply as institutional survival but as the capacity of democratic systems to adapt, regenerate and deepen democratic norms in the face of crises – has gained prominence in response to accelerating autocratisation. The article situates this shift within the diverse pathways through which democracies weaken and decline, including executive aggrandisement and growing political polarisation. While the existing literature has improved our understanding of autocratisation, much comparative research remains influenced by a relatively narrow set of Northern cases. As a result, it risks treating regional experiences as universal. Drawing on evidence from Africa, Asia and other parts of the Global South, the article argues for a comparative theory of democratic resilience that incorporates state capture, rapid authoritarian reversals and more diverse forms of aggrandisement.

📚 International Journal of Transitional Justice

📄 Transitional justice and more-than-human design: an unexplored relationship

∞ The field of transitional justice remains strongly anthropocentric. In contrast, more-than-human design – also referred to as posthumanist design, trans-species design or trans-species architecture – is a concept and praxis that explicitly de-centres humans and seeks to support multiple life forms. This interdisciplinary article makes an original contribution to transitional justice scholarship by bringing it into direct conversation with more-than-human design literature. In so doing, it aims to demonstrate the potentiality of more-than-human design for developing new approaches to transitional justice – linked to calls to decolonize the field – that are both conceptually and physically inclusive of, and attentive to, different lifeworlds. The article reflects on possible ways of incorporating more-than-human design into transitional justice, not just architecturally but also through crucial ontological and epistemological shifts that acknowledge – and value – other-than-human agencies.

📄 Coming full circle? Bringing transition back in

No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 International Political Science Review

📄 Agenda-setting through Twitter: presidential communication, public attention and media dynamics in crisis contexts

  • Author(s): Catalina Quinchia-Saavedra, Juan Miguel Rey-Pino, José Alberto Castañeda-García
  • Link: Read the article
This article analyzes how presidential communication on Twitter shapes public attention and information-seeking behavior and interacts with online media agendas during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on leaders’ use of social media in different political regimes, we assess the impact of presidential tweets on citizens’ information demand through Google Trends and their amplification in online press coverage. Using quantitative content analysis and time-series modeling, the study identifies patterns of agenda-setting that vary across democratic and hybrid contexts. Findings show that presidential use of Twitter can mobilize public attention and influence media agendas, although effects depend on regime type and media dynamics. The results contribute to understanding how digital platforms mediate political communication in times of crisis and highlight the role of social media in reinforcing or challenging democratic processes. We argue that Twitter functions both as a strategic tool for leaders and as a channel reshaping traditional media dynamics.

📄 Invalid leverage? Reassessing the ‘aid-for-votes’ mechanism amid U.S.–China competition

Despite billions in annual foreign aid to Africa, evidence that aid “buys” political support remains inconclusive. Using panel data for 49 sub-Saharan African countries (2000–2021) and case studies of Ethiopia and Djibouti, we distinguish between two influence logics: transactional flows (annual aid disbursements) and structural stocks (cumulative infrastructure financing and trade integration shaping long-term economic ties). We found that annual aid flows from both China and the United States showed no significant relationship with United Nations General Assembly voting alignment. By contrast, cumulative Chinese infrastructure finance stocks and bilateral trade dependence significantly predicted alignment even controlling for annual flows, while donor competition further eroded transactional leverage. These findings challenge principal-agent models of aid diplomacy and suggest that, amid U.S.–China rivalry, influence increasingly derives from embedded economic relationships rather than annual aid disbursements.

📄 International drivers of political settlement change in Africa

Political settlement analysis, as a framework to understand power configurations, has been mainly concerned with domestic dynamics, as well as with the implications of settlements for development. While some scholars have acknowledged the role of international capital in shaping political settlements, international actors are often overlooked in this literature, with settlements primarily understood as domestic elite coalitions. By conceptualizing three mechanisms—material resources, ideational influence, and regime recognition—the paper examines how international actors impact settlement dynamics. We illustrate the empirical plausibility of these mechanisms by examining four cases of political settlement change across different African countries: Ghana (1982), Kenya (2008), Côte d’Ivoire (2011), and Tanzania (2016). These cases reveal that international actors might play a pivotal role in defining and stabilizing political settlements, providing critical resources and legitimacy to ruling coalitions.

📄 The rise and closure of “liberal democracy”: A systematic review in contemporary political science, 1990–2025

This article provides the first systematic, large-scale review of how “liberal democracy” has been used in political science over the past three decades. Drawing on 2401 English-language journal articles indexed in Web of Science (1957–2025), it focuses on a political science subset of 737 items classified by subfield and regional focus. The analysis combines computational and qualitative approaches: a Wordfish text-scaling model maps semantic divisions across abstracts, while close coding of the 30 most cited articles adds interpretive depth. Three findings emerge. First, references to “liberal democracy” surge after the mid-2010s, even after normalization, reflecting heightened concern with democratic crisis. Second, conceptual openness declines: earlier debates over definition and measurement give way to a predominantly normative use of the term as a contrast to populism or authoritarianism. Third, democracy research becomes increasingly standardized. Overall, “liberal democracy” has shifted from a contested analytical concept to a largely defensive normative category.

📄 Introduction to the ‘Special issue: Academic freedom in decline’

This article introduces the IRSR Special Issue on Democratic Backsliding and Academic Freedom by further exploring how the two concepts are interrelated and contingent on one another. We do so by (1) providing some empirical background on the decline of academic freedom in countries around the world; by (2) introducing what we understand as the autocratic playbook toward academic freedom; and by (3) situating all the contributions to this special issue within this framework.

📚 Japanese Journal of Political Science

📄 One more time one more chance: election deposit refunds and politicians’ decisions to re-contest elections

Prior research on election deposit refunds has often focused on national-level elections or used broad candidate classifications. This paper provides new evidence from the local level in Taiwan’s single non-transferable vote council elections, where party institutionalization is high. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper finds that receiving a refund increases the probability of re-contesting by 4 percentage points. Although the main effect is not robust across specifications, we further examine heterogeneity across candidates’ gender and party affiliation. The results indicate that the positive and significant effect of refunds on re-contesting is concentrated among independent candidates. These findings suggest that election deposit refunds help mitigate disparities in party resources, thereby lowering barriers to re-entry into electoral competition.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 Gentrification in Durban’s Point Precinct and its impact on access to low-cost housing

  • Author(s): Zwelakhe Thulasizwe Mascot Maseko, Joyce Mnesi Mdiniso
  • Link: Read the article
Gentrification is a global urban phenomenon with significant socioeconomic and spatial consequences, particularly for low-income communities. In Durban’s Point Precinct, substantial urban transformation has raised critical questions about housing accessibility and social equity. This study explores how gentrification impacts access to low-cost housing in the Point Precinct, examining how urban renewal and economic reinvestment contribute to displacement, housing exclusion, and socio-spatial inequalities. Using qualitative methods in-depth interviews with 54 participants (50 residents and 4 municipal officials), document analysis, and field observations, the research reveals that while gentrification fosters economic revitalization, it simultaneously exacerbates housing insecurity for lower-income groups. Distinctively, the findings demonstrate how market-driven displacement in post-apartheid South Africa resonates with apartheid-era forced removals, reproducing racialized spatial exclusion through ostensibly neutral market mechanisms. This historical continuity matters because it reveals how contemporary urban development perpetuates rather than remedies colonial and apartheid spatial legacies, with profound implications for spatial justice and the right to the city. The research critiques the notion of “state-led gentrification,” revealing instead a pattern of state weakness that creates conditions for market-driven displacement while failing to protect vulnerable residents. This research provides essential guidance for policymakers, urban planners, housing activists, and community organizations striving for equitable urban development in South African cities and other post-colonial contexts.

📄 A divided nation, divided views? How South Koreans’ political and social orientations shape their view of North Korea?

This study investigates how South Koreans’ political and social orientations shape their perceptions of North Korea and North Korean defectors. Analyzing nationally representative survey data (N = 8251) from the 2024 Social Integration Survey, we employ ordinary least squares regression models to test a dual-framework hypothesis. The findings reveal a striking bifurcation in public opinion. Views of the North Korean state are positively associated with progressive ideology, high political interest, and social inclusiveness but negatively associated with patriotism and trust in the government. Conversely, acceptance of North Korean defectors is associated with conservatism, patriotism, trust in government, and social inclusiveness. These patterns suggest that the public applies distinct logics—ideological-positional versus moral-humanitarian—when evaluating the regime versus its people. We interpret these findings as descriptive associations rather than causal effects. The results highlight the politicized nature of inter-Korean perceptions and the risk of defectors being instrumentalized in domestic political battles, with implications for integration policy and inter-Korean relations.

📄 Mapping exclusion: Muslim women’s education in West Bengal from colonialism to the present

This article explores the systematic exclusion of Muslim women in West Bengal’s education system. Through descriptive, historical analysis and empirical investigation, the authors have examined the persistence of educational marginalisation of Muslim women using insights from theories of social exclusion, the capability approach, and intersectionality to interpret the problem. National-level surveys and micro-level studies have been used to critically analyse educational access of Muslim women. These have been statistically tested for compatibility and compared with primary data derived from the authors’ survey of five Muslim-majority villages in the Burdwan district of West Bengal to verify patterns of discrimination. The findings reveal the enduring problems of illiteracy and dropouts at secondary and higher secondary levels and the inefficacy of government interventions in improving the situation. Based on such evidences, the authors have argued that Muslim women face greater educational exclusion than other disadvantaged social groups. However, the findings indicate a marginal improvement in Muslim women’s participation in higher education. The novelty of the study lies in its broad historical scope, investigation of the multifaceted exclusion faced by Muslim women, and its systematic and scientific approach to support the central arguments.

📄 Earnings volatility and worker well-being in Dhaka’s gig economy: Precarity, platform governance, and urban livelihoods in Bangladesh

  • Author(s): Md Asad Noor, Md Sabbir Hossain, Md Sharukh Jaman Khan
  • Link: Read the article
This study examines earnings volatility and worker well-being among ride-hailing and delivery workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Drawing on a survey of 512 workers, earnings diaries, and qualitative interviews, the article conceptualizes platform work as digitally reorganized informality. Quantile regression and SEM-based association analysis show that multi-homing and tenure are associated with lower earnings volatility, whereas payment frictions, long hours, and perceived algorithmic management are associated with higher volatility. Earnings volatility is also linked to greater psychological distress and lower well-being, with heat and congestion intensifying these associations. The findings highlight earnings stability as a key labor governance issue in South Asian platform economies.

📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 Can Large language models serve as voting advice applications? An empirical test using Turkish lifestyle typologies

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📄 Multi-platform research in the light of technology affordances: networks of the far right in Germany

  • Author(s): Azade E. Kakavand, Nicola Righetti, Annie Waldherr
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Journal of Peace Research

📄 Landmark UN Security Council resolutions, agenda setting, and warring parties’ peacebuilding commitments

What is the relationship between United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and warring parties' peacebuilding commitments? The UNSC has adopted various landmark resolutions with the goal of codifying what it deems necessary for promoting lasting peace and security. However, little is known about whether there have been systemic shifts in the subsequential peacebuilding commitments that warring parties make as they transition out of armed conflict. I address this gap in two parts. First, I develop a theoretical framework to explain the agenda-setting role that landmark resolutions play in peace processes; in doing so, I explicate a mechanism through which agenda setting operates: the mandated activities of the United Nations’ (UN's) field missions. Second, I test this theory by leveraging insights from the PA-X Peace Agreement Database and the original Mandates of International Organizations' Missions dataset. In line with my framework, I find that warring parties incorporate different landmark resolutions' thematic issues into their peacebuilding commitments at higher rates following the resolutions' adoption as compared to time periods before their adoption, and UN missions' mandated promotion of the resolutions' thematic issues is consistently associated with higher rates of incorporation. Alternative models and placebo tests examining the mere presence of UN missions and the mandated activities of regional organizations' missions further substantiate these findings.

📚 Journal of Political Economy

📄 From Doubt to Devotion: Trials and Learning-Based Pricing

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📄 The Effect of Education Policy on Crime: An Intergenerational Perspective

  • Author(s): Ulrika Ahrsjö, Costas Meghir, Mårten Palme, Marieke Schnabel
  • Link: Read the article
Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📄 Rent Guarantee Insurance

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📚 Journal of Political Science Education

📄 Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship

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📚 Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

📄 Does it Pay to Send Multiple Pre-Paid Incentives? Evidence from A Randomized Experiment

  • Author(s): Andrew C Chang, Joanne W Hsu, Eva Ma, Kate Bachtell, Micah Sjoblom
  • Link: Read the article
We conducted a pre-registered between-subject randomized field experiment in the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, an interviewer-administered survey, to examine how different pre-paid incentives affect interview appointments, survey response rates, interviewer contact attempts needed to obtain an appointment or a survey response, time in the field, and item response rates. We assess the effects of: (i) increasing the total dollar value of the pre-paid incentive (from $5 to either $10 or $15), (ii) using two evenly-sized pre-paid incentives instead of one, controlling for the total dollar value (two payments of $5 instead of one $10), and (iii) using two unevenly sized pre-paid incentives, controlling for the total dollar value ($5 followed by $10 and vice versa, instead of one $15). All treatment groups had at least 1,200 households. Our evidence indicates that a single $15 pre-paid incentive increases survey response rates, without increasing time in the field or contact attempts, and without decreasing item response rates. Splitting the $15 into two payments increases time in the field without improving survey or item response rates, regardless of whether the first payment is larger or smaller than the second. Our results imply that the total incentive amount, delivered early in the field period, may be more important to individuals than the number of times they receive an incentive.

📄 Varying the Content of Political Science Surveys to Improve the Survey Experience and Data Quality of Politically Disengaged Respondents

Respondents’ survey experience affects their answering and participation behavior and, consequently, measurement and nonresponse errors. Political science surveys especially suffer from biased estimates of political attitudes and behavior. Improving respondents’ survey experience by offering a more interesting and varied questionnaire poses a possible solution to this problem. In this regard, we break new ground by investigating whether improving politically disengaged respondents’ survey experience by including non-political survey content enhances data quality with respect to measurement and nonresponse errors in political science surveys. For this purpose, we conducted two survey experiments in a probability- and a nonprobability-based panel that varied the content of a political science questionnaire. This study provides the first evidence that offering a varied questionnaire rather than a purely political one lowered or even diminished the gap in measurement and nonresponse errors between politically engaged and disengaged respondents.

📄 Youth Nonresponse in Panel Surveys: Investigating the Impact of Life Events

  • Author(s): Camilla Salvatore, Peter Lugtig, Bella Struminskaya
  • Link: Read the article
Nonresponse in surveys is particularly problematic among young people in both cross-sectional and panel studies. This article investigates the factors driving lower participation rates among young people in longitudinal surveys. We study whether nonresponse can be explained by young people experiencing more life events associated with disengagement from panel surveys. Using data from the Understanding Society panel in the United Kingdom, we employ a discrete-time multinomial logistic hazard model to study nonresponse across panel waves. Consistent with previous research, our analysis identifies lower education, unemployment, immigrant background, and residential circumstances as key predictors of nonresponse. Furthermore, we demonstrate that changes in employment status and (expectations of) residential relocation significantly contribute to predicting attrition among young participants, with age remaining a significant factor. Living with parents also plays an important role, as it is associated with a lower risk of non-contact.

📚 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society)

📄 Fake news detection via wisdom of synthetic and representative crowds

  • Author(s): François t’Serstevens, Roberto Cerina, Giulia Piccillo
  • Link: Read the article
Social-media companies have struggled to define fake news in a democratically legitimate way. Reliance on expert judgement has faced criticism due to trust deficits and political polarization. Crowd-based approaches offer a cost-effective, transparent, and inclusive alternative. This article presents a novel end-to-end method to detect fake news on X using the wisdom of synthetic, representative crowds. Drawing from multilevel regression and poststratification literature, we train a Hierarchical Bayesian model to predict tweet veracity from the perspective of diverse personae within the target population. We then weight these predictions using a representative stratification frame, ensuring decisions about ‘fake’ tweets reflect the broader polity. Based on the aggregated scores, we analyse a corpus of tweets and conduct a second multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the characteristics of fake news sharers. We find small but statistically meaningful heterogeneity in US fake news sharing on X: (i) sharing is rare, with a low average probability; (ii) strong evidence that Democrats share less fake news than Republicans; and (iii) when Republican definitions are used, Republicans show a decreased propensity to share fake news.

📚 Legislative Studies Quarterly

📄 Moderation or Amplification? Mapping Speech Distinctiveness Among Green Parties Using a Machine Learning Approach

  • Author(s): Clint Claessen, Denise Traber, Martijn Schoonvelde
  • Link: Read the article
How do issue‐owning parties adapt their rhetoric when transitioning from opposition to government? Focusing on the Green parties in Germany and Ireland, we analyze legislative debates to trace how these parties seek to maintain ownership of environmental issues. Using more than 1.7 million parliamentary speeches from the German Bundestag (1991–2018) and the Irish Dáil (1992–2013), we apply a fictitious prediction problem approach implemented as a multiclass text‐classification task to measure distinctiveness in parties' legislative speeches. Our findings show that both parties increased their rhetorical distinctiveness on environmental issues during their first time in government, but with key differences: the Irish Greens maintained a distinct profile throughout their term, while the German Greens' distinctiveness increased as elections neared. No such patterns emerge for welfare, a non‐owned issue. Our study offers a framework and a transferable method for studying how smaller parties navigate between coalition influence and visibility through the issues they own.

📚 Local Government Studies

📄 Who benefits from cooperation (if any)? Asymmetrical distribution of costs and benefits in intermunicipal collaborations

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📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 Unexpected Encounters in Island Worlds: Interactions Between ROC/Taiwan Fishers and Chinese Diaspora Communities in the 20th‐Century Pacific

Researchers have examined how the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) cultivated relations with Chinese diaspora communities to secure recognition of their government as the true homeland of the Chinese people. However, less attention has been paid to how accidental and contingent encounters between communities resident in the ROC or the PRC and those living abroad have affected the identity of Chinese diaspora communities and diplomatic recognition of the ROC/PRC. This paper uses archival records to examine how ROC/Taiwan fishers interacted with Chinese diaspora communities in various Pacific countries between the 1950s and the 1980s during a period when shipwrecks and disputes over illegal fishing consistently stranded fishers throughout the region. The paper argues that the (im)mobility of fishers and their unexpected relationships with diaspora communities suggest new avenues for studying the complexity and beyond‐the‐state relationships of Chinese diaspora groups.

📄 A Forced Union: Exploring the Consequences of India's Removal of Jammu and Kashmir's Special Status

This article adds to academic literature interested in two core questions: What happens to residents as a result of an annexation? And how do aggressor states maintain control over an annexed territory where there is a history of insurgency and mobilization for independence? It does so through a qualitative study exploring both civilian accounts and legal amendments made in the immediate aftermath of the forced removal of Jammu and Kashmir's (J&amp;K) special autonomous status by the Indian government in 2019. By applying Morland's framework of demographic engineering, the study identifies how India accelerated the forced integration of J&amp;K into the Indian Union by removing its special status to gain control over economic and investment opportunities, implementing changes to electoral boundaries, the development of military settler colonies and the issuing of domicile certificates.

📄 Economic Dependencies and Nationalist Divergences: Public Versus Private Sector Employment and Beyond in Corsican Separatist Nationalism

Separatist nationalism often persists in divided minority regions where internal factions struggle to agree on governance models, perpetuating conflict and political tension. This article examines the key structural and situational factors driving these divisions in Corsica, focusing on economic dependencies that shape divergent approaches to autonomy and independence. Drawing on original survey data, open‐ended questions and participant observation, this study reveals that while factors such as income level and cultural perceptions show no statistically significant impact on political preferences, different forms of economic dependency—particularly distinctions between public and private sector employment, unemployment, studentship, and retirement—play a decisive role. Private sector employees are 45% more likely to support independence and 66% more likely to support autonomy than public sector workers, retirees and others reliant on state‐funded welfare systems, who express greater apprehension towards political decentralisation. The findings highlight how economic dependency—whether through employment, welfare benefits or state infrastructure—intersects with cultural identity to shape separatist attitudes. By focusing on patterns of economic reliance rather than solely on ethno‐cultural explanations, income disparities or social class, this article sheds new light on the complex interplay between economic structures, cultural aspirations and political behaviour in underdeveloped regions. It offers fresh insights into separatist movements in economically fragile contexts.

📄 Education and Learning in Studies of Nationalism: Anderson and Weber in Focus

Scholars of nationalism have pointed to the importance of educational institutions for the dissemination of national identities and associated sentimental attachments, yet how nationalism is learned within these educational institutions has received little attention. This article takes as its focus two foundational texts on nationalism, Benedict Anderson's (1983) Imagined Communities and Eugen Weber's (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen, in order to identify how education and learning were situated within these respective works. This article argues that assumptions of learner passivity, environmental determinism and knowledge transfer underpinned Weber's and Anderson's respective conceptualisations of learning, and the argument points to the implications of conceptualisations of learning for studies into the role of educational institutions for the dissemination of nationalism.

📄 Immigrant Nations and the Limits of the Right to Exclude

This article challenges the liberal nationalist Right to Exclude View , which holds that states may exclude immigrants to protect national self‐determination. It critiques the underlying dichotomy between native nations and immigrant communities, arguing that resident immigrant groups and diasporas possess the key features of nations—shared beliefs, historical continuity, collective agency, territorial attachment and a public culture. These communities form ‘new immigrant nations’ with political agency and institutional presence in destination countries. As such, they are entitled to rights similar to those of native nations, including the right to influence immigration policies and invite fellow immigrants. The paper concludes that if immigrant groups are nations, then the moral and political grounds for exclusion are significantly weakened, calling for a rethinking of nationalist justifications for immigration restrictions.

📄 Constructing Eco‐Responsible National Identities Through Collective Memory: Settler and Māori Histories of Environmental Change in Aotearoa New Zealand

A growing body of scholarship argues that collective memories of historical environmental change—formed and transmitted through museums, movies, novels, activist performances and other cultural texts and practices—can help nurture proenvironmentalism. Three possible mechanisms have been proposed: the shifting baseline syndrome, planetary memory and ecological grief. My paper adds a further mechanism to this list: national identity. Through a case study of public memory in Aotearoa New Zealand, the paper demonstrates that culturally mediated representations of the historical past play an important role in the construction of environmentally responsible national identities. Whereas narrating the history of Aotearoa New Zealand exclusively from the viewpoint of European colonial settlers supports a monocultural construct of national identity that sanctions the exploitation of nature for human ends, representations of the past that are inclusive of Indigenous Māori experiences generate a bicultural image of the nation that engenders greater care for the environment. The paper develops this argument by means of a mixed‐method research design that combines quantitative mediation analyses of original survey data from a national probability sample ( N  = 1066) with qualitative interrogations of two museum exhibits (the National Museum of Sheep and Shearing and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa).

📄 Dread in the Homeland: Symbolic Politics and Ethnonationalist Struggles for Self‐Determination in Nigeria

The revival of Biafran separatism in contemporary Nigeria is often explained with three leading theoretical frameworks: relative deprivation, political economy and state repression. Whereas relative deprivation and political economy perspectives posit that the resurgent separatism derives from the perception and empirical reality of socioeconomic deprivation amongst Igbos, the state repression perspective maintains that the state's repression of dissent is linked to the resuscitation of separatist agitations in the southeast region. Although these three frameworks elucidate varied facets of revived separatist tensions in the southeast region, they provide only partial explanations that do not connect the dots amongst symbolic predispositions, leaders' framing, public perception and separatist mobilisation. Drawing on symbolic politics theory advanced by Stuart Kaufman and focusing on the transnational Indigenous People of Biafra, I contend that the resurgent separatism in the southeast region is now driven by ethnic narratives of group annihilation that the separatist group instrumentalises to engender mobilisation against the state. For members of the Indigenous People of Biafra—the largest Biafran separatist movement in Nigeria—who instrumentalise hostile ethnic narratives in their separatist discourses, ethnic Igbos are a people under threat of extinction in a state run by other ethnic and religious groups that purportedly intend to dominate and eliminate Igbos—which necessitates the restoration of the defunct secessionist Biafran state to safeguard against such ethnic elimination. This novel perspective contributes to the existing literature on the reemergence of separatism in contemporary Nigeria.

📄 Two Nationalisms, One City: Official and Diasporic Framings of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests

This study analyses the contested collective memories of the 2019 Anti‐Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti‐ELAB) movement, investigating how the Hong Kong government and diaspora construct divergent narratives to shape national identity and nationalism. Employing a mixed‐methods approach that combines corpus linguistic techniques and qualitative discourse analysis, this research identifies the government's use of language to reinforce state‐centric Chinese nationalism and delegitimize dissent, portraying the movement as a critical security threat. Conversely, diasporic narratives, often articulated on digital platforms, emphasize democratic values, resistance and solidarity, fostering an alternative Hong Kong nationalism rooted in local identity and transnational connections. These competing discourses demonstrate collective memory's dual function as both an instrument of state power and a potent resource for resistance. By situating these narratives within broader discussions of nationalism and identity, the study illuminates the interplay between authoritarian control and grassroots resistance, deepening understanding of nationalism in contested political spaces.

📄 Unpacking Populist Secessionism: Elite Discourse and Mass Attitudes in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina

While political leaders increasingly combine populist and secessionist appeals, systematic evidence remains lacking regarding their effectiveness in mobilizing public support. Drawing on original survey data from Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where leader Milorad Dodik employs populist‐secessionist rhetoric, this study finds that such discourse functions primarily as an elite‐level strategy without corresponding public resonance. Contrary to expectations, individuals with stronger populist attitudes—particularly anti‐elitism—demonstrate lower support for both secession and Dodik's party, reflecting the paradoxical effects of sustained populist rhetoric under long‐term incumbency. Traditional factors, including ethnic identification, ingroup bias and economic grievances, prove substantially stronger predictors of secessionist attitudes than populist sentiments. Beyond documenting these empirical patterns, the analysis illuminates a broader theoretical puzzle about how populist attitudes manifest differently when populist leaders exercise prolonged control within autonomous institutional frameworks. These insights extend scholarly understanding of ‘thin ideologies’, demonstrating how their strategic deployment by political elites may fail to reshape the fundamental drivers of mass political attitudes in divided societies.

📄 Estimating the Effect of Positivity About Immigrants on Vote Choice in the 2020 US Presidential Election

Much of the research that estimates how attitudes about immigrants affect outcomes uses a measure that ranges from a lack of negativity about immigrants to a high level of negativity about immigrants. But this overlooks the effect of positivity about immigrants. The present study illustrates a method that uses a neutral point of indifference about immigrants to separate the effect of positivity about immigrants from the effect of negativity about immigrants. Analysis of data from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group VOTER Survey suggested that positivity about immigrants was an important predictor of vote choice in the 2020 US presidential election. Generally, these results suggest that readers and researchers should consider whether key predictors have a neutral point and how to interpret results from predictors that do not isolate this neutrality.

📄 Explaining Variation in Support for Ethnic Group Rights: The Role of Forced Displacement and Conflict Proximity

Why do some members of an ethnic group support ethnic group rights while others do not? Drawing on social psychology, I argue that exposure to political violence shapes individual attitudes by deepening in‐group and out‐group distinctions and fostering expressive solidarity towards group rights. To test this argument, the study uses nationally representative survey data from Turkey, focusing on Kurds, combined with geo‐located conflict event data. The paper uses a novel approach to measuring support for ethnic rights using latent class analysis. The findings indicate strong correlations between forced displacement, exposure to political violence in conflict zones and support for group rights. The results show that Kurds who have experienced forced displacement and those residing in conflict zone regions are more likely to support ethnic group rights. Contributions are twofold. First, it highlights the role of geography and spatial proximity to conflict in shaping the varying demands for group rights. Second, it better conceptualizes individual support for ethnic causes.

📄 Archaeological Nationalism in Contemporary China and the Official Construction of Ancient Chinese History

This paper examines the archaeological nationalism of the Chinese state. The existence of the Xia dynasty, long regarded by Chinese scholars to be China's first dynasty, has become a contentious issue in both Chinese and Western academic circles. During Jiang Zemin's tenure, the Chinese government began to leverage state power to support archaeological efforts aimed at substantiating the historical reality of the Xia dynasty. The Project to Trace the Origins of Chinese Civilization (PTOCC) was launched while Hu Jintao was in power, but it has garnered more significant attention under Xi Jinping, who is deploying state funds in an effort to prove that Chinese civilization has endured for over 5000 years. Through the extensive mobilization of state‐affiliated scholars, the narrative on China's ancient history has been shaped by political directives. ‘Archaeological nationalism’ exemplifies how, within the official discourse of ‘cultural confidence’, even academic and historical research must align with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, this approach has resulted in a form of intellectual involution in China's study of national and ancient history, making meaningful dialogue with the international academic community increasingly difficult.

📄 How Old Is the Serbian Nation? Conceptual Analysis of Ethno‐National Terms in the Works of the First Serbian Writers 1199–1235

The goal of this study, theoretically grounded in ethno‐symbolism, is to shed light on the relationship and relative importance of confessional affiliation and dynastic and ethnic identity for the first Serbian writers during the first three decades of the 13th century. To achieve this, this paper presents an in‐depth analysis of the collected writings of Saint Sava, the first archbishop of Serbia, and Stefan the First Crowned, Sava's brother and the first king of the Nemanjić dynasty. The frequency and manner in which the noun Serb(s) and the adjective Serbian are used throughout their collected works are examined. Neither of these authors used the noun Serb(s) , with one exception, and they rarely used the adjective Serbian , which was specifically reserved for the ethnicity of the Nemanjić family and the lands they ruled over, rather than the people, who were referred to by the Christian term ‘the flock’. The paper shows that Saint Sava and his brother principally sought to justify the rule of the Nemanjić dynasty through Christian ideology. They could not have been nationalists, and the Serbian nation cannot be deemed to have existed at the time; however, it may be argued that this period marked the beginning of the formation of the Serbian lateral ethnic community.

📄 ‘Liberation’ of ‘Younger Brothers’ or Genocide of Subhumans? Genocidal Discourses on Ukrainians in Putin's Regime

This article explores Russia's genocidal discourses on Ukrainians, focusing on the predominant narrative that frames cultural genocide as the ‘liberation’ of Ukrainians through the erasure of their cultural identity. Existing literature tends to overlook this form of genocidal discourse, which diverges from typical ‘othering’ by instead claiming that Ukrainians are essentially the same as Russians, with those who wish to maintain their Ukrainian identity seen as needing to be eliminated. In this discourse, the destruction of Ukrainian culture is portrayed as an act of salvation. The more conventional genocidal rhetoric, which calls for the physical extermination of Ukrainians, remains a minority perspective and is primarily propagated by pro‐regime ultranationalist hardliners. This article places these discourses within the context of Russia's long‐standing nationalist thought, where the ‘Ukrainian question’ has been a central, existential issue for over a century.

📄 Nezihe Muhiddin and the Struggle for Women’s Franchise. The Defeat of Feminism by Nationalism in Early Republican Turkey

This article focuses on Nezihe Muhiddin, a pioneering figure in Turkish–Ottoman first‐wave feminism, who sought to secure women's political rights by attempting to establish the Women's People Party in 1923, over a decade before women gained suffrage. After the party’s rejection, she founded the Turkish Women’s Union in 1924 to continue her endeavour. However, internal conflicts and a smear campaign led to her expulsion, the end of her political career, and her eventual oblivion. This paper interprets Muhiddin’s marginalization as a watershed moment in the struggle between feminism and nationalism, contributing to the establishment of a nationalist and patriarchal Turkish state. Drawing on Jill Vickers’ concepts of ‘women‐friendly democracies’ and ‘getting on the ground floor’, it contends that Muhiddin's exclusion from the Republic’s founding moment had enduring consequences for women’s political participation and continues to significantly impact the low level of female political participation in contemporary Turkey.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 Machine learning of digital traces to detect risk for behavioural addictions online

  • Author(s): Tyrone L. Burleigh, Yifei Hao, Bruno Schivinski, Maria Prokofieva, Daniel Zarate, Taylor Brown, Vasileios Stavropoulos
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 When friendliness looks like desire

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📚 Parliamentary Affairs

📄 The political show: How theatricalized is the hostility in the Spanish parliament?

  • Author(s): Berta Chulvi, Alfonso de Paz, María F Rodrigo, Sara Degli Esposti, David Arroyo
  • Link: Read the article
This study tests the theatricalization hypothesis in the Spanish Parliament, defined as the difference between the rhetoric employed by Members of Parliament in frontstage (Plenary Sessions) and backstage (Legislative Committees) settings. Drawing on a balanced random sample from a corpus of over 200,000 speeches delivered between 1996 and 2023, we apply natural language processing tools to compute a Negative Sentiment Index and an Anger Index. Results statistically demonstrate an increase in theatricalization from 2017 onward, with large effect sizes. This effect is moderated by party affiliation and by the party’s power position (government or opposition).

📚 Party Politics

📄 Elitism versus populism: Experiments on the dual threat to American democracy BramCurtis. Elitism versus Populism: Experiments on the Dual Threat to American Democracy. 2025. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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📚 Perspectives on Politics

📄 José Carlos Mariátegui’s Archaic Developmentalism: Utopia, the Incan Empire, and Peruvian Reality

“Developmentalism” refers to the idea that human societies progress through a series of historical stages, along one path or multiple paths, which allows for the comparison and hierarchization of different populations. As numerous works have shown, developmentalism was often called upon to justify Europe’s domination of non-European populations, which were figured as backward or barbaric. To complicate the commonplace equation of developmentalism and empire, I analyze José Carlos Mariátegui’s political thought as a stratigraphic history in which different temporalities—especially archaic temporality, or the remnants of Incan communalism, and developmental temporality—were vertically stacked and in tension, and I elaborate a conception of what I call “archaic developmentalism.” For Mariátegui, while the past temporality, institutions, and practices of the Incan Empire persisted into the present, he did not perceive them as hurdles to be cleared on the upward march of progress. Rather, as I argue, Mariátegui recognized the political potency of Incan communalism’s remnants—particularly, the ayllu , or Incan communal form—and he conjectured that the collision of temporal-historical layers could open an alternative developmental trajectory by which the ayllu would be reactivated as a stage in the process of creating modern communism, skipping over the developmental stage of mature capitalism that was required by Soviet orthodoxy. In other words, Mariátegui thought that the friction generated by the convergence of Peru’s different telluric strata opened a new developmental trajectory in which remnants of Incan archaism could spark socialist struggle and be reconfigured as an arsenal of possibilities in the present.

📄 I Read the News Today, but Why? Media Consumption, Socialization, and Autocracy

Dominant models of news consumption in political science treat citizens as rational individuals, gathering information to make materially or politically consequential choices. This assumption, developed largely in democratic contexts, risks obscuring other incentives that may be equally or more influential—particularly in authoritarian regimes, where the informational value of news is often constrained. This article advances the concept of social rationality: the incentive to consume news to sustain conversations, reinforce social bonds, and participate in communities of shared meaning. Drawing on original survey data from Belarus and Russia—two highly authoritarian states with divergent approaches to media control—the analysis shows that social motivations are powerful predictors of both the intensity and breadth of media consumption, while decision-rational considerations also help to explain breadth. Divergent interactions between social motivations and intrinsic prosocial orientations in the two cases further complicate theories of “informational autocracy.” These findings challenge classical models and underscore the need to place social incentives at the center of explanations of media use.

📄 Colorism, Descriptive Representation, and the Representation of African Americans in the United States House of Representatives

  • Author(s): Danielle Casarez Lemi, Jennifer R. Garcia, Christopher T. Stout
  • Link: Read the article
Previous research overlooks how certain ascribed characteristics, such as skin tone, correlate with the representation of marginalized groups. Yet research also demonstrates how colorism shapes candidate evaluations and life experiences. We theorize that colorism, the systemic privileging of lighter skin, structures the motivations and electoral incentives of Black lawmakers. We hypothesize that darker-skinned Black members of Congress will better represent Black Americans on racialized issues than lighter-skinned Black members, depending on the form of representation: rhetorical or legislative. We test this hypothesis with a combination of human and computer-assisted content analyses of 204,806 press releases and 18,025 bill introductions from the 114th, 115th, and 116th Congresses and a crowdsourced measure of skin tones. We find that on average, darker-skinned Black members of Congress provide more representation in press releases, but not in legislation. Our findings highlight the need to examine diversity among descriptive representatives.

📄 The War on Universities: Illiberal Tactics in Turkey, Hungary, and the United States

Illiberal governments increasingly target universities as sites of political dissent and ideological opposition. This paper compares three illustrative cases—Boğaziçi University under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Central European University under Viktor Orbán, and elite US universities under Donald Trump—to examine how illiberal governments deploy state power against autonomous, high-profile, liberal-aligned institutions of higher education, and how students and faculty respond. Although universities are not always bastions of pluralism, tolerance, and democracy, attacks on universities are often concurrent with illiberal governance. We argue that illiberal governments perceive universities as vanguards of hegemonic liberalism and as partisan opponents in certain contexts, and that state repression operates along a continuum of coercion, legal displacement, and discursive delegitimation. These attacks on academic autonomy trigger varied responses—from mobilization, to fragmentation, to withdrawal—shaped by domestic political opportunity structures, the intensity of state repression, and campus culture. By conceptualizing the university as a contested political institution rather than a neutral educational space, this article contributes to broader debates on democratic backsliding, populism, culture wars, and higher education.

📄 The Victory Trap: Endogenous Opposition Coalition Weaknesses in Reversing Autocracy

After opposition parties and alliances defeat dominant autocratic incumbents, what challenges do they encounter in reversing autocracy and what are the consequences? We argue that long-neglected endogenous weaknesses in opposition coalitions undermine re-democratization efforts, easily opening the door to autocratic comebacks. First, coalition intra-elite conflicts post-victory result in fractured and ineffective governance, generating mass disappointment with the new political elites. Second, coalition intra-supporter divergence pressures the new coalition government into implementing pro-democratic reforms at haphazard speeds and fluctuating scopes. Swift actions in reversing autocracy alienate supporters of the ex-autocrat, elicit accusations of partisan revenge, and fuel counter-mobilization against the new government. A most-different case comparison between the recent autocratic reversal experiences of Poland and Malaysia demonstrates our argument. We show in both cases that ideological and distributional conflicts among diverse coalition elites undermined governance after victory, and different supporter bases prioritized different policy agendas. Counter-mobilization by the autocratic ex-incumbents was highly successful in undermining public support for the new government. These findings suggest that profound challenges in reversing autocracy and rebuilding democracy lie within opposition coalitions themselves, in addition to authoritarian legacies.

📚 Philosophy & Public Affairs

📄 Politics and Justice: Aristotle, Rawls, and the Case for Realism in Political Theory

Aristotle's analysis of stasis in Book V of the Politics offers a striking example of “distinctively political thought,” as advocated by Bernard Williams's political realism, and in contrast to the moralist approach exemplified by John Rawls. Aristotle identifies disputes over justice, driven by partial and conflicting conceptions of equality, as a principal cause of civil conflict, advocating institutional measures to manage such disagreements rather than relying on citizens converging on a correct understanding. This focus on stability as the first function of politics, aimed at preventing constitutional breakdown, parallels Williams's “first political question” and emphasizes the pragmatic safeguarding of order to avert catastrophe. By contrast, Rawls treats politics primarily as a means to realizing justice, positing that stability depends on an overlapping consensus. The paper critiques Rawls's neglect of the historical‐institutional foundations of liberalism, his underestimation of the durability of modi vivendi, and his ideal‐theoretic abstraction from the circumstances of politics. Aristotle's realist alternative provides a more plausible framework for understanding the relationship between justice and politics—a necessary corrective to Rawlsian political moralism.

📄 Epistocracy and the Commitment Problem

The epistocracy debate has turned largely on the character of the electorate—what voters know, whether competence filters can be designed well, and what filtered selection produces. Another strand has focused on the legitimacy of epistocratic justifications. I ask instead about the equilibrium effects of the institution. Epistocracy shifts some political authority from the median voter toward citizens selected on competence grounds, and existing critiques press legitimational, epistemic, abuse‐based, and demographic objections against such proposals. I develop a different objection, focusing on one especially plausible form of epistocracy: Jason Brennan's epistocratic veto , a competence‐selected council empowered to override legislation it judges incompetent. Drawing on Acemoglu and Robinson's account of democratization, I argue that the franchise solves a credible‐commitment problem between elites and the poor under conditions of revolutionary threat: universal suffrage puts redistributive authority in majority hands in a way elites cannot easily reverse, because reversing it requires revoking the franchise itself. The institutionally realistic veto hands some of that authority back to a body whose preferences systematically diverge from the median voter's, reintroducing the commitment problem suffrage solved. I give empirical and theoretical reasons to worry that the magnitude of the problem could potentially be significant, while its actual size (and its comparison with democracy's own commitment problems) remains an open empirical question. A formal appendix maps the veto to Acemoglu and Robinson's imperfect‐democracy parameter and shows that the range of conditions under which democratic institutions avert revolution strictly shrinks.

📚 Political Communication

📄 Affective Legitimacy and Digital Populism: Evidence from Romania’s Annulled Presidential Elections

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📄 Entertainment as Trojan Horse: Voluntary Consumption of Propaganda in China

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📄 Kamala is Brat: TikTok and the Affective Politics of Memes

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📄 Policing the Political Boundary: How the r/BarstoolSports Audience Confronts Politicization

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📄 Trending Topics, Growing Knowledge? How Curating Actors’ Political Social Media Content Affects Youth’s Political Knowledge

  • Author(s): Margot Lissens, Cato Waeterloos, Laura Vandenbosch, Desirée Schmuck
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📄 Examining the Influence of Media Coverage on Information-Seeking of Judicial Candidates

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📚 Political Science Research and Methods

📄 Debriefings in misinformation research should include fact-checks to correct misperceptions and increase perceived learning

Debriefings are a cornerstone of ethical research, especially when deception is used. In misinformation experiments, debriefings both disclose the deception and warn participants about misinformation. Unlike other misinformation interventions, they reveal that researchers deliberately introduced the falsehoods, raising concerns about trust and skepticism. In a preregistered U.S. experiment (N = 896), we compare no debriefing, a general debriefing, and a specific debriefing with fact-checks and source links. Only the specific debriefing reduced belief in false claims participants saw, not in novel ones. The general debriefing slightly reduced belief in true news, suggesting warnings may heighten skepticism. Both improved attitudes toward the study and perceived transparency, supporting the use of specific debriefings as an ethical and effective practice in misinformation research.

📄 Measuring racial attitudes pre-treatment in survey experiments

Experimental researchers often need to assess the moderating effect of racial attitudes. However, it is unclear whether the racial attitude battery deployed may bias treatment effects. Less subtle batteries could bias treatment effects toward zero if measuring racial attitudes primes these attitudes for subjects assigned to all conditions, including the control condition. We assess whether bias is introduced across four conditions, pre-treatment: not measuring racial attitudes, using stereotype endorsement measures, using the American National Election Study racial resentment battery, or using the simplified Cooperative Election Study racial resentment battery. We do not uncover widespread instances of treatment bias. However, we do identify bias when the stereotype endorsement measures are used pre-treatment. We conclude with recommendations for researchers.

📄 Right-wing terrorism and far-right support: evidence from anti-Roma attacks in Hungary

  • Author(s): Gabor Simonovits, Attila Gaspar, Bekes Gabor, Marton Vegh
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How do ethnically motivated terrorist attacks shape electoral support for the far right? We study a unique case: a coordinated series of anti-Roma murders in Hungary in 2008–2009, the most severe episode of anti-minority violence in the country since World War II. Combining difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods, we compare attacked settlements to multiple counterfactuals, including planned-but-unrealized targets. We find that Jobbik, Hungary’s radical right party, gained 11–14 percentage points more support in attacked villages than in comparable controls in the 2010 election—an increase 53–70% larger than baseline trends. The effect persisted for several years and spilled over to nearby settlements. In contrast to some research from Western Europe suggesting that right-wing terrorism can reduce far-right appeal, our findings highlight how deep-seated prejudice can reverse this pattern. The results underscore the importance of antecedent inter-group relations in conditioning political reactions to ethnic violence.

📚 Political Studies

📄 Government identifiability and the number of parties: No sweet spots, just a steady linear increase

Government identifiability – the degree to which the party composition of the eventual government can be predicted given the election results – is a desirable characteristic of a political system. But the measurement of identifiability has remained impressionistic, limiting our ability to speak precisely about trade-offs between identifiability and other characteristics of the political system. I show that a recent measure of bargaining complexity by Cronert and Nyman acts as a ratio-level measure of government identifiability measured in bits – or equivalently, the number of yes/no questions needed to identify the composition of the government. I then show how identifiability is linearly related to the number of seat-winning parties in three different contexts: parliamentary governments, presidential cabinets, and municipal governments. Across all three contexts, an additional seat-winning party increases entropy of government formation by between 0.7 and 0.8 bits. Since identifiability is linearly related to the number of parties, any increase in the number of parties through electoral reform will worsen identifiability by the same amount. Conversely, there are no “sweet spots” where we can achieve high levels of identifiability at low cost in terms of the number of parties.

📄 Two competing giants: An experimental test of spatial and valence models of voting

Rational choice theories offer one of the major explanations for citizens’ voting behavior. The most prominent models within the rational choice framework – spatial and valence voting – share the same roots but differ in central aspects, emphasizing ideological congruence and competence evaluations, respectively. In this note, we provide a direct test of the models’ relative strength. Does a party’s issue congruence with a voter (spatial) or its effectiveness in handling important issues (valence) have a larger effect on vote choice? Our results from lab-like conditions using a novel conjoint experiment show strong evidence for both models, but valence evaluations consistently trump spatial considerations. These results have important implications for research on electoral behavior, party politics, and democratic representation.

📄 Representative-capacity-making: The strategic backstage work of political representation

The work of being an elected representative today is increasingly demanding as they seek to perform representation amid political distrust, polarised electorates, and rising populism. In response, elected representatives and their teams invest heavily in developing and showcasing their capacities to represent. This variously involves constructing representative personas, designing participatory events, curating diverse digital content, and communicating evidence on how and where they are representing. Extending Saward’s representative claim-making framework, this article develops the concept of representative-capacity-making to better understand this overlooked (‘backstage’) aspect of modern representation. The article explores – in concept only – the work involved in developing and demonstrating four key representative capacities. The normative implications of representative-capacity-making in an era of democratic strain are considered. While representative-capacity-making can be read as a response to the challenges of democratic representation today, the extent to which it can be a solution is mixed, in specified ways.

📚 Political Theory

📄 Care and Contemporary Violence: Deconstructing the Monstrous in/as Cavarero’s Horrorism

This article offers a feminist reworking of Adriana Cavarero’s conceptualization of horrorism as a form of extreme violence that targets and dehumanizes its victims through dismemberment and an ontological assault on human uniqueness. While Cavarero’s intervention is motivated by a commitment to resisting patriarchal logics of war and reorienting political thought toward care, we argue that her framework depends on an overly fixed opposition between the monstrous perpetrator and the defenseless victim, exemplified in her reading of Medusa in contrast with the Christian Madonna. The binary risks reproducing the very logics of exclusion and moral absolutism it seeks to disrupt. Demonstrating the point, we engage in a critical rereading of Medusa across classical and later interpretive traditions that demonstrates how she cannot be reduced to an emblem of absolute monstrosity, but instead appears as a plural figure: victim, goddess, protector, and generative presence—as well as a destructive monster. This reading destabilizes Cavarero’s conceptualization of both horrorism and victimhood, revealing the political and narrative instability of these categories. In reaction, we develop a feminist framework for responding to contemporary violence that shifts analysis away from moralized typologies toward a relational and narratively mediated understanding of violence. This approach retains Cavarero’s commitments to relationality and uniqueness, but rejects the closure produced by the neologism “horrorism,” instead foregrounding the entanglement of care and violence and the contested processes through which both are recognized and named.

📚 Politics and Religion

📄 Do sectarian differences affect support for armed non-state actors? Evidence from survey experiments in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen

Sectarian cleavages are widely seen as central to Middle Eastern conflict, and Iran-backed armed non-state actors (ANSAs)—Hezbollah, the popular mobilization units, and the Houthis—are often portrayed as sectarian militias. Yet there is little empirical evidence that public support for these actors systematically varies along sectarian lines. Drawing on original survey experiments conducted in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen during the 2023–2025 Gaza war, this study uses a list experiment to mitigate social desirability bias and measure whether citizens view their domestic ANSA as a source of instability. Nearly half of respondents in each country expressed criticism. Sectarian affiliation alone does not explain variation. Instead, favorable attitudes toward Iran are associated with reduced criticism of ANSAs. This effect is not reducible to co-sectarian identity: perceptions of Iran as a regional power confronting Israel provide a more consistent explanation. The findings highlight the limits of static sectarian accounts and underscore the importance of geopolitical evaluations.

📚 Post-Soviet Affairs

📄 Audiences, contexts, and cues: explaining divergent public perceptions of China in Central Asia

  • Author(s): Jessica Neafie, Frank Maracchione, Ciara McGarry, Aigerim Aibassova
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📚 Public Choice

📄 Rent-seeking and litigation: some underappreciated virtues of reverse contingency fees

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📄 Private governance and the limits of state antiquity

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📚 Public Opinion Quarterly

📄 Attitudes Toward Energy Across European Union Member States (2006–2024)

  • Author(s): Piotr Jabkowski, Mariusz Baranowski, Piotr Cichocki
  • Link: Read the article
Our study describes European attitudes toward energy using a harmonized dataset comprising 46 waves of the Eurobarometer (2006–2024). This tracking survey covers all European Union member states; hence, our data accumulates 1,286 individual country surveys. We focus on attitudes relevant to energy transition through three complementary lenses: energy issue salience, policy priorities, and opinions on renewable energy sources. This study documents cross-national and temporal variation in attitudes without estimating the causal effects of specific energy-related European policies or contextual events. We record a marked increase in the salience of energy during crisis periods, especially Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which rapidly elevated energy’s importance in the hierarchy of public concerns. We also show that support for renewables, in the context of energy transition, coexists with affordability and security concerns in some regions of the EU, particularly in Central-Eastern and Southern Europe. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically harmonize such a large collection of Eurobarometer waves into a single comparable dataset, enabling long-term tracking of energy attitudes across all EU member states. In addition to the substantive results, our study also points to several difficulties the Eurobarometer project faces in providing long-term monitoring of public opinion across the highly diverse member states of the European Union.

📄 Assessing Nonignorable Response: Sensitivity Analysis for Survey Weighting, with Applications to Survey Estimates of COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake

Standard statistical uncertainty measures, like standard errors, are unable to quantify the uncertainty from an unrepresentative sampling process. Existing work has highlighted the potential risk in large datasets, in which larger surveys resulting in more precise estimates can misleadingly overstate the degree of confidence in biased survey results. In this research note, we introduce a sensitivity framework for researchers to transparently summarize their uncertainty to a biased sampling process. We illustrate the framework on a set of COVID-19 vaccine surveys, and show that had researchers conducted a sensitivity analysis, they would have found that despite substantially smaller standard errors, the larger surveys conducted on less representative samples were more susceptible to potential bias than smaller surveys conducted on more representative samples. We argue that these summary measures should be routinely reported to accurately quantify uncertainty to potential bias, allowing researchers to assess their confidence in results, in large and small datasets.

📚 Qualitative Sociology

📄 Who’s a “Good” Victim of Gender-Based Violence?: Credibility, Worthiness, and Ideal Victimhood in Victim Compensation Law

Scholars have argued that institutions privilege “good” victims of gender-based violence – those deemed sympathetic, morally upstanding, and worthy of public support. We extend existing research by synthesizing theories of good victimhood and theoretically distinguishing victims’ credibility in relation to the crime from their worthiness in relation to the state . Both credibility and worthiness are tied up in expectations of normative femininity. We then show how these processes operate in the case of victim compensation law, the only direct public benefit for crime victims. Our historical analysis reveals how policymakers proposed four restrictions to limit compensation to “good” victims, corresponding with victims’ credibility on the one hand, and worthiness on the other. With respect to credibility, eligible victims needed to present visible, embodied harm and could not have engaged in conduct that may have “contributed” to their victimization. With respect to worthiness, eligible victims were required to sever romantic ties with perpetrators and cooperate with police. By delineating credibility and worthiness as distinct components of good victimhood, we clarify how ideas of good victimhood infused specific eligibility restrictions in victim compensation law, while also equipping scholars with theoretical tools to understand logics of exclusion beyond our case.

📚 Representation

📄 From Presence to Meaning: Lived Experience and the Limits of Substantive Representation

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📚 Social Forces

📄 Integrating or segregating? Gentrification, the changing city-suburb divide, and black exceptionalism

Racial residential segregation has been pivotal in maintaining racial inequality following the Civil Rights Era. The transformation of cities by the spread of gentrification in recent decades may have mitigated these longstanding divisions or reproduced them as gentrification reorganizes residential patterns across urban space. However, the extent and nature of this relationship remain in question. We bridge theories of racial capitalism and residential sorting to test the racialized nature of gentrification’s prevalence, and we use a decomposition approach for measuring segregation to examine the relationship between the prevalence of gentrification and changes in segregation between various race-income groups from 1990 to 2019 across US metropolitan areas. We find that the prevalence of gentrification within central cities is associated with decreasing segregation between several groups—including poor Black and nonpoor White households—but also increasing segregation between poor minority and nonpoor White households in the suburbs and between nonpoor Black and White households overall. Altogether, the results highlight the changing spatial structure of segregation and the evolution of residential attainment for nonpoor Black households in the twenty-first century. They suggest that the spread of gentrification may contribute to dismantling longstanding patterns of segregation by race and class but may simultaneously contribute to new patterns of segregation in the suburbs and reinforce Black-White divisions.

📚 Social Problems

📄 Geographic constraints on the careers of graduate students in science: race, gender and family of origin

While research has examined how the career decisions and outcomes of scientists are influenced by their partners and children, less research has examined the role of their family of origin. Using data from an original survey fielded on a sample of U.S. graduate students in five natural and social science disciplines, we consider how a students’ closeness to and concerns about caring for their family of origin might influence their educational and career decision-making. Our analysis finds that women and many racially- or ethnically-minoritized groups express greater closeness to their family of origin and greater concerns about caring for their family of origin when compared to men and white students. In turn, closeness to and concerns about caring for one’s family of origin are both independently associated with students saying they picked their graduate program to be close to their family of origin and saying they would like to live close to their family after completing their graduate program. These patterns could lead individuals to seek programs and jobs of less prestige and compensation than they could otherwise obtain and have implications for efforts to recruit and retain these groups in science.

📄 Workplace injustice and inequality beliefs

Inequality scholarship has emphasized the tangible consequences of workplace position and status, focusing less attention on how experiences at work may influence individuals’ views about what is and ought to be. In this article, we explore the possibility that experiences with workplace injustice will shape beliefs about inequality. Our modeling builds on classic theory regarding organizational socialization experiences, recent conceptions concerning relational power dynamics, and research that touches on the spillover from work to other domains of social life. Drawing from five waves of the General Social Survey, our analyses highlight how perceived experiences of injustice in workplace organizations – incompetent management, unfair promotional practices and unjust pay – erode beliefs about meritocracy and encourage progressive orientations toward inequality, including whether or not the government should intervene. Notably, these relationships hold even when accounting for intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of work, demographic attributes, and other potentially relevant controls. Additional analyses demonstrate that these patterns are consistent across race, gender, and socioeconomic status, and are robust to alternative modeling strategies. We conclude by highlighting our most central findings in these regards and how they expand the sociological conception of experiences with inequality, implications for beliefs, and their foundations within organizational contexts.

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 Measuring Judicial Legitimacy: Public Support for the Mexican Supreme Court, 1998–2024

Introduction Survey indicators of judicial support, trust, approval, and performance ratings are often treated as interchangeable. This study tests whether this assumption holds for Mexico's Supreme Court, using two decades of surveys to assess whether wording yields different pictures of public support, with implications for judicial‐legitimacy research. Methods The analysis draws on 43 surveys, 1998–2024 ( N = 46,560). Pooled logistic regression with survey fixed effects, plus multilevel and survey‐specific models, assesses correlates of Court support across four wordings—autonomy, approval, rating, trust—and tests whether presidential co‐partisanship shapes support and how wording‐adjusted latent indices vary over time. Results Presidential approval and satisfaction with democracy are positive and significant across wordings, though magnitude differs by type: approval items are most responsive, ratings are intermediate, and trust is most stable. Co‐partisanship with the president independently predicts higher support, though spillover does not vary by alignment. Demographics play a limited role, and latent indices show no decline in support before the 2024 reform. Conclusion: Trust, approval, and performance ratings are not interchangeable: they differ in baseline levels and political sensitivity, with implications for judicial‐legitimacy trends. Court support appears shaped mainly by political attitudes rather than demographics, with no broad erosion ahead of the 2024 reform.

📄 Exposure to Crime and Perceptions of Crime in Major U.S. Cities

  • Author(s): David Doherty, Mena Whalen, Emily Richter, Dana Garbarski
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Objective Address three questions: (1) To what extent are direct victimization and contextual exposure to crime related to people's perceptions of crime in their neighborhoods? (2) Does the type of crime matter? (3) Do the effects of exposure to in one place “spillover” to evaluations of other areas? Methods We leverage data from surveys of residents of large US cities that asked respondents how safe they feel in their neighborhood and about their perceptions regarding how crime in their neighborhood compares to rates elsewhere. We also asked respondents about their victimization experiences and paired respondents with data on crime rates in their Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA). We estimate multiple regression models to estimate the relationships between our measures of crime exposure and each of our outcomes. Results Both victimization and local crime rates predict crime perceptions, though the relationships are arguably modest in magnitude. We find some evidence that instances of violent victimization are particularly closely connected to subjective feelings of safety, but all types of victimization predict more objective assessments of crime rates. Our evidence also suggests that the effects of exposure to crime in a given geographic area do not “spillover” and shape perceptions about crime and safety in other areas. Conclusion Our findings corroborate and extend findings from existing work, shedding new light on the relationship between exposure to crime and both subjective feelings of safety and more objective assessments regarding how crime rates in one's neighborhood compare to rates elsewhere.

📚 The Journal of Legislative Studies

📄 Critical gaps in representation: the promise and limits of quota reforms in Kenya

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📄 State legislative committee creation and the politics of tribal/state relations

  • Author(s): Richard Witmer, Frederick Boehmke, Joshua Johnson
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📚 The Quarterly Journal of Economics

📄 The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States*

We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income excluding the transfers to fall by about $1,900/year relative to the control group and a 4.2 percentage point decrease in labor market participation. Participants reduced their work hours as a result of the transfers by 1-2 hours/week and participants’ partners reduced their work hours by a comparable amount. Among other categories of time use, the greatest increase generated by the transfer was in time spent on leisure. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. Treated participants broadly increase expenditures, led by spending on non-durable goods and services, with smaller increases in spending on durable goods and human capital. We observe no significant effects on degree attainment, though the magnitudes of the estimated effects generally appear larger among younger participants. Measures of subjective well-being are higher among treated participants in the first year of the transfers but then revert to control group levels. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.

📚 West European Politics

📄 Political polarisation of climate-policy-relevant attitudes: longitudinal evidence from Britain

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📄 Beyond forbearance? Mapping and assessing the EU’s emergent compliance promotion architecture

  • Author(s): Ellen Mastenbroek, Oliver Treib, Esther Versluis
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📚 人文及社會科學集刊

📄 【預刊】（38卷3期）Creating Space: Bamboo Curtain Studio and Eco-feminist Arts Practice

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