Wang’s Picnic
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Weekly issue

Wang's Picnic (2026/09/12)

Updated journals
52
Articles
105

This week, 52 journals published 105 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

American Journal of Political Science Journal of Information Technology & Politics Politics & Society
Asian Survey Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Politics and Religion
British Journal of Political Science Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Post-Soviet Affairs
British Journal of Sociology Local Government Studies Public Opinion Quarterly
Contemporary Political Theory Nations and Nationalism Qualitative Sociology
Democratization Nature Reviews Psychology Quarterly Journal of Political Science
Discourse & Society Parliamentary Affairs Research & Politics
Economic Sciences Research in PNAS Party Politics Social Forces
Electoral Studies Perspectives on Politics Social Problems
European Political Science Review Policy & Internet Social Science Computer Review
Government and Opposition Political Behavior Social Science Quarterly
International Political Science Review Political Communication The International Journal of Press/Politics
International Studies Quarterly Political Psychology The Journal of Legislative Studies
Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Research Quarterly The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Journal of Conflict Resolution Political Science Research and Methods West European Politics
Journal of Contemporary China Political Science Research in PNAS 問題與研究
Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Political Studies
Journal of Human Rights Politics & Gender

📚 American Journal of Political Science

📄 Designing multi‐site studies for external validity: Site selection via synthetic purposive sampling

Multi‐site/context studies have become popular strategies to address the most common and challenging external validity concerns about contexts. Under such studies, scholars conduct causal studies in each site and evaluate whether findings generalize across sites. Despite the potential, there has been little guidance on the fundamental research design question—how should we select sites for external validity? Existing approaches have challenges: random sampling of sites is often infeasible, while the current practice of purposive sampling is suboptimal without statistical guarantees. We propose synthetic purposive sampling (SPS), which optimally selects diverse sites for external validity. SPS combines ideas of purposive sampling and the synthetic control method—it selects diverse sites such that nonselected sites are well approximated by the weighted average of the selected sites. We illustrate its general applicability using both experimental and observational studies. Overall, this paper offers a new statistical foundation to design multisite studies for external validity.

📚 Asian Survey

📄 The Limits of Performance

While governance performance is often regarded as the cornerstone of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy, its capacity to sustain national identity among a generation socialized in prosperity remains a critical question. Challenging the assumption of a linear relationship, this article examines the mechanisms and limits of performance-based legitimacy through two novel studies. In a priming experiment with 652 high school students, exposure to images of China’s development achievements did not significantly increase national identity and in fact lowered students’ reported sense of responsibility. A second survey of 1,625 university students reveals an inverted-U-shaped relationship between evaluations of governance performance and national identity. The relationship is conditioned by equity values and attribution of development problems: governance performance most strongly reinforces identity when individuals attach high importance to social justice but also attribute developmental problems to the government. These findings reveal the fragility of a legitimacy model based solely on material outputs.

📄 When the Miracle Ends

Many scholars have examined how economic development affects political support in China, but few have specifically investigated the impact of economic failure. Such efforts are critical given China’s current economic troubles, the inadequacy of first-order analysis of economic development, and the democratizing pressure exerted by long-term growth followed by short-term failure. An obstacle to this endeavor is a shortage of data on both economic downturns and political support. We argue that economic slowdowns, rather than downturns, are a good indicator of economic failure in China, and that past opinion data at both national and subnational levels provide hidden insights into the political consequences of economic failure. In this study, we leverage all five waves of the Asian Barometer surveys in China and conduct matched-sample tests as well as both cross-time and cross-provincial analyses. We uncover strong evidence that economic slowdowns erode political support in China.

📚 British Journal of Political Science

📄 Policy as a Bargaining Outcome: Coalition Leverage and Pledge Fulfillment

  • Author(s): Mark A. Kayser, Jochen Rehmert, Petra Schleiter
  • Link: Read the article
Which parties can deliver the policies that they promised? In multiparty contexts, parties must bargain to realize electoral promises. Prior work shows that parties influence policy change by using resources such as legislative seats, ministerial posts, and agenda, veto, and policing powers, while only theoretical work considers parties’ bargaining leverage from potentially changing the government. But for parties, fulfilling pledges (not incremental policy change) is paramount and they use their full leverage to achieve it. We offer and test a more complete and politically relevant account of multiparty policymaking that includes parties’ bargaining leverage through coalition options and focuses on the realization of distinct policy promises. We estimate regression analyses of pledge fulfillment in nine parliamentary democracies from 1974 to 2011 as well as local average treatment effects across a discontinuity and find that parties’ bargaining leverage from potential coalition change trumps conventional explanations for policy outcomes.

📄 The Audience of Coalition Bargaining: Voter Reactions to Portfolio Allocation

Obtaining portfolios is one of the most important pay-offs that parties receive from getting into office. Accordingly, we know a lot about how portfolios are distributed between coalition partners, but surprisingly little about how voters react to these distributional outcomes. We address this research gap both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that voters use cues from the quantitative and qualitative portfolio distributions to evaluate coalition partners’ competence in negotiations, which in turn shapes party support. Empirically, we use original experimental and panel survey data from the 2022 Danish general election. We find that voters infer negotiation competence from the number, power, and party-specific salience of the portfolios a party obtains. We also demonstrate that many voters paid attention to the real-world negotiation outcome and withdrew their support for the parties they perceived handled the negotiations less competently.

📚 British Journal of Sociology

📄 Theorising Indo‐Caribbean Identities Beyond the Homeland/Hostland Binary: Indo‐Guadeloupeans’ ‘Archipelagic Brown Consciousness’

Indo‐Caribbean groups, who settled in the Caribbean via the colonial system of Indian indentured labour, have long been marginal in discussions of diaspora and Caribbeanness. This paper explores how Indo‐Guadeloupeans—from Guadeloupe, a current French overseas territory—articulate post‐indenture identities by developing two interrelated concepts— Archipelagic Connections and Archipelagic Brown Consciousness . In doing so, it offers a novel theorisation of diasporic relationality as rooted in the place of (re)settlement while simultaneously looking towards other sites connected by past and present overlapping, cross‐imperial histories and geographies. Drawing on 10 biographical interviews with Indo‐Guadeloupeans, I argue that participants: unsettle essentialist definitions of Indianness by articulating a version of Indo‐Caribbean Hinduism that foregrounds Archipelagic Connections across religion and generations (1); and mobilise Archipelagic Connections across ‘race’ and imperial formations to claim space within Caribbeanness (2). By conceptualising Archipelagic Connections and Archipelagic Brown Consciousness , this article argues for moving beyond the colonial, historiographic and linguistic fragmentation of the Caribbean region.

📚 Contemporary Political Theory

📄 Erich Fromm: a political theory of fascism

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📄 Politicizing political liberalism: on the containment of illiberal and antidemocratic views

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📄 What is political theory today?

  • Author(s): Peter J. Steinberger, Jeffrey Church, Loubna El Amine, Shterna Friedman, Simone Chambers
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Democratization

📄 Drivers of opposition strategic choices against democratic backsliding

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📄 The conditionality-corruption nexus: implications for democracy promotion in candidate and neighbourhood countries

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📄 Transformative constitutionalism and Kenya: law-making, political process, and the state (2010–2025)

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📚 Discourse & Society

📄 ‘That’s not a quirk of racism [. . .] – that’s a quirk of geography’: Exploring the role of place(s) in assigning responsibility for exclusion in grassroots cricket in Australia

  • Author(s): Marianna Patrick, Stephanie Schnurr, Kieran File, Lucas Moreira dos Anjos Santos, Ruth Jeanes, Daniel Howe
  • Link: Read the article
This article examines how place is discursively constructed as an agent in talk about the exclusion of ethnic minority players in Australian grassroots cricket. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews with players and other stakeholders, we combine thematic analysis with Critical Discourse Analysis to identify the linguistic strategies used to construct place(s). We show how references to places of different degrees of granularity – from very specific to more general – shift responsibility for exclusion away from individuals and organisations, attributing it instead to geography. This discursive framing constructs exclusion as natural, inevitable, and beyond human intervention, thereby obscuring accountability and limiting the potential for meaningful change. By foregrounding references to place as a mechanism through which exclusion is normalised and justified, the article advances sociolinguistic understandings of how language shapes experiences of belonging and marginalisation in sport. The study highlights the need to critically examine spatial discourses when addressing inequalities in sport.

📚 Economic Sciences Research in PNAS

📄 Heritability and social interaction in labor market outcomes: Evidence from the population of twins in the United States

We use data on 44,000 twin pairs observed as adolescents in the 2000 Census, linked to their earnings 20 y later, to study the heritability of labor market outcomes. We extend the Classical Twins Design (CTD), which identifies heritability from contrasts between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, to settings where an analyst does not observe zygosity but can measure outcomes for same-sex and opposite-sex twins. We also allow for the presence of a family- and sex-specific component affecting same-sex siblings but only partly shared by opposite-sex siblings. Our extended model identifies heritability from the difference-in-differences of same-sex vs. opposite-sex twins vs. siblings. The estimates indicate strong heritability (h-sq = 0.36) of log earnings. Using an AKM [J. M. Abowd et al. , Econometrica 67 , 251–333 (1999)] decomposition that separates the person-specific component of earnings from employer-specific pay premiums, we find that both components are heritable. The heritability of employer pay premiums, however, is mainly driven by same-sex twins who work at the same firm, suggesting that social interactions may lead to an overestimate of the genetic component in earnings. Excluding siblings who work together leads to estimates of the heritability of log earnings that are 15% lower. Similar biases may be present in CTD-based estimates of heritability for other social outcomes like education.

📚 Electoral Studies

📄 Polling and parliamentary representation: Strategic voting in the 2025 German federal election

  • Author(s): Werner Krause, Jan Philipp Thomeczek, Aiko Wagner
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 European Political Science Review

📄 The international and transnational politics of the far right: an emergent research program

This article offers a state-of-the-art review of a new and growing research program in International Relations (IR) that analyzes the far right’s inter- and transnational politics. Responding to the rise of far-right leaders, parties, and movements worldwide, this nascent literature sheds light on the inter- and transnational drivers, patterns, connections, and effects of far-right politics. To further consolidate and develop this emerging research program, as this article argues, it is imperative to integrate this literature into a wider framework that delineates different analytical approaches and research agendas. For this purpose, the article identifies and examines five research strands: (1) foreign and security policy, (2) international thought, (3) the global causes of the rise of the far right, (4) trans- and international collaboration, and (5) international norms, institutions, and orders. It appraises their different analytical perspectives and insights, connects each research strand with various IR paradigms, subdisciplines, and literatures, and identifies unexplored lines of inquiry. Thereby, the article aims to broaden and diversify the theoretical, empirical, and methodological scope of this research program and to further facilitate synergies between IR and far-right studies. It then discusses a series of limitations and challenges facing this research program and proposes a level-of-analysis approach to advance it.

📚 Government and Opposition

📄 Living Activism: Biographical Trajectories and the Reconfiguration of Youth Participation

  • Author(s): Roger Soler-i-Martí, Juan Carlos Revilla, Jorge Benedicto
  • Link: Read the article
Youth transitions to adulthood have become longer, more complex and diverse, yet these shifts are often overlooked in studies of political attitudes and behaviour, leading to contradictory conclusions. This article explores the evolving nature of youth political engagement through the concept of ‘engagement biographies’, drawing on biographical interviews with young activists in Spain. It examines the extent to which young activists experience political involvement as a dynamic, context-dependent process shaped by their individualised and de-standardised paths to adulthood, interpersonal relationships and broader socio-political contexts. Adopting a biographical perspective enhances understanding of key trends identified in the literature on youth and politics, including the volatility of participation, a preference for direct and less institutionalised activism, the integration of activism into everyday life, and increasing disengagement from formal politics. These insights contribute to a more nuanced understanding of young people’s patterns of political engagement and their broader implications for democracies.

📚 International Political Science Review

📄 Cross-strait exchange programs and changes in regime attitudes among Taiwanese students

Cross-border exchange programs have become an increasingly important instrument of external political influence, yet their effects on regime attitudes remain poorly understood. This study examines whether exchange programs to Mainland China affect Taiwanese students’ acceptance of the Communist Party of China regime. Using an integrated four-pathway framework encompassing affective, cognitive, instrumental, and ideological dimensions, this study analyzed a 10-year panel dataset of 600 Taiwanese students. Analysis revealed a modest but statistically significant short-term increase in regime acceptance at the end of the exchange programs, associated with improved affective evaluations, reduced cognitive threat perceptions, heightened instrumental interest in development opportunities, and a strengthened authoritarian order orientation. By situating these mechanisms within broader debates on authoritarian influence and democratic resilience, this study demonstrates how structured exchanges operate as agents of political socialization. This study offers an analytically transferable framework for examining non-coercive influence and political socialization in contested geopolitical contexts.

📚 International Studies Quarterly

📄 From Domestic Contestation to Alpha Male Foreign Policy: Phantasies of Masculinity and the US Self

  • Author(s): Veronica Barfucci, Deborah Faudoa Rodríguez, C Nicolai L Gellwitzki
  • Link: Read the article
s How does masculinity inform the 2024 US presidential election and subsequent US foreign policy? To address this question, we develop the concept of phantasy of masculinity, an affectively charged imaginary that links normalized gender discourses with the narrative reconstruction of Self and Other(s), and that becomes increasingly regressive along a spectrum of intensification towards hypermasculinity. Analyzing official speeches and the media discourse surrounding the 2024 US presidential election campaign and the first year of foreign policy in the second Trump administration, we show that phantasies of masculinity Othering domestic political rivals were central to narrative contestation for both Republicans and Democrats. We further argue that US foreign policy is regressing towards hypermasculinity, in an affectively driven yet ultimately futile attempt to restore ontological security under conditions of perceived crisis. The article makes two contributions to International Relations (IR) scholarship. First, it develops the concept of phantasy of masculinity as a framework for analyzing the psychological and affective dimensions of masculinity. Second, it offers an explanation for seemingly “irrational” US foreign policy under Trump. We conclude by calling for closer integration of feminist IR and Ontological Security Studies to better understand geopolitical implications of gendered insecurities in an uncertain era.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 The politics of xenophobia in South Africa and pastoral care response to the plight of foreigners

While South Africa is frequently commended for its strong constitution and adherence to democratic principles, it remains deeply affected by recurring waves of xenophobic violence. In South Africa, xenophobia is born out of the apartheid system and racism that led to the marginalisation and oppression of the black people. Xenophobia refers to the human hatred towards another race, ethnicity and nationality, especially foreign migrants. Such hatred and fear of the migrants lead to violence that obscures the diversity of creation and nationalities. In South Africa, the xenophobic violence became more pronounced in 2008 and continued to occur periodically. This violence is characterised by biases, and social and economic exclusions – especially emphasising the words “foreigners” and “local.” The dichotomy does not only differentiate people, but also leads to hatred, exclusion and marginalisation, consequently resulting in labelling and killing. The foreigners are regarded as a threat to the social and economic lives, as South Africans face inflation and economic challenges. The results are violent crimes, such as stealing, robbery, rape and murder. This article contends that political leadership contributed negatively to xenophobic violence by both their silence and utterances. Given the gravity of the challenge of xenophobia, the church cannot remain silent and inactive but should provide a pastoral response to the crisis.

📚 Journal of Conflict Resolution

📄 Narratives as Separating Equilibria: On the Origins of the Ukraine War

NATO enlargement and Russian occupation of Crimea marked crucial turning points in the process that eventually resulted in the Ukraine war. According to one narrative, that Russian move was part of a plan to re-establish dominion over Eastern Europe. According to a rival view, it was an attempt to counter a U.S. plan to subjugate Russia. This paper scrutinizes the logical requirements of those narratives in a multi-stage game of incomplete information that produces equilibrium play such that first NATO is enlarged and then Russia attacks Ukraine. The two competing narratives correspond to two different separating equilibria. Conditions for their existence inform about the consistency and plausibility of the associated narratives.

📚 Journal of Contemporary China

📄 Chinese Intellectual Influencers and the Construction of Algorithmized Nationalism: The Case of Jinri Toutiao

  • Author(s): Haiyan Wang, Zhengqing Yan, Lin Wu, Carwyn Morris
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 Insecurity and policy preferences: how economic and physical threats shape attitudes toward social welfare and criminal justice

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📚 Journal of Human Rights

📄 Fear in exile: Transnational repression and its toll on social relations among Tibetans in exile

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📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 The control of digital spaces in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh: a comparative analysis

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📄 End of the happy times: Chinese cyber threats are more sophisticated because the institutional environment is less permissive

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📄 Cyber conflict, talent, and the governance of vulnerability research in China

  • Author(s): Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Eugenio Benincasa, Dakota Cary
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 Creator-led political satire on TikTok: youth expression in post-election Indonesia

  • Author(s): Tuhfatul Mubarokah Assalamah, Rahma Sugihartati, Muhammad Saud, Widya Astika Putri
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

📄 The Influence of Translator Backgrounds and Machine Translation on Statistical Properties of Surveys: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

  • Author(s): Chia-Jung Tsai, Clemens Lechner, Dorothée Behr, Ulrike Efu Nkong, Anke Radinger
  • Link: Read the article
Comparable questionnaire translation is essential for drawing valid conclusions in cross-cultural survey research. Sound translation methodology, including the use of adequate personnel, is seen as crucial for reaching this goal. The recommended methodology should be empirically backed and stay tuned to latest developments, say machine translation. Against this backdrop, to investigate the potential effect of varied translators’ backgrounds and machine translation on the statistical properties of surveys, we conducted an experiment in which an English questionnaire was translated into German by 16 professional translators and 16 social scientists. We introduced two translation conditions: translation from scratch and post-editing (machine translation corrected by a human translator). Translations were subsequently fielded in web surveys. To investigate the quality of the survey data from these 32 translation versions (approx. 250 responses each), we use standardized mean distance and Cohen’s d with the official translation as a benchmark. We have four key findings: First, the resulting statistical means of the survey items vary, sometimes substantially, across translations. Second, post-editing, with its potential to prevent unwanted creativity and guard against gross mistranslations, is associated with a reduced gap between the survey data from the experimental questionnaires and the official translation; it also lowers the variability among different translations. Third, post-editing can lead to systematic bias if translation errors made by the machine are not identified or miscorrected. This applies to both expert groups. Fourth, social scientists are slightly more likely to deviate from a benchmark and, when translating from scratch, to produce translations leading to statistical outliers of survey data. This study highlights to what extent decisions concerning the choice of translators and the integration of machine translation can impact the statistical properties of survey data. We offer evidence to implement multi-step, collaborative translation procedures to enhance data comparability in cross-cultural studies.

📄 Who are We Missing? Using Administrative and Contextual Data to Measure and Correct Partisan Nonresponse in Opinion Surveys

  • Author(s): Michael Jackson, Scott Clement, Emily Guskin, Arifah Hasanbasri, Jordon Peugh, Cameron McPhee, Mark J Rozell
  • Link: Read the article
The 2020 US pre-election polling had the highest error in national polls in 40 years and significantly underestimated Donald Trump’s support. An AAPOR task force suggested that at least some of the polling error was likely caused by differential partisan nonresponse, but that this dynamic could not be evaluated without comparing respondents and nonrespondents. Many common sampling methods used for election, opinion, and social surveys include no reliable data on party identification for all sample units, making it difficult to measure and mitigate partisan nonresponse bias. Surveys using registration-based samples have leveraged voter databases to account for partisan nonresponse and validate self-reported turnout, suggesting that such administrative data could also be effective for general population surveys that rely on address-based samples. This article assesses methods for using voter and consumer databases, along with small-area contextual data, to measure and correct for differential partisan nonresponse in a national address-based survey of US adults conducted online and by mail. A model predicting partisan leaning was developed using an existing survey panel matched to voter and consumer databases and precinct-level election results. Among addresses sampled for the survey, 86 percent matched the voter or consumer database, and predicted partisanship aligned with self-identified party leaning for 65 percent of respondents. The inclusion of predicted partisanship in survey weighting, in addition to demographic weighting, improved the accuracy of recalled-vote estimates. The voter registration database was also used to validate self-reported turnout among respondents, which further improved the accuracy of recalled-vote estimates.

📄 Using Large Language Models to Autocode Probing Responses to the Self-Rated Health Question: Strengths And Weaknesses in a Multilingual Survey Context

  • Author(s): Mao Li, Stephanie Morales, Kaidar Nurumov, Sunghee Lee
  • Link: Read the article
Web probing is an adaptation of a cognitive interview administered in a Web survey setting to understand respondents’ thought processes in formulating their answers and/or to improve survey questions. It often uses open-ended questions, which require coding the responses, an essential step for transforming qualitative data into analyzable formats. This is labor-intensive and difficult, and more so for probing on subjective and evaluative assessments, like self-rated health (SRH). Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for automation of this step. However, in multilingual and cross-cultural contexts, where linguistic nuances further complicate coding, their effectiveness remains insufficiently examined. This study examined LLM autocoding of open-text responses to a Web probe on the SRH question from surveys conducted across five countries (the U.S., Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, and Spain) and in four languages (English, Spanish, German, and Korean). We evaluated the performance of five major open-source LLMs by comparing their autocodes against human codes for SRH attributes (e.g., health behaviors, illness) and tone of the coded attributes (i.e., favorable, unfavorable, or neutral in relation to health). We also compared the performance of the five LLMs against traditional machine learning models (MLMs). The best-performing LLM resulted in a micro-F1 score of 0.76 for attribute classification and 0.77 for tone classification, outperforming MLMs without requiring task-specific training. Its performance was also consistent across English, Spanish, and German responses but lower for Korean, a language generally considered low-resourced for LLMs. Overall, our results demonstrate the promise of LLMs in reducing burdens for coding complex text data from SRH probing in multilingual survey research, which likely applies to a broad range of open-ended coding tasks in survey research.

📄 Getting consent to survey in new ways: evidence from experiments about questions by text message in the Understanding Society Innovation Panel

  • Author(s): Jim Vine, Annette Jäckle, Jonathan Burton, Mick P Couper
  • Link: Read the article
Some information cannot (reliably) be collected in annual surveys of panel members. Text messages (SMS) are well-suited to gathering time-sensitive responses, if a large and representative subset of a panel consents to being surveyed in this way. We investigate: (1) What proportion of respondents consent to text message questions? How does that vary by sample cohort, mode, and whether previously asked for consent? (2) What is the effect of consent question placement within the questionnaire? (3) Is the bias of the covered sample reduced by re-asking non-consenters at a later wave? (4) What coverage of non-internet users is gained by seeking consent for text message questioning? We use data from experiments within two waves (IP13 and IP15) of the Innovation Panel of Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Most respondents consented to receive questions by text message when first asked (69 percent in IP13, 74 percent in IP15). Of those who declined consent at IP13, 55 percent consented when re-asked two years later. Face-to-face respondents were more likely to consent than web respondents. Slightly more (2.4 percentage points, s.e. 1.5 percentage points) respondents consented when experimentally asked late in the questionnaire than when asked early. Re-asking consent not only reduced the proportion of people who had not provided consent, but also reduced non-consent bias, measured across a range of socio-demographic characteristics. Some panel members who never use the internet have mobile phones and consent to receive questions via text message, so this may complement web surveying.

📄 It’s Complicated: Effect of Actors’ Messages, Mode and Timing on Self-administered Survey Response Rates

The movement toward self-administered surveys includes an opportunity to apply a holistic design across multiple requests to maximize response rates. Among ways for improving the sequence of requests may be to vary from whom the survey request is made, as well as the timing of the request, the mode used, and other design features. This study explored incorporating an organizational leader in survey requests as a strategy for improving response. Four studies using a sequence of different messages from actors in leadership and manager roles at different times and by different modes were conducted. Interspersing messages from an organizational leader did not substantially improve response rates as compared to when all of the messages were from the survey manager. However, the response rate increased and more responses came in sooner when a URL was included in an emailed leader message that closely followed one from the survey manager, and mail was used for the final two reminders. The results suggest that survey researchers should give increased attention to developing a holistic communication strategy for their target population.

📄 Optimizing Survey Errors and Survey Costs: A Risk-Conscious Stopping Rule and Timing Analysis

We introduce a risk-conscious stopping rule that considers uncertainty in predictions of survey costs and errors. The rule is particularly useful for repeated surveys with a few key statistics and tight budgets. It helps meet cost constraints by stopping a subset of cases early, aiming to minimize the negative impact on the quality of key statistics without adding new design features. To implement a decision rule that stops a subset of cases in the data collection process, a survey manager not only needs to choose which set of cases to stop, but also when to stop them. Implementing the stopping rule early may help to maximize cost savings, while decisions with reduced uncertainty can be made later as more data are collected. Dynamically identifying the “optimal” timing for implementing a stopping rule that relies on predictions can be difficult since future outcomes are unknown during data collection. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study to analyze how the timing affects the performance of the risk-conscious stopping rule. The Monte Carlo method is used to quantify uncertainty in stopping decisions. Our study illustrates several scenarios in which implementing the stopping rule after 8–10 call attempts has the lowest number of call attempts per interview while maintaining the same level of data quality.

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

📄 Herman Chernoff, 1923–2026

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📄 A statistical framework for dynamic cognitive diagnosis in digital learning environments

Reading is foundational for educational, employment, and economic outcomes, but a persistent proportion of students globally struggle to develop adequate reading skills. Some countries promote digital tools to support reading development, alongside regular classroom instruction. Such tools generate rich log data capturing students’ behaviour and performance. This study proposes a dynamic cognitive diagnostic modelling (CDM) framework based on restricted latent class models to trace students’ time-varying skill mastery using log files from digital tools. Unlike traditional CDMs that require expert-defined skill-item mappings (Q-matrix), our approach jointly estimates the Q-matrix and latent skill profiles, integrates log-derived covariates (e.g. reattempts, response times, counts of mastered items) and individual characteristics, and models transitions in mastery using a Bayesian estimation approach. Applied to real-world data, the model demonstrates practical value in educational settings by effectively uncovering individual skill profiles and the skill-item mappings. Simulation studies confirm robust recovery of Q-matrix structures and latent profiles with high accuracy under varied sample sizes, item counts, and different sparsity of Q-matrices. The framework offers a data-driven, time-dependent restricted latent class modelling approach to understanding early reading development.

📚 Local Government Studies

📄 How contract design shapes investment commitment in PPPs: evidence from Chinese local governments

  • Author(s): Yingying Wang, Bo Zhang, Yongjian Ke, Masamitsu Onishi
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 The Contrasting Electoral Effects of National Identity: Evidence From White Working‐Class Voters in Canada and the United States

Can national identity ever be captured by non‐right‐wing parties? This paper examines this question with an underutilised comparison of white working‐class voters in the Canadian province of Ontario and the Midwest region of the United States. This paper combines insights from survey data and a candidate‐choice conjoint experiment. Evidence shows that national identity has a strong association with Republican voting and partisanship among Midwestern white working‐class voters, but is instead tied to support for the centre‐left Liberal Party among white working‐class voters from Ontario. Behind these effects, conceptions of the nation differ greatly. National identity among the American sample is more closely tied to racial resentment, religiosity and anti‐government sentiment, while national identity among the Canadian sample has no association with these sets of attitudes. This paper shows how the same social identity, among a similar group, can have starkly different political effects depending on national context.

📄 Memory, Crisis and Boundary Hardening: Historical Persecution Narratives and Attitudes Towards Arab Citizens of Israel

How is endorsement of a historical‐persecution narrative related to minority exclusion during crises? This article argues that historical persecution narratives are durable cultural resources whose political implications are neither uniform nor constant. Using longitudinal surveys of Jewish Israelis, it compares the May 2021 Gaza war and intercommunal violence with the war following the 7 October 2023 attack, when Arab citizens were not involved in internal violence. Within‐person increases in agreement with the historical‐persecution statement were associated with stronger exclusionary attitudes towards Arab citizens, including after 7 October. Heterogeneity analyses show that this within‐person co‐movement was not uniform across the Jewish public: It was detectable in different national‐belief clusters across the two crisis intervals. The article contributes to research on nationalism and collective memory by showing that crisis periods can coincide with upward shifts in endorsement of a persecution‐centred historical narrative and boundary hardening towards internal minorities, patterned by national‐belief configurations.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 Psychological drivers of men’s perpetration of intimate partner violence against women

  • Author(s): Marisol Lila, Enrique Gracia, Cristina Expósito-Álvarez, Rocío Pérez-Sabater
  • Link: Read the article
In this Review, Lila et al. synthesize evidence on the psychological drivers of men’s perpetration of IPV from systematic reviews, meta-analyses and methodologically rigorous primary studies, with emphasis on results drawn from samples of known male perpetrators.

📄 Understanding how experience supports the development of executive function skills

  • Author(s): Sabine Doebel, Nicolas Chevalier, Sebastián Javier Lipina, Victoria Rabii, Sammy F. Ahmed
  • Link: Read the article
In this Review, Doebel and colleagues critically examine how executive function is measured and synthesize evidence on how experience fosters the development of executive function skills.

📚 Parliamentary Affairs

📄 Confidence votes and executive dominance: the case of Italy

Governments have increasingly relied on confidence votes as a procedural tool to secure the passage of legislation in parliament. In this study, we investigate why executives resort to such votes, focusing on government bills in Italy between 1996 and 2023. Drawing on an original longitudinal dataset, we examine the conditions under which governments are more likely to invoke this formally exceptional instrument on individual bills. We argue that confidence votes, while ostensibly extraordinary, are often used strategically to manage or prevent coordination problems during the legislative process. In particular, we assess how intra-coalition policy heterogeneity, conflict surrounding government-sponsored bills, and the programmatic content of legislation influence the likelihood of tying a bill to a confidence vote. Our findings show that confidence procedures, originally designed for emergencies, have become routine instruments of governance that allow executives to maintain control over the legislative agenda and contain coalition tensions.

📚 Party Politics

📄 Rain, temperature, and votes: Weather effects on electoral participation in Argentina

Compulsory voting was designed to make electoral participation immune to individual costs, yet this paper shows that rain on election day still keeps Argentine voters home. Exploiting quasi-random variation in precipitation across 526 departments and 14 national election days between 2011 and 2023, I estimate two-way fixed effects models with department and election fixed effects using ERA5 reanalysis data matched to department centroids. Each additional millimeter of voting-hours precipitation (8am–6pm) reduces turnout by 0.08 percentage points ( p < 0.01); on a day of average rainfall this implies about a 0.2 percentage-point reduction. The estimate survives an extensive identification battery: balance tests, a 9-day placebo window with horse races, grid-cell clustering, and a validation of the reanalysis data against independent rain-gauge stations. Using newly constructed vote shares by ideological bloc, I find that rainfall does not bias the partisan outcome—it leaves the incumbent vote share, the left/Peronist bloc, and the left–right balance unchanged, in contrast to the partisan effects documented under voluntary voting in Europe—and it has no effect on blank ballots, null votes, or fragmentation. Weather thus operates through the extensive margin (whether to vote) rather than the intensive margin (how to vote). If even a century-old compulsory voting institution cannot fully insulate turnout from weather shocks, institutional reforms such as postal voting, extended hours, or remote electronic voting deserve consideration even where voting is mandatory.

📄 Contesting reputational advantages: Issue ownership and negative campaigning

Research on issue-based negative campaigning typically emphasizes issue salience and parties’ own issue strengths. This paper shifts the focus to the targets of attacks. We argue that negative campaigning on policy issues is systematically structured by the competence of the opponent, as parties seek to challenge rivals’ reputational advantages within specific issue domains. Using a dyadic dataset of party press releases from five Austrian national election campaigns (2006–2019), combined with survey-based measures of perceived issue competence, we show that parties are significantly more likely to direct negative messages at highly competent opponents. In contrast, sender-party competence and voter issue salience do not consistently shape targeting patterns. These findings suggest that issue-based negative campaigning is driven less by parties’ own issue strengths than by their opponents’ relative standing, highlighting how attacks serve as a strategy of reputational contestation in issue competition.

📄 The personal efficacy of party youth wing members

  • Author(s): Henrik Bech Seeberg, Duncan McDonnell, Sofia Ammassari, Niklas Bolin, Reinhard Heinisch, Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Marco Valbruzzi, Carsten Wegscheider, Annika Werner
  • Link: Read the article
Although young people are said to be increasingly withdrawing from participation in political parties, some still join because they believe they can influence them to achieve change. We examine this sense of personal efficacy among contemporary youth wing members and ask: how is youth wing members’ personal efficacy associated with their activity levels and membership length, and with intra-party democracy and youth wing integration into the party? To do so, we combine the Political Party Database with data from the YOUMEM project, the largest cross-national survey of youth wing members conducted to date, covering ∼3600 members of 12 party youth wings in six democracies. We find that higher levels of personal efficacy are associated in particular with individuals being more active; being in a youth wing which is well integrated into the party; and in a context of strong intra-party democracy. Our results thus suggest how parties can foster young members’ personal efficacy and nurture democratically engaged citizens.

📄 The German Local Manifesto Project (GLMP): A new data source for studying local party politics

Local politics remains comparatively understudied in political science, partly due to limited data on party competition at the municipal level. This research note introduces the German Local Manifesto Project (GLMP), a new dataset of German local election manifestos that expands the empirical infrastructure for studying programmatic competition in municipalities. The dataset contains 2307 manifestos from 306 political actors across 248 municipalities between 1989 and 2024, covering both national party branches and Independent Local Lists (ILL). Compared with existing collections of local manifestos, GLMP provides broader coverage of political actors and municipal contexts. The data allow scholars to analyze ideological positioning and policy priorities in local elections. An illustrative analysis demonstrates how the dataset can be used to compare ideological dispersion between ILL and national party branches. By providing large-scale manifesto data for German municipalities, GLMP opens new opportunities for research on local party competition and political representation.

📚 Perspectives on Politics

📄 Political Science in the Face of Climate Catastrophe: Democratic Impasses, Capitalist Contradictions, and Emergent Geopolitical Conflicts

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📄 Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World

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📄 Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic

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📄 Exit from International Organizations: Costly Negotiation for Institutional Change

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📄 Review Index

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📚 Policy & Internet

📄 Trust in the Machine? Practitioner Perspectives on the Role of AI in Online Content Moderation

  • Author(s): Elena Martellozzo, Kylie McCarthy, Megan Trafford, Emmanuel Adinkrah, Paul Bleakley
  • Link: Read the article
The scale and volume of user‐generated content produced in the Web 2.0 era have led to content moderation becoming an essential aspect of most online platforms' business models. This form of digital labour is often performed by human content moderators (CMs) in the Global South, however, artificial intelligence (AI) technology has increasingly changed the nature of this work leading to serious questions about the future of this industry. A mixed‐methods survey was conducted with Africa‐based CMS ( n  = 107) who responded to several open‐ended questions related to their perceptions of AI and its potential use in content moderation. Thematic analysis revealed strong support for the use of AI in content moderation. However, CMs noted several barriers to AI implementation, such as an inability to apply context, which limits its efficacy. The findings suggest that African CMs appreciate the potential benefits that AI can offer to the content moderation industry, yet still see a clear need for AI to be balanced with human oversight to properly address the contextual nuance that is inherent to the role.

📄 Privacy Asymmetries in Digital Public Mobility: Trust and the Perceived Value of Personal Data

  • Author(s): Mónica Humeres, Alexandra Davidoff, Teresa Correa, Claudia López
  • Link: Read the article
As algorithmic platforms increasingly mediate public service delivery, data‐driven systems shape how citizens experience trust and privacy while generating digital traces that inform policy decisions. In the context of public mobility, these dynamics manifest through routine interactions with systems that track movement, log behavior, and process personal information, transforming everyday travel into a site of data extraction with policy implications. This study investigates how individuals in Chile interpret and respond to digital transport systems, focusing on their concerns about data privacy, institutional trust, and the value of the data they generate. Drawing on interviews ( N  = 27) and six focus groups ( N  = 48), the paper uses the notion of privacy asymmetries to characterize the uneven dispositions users hold across three dimensions: (1) between functionality trust in digital platforms and data privacy concerns; (2) between acceptance of data collection practices by private companies and by the state, and (3) across demographic lines, particularly gender. These asymmetries reflect how historical legacies, political context, and sociodemographic categories shape trust and skepticism toward data use in public systems.

📄 Something New, Something Old: AI and the Sultan's Telegraph

Policy &Internet, Volume 18, Issue 3, September 2026.

📚 Political Behavior

📄 From Antagonistic Talk to Cooperative Acts: The Effect of Polarization Cues on Newspaper Audiences

Do media depictions of a ‘polarized society’ merely describe division or actually deepen it? We report two laboratory experiments in Germany (Study1 $$N=302$$ ; Study2 $$N=295$$ ). After reading authentic newspaper articles in which brief polarization cues were experimentally included versus omitted, participants (i) completed standard affective- and ideological-polarization measures and (ii) played incentivized Dictator, Ultimatum, and Trust Games with ideological out-group partners. Polarization cues increased both affective polarization and ideological extremity. Behavioral responses, however, were mixed. In the Dictator Game, where the recipient cannot respond, treated participants shared less with the out-group. In the Trust Game, characterized by mutual dependence and potential efficiency gains, treated participants sent more to out-group partners. Ultimatum behavior, where interdependence is partial, showed weaker and less consistent shifts. Taken together, polarization cues reliably heighten perceived division but do not uniformly translate into behavioral antagonism: even after cues that increase self-reported polarization, participants can still cooperate with ideological opponents when cooperation is perceived as mutually beneficial.

📚 Political Communication

📄 The Language of Democratic Resilience and Decline: A Comparative Study of Politicians’ Communication on Facebook in Sweden and Hungary

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📄 Do Emotional Ads Persuade? Evidence from Real-Time Campaign Advertising Experiments

  • Author(s): John Murphy, Alexander Coppock, Seth J. Hill, Lynn Vavreck
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Political Psychology

📄 Partisans misperceive and are influenced by dynamic norms

  • Author(s): Trystan Loustau, Ashley Fabrizio, Liane Young, Jordan Wylie, Stylianos Syropoulos
  • Link: Read the article
Perceptions of social norms, and how those norms change over time, play a central role in shaping how people understand and respond to political divides. We developed and iteratively refined dynamic‐norm messages about bipartisan attitude change to reduce divisive outparty perceptions and attitudes in a US context. We first identified real‐world issues that gained support over time among both Democrats and Republicans and were judged as believable. Study 1 documented systematic misperceptions of attitude change across a range of social issues and linked these misperceptions to colder outparty feelings. We then tested intervention messages that adapted standard static‐norm templates with the addition of information about change over time (dynamic norm; Study 2). This intervention increased expectations of future common ground but did not reliably improve downstream outparty attitudes. Next, we tested a refined intervention message that isolated dynamic norm information (Study 3). The refined dynamic norm message increased expected common ground and expected future feelings of belonging among the outparty and was associated with small but reliable increases in outparty warmth and positive outparty impressions relative to control. These results suggest that emphasizing trajectories of public opinion without highlighting current partisan gaps may be a useful strategy for reducing polarization.

📄 Revisiting the <scp>SciPop</scp> Scale: Measurement alignment, scoring rules, and cross‐context comparability

Science‐related populism—populist attitudes toward scientific authority—has attracted growing scholarly attention. Although the SciPop Scale measures this construct, its cross‐national psychometric properties remain underexamined. Using data from the Trust in Science and Science‐Related Populism project ( N  = 69,341; 68 countries/regions) and the Swiss Science Barometer ( N  = 1124), we evaluate factor structure and reliability, test multigroup invariance, apply alignment for approximate invariance, and compare scoring philosophies (Bollen vs. Goertz approach) on criterion validity. We further employ multidimensional item response theory models to provide complementary item‐level diagnostics, including discrimination, threshold, item information, and differential item functioning. Results show that reliability is high and a four‐factor model fits most broadly. Full measurement invariance holds across sex, age, education, residence, political orientation, and religiosity; partial invariance appears across regions, economic development, cultural values, and regime types. Cross‐national comparability is limited but improves via measurement alignment. Different scoring methods identify different weakest dimensions. For criterion validity, Bollen‐based aligned scores consistently outperform the Goertz approach, yielding higher explanatory power in cross‐national and cross‐group analyses. Finally, we provide guidelines for researchers using the SciPop Scale and future directions for measuring science‐related populism.

📄 Working hard to belong: Meritocratic ideology and deportation sentiments among Latino and Asian Americans

Why do some Latino and Asian Americans support conservative policies that may discriminate against them? Elaborating on system justification theory, we argue that ideologies such as meritocracy perpetuate the status quo by placating marginalized groups and assuaging their emotional concerns regarding their unfair treatment. This research examined the extent to which endorsing meritocratic ideology is associated with deportation policy attitudes and the degree of emotional concern about deportation among Latino and Asian Americans. Using data from the 2024 and 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post‐Election Surveys, we find that higher meritocratic ideology predicted greater support for deportation policies and lower emotional concern about deportation for Latino and Asian Americans. This research demonstrates that Latino and Asian Americans who have ingrained the ethos of meritocracy are more likely to support conservative policies and develop sentiments that work against the interests of their communities.

📚 Political Research Quarterly

📄 Backlashes to Gender Equality and Authoritarian Populism in the U.S.

According to recent scholarship, backlash toward gender equality is fueling support for the authoritarian and populist right in many countries and, perhaps, the rise of Trumpism in the U.S. Yet, there are potentially different types of backlash to gender equality. We argue that the rising status of women over the past several decades may result in anti-feminist attitudes, not just among older men who yearn for the traditional gender arrangements of their youth as some scholars argue, but also among younger, single men lacking college degrees, who are less attractive partners for women. We call this “mate-value backlash.” Using ANES data, we find that anti-feminist attitudes have long been associated with support for Republican presidential candidates, but only in recent years have these attitudes become more prominent among unmarried men, without college degrees.

📚 Political Science Research and Methods

📄 Masking or lexicographic preferences? Using conjoint experiments to distinguish between two fundamental theories of choice

Many studies on candidate choice and other political preferences suggest that the effect of one attribute may mask the effect of another attribute, which the respondent has no information about. If, for instance, respondents lack information about party membership, they may infer that female candidates are Democrats, which would lead to biased estimates of the pure effect of candidate gender. We propose an alternative explanation—namely that respondents have lexicographic preferences—and we present an empirical test using conjoint experiments to distinguish between what we call pure masking and lexicographic preferences. We illustrate our method using data on the effect of gender, race, and party in candidate choice and replicate the results in a preregistered conjoint experiment. We offer recommendations for researchers studying candidate and political choices.

📚 Political Science Research in PNAS

📄 Plausible nonsense and deliberative reasoning: Benchmarking LLMs against human judgment

Large Language Models (LLMs) are entering democratic contexts as instruments of governance, where the challenges at hand are ill-structured, marked by ambiguity and contestation. Ill-structured democratic problems demand more than factual precision; they call for intersubjective reasoning: context-sensitive judgments that others can understand and publicly accept. Using the Deliberative Reason Index (DRI), this study evaluates 60 LLMs against human deliberation across nine policy scenarios. Only four models consistently exceed the permutation-based null benchmark for alignment with human patterns of reason-giving. Most models fall short: their reason–preference structures rarely clear this threshold, even though their outputs can still appear coherent and persuasive. Yet outputs can appear reasonable even when this alignment is absent. The observed gap between surface plausibility and deliberative coherence urges caution: deploying LLMs in governance contexts requires prior assessment of their deliberative reasoning capacity, not just their surface outputs.

📚 Political Studies

📄 Right up my alley: Local radical right success, contextual alignment, and immigration attitudes in Sweden

  • Author(s): Stefan Dahlberg, Hilma Lindskog, Henrik Oscarsson
  • Link: Read the article
Electoral success of radical right parties is often argued to normalize previously stigmatized anti-immigration attitudes. Yet, it remains unclear whether such normalization reflects genuine within-individual persuasion or shifts in the local climate of political expression. We address this question by linking highly disaggregated district-level vote shares to individual-level panel survey data from Sweden (2018–2022), a period marked by sustained growth and partial normalization of the Sweden Democrats. Cross-sectional analyses reveal pronounced contextual patterns: Restrictive immigration attitudes are more prevalent in districts with higher local radical right support, particularly among voters who do not support the party, while core supporters remain comparatively stable. However, first-difference panel analyses provide little evidence that changes in local radical right support are associated with attitudinal change. The findings suggest that what appears as normalization in ecological analyses is more consistent with contextual alignment than with rapid persuasion, clarifying the micro-foundations of radical right normalization.

📄 Shifting sands? The impact of conflict displacement on voting

Does exposure to conflict displacement amplify support for far-right parties? This study investigates the political consequences of conflict-induced displacement in northern Israel by exploiting a natural experiment arising from government-ordered evacuations during military conflicts. Using a pre-registered survey and a regression discontinuity design based on an exogenous 5 km threshold, I assess changes in retrospective and prospective voting behavior as well as self-reported political ideology. The analysis reveals no evidence that displacement increases far-right support or induces partisan realignment. Rather, evacuees demonstrate a modest rightward shift in ideological self-placement without corresponding changes in voting behavior. This divergence suggests that displacement influences symbolic political positioning without prompting corresponding changes in voting behavior. These patterns unfold against a broader backdrop of political frustration and electoral disengagement that affects both displaced and non-displaced populations. The findings reveal troubling implications for democratic accountability during external conflict: leaders may be shielded from electoral consequences of security failures even as civic engagement deteriorates, challenging models of wartime accountability.

📚 Politics & Gender

📄 Violence Against Women Political Activists

In the last decade, research on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has increased significantly. First identified by women activists in the Global South, VAWIP refers to behaviors that specifically target women as women by pressuring them to leave politics (Krook and Sanín 2016). Activists in Bolivia and later in other regions of the Global South first called attention to VAWIP in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when countries around the world began adopting gender quotas to increase the presence of women in government (Krook 2019). Most scholarship in this area has focused on violence targeting women candidates and elected officials (Collignon and Rüdig 2020; Dalton 2021; Håkansson 2021; Herrick et al. 2021; Raney and Collier 2024; Schneider and Carroll 2020). Attention to women in formal politics is warranted given their important representational role. Women’s presence in politics is a necessary first step to achieve political change and advance women’s interests (Beckwith 2011).

📄 Gendered Political Violence in Transitional Moments: The Cases of Bangladesh and Iran

Women’s rights advocates and movements play an important role during political transitions, shaping feminist outcomes following these transitions. Women are also often at the forefront of many pro-democratic mobilizations and struggles for political change (Baldez 2002; Goetz 2009; Viterna and Fallon 2008; Waylen 2007; 2011). Yet this participation is not without costs, and one core cost remains undertheorized in the literature: targeted violence against women precisely because of their gender and political engagement.

📚 Politics & Society

📄 Varieties of Firm Republicanism: Institutional Models of Workplace Governance

Recent scholarship treats the firm as a regime of power in which workers are subject to arrangements analogous to those between state and citizen. Republican political theory is influential within these debates, identifying domination, the exposure to arbitrary power, as an obstacle to equal dignity and rights within firms. This article develops a new framework for understanding republican approaches to firm governance. It identifies three models: the regulatory-consultative model, which constrains managerial supervision; the workplace-democracy model, which addresses exclusion from governance; and the worker-ownership model, which treats ownership rights as the central source of domination. The article establishes the first systematic typology of republican institutional responses to domination in the firm and develops a configurational approach to their application. Rather than treating these models as rival blueprints or requiring their simultaneous application, it argues that the appropriate institutional response depends on the setting in which domination takes shape. This offers a new way of thinking about how relations of equal dignity and rights can be secured within firms.

📚 Politics and Religion

📄 Partisanship and openness to nonreligious candidates for elective office in the United States

Scholarly interest in the evaluation of atheist candidates for office has been growing. In the aggregate, atheists are a political pariah. However, aggregate effects conceal a wide partisan gulf, with Democrats more open and Republicans more averse to atheist candidates for office. Less is known about biases that nonreligious candidates with less stridently secular views might encounter in political evaluation. Focusing on broadly conceptualized nonreligion, I make several contributions to the literature: 1) I partially replicate the findings on the links between nonreligion and political appraisal using a conjoint experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey; 2) I assess the relative importance of nonreligion and other factors that influence candidate appraisal; 3) I investigate how partisanship and religiosity interact to affect receptivity to candidate nonreligion; and 4) I examine how age and religiosity interact to influence Democrats’ and Republicans’ openness to candidate nonreligion.

📄 Confrontation or mediation?: Episcopal responses to autocracy in Cuba and Nicaragua

In what conditions are national episcopates in Latin America likely to confront autocratic regimes? In what conditions are bishops positioned to mediate state-society conflicts? This article offers a structural account of episcopal responses to autocracy through comparative analysis of church-state relations and pastoral letters published in Cuba and Nicaragua during critical junctures from the Cold War to the 2020s. The personalization of regime authority, combined with repressive violence, increases the likelihood that bishops publicly confront autocracy. Personalization reduces opportunities for mediation, as regime leaders resist compromising their authority in mediation processes. Moreover, United States punitive measures against autocracies dependent on great power support can shift bishops into confrontational roles. Latin American regimes seeking alliances with geopolitical adversaries of the United States can also preclude opportunities for bishops to mediate conflicts. Conversely, the depersonalization of authority and the necessity to alleviate United States pressure opens the space that makes episcopal mediation efforts possible.

📚 Post-Soviet Affairs

📄 When society, identity, and security align: repatriation strategies in Central Asia

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📚 Public Opinion Quarterly

📄 Voting for Democracy? Testing Political-Cultural Constraints on Democratic Backsliding

Democratic backsliding continues to pose a clear danger to contemporary democracies. While a growing literature shows that voters often tolerate antidemocratic candidates when partisan or ideological incentives pull in that direction, we know less about whether support for democracy, institutional trust, political tolerance, and other democratic orientations ameliorate such temptations. We address this question with a systematic comparison of six measures of political culture as predictors of electoral resistance to antidemocratic candidates. Using candidate-choice conjoint experiments fielded in three democracies facing backsliding pressures—the United States, Poland, and South Korea—we find that several democratic orientations are associated with greater resistance to antidemocratic candidates. Among them, support for the core institutions and processes of liberal democracy stands out as the most consistent predictor. Its relationship with prodemocratic choice remains meaningful even in “cross-pressured” choices where partisan or ideological incentives pull voters away from the prodemocratic option. These findings suggest that political culture matters for democratic resilience, though some components of it matter much more consistently than others.

📚 Qualitative Sociology

📄 The Deviant Worlds of Howard Becker

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📚 Quarterly Journal of Political Science

📄 Persuasion and ideological voting in legislatures

American legislators are generally thought to be ideologues who take consistently partisan positions, but recent research suggests they are also pliant targets of persuasion campaigns by special interests, lobbyists, fellow legislators and even academics. This paper explores this seeming discrepancy. First, we revisit the credibility of findings of legislative persuasion to determine whether legislators’ positions can be changed and, if so, whether such changes are robust and long-lasting. Second, we examine whether persuasion works against or alongside ideology. Finally, we interview legislators to hear their experiences as targets of persuasion. We conclude that legislative persuasion can be long-lasting and found on bills other than those targeted by advocates. Persuasion can increase ideological position-taking and polarization by allowing legislators to better sort into positions consistent with their broader ideology. Finally, persuasion works through different mechanisms, including learning about policy expertise or electoral considerations, that vary in relevance across legislators. Our findings suggest legislative persuasion may play a key role in how parties, interest groups and constituents drive polarization.

📄 Policy decay and political competition

Modern political systems exist not in a vacuum but in a world of continuous technological, social and economic change. This change means policies designed for today’s world will fit only imperfectly tomorrow, a phenomenon they refer to as policy decay. In principle, policymakers could legislate to remove decay and restore the status quo. In practice, however, the need for “something to be done” creates opportunities for the majority party to leverage their proposal power and for the minority party to obstruct to gain an electoral advantage. We consider a classic agenda-setter model and show how the combination of decay and political competition alters the underlying logic of policymaking. Policy changes frequently in this setting, even when moderate, contrary to the notion of legislative gridlock. Yet legislation to remove decay is not always struck, leaving all policymakers worse off. Moreover, the agreements that are struck are often to the benefit of the minority party, reversing the classic logic of agenda-setting power.

📚 Research & Politics

📄 Reassurance and betrayal: Cross-ethnic appeals by party leaders in divided societies lead to asymmetric voter reactions

Why do conciliatory political appeals sometimes polarise rather than moderate electoral competition in divided societies? Existing accounts of consociational power-sharing explain how hardline parties can become credible negotiators, but they say less about how voters respond when the leaders of displaced moderate parties attempt to broaden support beyond their traditional community. I argue that leaders’ cross-ethnic appeals function as reassurance signalling: they reduce perceived threat to the outgroup while simultaneously weakening perceptions of defensive credibility among co-ethnics. Voters therefore update leader evaluations in opposite directions relative to a party’s inherited reputation. Using survey data from the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election, I compare leader evaluations to party baselines across identity groups. A leader who emphasised cross-community accommodation was evaluated more favourably by the opposing community and less favourably by co-ethnics, while leaders emphasising intra-group defence did not exhibit this pattern. The findings suggest moderation in divided societies redistributes support across groups rather than uniformly increasing approval, providing a behavioural mechanism within post-tribune party competition.

📄 National security versus human security: Intrastate conflict and states’ rhetoric on conventional arms control in the United Nations general assembly

While arms control during the Cold War was primarily concerned with weapons of mass destruction and their role in national security, the end of the bipolar order shifted attention toward intrastate conflicts, the conventional weapons with which they are fought, and their humanitarian consequences for civilian populations. Yet we still lack systematic evidence on how governments directly involved in such conflicts perceive conventional arms control. I argue that acute intrastate conflicts, but not intractable conflicts, lead states to view conventional arms control primarily as a matter of national security rather than a humanitarian issue. I test this argument quantitatively, using data on states’ rhetorical positions on conventional arms control in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and on enduring internal rivalries (EIRs). Consistent with my expectations, I find that intrastate conflicts unrelated to EIRs are associated with a stronger emphasis on national security in UNGA speeches, whereas conflicts embedded in EIRs are not significantly related to states’ rhetoric on conventional arms control. These findings shed new light on the relationship between intrastate conflict and arms control.

📚 Social Forces

📄 School preferences across countries and social groups: a factorial survey experiment in the United States, Germany and Italy

This paper examines whether evaluations of primary-school characteristics vary across national and social contexts. Using a factorial survey experiment with more than 2500 respondents in the United States, Germany, and Italy, participants evaluated hypothetical schools differing in six attributes. By holding information, cost, and proximity constant, the design isolates stated preferences from several constraints that shape observed school choices. Multilevel models estimate the effects of school attributes on enrolment intention, perceived academic effectiveness, and expected social integration. Two findings stand out. First, respondents with and without university education evaluate school characteristics in remarkably similar ways, providing limited evidence that school preferences are strongly stratified by educational background. Second, although the general pattern of evaluations is broadly similar across countries, the relative effects of particular attributes vary: U.S. respondents are more responsive to school performance levels, Italian respondents to academic growth, and extracurricular activities and parental involvement also differ in salience across contexts. Respondents react significantly to all six school attributes across the three evaluative dimensions, indicating that school preferences are shaped by multiple academic, social, and organizational considerations. Overall, our findings suggest that cross-national and social inequalities in school attendance are unlikely to be explained by preference differences alone.

📚 Social Problems

📄 Crime and symbolic boundaries in unsettled times: an analysis of middle-class responses to fear in Chile

Students of crime in the United States examine drug economies in poor communities, poor residents’ adaptive behaviors, and punitive crime policies. Research on Latin America, the most violent region in the world, focuses on criminal governance, violence in poor communities, and the popularity of punitive policies. However, few scholars have examined middle class residents’ experiences of crime. This article builds on work on middle classes and utilizes interviews and observations in three Santiago, Chile, communities. Findings focus on middle-class Chileans’ interpretations of crime, adaptive behaviors, and analyses of crime policies. In unsettled times, individuals construct symbolic boundaries with criminals and their peers. Direct experiences with crime as well as cultural and ideological beliefs shape middle class individuals’ contrasting interpretations of crime and construction of boundaries with others. These divergent attitudes reflect enduring fissures within Chilean society over its dictatorship (1973–1990) and recent social upheaval (protests, immigration, and rising crime), complicating universalizing narratives about a punitive Chilean citizenry.

📄 The disaster of their dreams: sheepdogs and restive U.S. gun ownership

Some American gun owners have embraced the label “sheepdog,” casting armed citizens as community protectors who step in when the state fails. This identity exposes a central tension in U.S. gun culture: armed citizens present themselves as defenders of order yet challenge the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. Previous work resolves this tension by dichotomizing gun owners into those who defer to state authority (neoliberals) and those who directly challenge it (neoradicals). We show that gun owners have used online discourse on the sheepdog identity as a locus of internal debate, grappling with the role of armed citizens in protecting their visions of social order. We conduct a digital ethnography, analyzing more than 125 items from 2008–2026 across gun forums, Reddit posts, blog posts, YouTube videos, and associated comments. A moral trinary of “sheepdog–sheep–wolf” animates these conversations, structuring how participants distinguish protectors, the unprepared, and threats. Most converge on a restive stance toward the state: deferential to law and order in normal times, yet prepared to act in the state’s stead when that order appears to fail. This study bridges existing dichotomies in gun scholarship by showing how a restive form of armed citizenship emerges across a polarized America.

📄 Beyond forced moves: examining anticipatory stress around housing loss

An extensive literature finds that forced moves erode well-being and widen family inequality. Fewer studies examine how worries over potential future displacement may also stratify families. Using survey data from a probability sample of Los Angeles County residents, we examine socially-patterned disparities in the prevalence and duration of anticipatory stress around housing loss, the association between such stress and health behaviors, and the role of doubling up in buffering anticipatory housing loss stress. We find that immigrants, renters, and lower-income households report significantly more anticipatory housing loss stress, even after controlling for multiple individual event stressors associated with displacement risk. We also find evidence that anticipatory housing loss stress is associated with present-day food cutbacks and that doubling up with relatives may shield against such stress. These findings advance past work on the housing crisis by demonstrating that its total impact extends beyond the downstream consequences of involuntary moves. Our results also contribute to research on socio-demographic disparities in anticipatory stress, the relationship between anticipatory stress and health behavior, and how doubling up shapes family well-being.

📚 Social Science Computer Review

📄 Parsing Causal Relationships in Social Science Publications

  • Author(s): Rasoul Norouzi, Bennett Kleinberg, Jeroen Vermunt, Caspar Van Lissa
  • Link: Read the article
Understanding the causes of phenomena is a key goal of scientific enquiry. For historic reasons, social scientists are reluctant to explicitly discuss causal assumptions. Nevertheless, causal claims do appear in the literature. Systematically cataloging these causal claims and parsing them into structured cause-effect relationship would allow us to synthesize them and, ultimately, construct theories based on oft-repeated causal claims. However, manually extracting these claims is infeasible due to the scale of the literature and linguistic ambiguity, and existing automated methods often lack domain specificity or fail to extract specific cause-effect pairs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a BERT-based multitask deep learning model trained on a novel, domain-specific benchmark dataset of 3,014 annotated sentences from social science papers. The model simultaneously (1) identifies sentences containing causal claims, (2) extracts cause and effect spans, and (3) links the associated causal pairs. In our study, the multi-head model outperformed a model with sequential architecture, as well as two generative LLMs (Llama 3 8B and Qwen3 8B), which were prompted to code the sentences with a few examples of the coding schema. Specifically, the multi-head model had the highest macro F1-score across all three subtasks and lower false-positive error propagation compared to the sequential model. Its agreement with human coders on the held-out test set (Krippendorff’s α = 0.81) was of similar magnitude to the interrater agreement among the human coders, computed on an interrater reliability subsample (α = 0.80).

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 The Convergence of Zero‐Sum Thinking and Illiberalism in the United States

  • Author(s): Jacob Morrier, Beatrice Magistro, R. Michael Alvarez
  • Link: Read the article
Objective Liberal democracies are under mounting pressure as citizens increasingly support policies that curtail fundamental rights. Prior research has often attributed illiberal attitudes to one partisan camp. We show that zero‐sum thinking—the belief that one group or person's gains necessarily come at another's expense—is a powerful cross‐partisan psychological predictor of such attitudes. Methods In a nationally representative survey experiment (), we asked respondents whether existential threats justify restricting fundamental rights under one of three randomized issue frames: climate change (a liberal issue), illegal immigration (a conservative issue), or no specific threat. Results We find that zero‐sum thinking strongly predicts support for illiberal attitudes across all treatment conditions: an interquartile‐range increase in zero‐sum thinking is associated with an 11–13 percentage point increase in illiberal attitudes, regardless of partisan affiliation. Framing effects are confined to low zero‐sum thinkers, who respond predictably to partisan cues: Democrats favor restrictions for climate change, while Republicans do so when they address illegal immigration. High zero‐sum thinkers, by contrast, hit a “threat ceiling,” exhibiting uniformly high support for coercive measures with little sensitivity to partisan framing.

📄 From Mainstream News to Prediction Markets: Dual Pathways of Information Seeking During an Anticipatory Security Crisis

  • Author(s): Vered Elishar, Dana Weimann‐Saks, Yaron Ariel
  • Link: Read the article
Introduction How do individuals seek information when a security threat is anticipated but has not yet materialized? This study examined whether intolerance of uncertainty and state anxiety are differentially associated with information consumption across channels during an anticipatory conflict period. Methods A national quota‐sampled survey of 403 Israeli adults was conducted in late February 2026, during days of heightened concern preceding a joint US–Israeli strike on Iran and Iranian retaliation. Mediation analyses (PROCESS Model 4; 5000 bootstrap resamples) examined associations between intolerance of uncertainty, state anxiety, and six information outcomes, controlling for demographic covariates. Results Domestic mainstream media, social media, and interpersonal channels were associated with intolerance of uncertainty directly; speculative platforms and foreign media only indirectly, through state anxiety. Respondents who find uncertainty generally difficult reported heavier use of channels embedded in daily routine, whereas those reporting greater anxiety during the crisis were more likely to consult sources outside it. Conclusion The findings are consistent with psychologically differentiated patterns of crisis information seeking: routine channels reflect stable dispositional monitoring, whereas non‐routine channels are associated with acute affective states. The study introduces speculative information platforms into crisis communication research and identifies state anxiety as a candidate mechanism differentiating media pathways.

📚 The International Journal of Press/Politics

📄 Projecting Tomorrow’s Challenges: Toward a Temporally Nuanced Framework for Studying Agenda Setting

  • Author(s): Maximilian Overbeck, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Christian Baden
  • Link: Read the article
Traditional agenda-setting research often focuses on the most urgent problems that dominate present public agendas. Challenging the prevalent conflation of importance with urgency in agenda-setting research, this article proposes a shift from a singular to a layered temporal conceptualization of public agendas. The suggested framework distinguishes between the immediate agenda, which addresses problems perceived as most urgent, and the delayed agenda, which focuses on issues deemed most important for the future. Enriching agenda-setting theory with insights from construal level theory, the study examines the psychological and media-related factors shaping the placement of topics on these agendas. Drawing upon original survey data and a large-scale news content analysis from the French 2022 Presidential Elections, as well as survey data from the 2023 to 2024 war in Israel and Gaza, the findings provide empirical support for the proposed framework. The results indicate that participants prioritize psychologically proximate issues on the immediate agenda, whereas psychologically distant issues gain importance on the delayed agenda. Additionally, we identify media agenda-setting effects that extend beyond the immediate temporal layer. Specifically, both studies provide evidence for a media priming effect, where news exposure increases issue salience without affecting temporal layering. The Israeli case reveals additional initial evidence for an urgency effect, where news exposure boosts issue salience of some issues primarily on the immediate agenda. Overall, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of public agendas and news media effects, introducing a temporally nuanced perspective that enriches classical approaches to agenda-setting research.

📄 Tracing Knowledge Gaps: Investigating the Influence of Education on News Exposure and Knowledge Using Digital Trace Data

  • Author(s): Dominique S. Wirz, Ernesto de León, Silke Adam, Mykola Makhortykh
  • Link: Read the article
The knowledge gap hypothesis—the assumption that an increasing flow of news on a topic fosters a gap in knowledge between the more and the less educated—has been demonstrated in numerous studies throughout the past 60 years. Knowledge gaps are attributed to individual differences in media selection and information processing capacities. However, it has been difficult to investigate the relative influence of selection and processing with conventional research methods. We used an innovative combination of individual-level digital trace and survey data collected in Switzerland ( n  = 403) and Germany ( n  = 471) to study the widening of knowledge gaps throughout the communication process. The data were collected at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an extraordinary period of extremely high information inflow on a novel topic. Our analyses show that individuals with lower education use less online news in general and less COVID-19-related news in particular than those with higher education, which results in a difference in knowledge about the origin of COVID-19 (but not on its severity). However, those with lower education do not have a similar share of COVID-19-related news in their news diet, and they learn even more than those with higher education from the COVID-19-related news that they are exposed to. Our study thus suggests that knowledge gaps are predominantly a result of selecting into news use.

📄 Yandex’s Top-5 News as a Tool of Russia’s Propaganda Abroad: A Case Study of Belarus

Prior research has demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. However, it has focused primarily on Yandex’s web and news search algorithms and largely neglected Yandex’s popular top-5 news recommender algorithm. Therefore, this study investigates the role of news embedded on Yandex’s homepage—on the side to its search functionality—in disseminating Russia’s propaganda to foreign audiences and tracks its evolution over time. To do so, I audited Yandex’s top-5 news algorithm in Belarus from 2010 to 2022. By analyzing 474,663 news headlines from Yandex’s homepage ( yandex.by ) in Belarus, I found that (1) on a monthly average, the majority (52.2%) of Yandex’s top-5 news in Belarus came from sources with explicit connections to Russia’s ruling elites, and (2) a substantial portion of the news was political, with the share of political news increasing over time. In addition, Yandex in Belarus (3) frequently featured news about Russia or Russian actors, which appeared almost exclusively in the default domestic top news section for Belarus as opposed to the top news happening in the world, and (4) experienced a notable decline in the presence of Kremlin-critical news sources, marked by the complete disappearance of Western and Russian opposition websites in late 2018–2019 and the disappearance of Belarusian opposition websites shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These findings demonstrate the gradual political appropriation of Yandex’s top-5 news algorithms by Russia’s ruling elites, marking Yandex as a propaganda tool of the Kremlin.

📄 Not a Bioweapon, or is it? The Role of Perceived Threats and Media Use in COVID-19 Misperceptions

  • Author(s): Noëlle S. Lebernegg, Julia Partheymüller, Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Hajo G. Boomgaarden
  • Link: Read the article
The COVID-19 pandemic not only posed unprecedented threats to public health and economic stability but also triggered a crisis of information, described by the World Health Organization as an “infodemic.” Against this backdrop, this study explores the dynamics of COVID-19 misperceptions through the lens of Appraisal Theory and the Reinforcing Spirals Model, examining how perceived threats and media exposure shaped belief updating and reinforcement over time. Drawing on a two-year panel survey conducted in Austria (April 2020 to March 2022), we use a mixed Markov chain model to analyze one of the most persistent and widely believed conspiracy narratives—the claim that COVID-19 was a deliberately engineered bioweapon. The results reveal two opposing types of belief trajectories: an upward trajectory of belief stability, reinforcement of accurate beliefs, and correction, driven by perceived health-related threats and exposure to high-quality media, such as public broadcasters and broadsheets; and a downward trajectory marked by heightened belief instability, reinforcement of misperceptions, and an erosion of belief accuracy, associated with perceived economic threats and the use of low-quality media—including tabloids, commercial TV, and social media. Overall, the findings highlight the value of the theoretical frameworks for a more nuanced understanding of belief dynamics in times of crisis and underline the vital role of high-quality media in fostering a well-informed democratic public.

📄 Newspaper Favorites? A Comparative Assessment of Political Parallelism Across Two Decades

Newspapers in most West European countries have historically had strong ties to specific political parties. While formal bonds have vanished, parallelism in news content might still remain; for instance, in a tendency to report more often and more favorably on parties that align with the political leaning of a newspaper. In this article, we ask whether political parallelism exists in newspapers today, and whether or not it has decreased over the last two decades. These questions are answered using a dataset of 5.4 million newspaper articles from three countries (Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) over 20 years, annotated with the presence of political parties, and the sentiment of party news, at the sentence level. Findings suggest that newspapers pay more attention to the mainstream party with which they share political leaning, but that this pattern of parallelism has weakened over time.

📄 What Makes it into the Media? Party Messages, Communication Channels, and Media Outlets

Media coverage of political actors and debates is a crucial avenue for voters to learn about political parties and their policies. However, nowadays party-media agenda-setting is increasingly shaped by large-scale transformations and the fragmentation of political communication across various party channels (e.g., press releases, social media, speeches) and media types (e.g., newspapers, television, online news), potentially affecting the provision of political information. This article examines these dynamics using large-scale textual data from political parties ( n  = 17,677) and media outlets ( n  = 90,531) published in the run-up to the Austrian national election in 2019. Building on the measurement of text similarity with state-of-the-art transformer-based models and multiverse analysis, we investigate the success of party messages from press releases, parliamentary speeches, Facebook and Twitter making it into important national newspapers, online news sites as well as television and radio news programs. The article shows that the variety in party channels and media outlets—with their distinct characteristics, modalities, and (technological) affordances—create different flows of information between the parties and the media. Press releases remain crucial tools for parties to get their messages into the media, while social media and parliamentary speeches also matter, albeit with varying effects by party. We also find that online news is more receptive to party messages than print, television, or radio news. Despite these differences, journalistic gate-keeping consistently favors large and government parties across all media types. These findings underscore the need for nuanced research into the interaction between party communication channels and media outlets in contemporary democracies.

📄 Can AI-Attributed News Challenge Partisan News Selection? Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

  • Author(s): Alon Zoizner, Jörg Matthes, Nicoleta Corbu, Claes H. de Vreese, Frank Esser, Karolina Koc-Michalska, Christian Schemer, Yannis Theocharis, Jan Zilinsky
  • Link: Read the article
With artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly shaping newsroom practices, scholars debate how citizens perceive news attributed to algorithms versus human journalists. Yet, little is known about these preferences in today’s polarized media environment, where partisan news consumption has surged. The current study explores this issue by providing a comprehensive and systematic examination of how citizens evaluate AI-attributed news compared to human-based news from like-minded and cross-cutting partisan sources. Using a preregistered conjoint experiment in the United States ( N  = 2,011) that mimics a high-choice media environment, we find that citizens evaluate AI-attributed news as negatively as cross-cutting news sources, both in terms of attitudes (perceived trustworthiness) and behavior (willingness to read the news story), while strongly preferring like-minded sources. These patterns remain stable across polarizing and non-polarizing issues and persist regardless of citizens’ preexisting attitudes toward AI, political extremity, and media trust. Our findings thus challenge more optimistic views about AI’s potential to facilitate exposure to diverse viewpoints. Moreover, they suggest that increased automation of news production faces both public mistrust and substantial reader resistance, raising concerns about the future viability of AI in journalism.

📄 Digital Diplomacy Followers as Indicator of Clout: Measuring the “Al-Jazeera Effect”

The “Al-Jazeera Effect” posits that Al-Jazeera has reshaped global news flows while challenging the hegemony of Western news outlets. However, few studies to date have measured this “Effect” or offered a method for doing so. This study addressed this gap by conceptualizing news outlets’ online following as Clout and assessing Al-Jazeera’s ability to attract high-quality digital diplomacy followers on Twitter including Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) and UN Missions. Such an analysis is important as the Clout of international news outlets arises in part from their ability to impact foreign policy makers. Using a sample of 56 MFAs, and 132 UN Missions, the study analyzed Al-Jazeera’s digital diplomacy following on Twitter and compared it to that of CNN, BBC World and Reuters. Quality of digital diplomacy followers was assessed using an innovative model consisting of fifteen variables, including offline variables, online variables, and networked variables. Statistical analyses and network analyses demonstrate that Al-Jazeera attracts high-quality digital diplomacy followers, be it UN Missions of affluent states and world powers, or MFAs that are central to diplomatic networks on Twitter. The study also assessed diplomatic institutions’ engagement with Al-Jazeera Tweets, which was found to be quite low. By developing a unique model for assessing the quality of digital diplomacy followers, this study offers a method for measuring the impact of news outlets in the age of social media.

📄 Fact-Checking News Use and Political Misperception: Testing the Cognitive Process of Elaboration on Political Knowledge

Fact-checking can play an essential role in reducing political misperceptions. However, how effective it is in doing so has yet to be understood. This study uses data from a two-wave panel survey administered during the 2022 Korean presidential election (Wave 1: N  = 1175, Wave 2: N  = 948) to examine the role of fact-checking news in reducing political misperceptions in the sociopolitical context of South Korea. Based on the Orientation-Stimulus-Reasoning-Orientation-Response model, we propose a reasoning process following fact-checking news use that involves cognitive elaboration and political discussion and examine the mediating effects of these processes in the relationship between the use of fact-checking news and individuals’ misperceptions. The findings suggest that cognitive elaboration and political discussion play significant roles in influencing the development of citizens’ political knowledge. Fact-checking reduces political misperceptions indirectly through elaboration, political discussion, and political knowledge. Implications of the findings for the effectiveness of fact-checking news are discussed.

📄 Aligning Emotions: A Comparative Analysis of Text and Imagery by European Party Leaders on Instagram

  • Author(s): Silvia Decadri, Moreno Mancosu, Fedra Negri, Gaetano Scaduto
  • Link: Read the article
This study explores the interplay of imagery and text in online political communication by European party leaders. We examine how visual and textual components combine to convey emotions in Instagram posts published by one hundred twenty-four mainstream and populist leaders of one hundred fourteen parties in twenty-four EU countries, covering 3 months before and after the 2019 European elections. Images are analyzed through automated face and emotion recognition algorithms to determine whether they contain positive, negative, or neutral emotions. The text accompanying each post is analyzed through a large language model algorithm. Results indicate that populist leaders, particularly right-wing ones, are less likely to combine positive textual and visual elements. Compared to mainstream leaders, right-wing populists more frequently post contents where text and image are redundantly nonpositive. Finally, emotional mismatch between textual and visual components is common among both mainstream and populist leaders.

📄 Money, Politics, or Ethics? Perceptions of the Factors Influencing Journalists’ Work

Mindful of the spread of negative sentiments toward journalism, scholars have been paying increased attention to audience perceptions of the news media and expectations from journalists (driving an “audience turn” in journalism studies). Adding to this body of knowledge, this study examines audience beliefs on journalistic autonomy, exploring which factors are perceived as influencing journalists. Based on an online survey among US adults ( N  = 900), we found that audiences were skeptical of the concept of journalistic autonomy, ranking five factors—political, economic, organizational, personal networks, and procedural—as having influence on journalists’ work. We also found that sociodemographic factors (political identity, gender, age, socioeconomic status, education, and race/ethnicity) can help predict audience perceptions of what influences journalistic work. Finally, we compare audience responses with the responses collected from US journalists by the Worlds of Journalism Study, revealing significant gaps in how the two groups perceived journalistic autonomy: journalists perceived procedural factors as more influential than audiences did, while audiences were far more concerned than journalists about economic and political influences, and perceived personal networks and organizational considerations as carrying greater influence than journalists. We discuss the implications of these findings of audience skepticism, inter-audience distinctions, and audience-journalists gaps and propose directions for future studies of news audiences.

📄 The Dynamic Interplay of Negativity in News and Interpersonal Communication in Shaping Beliefs

This article explores the interplay between negativity in news coverage and interpersonal communication in shaping individuals’ beliefs, using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing research has examined the direct effects of these factors on beliefs, two overlooked key aspects are addressed in this article. First, I investigate how interpersonal communication interacts with the impact of negativity in news on shaping beliefs. Second, building upon media system dependency theory, I accounted for the temporal dynamics of media effects since the pandemic evolved and progressed in phases with shifting societal contexts. By relying on a linkage approach consisting of a five-wave panel survey and a quantitative media content analysis conducted in Sweden, the findings indicate that interpersonal communication serves as an amplifying moderator for exposure to negativity in forming beliefs about the negative societal impact of COVID-19. Furthermore, I find evidence supporting the temporally varying nature of media effects, with the influence of negativity decreasing as the crisis dragged on.

📄 Addressing a Blind Spot in Selective Exposure Research: Perceptions of Media Bias and Their Effects on Mainstream Media Use. A Mediation Analysis

  • Author(s): Jesper Strömbäck, Sofia Johansson, Elena Broda, Erik Espeland, Hugo Ekström
  • Link: Read the article
According to selective exposure theory, people tend to select news media that are perceived to provide attitude-consonant information and avoid those that are perceived to provide dissonant information. Despite this, research on selective exposure seldom takes people’s perceptions of media bias into account, while research on perceptions of media bias seldom links such perceptions to subsequent media use. To address this, the purpose of this study is to investigate perceptions of mainstream media bias and whether such perceptions mediate the effect of using political alternative media on subsequent mainstream media use. Empirically, the study utilizes a three-wave panel survey during the 2022 Swedish parliamentary election campaign to investigate perceptions of public service media bias and subsequent use of public service media. Among other things, the results show that the use of right-wing political alternative media influences perceptions of leftist public service bias, which in turn mediates the effect of using right-wing alternative media on subsequent public service media use.

📄 Never Mind the Source? The Drivers of User Engagement With Politicians’ Online News-Sharing Posts in 15 European Countries

Politicians on social media curate the flow of information their followers are exposed to, and they share news as a way to do so. Previous research has shown that they are strategic in their selection of news stories—they select specific news items and outlets to appeal to their online audiences. The reach of politicians’ news-sharing posts and their possible effects, are, however, influenced by the extent to which individual social media users engage with them. Combining comparative survey data ( N  = 22,145) with Facebook posts ( N  = 21,113) by 2,021 MPs in 15 European countries, this article zooms in on user engagement with politicians’ online news-sharing posts. Results show that, in general, news content and message cues can drive user engagement, and that news outlet characteristics do not. Nevertheless, the ideological closeness between a politician and the news outlet, which was found to predict politicians’ online news-sharing behavior, does positively influence reactions in media systems with high levels of political parallelism. These findings shed a new light on partisan selective exposure following politicians’ news recommendations in the digital information environment.

📚 The Journal of Legislative Studies

📄 Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan: parliamentary diplomacy and parliamentary sovereignty at a crossroads

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

📚 The Quarterly Journal of Economics

📄 Fairness Across the World*

This paper provides the first comprehensive global evidence on people’s fairness and efficiency preferences, beliefs about the sources of inequality and the efficiency cost of redistribution, and policy attitudes toward redistribution. Using a globally harmonized consequential experiment with more than 65,000 individuals across 60 countries, we show that the source of inequality plays a substantially larger role for inequality acceptance than the efficiency cost of redistribution. At the global level, implemented inequality increases by 85 percent when inequality is caused by merit rather than luck, compared to a 14 percent increase when redistribution entails a 50 percent efficiency cost. We document substantial heterogeneity in fairness views and beliefs both within and across societies. The meritocratic fairness view is most prominent in many richer Western societies, while libertarian and egalitarian fairness views are widespread in many other parts of the world. Globally, people are more likely to believe that inequality reflects luck rather than merit, while beliefs in large efficiency costs of redistribution are relatively weak. Fairness preferences and beliefs are strongly associated with redistribution attitudes and actual redistribution through taxes and transfers across countries. Our findings illustrate how the interaction between fairness views and beliefs may shape redistribution across societies, highlighting the importance of jointly understanding preferences and beliefs in the political economy of redistribution.

📚 West European Politics

📄 When does rejection of homosexuality matter? Gendered opportunity structures and radical-right support

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📚 問題與研究

📄 「國際關係理論終結」爭論與實踐轉向述評

title: 「國際關係理論終結」爭論與實踐轉向述評 abstract: 國際關係理論研究歷經各次大辯論、典範戰爭或典範之間戰爭之後，學者主張各理論對話與綜合的多元主義，藉以超越各典範與各理論之間的派別，顯示出國關理論研究的多樣性及綜合性。但國關理論多元主義之後，不再重視理論檢證而忽視理論建構與發展，引起學者思考與爭論「國際關係理論終結」與「國際關係研究終結」議題，大理論或普遍理論已不再是學科知識的核心。 不贊同終結的學者，紛紛提出批評及反駁，主張國關理論未死也沒滅絕，只是因為學者誤解了理論本質，忽視不同類型的理論化，忽略建立理論與理論化，遂造成錯誤地說明理論關鍵概念的經驗研究模式，或令人誤解的測量方法，以及學界與實務界的隔閡，以致無法提出有用的政策建議。爭論普遍理論是否存在，或是否曾經存在，或是否未曾存在過，皆涉及國關科學性質的爭論，只要學者對於「科學」沒有定論，這些議題也就沒有、也不會有定論。 有些學者則意圖避免國際關係是否終結或存在普遍理論的爭論，以發展務實的知識為目的，倡導「實踐轉向」，引用「實踐理論」進入國關研究而成為「國際實踐理論」。國際實踐理論並非提供普遍理論或大理論，而是要展現國際關係研究的理論與實踐多元面向，例如「後人類國際關係研究」、「全球南方國際關係研究」與「多元宇宙國際關係研究」。 本文認為「多元宇宙國際關係研究」提升後設理論爭論至宇宙論層次，強調國際關係是不同宇宙之間的關係，提出不同宇宙論選案探索與理解世界，並尋求其中的共同理解，但它並非是普遍理論或一元宇宙論，協助國際政治的知識實踐，顯示出國關研究各理論與其實踐的共存多元性。

📄 古印度考提利亞的國際關係思想與六種對外策略

title: 古印度考提利亞的國際關係思想與六種對外策略 abstract: 印度GDP（PPP）居世界第三，其外交動向值得關注。考提利亞在《利論》中基於現實主義國際觀而提出六種對外策略：「和、戰、靜待、往征、托庇、貳端」，反映出對於地理鄰近性與權力平衡的考量。本文批判性梳理中、英、日文學界的相關研究，修正對考提利亞策略內涵的誤讀，並指出其思想對現代印度外交戰略的影響。

📄 中國大陸帶路倡議在大洋洲的區域影響

title: 中國大陸帶路倡議在大洋洲的區域影響 abstract: 本文以2022年5月26日中國大陸外交部長王毅出訪太平洋島國期間欲簽訂一份廣泛貿易安全協議為例，運用社會建構主義來看中國大陸《帶路倡議》（The Belt and Road Initiative）的現階段政策效果。中國大陸在推行外交政策時，認為互動有助於化解彼此的認知差異，並會轉化認同，且互動過程也會有效增進雙方對彼此的理解度，進而建立共有知識群，這過程會反映出中國大陸自我認同與價值觀。有鑑於此，本文一部分將探討社會建構主義的發展、爭議及分析模式，另一部分將以大洋洲區域援助結構與中國大陸認知來做為觀察切入點。而其中援助結構包含澳洲、紐西蘭及美國等國在經濟、文化層面長期影響下，中國大陸現階段透過《帶路倡議》大量物質資源介入能否改變大洋洲區域援助結構，還是會形成區域內的大國競爭情況愈加強烈。最後，對中國大陸《帶路倡議》在大洋洲區域發展提出評估及展望。

📄 中東歐半總統制國家聯合內閣的組成和運作

title: 中東歐半總統制國家聯合內閣的組成和運作 abstract: 半總統制的聯合內閣如何形成？半總統制下的總統如何影響內閣的組成和運作？聯合內閣不同的運作模式如何影響聯合內閣的存續？是本文主要的研究問題。本文的結論如下：第一、中東歐多數的半總統制國家之總統是屬於無黨籍總統，憲法規定當選之後必須退出政黨運作。然而這些無黨籍總統並沒有退居二線或是扮演超然中立的角色，依然會運作其憲法上的權威主導或是介入內閣的運作。特別是當國會沒有任何一個政黨控制過半數時，總統可以主導選擇結盟的政黨對象，藉由組合多數來籌組多黨內閣。第二、半總統制下多黨內閣的組合基礎會影響內閣的存活時間。當聯盟政黨之間屬於便利聯盟的情況下較容易瓦解。當聯盟政黨之間是以意識形態的立場合作時，其存活期間相對較長。第三、半總統制的總統和總理的權力平衡關係在多黨內閣的情況下，較容易向總統方向傾斜，因為總理的政黨並沒有掌握國會的過半數且總統有較高的民主正當性，當多黨內閣的總理如果無法鞏固聯盟黨的支持，其內閣很容易失去多數，甚至最後被反對多數解職下台。