Wang’s Picnic
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Weekly issue

Wang's Picnic (2026/09/19)

Updated journals
42
Articles
82

This week, 42 journals published 82 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

American Sociological Review Journal of Information Technology & Politics Politics and Religion
British Journal of Political Science Journal of Political Economy Post-Soviet Affairs
British Journal of Sociology Journal of Political Science Education Public Choice
Comparative Political Studies Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Quarterly Journal of Political Science
Democratization Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Representation
Economic Sciences Research in PNAS Nations and Nationalism Social Forces
European Political Science Review Nature Reviews Psychology Social Problems
Gender & Society Parliamentary Affairs Social Science Computer Review
Government and Opposition Party Politics Social Science Quarterly
Japanese Journal of Political Science Political Behavior Sociological Methods & Research
Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Communication The International Journal of Press/Politics
Journal of Conflict Resolution Political Research Quarterly The Journal of Legislative Studies
Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Political Studies The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Journal of Human Rights Political Studies Review West European Politics

📚 American Sociological Review

📄 Organizational Consolidation: How Organizations Reflect or Refract Societal Hierarchies

To understand how organizations distribute resources, we need to understand how they come to evaluate their members as worthy. This article introduces “organizational consolidation”: the degree to which ascriptive statuses—race, gender, class—align with the context-specific criteria that actors use when evaluating one another. Building on relational inequality theory and inhabited institutionalism, we argue that organizational consolidation shapes which attributes stand out, how actors categorize one another, and how combinations of attributes yield recognition or marginalization. When consolidation is high, local meaning-making is more likely to reproduce patterns of recognition that track ascriptive statuses; when it is low, alternative patterns become possible. We develop a concept-methods package that turns this framework into a roadmap for observing local patterns of recognition: association rule mining, latent class analysis, and partial order set modeling. We illustrate the value of these tools in a small, racially diverse U.S. high school where consolidation is low: teachers evaluate students through combinations of race, gender, and organizationally relevant characteristics, rather than any single attribute. By formalizing organizational consolidation as a measurable structural condition, we provide a diagnostic for comparing how organizations reflect or refract broader social hierarchies—shifting focus to how and under what organizational conditions inequality takes the specific forms it does.

📄 Strategic Inversion: How Refugees Reconfigure Everyday Resistance under Benevolent Oppression

  • Author(s): Rekha Krishnan, Aloysius Marcus Kahindi, Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode
  • Link: Read the article
What does everyday resistance look like among dominated populations experiencing paternalistic care rather than extraction? Research on everyday resistance emerged from contexts where power extracts surplus from the oppressed. In this scholarship, the backstage is a space where the dominated cultivate hidden transcripts to cope with oppression, while the frontstage, where performances are enacted to those in power, is primary. Inversions of this order, when they occur, are momentary. Using ethnographic fieldwork in two Tanzanian refugee camps, we show that under benevolent oppression—control justified by paternalistic care rather than extraction—dominated populations respond through “strategic inversion”: a reordering of dramaturgical space where the backstage is primary and the frontstage remains tactical. Refugees moved the center of social life backstage, into a thriving underground economy, and kept up frontstage displays of helplessness to shield it. Within this alternative social order, competition and cooperation operated as two routes to heshima (dignity/deference). Competition resisted the uniformity of the refugee label, and cooperation rejected the helplessness it presumed. Refugees sustained this inversion through compliance flooding , rule-following performances so dense that officials could not tell forbidden from permitted activity; embedded enforcement , as guards became accomplices in maintaining the clandestine economy they policed; and collective coordination , where communities maintained alert systems and consistent performances to shield backstage activities. Our analysis extends research on everyday resistance by demonstrating that under benevolent oppression, subordinates actively build and experience empowerment, rather than merely imagining alternative moral orders or experiencing them briefly in bounded rituals.

📚 British Journal of Political Science

📄 Reshaping Belonging: National Identity Change in Post-Referendum Britain

  • Author(s): Jac M. Larner, James David Griffiths, Daniel Wincott
  • Link: Read the article
National identity is usually treated as a stable driver of political behaviour, yet we know little about whether it responds to major political events. We examine how two pivotal electoral events – the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and the 2016 EU Referendum – were associated with changes in citizens’ sense of national belonging. Using the 2014–2025 British Election Study Internet Panel, we show that both referendums precipitated significant shifts in national identification, primarily among those on the losing side. Post-referendum changes in Scotland proved temporary, but among Remain voters British identification fell substantially and remained depressed through 2025, with the gap between winners and losers widening over time. These findings suggest national identity is more event-sensitive than commonly assumed, and that divisive referendums may leave durable marks on how citizens in multinational states relate to the state by eroding shared national sentiment.

📚 British Journal of Sociology

📄 The Road to Nowhere: Being Rooted in a Region Does Little to Predict Support for Populist Parties or Opposition to Migration and Social Change

  • Author(s): Achim Hildebrandt, Eva‐Maria Trüdinger, Simon Stocker, Ilirjana Ajazaj
  • Link: Read the article
In his influential book The road to somewhere David Goodhart claims that a split between a majority of people who are rooted in particular places or groups (the “Somewheres”) and a minority of people who are or can be at home anywhere in the world (the “Anywheres”) is at the heart of many contemporary political conflicts. According to him, the Anywheres dominate public discourse and political decisions, while the preferences of the Somewheres are neglected. Goodhart's arguments have been widely cited but rarely systematically tested. We conduct such a test for the following three central claims of his book: Somewheres oppose migration and social change and almost all supporters of populist parties are Somewheres. We extend the focus beyond the UK with an analysis in Germany and Switzerland, two countries where subnational identities are relatively pronounced. We contribute methodologically by identifying Somewheres and Anywheres according to their perceptions of regional identity collected via web probing. Respondents are classified based on their responses to an open‐ended question in an online survey asking why they feel close—or not close—to their region of residence. Contrary to Goodhart's claims, we find no differences between Somewheres and other respondents in attitudes towards social change and migration. And certainly not all supporters of populist parties are Somewheres. New and unconventional explanations for the causes of populist revolt in established democracies are timely, but without rigorous empirical tests in different settings they risk leading to false conclusions.

📚 Comparative Political Studies

📄 Inhibitory Institutions: The Tradeoffs of Public Goods Quantity and Quality

Governments frequently invest in public goods that citizens don’t want, yet voters hesitate to punish politicians who build useless or corrupt projects. I introduce the concept of inhibitory institutions—rules that allow state or societal actors to review, obstruct, or veto public investments before they are approved—and argue that they improve public goods quality at the cost of reduced quantity. This quantity-quality tradeoff binds most tightly when bureaucrats enjoy career autonomy from politicians and political competition encourages institutional enforcement. I illustrate the tradeoff through case studies of metro projects in Bogotá and Lima, where divergent institutional conditions led to contrasting outcomes for the quantity and quality of construction. Quantitative evidence from local infrastructure projects in Colombia suggests that political alliances to bypass inhibitory rules increase spending but reduce quality. At a time when observers want to cut procedural checks to get things built, this article underscores the risks for what gets built.

📚 Democratization

📄 The loyal dissent: democratic backsliding and salience-conditional voting by national judges at the European Court of Human Rights

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📚 Economic Sciences Research in PNAS

📄 Assessing the impacts of sufficient and reliable electricity in low-resource healthcare facilities

  • Author(s): Ryan McCord, Samuel B. Miles, Jackson M. Mughuma, Daniel M. Kammen, Laura H. Kwong
  • Link: Read the article
Health systems across sub-Saharan Africa often lack the electricity needed for lighting, medical, diagnostic, and sterilization equipment, and refrigeration. More than one billion people globally rely on facilities with no electricity or a highly unreliable supply. Using survey data, sensor data, and monthly health system records from 303 facilities across three provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we provide estimates of the impact of having sufficient and reliable power on inpatient mortality rates, patient utilization rates, and staffing. Using longitudinal targeted maximum likelihood estimation and two-way fixed effects models, we find that facilities with sufficient and reliable power ( > 22 h of power/day) experience a 41% reduction in mortality (a 1.8 percentage point reduction from control facilities, where mortality rates average 4.5%). For a subset of facilities where we measure reliability over time, we find that during months where the uptime > 22 h/d, mortality rates are 1.8 percentage points lower, suggesting that sustaining reliable power is also important. In facilities with reliable power there is also a 17% increase in the number of outpatients and a 24% increase in the number of days nurses work. Our results underscore the critical role of electricity as a foundational health system input with large impacts on patient survival and service quality, and demonstrate the potential of low-cost survey tools for capturing reliability in data-scarce settings.

📄 Air pollution after the shutdown of US embassy monitoring

  • Author(s): Zoey Yiyuan Zhou, Fanyu Wang, Allen H. Huang, Douglas Almond
  • Link: Read the article
For more than a decade, US embassies and consulates provided independent, publicly accessible air-quality information in cities worldwide. In 2025, this program was abruptly suspended, generating sharp drops in the availability of trusted pollution information. We evaluate the consequences of this change using real-time satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD) and a matched difference-in-differences design with same-country control cities. Across 46 cities, we find no systematic trends prior to the halt in US reporting, and a prompt 24 to 33% increase in local pollution levels after reporting stopped. Calibrating AOD to concurrent preshutdown embassy PM 2.5 readings, the main estimate corresponds to an approximate PM 2.5 -equivalent increase of 1.9 μ g/m 3 under our preferred conservative translation, with alternative approaches yielding values between 1.5 and 16.3 μ g/m 3 . Estimated effects are largest and most persistent in cities with poor substitutes for the US-provided data. The findings indicate that pollution reductions are not guaranteed by either previous air quality improvements or the legacy of reliable environmental data.

📚 European Political Science Review

📄 Not my democracy: conceptions, discontent, and participation in Europe

Citizens differ not only in how strongly they support democracy, but also in what they expect democracy to be. Yet we know less about whether these democratic expectations shape satisfaction with democracy (SwD) and, through it, political participation (PP) in established European democracies. We first develop a mechanism linking citizens’ prioritized understandings of democracy (UoD) to SwD and unconventional political participation (UPP). Satisfaction with democracy is treated as an indicator of perceived congruence between citizens’ democratic ideals and how democracy works in practice. Second, we test this mechanism systematically in Europe using ESS Round 10 data, including almost 60,000 respondents in 31 countries. We find that (a) citizens’ conceptions of democracy affect SwD and (b) that SwD is a mediator for the impact UoD have on UPP.

📚 Gender & Society

📄 Flexible Motherhood and the Unequal Logics of Women’s Work: Chinese Migrant Mothers in Singapore

How do women navigate contradictory expectations about motherhood and employment as they cross national and cultural boundaries? This study explores how college-educated Chinese migrants in Singapore interpret the meaning of work throughout migration and motherhood, contributing to feminist scholarship on transnational mobility and the gendered division of labor. Analysis of 36 in-depth interviews reveals how migrant women encounter shifting expectations about maternal employment across the intertwined processes of migration and motherhood. We call this pattern flexible motherhood : a gendered work–family schema that expects mothers to continually adjust their employment to serve collective family goals, particularly husbands’ careers and children’s education, while treating such adjustment as moral devotion. Despite divergent migration pathways, including family migrants who accompanied their husbands as they relocated and independent migrants who initially came to Singapore for their own education or employment, women experienced similar employment trajectories and institutional barriers to re-entering the workforce as migrant mothers. Across stages of migration and motherhood, women’s narratives suggest that flexible motherhood works less as a single mechanism than as an organizing logic. In the end, this study highlights how the demand for maternal flexibility reproduces gender inequality in families pursuing mobility across borders.

📄 Depoliticizing Gender Inequality: Right-Wing Cultural Repertoires of Gender Equality

European right-wing actors increasingly profess commitment to gender equality while opposing measures designed to combat gendered inequalities. While research has examined how elite actors and party rhetoric instrumentalize the language of gender equality to mobilize support, how right-wing voters understand and use the language of gender equality remains unclear. Drawing on survey data and a series of focus groups, this article analyzes how right-wing voters in the gender-equal context of Denmark depoliticize gendered inequalities. I show that right-wing voters and members of Gen Z understand gender equality differently than other groups in Denmark, and I identify two distinct cultural repertoires of gender equality that right-wing voters enact. Although older right-wing populist voters employ a repertoire that essentializes differences between men and women while young right-wing voters adopt a neoliberal repertoire centered around career, each repertoire depoliticizes existing inequalities while idealizing gender equality. These findings emphasize that commitment to gender equality does not mean commitment to combating gender inequality and show how devotion to the ideal of gender equality can still lead to the naturalization of inequality.

📚 Government and Opposition

📄 Culture Trumps Class and Place: How the Populist Radical Right Thrives on Sociocultural Conflicts in Western Europe

Using original survey data from seven Western European countries, this article investigates which social conflicts populist radical right parties (PRRPs) represent. Methodologically, it innovates by measuring individuals’ positions within conflicts combined with the importance they attach to them, capturing both attitudinal alignment and salience. The analysis tests whether traditional cleavages or new conflicts related to globalisation and cultural value change better explain PRRP voting. Findings show that PRRPs predominantly represent new conflicts – individuals opposing cosmopolitanism, LGBTQ+ rights and environmental sustainability – rather than class or territorial divides. While socio-structural traits such as being a production worker or rural resident predict PRRP voting, supporting these groups does not. This decoupling of structure and conflict positions suggests working-class and rural voters are motivated more by culturally reframed grievances than by class- or place-based solidarities. These results highlight the weak link between classic cleavages and PRRP voting, underscoring the centrality of cultural demarcation in today’s political conflict.

📄 Why Northern Ireland’s Institutions Need Reform

In a previous volume of this journal, scholars of consociational power-sharing counselled against reform of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions. Since then, repeated episodes of collapse and dysfunction have necessitated reconsideration of the case for institutional reform. This article argues that a sensible case now exists for reforms to enhance the stability and functionality of Northern Ireland’s consociation. Situating its analysis within broader debates on the evolution of consociational systems, it draws on elite political discourse and original public opinion data (N = 2,034) to assess support for reform and to consider associated trade-offs. We show that changing electoral and ethnonational dynamics have occasioned shifts in elite political attitudes to reform, and highlight public appetite for reform, including in relation to one of the consociation’s most powerful vetoes. Sustainable reform, the article concludes, will be most feasible when elite receptivity to change, civic involvement and (subtle) external support converge.

📚 Japanese Journal of Political Science

📄 Temporal spillovers in mixed-member systems: legislative incumbency and party-list voting in Taiwan

Does personal incumbency advantage generate lasting party-level gains across electoral tiers? We examine whether winning a single-member district (SMD) seat increases a party’s proportional representation (PR) vote share in the subsequent election under Taiwan’s mixed-member majoritarian system. Using constituency-level data from four legislative elections, we employ a regression discontinuity design that compares parties narrowly winning and losing SMD contests. Estimating this temporal spillover is complicated by “reverse contamination”: supporters of minor parties may strategically support major-party candidates in SMD races while continuing to vote for their preferred parties in the PR tier. Consequently, raw SMD–PR associations may understate the party-level returns to district incumbency. We address this problem by analyzing changes in constituency-level PR support demeaned by each party’s nationwide electoral shift, thereby isolating localized gains from broader changes in party popularity. The results show that narrowly securing an SMD seat increases the party’s PR vote share in the subsequent election. These effects are concentrated in southern Taiwan and in highly competitive constituencies. The findings demonstrate that personal incumbency can produce durable party-level benefits across electoral tiers

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 The effects of the Russia–Ukraine war on Ethiopian foreign policy roles

This paper assesses the impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on altering the foreign policy role conceptions of Ethiopia. In the following paper, we briefly describe role theory as a framework to examine changes in Ethiopian foreign policy that resulted from the shock of the war. We then use this framework to examine the impact that the Russia–Ukraine war had on Ethiopian foreign policy. We find that the war did not fundamentally change Ethiopia’s primary role conception as hegemon in the Horn of Africa, but it did change the means by which hegemony could be achieved. However, the war did cause Ethiopia to abandon its secondary role as defender of territorial integrity and national sovereignty.

📚 Journal of Conflict Resolution

📄 Powerful or Powerless? The Influence of Gender Advocates in Peace Negotiations

While the Women, Peace and Security sector advocates for the inclusion of gender experts in peace processes to improve outcomes for women, empirical support for their effectiveness remains inconclusive. This paper tests whether individuals designated to advocate for gender-specific issues are influential or ineffective. Leveraging an original dataset capturing the role of 2,300 delegates across 116 comprehensive peace agreements finalized between 1990 and 2020, we find that gender advocates increase the likelihood that agreements contain provisions for women. However, investigating the case of Northern Ireland using interviews and archival analysis, we find that the systemic masculinized structure of peace negotiations hinders advocates’ overall influence. Consequently, this paper explains how these actors are simultaneously powerful and powerless. Findings capture gender advocates’ limitations, caution against individuals bearing sole responsibility for gender considerations in peace processes, and expand the conceptualization of what it is to be an expert.

📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 Election delay: public support for postponing elections during public health crises

  • Author(s): Hyoungrohk Chu, Haruka Nagao, Rigao Liu, William Hatungimana, Leeann Youn
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Journal of Human Rights

📄 Freedom within and through culture: A structural engagement with the anthropological concept of culture within the context of cultural rights

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📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 Does following or engaging in online discussions trigger political participation? Results of two online experiments

  • Author(s): Carina Weinmann, Ole Kelm, Stefan Marschall, Gerhard Vowe
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 In cyber we trust? Understanding election legitimacy in the age of electronic election systems

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📄 Time to politicization: the emergence and effects of politics on science YouTube videos

  • Author(s): Aspen Omapang, Breanna Green, Chao Yu, Roxana Muenster, Drew Margolin
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 <b>Subversion: the strategic weaponization of narratives</b>

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📄 The bad citizen? Framing non-voting on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. election

  • Author(s): Chelsea Butkowski, Sam Wilson, Eric Wiemer, Fritz Kessler
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 How do parties use political advertising in election campaigns? Examining issue competition in advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram for the 2021 federal election in Germany

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📄 Recognizing fake news spreading in social networks using ensemble learning

  • Author(s): Fengjiao Zhou, Rui Ma, Mohamad Shaharudin Samsurijan, Ying Yang
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 Political shocks asymmetrically consolidate right-wing communities on Twitter

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📄 (In)direct control, freedom and the democratic imperative to refuse AI

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📄 Organizing the data-driven campaign: Party officers, external providers and party grassroots in Spain

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📄 Rethinking digital trace inference in political communication: evidence from a simulated platform experiment

  • Author(s): Jiyoun Suk, Wei Zhong, Yini Zhang, Meredith Pruden, Yunkang Yang, Chenchen Mao, Dominic DiFranzo
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Journal of Political Economy

📄 Quota Mechanisms: Finite-Sample Optimality and Robustness

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📄 Regulatory Competition in the US Life Insurance Industry

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📚 Journal of Political Science Education

📄 Teaching the History of Western Political Thought in Chinese Universities: A Framework of Context, Dialogue, and Application

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📄 Statement of Retraction: Promoting Youth Political Engagement Through Serious Games: A Quasi-Experimental Study on Local Election Boardgame in Thailand

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📚 Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

📄 Information Content in Text and Voice Response Formats for Open-Ended Survey Questions

Open-ended survey questions provide valuable data alongside closed-ended questions, but they can be challenging for respondents, leading to decreases in response quality. Our study explores how survey researchers can design open-ended questions to improve response quality and yield more informative answers. In particular, we examine the effect of requesting respondents to answer questions via voice input compared to text input. We use a US sample and questions adapted from popular social survey programs. By experimentally varying the response format, we examine which format produces answers with a higher amount of information. Our findings show that spoken responses tend to be longer and also slightly more informative in terms of entropy than written responses. We also identify sociodemographic and interview context-related factors that may influence the effectiveness of voice formats in certain settings.

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

📄 Mathematical Engineering of Deep Learning

Mathematical Engineering of Deep Learning: By LiquetBenoit, MokaSarat and NazarathyYoni, 2025. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman &amp; Hall. Pages: 414. Price: $89.99. ISBN: 9781032288284.

📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 Nationalism, Balance of Power, and World Order: Untangling Neorealism's Troubled Relationship With Nationalism

While many explain the crisis of the liberal international order through nationalism, its treatment by neorealist scholars remains frustrating. Untangling the nationalism–neorealism relationship would help explain the current crisis and enhance neorealism's explanatory power. First, this article reviews and critically assesses neorealist scholarship (defensive, offensive and neoclassical realism) about nationalism. Then, using these insights, I propose a distinctively neorealist theory of nationalism. International power shifts reshape nationalism, which, in turn, conditions the behaviour and discourse of the great powers. Rising material capabilities foster offensive nationalism; diminishing capabilities foster defensive nationalism. Hence, global power shifts—foremost the United States' decline relative to China and Russia—transformed the great powers' nationalism, breaking the post‐Cold War order. This approach enables predictions about nationalism's future. If the global power distribution stabilises, the ‘distribution’ of nationalism should stabilise, too; the evolution of nationalism shows a degree of predictability. Pursuing a ‘neorealist nationalism’ research agenda helps tackle fundamental questions about the international order.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 The role of the body in generating the self

Nature Reviews Psychology, Published online: 16 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00619-1The role of the body in generating the self

📚 Parliamentary Affairs

📄 Who serves on more committees? Committee assignment workload and electoral outcomes in South Korea

This article examines the determinants and electoral consequences of multiple standing committee assignments in the Korean National Assembly (17th–20th, 2004–20). Drawing on distributive, informational, and partisan theories of legislative organization, the analysis employs fixed-effects linear probability models to show that triple committee assignment is disproportionately associated with junior, younger, and female legislators, consistent with a workload burden interpretation. Yet the same assignments are positively associated with subsequent nomination and re-election, suggesting that workload also functions as a credible loyalty signal that party selectors reward, a dual-character pattern that neither a pure burden nor a pure opportunity account alone can explain. These findings contribute to comparative legislative studies by introducing committee assignment quantity as a theoretically meaningful dimension and connecting legislative workload allocation to legislators’ electoral careers.

📄 Immigration and voter turnout in Canada

Immigrants represent a growing share of the electorate in many democracies. Their political participation is crucial for the quality of democracy and representation, yet they vote to a lesser extent than native-born citizens. In this research, we examine voter turnout among immigrants in Canada, a particularly relevant case given the high share of its population that is born abroad and its immigration politics. We first show that the apparent small turnout gap between immigrants and native-born Canadians hides important heterogeneity among immigrants. Specifically, the size of the gap is heavily a function of the number of years spent in the country and is also linked to the regime type of newcomers’ country of origin. That said, conventional models of voter turnout make sense of most of the differences in turnout rates between natives and immigrants, with age having the greatest explanatory power. We discuss the implications of our findings for electoral participation and immigration politics.

📄 The negative spillover effect of political harassment toward MPs: evidence from MPs personal staff

Harassment politicians face has direct consequences on their working reality, yet the indirect spillover effects on those who witness it remain underexplored. In this study, we examine how exposure to harassment against members of parliament (MPs) affects their personal staff. We theorize that witnessing harassment towards MPs creates negative spillover effects that discourage staffers from politics, and that these effects are gendered. Drawing on original survey data collected among personal staff of MPs in Germany and the UK (N = 922), our findings show that the majority of staffers witness harassment and are discouraged from politics as a result. Moreover, women, and particularly those working for women MPs, report higher levels of discouragement. Our results suggest that when political role models experience harassment, the established positive effect reverses: their example discourages rather than inspires.

📚 Party Politics

📄 How members and elites make sense of ideological change: Natural evolution, pragmatic adaptation, or betrayal in the (Northern) League

How do party members and representatives make sense of ideological change? This article tackles this question by studying one of the most important party transformations in contemporary European politics: the shift of the (Northern) League from populist regionalism to populist radical right politics under Matteo Salvini. Drawing on 60 semi-structured in-depth interviews with members and representatives, the analysis identifies three recurrent narratives: natural evolution (the national turn as the completion of the federalist project), pragmatic adaptation (change as electorally and strategically necessary), and betrayal (a rupture with the founding identity). The survival of the residual Padanian identity is no longer sustained by ideology, but loosely surfaces in rituals such as the annual gathering at Pontida, where it is blended with the state-wide symbolism. The findings suggest that the mass party model has facilitated the transformation while preventing overt infighting. This invites further research into the interpretive work during party change.

📄 Varieties of left-wing authoritarianism? The local foundations and intra-party heterogeneity of the German challenger party BSW

  • Author(s): Eric Linhart, Jan Philipp Thomeczek, Manès Weisskircher, Benjamin Höhne
  • Link: Read the article
Research has emphasized both the existence of left-wing authoritarian attitudes among the European electorate and a lack of political supply. In Germany, this dynamic changed with the rise of the BSW. Advancing research on left-wing authoritarianism in general and the BSW specifically, we rely on original Voting Advice Application (VAA) data from six city elections in 2024, allowing us to study the supply- and demand-side at the local level. We highlight three findings: First, BSW’s local-level positions vary widely across policies, including left-wing, moderate, and (moderately) right-wing stances. Second, BSW’s intra-party heterogeneity is higher on socio-cultural than on socio-economic issues. Third, BSW voters’ answers to VAA questions are more right-leaning than their self-placement. Our findings on the BSW offer key insights into an empirically observable case of left-wing authoritarianism, highlighting nuanced perspectives on the ideology of an emerging political phenomenon.

📚 Political Behavior

📄 Credible Prejudice? When and Why Mainstream Party Adoption of Far-Right Rhetoric Weakens Anti-Prejudice Norms

This article examines whether mainstream political parties adopt prejudiced rhetoric from the far right and how such shifts shape anti-prejudice norms. Building on existing work, I argue that mainstream parties are particularly influential in weakening anti-prejudice norms because they possess greater normative credibility and legitimacy than far-right parties. Empirically, the article combines cross-national observational evidence with two preregistered survey experiments in Germany and Denmark. Using parliamentary speeches from six European countries between 1994 and 2022, I document rising mainstream party anti-Muslim rhetoric and its association with weaker norms against holding far-right views. The experiments provide causal evidence for the argument. In Germany, exposure to prejudiced rhetoric weakens anti-prejudice norms, but only when voiced by mainstream parties, rather than far right parties, likely due to their normative credibility and legitimacy. In Denmark, comparable effects are absent, consistent with decades of mainstream accommodation having already normalized such rhetoric. The experimental results also show that rhetoric targeting Muslims weakens anti-prejudice norms toward out-groups more broadly, suggesting spillover effects. These findings have important implications for future scholarship: when mainstream parties adopt prejudiced rhetoric from the far right, they affect not only electoral politics, but also the broader social norm environment.

📚 Political Communication

📄 Does Office Type Determine Gendered Campaign Messages?

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📄 The Democratic Cost of Pursuing Virality: A Study into Parliamentary Communications

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📄 Do Your Own Research: What Skepticism of Expertise Means for the News Media in the U.S.

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📚 Political Research Quarterly

📄 Candidate Gender and District Ideological Alignment in U.S. Congressional Elections, 2002–2020

Candidate ideology impacts a wide range of electoral outcomes, but are there gendered differences in the effects of candidate ideology? Using a unique dataset of U.S. congressional elections between 2002 and 2020, we examine candidate-level factors (gender, ideology, and partisanship) and district-level political factors (district ideology and partisanship), and the interaction between these candidate and district-level factors. We first compare two measurements of candidate ideology for congressional incumbents of both major parties: absolute extremity and ideological distance from the district. Although there are partisan differences, we generally find that women are more ideologically extreme than men. We then examine how ideological distance from the district impacts three dependent variables, likelihood of running unopposed, vote share, and probability of winning election, and test how candidate gender interacts with ideological distance from the district. We find that incumbent women are less likely to run unopposed and have a lower vote share than incumbent men. Overall, it appears that women congressional candidates may be more ideologically extreme and are more likely to be punished for their ideological positions than men.

📄 The Evolution of Committee Agenda Control in the Antebellum U.S. House of Representatives

Gatekeeping is viewed as an essential element of committee power in the U.S. Congress, but its emergence is not well understood. The House of Representatives moved to a system of standing committees by 1825. We investigated whether that move gave committees gatekeeping power prior to the Civil War or layered committees atop the earlier Jeffersonian system centering consequential legislative action on the floor. Using original data from the House Journal , we find evidence of institutional layering, with elements of gatekeeping – jurisdictional clarity, positive agenda setting, and negative agenda setting – developing unevenly and largely through changes in the behavior of members rather than formal reform of the House to empower its committees.

📚 Political Studies

📄 The changing meaning of left-right self-placement in the United Kingdom

Understanding how voters use the left-right scale is essential, as it is not only related to vote choice but also underpins how political scientists study ideology. This article finds that the way voters use the left-right scale is variable. Using British Election Study Internet Panel data from 2014 to 2024, I find that while economic and cultural values are both related to left-right self-placement, this varies both between individuals and over time. Those on the left of the self-placement scale can best be differentiated from one another by the strength of their economic values. For those on the right, cultural values are more useful in separating between different self-placement levels. Over time, left-right self-placement has become increasingly related to cultural values alongside economic values, driven by movements by people on both sides of the left-right scale. These findings indicate that even within one country, the meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right’ vary.

📄 The spatial politics of International Climate Finance: A case of India

  • Author(s): Soham Banerjee, Dishil Shrimankar, Matthew Paterson
  • Link: Read the article
Do political parties shape where International Climate Funds are allocated? We examine this question in the context of India, where International Climate Funds create opportunities for the central government to leverage externally funded resources to advance domestic political interests. Drawing on a novel geo-coded dataset of project locations from the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, we show that projects are more likely to be allocated to constituencies represented by co-partisans of the Prime Minister’s party, and that this effect is strongest in competitive constituencies within states governed by opposition parties, where the central government has the sharpest incentives to build new support. This is surprising because existing literature on the Clean Development Mechanism suggests that decisions on project allocations are depoliticized. By demonstrating otherwise, this article contributes to the literature on International Climate Funds by demonstrating the importance of domestic politics in shaping its distribution.

📚 Political Studies Review

📄 Populist profiles of young adults: Differences in political and emotional dimensions

Against the backdrop of prevalent views of populism as either a monolithic or a dichotomous category, exploring the diversity of profiles characterising populist citizens becomes crucial. Based on quantitative analyses of a Portuguese surveyed sample of 1047 young adults (aged 18–30), this article explores how citizens cluster around populist, democratic, immigration, and political values. Four profiles emerged (one non-populist and three populist): democratic pluralist , pluralist populist , anti-democratic populist , and democratic populist . These profiles are further examined to understand whether and how they differ regarding political and emotional dimensions. Our data show the coexistence of clear and expected profiles linked to left- and right-wing ideology, alongside a profile of young adults who intend to vote for Chega (a radical right-wing populist party) but who surprisingly display democratic and pluralist values. Moreover, negative emotions and institutional distrust are inextricably linked to populist attitudes, regardless of the populist profile. The cluster of far-right populists is the angriest and most threatened by the country’s political situation.

📄 Shared power, unequal influence? Gender dynamics in collective leadership

Party leaders play a crucial role in shaping candidate selection, government appointments, and party strategies. Despite progress in women’s political representation, leadership positions remain male-dominated, limiting gender equality and intra-party democracy. The increasing adoption of collective leadership structures—such as collective leadership models—offers an opportunity to examine how gender influences access to power and political influence within political organizations. Existing scholarship on collective leadership has primarily explored its emergence, typologies, and organizational characteristics. However, little is known about how gender shapes pathways to collective leadership and the distribution of power within these structures. Research on gender and political leadership suggests that while crises may create openings for women in leadership, their authority is often constrained by gendered expectations and male-dominated party dynamics. This article integrates literature on collective leadership and gender in political parties to develop an analytical framework for understanding how power and responsibilities are allocated in mixed-gender collective leadership structures. By investigating these leadership dynamics, this study sheds light on how gendered power relations shape decision-making processes and broader parliamentary practices.

📚 Politics and Religion

📄 Religious authority and political solutions to conflict: experimental evidence from religious leaders in Israel

How do religious leaders influence support for political compromise in conflicts involving sacred values? While existing literature suggests religious leaders can be effective peace entrepreneurs, their actual influence remains debated. We examine this question through two survey experiments in Israel, varying religious leaders’ religious authority and political credibility to understand their ability to generate support for compromise in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our results reveal important limitations on religious leaders’ influence: while we find modest effects of combined religious and political authority among religious respondents, neither form of authority alone significantly affects support for peace. Our findings suggest religious leaders’ capacity to promote political compromise is more constrained than previously theorized. When effects do emerge, they concentrate among already-religious audiences, suggesting religious leaders may better reinforce than transform political attitudes. These results contribute to understanding conditions under which religious authority shapes political behavior and highlight practical challenges in leveraging religious leadership for conflict resolution.

📄 Navigating secularism and diversity: understanding the disapproval of government employees wearing majority and minority religious symbols in Belgium

  • Author(s): Guido Priem, Cecil Meeusen, Bart Meuleman, Koen Abts
  • Link: Read the article
While the right to practice one’s religion is considered a fundamental value in Western European democracies, there is considerable debate about government employees wearing religious symbols. In this study, we test whether disapproval of civil servants wearing religious symbols originates from a general opposition against the expression of religion in public settings or from prejudice, specifically Islamophobia and Antisemitism. We test this by analyzing a split ballot experiment, which assesses the acceptance of government employees wearing three different religious symbols: the Christian cross, the Muslim headscarf, and the Jewish yarmulke. On the one hand, we find that an endorsement of the right to publicly express one’s religion predicts support for government employees wearing any religious symbol. Yet, prejudice, particularly Islamophobia, predicted opposition against both the Muslim headscarf and the Jewish yarmulke, overturning the abovementioned effect, indicating that these attitudes are closely aligned with attitudes regarding the place of Islam in societies.

📚 Post-Soviet Affairs

📄 From actors to practices: new typology of opposition from Russia and Belarus

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📄 Democracy under fire: rhetorical accountability and wartime governance in Ukraine

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📚 Public Choice

📄 Cross-tier incumbency spillovers: evidence from India

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

📄 A model of criminal justice discretion

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

📚 Quarterly Journal of Political Science

📄 The primary premium: Why legislators are incentivized to side with primary voters over general election voters

  • Author(s): Sarah E. Anderson, Daniel M. Butler, Laurel Harbridge-Yong
  • Link: Read the article
How are legislators incentivized to behave when their primary and general electorates disagree about an issue? We argue that primary electorates are generally more unified in their issue preferences and more sensitive to roll-call positions than general electorates, incentivizing legislators to prioritize primary voters when facing conflicting demands from the two groups. Using the 2016 Cooperative Election Study and an original survey experiment with over 13,000 respondents, we show that primary voters are both more unified and more likely to adjust their vote choice based on policy alignment. When we combine electorate unity and voter sensitivity, we find that US senators had more to gain by siding with their primary electorate in 84% of the votes where they were cross-pressured. This helps explain why politicians are incentivized to cater to their primary electorate − shaping patterns of representation and policy outcomes in American politics.

📚 Representation

📄 Trust-based or Sanction-based Dynamics? Size and Representation in Local Government

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📄 A Stable Two-Party System? The Case of Taiwan

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📄 Bridging the Gap? Citizens’ and Regional MPs’ Representational Preferences in EU Affairs

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📚 Social Forces

📄 Curricular-credential decoupling: how schools respond to college and career readiness policy

This study examines schools’ college and career readiness (CCR) policy responses through the lens of decoupling. We investigate how high schools have jointly implemented career and technical education (CTE) and industry-based certifications (IBCs), and whether there is evidence of curricular-credential decoupling via misalignment between the subject areas of students’ CTE coursework and IBC completion. Descriptive analyses of Texas’s statewide longitudinal dataset (n = 2,119,750) demonstrate the rapid rise in certification rates combined with minimal change in CTE course-taking patterns and a concomitant decline in the rate of CTE-IBC alignment, suggesting schools may be using IBCs as a superficial way to meet CCR requirements. Regression analyses show modest relationships between student characteristics and IBC receipt and CTE-IBC misalignment, while schools explain a substantial proportion of variation. We develop a typology based on these school-level rates, which may be a useful tool for understanding schools’ strategies for CCR implementation across state policy contexts. By comparing school characteristics across typology categories, we highlight factors that may contribute to misalignment and inform policy.

📚 Social Problems

📄 Christian, pagan, positivist: the religious repertoires of white nationalism

Scholarship on the far right often treats Christianity as the dominant religious frame structuring contemporary white nationalist politics. I argue that this emphasis overstates the movement’s metaphysical coherence and obscures the multiple existential orientations competing to articulate racial dominance. Drawing on Smith’s (2021) typology of Christian, Pagan, and Positivist orientations toward the secular and Swidler’s (1986) theory of culture in action, I conceptualize these existential orientations as macro-cultural toolkits that actors deploy to render race, nation, and political action meaningful. I draw on more than 600,000 posts (2001–2022) from the white nationalist forum Stormfront, combined with a novel dataset of opt-in user social groups to classify religious affiliation. Using a combination of computational tools, I show that Christian, Pagan, and Positivist repertoires are empirically distinct yet durably co-present. Christian discourse moralizes race through themes of family and decline; Pagan discourse sacralizes vitality, heritage, and struggle; and Positivist discourse rationalizes hierarchy through economics and biology. The persistence of these differentiated repertoires indicates that racial projects are stabilized through internally plural cultural supply rather than doctrinal unity. More broadly, my findings suggest a generalizable sociological dynamic where movements organized around secular concepts may derive durability from metaphysical plurality rather than coherence.

📄 Insert quote here: selective modulation in protest coverage

Why do some social movements get favorable media attention while others find their messages marginalized or distorted? While extensive research examines factors shaping protest coverage, researchers have overlooked a crucial mechanism: the selection and framing of direct quotes from movement actors. We argue that quotes function as key sites of selective modulation, a process through which journalistic practices systematically amplify or diminish the voices of movement participants based on specific protest characteristics. We develop and test this framework, identifying protest size, tactical choices, organizational capacity, and issue focus as key modulators. Using a mixed-methods approach, we first apply computational analysis to over 12,000 news reports (2022–2024), revealing that these modulators systematically predict the presence, frequency, and substantive content (grievance, demand, participation) of protester and target quotes. Second, a conjoint survey experiment (N = 496) demonstrates that quote inclusion in media coverage enhances perceived protest effectiveness, with issue-focused quotes (articulating demands or grievances) proving more impactful than participation-focused statements. By identifying quotes as a specific textual mechanism through which journalists negotiate media representation and offering the selective modulation framework, we extend theories of movement-media interaction and clarify how movements gain or lose legitimacy in media coverage.

📄 School discipline and the racial economy of black and white boys’ emotions in early childhood

Racial-gender disparities in school discipline remain a defining feature of U.S. education. The present study bridges the gap between the literature on racial-gender inequalities in school discipline with the emerging literature on racialized emotions. Based on ethnographic observations of Black and White boys in kindergarten and first grade, I investigate what role emotions play in racial discipline inequalities. I find that racialized emotions are deeply embedded within student-teacher disciplinary interactions. Racialized discipline triggered distinct emotions for Black and White boys. I also find that teachers respond to Black and White boys’ emotions in racialized ways. These findings illustrate how racialized emotions play a critical but understudied role in perpetuating racial inequalities in education.

📄 The political economy of sustainable urban development: a multilevel event history analysis of LEED project duration

This article extends sociological questions about the political economy of urban growth in relation to sustainable development. Drawing on the growth machine thesis (Molotch 1976), we argue that conflicts among pro-growth coalitions, environmentalists, and NIMBY activists are measurably embedded in construction project timelines. Using a geodatabase of all U.S. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) projects from 2007 to 2022, we employ multilevel event-history analysis to quantify this friction. The analysis reveals a central paradox: States with the most robust green policy regimes experience the longest project durations. A hierarchical cluster analysis demonstrates how these factors converge into distinct political-economic ecosystems. These ecosystems are composed of each state’s unique mix of economic conditions, regulatory policies, civic capacity for environmental advocacy, and historical patterns of racial segregation. These models explain nearly half of the state-level variation in project completion times, which translates to an average difference of about one year between states. Sustainable development outcomes are significantly shaped, not by project-specific characteristics alone, but by community factors tied to the political economy of placemaking.

📄 A culturally schematic view of racism: a case of black-led organizations in the deep south

The nonprofit sector has become an important social arena for scholarly inquiry into the nature of structural racism. Within the sector, scholars have examined the role of white philanthropists in exerting power that reinforced structural racism against Black-led organizations (BLOs) – those with an executive director (or equivalent role) and most full-time employees identifying as African American and whose mission serves a predominantly Black client base. Yet we know little about how these organizations, particularly in the Deep South with its legacy of racial injustice, navigate racialized dynamics in the nonprofit sector. Drawing upon 16 months of qualitative data in Montgomery, Alabama, including interviews with 20 BLOs, this paper examines how Black-led organizations in the Deep South understand and respond to racism in the nonprofit sector. Applying a cultural schema theoretical framework, I show how BLOs deploy cultural schemas to interpret racialized hierarchies and biases, as well as sector norms, shaping their responses through agency. The paper concludes by calling on scholars to develop a robust theory of racialization within the nonprofit sector that more effectively interrogates and understands its racial structure.

📚 Social Science Computer Review

📄 Leveraging Structural Information to Reconstruct Hidden Nodes in Propagation Graphs

While widely used for information exchange, social media networks are increasingly exploited to spread rumors and malicious content. It is essential to reconstruct propagation graphs to hold nodes accountable for such propagation. However, the dynamic and vast nature of social networks makes this task challenging. This study introduces Structural Hidden Node Identification (SHNI), a heuristic method for reconstructing partially observed propagation snapshots by identifying likely hidden participants. SHNI relies on the observed active nodes and structural neighborhood information, without requiring temporal traces, message content, user attributes, or network-specific supervised retraining; its structural parameters may be selected by expert knowledge or calibrated once and then reused across networks. Instead of materializing the entire graph in advance, the method supports on-demand neighborhood expansion from observed active nodes toward structurally relevant candidate nodes. It combines local activation pressure with a structural bridging component inspired by sociological principles of opinion formation, including local social influence, information bubbles, and the role of bridging nodes between groups. SHNI explores candidate hidden nodes through a priority-driven neighborhood expansion strategy, in which the most promising candidates are evaluated first, and further exploration stops when the heuristic evidence becomes insufficient. Experiments across different network structures show that SHNI achieves competitive reconstruction quality while maintaining low data requirements and transparent decision logic. These results indicate that SHNI is especially useful as an interpretable structural baseline when temporal traces, message content, or network-specific supervised training data are unavailable. The method may also be adapted to other propagation phenomena, such as epidemic spread or malware diffusion in computer networks.

📄 Rethinking Scale: The Efficacy of Fine-Tuned Open-Source LLMs in Large-Scale Reproducible Social Science Research

  • Author(s): Marcello Carammia, Stefano Maria Iacus, Giuseppe Porro
  • Link: Read the article
Large language models (LLMs) are distinguished by their architecture, parameter size, and performance capabilities. Social scientists have increasingly adopted LLMs to automate high-dimensional text classification tasks which are difficult to scale with human coders. Very large, closed-source models often deliver superior performance. However, reliance on large proprietary models raises concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and costs that make them impractical for large-scale research projects. In contrast, open-source models offer distinct advantages: they can be run locally (ensuring data privacy), fine-tuned for specific tasks, shared within the research community, and integrated into reproducible workflows. On the other hand, open-source models often underperform compared to commercial alternatives. In this study, we assess whether small, open-source LLMs – when fine-tuned appropriately – can match or exceed the performance of commercial alternatives such as GPT-4, while remaining feasible for large-scale academic research. To produce the labeled data that fine-tuning requires, we develop a hybrid annotation workflow in which several LLMs propose labels that human reviewers verify; this infrastructure is what makes fine-tuning feasible at scale. We apply this pipeline to three substantive social science classification tasks: coding tweets for human flourishing indicators, classifying European Parliament questions by policy area, and tagging datasets from the Harvard Dataverse. Our results show that fine-tuned models as small as Llama2-7B achieve performance on par with much larger closed models, offering a reproducible, low-cost alternative for computational social science research. We also explore the limits of fine-tuning effectiveness across model sizes and training set volumes. This work demonstrates a scalable and replicable approach to integrating open-source LLMs into empirical social science workflows.

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 Cultural Churches as Third Places and Relational Transitional Spaces Between Tradition and Innovation in Urban and Rural Areas

Objective Across Europe, declining religious participation has left many church buildings underused, while both rural and urban communities face shortages of accessible social infrastructure. In response, local actors are increasingly experimenting with the cultural repurposing of church spaces, transforming them into multifunctional places of encounter and fostering local niche innovations within social networks. Methods Based on an in‐depth qualitative case and network analysis of a cultural church in Lower Saxony, the characteristics of the cultural repurposing of an urban church are examined and compared with additional rural cultural churches in Germany. Results This article introduces a “rurbanity triad” to conceptualize social relations in their spatial context and combines it with the concept of third places, which has rarely been systematically applied to churches. This framework offers an opportunity to analyze cultural repurposing processes and discuss transitions, social networks, and community formation. Expanding cultural use contributes to sustainable regional development by extending the life cycle of existing buildings and strengthening community‐based social infrastructure. Conclusion The findings show that spatial factors significantly influence innovation processes related to the cultural use of church buildings, while social networks play a decisive role in shaping both the process and its outcomes.

📄 Not all Policy Losses Are the Same: How Judge–Public Co‐Partisanship Shapes Public Perceptions of the Court following a Judicial Policy Loss

  • Author(s): Nathan T. Carrington, Joseph Coll, Logan Strother
  • Link: Read the article
Objective We examine how judge–public co‐partisanship conditions the effects of policy losses on approval of the court and perceptions of the court as political and legal. Methods We use a repeated measure vignette experiment to examine the within‐respondent change in court approval and perceptions of the court as political and legal. Results We find that whether the deciding judge is a co‐partisan or out‐partisan crucially shapes federal court approval, perceived legality, and perceived politicization of the federal courts after the loss. Conclusion These findings suggest the costs of judicial decisions depend not only on policy disagreement but also on partisan alignment, underscoring the need to situate court outputs within their larger political context. Additionally, we also extend previous work on the Supreme Court by showing that similar effects are found when the court is lower in the judiciary hierarchy.

📄 From Need to Belong to Social Media Envy: Parallel Mediation Through Entertainment and Reality Alteration

Objective This study examines whether the need to belong predicts social media envy and explores the psychological mechanisms underlying this relationship by distinguishing between two dimensions of social media flow: entertainment and imaginative curiosity (EIC) and immersion and reality alteration (IRA). Methods Using two‐wave panel survey data, we estimate cross‐sectional and autoregressive regression models, followed by cross‐sectional and longitudinal mediation analyses. Results A stronger need to belong is associated with greater social media envy both cross‐sectionally and over time. Although need to belong is positively related to both dimensions of social media flow in cross‐sectional analyses, longitudinal evidence shows that it predicts only immersion and reality alteration. Longitudinal mediation analyses further demonstrate that immersion and reality alteration—but not entertainment and imaginative curiosity—significantly mediates the relationship between need to belong and subsequent social media envy. Conclusion The findings suggest that belonging needs contribute to social media envy primarily by fostering immersive forms of social media engagement rather than entertainment‐oriented experiences. By identifying immersion and reality alteration as the key psychological mechanism linking need to belong to envy, this study advances understanding of how different patterns of social media engagement predicts users' emotional well‐being.

📄 What Beliefs Are Central in the Climate Change Belief System Network?

Objective Climate change is one of the most polarized issues among the US public, and the beliefs that divide the public – cultural worldviews, political ideology, environmental orientation, perceived scientific consensus, and climate policy preferences – form an interconnected belief system. Belief systems have historically been understood as having a hierarchical structure, in which abstract, deep core beliefs constrain policy core and secondary beliefs. Recent work suggests that such a system can be understood as a network, in which beliefs are nodes, edges represent the relationships between them, and centrality captures a belief's structural importance. This paper asks which climate change beliefs are most central, and whether the answer depends on how the belief system is modeled. Methods I use original survey data from a quota‐based sample of 1,129 US residents collected in October 2017. Over the same 17 belief nodes, I estimate the belief system as both an undirected network, using a Gaussian graphical model, and a directed network, using a Bayesian network learned with hill‐climbing, tabu search, and constraint‐based algorithms. Structural importance is measured with bootstrapped betweenness, closeness, and strength centrality in the undirected model, and with out‐degree and Markov blanket size in the directed model. Results Structural importance cuts across the deep core, policy core, and secondary belief hierarchy that theory predicts. Individualism, perceived climate risk, and support for an international agreement are robustly central regardless of whether the network is modeled as undirected or directed, and support for an international agreement occupies the most upstream position in the directed network. Egalitarianism ranks highest on betweenness and closeness in the undirected network yet is peripheral in the directed one. Political ideology, partisanship, and perceived scientific consensus rank low on nearly every measure in both models. Conclusions A belief's structural importance likely depends on both the type of belief and modeling assumptions, complicating any single account of how climate change beliefs are organized. Rather than replacing the hierarchical approach common in policy process research, a network approach likely offers additional analytic leverage, particularly when undirected and directed models are estimated together.

📚 Sociological Methods & Research

📄 Forging Better Axes: Evaluating and Improving the Reliability of Semantic Dimensions in Word Embeddings

Word embeddings are a powerful tool for measuring cultural meaning using large text corpora. In sociology, applications commonly estimate the meanings of concepts by projecting keywords onto axes constructed from pairs of opposing anchor keywords. At present, there are no established metrics for assessing axis reliability from embedding data. We investigate three potentially relevant forms of reliability: parallelism between offsets, synonymy between same-endpoint anchors, and antonymy between opposed anchors. Using an original N = 1 , 750 survey of respondents’ ratings of several hundred terms along 36 semantic dimensions plus existing ratings for 3 more, we find that parallelism robustly outperforms the other metrics in predicting the accuracy of 39,000 axes that operationalize these dimensions. Our decomposition of the parallelism–accuracy relationship between and within latent dimensions and anchor sets further shows that, while reliability is robustly related to axis accuracy at all levels, it provides a relatively weak guide for selecting specific keywords. Instead, the primary utility of parallelism may lie at higher levels of methodological decision-making: strongly identifying the most empirically tractable semantic dimension and, secondarily, suggesting the best embedding model for an anchor set.

📚 The International Journal of Press/Politics

📄 Modeling Civic Engagement in the Age of AI: A Communication Mediation Approach to AI News, Multifaceted Trust, and Participation in a Two-Wave Panel Study

  • Author(s): Seungahn Nah, Fanjue Liu, Jun Luo, Lee LaPlaca, Chris DeFelice
  • Link: Read the article
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes both a topic of news coverage and a force shaping the information environment, citizens must make sense of AI-related issues while evaluating machine-generated content, journalistic coverage, and institutional actors. This study applies the Orientation-Stimulus-Reasoning-Orientation-Response framework to examine how AI-related news consumption is associated with interpersonal discussion, multifaceted trust, and AI-related offline civic participation. Using two-wave panel data from U.S. adults (Wave 1 = 2,010; Wave 2 = 942), the study models AI-related news consumption across television, newspapers, online news sites, and social media as the stimulus; AI-related online and offline discussion as reasoning; trust in AI-generated news, legacy media coverage of AI, and AI-related institutional actors as reorientation; and AI-related offline civic participation as the response. Results reveal a selective communication pathway. Newspaper and social media AI news use were the most consistent predictors of AI-related discussion. Online discussion was associated with later trust in AI-generated news and legacy media coverage of AI, and trust in AI-generated news and AI-related institutional actors was associated with later offline participation. The observed indirect pathways operated through online discussion and trust in AI-generated news. These findings refine communication mediation research by showing that public engagement with AI-related issues depends on where people encounter AI news, how they discuss it, and which sources and institutions they come to trust.

📚 The Journal of Legislative Studies

📄 The impact of parliamentary fragmentation and polarisation on government legislative success: evidence from Israel (1951–2014)

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📄 The effectiveness of parliamentary budgetary rights in single-party regimes: the case of the Turkish Grand National Assembly Budget Committee (1925–1950)

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📄 Legislating democratic backsliding: a novel dataset

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📄 Whose agenda moves? Party composition and an apparent ‘regime turn’ in Turkish parliamentary questions (2002–2026)

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📚 The Quarterly Journal of Economics

📄 Attention to the Macroeconomy*

We measure which economic topics are top of mind using quarterly German household and firm panels from 2020 to 2024, a period that spans the post-pandemic inflation surge and the subsequent disinflation. With these data, we study potential determinants and consequences of having inflation top of mind. In line with goal-directed attention, the likelihood that inflation is top of mind rises with proxies for its true payoff relevance. At the same time, prior experiences predict whether respondents have inflation and energy prices top of mind conditional on a large set of controls for payoff relevance, and this relationship strengthens when the environment becomes more inflationary. Having inflation top of mind predicts stronger increases in information acquisition and inflation expectations over the shock period. At odds with goal-optimality, having inflation top of mind is associated with expectations further away from multiple ex-ante benchmarks. Finally, both key determinants of having inflation top of mind—payoff relevance and prior experiences—are associated with stronger shifts of expectations away from these benchmarks over the shock period.

📚 West European Politics

📄 Voters’ perceptions of ideologically inconsistent parties

  • Author(s): Ruth Dassonneville, Patrick Fournier, Zeynep Somer-Topcu
  • Link: Read the article
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