Wang’s Picnic
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Weekly issue

Wang's Picnic (2026/09/26)

Updated journals
46
Articles
87

This week, 46 journals published 87 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

American Journal of Political Science Journal of Conflict Resolution Political Research Quarterly
American Politics Research Journal of Contemporary China Political Science Research and Methods
American Sociological Review Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Political Studies Review
Asian Survey Journal of Human Rights Politics & Society
British Journal of Political Science Journal of Information Technology & Politics Qualitative Sociology
British Journal of Sociology Journal of Political Economy Quarterly Journal of Political Science
Comparative Political Studies Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Research & Politics
Contemporary Political Theory Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Social Problems
Democratization Latin American Politics and Society Social Science Quarterly
Discourse & Society Local Government Studies Sociological Methods & Research
Economic Sciences Research in PNAS Minds and Machines The International Journal of Press/Politics
Electoral Studies Nations and Nationalism The Journal of Legislative Studies
Government Information Quarterly Nature Reviews Psychology The Quarterly Journal of Economics
International Journal of Transitional Justice Party Politics West European Politics
Japanese Journal of Political Science Policy & Internet
Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Communication

📚 American Journal of Political Science

📄 Breadwinner backlash: The gendered effects of industrial decline

Low‐skilled men have long been vulnerable to globalization, decarbonization, and other forms of economic disruption. When shocks are realized, women often increase their paid labor to compensate for men's loss of income. We study how layoffs of low‐skilled men and concurrent shifts in workforce composition toward women affect voting. We theorize that this labor market rebalancing produces “nostalgic” coalitions of men and women that seek a return to male‐breadwinner family models. Such attitudes fuel right‐wing movements that pledge to protect conservative gender roles. Evidence from local labor markets and voting in the United States over the last two decades, as well as a longitudinal study tracking individual Americans over several decades, support this theory. These findings contribute a new gender‐based account of the globalization backlash.

📚 American Politics Research

📄 Where the Candidates Stand: Presidential Candidate Announcement Speeches and Success in Nomination Contests

  • Author(s): Scott D. McClurg, Zahedur Rahman Arman, Kazi Mehedi Hasan, Seth Masket
  • Link: Read the article
This study examines how modern presidential candidates strategically and ideologically position themselves in their campaign announcement speeches. We perform a network analysis of announcement speeches from 27 Democratic and 9 Republican presidential contenders in the 2020 and 2024 presidential nomination cycles, respectively, based on the idea that these statements represent fundamental narratives and issue priorities prior to interactions between the candidates, voters, and journalists. We create a candidate-to-candidate network by mapping candidates’ rhetorical alignment and evaluating linguistic proximity. We additionally examine a two-mode network of candidates and issues to assess the importance and peripherality of both actors and issues. The results validate two main hypotheses: Candidates with more rhetorically connected speeches were generally more central within the party’s ideological network and fared better in polls and early primary contests, and issues commonly discussed among the candidates tended to be more central to overall party priorities.

📄 From Policy to Personality: How Americans Evaluate Presidential Candidates, 1984–2020

This study examines how American voters’ articulated standards for evaluating presidential candidates have changed over time. Using open-ended “likes” and “dislikes” from the American National Election Studies (ANES) from 1984 to 2020, I analyze the criteria citizens invoke and how broadly they evaluate nominees in their own words. I extend ANES’s likes/dislikes coding – which classifies responses into nine evaluative categories spanning policy, party, candidate traits, governance, and other considerations – to recent elections using new human labels and a BERT-based classifier, enabling consistent classification across the full time series. The analysis focuses on three dimensions of expressed evaluation: evaluative content, evaluative breadth, and cross-party evaluative overlap. The results reveal a long-run transformation in articulated electoral judgment. Personal qualities expand sharply to become the dominant evaluative dimension, while policy-based considerations – especially domestic policy – decline in relative prominence. At the same time, evaluative breadth contracts, with respondents articulating fewer distinct criteria per candidate even after accounting for respondent characteristics and interview mode. Finally, cross-party comparison narrows as shared evaluative standards decline and become increasingly concentrated in personal qualities rather than policy. A party-evaluation placebo shows that these patterns are not reducible to generalized open-ended survey fatigue. These patterns indicate that contemporary articulated candidate evaluation is thinner, more personalized, and less anchored in shared programmatic benchmarks, suggesting a narrowing foundation for commensurable electoral accountability in American presidential elections.

📚 American Sociological Review

📄 Connective Resource Mobilization: A Relational Approach to Movement Continuity in Transnational Activism

Social movement studies have long centered social movement organizations (SMOs) as the primary vehicles of mobilization. Yet contemporary movements are increasingly decentralized and digitally mediated, challenging SMO-centric frameworks such as resource mobilization theory (RMT). As contention becomes more individualized and non-conventional, organization- and event-centered approaches struggle to explain how movements persist, evolve, or dissolve under shifting conditions. Drawing on RMT and economic sociology, this article advances a relational resource mobilization framework through four propositions: resource mobilization (1) is historically contingent; (2) translates into tactics differently across organizational configurations; (3) is relational; and (4) provides an analytic for examining movement continuity across time and space. Within this framework, I introduce the model of connective resource mobilization to theorize how digitally mediated movements generate strategic capacity through personalized earmarking practices across borders and phases of contention. Based on 179 interviews and observation at 187 events in Hong Kong and Canada, I trace how the Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Movement evolved from its 2019 protest peak through its subsequent downturn across domestic and diasporic contexts. The analysis demonstrates how a relational approach to resource mobilization can illuminate divergent trajectories of movement continuity across historical, geographic, political, and socio-technological contexts.

📚 Asian Survey

📄 Cooperative Inter-Korean Relations and Presidential Approval

Do cooperative foreign relations with a rival state benefit leaders politically? The literature is divided on whether cooperative diplomacy generates political rewards or backlash, and it remains unclear under what conditions cooperation increases public approval. We argue that the domestic impact of cooperative foreign relations is conditional on partisanship and issue ownership. When foreign policy outcomes are strongly aligned with the government’s ideological identity, cooperation can be interpreted as evidence of competence and success. When such outcomes contradict core partisan expectations, they are more likely to generate audience costs. South Korea provides an ideal setting to test this argument because inter-Korean relations are highly salient and deeply polarized along ideological lines. Using monthly time-series data on inter-Korean relations and presidential approval, we find empirical support for our theoretical expectations. This study contributes to broader debates on foreign policy and public opinion and explains when diplomatic engagement generates domestic political benefits.

📚 British Journal of Political Science

📄 Ideas at Work: Educated Colleagues Shape Political Attitudes

Workplaces are increasingly sorted by education. How does the educational composition at the workplace shape political attitudes? To address this question, I use Swedish population-wide administrative data combined with a representative election survey – an empirical approach that links respondents to their colleagues. The central finding is that the share of university educated at the workplace influences individuals’ attitudes independently of the individual’s own educational background. Further analysis indicates that the effect is partly caused during the time spent in the labor market and varies with the educational field composition of the workplace. The results shed light on how social connections at work, as opposed to personal experiences, shape political attitudes. This has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the politically relevant aspects of the work life, as well as for the formation of the education divide.

📄 Religious Cross-Pressures and Electoral Decision Making

For many Americans, religious teachings are central to political identity, yet these teachings often do not align neatly with party platforms. How do voters decide when their faith crosses partisan lines? I examine this question by focusing on Catholic and Muslim Americans, whose moral and social world-views span both sides of the partisan divide. Using a novel ‘dynamic’ choice experiment, I show that religious cross-pressures shape how voters arrive at their choices. Contrary to classic accounts linking cross-pressures to disengagement, I find no evidence of increased decision avoidance; instead, voters remain engaged but simplify their choices. Cross-pressure salience is linked to greater decision difficulty, reduced information search, and greater reliance on issue prioritisation. These findings challenge the view that attitudinal conflict improves the quality of democratic participation, suggesting instead that cross-pressures constrain deliberation and may weaken the representational signal voters send to parties.

📄 Selection, Stability, and Shock: Political Attitudes of Chinese Students at Home and Abroad

Theories of democratic diffusion predict that exposure to liberal democracies fosters support for political liberalism, while recent studies on Chinese overseas students suggest studying abroad generates backlash against liberal values. Using a unique four-year longitudinal dataset of nearly 1,000 Chinese college students in China and the United States, we examine how studying abroad shapes students’ ideology, attitudes, and identity. Our findings challenge both perspectives. Students who study in the United States are already more politically liberal, market-oriented, and cosmopolitan, and less nationalistic than their peers upon departure, underscoring the importance of selection. Ideological preferences remain remarkably stable throughout college, regardless of location. However, support for China’s political system and affective identification with Chinese national identity declines among students in both countries from 2022 to 2023, with a greater decline among students in the United States. These results show that selection, home-country shocks, and host-country context jointly shape overseas students’ political attitudes.

📚 British Journal of Sociology

📄 Rebranding the Nation: Migrant Fashion Production and the Contested Politics of ‘Made in Italy’

This article examines how Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in Prato engage with the contested meaning of the Made in Italy production label. As Chinese‐run fashion firms have become central to Italy’s fast fashion sector, their growing visibility has raised public concerns about authenticity, national identity, and the perceived erosion of cultural heritage. Drawing on 35 semi‐structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, the study explores how commercial nationalism shapes both the marginalisation and the legitimisation of migrant‐led production. It argues that the controversy surrounding Made in Italy reflects broader struggles over symbolic legitimacy and participation in national production in a globalised economy. The findings show that Chinese entrepreneurs rely on distinct forms of social capital to establish credibility, respond to exclusion, and reinterpret the meaning of national branding. By foregrounding the role of producers, the article contributes to debates on migrant entrepreneurship, nationhood, and the social foundations of economic legitimacy.

📄 Is There a ‘Cancel Culture’, and if so, for Whom? Rank‐Based Differences in Restrictions on Academic Freedom

  • Author(s): Julian Hamann, Gregor Fabian, Christiane Thompson, Paula‐Irene Villa
  • Link: Read the article
This article investigates the relationship between academic career ranks and restrictions on academic freedom. Drawing on a representative survey of 9083 full‐time academics at German higher education institutions, we examine how academics across different career ranks assess their freedom in teaching and research. Although precarious employment conditions and professional hierarchies may suggest otherwise, our findings show that doctoral candidates and postdocs on fixed‐term contracts do not report experiencing restrictions on their academic freedom significantly more often compared to tenured professors. However, distinguishing between experienced restrictions, on the one hand, and expectations of restrictions as well as broader perceptions of academic freedom on the other, we find that non‐tenured academics report more often to expect or perceive their academic freedom to be restricted compared to professors. We explain these rank‐based differences with a chilling effect generated by a polemical and polarized discourse on ‘cancel culture.’ Academics on fixed‐term contracts are more likely to be receptive to often polemical debates on ‘cancel culture’ and for the concerns that come with it. This suggests that structural employment insecurity plays a key role in shaping how academics assess their academic freedom. Our results challenge simplified accounts of ‘cancel culture’ by showing that discourse and institutional hierarchies intersect to produce differentiated vulnerabilities within academia. Although based in Germany, the findings speak to broader international concerns about restrictions on academic freedom and precarious academic labour. Our research implies, first, that research on academic freedom should attend not only to visible incidents but also to the affective dimensions of anticipated restrictions. Second, it is crucial to take into consideration current employment conditions and budget cuts in higher education when reflecting on the repercussions of illiberal threats to academia.

📄 The Electoral Class Gap: Working‐Class Non‐Voting on the Rise in Twenty‐First Century Norway

The growing working‐class disengagement from politics witnessed in Western democracies in recent decades poses a serious threat to democratic legitimacy. Crucial in meeting this challenge is scrutinising arenas that connect disadvantaged groups of the electorate to politics. In this article, I examine class inequality in voting in the egalitarian context of Norway with relatively high levels of political integration. Mapping voting patterns from the 1980s until today, findings indicate a growing class gap and historically high working‐class non‐voting in the twenty‐first century with twice as many workers abstaining compared to in the 1980’s. This decline in voting is evident across all demographic segments of workers and cannot be reduced to structural changes in the working class in this period. Finally, unionisation and to some extent public sector employment are identified as arenas associated with substantially higher levels of working‐class voting, and increasingly so today, indicating that they may play a key role for continued working‐class electoral participation and inclusive democracy in twenty‐first century Norway. Applying a class model that adequately reflects the heterogeneousness of the twenty‐first century working class, I argue that occupational class offers a relational and multidimensional approach to understanding electoral participation disparities, linking social inequality in voting both to politically relevant competences gained through education as well as aspects of occupational life key to democratic integration.

📚 Comparative Political Studies

📄 Listening to Leaders: Illiberal Speech as a Symptom of Democratic Decline

  • Author(s): Seraphine F. Maerz, Dean Schafer, Carsten Q. Schneider
  • Link: Read the article
Political leaders signal their commitment to democratic or authoritarian values through public speeches. Such signals can constitute a breach of democratic norms and indicate intent to undermine democratic institutions. By listening to what leaders say, we are able to capture a hitherto overlooked sign of a crisis of democracy. We develop indicators for illiberal speech that capture the language by leading representatives of political regimes across the globe. Utilizing a machine learning approach, we fine-tune DeBERTa models to score 27,683 speeches by 452 political leaders representing over 400 administrations in 123 countries between 1989 and 2024, yielding over 400,000 semantically coherent paragraphs. The scores place leaders on an illiberal-liberal scale and have been validated with openai’s gpt-5.2 and human coders. We find that illiberal public discourse is part of the multi-dimensional symptom of democratic decline. Our analysis opens up a new research agenda on the role of public rhetoric in the study of political regimes and their transformation.

📚 Contemporary Political Theory

📄 The first right: self-determination and the transformation of international order, 1941–2000

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

📄 Marx’s democratic idea: an alternative to the neoliberal slide towards fascism

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

📄 Modern aesthetics and democratic life: the struggle for aesthetic freedom

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

📚 Democratization

📄 Judging for Democracy: Principles and Strategies in Hybrid Regimes

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📄 Friends like us? Support for democracy and the perception of great power

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📚 Discourse & Society

📄 ‘But, today, you’ve got to be beyond reasonable doubt’: The discursive negotiation of judicial directions in mock-jury deliberations in England and Wales

Drawing on a corpus of mock-jury deliberations from England and Wales comprising 94,000 words of transcript and 10 hours of video data from 132 participants, this study employs discourse analysis – specifically interactional analysis and narrative analysis – to examine how mock jurors interpret, negotiate, and recontextualise judicial directions. The analysis identifies two interactional manifestations of juror agency: adherence to judicial directions, and transgression through lay-knowledge-based reasoning. These orientations reveal how mock jurors construct and contest interactional roles, manage intra-group dynamics, and navigate the relationship between everyday knowledge and institutional authority. Rather than depicting jurors as passive recipients of legal expertise, the study foregrounds their evidential reasoning, moral judgement, and interpretive agency. The findings contribute to discourse studies by bridging institutional discourse, epistemic agency, and the revalorisation of lay knowledge within courtroom interaction.

📚 Economic Sciences Research in PNAS

📄 Valuing five centuries of unpaid breastfeeding in England

Breastfeeding is vital and valuable labor, contributing to the physical and cognitive health of children throughout their lives, yet it is rarely compensated in formal labor markets. Its economic importance may therefore go unrecognized. We impute upper and lower bounds for the value of unpaid breastfeeding over five centuries in England to better understand its economic role over the course of economic development. We also contribute an estimate of changes in breastfeeding duration over this period from historical and bioarchaeological sources using interval regression. At minimum, unpaid breastfeeding consistently exceeded 0.1% of gross domestic product (GPD), reaching a possible peak of 6.58% in the sixteenth century while the wider economy stagnated. This quantity exceeds expenditures on school and apprenticeship, making breastfeeding possibly the largest source of human capital investment in early modern England. Yet the relative value of unpaid breastfeeding gradually declined as the wider economy grew. Indeed, for much of English history the income elasticity of breastfeeding appears to have been negative, only becoming positive at some point in the nineteenth century. Because breastfeeding was strongly negatively correlated with infant mortality, this challenges longstanding assumptions about the relationship between income and mortality. In sum, breastfeeding was not a biologically determined constant but a dynamic, if neglected, part of economic life.

📚 Electoral Studies

📄 From the center to the fringes: A comparative test of attitudinal explanations for mainstream-to-challenger defection

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

📚 Government Information Quarterly

📄 Shared digital leadership in government: a roles and competencies study

  • Author(s): Boniface Ushaka Adie, Mary Tate, Wonhyuk Cho, Elizabeth Valentine
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📄 Mandating business-to-government data sharing for public interest: Coalitions and their policy beliefs in the shaping of the EU Data Act

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

📚 International Journal of Transitional Justice

📄 Transformative Memory: Ways of Being Together in the Afterlives of Political Violence

As a global collective of artists, activists and scholars, the Transformative Memory International Network explores memory as a transformative force attentive to the complexities of power and justice regimes, and to the tensions, exclusions and silences that enter the historical record and institutionally curated representations of political violence. We embrace methodologies of relational, embodied and emplaced knowledge exchanges and foster spaces of creativity such as artistic, affective and experimental approaches to knowledge generation. Reflecting on the memory labours of and knowledge exchanges between members, we interrogate how these works activate transformative possibilities. As a force, memory is a living and persistent insistence of life where life is denied. As a forcefield, memory is a way of persevering, regathering and refashioning a sense of self, relationships to others and political action, anticipating other ways of being together.

📄 Unpacking the Harms of Reproductive Violence in Mass Atrocities: Developing a New Typology

∞ Despite widespread evidence of reproductive violence in mass atrocity contexts, transitional justice and international criminal law have been slow to recognize and prosecute these violations. This article argues that this accountability gap stems partly from pedagogical failures – while existing definitions conceptualize reproductive violence as violations of reproductive autonomy, they fail to unpack its differentiated harms. This article develops a new typology that categorizes reproductive violence according to reproductive consequences for victim-survivors. It performs a pedagogical function, making more visible the distinct suffering each category inflicts. By assisting pattern recognition across seemingly disparate acts, the typology helps investigators in framing such acts as interconnected instances of reproductive violence, identifying systematic reproductive control strategies and gathering targeted evidence. By strengthening understanding of the far-reaching physical, psychological and sociopolitical consequences for victim-survivors, this typology offers a tool to recognize reproductive violence as meeting the gravity threshold for accountability under the Rome Statute and beyond.

📄 Twenty years of transitional justice: reading a field through the International Journal of Transitional Justice 2006–2026

The 20th anniversary of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (IJTJ) offers an opportunity not simply to celebrate two decades of scholarship but also to reflect critically on the intellectual transformations that have shaped transitional justice during this period. This editorial introduces a retrospective collection of 20 contributions selected from across the journal’s history. The collection is not intended as a definitive canon, nor as a ranking of the journal’s ‘best’ articles. Rather, it is conceived as an intellectual history of a field in motion. To reconstruct that history, our selections combine evidence of scholarly and readership impact with nominations from past and present editors, while also seeking balance across time periods, disciplines, methodologies, regions, themes and academic–practitioner perspectives. Read collectively, the 20 contributions reveal a field that has repeatedly reconsidered its own boundaries. Transitional justice has expanded from an initial concern with accountability, truth, reparations and political transition towards sustained engagement with development, peacebuilding, socioeconomic inequality, everyday life, gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, structural violence, victim participation, archives, civil society, complex identities and democratic decline. This has coincided with an evolving profile of the scholars engaging in the field. While legal scholars and political scientists initially shaped the debates around formal processes and the constraints imposed by international law, social scientists with interests in grassroots and non-state-level processes now do so. While stopping violence was seen initially as a sufficient goal for transitional justice processes, now transformation and addressing structural impediments to justice are more commonly invoked. This history is not adequately described as a linear progression. From its earliest volumes, IJTJ provided space for ethnography, practitioner knowledge, survivor perspectives and critiques of universalist assumptions; and formal processes and legal questions remain features of the contemporary scholarly terrain. From its origins, scholars debated what counts as success for the field and questioned whether transitional justice processes could achieve what scholars and practitioners hoped. What has changed is the depth and cumulative force of challenges to the conceptual categories and of the multiple lenses that disciplines bring to understanding violence, transition, victimhood, justice and political transformation. The 20 contributions tell a story of intellectual expansion accompanied by increasing self-reflexivity. They show transitional justice becoming less certain about where transition begins and ends; less willing to treat legal institutions as its sole centre of gravity; increasingly attentive to the actors, structures and forms of knowledge previously marginalized by dominant frameworks; and unclear about where the boundaries of transitional justice end and how to evaluate the success of transitional justice processes in promoting enduring change. In celebrating 20 years of IJTJ, this retrospective consequently celebrates not the consolidation of a settled paradigm but the capacity of a field to remain open to critique, empirical challenge and conceptual transformation.

📄 Rethinking amnesty in Turkey: Pathways to peace and the limits of fragmented transitional justice

∞This article examines the 2003 Law of Social Reintegration in light of renewed attention to peace following the PKK’s 2025 declaration to end its four-decade insurgency in Turkey. Introduced as a conditional amnesty mechanism to promote demobilization and reintegration, the law was framed as a step towards peace but delivered limited results. By situating the Turkish case within broader transitional justice debates, the article argues that amnesties are most effective when embedded within comprehensive frameworks encompassing disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR), transitional justice and institutional reform. In contrast, Turkey’s approach remained selective, externally driven and institutionally fragmented, reflecting the absence of a substantive political transition.

📚 Japanese Journal of Political Science

📄 Confrontation, cooperation, and perceived ideology: experimental research on voters’ perceived positions and political competition

Accurate perceptions of parties’ political positions are necessary for accountability and representation. Politicians signal their political positions to voters through policy messages; however, policy messages alone often do not work as intended. Furthermore, since politicians use various ideological labels, voters may have a complicated understanding of political positions across multiple dimensions. Thus, discrepancies can arise between ‘objective’ and ‘perceived’ positions. We hypothesized that voters use the tone of politicians’ questions (polite or impolite) and cooperation with other parties to infer a party’s political position. To test this hypothesis, this study conducted a conjoint experiment in Japan while also disentangling voters’ conceptions of left–right, liberal–conservative, and progressive–conservative scales. We found that voters form perceptions of politicians’ political positions based on their confrontational and cooperative behaviour.

📄 When the emperor gets the blame: unpacking protest targeting in Xi Jinping’s China

Does the nationwide ‘White Paper Movement’ protesting against zero-COVID measures by the central government signal a threat to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule? This article explores protest dynamics under the Xi Jinping administration, examining patterns of grievances directed at different government levels. Drawing on a comprehensive dataset spanning 2012–2022, we analyse protest characteristics and contextual factors to identify the determinants of protest targeting. Our findings reveal that protests articulating ideological demands, occurring in urban hubs, and involving sizable crowds, particularly in Beijing, are more inclined to target the central government. These insights gain significance when contrasted with protests aimed at local institutions. This study advances our comprehension of protest patterns within a resilient authoritarian framework, offering insights into social stability and regime durability post-White Paper Movement.

📄 Gendered patterns of political knowledge in Japan

  • Author(s): Tetsuya Matsubayashi, Mizuki Nakagoshi, Honami Izutsu
  • Link: Read the article
Voters with greater political knowledge are more likely to participate and to make judgements that advance their own interests. This raises a vital question about how such knowledge is distributed across citizens. In particular, how large is the gender gap in political knowledge among Japanese voters? Does measurement influence the observed gap? Using two large-scale online surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 and fifteen face-to-face surveys fielded between 2000 and 2018, we first show that Japanese women answer questions on political institutions and leaders correctly at rates 10 to 15 percentage points lower than men. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data Modules 2–4, we also show that the gender gap in Japan is comparable to that in other countries. We then demonstrate that the magnitude of the gender gap depends on how political knowledge is measured. Women are more likely to select DK, and the gap shrinks substantially when DK responses are excluded or when knowledge items related to women are included. Overall, the findings are consistent with those from other countries. While a gender gap in political knowledge is non-trivial in Japan, its size is strongly shaped by the measurement context.

📄 Corruption and leaders’ age

While existing literature has studied the political consequences of corruption, surprisingly little is known about how corruption is associated with voters’ preferences for particular leader characteristics. Using both micro- and macro-level cross-national data, this study analyses whether prevalent corruption is associated with a greater likelihood that young leaders attain executive office. We argue that, in democracies, a higher level of corruption makes younger leaders more electorally attractive because they can be perceived as less embedded in entrenched political networks and more likely to pursue anti-corruption reforms. By analysing data on various political leaders’ backgrounds from 110 democracies between 2001 and 2020, we find that a higher level of corruption is associated with younger elected leaders in democracies. Using the Afrobarometer survey data from 15 African democracies between 2019 and 2020, we find additional evidence that a negative perception of corruption increases citizens’ support for introducing a maximum age limit for presidential candidates. Our study contributes to the literature on leadership selection by highlighting the role of corruption in shaping voter preferences for young leaders.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 Spain’s Migration Policies: Building Bridges or Burning Them?

  • Author(s): Indhira García Belda, María Ángeles Alaminos Hervás, Gloria Fernández-Pacheco Alises
  • Link: Read the article
In the absence of a joint migration management system, Spain has sought to protect its external borders by building relations with African countries through different foreign policy frameworks. In a context where the European Union is tightening its external borders, we ask what the central axis structuring Spanish migration policies toward Africa is. The most recent foreign policy framework, the Spain-Africa Strategy 2025–2028, has been presented as a bridge between Europe and Africa, wanting to consolidate Spain as the interlocutor between both continents and as a reliable partner for African countries. But to what extent does it pursue a differentiated approach? Is it an effective policy instrument to establish equal partnerships? These are some of the questions that have been addressed through a qualitative document analysis. Aiming to contribute to the literature on Spain’s migration policies from a critical security studies perspective, we conclude that the Spain-Africa Strategy is not context-free and, as such, is dependent on larger foreign policy structures that are built around a security-development nexus, hence hindering the achievement of equal partnerships.

📚 Journal of Conflict Resolution

📄 Bruce Russett Award for Article of the Year in JCR for 2025

Journal of Conflict Resolution, Ahead of Print.

📄 Peace Under the Influence? The Role of Illicit Drug Economies in Peace Processes and Rebel Splintering

How do the economic foundations of rebel groups shape civil war dynamics? While prior research has explored how different resource types affect conflict, less is known about how the illicit nature of certain resources—particularly drug economies—affects peace processes. We argue that the inherent illegality of drug-based financing imposes structural barriers to peace, distinguishing it from other forms of rebel revenue. Using cross-national dyadic data from 1990 to 2011, we find that drug-reliant rebel groups have 34 percent lower hazard of initiatiating peace talks and over six times more likely to fragment once peace processes begin. These findings suggest that drug-based financing generates a self-reinforcing cycle that sustains violence. In contrast to accounts emphasizing grievances produced by peace processes, we show that some groups may be structurally predisposed to reject peace altogether. Our findings call for theoretical and policy approaches tailored to the distinct challenges posed by illicit drug economies.

📚 Journal of Contemporary China

📄 Steering at China’s Periphery: Tech-Poor Provinces and International Digitalization Ambitions

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📄 Voluntary Compliance with COVID-19 Nonpharmaceutical Interventions: Evidence from Mainland China and Hong Kong

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📄 Redefining China’s Approach to AI Governance: Beyond Top-Down, Government-Led, and Command-and-Control

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📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 Ideological principle or outgroup attitudes? An experimental analysis of cross-pressures, social dominance orientation, and vote choice among white Americans

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📄 AI as a partisan cue: the relational dynamics of AI-assisted campaign messaging in election integrity perceptions

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📚 Journal of Human Rights

📄 It is time to revisit the external determinants of state terror

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📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 AI for democratic participation? Citizens’ perceptions of problems in online participation processes and AI-based solutions

  • Author(s): Carina Weinmann, Mira Warne, Florian Sauer, Marike Bormann, Stefan Marschall, Marc Ziegele
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Breeding conspiracy thinking? Investigating the longitudinal relationship between media use and conspiracy mindset

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📚 Journal of Political Economy

📄 Why Is Intermediating Houses So Difficult? Evidence from iBuyers

  • Author(s): Greg Buchak, Gregor Matvos, Tomasz Piskorski, Amit Seru
  • Link: Read the article
Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📄 Silence to Solidarity: How Communication about a Minority Affects Discrimination

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📚 Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

📄 What Informs Interviewer Question Asking and Probing? Evidence from the Survey of Income and Program Participation

Interviewers play a crucial role in the outcome of an interview because their behavior during interview interactions can affect data quality and respondent burden. Existing models of interviewer behavior hypothesize a range of reasons why interviewers deviate from scripted protocols, but these models lack an essential piece of the puzzle: the information driving interviewer decision-making. In this article, we propose a model of the information acquired by the interviewer during the interview process, focusing on the interviewer’s early impressions of the physical interview environment and respondent doorstep behavior (also known as interviewer observations) and the interviewer’s knowledge about the respondent, as gained through the asking and recording of responses to survey questions. To evaluate this model, we used several data and paradata sources from wave 1 of the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) Panel, including computer audio-recorded interview (CARI) recordings, interviewer observations, and survey responses collected during the household interview. Consistent with previous research, question characteristics were the most powerful predictors in our models of interviewer behavior. However, we did find limited evidence of interviewers using information they acquired during the interview, including interviewer observations and survey response data, to inform deviations in question asking. Future research and interviewer training implications are discussed.

📄 Motivating The Unmotivated? Testing Conditional Lottery Incentives in an Ongoing Panel Survey

  • Author(s): Rasmus Patton, Jannes Jacobsen, Jörg Dollmann, Almuth Lietz
  • Link: Read the article
This study examines whether conditional lottery incentives, where the probability of winning increases with continued participation, can motivate panelists to reengage in a randomly sampled, quarterly online survey. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a control group (CG) receiving the standard €10 incentive, treatment group 1 (T1) with an additional lottery offering ten Amazon vouchers worth €500, and treatment group 2 (T2) introducing conditionality by linking the probability of winning to participation in successive waves. This design tests whether reengagement depends not only on incentive size but also on respondents’ perceived ability to influence their odds of winning. Results show no statistically significant treatment effects. Neither the high-value lottery nor its conditional variant increased participation. Subgroup analyses reveal no systematic differences across prior participation, education, income, or country of origin. These findings confirm earlier evidence on the limited effectiveness of lotteries in survey research but extend it by testing conditionality as a motivational mechanism. Although conditional incentives strengthen the conceptual link between effort and reward, restoring agency alone appears insufficient to overcome deeper motivational barriers in quarterly online panels.

📄 Using Recordings of Survey Interviews and Machine Learning to Evaluate Differences in Interviewer–Respondent Interactions Between Telephone, In-Person, and Video Interviews

Computer-Assisted Recorded Interviewing captures audio recordings of survey interviews in real time, producing a distinctive form of unstructured paradata—question-level audio files that capture the question–answer sequences between the interviewer and respondent. These recordings offer insights into the survey response process, enabling a deeper understanding of how responses are formed and delivered. This paper explores the use of machine learning to automate the processing of recordings and to compare interviewer–respondent interactions in video interviews with those of in-person and telephone interviews in the production environment of a large national survey of US households. We first applied machine learning algorithms to transcribe the audio recordings and generate indicators describing interviewer–respondent interactions. We then assessed differences across the three modes in two interviewer behaviors indicative of adherence to standardized interviewing protocol (reading questions verbatim and maintaining question meaning) and in three interaction outcome measures indicative of respondent difficulty answering survey questions (number of the respondent’s turns, duration of the respondent’s first turn, and the total duration of turns with speech). We found significant differences in interviewer question reading behaviors and in the duration of the respondent’s first turn across the three modes, but the differences were small. Additionally, the question itself emerged as the primary source of variability across all outcome measures. This paper demonstrates a viable method for using recordings to efficiently assess interviewer–respondent interactions for research purposes.

📄 Conditional Optimal Sampling: Enhancing Unequal-Probability Designs with Auxiliary Information

We address the problem of selecting a fixed-size sample from a finite population when the goal is to reduce the estimation error as much as possible. Our approach builds on the idea of choosing samples that are nearly optimal with respect to the values of the study variable, even though these values are not observed in advance. Instead, we rely on predictions derived from auxiliary information, for example, through statistical or machine-learning models, and construct sampling designs that are optimal for these predicted values. We show that this strategy is remarkably effective: even when the predictions are imperfect, the resulting designs tend to be very close to the unknown optimal design based on the true values. To understand why this happens, we study the geometric structure underlying the space of all feasible sampling designs and use this perspective to develop practical algorithms. Simulation experiments indicate that the proposed methodology achieves noticeably lower estimation error than classical unequal-probability sampling methods commonly used in the literature, including balanced procedures such as cube and classical fixed-size designs like conditional Poisson sampling.

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

📄 Dynamic healthcare demand with informative dropout: evidence from register data

  • Author(s): Vincenzo Carrieri, Dorte Gyrd-Hansen, Paolo Li Donni
  • Link: Read the article
We study the dynamic relationship between outpatient secondary care and emergency secondary care using linked Danish register data on approximately 30,000 individuals with type-2 diabetes followed for 5 years after an emergency hospital admission. The data present 3 challenges: utilization is observed as 2 interrelated count outcomes, attrition is informative because it is largely driven by mortality, and the timing of death is recorded only at the quarterly level. We address these features using a hidden Markov dropout bivariate Poisson model that combines time-varying latent health states with a discrete-time specification for dropout. This framework allows us to separately identify dynamic state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity in both care utilization and survival. Accounting for latent health dynamics substantially alters the estimated relationship between the 2 services: standard random-effects models suggest mild complementarity, whereas the hidden Markov specification indicates substitution. Modelling dropout as informative further refines these estimates and clarifies the role of unobserved heterogeneity, disentangling persistent frailty from time-varying health dynamics. The results reveal substantial heterogeneity in patient trajectories and show that more recent cohorts experience improved survival together with a shift from emergency towards outpatient utilization. The framework is applicable to settings with interdependent recurrent events and endogenous attrition.

📚 Latin American Politics and Society

📄 The Right Mobilizing Against Gender and Women’s Rights in Latin America

  • Author(s): Julia Margaret Zulver, Kiran Stallone, Leigh A. Payne
  • Link: Read the article
Gender rights are under attack across Latin America. This article analyzes these threats to rights by “right-against-rights” (RAR) mobilizations in the region. We do so by drawing on an original RAR database of such mobilizations in seven countries and transnationally with over 700 mobilizations, 75.5 percent of them targeting gender rights. We further explore three emblematic case studies to analyze the dynamics of this recent phenomenon of anti-gender RAR mobilizations. Our findings develop new insights into who mobilizes against gender rights, against what sets of rights, how, where, why and when, and with what impact. In responding to these questions, we disaggregate different types of anti-gender rights actors, their motives, and their strategies. Our findings suggest that there is much more variety in the aims and tactics used by the RAR around gender than the existing literature captures.

📄 The bidirectional association between electoral rules and the effective number of parties: Evidence from the Chilean Congress

The relationship between electoral institutions and the party system is one of the main topics of political science. Here we delve deeper into a diachronic analysis using a database of almost 200 years of history. By collecting data on the effective number of parties (ENP) in Chile, an early multiparty system which has had numerous changes in electoral rules, we investigate the association between electoral reforms and ENP in both chambers of Congress. We classify 18 electoral reforms and explore 54 legislative elections held in Chile since 1833 until 2025. Major and technical changes in electoral rules account for noticeable changes in the ENP. The effect of electoral reforms is not always immediate, nor does their adoption correspond to a linear trajectory, and sometimes reforms reflect social and political changes that already occurred in the political system. The evidence suggests bidirectional association and nuanced dynamics between electoral rules and the ENP.

📚 Local Government Studies

📄 What effect does the projectification of local governance have on the transformative capacity of urban net-zero policies? A French case study

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📄 Vertical consolidation and voter turnout: evidence from England

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📄 Public sector contracting-out for unilateral benefit: analysing the financial condition of local government and public enterprise

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📄 Elites by design? How organisational structures shape assignment concentration in local government

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📚 Minds and Machines

📄 Abduction In Silico: Large Language Models Replicate Human Inference to the Best Explanation

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

📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 From Gastfreundschaft to Überfremdung: National Identity and the Origins of Right‐Wing Migration Politics in West Germany, 1973–1983

This article contributes a historical perspective to scholarship on migration and right‐wing politics in Germany. By examining legal texts, party programmes and parliamentary debates, it traces how West German national identity discourses shaped immigration and foreigner policies between the guest worker recruitment stop in 1973 and the federal elections of 1983. In this crucial but oft‐neglected period, political parties renegotiated national membership criteria amid economic crisis and an emerging multicultural society. Ethnocentric conceptions of German identity by influential right‐wing politicians entrenched an understanding of immigration as a national security threat. After the so‐called refugee crisis of 2015, the far‐right Alternative für Deutschland ( AfD ) mobilised these ideals of ethnic homogeneity in narratives about eroding German sovereignty and citizenship since the guest worker era. The article highlights the importance of analysing such historical constructions and political continuities of the ‘foreigner problem’ to make sense of resurging far‐right politics across Europe today.

📄 Hemispheric Exclusions: Racial Borders and ‘Anti‐Black’ Racism Against Haitian Migrants in the Americas

  • Author(s): Denise N. Obinna, Amanda Pinheiro de Oliveira
  • Link: Read the article
Emigrating from a country beset with political instability, gang violence and severe food shortages, Haitian migrants have sought sanctuary across the Americas. Yet despite their desperate search for asylum, Haitians have had to deal with anti‐Black and anti‐Haitian racism. As a form of hemispheric exclusion, Haitians have encountered racial borders as they attempt to cross international boundaries. Facing challenges due to their irregular status as transient migrants, we assert that the denial of asylum across the Americas represents a systemic form of racialized exclusion. Analysing contexts of reception in Brazil, Mexico and the United States, we explore the complexities of migration for displaced Haitians. Our work also explores the growth of Haitijuana —a community on the San Diego–Tijuana border, which has grown amid exclusionary policies in the United States and Mexico. Our work argues that racial borders perpetuate anti‐Black racism against Haitian migrants. We present a complex study of race, national origin and xenophobia across the hemisphere.

📄 Green Nationalism: The Case for Integrating Ethnosymbolism

This article makes the case for integrating elements of ethnosymbolism from Anthony D. Smith in the study of green nationalism. It presents a Smithian critique of Ernest Gellner's theory while accounting for criticisms of ethnosymbolism, partially grounding it in modernist foundations. Gellner's theoretical perspective is undoubtedly valuable, but this article argues that there are benefits in engaging with ethnosymbolism without abandoning modernisation theory entirely. Ethnosymbolism contributes to a more transformative account of green nationalism beyond the pure‐modernist narrative that inextricably links nationalism to environmentally destructive industry. In dissociating green nationalism from industrialisation, ethnosymbolism opens the analytical space for it to be a restorative force that can marshal climate action through longue durée symbolism and mass participation.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 The psychology of generative AI written before it existed

Nature Reviews Psychology, Published online: 23 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00623-5The psychology of generative AI written before it existed

📄 Spatial boundaries impact object memory

Nature Reviews Psychology, Published online: 22 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00622-6Spatial boundaries impact object memory

📄 When conversational AI validates delusional beliefs

Nature Reviews Psychology, Published online: 21 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00620-8When conversational AI validates delusional beliefs

📚 Party Politics

📄 Practical social democracy

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.

📄 Different articles, similar arguments: A response to Rosenberg

In this short response to Rosenberg (2026), we focus on three points. First, we note that there is now agreement that intra-party sortition is unlikely to deliver a more socially representative legislature without some other measures such as stratification or quotas. Second, we argue that it is curious to criticise us for not considering the possibility of change in the future in response to the introduction of intra-party sortition, when we did exactly that at some length in our original article. And third, we raise a broader issue about exactly how scholars might measure the overall representativeness of an institution.

📚 Policy & Internet

📄 The End of the Observable Infodemic: Privatised Observability and Public Health Monitoring

Infodemiology and infodemic management rest on a premise so foundational that it is rarely stated: health information behaviour leaves traces that researchers and public institutions can observe. This paper argues that the premise is dissolving. Health information seeking is migrating from publicly observable websites and platforms into conversational artificial intelligence, where exchanges unfold in private dyads between user and system and are visible in full only to the providers operating them. The paper develops a typology of three observability regimes, termed open, brokered and enclosed observability, which differ in trace custody, conditions of third‐party observation, attainable granularity, stability of access and the epistemic position of public health. It traces the arc from the open web through the platform era, whose brokered observability collapsed in the post‐API age, to the enclosed regime of conversational agents, in which knowledge about population health information behaviour is produced and selectively disclosed by commercial providers. The analysis derives implications for infodemic management, for the evaluation of health information environments and for regulation, and argues that privacy‐preserving research access to conversational health data should be established as public health infrastructure.

📚 Political Communication

📄 Political Actors and Their Media Practices: Analyzing the Role of Media Participation in Democratic Backsliding and Resilience

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📚 Political Research Quarterly

📄 Leveraging National Party Leaders in Congressional Campaigns: The Case of Nancy Pelosi

  • Author(s): Nichole M. Bauer, Erin C. Cassese, Natalie M. Standridge
  • Link: Read the article
Existing scholarship on negative campaigning has focused on the communication strategies of candidates who are actively contesting specific seats or offices. Yet, political leaders are often featured in ads where they are not a contestant. For example, between 2018 and 2022, the Republican Party spent over 227 million dollars on negative campaign ads featuring Nancy Pelosi, hoping to capitalize on her unpopularity with a wide swath of the voting public. In this paper, we develop a theoretical perspective on this kind of attack by association that emphasizes two processes – ideological signposting and transfer of affect – to explain why campaigns might choose to adopt this strategy. Using Pelosi as a case study, we analyze her depictions in televised U.S. House race ads from 2010 to 2020 and compare them with similarly situated male Congressional leaders. Our approach blends a content analysis of the visual and verbal elements of campaign ads with metadata from the Wesleyan Media Project, providing insights into the conditions under which attacks against Pelosi are likely to emerge. Our findings have implications for understanding not only negative campaigning but also the nationalization of political discourse and the challenges facing women as they advance to leadership positions within Congress.

📚 Political Science Research and Methods

📄 Religiosity and local debt repayment: evidence from Italian mayors

Does a politician’s religion influence their policymaking? While existing research has examined how gender, class, and ethnicity shape political decisions, the role of religiosity remains understudied. This paper investigates how religious values influence debt repayment decisions among local politicians. I develop a novel measure of individual religiosity, based on names matching local patron saints, and apply it to 62,908 candidates in Italian municipal elections. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that narrowly elected religious Catholic mayors are more likely to increase debt repayment. This effect likely reflects two mechanisms: Catholic moral teachings, which stress the obligation to repay debt, and risk aversion rooted in religion. Overall, these findings demonstrate that religion meaningfully shapes the fiscal behavior of elected officials.

📚 Political Studies Review

📄 In the name of love: The asymmetric effects of love rhetoric on political support

This study examines how different expressions of love in political rhetoric influence individual emotional responses and support for leaders. Using a survey experiment with a representative sample of 525 Jewish adults, we tested the effects of compassionate universal love ( agape ), protective particularistic love ( eros ), and neutral rhetoric (control) in a simulated official communication about Israel’s policy toward Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Ukraine–Russia conflict. Participants evaluated the same speaker announcing the acceptance of refugees from Ukraine under one of these three conditions. Our findings indicate that only protective particularistic love elicited positive emotional responses and political support for the leader, while compassionate universal love and neutral rhetoric had no comparable effect. By situating love within the broader moral-emotional dynamics of immigration politics, these results contribute to understanding the emotional power of eros in political communication and its implications for leadership appeal and public persuasion.

📚 Politics & Society

📄 A Prophet Not Accepted in His Own Time: Hyman Minsky, the Disruption of the Postwar Growth Model by Financial Innovation, and the Vision of a Truly Wage-Led Economy

Since the financial crisis of 2007–9, the economics of Hyman Minsky has inspired calls to reduce financial instability so as to rebalance the current US growth model or even to replace that growth model with a new one that would distribute prosperity more evenly. Why did Minsky's economics fail to achieve even a modicum of such uptake during his lifetime? This article conducts the first systematic analysis of Minsky's archived correspondence to study his little-known but sustained efforts to influence policymakers. In the late 1960s, Minsky collaborated with the Federal Reserve to begin collecting data on the innovation that he considered the greatest source of financial instability, the money market. Yet Fed officials grew concerned that the project would be opposed by banks. They terminated the collaboration when Minsky said in a speech before the Board of Governors that there was no way of rebalancing the extant growth model that would be acceptable to its core constituencies. In the 1970s, Minsky developed a blueprint for a new growth model that he pitched to congressional Democrats. It centered on regulating the money market and shifting the backbone of employment and aggregate demand from private investment to a public job guarantee. The more Minsky rose to the challenge of explaining the economics of his proposal through narrow-bandwidth channels such as newspaper articles and congressional hearings, the more Democrats grew concerned about its politics. The article demonstrates that bringing growth model analysis into dialogue with the sociology and history of economics can be mutually beneficial.

📚 Qualitative Sociology

📄 Global Art Worlds: Working Encounters and Asymmetric Collaboration

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

📚 Quarterly Journal of Political Science

📄 Coloring in the lines: the role of segregation and majority-minority districts in local descriptive representation

The urban politics literature finds municipal elections are highly racialized, but it is unclear how this is reflected in redistricting. I analyze the implementation of majority-minority districts in 133 US cities during the 2010 redistricting cycle. I find that in cities where Black or Hispanic citizens are minorities, they are proportionally underrepresented in city council districts, but are overrepresented in cities where they make up the majority. To isolate the role of residential segregation, I use a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from the underlying distribution of plausible maps. The proportion of Hispanic-majority districts implemented generally matches median simulated plans, but nearly one-third of cities implemented more Black-majority districts than the median simulation. The proportion of Black city council members positively predicts the gap between the median proportion of majority-minority districts simulated and the proportion implemented. I then link this data to the electoral outcomes of racially identified candidates. I find that majority-minority and majority-White districts elect co-racial or co-ethnic candidates in over 75% of elections (n = 2,434). Finally, I predict the number of Black and Hispanic councilors elected under simulated plans. Implemented plans led to an estimated 9.5% more Black councilors on average, but roughly the same number of Hispanic councilors.

📄 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.

📚 Research & Politics

📄 Lobbying by Rebel Groups in the United States: Introducing the Rebel Lobbying Dataset, Version 1, 1945–2012

During civil wars, some rebel groups hire lobbying and public relations (PR) firms to cultivate favorable perceptions abroad. Almost 15% of rebel groups, for example, lobbied through PR firms at least once in the United States between 1945 and 2012. Yet, data limitations have made it difficult for scholars of rebel diplomacy to study rebel lobbying systematically. To help mitigate these limitations and facilitate future research, we introduce the first version of the Rebel Lobbying Dataset (RLD), which captures whether and when rebel groups hired professional lobbying firms in the United States. The RLD covers 230 rebel groups engaged in 103 civil conflicts worldwide from 1945 to 2012. After presenting several descriptive patterns, we demonstrate the dataset’s utility by examining whether rebel lobbying in Washington is associated with subsequent U.S. support for rebel groups. By making rebel groups’ use of professional lobbying firms visible at scale for the first time, the RLD opens new avenues for studying the determinants, timing, and consequences of how rebel groups pursue foreign influence.

📚 Social Problems

📄 “It provides the lifestyle that we have”: masculinity, class, and fossil fuel worker support for a just transition

The global imperative for decarbonization faces significant friction from fossil fuel workers, suggesting motivations that extend beyond economic self-interest. This study investigates how the intersection of masculinity and class shapes support for the energy transition among Alberta’s oil and gas workers. Drawing on 29 semi-structured interviews, I argue that just transitions are an inherently gendered project that challenges existing social hierarchies. The findings reveal a sharp divergence between office and field workers: while professional-managerial class men leverage educational capital to align with progressive climate discourses, fieldworkers perceive the transition as a direct threat to the breadwinner masculinity that has historically afforded them upward mobility. Rather than entrenched masculinities inherently causing climate resistance, I find that the externalization of toxic industry culture onto the working class erodes field-level trust in just transition policies. While workers largely support transition policies in principle—provided their material security is guaranteed—they harbor deep skepticism toward a professional class they perceive as insulated from the material risks of decarbonization. I conclude that effective climate policy must move beyond the cultural critique of working-class masculinities and instead address the material precarity and symbolic subjugation that currently prevent class solidarity in the energy transition.

📄 (De)stigmatizing markets and racialized morality: the case of Seattle’s emerging recreational cannabis market

Sociologists find economic relations are often structured by broader cultural understandings of the appropriate role of markets in society. By studying stigmatized markets, scholars show how market actors orient their activities in ways that distance themselves and their markets from stigma. However, much of this work treats conceptions of morality as race-neutral when we know that moral narratives are often racialized in ways that justify the subjugation of minoritized racial groups. Using Seattle’s legal cannabis retail industry as a case of a racially stigmatized market, I draw on sixty semi-structured interviews with retail store owners, managers, and staff from twenty-six licensed cannabis retail locations and 107 hours of ethnographic observation across three of these stores to understand how market actors in these new spaces grapple with the racialized stigma of cannabis, if at all, and the consequences this has for racial inequality in this new market. I find that sellers construct occupational norms that attempt to distance cannabis from the racialized stigma used to justify the criminalization of cannabis during prohibition. However, this construction disadvantages Black individuals seeking to enter the legal industry and is an important way racial hierarchies were imported into these new market organizations.

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 Does Intergroup Contact Reduce Affective Polarization? A Natural Experiment

Objective Reducing affective polarization has become a priority in discussions of American democracy. Intergroup contact is a promising and practical remedy, but it rarely occurs without intervention. Methods This study examines contact among American undergraduates who naturally interact on campus. By taking advantage of first‐year random housing assignments, the analysis compares students with ideological outgroup roommates to those with ideological ingroup roommates. Data come from an original survey at a private university in April 2023. Results Students with outgroup roommates report greater favorability toward outgroup students while showing little ideological change, compared to those with ingroup roommates. They also report a higher percentage of ideological outgroup friends and more frequent interactions with them. Conclusion The findings suggest that contact can contribute to depolarization in real‐world settings, and social environments such as universities can bring students with different views together.

📚 Sociological Methods & Research

📄 Do Respondents’ Commitments Improve Data Quality in Opt-in Online Surveys? An International Experiment on Participants’ Attentiveness, Cheating, Satisficing, and Skipping

Online surveys are increasingly the norm in public opinion research. Self-administered internet surveys present opportunities, but also specific risks for data quality. In search of solutions, scholars are returning to commitment as one way of encouraging participants to provide accurate responses. This article provides an extensive study of commitment as a potential method for improving data quality in the context of opt-in online surveys. Theoretically, I argue that the effectiveness of commitment in motivating good conduct depends on respondents’ material and immaterial cost-benefit calculations. In an experimental survey in 2021 including more than 32,000 respondents from the general populations of 10 countries worldwide, I find that commitments make participants less likely to cheat on knowledge questions, but are ineffective or even counterproductive with respect to respondents’ attentiveness, satisficing, and skipping. Researchers should thus use commitments carefully and selectively, particularly in the context of opt-in online surveys.

📄 Insufficient Effort Responding and Adolescent Respondents: Measurement, Extent, and Prediction

This article addresses insufficient effort responding (IER), an issue in survey research affecting data quality. We focus on predicting reactive-check-based IER classifications through nonreactive measures and estimating the proportion of respondents classified as IER in a pupil population, using a sizeable adolescent survey. The analysis highlights IER as a nonmarginal issue that varies considerably by gender, migration status, and school type. Utilizing Random Forest models, we evaluate nonreactive measures’ predictive power for reactive-check-based IER classifications, notably response time, intraindividual response variability, and Mahalanobis Distance. The findings show these measures’ future research value, emphasizing the strong influence of response time. We also explore the relationship between predictors and our target variable and find that shorter response times and less response variability correspond to a greater likelihood of IER. This study illustrates the potential of nonreactive measures and advanced machine learning techniques for identifying IER and highlights the necessity for further research.

📚 The International Journal of Press/Politics

📄 When Movement Widens the Gap: The Contingent Effect of the Chinese #MeToo Movement on Feminist Attitudes

Social movements are often associated with various cultural outcomes, including shifts in public opinion regarding movement-related attitudes and ideologies. This study examines the shift of feminist attitudes among the public following the Chinese #MeToo movement. We develop a sociotechnical contingency framework that emphasizes how identity-based movement relevance and access to information channels shape the shifts in public opinion following social movements. Using nationally representative data from the Chinese General Social Survey (2010–2023), we find that the #MeToo movement was significantly associated with an increase in pro-feminist attitudes. These changes were unevenly distributed across groups, revealing widening attitudinal gaps along gender identities and digital divides. Our findings contribute to a nuanced understanding of how contemporary digitally mediated movements catalyze cultural change and underscore the need to contextualize their impact as it interacts with structural dynamics.

📚 The Journal of Legislative Studies

📄 The operation and abolition of ‘English Votes for English Laws’ in the UK parliament: differentiated voting rights and English ‘legislative consent’

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📄 Reconnecting parliament and citizens: the conditions for institutionalising participation in Nigeria’s Tenth House of representatives

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📚 The Quarterly Journal of Economics

📄 How Does Wage Inequality Affect the Labor Movement?*

This paper provides evidence on how wage inequality among workers affects the labor movement using three complementary research designs: a vignette experiment with union organizers, a natural policy experiment that increased wage inequality among Wisconsin school teachers, and an information intervention during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. Across all studies, we find that inequality undermines union strength through multiple channels. First, workers with high individual bargaining power are more likely to withdraw support in unequal environments, preferring individual over collective bargaining. Second, union organizers facing hypothetical choices strategically respond to inequality in ways that may preserve membership but limit redistribution, such as shifting their campaign away from wages and choosing smaller, more homogeneous bargaining units.

📄 Bringing Work Home: Flexible Work Arrangements as Gateway Jobs for Women in West Bengal*

There is a large latent workforce in developing countries that consists of hundreds of millions of women who prefer to have paid work and yet are out of the labor force. Often, available job opportunities are incompatible with traditional gender roles that encourage women to stay at home. In a randomized experiment with 1,670 households, we partner with a jobs platform to offer short-term data work to women who are out of the labor force. We find three main results. First, flexible work-from-home jobs are highly effective at bringing women into paid work. Job flexibility more than triples take-up from 15% for an office job to 48% for a job that women can do from home while multitasking with childcare. Second, these jobs can act as a stepping stone to less flexible work. Trying paid work from home increases take-up of less flexible jobs two to three months later among women without previous work experience. “Gateway jobs” are especially important for women from more traditional households: their labor supply is more likely to be marginal to flexibility, and in turn, work experience shifts their attitudes to become less traditional. Third, from the labor demand side, remote work comes with trade-offs in worker performance. Working from the office increases accuracy by 3% and speed by 18%. However, these performance drawbacks of work-from-home arrangements may be outweighed by the increase in available workers.

📚 West European Politics

📄 Two sides of governments: comparing inside and outside executive agendas in Denmark

  • Author(s): Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Peter Bjerre Mortensen, Henrik Bech Seeberg
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Citizen participation in the European Union: can it make a difference?

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📄 Time dilation: the temporal structure of elite–voter incongruence on redistribution and immigration

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📄 The structural political power of firms – and its boundaries

  • Author(s): Marcel Hanegraaff, Anne Binderkrantz, Juho Vesa
  • Link: Read the article
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