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本週期刊簡報(2026/07/25)

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45
文章
103

This week, 45 journals published 103 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

AI & Society Gender & Society Political Psychology
American Journal of Political Science Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Science Research and Methods
American Journal of Sociology Journal of Contemporary China Political Science Research in PNAS
American Politics Research Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Political Studies
Big Data & Society Journal of Human Rights Political Studies Review
British Journal of Political Science Journal of Information Technology & Politics Politics & Gender
British Journal of Sociology Journal of Peace Research Politics & Society
Comparative Political Studies Journal of Political Science Education Post-Soviet Affairs
Democratization Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Representation
Discourse & Society Local Government Studies Research & Politics
Economic Sciences Research in PNAS Nations and Nationalism Social Forces
Electoral Studies Nature Reviews Psychology Social Problems
European Political Science Review Party Politics Social Science Quarterly
European Sociological Review Political Behavior The Journal of Legislative Studies
Field Methods Political Communication West European Politics

📚 AI & Society

📄 The quasi-gods of algorithmic providence: recommender systems and religious frameworks

  • Author(s): Ljubiša Bojić, Mark Coeckelbergh, Ernest Ženko, Petar Stevanović, Damian Guzek
  • Link: Read the article
Recommender systems now mediate information exposure for over half the global population daily, shaping beliefs, values, and life decisions at unprecedented scale. Prior research has documented polarization effects, responsibility gaps in autonomous systems, and patterns of AI sacralization in public discourse. Philosophy of technology has established that such systems function as socio-technical assemblages with world-making power rather than neutral tools. Yet few works systematically compare theological doctrines of providence with algorithmic steering, and the convergence of large language models with recommenders has rarely been examined as a transformation of authority and meaning-making. This paper develops a comparative framework drawing on Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist accounts of providence alongside AI ethics, sociology of digital religion, and philosophy of technology. This analysis reveals that recommender systems resemble providence phenomenologically through ubiquity, apparent omniscience, and guidance, but differ decisively in ontology and teleology. These systems optimize for engagement metrics rather than genuine human goods, close futures through performative predictions, and create conditions for what we term technological idolatry. Integration with large language models intensifies these dynamics through conversational persuasion and agentic capabilities. This paper proposes design and governance strategies to resist algorithmic determinism, preserve moral agency, and relocate responsibility within platform infrastructures. The argument is integrative rather than strictly empirical, and systematic field experiments tracing long-run causal effects of recommenders remain scarce. Future research should develop standardized metrics for social impact and test care-based design proposals under controlled conditions.

📄 When vulnerability becomes an asset: revisiting Beck’s risk society in the cyber age

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

📄 On a newer, cheaper kind of vellum

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

📄 Whose harm gets detected? A structured review and conceptual framework for misogyny detection and Dari–Pashto marginalization in AI content moderation

  • Author(s): Mursal Dawodi, Juergen Pfeffer, Yingping Sun, Jawid Ahmad Baktash
  • Link: Read the article
Women in Dari and Pashto digital spaces face gendered abuse expressed through proverbs, religious framing, and moral instruction forms that existing AI content moderation systems often fail to detect. This paper presents a theory-driven structured review of misogyny detection research, complemented by a structured empirical mapping of representative studies. Drawing on a corpus of 84 publications published between 2015 and 2025, we examine how misogyny is operationalized across four dimensions of the NLP moderation pipeline: linguistic surface modeling, cultural-norm encoding, annotation epistemology, and computational adaptation. Our analysis reveals a pronounced structural imbalance. Across a coded subset of representative studies ( n = 20), all focused on linguistic surface modeling and computational adaptation, while only a small minority addressed annotation epistemology, and none explicitly operationalized culturally grounded norm systems as a dedicated modeling layer. These dimensions are not mutually exclusive. Across datasets and benchmarks, recurring limitations include overreliance on explicit lexical toxicity, Western-centric resource concentration, limited robustness under domain shift, and the absence of misogyny-specific resources for Dari and Pashto. We argue that these limitations are systemic rather than purely architectural. Framing misogyny detection as a sociotechnical moderation pipeline, we introduce the Culturally Grounded Misogyny Detection Framework (CG-MDF) and outline design principles for culturally grounded dataset development, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop moderation, with particular emphasis on establishing a research foundation for Afghan languages.

📄 Sympoietic creativity and the boundaries of qing: digital romance writers negotiating generative AI

This study investigates how writers of high-velocity Chinese digital romance fiction negotiate the arrival of generative AI at the desk. Drawing on a 4-year multi-sited digital ethnography (2021–2025) and interviews with 34 writers on Jinjiang Literature City alongside sustained forum observation and platform-discourse analysis, this article tracks how authors of serial romance work under the time discipline of the daily-update treadmill in the presence of large language models (LLMs). I argue that what is emerging is sympoietic creativity: a distributed practice of “making-with” the machine that is fraught, ambivalent and strategic rather than collaborative or replacement-driven. Four modes of negotiation co-exist across the cohort. In strategic collaboration , writers delegate world-building, naming and structural error-checking to the LLM. In cyborg authorship , they curate machine-generated prose under acute platform pressure, at the cost of what they themselves call the work’s “aura.” In conditional refusal , they hold the line at the inter-subjective texture of feeling they consider, on present evidence, beyond the model’s competence. In narrative incorporation , they thematize algorithmic logic in the fiction itself, casting the algorithmic system as villain and human emotion as the route to victory. Throughout, I reserve qing —the inter-subjective, somatic bond from which affect, desire, and embodiment become legible to the reader—as a precise analytical term distinct from generic English-language emotion or affect. The human zone these writers preserve is not a permanent or guaranteed space, but an unstable equilibrium sustained by reader vigilance, platform metrics, and writer self-discipline—any of which could withdraw.

📄 Capability determinism, energy and AI labour substitution

Contemporary policy and media discourse on AI and labour follows a recurring pattern. A demonstration of model capability runs through an inference about workplace substitution to a distributional politics, with the variables that would decide the outcome treated as background. This paper names that pattern capability determinism situates it within Wyatt’s account of soft technological determinism, and reframes the substitution question as a unit-cost economics test. On the AI side, cost per task decomposes into a variable inference cost dominated by electricity and the supply chain that produces compute, an amortised integration cost recoverable across volume, and a residual supervision cost that regulatory and professional regimes will not let fall to zero. Once these three lines are loaded, the substitution discourse turns out to operate as a feedback structure: capability gain stresses the supporting systems faster than it improves the calculus on which substitution depends. The variables outside the AI debate, energy markets, integration economics, professional regulation, capital-market patience, and the geopolitics of compute supply chains decide whether substitution clears in any given place at any given time. Substitution arrives selectively, configurationally, and at a more modest scale than the dominant discourse implies.

📚 American Journal of Political Science

📄 Correcting measurement error bias in conjoint survey experiments

  • Author(s): Katherine Clayton, Yusaku Horiuchi, Aaron R. Kaufman, Gary King, Mayya Komisarchik
  • Link: Read the article
Conjoint survey designs are spreading across the social sciences due to their unusual capacity to estimate many causal effects from a single randomized experiment. Unfortunately, by their ability to mirror complicated real‐world choices, these designs often generate substantial measurement error and thus bias. We replicate both the data collection and analysis from eight prominent conjoint studies, all of which closely reproduce published results, and reveal high levels of measurement error in all. We then discover a common empirical pattern in how measurement error appears in conjoint studies and, with it, introduce an easy‐to‐use statistical method to correct the bias. Along the way, we provide a much simpler and simultaneously more powerful approach to designing, organizing, understanding, and analyzing conjoint data analyses.

📄 Electoral contests over voter beliefs

Voter perceptions of candidates are the substrate on which campaigns act. It is costly, however, for voters to devote enough attention to politics to change their own perceptions of candidates. This paper views campaigns—and the time, effort, and money they expend—as subsidizing rationally inattentive voters' adoption of new beliefs about candidate platforms. We employ an all‐pay contest to model costly competition over voter perceptions. In our baseline model, campaigns seek to improve perceptions of their own candidates. In a variant, candidates engage in negative campaigning. Among other results, we observe platform divergence under more reasonable informational assumptions than previous spatial models, replacing candidate uncertainty about voters with voter uncertainty about candidates. This model serves as a bridge between behavioral research on campaigns and theoretical literature on elections, offering a richer set of empirical predictions while preserving the insights of the canonical Downsian framework as a limiting case.

📄 Contesting repression in divided democracies: Can counternarratives reduce support for police violence?

Democracies often struggle to contain police violence, which undermines the rule of law and reproduces inequality by targeting marginalized citizens. Yet, scholars have shown that repressive policing enjoys considerable public support. Focusing on Brazil, we demonstrate that attitudes toward police violence mirror polarization between left‐ and right‐wing voters, and investigate how competing narratives change attitudes toward police violence through multiple mechanisms. We argue that marginalized victims’ counternarratives can counteract police discourses justifying violence through perspective‐getting, enabling citizens to hear about the experiences of stigmatized groups. Using a nationwide survey experiment, we find that although police narratives increase endorsement of lethal violence, statements from victims’ mothers emphasizing innocence and disadvantage reduce support for police killings—even among right‐wing voters—by increasing empathy and reducing victim‐blaming. We demonstrate that, even in deeply unequal and polarized democracies where exclusionary attitudes align with entrenched ideological divides, counternarratives from marginalized groups can shape public attitudes toward injustices.

📚 American Journal of Sociology

📄 Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls by Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott

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

📚 American Politics Research

📄 Partisanship and Voting Rule Trade-offs

  • Author(s): David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, Michael G. Miller, Jeffrey D. Milyo
  • Link: Read the article
To what extent are partisan differences about voting rules rooted in sincere disagreements about the relative importance of maximizing turnout versus preventing ineligible voters from casting ballots? We document partisan differences in preferences regarding this trade-off over time, demonstrating that these differences are particularly pronounced among the most politically interested respondents. We then report findings from two pre-registered survey experiments that shed light on whether these gaps are a product of partisan sorting or responses to elite cues. The experiments asked participants to make trade-offs between a pair of voting systems. One system would entirely prevent ineligible votes, randomly varying turnout rates among eligible voters; the other would yield universal turnout among eligible voters, but result in some randomly varied number of ineligible voters casting ballots. Some participants were also provided with cues signaling which party endorsed which system. Our results suggest that the effects of divergent partisan cues, rather than differing priorities regarding maximizing eligible turnout and minimizing ineligible turnout, are the more likely explanation for the partisan gaps we find in our observational data. Taken together, the findings suggest that strategic elites can stoke partisan disagreements about how the democratic process should work.

📚 Big Data & Society

📄 YSocial: An artificial intelligence powered social media virtual twin

  • Author(s): Giulio Rossetti, Massimo Stella, Rémy Cazabet, Katherine Abramski, Salvatore Citraro, Erica Cau, Andrea Failla, Virginia Morini, Valentina Pansanella
  • Link: Read the article
This paper introduces YSocial, a new-generation virtual twin designed to replicate an online social media platform. Digital and virtual twins are virtual replicas of physical systems that allow for advanced analyses, control, experimentation, and scenario simulations. In the case of social media, a virtual twin such as YSocial provides a powerful tool for researchers to simulate and understand complex online interactions. YSocial leverages state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to replicate sophisticated agent behaviors, enabling accurate simulations of user interactions, content dissemination, and network dynamics. By integrating these aspects, YSocial offers valuable insights into user engagement, information spread, and the impact of platform policies. Moreover, integrating LLMs allows YSocial to generate nuanced textual content and predict user responses, facilitating the study of emergent phenomena in online environments. To better characterize YSocial, we describe the rationale behind its implementation, provide examples of the analyses that can be performed on the data it generates, and discuss its relevance for multidisciplinary research.

📚 British Journal of Political Science

📄 Thinly Veiled: The Use of Femonationalist Speech in European Parliaments

  • Author(s): Jorge M. Fernandes, Bonnie M. Meguid, Ana Catalano Weeks
  • Link: Read the article
Femonationalism – the use of gendered rhetoric to promote nativist anti-immigration views – is thought to be on the rise across Western European democracies, but scholars lack a systematic understanding of its prevalence across parties and countries, the conditions under which it appears, and the role gender plays in its use. To make progress on these questions, this study explores the use of femonationalism in legislative speeches from five Western European countries from 2009 to 2024. Combining dictionary methods with topic modeling, we find that far-right parties are most likely to use femonationalist rhetoric, increasing these appeals when party opponents threaten their issue distinctiveness by converging towards their anti-immigration policy position. Crucially, our analysis also highlights the role of gender in shaping femonationalist rhetoric: while the overall strategy is party-driven, men and women legislators emphasize different dimensions of femonationalism, with men focusing on security concerns and women invoking gender equality.

📚 British Journal of Sociology

📄 Only Fools Believe Their Theories Are Finished Products! Thirty Years of Updates to the ‘Racialized Social Systems’ Approach to Race Matters

In this address, I discuss the theoretical work I have developed since the publication of my article “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation” in 1997. First, I discuss the idea of “racial habituation.” As part of this discussion, I highlight the centrality of “white normativity” to understand racial affairs. Second, I examine the formation of racial subjects and underscore the import of “regular white folks” (RWF henceforth) in the maintenance of white supremacy regimes. Third, I explore several sources for change. I end my address with an appraisal of the relevance of my claims and mention a few elements that still need to be theorized.

📄 Engineering Apprenticeships: Youth Transitions, Industrial Capital and the Role of Working‐Class Households

Using biographical methods, the study explores the lives of 34 young people undertaking engineering apprenticeships in Teesside, Northeast England. It examines why working‐class youth in a deindustrialised region might be attracted to engineering, how they might secure apprenticeship, and the invaluable role households play in orchestrating and sustaining these relations. To understand such youth transitions we develop the concept of ‘industrial capital’, deployed by adult male family members to leverage employment opportunities in working‐class neighbourhoods. Where apprenticeship studies tend to focus on schools, training centres and workplaces, we argue for a need to connect these wider circuits of labour to the political economy of working‐class households. In doing so, we explore how inter‐generational labour histories may engender attitudes and dispositions, formative of ‘respectable’ work. Furthermore, the article discloses how working‐class households ultimately finance the current apprenticeship system, which has implications not only for them, but for those from low‐income backgrounds.

📚 Comparative Political Studies

📄 For Everything There is a Season: Seasonality and Retrospective Voting in African Elections

Are African elections subject to seasonal effects? I argue that agricultural seasonality patterns election outcomes by influencing voters’ retrospective performance evaluations. When countries hold elections after harvests, voters reward incumbents. As the year continues and conditions worsen, voters begin to sour on incumbents. I construct a measure of agricultural seasons using satellite imagery and pair it with an original dataset of 145 executive-election results from 32 countries, as well as with over 100,000 Afrobarometer survey responses. I first show a curvilinear relationship between the time from harvest and support for incumbent executives. Initially, voter support for incumbents increases following a harvest, but this relationship eventually reverses before the next harvest. To account for endogenous election timing, I also examine quasi-experimental evidence from two Zambian by-elections triggered by the deaths of incumbents. Finally, I analyze survey responses to probe for causal mechanisms and find evidence of sociotropic rather than pocketbook voting.

📄 Property Rights and Social Institutions in Urban Africa: Experimental Evidence From a Land Formalization Program in the DRC

  • Author(s): Pablo Balán, Augustin Bergeron, Gabriel Tourek, Jonathan L. Weigel
  • Link: Read the article
Formal property rights to land remain rare in sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that social institutions shape citizens’ demand for land formalization. When offered the opportunity to formalize, citizens weigh the insurance and tenure-security benefits of informal institutions against their monetary and social obligations. We study a randomized land titling program in a large Congolese city that sharply reduced the costs of acquiring a title. The program caused large increases in both initiation and receipt of titles. Demand was strongest among citizens more engaged in social institutions and more connected to city chiefs, yet such ties did not predict completion of the titling process. Program assignment also reduced citizens’ participation in social institutions and worsened their evaluations of chiefs. These findings suggest that, in urban settings where land values are higher and social institutions are more costly, citizens may exit social institutions when formal alternatives become available, illustrating how formalization can reshape engagement with informal authority.

📚 Democratization

📄 Public support for democracy and different patterns of democratic backsliding

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

📄 Bringing War Back In: victory, defeat, and the state in nineteenth-century Latin America

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

📄 Individual militant democracy in EU institutions

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📄 Autocratization by dual aggrandizement: the civil–military coalition driving Mexico’s democratic backsliding

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📄 Is assembly-independent government good for democracy? Bhutan, Suriname and Switzerland in comparative perspective

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📄 Institutionalization of electoral authoritarianism in North Africa: the 2024 presidential elections in Mauritania

  • Author(s): Raquel Ojeda-García, Samara López-Ruiz, Manuel Rodríguez-Puerta
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Discourse & Society

📄 Discursively acceptable memory and accountability bottlenecks in post-authoritarian testimonial discourse

This article examines how post-authoritarian testimonial discourse can voice critique while limiting the public attribution of blame. Drawing on Van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach, I analyse 41 publicly available oral-history interviews in which speakers recount gender and sexual dissidence under dictatorship and its aftermath. Rather than treating testimony as transparent access to experience, the article identifies four recurrent discourse mechanisms across the corpus: ideological polarisation, agency and responsibility management, presuppositional and evidential framing, and strategic silences. These mechanisms converge at moments where institutional responsibility for coercion would otherwise require explicit naming, producing what I term discursively acceptable memory. In doing so, the article extends sociocognitive CDA by identifying discourse devices through which testimonial critique may be publicly voiced while institutional blame remains constrained, with implications for the study of testimonial discourse in other post-authoritarian settings.

📚 Economic Sciences Research in PNAS

📄 The backfiring effect of weak AI safety regulation

Recent policy proposals aim to improve the safety of general-purpose AI, but there is little understanding of the efficacy of different regulatory approaches. We present a strategic model that explores interactions between safety regulation, general-purpose AI technology creators, and domain specialists—those who adapt the technology for specific applications. Our analysis examines how regulatory measures targeting different parts of the AI development chain affect the outcome of this game. Our model assumes AI technology is characterized by two key attributes: safety and performance. The regulator first sets a minimum safety requirement that applies to one or both players. The general-purpose creator then invests in the technology, establishing its initial safety and performance levels. Next, domain specialists refine the AI for their use cases, updating the safety and performance levels and taking the product to market. Resulting revenue is shared between the specialist and generalist. Our analysis reveals two insights: first, weak safety regulation imposed predominantly on domain specialists can backfire. While it might seem logical to regulate AI use cases, our analysis shows that weak regulations targeting domain specialists alone can reduce safety in a large class of parameterizations. Second, in contrast to the previous finding, we observe that stronger, well-placed regulation can mutually benefit all players. When regulators impose appropriate safety standards on both general-purpose AI creators and domain specialists, the regulation can function as a commitment device, leading to safety and performance gains, surpassing what is achievable under no regulation or regulating only one player.

📄 Gender pay gaps in the social sciences

  • Author(s): Ayelet Gneezy, Uri Gneezy, Joshua Graff Zivin, Gaurav Khanna, Elizabeth Lyons, Marta Serra-Garcia
  • Link: Read the article
We provide a longitudinal, multifield analysis of the gender pay gap in academia that directly links individual-level salaries to measures of scholarly productivity. Using administrative data from the ten campuses that comprise the University of California system, we combine detailed pay records with bibliometric data on publications and citations for faculty in five major social science fields. We find a raw gender pay gap of 23%, which decreases to 4.3% after controlling for field, campus, and cohort. Including controls for job title and scholarly productivity has little effect on the estimated gap, although they substantially increase explanatory power. A decomposition shows that 17% of the gap is unexplained, persisting across junior and senior faculty. We also find a large, persistent gender gap in publications, but no citation gap once output and career length are considered. Field-level analysis reveals that pay gaps are not universal: They persist in Business, Sociology, and Anthropology, but are absent in Economics, Political Science, and smaller social science fields. Our results suggest that pay transparency is insufficient to eliminate salary disparities and that more equal representation within the field is not a prerequisite for pay equity. Our study isolates the residual gap that remains unexplained by productivity or seniority, challenging the view that these factors fully account for gender pay differences. Taken together, our findings highlight the role of field-specific norms and institutional structures, offering directions to promote equitable compensation in academia.

📚 Electoral Studies

📄 Who won the feed? TikTok campaigning of the alternative for Germany (AfD) and the left in Germany’s 2025 federal election

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

📚 European Political Science Review

📄 New or old politics? Understanding public preferences for the EU single market

  • Author(s): Martin Moland, Tobias Bach, Nicholas Jacobs, Craig Parsons
  • Link: Read the article
Despite its place at the core of EU integration, support for the EU’s single market is under-investigated by European public opinion scholars. This paper uses novel survey data from eight EU member states to compare how utilitarian concerns, postmaterialist values and national identities shape popular views of the EU’s single market. Focusing on the freedom of movement for goods, workers, and services, we find that postmaterialist attitudes more consistently predict attitudes towards the single market than economic positioning. We thus contribute to the literature on attitudes towards European integration by showing that postmaterialist values and national identities matter not only for views of highly politicized issues like migration, but also for “bread-and-butter” policies like single market governance. These results are particularly surprising given that we would expect utilitarian expectations to be particularly prominent for these kinds of economic policies.

📄 Whom do you serve? A comparative analysis of congruence between party representatives, voters, and economic elites (2007–2017)

Research on unequal representation argues that party representatives’ preferences align more closely with wealthier citizens than with the public. Comparative research on the role of economic elites in political representation, however, remains largely unexplored, as most studies rely on income to distinguish segments of the population. To address this gap, we employ an innovative measure – the Earth Mover’s Distance – to examine elite bias through a longitudinal, comparative analysis of mass–elite congruence across 16 European countries in 2007, 2016, and 2017. Our findings confirm a systematic bias toward the preferences of economic elites, particularly among party representatives from mainstream, right-leaning, and governing parties. Yet, this tendency is not uniform. Elite bias is most evident on cultural values and European integration, whereas voter bias emerges on other issues. Our results also show that politicians moved further away from the positions of economic elites in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis.

📚 European Sociological Review

📄 School competition, academic achievement, and stratification in a predominantly non-public education system

The relationship between school competition and educational outcomes has been widely studied. Yet evidence from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remains scarce, including from contexts where private or non-public schools provide a substantial share of education. This study investigates the link between school competition and academic achievement in Bangladesh’s secondary schools, where most are classified as private or non-public. Using original school-level longitudinal data and multilevel regression analysis, the results suggest that achievement is lower where school competition is weaker, measured by the distance to nearby schools. However, this association becomes non-significant once school rurality is taken into account, pointing to potential selection bias. Urban areas tend to have more and better-quality schools, and relatively wealthier families. The findings also point to stratification across academic streams: weaker competition is associated with a larger decline in achievement in the science stream than in arts/humanities or business studies. This may again reflect selection, since science students typically come from more advantaged backgrounds and are more likely to have access to private tutoring and better-resourced schools. The results are consistent across several specifications and alternative outcome measures. The study suggests that competition in a largely private/non-public education system does not necessarily raise achievement and may reinforce existing inequalities in educational outcomes.

📚 Field Methods

📄 Exploring Cost-effective Approaches to Behavioral Analysis Through Established Questionnaires

  • Author(s): Konstantin Julian Reule, Carlos Schönfeldt-Lecuona, Theresa Sophie Hanke
  • Link: Read the article
Conducting behavioral analysis and administering questionnaires at the start of psychotherapy is time consuming and costly. This study explores a new approach linking diagnostic information across disorders to behavioral response categories (BRCs) used in behavioral analysis addressing the research gap concerning the integration of behavioral analysis into questionnaire-based diagnostic methods. Clinical psychologists assigned SCL-90-R items to one of four response variables (emotional, cognitive, physiological, behavioral). Three groups emerged: items unequivocally assigned to one BRC, items assigned to multiple BRCs (combined M var = 296.15), and items that couldn't be assigned due to expert disagreement, ambiguous formulations, or enumerations in items ( M var = 109.97). The feasible approach enables receiving multiple types of diagnostic information while only executing one questionnaire, potentially enabling cost-effective diagnostics, reducing therapy time, and making treatment more accessible to individuals with lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The findings emphasize the importance of semantic clarity in item formulations.

📚 Gender & Society

📄 Sharing Knowledge Openly: Author Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Feminist Science

Open science is an increasingly important movement in contemporary social science. Many funders have begun to mandate open practices, newer journals like Socius are open access, and preprint servers have increased readership of paywalled articles. Feminist scholars have written about the values and pitfalls of open research. In this paper, we put those ideas in conversation with each other and empirical data on open-access publishing to develop a feminist framework for thinking about feminist knowledge, data, publishing, and audience. Using a survey of 19,462 social scientists, linked with their entire Web of Science publication history from 2000 to 2023 and all papers posted to SocArXiv, we replicate past work showing that articles by women are less likely to be some types of open access. We extend these findings to scholars of color and feminist scholarship, while also demonstrating a few surprising null results for all three groups.

📄 What Gets Lost in Translation? Epistemic Tensions between Translation and Diffusion in Practice-Oriented Scholarship

  • Author(s): Steven Lauterwasser, Laura K. Nelson, Jessica R. Gold, Alexander J. Gates, Kathrin Zippel
  • Link: Read the article
This paper proposes a feminist-informed metascience theory to explain the interconnected processes of idea creation, translation, and diffusion. Drawing on feminist critiques of science centered on perspective, power, and praxis, we develop a creation–diffusion model that jointly examines how ideas are created and then how the content of ideas influences their spread across academic fields. Using a nationally funded gender equity program as a case of a practice-oriented knowledge-production community, we analyze how gender equity research concepts were translated and diffused through the program-funded publications. We operationalize substantive engagement with gender equity research using word embeddings and Concept Mover’s Distance. Then, with additional contextual variables, we measure (1) the predictors of this engagement (ideas) and (2) the impact of engagement on citation counts and citation interdisciplinarity (the diffusion process) across social science and STEM fields. Our findings show that, in addition to context, the content of the idea matters for diffusion: Engagement with critical dimensions of gender equity research, such as feminism and structural concepts, diffused less often, whereas other dimensions, such as gender and methods, achieved broader uptake. Our empirical findings highlight the role of perspectives and epistemic power in shaping both knowledge production and diffusion. Our theoretical framework and methods demonstrate how metascience can incorporate feminist theory directly into diffusion studies, and why it should.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 Quality, trust, and trade: Reputational dimensions of India’s pharmaceutical exports to African markets

  • Author(s): Gunjan Kumari, Oindrila Dey, Debashis Chakraborty
  • Link: Read the article
The consumption of counterfeit or substandard medicines poses a significant health and trade concern, particularly in Africa. Fatalities in 2022–2023, allegedly linked to Indian-origin drugs, raised questions about product quality and potential reputational risks for India. This study analyses structural breaks in product-level export data and compares them with policy shifts and external shocks. Findings show that negative news causes short-term disruptions, but India’s pharmaceutical exports remain largely resilient due to stronger regulation and quality compliance. Enhancing institutional support to help firms meet international standards and secure certifications is vital to reduce reputational risks and sustain India’s credibility. JEL classification: L65, H32, L15, C32

📄 Hadithi za wasanii wa mtaa (Stories of local artists): Motivations for Afrosensed youth-led civic engagement in Kenya

  • Author(s): Carine Umutoniwase, Laura Ann Chubb, Pat Bullen
  • Link: Read the article
Western informed anthropological and demographic narratives dominate citizenship and youth civic engagement discussions across Africa. This article documents artistic youth-led civic practices that reveal local motivations for civic engagement in Kenya. Using a novel method, Creative Storywork, stories were shared by seven socially charged artists in Nairobi and analysed through an interpretative phenomenological approach; the findings are presented as found poems. The findings show that socially charged artists engage civically to heal from challenges, raise consciousness, and address community needs. Socially charged artists provide context-specific insights that can be used to indigenise policy and programmes while also grounding them in African youth’s lived realities.

📚 Journal of Contemporary China

📄 When the Mass Line Encounters the Ground: Public-Oriented Accountability and Frontline Coping in China

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

📄 Memory in Motion: The Configuration of Korean War Memory in Chinese Popular Representations

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📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 Subnational electoral accountability in multilevel emerging democracies. Gubernatorial voting behavior in Argentina

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

📄 Black and Latino American support for cross-ethnic coalitions: evidence from two conjoint experiments

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📄 Affective polarization and electoral turnout: testing the moderating role of political sophistication on the Italian case

  • Author(s): Antonino Castaldo, Danilo Di Mauro, Vincenzo Memoli
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Journal of Human Rights

📄 Emotion in the production of political violence

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

📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 From marginality to mobilization: the emergence of a pro-Russian digital community in the Spanish-speaking sphere

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

📄 Digital transformation and contested sovereignty in humanitarian action

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📄 Does political efficacy reduce self-censorship? A quantitative analysis of perceived ideological diversity and fear of isolation in Thailand’s digital sphere

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📄 An experiment in forecasting out-of-sample coup events with artificial intelligence

  • Author(s): Cale Horne, Hannah Bult, Nathan Emerly, Patton Hickman, Kateryna Kadian, Isaac Leicht, Chandler Lines, Sebastian Rodriguez, Grace Seitz, Bryant White
  • Link: Read the article
No abstract was provided by the RSS feed or Crossref API.please use the Read the article link above.

📚 Journal of Peace Research

📄 The effects of population settlements and territorial labeling on domestic audience: Evidence from Israeli settlements in the West Bank

States trying to absorb previously external territories under dispute need to convince their national community that the newly acquired territory is an indivisible part of the homeland, important for national security, identity, and prosperity, and is generally worthy of incorporation even at a cost of a protracted conflict. Two strategies that states use to this end are territorial labeling, which means assigning a name to the territory that evokes intrinsic ties to the nation's history and populating the acquired territory with members of the national community (population settlements). To date, no empirical study has evaluated the impact of these two strategies. Using an original survey experiment in the case of Israel, we test the impact of territorial labeling and population settlements on the propensity of Israeli Jews to view the territories Israel conquered from Jordan in the 1967 war (West Bank/Judea and Samaria) as tied to their homeland, important for economic prosperity and national security, and on support for annexation and continued population settlements. We find that territorial labeling is consequential for all our outcomes of interest, whereas the impact of population settlements, specifically the demographic concentration of conationals, is on perceptions of connection to historic homeland and security importance, with no observed effect on policy preferences. These findings have theoretical implications for our understanding of how national territories are socially constructed and made seem more indivisible, demonstrating specifically the impact of symbolic-discursive practices and tangible, material changes on territorial attachments and policy preferences in territorial conflicts.

📄 Organized violence 1989–2025, and violent political protests

  • Author(s): Shawn Davies, Therése Pettersson, Magnus Öberg
  • Link: Read the article
This article examines global trends in organized violence from 1989 to 2025 using new data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). In 2025, fatalities increased sharply to 244,600, up from approximately 187,000 in 2024. This marked a significant rise, with one-sided violence seeing a fivefold increase, largely driven by large-scale violence against civilians in Sudan, resulting in the highest fatality levels since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The number of state-based conflicts reached a record high of 65, with interstate conflicts doubling for the second consecutive year, highlighting an increasing trend in international tensions. State-based fatalities, though slightly lower than in previous years, remained high at 153,600, reflecting the intensity of ongoing armed conflicts, particularly in Ukraine, Israel, and Sudan. Non-state violence, on the other hand, continued its decline, with fatalities dropping to their lowest level since 2013. These developments take place in a broader context of mass mobilization, where some events escalate into violence or are met with repression, sometimes overlapping with patterns of organized violence. To capture this dynamic, the article also presents updated data on violent political protests, an established but intermittently published UCDP category, extended here to 2025.

📄 The Major Episodes of Contention (MEC) data project: an introduction

Although both violent and nonviolent campaigns for political change come in many varieties, scholars of civil resistance have thus far overwhelmingly focused on large campaigns seeking maximalist goals such as the overthrow of a regime, the removal of a foreign occupier, or secession. Most mass movements, however, have reformist goals—like economic, political, environmental, or social policy change—rather than maximalist ones. This article introduces the Major Episodes of Contention data, which identifies the onset, outcomes, and additional variables of 2,734 reformist and maximalist contentious episodes globally from 1955–2018. The dataset relies on English language sources to capture all reported episodes lasting over a week and involving at least a thousand participants. Comparable to the NAVCO v1 Data Series, episodes are classified according to size, goals, duration, defection and/or repression by the incumbent government, and their outcomes. The dataset therefore allows for more differentiation and comparability between like and unlike campaigns. The article presents the major features of the dataset and describes patterns and trends for a more nuanced understanding of different types and forms of contentious mobilization.

📄 Reliability as resolve: reputational transference in international relations

While reputation has a broad connotation in the study of deterrence, empirical analyses typically assess resolve by narrowly examining states' past conflict behavior as primary belligerents. However, this focus often overlooks how states' conduct as allies shapes external perceptions of their resolve and credibility. In this paper, I contend that a reputation for reliability—the record of honoring past alliance commitments—crucially shapes states' resolve, thereby directly affecting their deterrence against external aggression. A reputation as an unreliable ally (a) makes finding future allies more costly and (b) lowers the reputational costs for current allies to break their commitments. So, states with poor reliability experience substantial changes in their (perceived) costs of fighting. Potential challengers view these developments as affecting the target state's willingness to risk war and, consequently, are more likely to exert coercive pressure by initiating conflict. I test this argument using a dynamic measure of reputation based on cross-sectional time-series data spanning 1816 to 2000. The findings show that a state's poor reliability significantly increases the likelihood of being targeted in an interstate conflict. The analysis highlights an additional mechanism of reputational transference, underscoring how alliance politics shapes assessments of resolve in interstate conflicts.

📄 Experience open to interpretation: US presidents and economic coercion

Research offers conflicting accounts of the effect of economic sanctions on the popularity of political leaders, suggesting that the public either rewards an active foreign policy or punishes the use of coercion. Moreover, scholarship assumes that political leaders do not observe ambiguous signals from the public and read the changes of public opinion in an unbiased fashion. Yet, literature on belief formation and on difficulties political leaders have with reading public preferences suggests that policy leaders may be susceptible to confirmation bias in respect to audience effects of sanctions. In this article, I develop a formal model of the behaviour of political leaders with respect to sanctions in an environment in which signals from the public are open to interpretation. I predict that US presidents are likely to anticipate a benefit resulting from sanctions imposition and engage in coercion when approval ratings are decreasing. I test the theory using an event study design and data on approval ratings of US presidents. The empirical analysis identifies an anticipation effect for US presidents, with lower approval ratings prior to imposition of economic sanctions. Additionally, I observe weak evidence in support of audience benefits following imposition of sanctions.

📄 Projecting power at home and abroad: domestic state capacity and military capability

  • Author(s): Johannes Lindvall, Magnus Lundgren, Jan Teorell
  • Link: Read the article
We examine the relationship between domestic state capacity and the projection of military power abroad during the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on recent advances in the conceptualization and measurement of state capacity, we develop a theoretical framework that identifies fiscal, administrative, and informational components as core resources of the state that enable external power projection. We theorize two distinct channels through which domestic state capacity shapes power-projection capabilities: unconditionally, by enhancing the state’s ability to pursue an effective foreign policy, and conditionally, by improving its capacity to mobilize material resources within its territory. We further argue that both channels are amplified when states face geopolitical competition from international rivals. We find evidence for both channels, as well as the amplifying effect of rivalries, not only among former and current great powers, but also in a broader sample of countries. These findings contribute a general and flexible framework for analyzing the domestic foundations of international power and have implications for core debates on the sources, conditions, and consequences of power projection.

📚 Journal of Political Science Education

📄 Centering Career Preparation in Political Science

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📄 Critical Multivocality: A Pedagogy for Exploring Controversial Issues About Israel/Palestine in the Classroom

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📚 Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

📄 The Relevance of Internet-Related Characteristics in Explaining Online Panel Participation and Designing Nonresponse Adjustments. Evidence from a Mixed-Mode Experiment in Recruiting A Probability-Based Online Panel

The transition to online data collection in social science research offers benefits such as lower costs and faster data collection, but also brings challenges, particularly in terms of nonresponse bias related to digital inequality characteristics. People with less pronounced Internet-related characteristics and thus low digital skills or privacy concerns are often unwilling to participate in online panels, which is often a source of bias in survey results. Using data from the 2018 German Internet Panel recruitment experiment, we investigate whether offering an offline recruitment mode attracts respondents with less pronounced Internet-related characteristics, whether these characteristics affect online panel participation, and how including Internet-related characteristics in nonresponse weighting can help improve nonresponse adjustments. Our results show that mixed recruitment strategies that offer a paper-based recruitment survey initially attract individuals with less salient Internet-related characteristics, thereby mitigating their underrepresentation in surveys that offer only an online recruitment survey. In addition, the inclusion of Internet-related characteristics in the nonresponse weighting of the online panel improves estimates for several substantive variables.

📄 Using Opt-In Non-Probability Surveys to Estimate COVID-19 Infection and Vaccination Rates

  • Author(s): Alexi Quintana-Mathé, Ata A Uslu, Jason Radford, James N Druckman, Kristin Lunz Trujillo, Alauna Safarpour, Katherine Ognyanova, Matthew A Baum, Jonathan Schulman, Roy H Perlis, Mauricio Santillana, David Lazer
  • Link: Read the article
Public health crises demand timely surveillance of disease and interventions. This was a substantial challenge during COVID-19 in the United States due to the federalized response. States varied widely in infection and vaccination rates. Continuous state-level probability samples for tracking were unavailable and would have been logistically and financially onerous. Administrative data eventually became inaccurate. We thus evaluate the accuracy of large-scale opt-in non-probability state and national samples (from the Covid States Project) that estimated infection and vaccination rates on a near-continuous basis. The estimates aligned closely with a high-quality national probability sample and state-level administrative data (when such data were reliable). We offer evidence that the success of the surveys, compared to other less accurate non-probability surveys, may have stemmed from the successful recruitment of respondents with low trust in health institutions (i.e., individuals who often avoid surveys). We conclude by discussing how the Covid States Project can inform further data collection efforts requiring extensive spatial and temporal coverage.

📚 Local Government Studies

📄 Disasters, vulnerability, and governance: spatial insights into local fiscal responses across jurisdictional boundaries

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📄 The complementary effects of algorithmic source and governmental context on citizens’ acceptance of algorithmic advice in government

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📄 Electoral reform and party-system fragmentation: diminishing marginal effects and vote–seat conversion limits in Chile’s concurrent local elections

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📚 Nations and Nationalism

📄 National Image as Emotional Nationhood: Zelenskyy's Digital Construction of Ukraine at War

  • Author(s): Yourong Yao, Zhengyang Pei, Yuchen Huang, Zixuan Wang
  • Link: Read the article
How do political leaders construct nationhood through social media in wartime? This article examines Volodymyr Zelenskyy's personal Twitter (currently X) communications alongside those of official Ukrainian government accounts during the Russo‐Ukrainian War. Drawing on English‐language tweets from January 2022 to January 2024, it investigates how different political actors contribute to wartime national image construction through emotional expression, self‐other positioning and securitized communication. Combining sentiment analysis with a difference‐in‐differences design, the study compares changes in affective expression before and after the war's onset. The findings show that Zelenskyy's account displayed greater affective intensity and volatility, combining narratives of victimhood, resilience and antagonism to construct the national image and delineate self‐other boundaries. By contrast, official accounts maintained a more stable and institutionally restrained communicative style. The article contributes to nationalism scholarship by demonstrating how elite communication functions in wartime nationhood.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 Autistic students face ableism in the classroom

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📄 Interpreting respiratory heart rate variability

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📚 Party Politics

📄 Divergence or nationalization? Voting across constituencies in four European countries

  • Author(s): Valentin Pautonnier, Ruth Dassonneville, Richard Nadeau
  • Link: Read the article
While the nationalization of elections is often viewed as a key characteristic of modern European democracies, the growing body of evidence on urban-rural electoral divergence suggests a reversal of nationalization, due to regional disparities in electoral outcomes. In this paper we study this issue by analyzing constituency-level election results from Denmark, England, France, and Germany over six decades. Using a divergence index, we uncover a trend toward increasing electoral divergence in election outcomes between constituencies in three of the four countries (not in Denmark), particularly since the 2000s. While we find evidence that non-mainstream parties and party system fragmentation contribute to this increase, even the results of mainstream parties have diverged more in recent elections. We also show that rural-urban electoral polarization is an important predictor of divergence which, alongside party system fragmentation and non-mainstream party strength, accounts for much of the temporal trend—suggesting that the growing structuring of party competition along the density gradient is a key driver of de-nationalization. Our findings challenge former analyses suggesting the inevitability of nationalization and underscore the importance of geographical divides in shaping European political landscapes.

📚 Political Behavior

📄 Irregularities in Perez Brower (2024), “Reframing Gendered Issues: Intersectional Identity Frames and Policy Agendas”

  • Author(s): Christopher Adolph, Caitlin Ainsley, Aslı Cansunar
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Government Spending Shapes the Emergence of Women Candidates for Local Office

  • Author(s): Tiffany D. Barnes, Patrick Cunha Silva, Mirya R. Holman
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Partisanship and the Social Construction of Deservingness in the United States

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📄 Editorial Expression of Concern: Reframing Gendered Issues: Intersectional Identity Frames and Policy Agendas

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📄 Editors’ Commentary: Reflections on Post-Publication Corrections

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📚 Political Communication

📄 Common Identities and Political Talk: Evaluating Cross-Cutting Political Discussions in Sports Communities on Reddit

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📄 Affective Publics in the YouTube Live Chat: Multimodal Emotional Contagion During the 2024 U.S. Presidential Debate

  • Author(s): Sungwon Jung, Zhi Lin, Joseph M Stepniewski, Jennifer Castillo Cortes, Yuzhe Lei
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Studying Propaganda as a Social Process

  • Author(s): Christian Baden, Anna Litvinenko, Gregory Asmolov
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Political Fact-Checking Efforts are Constrained by Deficiencies in Coverage, Speed, and Reach

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📄 Reintegrating Influencer Media Logic into the Study of Political Influencers

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📚 Political Psychology

📄 Beyond prejudice reduction: Personal and civic effects of intergroup contact among marginalized youth in Northern Ireland

  • Author(s): Danielle L. Blaylock, Patrick F. Kotzur, Alexander W. O'Donnell, Rhiannon N. Turner, Stephanie Burns, Laura K. Taylor, Linda R. Tropp
  • Link: Read the article
Intergroup contact reduces prejudice, but its potential to foster broader personal and societal change remains understudied. We address these gaps by examining a large‐scale peacebuilding intervention (PEACE4Youth) among marginalized youth in post‐conflict Northern Ireland. Using latent growth curve modeling across three waves, we demonstrate that increased intergroup contact is associated with improvements not only in youth's outgroup attitudes but also in their self‐esteem, leadership skills, and civic engagement. Youth with steeper contact gains showed the strongest growth across all domains, supporting intergroup contact as a mechanism for multidimensional change. While effects emerged across Catholic and Protestant youth, baseline differences underscore the role of pre‐existing disparities. These findings extend contact theory by empirically linking contact to personal and societal development, redefining it as a tool not only for harmony but also for empowering individuals to transform divided societies.

📄 Benevolent authority beliefs, democratic values, and public support: A comparative study of China and Japan

Emergencies and crises, such as the COVID‐19 pandemic, pose significant challenges to a country's governance, and public approval is crucial for effectively managing such crises. China and Japan are two East Asian countries that share Confucian cultural legacies but have undergone distinct political transformations since World War II. In light of these contextual differences, this study argues that the benevolent authority system of governance remains influential in China, while its influence has diminished in Japan, where public approval of the government is primarily rooted in democratic values. Using survey data from the general public in both countries, the results reveal that benevolent authority beliefs continue to sustain public approval in China, while their effects were insignificant in Japan. Democratic values were positively associated with public approval in Japan but negatively associated with that in China. Moreover, democratic values among younger generations in Japan were significantly lower than those of their older counterparts, whereas younger individuals in China exhibited higher levels of benevolent authority beliefs compared to the older generation. Economic recession and widening income inequality may help explain the conservative shift among younger generations.

📄 Identity threat, personal values, and political attitudes: Evidence from a large‐scale survey across the European Union

In political contexts, identities are typically based on shared values. Populist rhetoric often utilizes real and perceived threats to evoke such identities, especially on the far right. Using dedicated items in a survey covering all 27 EU Member States ( N  = 27,032), we present evidence on the understudied link between perceived identity threat and values, reflecting foundational motivations of people, as well as downstream political attitudes. At the EU level, personal values related to anxiety avoidance correlate positively with perceived identity threat, whereas growth‐focused values correlate negatively. The positive relationship between identity threat and values focusing on increasing one's self‐efficacy and status is especially pronounced, suggesting compensatory motivational processes. National‐level analysis reveals a more nuanced picture. Perceived identity threat correlates strongly with lower support for liberal policies. This result is relatively homogenous across the EU‐27 and holds when controlling for personal values. Overall, the findings resonate with populist rhetoric focusing on in‐groups and status while attacking liberal policies and universalist values. Conversely, the findings offer hope that policies and communication reducing identity threat may reinforce support for liberal policies and aligned values.

📚 Political Science Research and Methods

📄 Benchmarking in public updating of economic perceptions

How do people respond to new information about social conditions? For example, does an improvement always lead people to say things are “better”? We argue that people update their views differently depending on whether preexisting perceptions are positive or negative, meaning equivalent changes in conditions can elicit different public reactions. To test this possibility, we update a classic model of aggregate public responsiveness to economic conditions by including recent public perceptions as a moderator variable. This reveals a substantial source of heterogeneity: changes in the economy matter either a great deal for public perceptions or not at all, depending on the prior levels of those perceptions. The results imply that updates of public perceptions are benchmarked to the recent past.

📚 Political Science Research in PNAS

📄 At the boundary: Law and AI

  • Author(s): Daniel E. Ho, Julian Nyarko, Vanessa Parli, Christopher D. Manning
  • Link: Read the article
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 30, July 2026.

📄 Public responses to atrocities depend on partisanship and context, not legal labels

  • Author(s): Yphtach Lelkes, Ellie M. Mitchell, Erin Walk, Sean J. Westwood
  • Link: Read the article
Legal labels such as genocide and crimes against humanity carry substantial legal and diplomatic weight in elite and institutional arenas, where classification shapes treaty obligations, ICC jurisdiction, and the perceived stakes of inaction. A common assumption in advocacy and policy discourse is that these labels also shape mass public judgment. Direct evidence is limited and ambiguous. We test this assumption in a preregistered, nationally representative survey experiment ( N = 2 , 000 ) comparing four legally salient atrocity terms—genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing—against a nonlegal control across five real-world conflict contexts, measuring support for punitive and humanitarian policies as well as moral attributions of responsibility. Across outcomes, estimated label effects are small and rarely distinguishable from zero. Critically, even within a given partisan and country context, swapping legal labels produces smaller shifts than the baseline gaps across partisan and geopolitical contexts—indicating that where you stand and who you are matter far more than what word is used. Any departures from zero are narrow and do not accumulate into a consistent pattern across outcomes or conflicts. These results suggest that the political significance of atrocity labeling lies primarily in elite and institutional arenas; for mass publics, legal terminology is a weak lever compared to country context and partisan commitments.

📚 Political Studies

📄 Constituent power and constituent collectives in a Union context: Deciding the futures of Scotland and the United Kingdom

Over the last few decades, interconnected debates about Scottish independence and Brexit have shaped politics in the United Kingdom and raised questions of constituent power that remain controversial both politically and theoretically. Against this backdrop, this article proposes a nuanced democratic conception of constituent power that serves as an alternative to orthodox sovereigntist accounts. This conception is theoretically more compelling and, moreover, enables fruitful engagement with contemporary constitutional controversies. By establishing a dialogue between theoretical discussion and the Scottish and UK case, the article, first, explores constituent power as one dimension of popular sovereignty and its interplay with constituted powers over time. Second, it examines how constituent collectives can and, in recent history, have become subject to contestation and change. Third, it sketches monist and pluralist conceptions of constituent power and peoples that co-exist, yet conflict within the United Kingdom, thereby mapping distinct trajectories for possible constitutional futures in a union setting.

📄 The return to compulsory voting: Invalid voting and its representational challenges in Chile’s subnational elections

Compulsory voting (CV) reliably raises turnout, but its effects on invalid ballots and the inequalities these produce are less well understood. Chile’s return to CV in 2022 provides a rare within-country test of how the shift from voluntary to compulsory participation reshapes invalid voting and what this produces in the context of shifting inequalities. We analyse the last local elections held under voluntary voting (VV, 2021) and the first under CV (2024) across all 345 municipalities, exploiting concurrent contests held under distinct electoral rules. Our central finding is that CV shifts inequality from participation to vote validity, with rates of invalid voting varying across majoritarian and proportional elections. Specifically: (1) invalid voting increased substantially under CV, though valid votes for parties and candidates also rose; (2) the entry of new voters is associated with a shift from abstention under VV to invalid ballots under CV; (3) ballot size is more strongly associated with invalid voting under CV in proportional than in relative-majority systems; (4) poverty is unrelated to invalid voting under VV but becomes significant under CV, especially in the capital; and (5) rurality is negatively associated with invalid voting under CV but not under VV. These results contribute to debates on whether CV corrects or displaces class bias in participation, on the structural determinants of invalid voting, and on how electoral system type conditions invalid ballot rates under compulsory participation.

📚 Political Studies Review

📄 Justifying the political liberal justificatory constituency

This paper critically assesses one of many innovative arguments within Badano and Nuti’s important book Politicizing Political Liberalism , namely their ‘core truths approach’, which rejects the need to offer any justification for political liberalism’s conception of reasonableness other than the inherent attractiveness of the ideal. I argue that this approach cannot succeed, especially in the light of disagreements regarding the proper conception of reasonableness among political liberals themselves. The ‘rationale’ for political liberalism that justifies its central claims, including a conception of reasonableness, is a crucial aspect of the theory. I further argue that this has implications for Badano and Nuti’s arguments regarding containment, and, in particular, for the application of partisans’ duty to transform public reason.

📄 Beyond co-occurrence: Homonativism, boundary-making, and the coupling of sexual liberalism and nativism

Across Europe, political actors increasingly claim to defend sexual minorities while pursuing exclusionary agendas on immigration, integration, and national belonging. Recent work has identified this alignment as homonativism: the strategic incorporation of sexual-liberal stances towards homosexuality into nativist boundary-making, applied primarily to party rhetoric and electoral competition. This article extends homonativism to the mass level, asking how sexual-liberal and nativist attitudes come to be held together by individual citizens, rather than merely held alongside one another. Existing survey research establishes that these attitudes frequently co-occur, but co-occurrence – two attitudes held simultaneously – is conceptually distinct from coupling, in which one attitude actively legitimises or amplifies the other through a narrative or causal relationship. Drawing on elite cue theory and theories of symbolic boundary-making, the article explains how coupling operates: sexual tolerance functions as a marker of national belonging, such that nativist exclusion is experienced not as contradicting liberal values but as defending them. The article specifies observable implications for survey, experimental, and mediation-based research, distinguishing coupled attitude configurations from mere co-occurrence. In doing so, it provides the mass-level theoretical apparatus that homonativism has so far lacked and sets out a precise empirical agenda for testing it.

📄 Reversing the political donations gender gap in federal systems: The role of issue salience and financial equality

  • Author(s): Amanda Friesen, Jesse Mehravar, Christopher Alcantara, Jason Roy
  • Link: Read the article
Despite a persistent gender gap in political donations—where men donate more than women—recent Canadian research suggests this gap can reverse when financial resources are equalized and donors consider provincial parties. Building on this insight, we investigate the mechanisms driving gendered donation behavior using a pre-registered survey experiment. By manipulating financial resources and issue salience in a federal system, we assess donations to Canadian federal and provincial parties. Our findings show that, with equalized resources, women are more likely to donate to provincial parties when issues and jurisdictions are not primed. However, when issue salience is highlighted beforehand, women’s donation behavior aligns more closely with men’s. These results suggest that the gender gap in political donations may be shaped not only by material constraints but also by institutional context and access to political information at the time of decision-making.

📄 Party-colored trust? Ties between party preference and epistemic trust in climate change issues

The relationship between party preference and epistemic trust is a seldom studied subject, especially regarding climate change issues. Previous studies have focused mainly on left–right and liberal–conservative divides and the role of partisan media. Here, we deployed a design that allowed an examination of how party preferences shape epistemic trust in experts and science as well as in different information sources of climate change-related knowledge in the multi-party environment of Finland, a country known for its high societal trust in science and institutions. Based on survey data, we found that party color affects epistemic trust in multifaceted ways. The supporters of the New Left and Green parties were consistent and unified in showing epistemic trust, the voters of the Social Democratic Party trusted agencies of urgent climate action and agencies of industry, and the voters of the populist far-right showed low epistemic trust in general.

📄 Discursive Reinforcement of State Legitimacy: The Role of Iranian Media in Framing the Iran–Israel War

This study is a critical discourse analysis of how Iranian state-aligned media – Tehran Times and Mehr News Agency – discursively construct social legitimacy for the Islamic Republic of Iran during the 2025 Iran–Israel war. Drawing upon the theoretical foundations of legitimacy and legitimisation and utilising the framework of legitimisation strategies and proximisation theory, this research analyses 200 headlines and lead paragraphs from The Tehran Times and Mehr News Agency . Data collection was carried selectively: We solely opted for the headlines and lead paragraphs that portrayed Iran–Israel’s war from a variety of aspects. Through systematic coding and thematisation, the study identifies four major conceptualisations of WE as the focal point is soliciting legitimisation: WE as a united nation, WE as a rightful nation, WE as a wounded nation and WE as a powerful nation. These conceptualisations fall under three representational themes – the representation of the US camp, the representation of the Iran–Israel conflict and the representation of Iran’s retaliation – framing the IRI’s state of national-ideological stance, its affectedness and its preventive-retaliatory posture in the context of an existential threat and national resistance. The study reveals how regimes under duress repurpose conflict as a discursive opportunity to restore fractured trust, reforge ideological cohesion and reassert political credibility for the political system.

📄 The effects of crises in democratic and non-democratic regimes: Introduction to the special issue

Over the past two decades, Europe has experienced a succession of major crises, including the global financial crisis, the refugee crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Rather than isolated events, these crises unfolded in close temporal proximity and often interacted with one another, generating cumulative pressures on political systems and institutions. The articles in this special issue shows how crises are not really “exceptional disruptions,” but rather transformative political moments that reshape relationships between citizens, institutions, and political actors across democratic and non-democratic settings; and their consequences depend on regime type, institutional configurations, political leadership, and societal responses.

📚 Politics & Gender

📄 Baby Slump: The Political Consequences of Pregnancy for Candidates

Do women candidate’s parental status, whether childfree, pregnant, or a mother, influence how U.S. voters evaluate their leadership, commitment, and policy expertise at the state executive and legislative levels? Using data from a nationally representative survey experiment, I assess how voters rate these candidates’ competencies. Regardless of partisanship, I find voters reduce support for pregnant candidates, particularly at the executive level, due to concerns about time availability. I also discover a parenthood timing gap effect — while pregnancy is perceived as a limitation to do the job as an elected official, having young children as a mother enhances leadership evaluations, at least among Democrats. A partisan divide emerges, with Democrats rating maternal-cuing candidates higher on leadership competencies compared to Republicans. This research has important implications for how candidates need to strategize their presentation as we see more women and (expecting) mothers run for all types of office.

📄 The Green Gender Gap in Adolescence: A Case Study of Norway

Previous research from predominantly Western contexts finds that men consistently show less concern for climate change and the environment than women, a pattern known as the Green Gender Gap. This article investigates whether political gender socialization contributes to this phenomenon. Drawing on two unique data sources from Norway, I find that among adolescents aged 15 to 18, girls are more supportive of the Green Party, consider environmental protection more important, and are more likely to prioritize the environment over oil production and industrial development. I also find that girls express greater concern about climate change than boys from as early as age 13, the earliest age at which data are available. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that early-life political gender socialization plays a key role in shaping the Green Gender Gap. The gap emerges before structural gender sorting into different educational and occupational trajectories, and while most adolescents still live at home and share the same formative environment. These findings are particularly striking given the Norwegian context, which is characterized by minimal structural gender segregation among adolescents. The findings in this article point to gendered socialization, rather than structural differences between women and men, as one of the driving forces behind the Green Gender Gap.

📄 Voting the Same, Feeling Differently: Sister Circles, Black Feminist Epistemologies, and Black Women’s Political Emotions During the Harris Campaign

  • Author(s): Nadia E. Brown, Camille Burge-Hicks, Christine M. Slaughter
  • Link: Read the article
Kamala Harris, a first multi-racial Black woman, became the official Democratic presidential nominee on August 5, 2025. This historic achievement only amplified the intensity of discussions about Black women’s politics in the United States. As Black feminist political scientists studying Black women’s politics, we knew we needed to document the nuance, dynamism, and historical nature of Harris’s campaign. We were keenly aware that we needed to capture the narratives of Black women voters to fully make sense of this historic moment. The media narrative that Black women were excited about Harris’s nomination (Jones 2024; Walker 2024) and scholarly findings that Black women voters preferred Black women candidates (Brown et al. 2019; Philpot and Walton, Jr. 2007) seemed superficial. We believed that beneath Black women’s support for Harris lay a particularized set of emotions and wide variation in candidate evaluations, which are underexplored because Black women consistently vote Democratic and are the demographic group most likely to support Black women candidates. These varied emotive responses lead to the same political behavior: a vote for Harris. Our research examines how Black women feel about politics and how these emotions translate into political action.

📚 Politics & Society

📄 Simulating Reform: Statistics, Working Consensus, and Stop-and-Frisk Persistence in New York City

According to official statistics, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program is no more. After a 2013 federal court ruling declared the program unconstitutional, recorded stop-and-frisks fell from a peak of nearly 700,000 in 2011 to fewer than 10,000 by 2020. We demonstrate that this portrayal of the program's demise is more fiction than reality—a simulation sustained through underreporting and reclassification of pedestrian stops into categories that draw less attention. The simulation persists not through deception but through a working consensus involving police, politicians, media, and even advocacy groups. These actors tacitly accept the statistics despite countervailing evidence, allowing each to hold otherwise incompatible positions: officials proclaiming stop-and-frisk outmoded even as the same stops continue under new labels, advocates celebrating its end even as the communities they represent report no real change. Our analysis shows how mechanisms designed to ensure government accountability can become instruments that enable highly scrutinized agencies and programs to evade reform.

📚 Post-Soviet Affairs

📄 Russia’s failed “muscular mediation” in Nagorno-Karabakh

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📚 Representation

📄 Speaking for Votes: The Electoral Returns of Region-Focused Rhetoric in Korean Legislative Committee

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📄 Authoritarian Legacies and the Kuomintang's Electoral Performance in the 2024 Election

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📄 Asymmetric Accountability: A Causal Test of Multidimensional Legislative Responsiveness in Five European Democracies

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📚 Research & Politics

📄 War propaganda without misinformation? Normative framing and side-taking in war

How do citizens of third-party states form sympathies in foreign wars? Most prior work on wartime public opinion focuses on the effects of information: material costs, elite assessments, and characteristics of combatants. Yet wartime coverage must also make choices about how to frame a conflict, separate from endorsements or facts. For example, a military intervention might be introduced in the context of one state’s sovereignty or the other state’s quest to restore democracy, even holding the facts constant. We argue that these normative frames have a large impact on public sympathy and support, especially in third-party publics, for whom material costs may be secondary considerations and loyalties may be open to debate. We demonstrate these effects with two vignette experiments among a representative sample of 1200 American adults. Framing decisions swayed respondents’ moral judgments and sympathy by 40–65 percentage points, and support for military aid by 20–30 percentage points. These effects were large and consistent regardless of the characteristics of warring parties, respondents’ foreign policy views, or their attitudes on current events such as the wars in Gaza or Ukraine.

📚 Social Forces

📄 The stalled gender housework revolution in the United States

Prior studies document a declining but persistent gender housework gap since the 1960s, with declines in women’s housework time far exceeding increases in men’s. Yet scholars differ in their assessment of what these trends mean about the pace and extent of gendered change in family life. Using individual-level longitudinal data from the 1976–2023 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study addresses this theoretical impasse by asking whether housework has become fundamentally degendered over time. I assess degendering using two novel indicators: the residual gender housework gap relative to the total gap and gender symmetry in associations between key predictors and housework. Results show that although the overall gender housework gap has declined substantially, the share of the total gap accounted for by theoretically relevant observed predictors remains small and has not increased over time. Individual fixed-effects models further show that cohabitation, marriage, and children remain much more strongly associated with increases in women’s housework than men’s across periods. Associations of paid work hours and earnings with housework, in contrast, attenuate over time, with less consistent evidence of gender asymmetry. Overall, these findings indicate limited progress in degendering housework and are more consistent with a stalled gender housework revolution.

📄 Fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity

Different conceptions of inequality of opportunity have been developed in political philosophy. We focus on two competing conceptions: fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity. We develop an empirical framework to measure and compare these conceptions. Both fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity consider it unjust if ascribed characteristics such as social origin, gender, race, and ethnicity affect life outcomes. However, they differ in what they regard as just: fair inequality of opportunity considers it just if abilities and individual choices affect life outcomes, while luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity considers it just only if individual choices affect life outcomes. We measure fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity in education, occupation, income, and wealth using survey data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Our results show that conclusions about inequality of opportunity depend on the conception of inequality of opportunity employed. From the perspective of fair inequality of opportunity, the United States is a rather just society, while the nation’s degree of luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity is high. The difference between fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity is largest for education, followed by occupation, and finally income and wealth. There is no evidence that changes across cohorts differed between fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity.

📚 Social Problems

📄 The diversity pendulum: predictors of DEI shifts in corporate America

  • Author(s): Lisa A Marchiondo, Alicia R Ingersoll, Christy Glass, Alison Cook
  • Link: Read the article
Between 2020 and 2025, United States companies demonstrated unprecedented swings in their commitments to DEI. This manuscript addresses predictors of why some firms sustain their commitments to DEI while others retreat in the face of sustained political backlash. Drawing on institutional theory, we test the predictive power of three mechanisms to explain firms’ reactions to political and social attacks on DEI practices: coercive pressures (state laws), mimetic pressures (industry leaders), and normative pressures (racial and gender compositions of CEOs and boards). Two author-constructed datasets were developed. The first dataset contained DEI communications within annual shareholder letters for S&P 500 firms. The second was a proprietary dataset with supplemental data that tracked firms’ public-facing practices, policies, and commitments to DEI. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that the passage of anti-DEI laws in states where firms were headquartered (i.e., coercive pressure) contributed to sustained firm commitment to DEI rather than retreat. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that the presence of historically underrepresented leaders on companies’ boards (i.e., normative pressure) positively related to sustained commitment to DEI. We did not find support for the influence of industry leaders (mimetic pressure), nor of CEO gender or race, on firms’ DEI-related actions.

📄 The asset economy and its politics: homeownership and class in the United States, 1985–2022

In recent decades, asset prices have outpaced consumer goods inflation and wages in many developed and some developing economies. In turn, scholars have suggested that asset ownership, especially homeownership, is increasingly important to individual life chances in these economies relative to employment, but less is known about how the political attitudes of asset owners and non-owners have changed. Using General Social Survey data spanning 1985 to 2022, I examine changes in Americans’ attitudes toward downward government redistribution and voting for Republican presidential candidates by homeownership status. I find evidence for a substantial divergence in the attitudes of homeowners and non-owners over the past several decades. This divergence is evident not only in the overall population but also among non-managerial non-professional employees and those earning less than the median income, substantiating longstanding claims that the working class is politically fragmented by homeownership. Furthermore, attitudinal differences by homeownership status exceed those between the self-employed, managerial employees, non-managerial professional employees, and non-managerial non-professional employees in the United States today.

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 The Punitiveness of the Mass Public: Lessons From Exploratory Studies

  • Author(s): Kevin J. Mullinix, Nathan Brophy, Robert J. Norris, Kyra Cornell
  • Link: Read the article
Objective A large literature across the social sciences examines the punishment preferences of the mass public. Although this work yields valuable insights into the correlates of punitive attitudes, differences in research design and measurement complicate comparisons across studies. We engage in a large‐scale exploratory analysis of the dynamics that shape punitiveness. Methods We fielded two surveys in the United States with multiple measures of punishment preferences, providing a uniquely comprehensive assessment of the individual characteristics associated with these attitudes. Within the surveys, we also conducted 13 experiments examining how contextual features of crime—including offense type and victim and offender characteristics—influence punitiveness. Results Three general findings emerge. First, despite variation across measures, some individual characteristics—such as worry about victimization and authoritarianism—exert consistent independent effects on punishment preferences. Second, average levels of punitiveness vary with contextual features of the crime, particularly descriptions of the offense and the individuals involved. Third, individual characteristics interact with contextual features such that inferences about the predictors of punitiveness often depend on crime context. Conclusion We call for greater conceptual clarity and increased attention to how measurement choices shape conclusions about punitiveness. We propose a framework for organizing predictors of punitiveness, situating empirical findings within the broader literature, and guiding future research.

📚 The Journal of Legislative Studies

📄 Moved but not equal: age, gender, and committee transfers in the Korean National Assembly

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📄 The Paper Power Paradox: institutional determinants and the mediating role of oversight culture in the Ethiopian Parliament

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📚 West European Politics

📄 Public support for climate policies: costs, redistribution, and ideological divides

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