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本週期刊簡報(2026/08/01)

更新期刊
52
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142

This week, 52 journals published 144 new articles.
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Journals Updated This Week

American Economic Review Journal of Conflict Resolution Political Studies Review
American Politics Research Journal of Contemporary China Politics and Religion
Annual Review of Sociology Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties Public Opinion Quarterly
Big Data & Society Journal of Experimental Political Science Research & Politics
British Journal of Political Science Journal of Information Technology & Politics Social Forces
British Journal of Sociology Journal of Political Economy Social Problems
Comparative Political Studies Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Social Science Computer Review
Contemporary Political Theory Journal of Theoretical Politics Social Science Quarterly
Democratization Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) Sociological Methods & Research
Discourse & Society Legislative Studies Quarterly The International Journal of Press/Politics
Economic Sciences Research in PNAS Nature Reviews Psychology The Journal of Legislative Studies
Electoral Studies Party Politics The Quarterly Journal of Economics
European Journal of Political Research Policy & Internet Theory and Society
Field Methods Political Analysis West European Politics
Government and Opposition Political Communication World Politics
International Political Science Review Political Psychology 人文及社會科學集刊
Journal of Asian and African Studies Political Research Quarterly
Journal of Chinese Political Science Political Studies

📚 American Economic Review

📄 Community Engagement and Public Safety: Evidence from Crime Enforcement Targeting Immigrants

  • Author(s): Felipe Gonçalves, Elisa Jácome, Emily Weisburst
  • Link: Read the article
We study the role of victim reporting in the production of public safety. We examine the Secure Communities program, a crime-reduction policy that involved police in detecting unauthorized immigrants and increased deportation fears in immigrant communities. We find that the policy reduced the likelihood that Hispanic victims report crimes to police and increased offending against Hispanics. The number of reported crimes is unchanged, masking these opposing effects. We show that reduced reporting drives the offending increase and provide the first elasticity of offending to victim reporting in the literature, calculating that a 10 percent decline in reporting increases offending by 7.9 percent. (JEL J15, K37, K42)

📄 Additionality and Asymmetric Information in Environmental Markets: Evidence from Conservation Auctions

Mechanisms that aim to reduce environmental degradation at low cost can be undermined when participants' conservation actions are not marginal to the incentive—or “additional”—as the lowest-cost participants may not be the highest social value. We investigate this challenge in the Conservation Reserve Program's auction mechanism for ecosystem services, linking bids to satellite-derived land use. Three-quarters of marginal auction winners are not additional. The heterogeneity in counterfactual land use introduces adverse selection. We develop a model of bidding and additionality to quantify welfare implications. Alternative auctions increase efficiency by using scoring rules that incorporate expected land use impacts. (JEL D44, D82, Q24, Q57, R14)

📄 Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets

  • Author(s): Gautam Gowrisankaran, Ashley Langer, Mar Reguant
  • Link: Read the article
Natural gas has replaced coal as the dominant fuel for US electricity generation. However, utilities in regulated US states have retired coal more slowly than others. We build a structural model of rate-of-return regulation during an energy transition where utilities face trade-offs between lowering costs and maintaining and using legacy capacity. A regulated utility facing carbon taxes lowers short-run coal generation 48 percent as much as a cost minimizer would. Thirty years after a sudden energy transition, a cost minimizer has retired 71 percent more coal capacity than the regulated utility. Alternative regulations may jeopardize affordability and reliability goals during energy transitions. (JEL D24, L94, L98, Q35, Q48)

📄 Merger Effects and Antitrust Enforcement: Evidence from US Consumer Packaged Goods

  • Author(s): Vivek Bhattacharya, Gastón Illanes, David Stillerman
  • Link: Read the article
We document the effects of a comprehensive set of mergers of consumer packaged goods manufacturers on prices, quantities, and product assortment. Across specifications, we find a small average price effect of mergers (−0.5−1.1 percent) but substantial heterogeneity, with a standard deviation between 3.9 and 7.6 percentage points. Through a model of enforcement, we find that agencies act as if they challenge mergers they expect would increase prices more than 4.8 to 6.3 percent. Increases in stringency would reduce prices and the prevalence of completed price-increasing mergers, with minimal impacts on blocked price-decreasing mergers, at significantly greater agency burden. (JEL D43, G34, K21, L13, L41, L66)

📄 Remote Work and City Structure

  • Author(s): Ferdinando Monte, Charly Porcher, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg
  • Link: Read the article
Relative to remote work, working downtown facilitates valuable interactions with other in-office workers but entails commuting costs. The resulting coordination mechanism can lead to multiple stationary equilibria with varying levels of remote work. Temporary reductions in commuters, as in the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to persistently large fractions of remote workers. Cell phone-based mobility data for the United States shows commuting trips in the largest cities, which are more likely to exhibit multiplicity, have stabilized at only 60 percent of prepandemic levels, while they are fully back in smaller cities. Cities with permanently low commuting experience average welfare losses of 2.3 percent. (JEL I12, J22, M54, R23, R31)

📄 The Productivity of Professions: Evidence from the Emergency Department

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians, two professions performing overlapping tasks but with starkly different backgrounds, training, and pay. Using quasi-experimental variation in patient assignment to NPs versus physicians in Veterans Health Administration emergency departments, we find that, on average, NPs use more resources and exhibit a higher 30-day preventable hospitalization rate than physicians. However, the NP-physician performance difference varies by case complexity and severity. Importantly, even larger productivity variation exists within each profession, leading to substantial overlap between the productivity distributions of the two professions; NPs outperform physicians in 38 percent of random pairs. (JEL I11, I18, J24, J44, M53)

📄 Random Utility with Unobservable Alternatives

The random utility model (RUM), a cornerstone in economics, is typically studied under the assumption that choice frequencies of all alternatives are observable. In practice, however, some alternatives have unobservable choice frequencies and are commonly aggregated into a single category called an outside option. We study RUM in such environments and derive a finite, nonredundant system of inequality constraints on observed choice frequencies that characterizes RU-rationalizability. We show that the conventional practice of aggregating unobserved alternatives can miss key information leading to incorrect conclusions such as that observed choices are rationalizable, even when no RUM is consistent with them. (JEL D11, D44, D83)

📄 Designing Dynamic Reassignment Mechanisms: Evidence from GP Allocation

  • Author(s): Ingrid Huitfeldt, Victoria Marone, Daniel Waldinger
  • Link: Read the article
We study the problem of designing a dynamic reassignment mechanism when agents' preferences over objects change over time. In the context of Norway's system for (re)assigning patients to general practitioners (GPs), we provide direct evidence of misallocation under the current mechanism—patients waiting for each others' GPs, but who cannot trade—and estimate a structural model of GP-switching behavior to evaluate alternatives. Introducing top trading cycles (TTC) would, on average, reduce waiting times and increase patient welfare. However, patients endowed with less desirable GPs would be harmed. Prioritizing these patients can avoid these harms while preserving most of the gains from TTC. (JEL D82, H51, I11, I13, I18)

📄 Uncertainty and Change: Survey Evidence of Firms' Subjective Beliefs

  • Author(s): Rüdiger Bachmann, Kai Carstensen, Stefan Lautenbacher, Manuel Menkhoff, Martin Schneider
  • Link: Read the article
This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new panel survey of German manufacturing firms, we observe both forecasts of sales growth and a quantitative measure of subjective uncertainty. We show that subjective uncertainty reflects change experienced by firms: It is high when growth is either unusually low or unusually high. Subjective uncertainty is more than conditional volatility; while more volatile firms are typically more uncertain, experienced change alone increases uncertainty, consistent with a model of learning. Uncertainty over our sample is mostly idiosyncratic but varies substantially over time and leads managers to plan lower employment and prices. (JEL C83, D22, E20, E23)

📄 Talent Hoarding in Organizations

Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers. However, managers who are evaluated on team performance have an incentive to hoard workers. This study provides the first empirical evidence of talent hoarding using personnel records and survey evidence from a large firm. Talent hoarding is self-reported by three-fourths of managers, is detectable in manager ratings of worker talent, and occurs more frequently under stronger hoarding incentives, proxied by performance-related pay, team size, and talent visibility. Using quasi-random exposure to talent hoarding, I show that hoarding deters internal job applications, inhibiting career progression and altering talent allocation in the firm. (JEL D22, J23, L60, M12, M51, M54)

📄 Professional Motivations in the Public Sector: Evidence from Police Officers

We study how public sector workers balance their professional motivations with private economic concerns, focusing on police arrests. Arrests made near the end of an officer's shift typically require overtime work, and officers respond by reducing arrest frequency but increasing arrest quality. Days in which an officer works a second job after their police shift have higher opportunity cost, also reducing late-shift arrests. Combining our estimates in a dynamic model identifies officer preferences over workplace activity and overtime work. Our results indicate that officers' private costs of arrests have a first-order impact on the quantity and quality of enforcement. (JEL K42, J33, J45)

📚 American Politics Research

📄 Individuals and Public Opinion Change: The Liberal Rebound, Continued Partisan Divergence and Affective Partisanship 2016–2020

There have been three striking patterns of public opinion change in the United States since the second half of the 20th century. One is the political cycle of overall trends in liberalism and conservatism that James Stimson has adeptly tracked and summarized with his “public mood” measure. A second has been the stunning partisan divergence in public opinion that occurred as politics became more ideologically partisan beginning in the mid-1970s, and this penetrated strikingly to the level of public opinion by the 1990s. Third, related to this, is the increase in affective partisanship : partisans of one party emotionally disliking the other party and its candidates and supporters. Underlying these aggregate changes have been individuals changing their opinions. Here we ask to what extent did the rise of Donald Trump and his first presidency shake up partisan politics that affected all these trends. This as an open question since Trump, when first elected president in 2016, was not a mainstream Republican conservative, and his positions and policymaking, including in the end his activist government response to COVID-19 might be perceived differently in ways that might upend or accelerate the past patterns of opinion change, the divergence in partisan opinions, the nature of this divergence, and the state of “affective partisanship.” Further, to the extent that past patterns continued or were disrupted, did they occur because people who held particular opinions changed their minds (from liberal to conservative, or vice-versa), in contrast to individuals going from having no opinion to holding attitudes toward issues and the opposing party. We examined these questions using the American National Election Study and the NORC General Social Survey 2016–2020 panel data. What we found, for one, was the expected liberal reversal in aggregate opinion after the election of a Republican president. Second, at the same time, the ongoing partisan divergence in issue opinions had not ended but continued, driven during the 2016–2020 period by Democrats (and usually Independents, even with some Republicans in some cases) moving in a more liberal direction on issues. And third, the long-term increase in affective partisanship was given a further jolt with Trump’s election and presidency, with Republican in particular showing a noticeable increase in partisan animosity. This further short-term increase in affective partisanship is associated with the increases in partisan differences on some issues.

📚 Annual Review of Sociology

📄 Qualitative Research in an Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Pragmatic Approach to Data Analysis, Workflow, and Computation

  • Author(s): Corey M. Abramson, Tara Prendergast, Zhuofan Li, Daniel Dohan
  • Link: Read the article
Computational developments—particularly artificial intelligence—are reshaping social scientific research and raising new questions for in-depth methods such as ethnography and qualitative interviewing. Building on classic debates about computers in qualitative data analysis, we revisit possibilities and dangers in an era of automation, large language model chatbots, and big data. We introduce a typology of contemporary approaches to using computers in qualitative research: streamlining workflows, scaling up projects, hybrid analytical methods, the sociology of computation, and technological rejection. Drawing from scaled team ethnographies and solo research integrating computational social science alongside in-depth observation, we describe methodological choices across study life cycles, from literature reviews through data collection, coding, text retrieval, and representation. We argue that new technologies hold potential to address long-standing methodological challenges when deployed with knowledge, purpose, and ethical commitment. Yet, a pragmatic approach—moving beyond technological optimism and dismissal—is essential given rapidly changing tools that are both generative and dangerous. Computation now saturates research infrastructure, from algorithmic literature searches to scholarly metrics, making computational literacy a core methodological competence in and beyond sociology. We conclude that when used carefully and transparently, contemporary computational tools can meaningfully expand, rather than displace, the irreducible insights of qualitative research.

📄 Intersectionality and the Internet: Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality, and the Digital

  • Author(s): Safiya U. Noble, André Brock, Kishonna Gray, Sarah T. Roberts
  • Link: Read the article
Over the past 20 years, the broad field of digital media and technology studies has been influenced by theories of power that include intersectionality as a key organizing theory and method. In this article, we review the major contributions across multiple fields of study, particularly critical race and digital studies, to the examinations of the Internet and technology that use intersectionality as an organizing logic. Applying intersectionality as a conceptual lens into digital technology design, dissemination, and use has aided in findings that the computing industries are ill-equipped to map the world, its conditions, or its inhabitants. In reframing this sociocultural complexity as solvable by mathematics, statistics, code, and data, these industries make dehumanizing political and ethical decisions through reduction—from people and culture to content and abstracting the world to data. In the process, they intentionally reify long-standing inequities in the name of efficiency, progress, and profit and fail to capture what is necessary to improve life in socially, politically, and environmentally just ways. While intersectionality theory is complex, its intricacies afford critical culture digital scholars the epistemological tools and methodological insights needed to highlight that people, communities, and the environment must be considered prior to, in the midst of, and downstream of technoculture's mechanistic, rationalist, extractive desires or capitalism's desires for profit through exploitation.

📄 Colorism as a Fundamental Cause of Inequalities in Health

One of the most influential theories guiding research on the social determinants of health is the theory that socioeconomic status (SES) is a fundamental cause of health inequalities. Nevertheless, the authors of that theory agree that SES is not the only fundamental cause of health worth considering. They, along with other researchers, have identified racism as another important fundamental cause of health inequalities that affects health: ( a ) through its link to SES; ( b ) through its association with flexible resources such as prestige (or status), freedom, and beneficial social connections; and, crucially, ( c ) how it affects multiple disease outcomes through multiple mechanisms above and beyond SES. We argue that colorism, which is a system of discrimination based on the lightness or darkness of one's skin color that is often obscured by or even conflated with racism, is also a fundamental cause of health inequalities for many of the same reasons that racism is. While there is still much to learn about colorism and health, as we acknowledge, there is still enough existing evidence to reasonably conclude that colorism, too, is a fundamental cause of health inequalities—and one that affects health above and beyond both SES and race/ethnicity.

📄 Discrimination and Health Inequalities

Although theory suggests that discrimination generates health inequalities in a variety of ways, research today concentrates almost exclusively on one particular mechanism: the conscious experience of unfair treatment, often termed “perceived discrimination.” To rethink perceived discrimination as one among other mechanisms, this review draws on the social stress model, reinterpreted as a macro-micro-macro sociological explanation. This reframing additionally reveals that the social stress model rests on an implicit theory of the emotional actor that provides no guidance to distinguish psychiatric illness (an individual problem) from nondisordered but painful emotional responses to external adversity (a social problem). To prevent this confusion, the review puts forward an account of the emotions that emphasizes their rootedness in the social world. On the empirical front, the review covers ethnic differences in depression and psychosis, as well as recent studies indicating that only a small portion of discriminatory treatment surfaces in the target's consciousness as perceived discrimination.

📄 The Making of Meritocratic Status Orders

This article surveys a growing body of work examining the concrete consequences of implementing meritocracy in social life. To date, this work remains compartmentalized into the separate subfields of cultural sociology, economic sociology, organizational science, and the sociology of education and stratification. We bring this work together by arguing that it explores meritocracy as the making of merit-based status orders, or merit orders. Merit orders are status hierarchies—sets of relations of value superiority, equality, or inferiority people perceive among others—based on assessments of others’ merit, achievement, or performance. They exist as cultural objects and cultural schemas, and they can be studied for their shape and for their sharedness. Most importantly, focusing on merit orders enriches our understanding of how meritocracy enters social stratification processes. This is because meritocracy shapes stratification not only by sorting individuals into unequal social positions, but also by creating merit orders that have stratifying effects of their own. In particular, the making of merit orders has a tendency to moralize inequality by framing disparities in social advantage as differences in individual merit, it teaches observers to perceive quality differences among social actors in hierarchical terms that undermine egalitarian beliefs, and it can directly exacerbate inequality in merit-based rewards when the architecture of merit orders is more hierarchy-like.

📄 Legacies of Racialized Social Control

Research on legacies of racialized control recognizes and examines how historical violence continues to exert effects on contemporary inequalities. Focused predominantly on histories of enslavement and lynching in the US South, studies have demonstrated the continuing hold of systems of control on a wide range of racialized outcomes, including income inequality and poverty, violent crime, incarceration and other criminal legal consequences, political polarization, residential segregation, and educational and health disparities. Over the past two decades, the literature has matured significantly, evolving from studies demonstrating these durable temporal connections to more recent robust attention to a unified theoretical framework and the mechanisms that enable legacy effects to persist over long time periods. This review emphasizes recent refinements associated with parsing sources of persistent inequalities, accounting for interrelationships among modes of control, and identifying factors that interrupt as well as produce durable legacy effects. It concludes with recommendations to more directly engage the systemic nature of racialized control, take fuller advantage of leverage provided by expanding methodological foci, and thicken connections to parallel work in cognate fields.

📄 Cross-Border Intimate Mobilities Between the Global South and North: Resetting the Research Agenda Beyond Marriage Migration

Three decades ago, influential marriage migration perspectives emerged that importantly transformed the agenda for studies on how women from the Global South experience intimate relations with men from the wealthier North. Applying feminist gender perspectives, this field centered on a woman's subjective lived experiences of her asymmetrical, unequal union with a foreign man, focusing on reproductive labor and questions of hypergamy. It remains the dominant analytic lens, but we advocate a rethink. First, we argue for extending the marriage migration frame to cross-border intimate mobilities, so that it includes a fuller range of this type of gendered, sexualized, and unequal intimate social relationship. Second, it is necessary to account for the important contextual backstory—opportunity structures—that facilitates the evolution of significant pathways for intimate mobilities between specific Southern and Northern places over time. We demonstrate by reference to Thailand, one of the largest sources and locations for cross-border intimate mobilities.

📚 Big Data & Society

📄 Stupid AI around? Understanding users’ everyday AI complaints

Grounded in the user-coined label “人工智障” (“artificial stupidity”) that has circulated on the Chinese internet in recent years, this study examines how ordinary users articulate negative experiences and understandings of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in everyday human-AI interactions. Drawing on the literature on algorithmic imaginary and complaint behavior, we develop a framework of “AI complaint” to conceptualize everyday, contextualized, user-generated negative evaluations of AI systems as a behavior-oriented discursive practice. Using thematic analysis of social media posts related to the hashtag “artificial stupidity,” we identify four user roles and pathways through which people complain about AI: judges grounded in evidence-based facts, appraisers based on subjective preferences, guardians of cultural representation, and sustainers of a contextualized repertoire. Based on empirical data, we argue that AI complaints constitute meaningful affective and social practice, serving functions including intrapsychic balance, social solidarity, and emotional regulation. We further note that not all AI complaints are necessarily reasonable, as some reflect unrealistic expectations or inappropriate uses of AI, highlighting the importance of addressing AI-related issues by considering both algorithmic accountability and human responsibility.

📄 Moralizing metrics: Discourses of data and equity in California's public health response to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic witnessed the transformation of data from a public health resource into a measure of morality. Disadvantage indices such as the Healthy Places Index and other metrics became central to promoting equity in the pandemic response, guiding real-time policy decisions in testing, reopening, and vaccine distribution. Drawing on a discourse analysis of public records, policy documents, and advocacy materials from the state of California, this article traces how metrics came to embody moral responsibility towards redressing inequities during times of crisis. We show how early optimism around data-centered equity—oftentimes rooted in appeals to fairness and justice—gave way to successive debates over the design, scale, and limitations of proposed metrics. Despite recognition of these various critiques, the state continued to use these metrics as a “pragmatic” means of fulfilling ethical imperatives. Our case reveals how data infrastructures acquired moral significance in times of crisis: metrics were expected to legitimate response efforts while absorbing urgent ethical demands. Ultimately, we show how metrics may function as evidence of moral commitment and the boundaries of moral imagination.

📄 Perpetuating misogyny with generative AI: How model personalization normalizes gendered harm

Open-source text-to-image (TTI) pipelines have become dominant in the landscape of AI-generated visual content, driven by technological advances that enable users to personalize models through adapters tailored to specific tasks. While personalization methods such as LoRA (low-rank adaptation) offer unprecedented creative opportunities, they also facilitate harmful practices, including the generation of non-consensual deepfakes and the amplification of misogynistic or hypersexualized content. This study presents an exploratory sociotechnical analysis of CivitAI, the most active platform for sharing and developing open-source TTI models. Drawing on a dataset of more than 40 million user-generated images and over 230,000 models, we find a disproportionate rise in not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content and a significant number of models intended to mimic real individuals. We also observe a strong influence of internet subcultures on the tools and practices shaping model personalizations and resulting visual media. In response to these findings, we contextualize the emergence of exploitative visual media through feminist and constructivist perspectives on technology, emphasizing how design choices and community dynamics shape platform outcomes. Building on this analysis, we propose interventions aimed at mitigating downstream harm, including improved content moderation, rethinking tool design, and establishing clearer platform policies to promote accountability and consent. Content warning: This paper contains references to pornography, gender-based digital violence and verbal vulgarity that might be disturbing, distressing, and/or offensive.

📄 Moral contact tracing: Proximity, risk and epidemic reasoning in digital public judgement

Digital publics increasingly evaluate scandal through practices that resemble epidemiological contact tracing: users reconstruct networks from digital documents, images, logs and archived traces to infer graded moral risk from proximity to an alleged wrongdoer. I conceptualise this as moral contact tracing, a mode of moral inference that shifts judgement from action and intention toward adjacency, degrees of separation, and documented co-presence. Situating the phenomenon in scholarship on contamination, stigma and epidemic rationalities, I argue that contemporary digital infrastructures enable large-scale, participatory ‘network forensics’ in which adjacency functions as quasi-evidence. This framework illuminates how suspicion becomes scalar, boundaries of moral relevance destabilise and reputational stigma persists through durable digital traces. This article contributes to debates on how digital traces, archives and records shape moral evaluation in datafied societies.

📚 British Journal of Political Science

📄 Education for Mobilization: The Effects of Knowledge about Labor History on Union Support

The US working class is less organized along class lines than in other advanced democracies. We propose a new explanation: the absence of education on historical class struggle and labor organizing weakens support for the contemporary labor movement. To test this, we conduct two survey experiments exposing respondents to educational videos about the history of an American union and present-day union drives. Our surveys focus on non-college-educated whites in the US South, where union membership is low and racial conflict has historically constrained class-based solidarity. We find that exposure to labor history increases enthusiasm for unions and cross-racial class coalitions. These effects appear to be driven by greater political efficacy, better understanding of unions’ material benefits, linked fate with the working class, and increased allyship with marginalized groups. Our findings suggest that labor history education can shift political attitudes and foster greater class-based mobilization, even in contexts historically resistant to such organizing.

📄 Democratic Satisfaction and the Public Sphere

Public debate is central to most theories of democracy, yet few cross-national studies have examined its association with democratic satisfaction. This article identifies three features of national public spheres – pluralism, information, and respect – and presents annual measures of these features for 175 countries from 2000 to 2020. Among electoral democracies, pluralism remained stable, but the quality of information and the respectfulness of debate tended to decline during that period. Using data from the European Social Survey and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that higher levels of pluralism, information, and respect correlate with greater democratic satisfaction, even after controlling for other democratic institutions, various socio-economic factors, and past levels of satisfaction with democracy. Notably, respect remains associated with higher democratic satisfaction when controlling for the other features of the public sphere. These findings call for further research into the relationship between non-electoral components of democracy and political attitudes.

📄 The Equality Positions and Policies of Governments, 1970–2020: How Egalitarian Parties Evoke Equality While Evading Real Redistribution

Despite egalitarian rhetoric, governments often fail to implement redistributive policies. We argue that selective egalitarianism helps to understand this puzzle. Analysing a new dataset of 850,000 manifesto statements and equality policies in 12 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (1970–2020), we show that even parties committed to equality avoid taxing the rich. Instead of engaging in complex top-end taxation, which is perceived as electorally risky, they pursue pre-distribution and welfare policies with less concentrated costs and complexity. Even these policies are primarily adopted if the party’s constituency is not too educated or rich to benefit from them. Our findings suggest that equality-oriented governments adopt an approach that insures the middle, buffers the poor, but spares the rich. The result is a rhetorical commitment to equality that eschews its most redistributive instrument(s). The patterns we reveal help to explain the consequential disconnect between redistributive demand and actual policy, even under ostensibly economically egalitarian governments.

📄 Disproportionality in Geographic Representation

We theoretically develop and empirically study the concept of geographic representation. We identify an overlooked aspect of (mis)representation in electoral systems: the degree to which within parties, voters residing in some districts are overrepresented at the expense of their co-partisans residing elsewhere. Drawing on district-level data of 113 parties from twelve districted democracies, we find a substantial degree of geographic representational discrepancies within parties. Importantly, we show that the discrepancy is often accompanied by a difference in policy positions between under and overrepresented districts, making it particularly significant politically. We derive a general measure for the discrepancy between the votes a party gains and the seats it holds in different districts, namely, geographic disproportionality (GeoDisp). Unlike malapportionment, GeoDisp is party specific and draws on actual votes. Utilizing geocoded data, we find a substantial degree of geographic disproportionality, which, per our expectations, varies systematically by party.

📚 British Journal of Sociology

📄 Twenty‐First Century Butlers and the New Spirit of Service

More than 50 years ago, Lewis Coser argued that the “servant” had become obsolete, claiming that such a “premodern” occupation could not function within modernity without religious legitimations. However, with parts of the contemporary service sector exhibiting the very characteristics that Coser viewed as “premodern”—especially within services to wealthy elites—there is reason to review Coser's thesis. In this paper, I do just that through the case study of the 21st century butler, drawing from an ethnography where I trained and worked as a butler myself, interviewed private service butlers ( N  = 26), and analysed servant instruction literature and memoirs ( N  = 33) spanning the last two centuries. After demonstrating how contemporary butler practices exhibit a high degree of servant‐like characteristics, I turn to the question of how butlers consent to these conditions. On top of economic factors such as necessity and security, the paper highlights: (1) how butlers coming from the luxury hospitality sector engage in a kind of service illusio , where the desire to deliver “high levels of service” renders their occupation craft‐like and vocational; and (2) how butlers derive subjective symbolic rewards from close proximity to elites by vicariously consuming distinct lifestyles and finding excitement within the peripheries of power. I suggest that these constitute features of a “new spirit of service”, one that expresses servanthood and social class through the more modern mediums of “professionalism” and “lifestyle”, securing servant‐like labour within worlds of work generated by wealth inequalities.

📄 The Mysterious Stranger and Modern Enchantment

Sociological accounts of modernity have long emphasized rationalization, alienation, and the attenuation of affective intensity. While these diagnoses capture crucial dynamics of modern social order, they leave underexplored a persistent and generative dimension of social life: enchantment. Few existing attempts to theorize enchantment in modernity treat it as anything other than a residual survival at the margins of an otherwise disenchanted world; those that avoid this residualist framing often relocate enchantment outside culture altogether, grounding it in material vitality or hybrid ontologies rather than in social meaning. This article proposes a different approach by identifying mystery as a constitutive cultural structure of modern enchantment. Mystery organizes interactional encounters with the unknown by transforming a mundane absence of information into an issue of transcendent significance, generating affective tension and imaginative depth. By locating enchantment in the ordinary texture of cultural experience, mystery decentralizes enchantment, dissociating it from conceptual frameworks that concentrate enchantment in religion‐like centers. Focusing on fleeting encounters with strangers in urban settings, mediated by architectural transparency and mobility, I show how windows, glass façades, and trains structure perceptual and emotional engagements that orient modern sensibility. Drawing on literary and artistic representations—from Baudelaire and Hopper to Le Corbusier and Hitchcock—I argue that mystery is not a residual pre‐modern trace but an endogenous and durable feature of modern urban experience.

📄 Introduction to the BJS Special Issue, 2026, Families and Wealth

  • Author(s): Céline Bessière, Katie Higgins, Hanna Kuusela
  • Link: Read the article
The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView.

📄 Demand Networks and Informal Volunteering

Patterns of volunteering have predominantly been explained by focusing on the supply side in terms of volunteers' resources and motivations. We shift the focus to the demand side of volunteering and develop the concept of demand networks. We argue that experienced demand for help in one's personal network is important to explain why individuals engage in informally organized voluntary help and support: the amount of demand for help a person experiences in their network influences the likelihood that the person helps. To explain why individuals who perceive similar levels of demand do not all volunteer to the same extent, we theorize how demand networks are mediated by the institutional factors of social values and gender roles. We hypothesize that altruistic values and gendered social roles dispose individuals to respond differently to demands for help, with women and those holding stronger altruistic values being more likely to act on the needs they perceive. We examine the hypotheses using a cross‐sectional survey inquiring about informally organized volunteering during COVID‐19. The results clearly indicate the importance of the demand side to adequately explain informal volunteering. We argue that our findings imply that sociologists should reconceptualise social connections not only as providing access to resources but also as a source of demands on individuals. In doing so attention should be paid to gender roles which the results suggest function as an amplifier of demand networks association with informal volunteering. We further discuss how the results have implications for building social capital and societal resilience in times of crisis.

📄 Fast‐Tracks in Mathematics: Accelerated Learning, Self‐Selection or Teacher Bias?

  • Author(s): Øyvind Nicolay Wiborg, Karl Ingar Kittelsen Røberg, Håvard Helland
  • Link: Read the article
This study examines high‐achieving students in Norwegian lower secondary schools who follow accelerated learning trajectories in mathematics, so‐called fast‐tracks. It asks whether and how fast‐tracks improve high‐achieving students' learning and performance. The analyses rely on high‐quality administrative register data from Norway covering all students who graduated from 2010 to 2017. The results show that fast‐track students outperform regular students in mathematics. They are overrepresented with top school grades, so effects are often underestimated using standard methods. To address ceiling effects in grades, we apply Tobit regression and a novel use of correlated‐random effects (Mundlak model), embedding fixed‐effects and instrumental‐variable approaches within nonlinear Tobit models. The results suggest that (1) the fast‐tracks improve the students' learning, and (2) the students are selected and self‐selected, based on prior performance and background characteristics. When comparing teacher‐set grades versus exam grades set by anonymous, randomly assigned examiners, the results suggest that (3) teachers give fast‐track students even better grades than regular students. One plausible explanation is that teachers perceive or label fast‐track students as more talented than other students. The findings, in particular, suggest that Norwegian teachers compensate disadvantaged fast‐track students who originate from homes with limited parental educational resources.

📚 Comparative Political Studies

📄 Concessions and Protest Demobilization

How and why do concessions, or promises to implement reform in the future, affect protest mobilization in autocracies? Concessions are a routine response to protest and generate a puzzling empirical regularity: Although autocrats often renege once protest abates, concessions can produce demobilization. We develop a model showing that concessions demobilize by exploiting heterogeneity among protesters. A subgroup of moderates, who derive symbolic value from the autocrat’s promise to reform, and a subgroup of radicals, who value only implemented reforms, must coordinate to sustain protest after a concession. Concessions undermine the between-group coordination necessary for protests large enough to prevent reneging. Some moderates demobilize in response to promised concessions, and in turn, declining turnout demobilizes radicals. Even autocrats in highly repressive regimes may concede because concessions and repression demobilize through distinct mechanisms. However, concessions lose efficacy as moderates lose trust in the autocrat. Morocco’s Feb20 movement illustrates the theory.

📚 Contemporary Political Theory

📄 Facing authority: a theory of political legitimacy

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📚 Democratization

📄 Bonding, bridging, & bypassing: understanding ethnic politics in diverse societies

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📚 Discourse & Society

📄 Sentence voice preferences and sentiment patterns in gendered Weibo headlines on violent events: A data-driven critical discourse analysis

Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis framework, this study investigates gendered language differences in Weibo hot-search topics related to violent incidents between 2021 and 2024. We combine quantitative textual and sentiment analysis with discursive and socio-cultural interpretation to reveal these differences, and to uncover the possible motivations underlying them. The quantitative results reveal a consistent preference for passive-voice constructions when men are the perpetrators and women the victims, possibly muting male agency and foregrounding female suffering. At the socio‑cultural level, the results illustrate how this syntactic bias can be sustained through the interplay of media conventions, Weibo’s algorithmic logic, and the reinforcement of traditional gender hierarchies. The multidimensional sentiment analysis finds no systematic emotion differences by perpetrator gender, which may partly reflect a tendency for some male-perpetrator headlines to adopt a more neutral and fact-focused tone despite the attention-driven nature of the hot-search system. This both aligns with the goals of upholding the media’s discursive stance, and reflects the prevailing social gender conventions. Our findings highlight the subtle but impactful role of syntax in demonstrating gendered power imbalances in social media discourse.

📄 From political tribalism to geopolitical polarization: Democratic virtues in an era of U.S.–Iran conflict

  • Author(s): Karim Suryadi, Irma Irayanti, Salfira Az Zahra, Jaelani Husni
  • Link: Read the article
Political polarization is commonly examined within domestic electoral politics, while its role in geopolitical discourse remains underexplored. This study investigates how communicative dynamics associated with political tribalism and affective polarization operate within elite political discourse surrounding the United States–Iran conflict. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study analyzes fourteen official speeches, diplomatic statements, and policy communications produced between 2017 and 2025 by U.S. and Iranian political actors. The analysis identifies competing geopolitical narratives through which each side constructs legitimacy, threat, sovereignty, aggression, and international responsibility. While democratic virtues expressed through dialogue, peace, and legal legitimacy remain present, they coexist with broader narratives of antagonism and distrust. The findings extend scholarship on affective polarization and propose geopolitical polarization as a distinct discursive phenomenon characterized by moralized threat, competing legitimacy claims, and symbolic divisions within international politics.

📄 Claiming victimhood as a response in discussions about privilege and advantaged group identity

Privileged groups are those with greater access to power or resources in society but they may experience a moral identity threat in contemporary social contexts. One strategy to avoid this is to claim victimhood status for one’s group to accompany or rival other groups. However, this must be managed carefully to avoid rebuttals. Drawing on discursive psychology and victimhood research, six interviews between a Black, female researcher and White males are analysed to show how speakers draw on strategic forms of victimhood discourse to negotiate the dilemma of privilege: competitive, digressive and inclusive. Speakers strategically use vagueness and specificity to construct accounts of victimhood that pre-empt rebuttals. This shows how victimhood discourse is constructed and mobilised in intergroup conversations about privilege and highlights the need for future research on how victimhood discourse can be responded to.

📚 Economic Sciences Research in PNAS

📄 Social dynamics of AI adoption in parents’ educational decisions

  • Author(s): Leonardo Bursztyn, Alex Imas, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Aaron Leonard, Christopher Roth
  • Link: Read the article
When adopting a performance-enhancing technology offers short-run relative advantages, competitive pressure can drive diffusion even if most adopters would prefer a collective ban. We study this dynamic in the context of unrestricted AI tools for teenagers’ education. In preregistered, incentive-compatible experiments with approximately 2,000 parents in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, we elicit willingness to pay for a three-month premium subscription to a leading general-purpose AI platform. Demand increases steeply with the share of other teenagers using AI: Moving perceived peer take-up from 20% to 80% raises willingness to pay by more than 60%. We then test whether information about emerging evidence on potential downstream skill effects changes behavior. Risk information substantially shifts incentivized beliefs about longer-run impacts but has little effect on individual demand, yet it strongly increases support for school-level restrictions. Follow-up experiments show that peer-adoption information does not significantly shift perceived AI quality, the importance parents assign to core skills, or support for bans, pointing to social pressure rather than social learning as the primary channel. The results reveal a rat-race dynamic in which individual adoption responds to peers even as collective preferences shift toward restriction.

📚 Electoral Studies

📄 Exodus and vote: Mass emigration and voter turnout in Honduras

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📚 European Journal of Political Research

📄 How group appeals shape candidate support: The role of group membership, identity strength, and deservingness perceptions

Recent research draws attention to parties’ reliance on group appeals. Such group appeals are a tool that parties and candidates use to strengthen the association between voters’ social group membership and their electoral support. However, what we know about the effects of such appeals on voters is mostly limited to class appeals. Using two survey experimental studies among British voters ( N =1,500; N =3,200), we shed light on the generalizability of the effects of symbolic group appeals for other types of social groups. We show that group appeals based on class, place, education, age, gender, and ethnicity all shape candidate support. We also theorize that effects are conditioned by respondents’ strength of identity and their deservingness perceptions and show that the latter are key to explaining voters’ reactions to group appeals. These findings clarify the scope and conditions of group appeals’ effects and advance our understanding of group politics.

📄 Pics or it didn’t happen! EU institutions’ visual communication and user engagement on Facebook and Instagram

Social media often follow a visual logic found to increase engagement, as images are more likely to attract attention, presenting information on a holistic-associative basis. For a political entity like the EU, social media are a promising route to overcome the remoteness to its citizens, identified as one of the crucial challenges to its public legitimacy. Against this broader background, our study analyses the influence of 10 years of EU visual social media communication on user engagement as an indicator of successfully creating visibility in a crucial communication space. For this purpose, we conducted an image-type analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative features of visual analysis: First, a subsample of posts was inductively analysed to identify recurring image types and subsequently used to implement a manual quantitative visual content analysis. Building on the results, we drew on a machine learning approach, allowing us to analyse over 40,000 posts, including more than 20,000 pictures. Our results emphasise the crucial influence of social media affordances in explaining user engagement with EU visual social media communication. Implications are discussed with reference to the ongoing discussion about the EU’s democratic deficit.

📄 Distributional preferences in a global pandemic: Voter attitudes toward COVID-19 economic policy interventions

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a deep economic crisis that prompted governments and central banks to implement extraordinary fiscal, monetary, and financial interventions. We examine public support for these interventions using a conjoint survey experiment conducted in Australia and the United Kingdom in early 2021. Our experiment innovates by investigating public preferences across two main categories of intervention: (1) wage subsidies designed to address employment and income risks and (2) financial stabilization measures aimed at supporting the balance sheets of households, businesses, and financial institutions. Results show that wagesubsidies received robust public support across diverse social, economic, and experiential cleavages. By contrast, financial and credit market interventions elicited mixed reactions, with strongest opposition toward those benefiting large firms and banks. We argue that the variation in support is primarily driven by an alignment of fairness considerations and policy design. In both countries, wage subsidies had key design features that made them more likely to be perceived as distributionally neutral, consistent with important fairness norms, and limiting the potential for free riding. They were available to all citizens experiencing verifiable employment disruption, delivered through employers, and appealed to welfare-chauvinistic views by excluding many recent immigrants and temporary residents. Moreover, the viral origin of the economic shock was widely perceived as exogenous and quasi-random, and the associated losses – particularly those related to employment and income more readily elicited greater empathy when borne by individuals than by firms. In contrast, financial-sector interventions, especially those aiding large corporations and banks, were less easily viewed as consistent with these fairness norms. These interventions were more prone to being perceived as favoring opportunistic or politically connected firms, echoing earlier public resentment of global financial crisis bailouts. Even some household-targeted financial interventions, such as debt relief and rent holidays, likely raised concerns among respondents about undeserved gains. Unlike some existing studies, our subgroup analysis finds little evidence that personal or local pandemic experiences significantly influenced attitudes toward economic interventions. Individuals who suffered direct health or economic impacts, or who lived in areas with high infection rates or strict lockdowns, were no more or less supportive of interventions. Instead, partisan orientation and perceptions of inequality were more predictive. Left-wing partisans and those who perceived rising or high inequality were especially supportive of wage subsidies and household-focused assistance. Traditional material cleavages – such as income, education, wealth, or asset ownership – had limited explanatory power. The underbanked population was an exception, showing more muted support for all interventions, likely due to perceived exclusion or limited personal benefit. We conclude that public evaluations of economic interventions during the pandemic were shaped less by self-interest or crisis exposure than by judgments about deservingness, fairness, and partisan attachments. Our findings emphasize the importance of policy design and political framing in sustaining public support for large-scale interventions during crises, and they have broader implications for the politics of economic policy in future global shocks.

📄 Political knowledge and perceptions of minority governments in Europe

Minority governments are common across parliamentary systems, and a large body of literature has examined their stability and performance. Meanwhile, we know very little about how voters perceive this government type and whether they understand its political implications. We survey voters in Denmark, Germany, and Sweden, three European countries with varying degrees of exposure to minority governments, about their knowledge and perceptions of minority governments. We find that voters have knowledge levels comparable to those about the role of political parties, and that this is independent of the respective prevalence of minority governments in each country. Informed voters express stronger preferences for majority governments. However, minority governments are associated with specific positive representational traits, specifically with the impression that such governments listen more to the demands of all voters, and general perceptions are stronger for knowledgeable voters. The findings have implications for how elites can formulate arguments in favour or against minority governments that may resonate with voters.

📄 Do voters and non-voters differ in their policy preferences?

The declining voter turnout across democracies has raised concerns regarding its implications for democratic representation. Yet, the extent to which low turnout may undermine representation in Europe remains unclear. Do the policy preferences of voters and non-voters differ? This research addresses that question by providing the first large-scale, cross-national examination of policy preference differences between voters and non-voters in European democracies. Using data from the 2014 and 2019 waves of the European Election Study, covering 29 European democracies, I analyse differences across the left-right spectrum, economic attitudes (ie redistribution, regulation, spending), social attitudes (ie immigration, same-sex marriage, environment, and civil liberties), and views on European integration. The results reveal some disparities between voters and non-voters, but these are generally sporadic, even within individual countries, suggesting that such disparities are not the norm. Still, when differences do arise, they are not trivial. The analysis of how the electorate’s preferences would change under a hypothetical full turnout scenario suggests that these disparities can introduce meaningful biases. Using data from the British Election Study Internet Panel, I further distinguish between regular voters, peripheral voters, and perpetual non-voters and find notable heterogeneity in their policy preferences. These findings show that when turnout is low, the electorate’s overall stance reflects that of regular voters, but higher turnout mitigates this bias. Overall, the results suggest that while voters and non-voters in Europe typically hold similar policy views, occasional disparities can introduce representation bias in policy preferences, with implications for democratic representation and party strategies.

📄 Compensating the losers: The (limited) elite–public gap in trade politics

Compensatory policies for the losers of trade are a key feature of the liberal economic order established after the Second World War. Legislators have a variety of policy options to choose. But do political elites and the public have the same attitudes toward compensatory policies? We expect an elite–public gap with the public relatively less supportive of spending policies and more supportive of tax cuts and trade restrictions than political elites. Moreover, we reason that ideology should matter more for elites than the public. Unique data from a survey with legislators in 19 European countries and public opinion surveys in three countries allow us to test this argument. We find that elites and the public indeed differ in their attitudes toward compensatory policies. However, these differences pale in comparison to variation in support for various compensatory policies. These findings shed light on the politics of compensation and on the political attitudes of elites and the public more broadly.

📄 Voices of the party base: How supporters want established parties to respond to new parties

  • Author(s): Dominik Duell, Lea Kaftan, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Jonathan B. Slapin, Christopher Wratil
  • Link: Read the article
New parties have emerged across European democracies, forcing established parties to develop strategies to campaign against them. But how do supporters want their established parties to respond to these new parties? Using survey experiments in 14 European countries, we examine how party supporters react to responses their preferred parties might take to the rise of a hypothetical new party. Our results primarily highlight that voters care about substantive representation. They endorse accommodative responses towards a new party offering a policy they agree with. Thus, the extent to which party responses bind supporters to established parties is highly contingent on the distribution of policy positions among their supporters. Often, established parties must walk a precarious tightrope, balancing the need for unity with some degree of tolerance for dissent. Hence, our results explain why parties accommodate the position of new parties, despite recent evidence that doing so can be electorally detrimental.

📄 Angry losers? The (null) effects of feeling electoral loss on anti-democratic attitudes

  • Author(s): Katharina Lawall, Katerina Michalaki, Manos Tsakiris
  • Link: Read the article
Peaceful transfers of power are a fundamental principle of democracy. Yet, in times of heightened affective polarisation, election losses may trigger strong negative emotional reactions in partisans, which in turn undermine support for fundamental democratic principles among partisans. We test this idea through two pre-registered survey experiments conducted after the 2022 and 2024 elections in the United States. We randomly assign partisans to receive either a placebo or an emotive reminder about the election that their party lost, containing others’ angry or worried reactions at the election outcome. Contrary to our pre-registered expectations, we do not find evidence that priming negative feelings about electoral loss affects support for political violence or democratic norms. Emotive reminders about salient political events can momentarily turn up the heat on politics, but are not enough to propel partisans to adopt extreme anti-democratic attitudes. By linking the study of emotions to democratic norms, this article contributes to our understanding of when negative emotions (fail to) radicalise partisans.

📚 Field Methods

📄 Measuring Disability in Multi-topic Household Surveys in the Middle East and North Africa

This article reports survey questions capturing disability in a multi-topic household survey for general populations in the Middle East and North Africa. The results suggest that the survey predicted a higher prevalence of disability compared to estimates based on official statistics. Acknowledging that the “true” level of disability remains unknown without linking administrative health care data, we are confident that the questions accurately captured prevalence, nature, and severity of disability at household level in a region challenged by unrest, lack of infrastructure and democracy.

📚 Government and Opposition

📄 Rival or Villain? The Evolution of Language Depicting the Opposition under Authoritarianisation

Discursive attacks towards the opposition are often a harbinger of polarisation, democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. We study the evolution of negative language about the opposition in Turkey under Erdoğan, a pioneering case of democratic backsliding. We distinguish between two types of negative language: a valid competitor – ‘rival’ – versus an enemy that needs to be destroyed – ‘villain’. We leverage machine learning to examine every opposition-related sentence in two major newspapers from 2009 to 2022. Our data allow us to compare the depictions of the main opposition party as a rival or villain between media outlets, before and after media ownership change, during election times and beyond. We also test how these depictions respond to currency shocks and military casualties, as the incumbents could try to contain the fallout from these adverse events by discursively attacking the opposition. We find that vilification of the opposition is driven by security challenges rather than economic troubles, which are associated with increases in rival discourse. Results also suggest that political competition can appear unrepresentatively civil precisely during election periods, as an already polarising incumbent may try to present himself in a more reconciliatory light during the campaign period.

📄 Clarity of Responsibility and the Performance of Government Parties in European Second-Order Elections

European Parliament elections (EPEs) are widely regarded as second-order contests. Their perceived lower importance is expected to produce a distinct set of electoral outcomes, chief among them the proposition that governing parties lose support in EPEs relative to preceding national first-order elections (FOEs). This article examines explanatory mechanisms behind this proposition, focusing on the previously unaddressed effects of clarity of responsibility. Particular emphasis is thus given to whether the expected losses vary with government parties’ size and cabinet role, and with other factors that shape responsibility attribution, including coalition size, ministerial portfolio shares and prior government experience. In addition, I also assess whether parties providing formal external support to governments face electoral penalties in EPEs. Covering all EPEs and corresponding FOEs from 1979 to 2024, the study also examines whether the second-order model and its key mechanisms, such as election timing, have shifted over time in response to broader transformations in European politics.

📚 International Political Science Review

📄 Simulating election results and party systems

Simulated data sets are widely used in sciences, natural and social alike, because of their ability to overcome constraints inherent in the real-world data. In political science, particularly in such important subfields as electoral systems and their effects upon party systems, districting and gerrymandering and coalition politics, simulated data sets are often employed to address specific research questions. This study introduces a new method for generating simulated election results/party system configurations. Starting with formulating general requirements to this kind of data, the study develops an algorithm that is suitable for the purpose, and then validates the new method theoretically, by using several tools of quantitative validation developed in political science and empirically. Empirical validation relies on the data from 1391 legislative elections held in 103 countries of the world in 1792 to 2010. The analysis confirms the theoretical and empirical validity of the proposed method.

📚 Journal of Asian and African Studies

📄 The Paradox of Survival: The Adverse Impacts of Livelihood Strategies on Household Food Security in Muzarabani District, Zimbabwe

Muzarabani district of Zimbabwe is plagued by chronic food insecurity, where households resort to various livelihood strategies to cope with economic adversity. This study examines the paradoxical nature of these strategies, as they can have both positive and negative impacts on household food security. The research explores how the context, shocks, assets, institutions, activities and strategies of rural households in Muzarabani interact to shape their well-being and food security. Qualitative methods were employed to uncover the complex interplay of factors that drive households to adopt certain livelihood strategies, which may ultimately undermine their long-term food security. The findings reveal that poor households often engage in environmentally hazardous activities, such as illegal mining, sand poaching and unsustainable farming practices, as a means of securing their livelihoods. However, these strategies come at a cost, as they can deplete natural resources and exacerbate food insecurity. The study highlights the need for policymakers to address the broader socioeconomic and environmental challenges facing rural households in order to promote sustainable livelihoods and enhance food security in the Muzarabani district. In the pursuit of survival, households adopt various livelihood strategies to secure their well-being. Paradoxically, these strategies, designed to enhance resilience, often contribute to the erosion of food security. This paper explores how certain livelihood activities while offering short-term economic relief undermine long-term food availability, access and sustainability.

📄 Increasing Access to Cancer-Related Diagnostic Care Using Health Insurance: Evidence From South Asia

In India, non-communicable diseases account for over 60% of all deaths, with cancer as a leading cause. Early detection through breast and cervical cancer screenings remains limited, particularly among low-income populations. This study examines whether a publicly funded health insurance program increased access to preventive screenings. Using administrative data on program rollout and the 2015–16 National Family Health Survey, we apply an instrumental variable approach. We find that insurance coverage significantly increases reported screenings. These results suggest that subsidized health insurance can improve early diagnosis and access to preventive care in resource-constrained settings such as Asia and Africa.

📄 The Right to Remain: Housing Affordability Crisis and Displacement in Durban’s Point Precinct

This paper examines the housing affordability crisis and displacement dynamics in Durban’s Point Precinct, a contested waterfront development site in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between May and August 2024, including interviews with 50 residents and 4 municipal officials, the study reveals how state-led gentrification creates both direct and indirect displacement pressures on middle and low-income residents. Applying the Right to the City theoretical framework, the research demonstrates how economic displacement operates alongside social and cultural marginalization, creating compound displacement effects that undermine residents’ ability to remain in their communities. The findings reveal that despite high institutional awareness of gentrification processes, implementation gaps in housing policy have resulted in severe affordability challenges, with 92% of participants reporting housing as increasingly unaffordable. The study contextualizes these findings within Durban’s unique post-apartheid urban transformation, including ongoing struggles over urban land through regular land occupations and violent municipal evictions. While gentrification remains a localized phenomenon in Durban compared to broader patterns of middle-class flight, the Point Precinct represents a critical site where contested visions of urban development play out through everyday struggles over housing rights and urban citizenship.

📄 Public Support of Free Speech Limitations in Taiwan: The Partisan Connection

What explains public support for free speech limitations in Taiwan? I suggest that one’s partisanship, cultural factors prioritizing stability, and views on democracy itself shape tolerance for speech limitations. Although a combination of existing data from the Taiwan Social Change Survey and AsianBarometer, along with original survey data, I find broad opposition to free speech limitations, however supporters of the ruling party consistently were more likely to support such limits. Moreover, those who believed that inconsistent ideas bring chaos or who were indifferent about regime types were also more likely to support speech restrictions.

📄 Untouchability, Caste-Based Reservation, and Confidence Gap in Police: Interacting Dynamics

Marginalised groups often exhibit lower trust in institutions such as the police and courts. In hierarchical societies like India, such disparities between caste groups can heighten social discrimination, including untouchability. Using India Human Development Survey–II (IHDS-II) data, this study examines how Pradhan seat reservation for lower castes interacts with the caste bias of confidence in police to shape untouchability experiences. Findings show that in reserved villages, a pronounced inter-caste confidence gap in the police corresponds to higher reports of untouchability among lower-caste households. Revealing that while reservations aim at empowerment, unequal institutional trust may intensify discrimination. Bridging this gap is vital to safeguard the intensions of affirmative action.

📄 Redefining Community Broadcasting in Ethiopia: Towards Public Ownership and Engagement

This article scrutinises the nature of community broadcasting, in terms of ownership and public participation, in Ethiopia, using qualitative and quantitative data. While the qualitative data were collected through interviews, focus group discussions with media managers and journalists in nine community radio stations, and document analysis; the quantitative data were collected through questionnaires from 33 community broadcasting stations. Findings indicate that, despite the efforts of community broadcasting to expand in number and engage diverse audiences in various languages, a significant lack of public involvement in production, financing and running was observed. Also, ownership issues of the community broadcasting blur the lines between it and local/public FM stations and campus radio. Upon an examination of the licencing process, ownership, legal framework, geographical diversity, public participation and the practices of community broadcasting, the author advocates for either redefining community media in the context and practice of Ethiopia or reappropriating it in line with the ideal definition of community radio features. The author also suggests a community-centric model of community broadcasting in Ethiopia to ensure its ideal status and serve the larger public.

📄 Fiscal Responses to Foreign Aid in Post-Conflict Rwanda

  • Author(s): Douglas B. Kigabo, Richard Kabanda, Alfred R. Bizoza
  • Link: Read the article
This study examines the impact of different types of foreign aid on Rwanda’s fiscal policy in the post-conflict period, with a particular focus on public spending, tax revenue, domestic and external borrowings. Specifically, the study seeks to assess whether aid contributes to fiscal discipline or leads to fiscal profligacy. Using quarterly data from 1996Q1 to 2023Q4 and employing a Vector Error Correction approach, the findings reveal that foreign aid significantly enhances public spending and tax revenues while reducing reliance on domestic borrowing. Furthermore, foreign aid is negatively associated with external borrowing, which may reflect its role in filling financing gaps and reducing borrowing needs, the Government of Rwanda’s strategy to optimize financing costs by substituting aid for debt, or donor-imposed restrictions aimed at discouraging excessive borrowing and safeguarding macroeconomic stability. Budgetary grants, particularly non-earmarked budget support, have a stronger influence on capital investment than on recurrent expenditures, suggesting that Rwanda prioritizes domestic resources for operational costs and directs aid toward development projects. These findings challenge the notion of aid-induced fiscal laxity, showing instead that aid can support strategic fiscal management in post-conflict settings. Nonetheless, Rwanda’s unique context cautions against broad generalization to other countries with different governance and donor dynamics.

📄 Thanks to Reviewers

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📄 The Moral Weight of Watching Children Starve: Maternal Voices on Systematic Deprivation in Gaza

This study analyzes testimonies from 30 displaced mothers in Rafah, Gaza, through perspectives of social suffering, political famine, and feminist international relations. It reveals how systematic starvation manipulates maternal care, inflicting severe trauma. Six key themes emerged, including starvation as a deliberate tool, maternal helplessness as violence, and the child’s body as evidence. The findings illustrate starvation as a policy that destroys biosocial futures, creating a crisis of gendered insecurity. The mothers’ voices demand that starvation be recognized as a grave violation requiring urgent accountability and a redefinition of security centered on bodily integrity and care.

📄 Japan’s Counterstrike Capability: Pushing the Limits of a Defense-Oriented Policy

This analysis explores the most significant change in Japan’s defense policy since the end of World War II, based on Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government publication, in late 2022, of three policy documents proposing to expand the country’s military capabilities by increasing military spending over a 5-year period. The most remarkable proposition is to acquire a counterstrike capability, consisting of long-range cruise missiles to strike deep into a potential adversary’s territory. Contrary to arguments pointing out these plans represent an “unprecedented” transformation of Japan’s defense policy since 1946, they are rather the logical consequence of a gradual, but significant, change that has been occurring since at least a couple of decades. These recent proposals are explored within the wider debate about whether Japan should continue pursuing a pacifist posture, or to adopt a more assertive stance in response to a more threatening international environment.

📄 Domestic Violence, Divorce, and Resistance Among Palestinian Arab Women in Israel

This qualitative study examines domestic violence, divorce, and resistance among Palestinian Arab women in Israel, analyzing 30 narratives from the Facebook group Sabaya al-Kheir . Findings reveal how silence, blame, and community complicity perpetuate abuse, reinforced by legal, institutional, and economic barriers. Divorce often brings ostracism and heightened vulnerability, yet women demonstrate agency through coping strategies and struggles for dignity. Framed within intersectional and postcolonial feminism, the study situates domestic violence within patriarchal family structures and systemic state discrimination, producing “dual marginalization.” It concludes with policy recommendations while highlighting women’s resilience and contributions to debates on gender, violence, and minority rights.

📄 From hattenba to profiled geography: Gay sex work, platform mediation, and urban governance in Tokyo (1990–2025)

This article examines the transformation of male sex work in Tokyo between 1990 and 2025 through shifting spatial and media infrastructures. Drawing on Japanese-language scholarship, media archives, documentary sources, and platform analysis, it traces a transition from hattenba-based cruising economies to homepage-mediated escorting and, later, smartphone app–based sexual labor. Rather than treating digitization as displacement, the article theorizes this shift as re-territorialization, reorganizing labor, risk, and intimacy across space and media. It introduces the concept of profiled geography to describe how platform interfaces function as sites of sexual labor under conditions of legal silence and urban governance.

📄 Reimagining Africa on Chinese social media: Everyday visualities and a horizontal gaze on <i>Xiaohongshu</i>

This study examines representations of Africa in user-generated videos on Xiaohongshu , one of China’s leading lifestyle-sharing platforms. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of 156 short videos, it conceptualises a “horizontal gaze”: a mode of representation centred on pragmatic concerns such as work, travel, local knowledge, and everyday experience. Rather than treating Africa only as an exotic spectacle or a site of lack, this gaze presents it as a place for everyday engagement. While stereotypical images of poverty and underdevelopment remain visible, the findings suggest a shift towards more grounded and experience-based representations of Africa in Chinese digital culture.

📄 Paths of war: Route ecologies and guerrilla mobility in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, 1963–1979

This article examines how guerrillas from the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) moved into and out of Rhodesia between 1963 and 1979. It argues that infiltration and exfiltration routes were dynamic mobility systems shaped by terrain, civilian networks, regional politics, and counterinsurgency. Rather than a logistical background, control over movement was central to sustaining the war. Drawing on oral and archival sources, this analysis shows that ZANLA relied on flexible eastern corridors, initially through Zambia in the earliest phases of the liberation war and later through Mozambique, especially after its independence in 1975, while ZIPRA Army used more structured northern and western routes via Zambia and Botswana, all of which continuously adapted to Rhodesian counterinsurgency pressure.

📄 The political (un)making of Indian secularism: Majoritarianism and the decline of counter-hegemonic politics

  • Author(s): Waseem Ahmad Bhat, Shazia Majid, Adil Qayoom Mallah
  • Link: Read the article
Indian secularism has historically differed from Western models through its emphasis on religious plurality, selective state engagement, and the constitutional protection of minority rights. In recent decades, however, this framework has come under growing strain from majoritarian politics, executive centralisation, and the politicisation of religion. This study analyses Indian secularism as a constitutional and institutional regime shaped through legal interpretation, state practice, and political contestation. Drawing on constitutional theory and political sociology, it argues that the Indian model is increasingly being transformed from a principle of plural democratic governance into a politically mediated framework of legitimacy. The analysis further contends that this shift is linked not only to the rise of majoritarian nationalism but also to the decline of counter-hegemonic political forces, particularly the Left, which historically embedded secularism within broader projects of social justice. By foregrounding institutional practice over legal idealism, the article reframes the crisis of the secular state as a problem of democratic power, ideological contestation, and institutional reconfiguration rather than constitutional absence alone.

📄 Geography of grievance: Migration, memory, discrimination, and political identity in South Korea

Regional identity continues to shape political behavior in South Korea, despite decades of democratization and internal migration. This study examines whether regional origin conditions the political association of perceived regional discrimination among migrants residing in the Seoul Metropolitan Area. Using original survey data on migrants from Jeolla and Gyeongsang, the analysis shows that perceived discrimination is more strongly associated with Democratic Party attachment among Jeolla-origin respondents, while comparable experiences among Gyeongsang-origin respondents are associated more weakly with partisan consolidation. The findings suggest that historically institutionalized regional cleavages remain politically consequential even after relocation into a shared metropolitan environment.

📄 Resistance, negotiation, and desire: Development and the state in the hills of Manipur

The article examines the dialectical relationship between resistance and negotiation with the state, on the one hand, and the desire to be part of the state, on the other. In doing so, it uncovers the micromanaging nature of the state. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the study shows how this micromanaging state is resisted and negotiated in relation to the distribution and implementation of development schemes and programmes in a hill district of Manipur. It further argues that, despite such resistance and negotiations, there remains an aspect of the state that attracts people and fosters a desire to be part of it. This emphasizes attending afresh to the details of socio-temporal settings to understand how the multilayered, multiethnic state functions in Manipur.

📄 Visual culture, well-being, and storytelling in Indigenous Taiwan

  • Author(s): Charlène Clonts, Barış Çoban, Yu Yang, Chao Yun Wu
  • Link: Read the article
This article investigates how storytelling operates as a constitutive mechanism of well-being in Indigenous communities in Taiwan. Rather than approaching well-being through biomedical or individualistic frameworks, the study conceptualizes it as a culturally organized and collectively practiced process sustained by narrative, embodiment, and place. Theoretically, the article integrates narrative identity, cultural sustainability, and embodied heritage to advance the notion of storied well-being, whereby care, memory, and identity are coherently structured through storytelling practices embedded in everyday life. Methodologically, the study employs a decolonial, Indigenous-centered qualitative design that combines participant observation, narrative analysis, material culture analysis, and institutional document review. Empirical research was conducted across Indigenous museums, community workshops, cultural health stations, and village settings in Taiwan. Analysis foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies and proceeds through contextual grounding, relational mapping of practices and infrastructures, and interpretation attentive to embodied and place-based forms of knowledge. Primary analytical depth is given to three sites: the Wulai Atayal Museum, the Bunun Cultural Museum, and community workshops in Wanrong Township, each selected because it foregrounds a distinct modality of storied well-being: tactile museum pedagogy, land-based experiential transmission, and community craft practice. The remaining sites provide comparative context. The findings demonstrate that storytelling, enacted through tactile museum practices, craft pedagogy, land-based narratives, ritual activity, and Indigenous media, transforms visual and material culture into psychosocial resources that sustain intergenerational continuity, collective identity, and culturally intelligible forms of care. By theorizing storytelling as the architecture of well-being, the article contributes to interdisciplinary debates on Indigenous heritage, narrative theory, and culturally sustainable approaches to health and resilience in postcolonial contexts.

📄 Towards a conceptual framework for monitoring rural development outcomes in South Africa

  • Author(s): Moye T. Malatji, Senia Nhamo, Pinky Lalthapersad-Pillay
  • Link: Read the article
This paper develops a conceptual framework for the South African Rural Development Index (SARDI), a composite measure designed to assess rural development outcomes and monitor policy progress across South Africa’s local municipalities. Drawing on rural development literature, South African policy priorities and international index methodologies, the study identifies context-appropriate dimensions and indicators that reflect demographic, economic, social, infrastructural, environmental, and transformation dynamics. The review shows that existing rural development indices, while useful in their respective contexts, are not directly transferable to South Africa’s unique spatial and historical context. The proposed SARDI framework provides a standardised, outcome-based tool for tracking rural development trends, comparing municipalities and supporting evidence-based rural policymaking.

📄 Perceived governing competence and ideological alignment: Democratic satisfaction in Japan’s one-party dominant system

This study examines how dominant-party systems reshape the criteria by which citizens evaluate democratic performance, drawing on Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Wave 5 data from Japan. It is argued that when electoral alternation is structurally foreclosed, a single structural condition reconfigures two standard relationships. Perceived governing competence appears to displace electoral outcomes as the primary basis for democratic satisfaction, with this effect significantly stronger among ruling party supporters than opposition voters. The standard relationship between ideological distance and satisfaction appears to be inverted, such that a wider gap between the governing and opposition parties signals unresolvable conflict rather than meaningful choice, while a narrower gap signals workable accountability. These findings suggest that dominant-party systems sustain democratic satisfaction through performance-based evaluation rather than procedural competition and that the criteria of democratic legitimacy may themselves be shaped by the structural conditions under which citizens evaluate them.

📚 Journal of Chinese Political Science

📄 Monitoring Boosts Alignment: Evidence from China’s Top-down Central Inspections

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📄 Place-Based Policies Diffusion: Development Zones and Labor Distribution in China

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📚 Journal of Conflict Resolution

📄 Diplomats in Camouflage: A Dataset of China’s Military-Diplomatic Engagements

  • Author(s): Noel Foster, Zenobia T. Chan, Jackie S. H. Wong
  • Link: Read the article
Face-to-face diplomacy is central to international politics, yet existing research focuses largely on civilian leaders and diplomats. We introduce an original meeting-level dataset of China’s public military-diplomatic engagements from 2000 to 2023. Drawing on four authoritative Chinese-language party, state, and military outlets, the dataset records over 2,500 engagements involving senior Chinese military leaders and foreign counterparts. It classifies engagements as receptions in China, outbound visits, multilateral organization meetings, and defense and security fora, while preserving information on participants, timing, location, sources, and reported content. Official reporting frames these engagements primarily around cooperation and exchange. An illustrative analysis of outbound visits finds little evidence that China concentrates senior-level military outreach on U.S. allies. Outbound visits are instead positively associated with pre-existing security-specific and economic relationships with China. This dataset enables future research on how military diplomacy complements civilian diplomacy, signals strategic priorities, and shapes security cooperation, crisis management, and political influence.

📚 Journal of Contemporary China

📄 Poverty in Urban China 2012–2020: Applying an Income-Asset Joint Framework

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📄 Care Under Strain: Caregiver Mental Health and Early Childhood Development in Rural China

  • Author(s): Lei Wang, Chuhan Tang, Kaiwen Guo, Victoria Tang, Tiffany Zhu, Vivian Zhang, Sophia Li, Amelie Ibel, Anabelle Lin, Scott Rozelle
  • Link: Read the article
.

📚 Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

📄 Pandemic politics: electoral outcomes for incumbents during COVID-19

  • Author(s): Jacek Lewkowicz, Jan Fałkowski, Eliza Hałatek
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Place resentment in England: measurement and effects

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📄 Ticket-splitting in Georgia

  • Author(s): David Cottrell, M.V. Hood III, Seth C. McKee, Daniel A. Smith
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Journal of Experimental Political Science

📄 Beyond Single-Shot Designs: Repeated Treatments, Affective Polarization, and Democratic Norms

Although theory and observational work suggest that affective polarization should shape citizens’ support for democratic norms, experimental tests of this causal claim largely find null effects. Most studies assume any impact would be immediate and rely on one-shot manipulations. Yet democratic norms are sticky; brief shifts in partisan feelings may be too weak or fleeting to move them. I therefore test whether repeated treatments over several waves of a survey shift affective polarization and, in turn, support for democratic norms. I find no significant first-stage effects: the treatments do not change respondents’ affective polarization, so repeated exposures do not cumulatively move it and downstream effects on norms cannot be identified. I conclude by considering why my findings differ from studies that report significant effects for similar treatments. Many experiments measure affective polarization as hostility toward the outparty, whereas this study and observational work conceptualize it as the gap between inparty and outparty evaluations.

📚 Journal of Information Technology & Politics

📄 Drawing boundaries of pursuit and response of digital rise: TikTok as a friction space of techplomacy

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📄 Search engines in polarized media environment: auditing political information curation on Google and Bing prior to 2024 US elections

  • Author(s): Mykola Makhortykh, Tobias Rohrbach, Maryna Sydorova, Elizaveta Kuznetsova
  • Link: Read the article
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📄 Navigating the hybrid media landscape? Danish green NGOs’ use of digital platforms for internal and external communication

  • Author(s): Anita Nissen, Andreas Beyer Gregersen, Markus Löchtefeld, Malayna Raftopoulos
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 Journal of Political Economy

📄 Markups: A Search-Theoretic Perspective

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📄 Optimal Tests Following Sequential Experiments

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📄 Illiquid Lemon Markets and the Macroeconomy

  • Author(s): Aimé Bierdel, Andres Drenik, Juan Herreño, Pablo Ottonello
  • Link: Read the article
Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

📚 Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

📄 Three-fold Fay-Herriot model with unequal variance random effects

  • Author(s): Esteban Cabello, Laura Marcis, Domingo Morales, Maria Chiara Pagliarella, Renato Salvatore
  • Link: Read the article
This study extends the classical Fay–Herriot model to a threefold hierarchical structure incorporating heteroscedastic random effects. Three submodels are also introduced within this framework. Small area best linear unbiased predictors are derived for linear indicators, and their mean squared errors (MSEs) are estimated using both analytical and parametric bootstrap methods. Model performance and reliability are evaluated through diagnostic tools and influence measures, specifically designed for small area estimation. Simulation experiments are conducted to analyze the empirical properties of the predictors and MSE estimators. The proposed approach is applied to data from the 2019–2021 Spanish Living Conditions Survey to estimate the proportion of women and men below the poverty line, disaggregated by province, age group, and year.

📄 Exploring Common Causes of Survey Cooperation and Response Quality in A Diary Study

  • Author(s): Christopher Antoun, Joseph B Rodhouse, Elina T Page
  • Link: Read the article
This study explores the potential link between nonresponse error and measurement error, two issues often treated separately in survey research. Using paradata and self-reports from a U.S. national food diary survey, we examine whether an individual’s likelihood to cooperate with a survey request influences their response behavior upon participating. We also examine factors such as respondent motivation, cognitive ability, and task difficulty that may simultaneously affect both response propensity and response behavior. Our results indicate that individuals with a lower propensity to participate in the diary survey were more likely to delay logging food events and backfill—adding entries for previous days that were missed—compared to those with a higher response propensity. However, no differences were found between these groups for other indicators of response quality. Additionally, while the factors we examined predicted cooperation, they did not account for variations in response quality. These findings suggest that recruiting reluctant respondents may inadvertently lead to increased problematic behaviors, such as backfilling. Nonetheless, the reasons behind the connection between response propensity and response behavior remain unclear, warranting further investigation.

📚 Journal of Theoretical Politics

📄 The politics of self-imposed term limits

This article examines how self-imposed term limits—pledges made by candidates, should they be elected, not to seek reelection—can arise endogenously within a model of electoral accountability. To this end, I extend a standard model with adverse selection by introducing an election stage during which two candidates may voluntarily pledge to forgo reelection. I first show that such pledges can occur in equilibrium even without credible commitment power, highlighting their connection to cheap talk. I then analyze, at a high level of generality, equilibria when candidates can credibly commit to such pledges. In this scenario, self-imposed term limits allow strong candidates to signal their type and commit to making policy choices free from career distortions, thereby gaining an electoral advantage over reelection-seeking candidates. Finally, in a model specification in which politicians have heterogeneous policy preferences, I identify conditions under which term limit pledges are both informative and welfare-improving.

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

📄 Migrant age profiles reconciling digital trace and survey data: an example of the United Kingdom in 2018 and 2019

Accurate estimates of migrant population stocks by age and sex are essential for demographic analysis and policy. This study develops a hierarchical Bayesian model that integrates survey data from the Labour Force Survey with digital trace data from the Facebook Advertising Platform to improve estimation of migrant age–sex distributions. The approach applies reduced Rogers–Castro age schedules as first-stage smoothing and harmonizes profiles within a multinomial-Dirichlet–Dirichlet framework. We illustrate the model using data on the 10 largest European migrant groups in the United Kingdom in 2018–2019. Results reveal 3 broad patterns: younger age structures among Western and Southern European migrants, slightly older working-age profiles for Central and Eastern Europeans, and a predominantly older Irish migrant population. External validation against Census 2021 country-of-birth data for England and Wales shows that the proposed model more closely matches benchmark age–sex distributions than a specification inspired by the area model of Wiśniowski et al. (2016. Integrated modelling of age and sex patterns of European migration. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), 179(4), 1007–1024. https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12177). Facebook data improve representation of younger migrants, who are often underrepresented in surveys, while the Labour Force Survey provides broader demographic structure. Overall, the findings demonstrate the value of combining traditional and digital data to address gaps in migration statistics and produce timely, detailed population estimates.

📚 Legislative Studies Quarterly

📄 When Does Term Length Matter? Party Status, Polarization, and Legislative Productivity

Longer terms should increase legislative productivity by extending time horizons, yet the empirical evidence for this outcome is inconsistent. This manuscript argues that the effects of term length depend on both party status and polarization. Using data from across U.S. state legislatures, the results demonstrate that the productivity advantages of longer terms depend on the political context. As polarization increases within states over time, the relative benefit of longer terms shifts from minority to majority party members. At low polarization levels, minorities would benefit more from term extensions than majorities. At high polarization, this pattern reverses. These findings reconcile prior research and reveal how the political context can shape institutional effects.

📄 Learning in Committee? How Racial Diversity Shapes Speech, Evidence Use, and Substantive Representation in Congress

Research on descriptive representation has primarily examined whether and how descriptive representatives themselves advance group interests. In the context of race, this work shows that nonwhite lawmakers advance nonwhite interests, but less is known about whether nonwhite representation also shapes white lawmakers' behavior. I argue that repeated contact with nonwhite lawmakers in racially diverse committees may shape how white Democrats engage race‐related issues, making them more likely to support race‐related hearing statements with evidence. To test this expectation, I combine large‐scale text classification with a detailed content analysis of more than 11,000 race‐related committee hearing statements and 87,000 full bill texts from the 105th–117th Congresses. Using a within‐legislator design, I find that white Democrats serving on racially diverse committees are more likely to cite evidence when discussing race and to cite the same sources as their nonwhite colleagues. I also show that race‐based expertise is associated with substantive representation: legislators who more frequently cite evidence when discussing race are more effective at advancing race‐related legislation. Together, these findings suggest that descriptive representation may foster substantive representation, in part, by shaping how white Democrats engage race‐related issues in racially diverse legislative committees.

📄 Controlling for Oversight in Studies of Oversight

In honor of the creation of the Congressional Oversight Research Database (CORD), we explore some of the selection effects that observable measures of oversight may be subject to. We present a model in which Congress endogenously chooses whether to hold a hearing or to preempt the need for one by overturning an agency's policy in advance. These endogenous oversight choices imply that observable outcomes arise through two pathways: Congress may overturn a policy immediately or only after acquiring additional information through a hearing. Failing to account for this information‐gathering stage can obscure the underlying mechanisms that drive these outcomes. Using data from ProQuest and CORD, we test two implications of the model, finding evidence that Congress selects into conducting oversight hearings and implementing subsequent policy reversals more often when in opposition to the President, with no impact of the information gathered during a hearing on subsequent policy reversals. This implies that Congress uses committee hearings primarily as a mechanism for sharing information about the executive branch when it is politically convenient, rather than as a mechanism for gathering information on policy alternatives. We then conclude with broader implications for empirical research on oversight, including the importance of distinguishing between information gathering and information sharing in oversight.

📚 Nature Reviews Psychology

📄 Causal relationships between depression and cardiovascular disease

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📚 Party Politics

📄 A dynamic seat product model

The Seat Product Model uses just two institutional parameters (average district magnitude and assembly size) to predict legislative fragmentation with remarkable accuracy. However, it is best suited for simple, single-tier systems. Subsequent extensions to complex, two-tier systems rely on an upper-tier (multiplier-style) correction that accounts for cross-tier inflationary effects but estimate it as a single constant from pooled cross-national data. Applied to Mexico’s mixed-member lower house elections (1997–2021), both specifications systematically mispredict legislative fragmentation. This is because cross-tier inflationary effects are not a fixed system property but an evolving one, shaped by institutional features interacting with a changing party system. This study proposes a Dynamic Seat Product Model that retains the original institutional baseline while allowing the correction to update automatically via exponential smoothing. The DSPM tracks Mexico’s long-run rise in legislative fragmentation more closely than fixed alternatives, clarifies the mechanism behind it, and offers a principled path toward making the SPM applicable to virtually any single election.

📄 When the party is over: How parties respond to electoral decline

Over the past decades, we have witnessed the severe electoral decline of formerly successful parties. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how these parties have responded to their losses. I examine the consequences of severe and persistent electoral losses through the lens of intra-party dynamics. I argue that parties react to severe decline by shifting attention to core issues and adopting more extreme positions. I theorize that this is because office-seekers are the first to abandon the sinking ship, tilting the internal power balance towards policy-motivated actors. Testing the theory with manifesto data from 18 Western European countries between 1970 and 2025, I find evidence that parties devote more attention to their core issues following their electoral decline. Parties do not, however, adopt more extreme positions on these issues. I find limited evidence that shifts in the intra-party balance are behind these changes.

📄 Party responsiveness to party supporters, the electorate, and interest groups in a multidimensional policy space

This article sheds new light on party responsiveness by considering the role of interest group pressure in parties’ responsiveness to their supporters and the electorate on multiple policy dimensions in 12 countries. Following recent work, we expect that parties are as responsive to shifts in their supporters’ preferences as to the wider electorate. Yet, parties also attend to interest group pressure. We argue that parties’ responsiveness to voters is enhanced by leadership ties with interest groups but that ties with only sectional groups are associated with more stable party positions. Combining data on voters, interest groups, and parties, our analysis shows that parties are responsive to preference change among their supporters and, further, that their policy positions are more stable when they only have ties with sectional groups. However, parties’ responsiveness on specific dimensions is not necessarily enhanced by leadership ties with the interest groups particularly active on those dimensions.

📄 Technocracy or not, this is the question: can party system predict the number of technocrats in governments?

In the last three decades, Europe has witnessed an increase in the number of technocrats – non-partisan, non-elected experts appointed on the basis of technical competence – in government. This paper examines whether structural characteristics of party systems predict the share of technocrats in cabinets across 30 European countries between 2000 and 2024. Building on theories of party competition, delegation, and representation, it investigates how systemic features of party democracy shape technocratic appointments. Using fractional regression models, the study tests the relationship between the share of technocrats and three key party-system variables: ideological polarization, party system fragmentation, and party institutionalization. The findings reveal that technocrats are significantly more prevalent where ideological distance between parties complicates bargaining and creates demand for neutral mediators who can bridge incompatible policy positions. Conversely, when more parties compete for portfolios, partisan actors crowd out non-partisan experts rather than delegating to them. Most importantly, in systems where parties possess stable organizations, coherent programmatic profiles, and deep societal roots, technocratic inclusion is significantly lower.

📄 Allocative claims and pork barrel politics

  • Author(s): Marius Sältzer, Hauke Peters, Charlotte Keyßler
  • Link: Read the article
Political strategies are shaped by electoral institutions and incentives. There is a large literature on pork barrel politics in single-member districts (SMD), but understanding the institutional effects that shape the incentives for pork requires comparison within the same system. The German Mixed-Member Electoral system offers an ideal institutional setup, but official data on pork is not available. Instead, we focus on the use of pork references as an electoral strategy, adapting credit-claiming theory to textual analysis of candidates’ social media posts. Using supervised machine learning on Facebook posts by candidates in the 2017 and 2021 federal election campaign period, we fine-tune a BERT classifier on 1000 manually coded posts to identify pork references (F1: 0.82). Our results demonstrate that incumbents, particularly district incumbents and those who outperform their national party’s vote share, are significantly more likely to emphasize pork in their communication. Moreover, candidates are more likely to use pork references if their competitors within the district employ similar strategies, and when electoral competition in the district is high. Our findings imply that particularistic logic exists beyond SMDs and can be shaped by the internal specificities of more complex incentive systems.

📚 Policy & Internet

📄 Framing Extremist Narratives: A Multi‐Stage Computational Analysis of Discourse Structures, Emotional Mobilization, and Cross‐Platform Migration

Online extremism poses a particularly difficult governance challenge when radical actors adapt and spread grievance, authority, enemy, and recruitment narratives across heterogeneous platforms. This study develops a multi‐stage computational framework for analyzing extremist narratives across platforms. Using a corpus of 22,347 English‐language documents from Twitter/X, Telegram, Gab, public web archives, and extremist‐adjacent forums posted between 2020 and 2023, the study integrates topic modeling, frame classification, psycholinguistic and emotion scoring, semantic cross‐platform matching, qualitative validation, and negative‐control checks. The findings identify eight topic clusters, six recurring narrative frames, and a platform‐migration pattern associated with semantic drift and stronger enemy‐focused framing in less‐moderated destination spaces. The results are consistent with a displacement‐and‐intensification mechanism, although they do not establish causal effects of deplatforming or individual radicalization. The study contributes to computational discourse analysis, coordinated platform governance, and frame‐aware counter‐narrative design.

📄 Digital Futures Between Participatory Digital Democracy and Participatory Digital Fascism

This paper explores one of the defining political questions of the twenty‐first century: will digital technologies strengthen democracy or accelerate new forms of authoritarianism and fascism? Against the backdrop of platform capitalism, AI‐driven communication, surveillance infrastructures, disinformation and democratic crisis, the study asks how experts in digital democracy assess the present condition and possible futures of digital society. To address this question, the paper draws on the Futures of Digital Democracy Survey (FDDS), a two‐round international expert survey involving researchers, practitioners and civil society actors working in the fields of digital democracy, media, Internet governance and digital society. Combining futures research, scenario analysis, and qualitative and quantitative content analysis, the study investigates competing trajectories of digital development ranging from participatory digital democracy to corporate and state‐controlled digital fascism. The findings reveal a profound tension at the heart of contemporary digital society: while respondents overwhelmingly imagine an ideal future democracy in participatory and deliberative terms—centred on citizens’ assemblies, digital participation, public‐service Internet platforms and democratic AI—they simultaneously express deep pessimism about the actual direction of digital capitalism and platform power. Experts consider authoritarian and fascistic digital futures significantly more likely than democratic ones. The paper analyses these contradictions by examining the relationship between deliberative democracy, constitutional rights, platform governance, digital commons, public service media, AI, surveillance and the political economy of Big Tech. It argues that democracy in the digital age can only survive if participatory and deliberative digital structures are institutionally combined with constitutional safeguards, public ownership, democratic regulation and the defence of human rights. By bringing together debates on digital democracy, authoritarianism, political economy and digital futures, the paper offers both a critical diagnosis of the contemporary digital condition and a normative vision of democratic alternatives in the age of AI and platform capitalism.

📚 Political Analysis

📄 The Power of Prognosis: Improving Covariate Balance Tests with Outcome Information

Scholars frequently use covariate balance tests to test the validity of natural experiments and related designs. Unfortunately, when measured covariates are unrelated to potential outcomes, balance is uninformative about key identification conditions. We show that balance tests can then lead to erroneous conclusions. To build stronger tests, researchers should identify covariates that are jointly predictive of potential outcomes; formally measure and report covariate prognosis; and prioritize the most individually informative variables in tests. Building on prior research on “prognostic scores,” we develop bootstrap balance tests that upweight covariates associated with the outcome. We adapt this approach for regression-discontinuity designs and use simulations to compare weighting methods based on linear regression and more flexible methods, including machine learning. The results show how prognosis weighting can avoid both false negatives and false positives. To illustrate key points, we study empirical examples from a sample of published studies, including an important debate over close elections.

📚 Political Communication

📄 Happiness in Political Communication by Men and Women Members of the US Congress

  • Author(s): Constantine Boussalis, Travis G. Coan, Mirya R. Holman
  • Link: Read the article
.

📄 Networked Counterpublics and Contentious Publicity: A Cross-Platform Analysis of QAnon on Parler and Twitter

  • Author(s): Sang Jung Kim, Jordan Foley, Yunkang Yang, Keyeun Lee
  • Link: Read the article
.

📚 Political Psychology

📄 More than a partisan pandemic: Worldview and COVID‐19 response in the United States

  • Author(s): Marc J. Hetherington, Andrew M. Engelhardt, Isaac D. Mehlhaff
  • Link: Read the article
As the COVID‐19 pandemic unfolded, public responses increasingly divided along political lines: Democrats tended to support policies and behaviors recommended by public health experts and Republicans tended to oppose them. We argue that exclusively party‐based explanations for these patterns are incomplete. Instead, we call attention to people's philosophy about life—their “worldview”—as an important force behind their pandemic responses. We posit that citizens use beliefs derived from interactions with their everyday life to inform their affinities and preferences when analogous matters enter the political realm. Using original cross‐sectional and panel survey data gathered over the course of the pandemic, we theorize and empirically validate a multidimensional measure of worldview. We show that worldview is a coherent, belief‐system‐like entity that remained stable during the pandemic, suggesting its centrality in mass responses to uncertain and novel stimuli. We then show that even before strong party cues emerged, worldview structured Americans' reactions to COVID‐19 and constrained the positions parties could take. Worldview's influence was both direct and indirect, channeled through its relationship with partisan preference. While partisanship is a potent force in political belief systems, much of its effect, we suggest, comes from its association with people's general philosophy about life.

📄 Measuring affective polarization: Matching concepts to measures

  • Author(s): James N. Druckman, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky, John Barry Ryan
  • Link: Read the article
Affective polarization is the extent to which partisans like their own party relative to their dislike of opposing parties. High levels of affective polarization in the United States and many other countries have prompted widespread scholarly interest and practical concern. Yet, despite nearly 15 years of scholarship, significant uncertainty remains about how best to measure affective polarization. We offer a comprehensive review focused on the measurement of affective polarization, underscoring how seemingly innocuous choices can yield substantially different results. These include the target of evaluation (e.g., engaged ideologues, ordinary voters), the dimensions of evaluation (e.g., liking/disliking, moralization), the measurement context (e.g., whether respondents are interviewed by an interviewer or complete surveys independently) and the political context (e.g., the power relationship between parties). We conclude that the next generation of inquiry will need to more carefully align measures of affective polarization with specific research questions.

📚 Political Research Quarterly

📄 Belief and Betrayal: Institutional Trust in the Shadow of Religious Violence

  • Author(s): Tang Xi, Chang Li, Kalsoom Paracha, Shaukat Hussain Bhatti
  • Link: Read the article
Religious violence erodes the moral and social fabric that binds communities, striking at the very heart of societal cohesion. As fear and intolerance spread, the foundations of institutional trust weaken, leaving nations vulnerable to deep-seated divisions and governance challenges. Present investigation analyzes the asymmetric impact of religious violence on institutional trust in 10 selected emerging countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, Mexico, and the Philippines). Departing from conventional analyses that rely on standard econometric techniques and often overlook regional heterogeneity, the present investigation uses the cutting-edge Quantile-on-Quantile method. This approach facilitates a nuanced examination of cross-country variation, enhances analytical precision, and reveals intricate, nation-specific behavioral dynamics. The results exhibit a strong negative association between religious violence and institutional trust in most sample countries. In contrast, South Africa and Mexico exhibit a mixed association. These findings underscore notable variations across quantiles, highlighting the asymmetric nature of the relationship between the variables. They emphasize that policymakers must undertake thorough assessments and formulate strategies tailored to each country’s specific social and regional contexts, ensuring that the multifaceted and sensitive link between religious violence and institutional trust is addressed effectively and in a locally responsive manner.

📄 Infelicitous Political Talk: Disparaging Institutions and Support for Democracy

Infelicitous political talk is now a routine feature of American politics, with scholars debating the extent to which it meaningfully shapes citizens’ democratic attitudes. We seek to contribute to this body of work by showing that the degree of inappropriateness of a criticism is continuous and subjective; that rhetorical denigration of democratic institutions is more likely to influence evaluations of the speaker than to erode broader commitments to democracy; and that criticisms that “cross the line” of appropriateness can create backlashes that actually wind up increasing support for democratic institutions and values. Using an experiment embedded in a national survey, we evaluate the effects of inappropriate attacks on the U.S. judiciary. Perceived rhetorical denigration does not weaken democratic values; instead, it produces a small but consistent backlash that slightly increases support for democratic institutions. Our various findings strongly challenge the assumption that rising infelicitous talk poses a serious threat to democratic stability in the U.S.

📚 Political Studies

📄 Fair reciprocity and EU law

Should all European Union (EU) citizens enjoy the same welfare benefits as nationals when they migrate within Europe? Which categories of EU migrants (workers, job-seekers and non-economically active ones) should be entitled to full equal treatment? I discuss reciprocity as a moral basis of EU law, extending White’s account of fair reciprocity to the supranational context of the EU. I suggest that the concept of workers in EU law should be reformed to account for a plurality of valuable contributions. I also discuss the implications of reciprocity in non-ideal conditions, arguing that EU migrants have a reduced contributive obligation when they face injustice in the host member state. The seriousness of such injustice may even imply lifting the contributive obligation entirely. The contributive obligation of non-economically active individuals is a duty to seek work, and I suggest it entitles them to limited equal treatment.

📄 Whose China Shock? Partisanship, import exposure, and trade rhetoric in the US Senate

Trade among major powers is never purely economic; it is also a site of political conflict over blame, threat, and national interest. Why, then, do legislators facing similar trade shocks respond in such different ways? Focusing on US Senate rhetoric on trade with China between 2009 and 2023, this paper examines how partisanship conditions the translation of economic disruption into elite political speech. Drawing on sentiment analysis of Senate floor speeches and state-level measures of Chinese import exposure across two periods, it develops a partisan-conditioning argument: trade disruption acquires political meaning as parties interpret it. Democratic senators grew markedly more critical as local import exposure increased, especially under the earlier China Shock window. Republicans showed a much flatter response to early-period exposure and even a slightly positive association with later-period penetration. The China Shock left a durable mark on Senate discourse, but one structured by party, not geography alone.

📄 The politics of crime prevention: Evidence from Colombia

Why do governments prevent crime in some places while neglecting others? Crime prevention policies are often viewed as too slow, diffuse, and politically intangible to generate electoral rewards. When implemented, existing research suggests they primarily serve to reward co-partisans or mobilize ideologically aligned voters. This article challenges that view by arguing that incumbents allocate crime prevention resources to electorally competitive municipalities because these investments yield electoral returns. Using detailed project-level data from Colombia, I show that national incumbents disproportionately direct crime prevention funds to municipalities where recent presidential elections were closely contested, rather than to areas with higher crime rates or strong partisan loyalties. I then show that these allocations increase the vote share of the right-wing incumbent coalition in subsequent elections. Drawing on quantitative analyses and interviews with policymakers and bureaucrats, I argue that these effects operate primarily through the visibility and attribution of crime prevention projects, particularly those aligned with right-wing issue ownership of public security.

📄 Evaluations of institutional performance among adolescents: Comparing the socializing roles of schools and families

Democratic accountability requires citizens’ political trust to reflect institutional performance, making it crucial to understand what fosters such responsiveness. While existing studies suggest that education shapes evaluative attitudes, direct evidence remains limited because many analyses struggle to separate educational effects from those of parental background. This paper offers a comprehensive test of these explanations by examining adolescents within the same target grade and by assessing school-level civic education characteristics often credited with cultivating critical citizenship norms. It then compares school-level patterns with parental background to evaluate the proxy-versus-cause debate. Using data from three waves of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, the analysis shows that structurally low and declining institutional performance depresses political trust among adolescents. However, consistent with the education-as-proxy argument, the positive association between performance and trust is significantly stronger among adolescents with higher parental socio-economic status, while school-level civic education shows no meaningful moderating effect.

📄 The trust in government gap: National trust, local trust, and compliance

According to Tang and Huhe, individuals “are nested in a multiplicity of governments,” including national and local governments, “and . . . constantly find themselves in variant relationships with government at different levels”. Yet, previous research has mostly concentrated on individuals’ assessments of national governments, or supranational organizations such as the European Union, overlooking assessments of local governments and their effects. To address this, we fielded a four-wave survey in England in 2020–2021 capturing local and national government trust, as well as contemporaneous indicators of performance across these levels of government. Disaggregating between- and within-individual explanations for variation, we find distinct influences on trust in national and local government, and that trust in local government exerts an influence on pro-social behaviour whereas national government trust does not. Importantly, for future research on political trust, our findings show that the level of government matters for both the drivers and consequences of political trust.

📄 Who supports martial law in a democracy? Lessons from South Korea

On 3 December 2024, South Korea experienced an unprecedented political crisis when the president declared martial law. While the declaration was rapidly reversed and condemned by key democratic institutions, public opinion did not converge on rejection. Instead, support for—and tolerance of—the measure persisted among a nontrivial share of citizens. Why, in a democracy with functioning institutions, are some citizens willing to accept extraordinary executive measures? Using original nationwide survey data, this research shows that public support for martial law is strongly associated with affective polarization. Individuals who express strong partisan and leader-based affective alignment with the incumbent are significantly more likely to accept martial law, while those polarized in the opposite direction overwhelmingly reject it. The findings suggest that affective polarization can align evaluations of executive overreach with partisan loyalties, weakening normative constraints even in consolidated democracies where institutional safeguards continue to function effectively.

📚 Political Studies Review

📄 Perception versus practice: Using neoclassical realism to analyse states’ ‘dual perceptions’ of fossil fuel, and the dilemma of climate change mitigation in a world of uncertainty

This study examines and evaluates states’ ‘dual perception’ of fossil fuels as both strategic assets and environmental liabilities among the world’s top carbon emitters (China, the United States, India, and Russia). By applying neoclassical realism, it bridges the gap between international structural pressures and domestic political variables to explain why states continue to heavily rely on fossil fuels despite ambitious climate pledges, underscoring the complex intersection of energy, politics, and environmental concerns. Empirically, we used a mixed-methods approach to test the hypotheses: qualitative thematic content analysis of leaders’ speeches (coded in NVivo) and quantitative indicators drawn from International Energy Agency and Climate Action Tracker. We conclude that countries’ dual perception of fossil fuels is a rational but constrained response to domestic political variables (revenue, employment, economic sustenance, and energy security) and international structural pressures (green competition, meeting Paris Accord commitments, and moral imperatives), among others. This study contributes to the international relations literature by introducing a non-traditional security variable like climate change into the neoclassical realist discourse.

📚 Politics and Religion

📄 Migration crisis at the Polish–Belarusian border in the Polish Catholic press discourse

The aim of this article is to examine the issue of refugees/migrants at the Polish–Belarusian border in the discourse of the Polish Catholic press, with a particular focus on assessing the consistency of the Catholic press discourse with the teachings of Pope Francis. This juxtaposition is significant, as the teachings of the Pope undergo interpretation by spiritual symbolic elites, the Catholic press and are further conveyed to the people. In light of this, the most widely read Catholic opinion weeklies were selected for empirical analysis. The longterm perspective (from August to December 2021) made it possible to observe the evolution of views on the migration crisis at the Polish–Belarusian border. The analysis was based on Gerbner’s framework for the analysis of press information. The research led to the conclusion that there is a lack of consistency between the presented discourses. This article examines how faith-based media mediate religious authority while navigating political alignments during the migration crisis on the Polish–Belarusian border. Rather than uniformly transmitting papal teachings, Catholic outlets employ selective citation and framing that subordinate religious authority to political interests. The analysis reveals three mechanisms: mediation of religious authority through selective interpretation of papal texts, political alignment subordinating theology to political projects, and threat construction shaping editorial narratives to reflect political positioning. These mechanisms reflect broader patterns observed in faith-based media globally when addressing migration and humanitarian crises.

📚 Public Opinion Quarterly

📄 Nonpolitical Identity Signals as Information Shortcuts: Evidence from Three Experiments

A rich literature has documented how voters navigate the complex information landscape by using heuristics, or “information shortcuts,” to help them make sense of the political world. Additionally, a budding line of research argues that our current polarization crisis has extended beyond just the political and now even affects the nonpolitical realm. We submit that voters may be using these nonpolitical identity signals (e.g., a candidate driving a Toyota Prius or eating at Chick-fil-A) as heuristics to make sense of the contemporary political era. Using three original survey experiments, we find that these nonpolitical identity cues are indeed used by voters as partisan heuristics, but only in the absence of political (partisan and issue) informational cues. Furthermore, we also suppress the effect of partisan identification when we provide orthogonal nonpolitical information. These findings show that nonpolitical identity items can be used by citizens as information shortcuts to help citizens navigate the complicated political waters that surround them, but that their effect in light of other pieces of information is minimal.

📚 Research & Politics

📄 From the courtroom to the public: Judicial influence on People’s attitudes toward same-sex marriage in Japan

  • Author(s): Robert Nordström, Sou Shinomoto, Antonio Benasaglio Berlucchi
  • Link: Read the article
Can judicial action change public attitudes? While most empirical studies on the societal impact of court rulings have focused on the United States, particularly its Supreme Court, the influence of courts in other contexts remains largely unexplored. This study examines Japan—the only G7 country that does not legally recognize same-sex marriage—and explores how judicial rulings on same-sex marriage influence public attitudes. Using data from an original survey incorporating natural and experimental treatments, the analysis finds that while a court decision has no significant effect in a natural environment, experimental exposure to a reminder of the ruling can shift respondents’ views. The findings suggest that judicial action on same-sex marriage may have limited but measurable impacts on public attitudes, even in unconventional settings, and therefore contribute to discussions of external validity regarding the societal influence of courts.

📚 Social Forces

📄 Framing inclusion: discursive logics of entitlement in immigrant social rights advocacy

This article investigates how civil society organizations (CSOs) advocate for immigrant access to social assistance in politically charged environments. It explores whether the frame choices of CSOs are shaped by their relationships with government bodies and examines the implications of these narratives for representing a highly diverse group of non-citizens. The article introduces a novel two-dimensional framework that categorizes advocacy frames along two axes: “scope of inclusion” (Targeted Inclusion vs. Universal Inclusion) and “justification for entitlement” (Individual Justification vs. Structural Justification). Findings from document analysis reveal a predominant reliance on frames that call for the inclusion of specific groups basing entitlement on individual characteristics independent of CSOs’ relationship to the state. The most radical frame type (Structural Justification for Universal Inclusion), however, is more frequently used by independent CSOs. Analyses of interviews underscore that CSOs navigate a trade-off: aligning with targeted, individualistic frames can achieve incremental policy gains, but potentially reinforces stratified notions of “deservingness”, contributing to internal hierarchies within immigrant communities. Conversely, advancing structural justification for universal inclusion carries the potential to challenge systemic inequalities yet risks limited immediate resonance within the political mainstream. These insights highlight the tension between short-term policy success and long-term systemic change in CSO advocacy strategies. The empirical findings, alongside theoretical discussions, extend beyond this specific policy field, offering broader insights into civil society strategies in adverse contexts.

📚 Social Problems

📄 “Don’t care, you gotta move”: homeless mobilities in the production of environmental inequality

Often referred to as the “mobility turn,” sociologists increasingly attend to the social implications of movement and to movement as itself constitutive of social processes. Despite this shift, environmental justice scholars remain largely focused on spatially fixed areas as sites of analysis, but this approach may miss the complexity of environmental harm experienced by uniquely mobile populations. This article focuses on experiences of environmental injustice for one such population: people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with people experiencing homelessness, I examine how participants are impacted by extreme and unpredictable weather patterns related to climate change in a mid-sized city in Oregon (USA). The study bridges frameworks from environmental justice and mobilities studies to uncover that homeless criminalization, a lack of social services, and gendered violence compel participants to employ strategies of heightened movement which shape and are shaped by their exposure to environmental hazards, with women and people with disabilities experiencing unique and compounded forms of environmental injustice. By centering the role of movement in processes of environmental inequality, this study expands sociological understandings of environmental justice while offering practical insights for more effective responses to climate change and homelessness.

📚 Social Science Computer Review

📄 Where You Are Is What You Get! Inconsistencies of Digital Trace Data across Download Locations

To collect digital trace data, researchers continue to rely on for-profit companies’ Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These APIs often return samples of the data based on intransparent sampling procedures and algorithms. In this paper, we extend research on the reliability of digital trace data from APIs by examining the effect of the download location on inconsistencies across returned samples: Do we get different values from digital trace data APIs depending on where we download the data from? We compare samples from Google Trends, YouTube Data, and the New York Times (NYT) API from four countries across three continents (Austria, Germany, the U.S., and Australia) for the same query parameters (i.e., search term, region, and time range). Our results show that the download location impacts the returned samples for all three APIs, depending on the query. We find large inconsistencies for samples from Google Trends and the YouTube Data API, while the NYT API returns identical article sets from each download location for most queries. We conclude with practical recommendations for researchers using these APIs. Our findings serve as a cautionary reminder for social scientists relying on sampling-based APIs as they point to yet another limitation regarding their reliability and reproducibility.

📚 Social Science Quarterly

📄 Polarized by Education: Political Affiliation, Education, and Beliefs on the Free Market

Objective This article tests how education and political affiliation shape individuals’ political attitudes toward free‐market economics. Prior research finds that higher education levels are associated with more liberal political attitudes toward cultural issues—the “liberalization thesis.” However, this pattern may not hold for economic issues, especially surrounding free‐market economics. Methods For analysis, this article uses data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to model the association between political affiliation and respondent education with free‐market attitudes. Results In contrast with the liberalization thesis, we find that at higher levels of education, Democrat and Republican respondents are more polarized, respectively, in their attitudes toward free‐market economics compared to their Democrat and Republican peers at lower levels of education. Conclusion Our findings demonstrate the complexity of education's association with political attitudes, contrasting with commonly held beliefs about unified liberalizing effects of education. One plausible explanation is that education reinforces prior held economic attitudes, leading to greater consistency between political affiliation and attitudes toward the free market.

📚 Sociological Methods & Research

📄 Marginal Structural Effects for Exponential Random Graph Models

Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are now a staple for social network analysis due to their ability to parameterize effects from endogenous network structures, such as two stars and triangles. However, interpreting coefficients for structural ERGM terms poses two problems. First, it is not possible to change the value of a structural term “holding all else constant” in models with nontrivial dyadic dependencies. Second, parameters for structural ERGM terms may be affected by scaling (noncollapsibility), which can alter the direction, size, and significance of structural coefficients. While the first issue is known in the literature, the second has not been previously reported. This study introduces a methodological framework based on marginal structural effects (MSEs) to address both problems. MSEs capture the discrete marginal effect of an endogenous network structure by calculating the difference in probability when comparing two potential ties that differ only by the value of a structural term. MSEs provide an intuitive interpretation for structural network effects and are robust to the effects of scaling. Extensions to comparisons between models, interactions with exogenous covariates, and analysis of samples of networks are discussed. An example is provided using the largest AddHealth school network to demonstrate how the framework can be applied.

📚 The International Journal of Press/Politics

📄 Media Use and Attitudes Toward Homosexuality: A Cross-National Analysis of the Moderating Roles of Polarization and Press Freedom

The media can have an influential role in shaping citizens’ attitudes toward marginalized groups in society, such as homosexuals. Drawing from a cross-national survey sample from 43 countries ( N  = 57,583), this study showed that traditional media use was related to negative attitudes toward homosexuals, while digital media use was positively related. The relationships were also contingent on levels of country-level societal political polarization and press freedom. Higher levels of polarization weaken the relationship between media use and attitudes toward homosexuals across media types. Under higher press freedom, traditional media are associated with higher justification of homosexuality and higher rejection of homosexual neighbors, while digital media use is associated with lower rejection of homosexual neighbors. These findings demonstrate that the relationship between media use and attitudes is to some extent contextual on a country’s political and media environment.

📚 The Journal of Legislative Studies

📄 Determinants of bill co-sponsorship in open-list proportional representation systems: the case of Chile, 2018–2022

  • Author(s): Tomás López, Nicolás Mimica, Patricio Navia, Gonzalo Espinoza Bianchini
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📄 What is a vote of no confidence, really? A deductive approach and global perspective

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📚 The Quarterly Journal of Economics

📄 Capital Services in Global Value Chains*

This paper constructs the first global dataset on inter-sectoral capital service expenditures. I use this data to disaggregate capital services and intermediate inputs in a dynamic multi-sector trade model. Steady state allocations and responses to shocks are determined by a capital-augmented global input-output matrix. Two properties of the measured network deliver larger long-run consumption gains from globalization than existing estimates, as well as larger gains in more capital-intensive countries. First, more trade-exposed sectors supply capital to more consumption-influential producers. Second, heterogeneity in the network reallocates sectoral expenditures towards producers with larger declines in capital rental prices. These reallocations raise capital incomes and lower consumption price indices.

📚 Theory and Society

📄 The fidelity of large language models in social science: a human-ai parallel experimental test of middle-range theory

  • Author(s): Pu Yan, Hengyi Li, Nuo Chen, Lingyun Li, Pince Chen
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📚 West European Politics

📄 A green divide? Climate policy support and its rural geography in Europe

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📄 Stuck on the stairway of change: the EU’s enlargement and security and defence policies post 2022

  • Author(s): Antoaneta L. Dimitrova, Seda Gürkan, Joachim Koops
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📄 The EU core executive and the Green Deal

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📄 The crisis of long-termism: time and independence in the European Union

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📄 Judicial diversity and immigration appeals: evidence from the United Kingdom

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📄 Defending democracy: investigating the efficacy of elite democratic defence in a competitive information environment

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📄 Exploring the EU’s response to the COVID-19 and Rule of Law crises through functional spill-over

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📄 Electoral input and political legitimacy

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📄 Climate-related hazards and issue attention to climate policy in the European Parliament

  • Author(s): Aron Buzogány, Mihail Chiru, Vlad Surdea-Hernea
  • Link: Read the article
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📚 World Politics

📄 The Myth of the Traditional Gender Gap? Evidence from Catholic Countries

IN most rich democratic countries today, women are much less supportive of conservative parties&#x2014;especially parties on the far right&#x2014;than men are.1 This fact presents itself as a puzzle because throughout most of the twentieth century, women, not men, were understood to be the bulwarks of conservatism. Indeed, contemporaneous observers, pundits, and scholars who reflected on women&#x2019;s political preferences around the time of suffrage often suspected that women would cast a more conservative ballot than men.2 The &#x201c;traditional&#x201d; gender gap in voting, as this phenomenon has been labeled, rests on two ideas. First, that when women did not work outside the home they were more attached to both the church and conventional ... Read More

📄 Who Sets the Agenda? Diplomatic Experience and Small Power Influence in the United Nations

In 1959, Ambassador Frank Aiken of Ireland proposed that the question of nuclear weapons proliferation be included for debate in the United Nations General Assembly (ga). Despite objections from the United States and the Soviet Union, the proposal was approved and nuclear proliferation was debated. Aiken subsequently led the ga to adopt resolutions that called for states to create an agreement on weapons dissemination,1 taking advantage of a geopolitical policy window 2 to lay the formal groundwork for international nonproliferation law. Within ten years, the Partial Test Ban Treaty and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (npt) were opened for signature, largely succeeding in preventing further ... Read More

📄 Peasants and Parliaments: Institutional Foundations of Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Europe

MANY scholars of development share one interpretation of the relationship among property rights, representation, and long-term growth. They believe that representative institutions are the guardians of property against governmental predation, be it in the form of forced loans, arbitrary taxation, or outright expropriations. Secure property rights, in turn, create incentives for investment, innovation, specialization, and other forms of beneficial economic activity; the owners of productive factors can exploit these with confidence that they will capture the social returns to their actions as private returns.1 In the long run, representative institutions foster development by controlling and constraining the ... Read More

📄 Democratizing from Within: British Elites and the Expansion of the Franchise

GREAT Britain stands out in the democratization literature as the paragon of a gradual and nonreversible political process that, through the balanced expansion of liberalization and participation, led from a &#x201c;closed hegemony&#x201d; (to use the words of Robert Dahl) to a &#x201c;polyarchy.&#x201d;1 During almost a century, British ruling elites broadened the franchise, roughly doubling it every generation&#x2014;from fewer than one in eight men to about one in six after the First Electoral Reform of 1832, to one in three in 1867, to more than half of all males in 1884, and to universal male and extensive female suffrage in the Fourth Electoral Reform of 1918. The reforms, which were passed and implemented peacefully, fostered the formation ... Read More

📄 South-South Immigration and Redistribution Preferences: Evidence from Colombia

IMMIGRATION is a global phenomenon that has significant economic, social, and political consequences. One of the most important areas on which political science research has focused is the impact of immigration on redistribution preferences.1 However, our knowledge of the effects of immigration on domestic policy comes disproportionately from studies in developed countries. Conflicts and severe crises in the developing world are leading to an increase in international migration and forced displacement, with most of this migration taking place between countries in the Global South. Yet developing countries remain understudied: Although they host most of the world&#x2019;s refugees and migrants, no relationship exists ... Read More

📚 人文及社會科學集刊

📄 【預刊】（39卷）Stepping Out of the Home Together: A Case Study of Symbiotic Services from the Social Inclusion Perspective

  • Author(s): 歐紫彤 Tzu-Tung Ou, 鄭清霞 Ching-Hsia Cheng, 洪惠芬 Hui-Fen Hung, 李佩芳 Pei-Fang Lee
  • Link: Read the article
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