Voters use salient issues to inform their vote choice. Using 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES) data, we analyze how short-, medium-, and long-term issues informed the vote for president in the 2020 election, which witnessed record-setting participation. To explain the dynamics of presidential vote choice, we employ a voter typology advanced by Key (1966). Specifically, compared to standpatters, who in 2020 registered the same major party vote as in 2016, we find that new voters in 2020 and voters switching their preferences from 2016 cast their ballots in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. In the end, President Donald Trump was denied reelection by new voters and vote switchers principally because certain issues had a notable effect in moving their presidential preferences in the Democratic direction.

We study the problem of how citizens should punish or reward a leader's choices during international crises. Audiences should impose costs rooted in citizens’ preferences over policy outcomes, but that need not mean that these costs directly reflect the citizens’ preferences over actions. Instead, rewards and punishments are valued for their equilibrium consequences. To understand how citizens’ policy preferences shape electoral accountability, we characterize the retention strategies that maximize citizen welfare. In the optimal strategy, citizens always punish leaders who initiate crises and then back down. This is a robust finding, and true even though the citizens have no intrinsic preferences for policy consistency. Whether they punish leaders for backing down rather than going to war, on the other hand, depends on the status quo and on the costs of war. Importantly, these strategies of rewarding and punishing leaders need not have any immediate connection to voter's ex ante preferences over war and peace, even if preferences over policy outcomes ultimately motivate citizen behavior. This has important implications for interpreting empirical and experimental results related to audience costs.

Moving past the conventional focus on ministerial portfolios, this paper investigates how coalition governments allocate and share ministerial responsibility for individual policy issues. Sharing responsibility induces coalescing parties to collaborate on policy issues, which addresses the problem of ministerial autonomy. Consequently, I argue that incumbent parties in coalition governments share ministerial responsibility for contentious and salient policy issues. This claim is corroborated based on a newly elicited dataset of over 30,000 ministerial policy responsibilities from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The findings have important implications for scholarship on coalition governments, as they demonstrate that incumbent parties can use the design of ministerial portfolios itself to insulate a coalition compromise from partisan deviations.

Did the 2008 United States presidential election produce stronger future mobilization for Blacks than non-Blacks? First-time voting influences long-term political behavior, but do minority voters see the most powerful effects when the formative election is tied to their group's political empowerment? I test this hypothesis in the context of the election of the first Black president in United States history, using voting eligibility discontinuities to identify the effect of voting in 2008 on future voting for Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites. Voting in 2008 caused a greater increase in the likelihood of voting in 2010 for Blacks than for other new voters, but there is no evidence of a sustained mobilizing advantage in subsequent elections. Furthermore, 2008 was not a unique formative voting experience for new Black voters, but rather produced similar effects on future voting as other presidential elections. These results signal that group political empowerment does not drive habitual voting.

To what degree and why are traditional institutions persistent? Following up the literature on the long-term effects of precolonial institutions in Africa, we investigate whether and where today's traditional institutions mirror their precolonial predecessors. We do so by linking data on contemporary traditional institutions of African ethnic groups with Murdock's historical Ethnographic Atlas. We find a robust association between past and present levels of institutional complexity, differentiating between institutions’ political centralization and functional differentiation. However, this persistence originates almost exclusively from former British colonies governed with more reliance on precolonial institutions than other colonies, in particular French ones. These findings contribute to research on the development and effects of traditional institutions, highlighting the need to account for varying persistence of traditional institutions.

Survey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach causal inference. This may account for conflicting findings in published research.

Here, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design situated in Romania, where students who pass a national baccalaureate exam are uniquely qualified to enter university. We find that university attendance causes more liberal party preferences along the cultural dimension of party politics—though not along the economic or left-right dimensions of party conflict.

This paper proposes a framework of immigrant acceptance that accounts for both group-level and individual-level characteristics and conducts a novel test of the cultural threat hypothesis. Immigrants’ individual traits are conceptualized as secondary to their identity-based claims. The empirical strategy leverages a set of survey experiments conducted in the extreme rentier state of Qatar, where naturalization poses tangible negative financial consequences for citizens by expanding the pool of government welfare beneficiaries. Findings demonstrate that citizens are willing to share citizenship with a narrow ethnic in-group while individual cultural and economic attributes are lower-order determinants influencing economically vulnerable citizens. Importantly, answers to direct survey measures are at odds with these findings, demonstrating their susceptibility to social desirability bias.

Polls from the Middle East/North Africa show high support for democracy. However, the veracity of this support has been called into question. This study uses a conjoint analysis to show that citizens support democratic institutions, as well as favoring an effective welfare state and a state religion. The results demonstrate that support for elected governance is not contingent on the state's providing economic benefits; citizens are more likely to favor participatory government at each level of economic outcome. Interest in incorporating religion in the state, however, is contingent on the political and economic profile described; the contingent effects suggest interest in Islamic governance is, at least partly, instrumental. Although pro-democracy public opinion alone does not secure democratization, it creates fertile ground for future democratization movements.

Despite the substantial body of research on compulsory voting's (CV) relationship with turnout, much remains unknown about the role of different types of CV rules, their enforcement, and their ability to prevent the secular turnout decline observed around the world. Moreover, existing studies that leverage changes to CV laws are limited to a single country. We assemble rich new data on voter turnout and electoral legislation that, we believe, include the most accurate and extensive cross-national measure of CV to date. We test three theoretically derived hypotheses: that CV enforcement matters for participation; that enforcement's effect is conditioned by state capacity; and that, only when CV is enforced, will it mitigate voter turnout's post-1970 tendency to decline. We find support for each. We also find that the nature of sanctions for non-voting is irrelevant for participation.

Citizens often support politicians who vote against their parties in parliament. They view rebels as offering better representation, appreciate expressive acts, take rebellion as a signal of standing up for constituents, or see rebels as defending their moral convictions. Each explanation has different implications for representation, but they have not yet been tested systematically against one another. We implement survey experiments on nationally representative samples in the UK, Germany, France, and Italy to assess whether voters treat rebellion as a cue for better representation or infer positive character traits implying a valence advantage. Policy congruence does not drive voters’ preference for rebels. However, voters do associate positive traits with rebel MPs, even if they do not feel better represented by them.

In coalition governments, parties need to agree on a common policy position. Whose preferences prevail? The proportionality hypothesis, the idea that coalition partners’ influence on policy is proportional to their share of seats, has been used widely in the literature on democratic representation, ideological congruence, and coalition politics. In my analysis of competing theories aimed at determining what influences policy compromise in multiparty governments, I reject the proportionality hypothesis. My results suggest instead that coalition partners exert equal influence on policy compromises, independent of their number of seats. More extensive analysis also provides evidence for increased party influence on policies when the party is the formateur or closer to the parliamentary median, ceteris paribus. As a by-product of my analysis, I provide a simple and better proxy for measuring a government's position when this position is not directly observable.

Does technological change fuel political disruption? Drawing on fine-grained labor market data from Germany, this paper examines how technological change affects regional electorates. We first show that the well-known decline in manufacturing and routine jobs in regions with higher robot adoption or investment in information and communication technology (ICT) was more than compensated by parallel employment growth in the service sector and cognitive non-routine occupations. This change in the regional composition of the workforce has important political implications: Workers trained for these new sectors typically hold progressive political values and support progressive pro-system parties. Overall, this composition effect dominates the politically perilous direct effect of automation-induced substitution. As a result, technology-adopting regions are unlikely to turn into populist-authoritarian strongholds.

Affective polarization between partisans is potentially troubling for liberal democracy. Hence, recent research has focused on how affective dislike between partisans can be reduced. Using a survey experiment in Austria, we test whether elite signals matter. Respondents exposed to fictional news stories implying that their in-party might form a coalition with an out-party show reduced dislike toward supporters of that out-party. Our experiment also shows that coalition signals can influence out-party affect even if neither of the two parties signaling cooperation are an in-party. We conclude that cooperation between rivals has an important role in reducing affective polarization.

Do the choices of city leaders matter for local economic conditions? While existing literature focuses on how the preferences of local officials influence city policy, we argue that the managerial skill of local leaders should condition their ability to achieve their goals. We conduct an original phone survey of over 300 mayors and city managers across the USA to learn about their management practices. Using a two-way fixed effects design that holds fixed a rich battery of individual and city-level characteristics, we examine how changes in leadership affect economic growth, a common goal for local officials. We find that when local leaders employ the “best practices” of organizational management, their cities grow across a range of indicators. These results are strongest for the subset of leaders who mention a growth-related goal for their time in office, suggesting that managerial skill allows local leaders to more effectively achieve their objectives.

We argue that education's effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We examine Senegal, a stable but developing democracy where presidential over-reach threatened to weaken democracy. For causal identification, we use a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits variation in the intensity of a major school reform and citizens’ ages during reform implementation. Results indicate that schooling increases interest in politics and greater support for democratic institutions—but no increased political participation in the aggregate. Education increases political participation primarily when democracy is threatened, when support for democratic institutions among educated individuals is also greater.

This article explores the effects of social media on government accountability under authoritarian regimes. It examines whether online discussions have a disciplining effect on officials' scandals. We use a unique dataset containing records of scandals discussed on microblogs in China to systematically study their effects on the government response process and officials' disciplining. We find that the government employs clear strategies: higher levels of online discussion lead to quicker government responses and more severe punishment of the officials involved. Scandals involving sexual and economic factors, which initially capture more attention, involve quicker responses and more severe punishments. Even when we exploit rainfall as the instrumental variable to mitigate the endogeneity, the results are still robust. Our findings highlight the accountability mechanism facilitated by social media and the power of social media empowerment.

This paper explores how factional competition shapes local media's coverage of negative political news. Employing news reports that appeared in Chinese national and local newspapers (2000–2014) coupled with data on the networks of elites, we find that local bureaucrats connected to strong national leaders tend to criticize members of weaker factions in politically damaging news reports. These adverse reports indeed harm the promotion prospects of the province leaders reported on in the articles, weakening the already weak factions and expanding the relative power of the strong factions. Our findings suggest that the loyalty-based competitive behaviors of political elites further tilt an already uneven playing field across political factions and facilitate power concentration in China.

Governments can grant political concessions to induce quasi-voluntary compliance with taxation, yet empirical evidence probing the taxation–representation connection remains inconclusive. We contend that this association remains valid but it is primarily confined to business elites in nondemocratic regimes because the same wealth that exposes them to state predation also incentivizes them to endorse tax policies that offer greater political representation. We test our argument by evaluating preferences for hypothetical tax reforms in separate samples of business elites and ordinary citizens in China. We find that business elites show stronger preference than nonelites for tax policies that include advances in political representation. We explore various mechanisms for our results and find support for government credibility, tax ownership, and tax salience considerations.

In this note, we provide direct evidence of cheating in online assessments of political knowledge. We combine survey responses with web tracking data of a German and a US online panel to assess whether people turn to external sources for answers. We observe item-level prevalence rates of cheating that range from 0 to 12 percent depending on question type and difficulty, and find that 23 percent of respondents engage in cheating at least once across waves. In the US panel, which employed a commitment pledge, we observe cheating behavior among less than 1 percent of respondents. We find robust respondent- and item-level characteristics associated with cheating. However, item-level instances of cheating are rare events; as such, they are difficult to predict and correct for without tracking data. Even so, our analyses comparing naive and cheating-corrected measures of political knowledge provide evidence that cheating does not substantially distort inferences.

Travel bans were a globally prevalent policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, travel bans against China and European countries proved a broadly popular mitigation tool among Americans. Why did Americans support COVID-19 travel bans? We fielded two novel survey experiments, surveying 3000 American citizens across five waves (between March 2020 and March 2021). In randomizing the country of origin of those potentially subject to travel ban measures, we find consistent evidence that racial attitudes drive support for travel bans. The strength of this relationship varies across political parties and across hypothetical target countries but is not explained by objective caseloads that change across countries and over the course of the pandemic.