Ideal points of MPs in the UK House of Commons (HoC) are characteristically difficult to ascertain due to tight party discipline and strategic voting by opposition members. This research note generates left/right ideal point estimates for 591 British MPs sitting in the HoC as of 22/08/2022, ascertained through their social media followership. Specifically, estimates are derived by conducting correspondence analysis (CA) on MP Twitter (X) follower networks, which are subsequently validated against an expert survey, confirming that these estimates have a high degree of between-party (R2 = 0.93) and within-party (Con: r = 0.84; Lab: r = 0.81) accuracy. The informative value of these estimates is then demonstrated by predicting candidate endorsement in the September 2022 Conservative leadership contest, confirming that an MP's ideal point was a statistically significant predictor of candidate endorsement, with Liz Truss drawing support primarily from the further right of the party.

How does the decline of traditional news outlets affect political polarization? We provide novel evidence on this question by examining the link between local newspaper exits, media consumption, and electoral behaviour in a multiparty setting. Our empirical analysis combines a unique panel of all German local newspapers between 1980 and 2009, electoral returns, and an annual media consumption survey of more than 670,000 respondents. Using a difference-in-differences design, we demonstrate that local newspaper exits increase electoral polarization. Additional analysis points to changes in media consumption as the underlying mechanism driving this result: following local news exits, consumers substitute local news with national tabloid news. Our findings extend prior results in the US context to a multiparty setting and shed new light on the causal chain running from changing local news landscapes to electoral behaviour.

Group-based identities are an important basis of political competition. Politicians consciously appeal to specific social groups, and these group-based appeals often improve the evaluation of parties and candidates. Studying place-based appeals, we advance the understanding of this strategy by distinguishing between dominant and subordinate social groups. Using two survey experiments in Germany and England, we show that group appeals improve candidate evaluation among subordinate (rural) voters. By contrast, appeals to the dominant (urban) group trigger a negative reaction. While urban citizens’ weaker local identities and lower place-based resentment partly explain this asymmetry, they mainly dislike group-based appeals because of their antagonistic nature. If the same policies are framed as benefiting urban and rural dwellers alike, candidate evaluation improves. Thus, people on the dominant side of a group divide reject a framing of politics as antagonistically structured by this divide, even if they identify with the dominant group.

Understanding which political candidates are elected for office is fundamental to democracy and political science. Whereas there is much agreement that party affiliation is one of the most important candidate characteristics to voters, evidence regarding the gender and race of the candidate is mixed. We suggest voters have lexicographic preferences, meaning they rank their preferences and focus primarily on the candidate's party affiliation. Second-order preferences such as gender and race are mostly necessary when there is a tie in first-order preferences when voters choose between two same-party candidates or have no party information. We show how conjoint experiments can be used to test for lexicographic preferences and use data from a US-representative sample and a pre-registered replication to confirm that in the United States, gender and race are second-order preferences. Lexicographic preferences provide a theoretical lens explaining some of the mixed results of gender and race in the candidate literature.

How governments raise tax revenue is at the core of domestic political conflict. Public opinion towards taxation is measured generally and qualitatively by many surveys, but previous research has not closely linked public preferences to the budget problem faced by governments regarding how best to raise or cut a marginal quantity of revenue. We present results from a novel tax preference experiment in which UK respondents are given choices over different tax ‘levers’ that are expected to raise or cut equal revenue. We find that while different tax levers vary substantially in their popularity, there is a ‘hidden consensus’ regarding different tax levers across income levels and partisanship of the respondents.

Does nationalism increase beliefs in conspiracy theories that frame minorities as subversives? From China to Russia to India, analysts and public commentators increasingly assume that nationalism fuels belief in false or unverified information. Yet existing scholarly work has neither theoretically nor empirically examined this link. Using a survey experiment conducted among 2,373 individuals and 6 focus groups with 6–8 participants each, for a total of 50 individuals, we study the impact of nationalist sentiment on belief in conspiracy theories related to ethnic minority groups in Pakistan. We find that nationalist primes – even those intended to emphasize the integration of diverse groups into one superordinate national identity – increase belief in statements about domestic minorities collaborating with hostile foreign powers. Subgroup analysis and focus groups suggest that nationalism potentially increases the likelihood that one views rights-seeking minorities as undermining the pursuit of national status.

Racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in most Western democracies. This article investigates one potential root cause behind this pattern: minority and majority citizens might expect to feel discriminated against if they enter politics. Using data from three large-scale surveys, we find that minorities in both the United States and Sweden are less likely to expect to feel welcome than the majority population. These discrepancies in expected discrimination persist, even after controlling for other factors. Moreover, expected discrimination is not without political consequences: those who expect to feel less welcome are less likely to indicate an interest in running for political office. Finally, these results do not differ for politically engaged citizens who constitute a more realistic pool of potential candidates. We conclude by discussing what expectations of discrimination can tell us about the fairness of the political system and how these attitudes shape political ambition among minorities.

Globalization creates winners and losers, and recent research emphasizes that large corporations are among the biggest beneficiaries of trade while smaller firms may be harmed. How do these redistributive effects impact trade attitudes? Because a growing share of Americans hold highly unfavourable views of big corporations, we argue that the belief that large firms win from trade will provoke hostility towards trade and globalization. To test this theory, we show experimentally that informing people that large corporations benefit from trade makes them markedly more hostile towards trade compared to a treatment emphasizing that firms in exporting industries benefit. Using subgroup and mediation analysis, we find that anti-corporate sentiment drives this effect, particularly concern about corporations’ power in society. Our findings illustrate how distributive consequences and attitudes towards the winners and losers from policy change interact to shape public opinion on economic policy.

Democracies generate norms prescribing what behaviours and preferences are deemed acceptable. But what keeps these political norms in place? We expect that they are enforced by observers who disapprove of norm-breaching behaviour and are willing to apply sanctions that make it socially costly. We test this expectation with a survey in Spain, where respondents were shown pictures of individuals with different political views. We focus on norms against radical-right preferences, one of the most established political norms. In line with our expectations, individuals disapprove of radical-right preferences more than other political preferences. This makes them more likely to socially sanction those preferences, which they do mainly in indirect ways that do not force interaction with the person breaching the norm. We provide evidence on the individual-level predictors of norm enforcement. Our findings highlight the micro-level mechanisms by which social influence affects the behaviour of democratic citizens.

Does an MP's localness affect their behaviour towards constituents? Existing research has shown biases in MPs' responsiveness to citizens based on citizens' sociodemographic and political traits and voters’ tendency to prefer ‘local’ MPs. Yet, we know little about whether MPs' localness affects their responsiveness to constituents. MPs' localness may influence their behaviour for strategic reasons and/or because of homophily. To explore this relationship, we conducted a field experiment in the United Kingdom where we asked legislators about their policy priorities regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that local MPs do not differentiate in their responsiveness to constituents. However, non-local MPs are motivated by party affiliation and gender in their responsiveness to constituents, with ethnicity and class playing insignificant roles. Non-local MPs respond more to co-partisans than non-partisans and women non-local MPs are more responsive to women constituents. This experiment underscores the impact of (non-)localness on MPs' interactions with constituents.

Wealth provides self-insurance against financial risk, reducing risk aversion. We apply this insurance mechanism to electoral behaviour, arguing that a voter who desires a change to the status quo and who is wealthy is more likely to vote for change than a voter who lacks the same self-insurance. We apply this argument to the case of Brexit in the UK, which has been widely characterized as a vote by the ‘economically left-behind’. Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth. We corroborate our theory using two panel surveys, accounting for unobserved individual-level heterogeneity, and by using a survey experiment. The findings have implications for the potential broader role of wealth-as-insurance in electoral behaviour and for understanding the Brexit case.

A vast and growing quantitative literature considers how social networks shape political mobilization but the degree to which turnout decisions are strategic remains ambiguous. Unlike previous studies, we establish personal links between voters and candidates and exploit discontinuous incentives to mobilize across district boundaries to estimate causal effects. Considering three types of networks – families, co-workers, and immigrant communities – we show that a group member's candidacy acts as a mobilizational impulse propagating through the group's network. In family networks, some of this impulse is non-strategic, surviving past district boundaries. However, the bulk of family mobilization is bound by the candidate's district boundary, as is the entirety of the mobilizational effects in the other networks.

We study a new driving factor of women's inclusion in politics: the economic empowerment of their mothers. We evaluate Swedish microdata on politicians and their parents over fifty years. The results demonstrate a strong intergenerational dynamic from mothers to daughters. Female politicians come from households where their mother is more likely to be employed, earns more in the labour market, and earns a larger share of household earnings. This pattern was strong among parliamentarians in the 1970s and 1980s when female numerical representation increased rapidly in Sweden but is not present in national politics after the introduction of gender quotas in the early 1990s or in local politics.

How scholars conceptualize and measure the gender gap in mobilization can have profound consequences for substantive conclusions. Scholars typically refer to a difference between women and men's turnout (difference-in-proportions measure) or a fraction of women voters among all voters (proportion measure). Using the case of proportional representation (PR) reform in Norway, I demonstrate that, in the context of low men's turnout, the proportion measure indicates that PR narrows the gap, while the difference-in-proportion measure indicates that it widens the gap. This is because mobilizing fewer women than men widens the difference between women and men's turnout, but may constitute a greater proportional increase in women's mobilization compared to men when only a few men (and even fewer women) vote. These findings bring together seemingly opposing arguments in the PR-gap debate and have wide implications for the study of ‘gaps’ within and beyond gender scholarship.

Populist radical right (PRR) parties are often more successful in some regions of their countries than in others. However, previous research shows that the relationship between context and PRR support is not straightforward. We develop and test an expanded framework linking local conditions to PRR support through two causal mechanisms. First, we argue economic and cultural contextual factors can influence citizens by fostering a sense of perceived local decline, which in turn predicts both populist and nativist attitudes and, hence, PRR support (mediation). Second, we expect that citizens with fewer resources and stronger local embeddedness are more strongly influenced by the context in which they live (moderation). Combining geocoded survey data with contextual data from four countries (DE, FR, GB and NL), we show that the link between local context and PRR support is indeed mediated and moderated, providing a better understanding of the spatial distribution behind recent PRR success.

Do the rich become more or less supportive of redistribution when exposed to poor people in their local surroundings? Most existing observational studies find that exposure to poor individuals is positively associated with support for redistribution among the well-off, but one prominent field experiment found a negative link. We seek to resolve these divergent findings by employing a design closer to the studies that have found a positive link, but with more causal leverage than these; specifically, a three-wave panel survey linked with fine-grained registry data on local income composition in Denmark. In within-individual models, increased exposure to poor individuals is associated with lower support for redistribution among wealthy individuals. By contrast, between-individual models yield a positive relationship, thus indicating that self-selection based on stable individual characteristics likely explains the predominant finding in previous work.

Politicians are exposed to a constant flow of information about societal problems. However, they have limited resources and need to prioritize. So, which information should they pay attention to? Previous research identifies four types of information that may matter: public concern about a problem, problem attention by rival parties, news stories about problems, and statistical problem indicators. We are the first to contrast the four types of information through a field experiment with more than 6,000 candidates and multiple elite interviews in Denmark. The candidates received an email invitation to access a specially tailored report that randomly highlighted one of the four types of information. Statistical indicators and public opinion were accessed the most (26.9 per cent and 26.5 per cent of candidates in the two conditions). Our results provide new and important evidence about the types of information politicians consider when addressing societal problems.