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 use an online experiment to study the relative effect on voter behavior of a candidate’s voice pitch and policy stance. We demonstrate a strong voice-pitch bias: between candidates who are identical in every other aspect, voters are more likely to choose the one with the lower voice-pitch, and more so in elections between men than women candidates. We then introduce a novel phenomenon: persistence of voice-pitch bias is the amount of policy difference needed to compensate for voice-pitch bias. While persistence is also gender-dependent, the effect is now reversed: voice-pitch bias is more persistent in elections between women than men candidates. As a possible mechanism, we show that voters perceive candidates with lower voice-pitch as more competent and trustworthy.

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.

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.

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.

Stereotypes of the two parties play an important role in political cognition, and a range of recent studies have examined the content and effects of partisan stereotypes. However, little work has studied change in partisan stereotypes over time. We address this question by comparing data on stereotypes of partisans collected before and after the Trump presidency, a time when we might expect individuals' images of the two parties to undergo significant change. Using a structural topic model, we compare responses to open-ended questions asking respondents to list words describing members of the two parties from 2016 and 2021. We find that partisan stereotypes in the 2021 sample are less group- and issue-based and focused more on personal traits. These results suggest that, during the Trump era, members of the mass public came to see the parties in more personalized, character-focused terms, potentially contributing to affective polarization.

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.

Some work in political methodology recommends that applied researchers obtain point estimates of quantities of interest by simulating model coefficients, transforming these simulated coefficients into simulated quantities of interest, and then averaging the simulated quantities of interest (e.g., CLARIFY). But other work advises applied researchers to directly transform coefficient estimates to estimate quantities of interest. I point out that these two approaches are not interchangeable and examine their properties. I show that the simulation approach compounds the transformation-induced bias identified by Rainey (2017), adding bias with direction and magnitude similar to the transformation-induced bias. I refer to this easily avoided additional bias as “simulation-induced bias.” Even if researchers use simulation to estimate standard errors, they should directly transform maximum likelihood estimates of coefficient estimates to obtain point estimates of quantities of interest.

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.

What are the electoral consequences of urban riots? We argue that riots highlight the economic and social problems suffered by those who participate, inducing potential electoral allies to mobilize. These allies can then punish local incumbents at the ballot box. We test this hypothesis with fine-grained geographic data that capture how exposure to the 2011 London riots changed vote choices in the subsequent 2012 mayoral election. We find that physical proximity to both riot locations and the homes of rioters raised turnout and reduced the vote for the incumbent Conservative mayor. These results are partly driven by a change in the turnout and vote choices of white residents. This provides support for the view that riots can help shift votes against incumbents who oppose the implied policy goals of rioters.

Political divisions in the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election were large, leading many to worry that heighted partisan conflict was so stark that partisans were living in different worlds, divided even in their understanding of basic facts. Moreover, the nationalization of American politics is thought to weaken attention to state political concerns. 2020 therefore provides an excellent, if difficult, test case for the claim that individuals understand their state political environment in a meaningful way. Were individuals able to look beyond national rhetoric and the national environment to understand state-level electoral dynamics? We present new data showing that, in the aggregate, despite partisan differences in electoral expectations, Americans are aware of their state's likely political outcome, including whether it will be close. At the same time, because forecasting the overall election outcome is more difficult, Electoral College forecasts are much noisier and display persistent partisan difference in expectations that do not differ much with state of residence.

What is the impact of uncommon but notable violent acts on conflict dynamics? We analyze the impact of the murder of a Palestinian child on the broader dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian violence in Jerusalem. By using novel micro-level event data and utilizing Discrete Fourier Transform and Bayesian Poisson Change Point Analysis, we compare the impact of the murder to that of other lethal but more typical Israeli-Palestinian events. We demonstrate that the murder had a large and durable impact on the average number of daily riots in Jerusalem, whereas the other events caused smaller, short-term effects. We demonstrate that scholars should devote more attention to the analysis of atypical violent acts and indicate a set of tools for conducting such analyses.

Despite considerable progress, inequality between countries remains at staggering levels. However, we know surprisingly little about demand for international redistribution in the Global South. This is unfortunate as it hinders our understanding of the pressures governments experience to cooperate internationally. Therefore, this paper studies perceptions of international inequality and attitudes toward international aid, an important instrument for redistribution, in Kenya, a major recipient of aid. It features an SMS-based survey experiment, in which respondents are treated with information about international income differences. It is found that most respondents underestimate these differences and that providing accurate information lowers inequality acceptance. However, this does not translate into demand for aid. The findings question often-made assumptions about the popularity of aid and call for further investigation of other internationally redistributive policies.

How do voters in a developed economy react to political violence at the ballot box? Most of the current literature suggests that a social movement turning violent dampens its support. To this end, we examine the effect of violent clashes and indiscriminate state repression on Hong Kong's 2019 municipal election. Using original geocoded data, we proxy violence and repression by the frequency of police shooting tear gas rounds at protesters. Despite the movement turning in part violent, the presence of indiscriminate state repression reduces regime support. We offer evidence that repression de-mobilized pro-regime voters. We discuss possible explanations behind our findings and how the specificity of political violence may matter in shaping public support in protest movements.

While a number of high-level figures around the world have been prosecuted and even jailed for corruption in recent years, we know little about how such anticorruption efforts shape public opinion and patterns of political engagement. To address this question, we examine evidence from Argentina and Costa Rica involving the unprecedented sentencing of two former Presidents on corruption charges. Exploiting the coincidence in timing between these cases and fieldwork on nationally representative surveys, we find that citizens interviewed in the aftermath of these events expressed lower trust in institutions and were less willing to vote or join in collective demonstrations. Overall, these findings suggest that high-profile efforts to punish corrupt actors may have similar effects as political scandals in shaping citizens’ relationship to the political system.

Research has shown that first-time voting experiences affect subsequent voting behavior, with salient elections boosting subsequent turnout and non-salient ones suppressing it. We challenge this view. Following research on the context-dependent nature of habit formation, we argue that all elections should affect subsequent turnout in elections of the same type. Comparing individuals that differ only in how salient their first eligible election was (Presidential or Midterm), we find support for this expectation. Individuals are more likely to vote for, and be interested in, elections of the same type as their first voting experience. Leveraging voting age laws in the US, we also show that such laws affect subsequent participation by changing the type of election individuals are first eligible for.

In latent scaling applications, such as the positioning of political parties, differential item functioning (DIF) may occur because of measurement issues or because of substantive differences in the association between latent and manifest variables. While the first source of DIF has received considerable attention, the second has not, although it is of potential interest to comparative scholars. In this research note, we introduce a novel hierarchical Bayesian item response model that allows us to disentangle different sources of DIF. Drawing on the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), we highlight how the same issues are unequally politicized across Western Europe, and how some issues are less ideologically determined than others. Our model can be adapted to alternate settings, allowing researchers to shine a light on variation in, e.g., ideology, issue politicization, or party competition.

I rely on data from 31,754 electoral districts in the United States from 1834 until 2016 to explore how the nationalization of politics occurs within districts. I argue that in the early stages of the American democracy local concerns were more prominent in the distant districts from the capital city than in the nearby districts, and therefore the number of parties was greater in the former than in the latter. However, these differences vanished after the New Deal, when authority was centralized. Nationalization reduced the number of parties everywhere, but above all in the most distant district from Washington, D.C.

Time preferences may explain public opinion about a wide range of long-term policy problems with costs and benefits realized in the distant future. However, mass publics may discount these costs and benefits because they are later or because they are more uncertain. Standard methods to elicit individual-level time preferences tend to conflate risk and time attitudes and are susceptible to social desirability bias. A potential solution relies on a costly lab-experimental method, convex time budgets (CTB). We present and experimentally validate an affordable version of this approach for implementation in mass surveys. We find that the theoretically preferred CTB patience measure predicts attitudes toward a local, delayed investment problem but fails to predict support for more complex, future-oriented policies.