How pervasive is partisan sorting and polarization over public policies in the American public? We examine whether the barriers of partisan sorting and polarization seen in national politics extend to important local policies that shape economic development. To describe the extent of partisan sorting and polarization over local development policies, we employ conjoint survey experiments in representative surveys of eight US metropolitan areas and a hierarchical modeling strategy for studying heterogeneity across respondents. We find that strong partisans are sorted by party in some of their policy opinions, but rarely polarized. The same voters who disagree about national issues have similar preferences about local development issues suggesting a greater scope for bipartisan problem solving at the local level.

Partisanship is a powerful driver of economic perceptions. Yet we know less about whether other political divisions may lead to similar evaluative biases. In this paper, we explore how the salient divide between “Remainers” and “Leavers” in the UK in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum has given rise to biased economic perceptions. In line with the cognitive dissonance framework, we argue that salient non-partisan divisions can change economic perceptions by triggering processes of self- and in-group justification. Using both nationally-representative observational and experimental survey data, we demonstrate that the perceptions of the economy are shaped by the Brexit divide and that these biases are exacerbated when respondents are reminded of Brexit. These findings indicate that perceptual biases are not always rooted in partisanship, but can be triggered by other political divisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unparalleled global crisis. Yet, despite the grave adversity faced by citizens, incumbents around the world experienced a boost in popularity during the onset of the outbreak. In this study, we examine how the response to the COVID-19 outbreak in one country affected incumbent support in other countries. Specifically, we leverage the fact that the first country-wide lockdown on European soil, in Italy on 9 March 2020, happened during the fieldwork of surveys conducted in four other European countries, France, Germany, Poland and Spain. This allows us to examine how an event abroad that alerted citizens to an imminent crisis—prior to a similar domestic government response—influenced incumbent support. Our results indicate a crisis signal effect of Italy's COVID-19 lockdown, as support for the incumbent increased domestically in other European countries after the lockdown. Importantly, these findings suggest that incumbents can benefit from a crisis unfolding in other countries, even when their own performance in response to the same crisis is not yet fully clear. They illustrate the importance of developments abroad for incumbent approval and the difficulty facing citizens seeking to disentangle performance signals from exogenous shocks.

Research on autocratic regimes in comparative politics and international relations often uses categorical typologies of autocratic regimes to distinguish among different forms of autocracy. This paper introduces historical data on dozens of features of dictatorships to estimate latent dimensions of autocratic rule. We identify three time-varying dimensions of autocracy that correspond to ideal types proposed in the literature: party dominance, military rule, and personalism. We show that dimensions of autocratic rule are orthogonal to commonly-used measures of democracy–autocracy, and compare these dimensions to existing typologies of autocracies, showing that time-varying information on personalism is unique. We discuss a measurement model of personalism and illustrate the time-varying features of this measure in applied research on conflict initiation and regime collapse.

Scholars have long argued that leaders manipulate foreign policy, sometimes even initiating wars in order to enhance their domestic political position. But diversionary wars are relatively rare given the high costs of conflict. In this project, we examine data from major Syrian daily newspapers over a 30-year period (1987–2018) to explore how autocratic regimes use diversionary rhetoric. We find that before the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Syria's state-controlled media concentrated on Israel as a security and political threat. Emphasis on Israel as a diversionary threat decreased during peace negotiations between Syria and Israel, probably in a bid to prepare the Syrian public for normalization of bilateral relations. After 2011, scrutiny of Israel—and other long-standing topics of state discourse—was displaced by discussion of foreign plots and conspiracies against the Syrian state. Our analysis illustrates how authoritarian regimes make use of diversionary strategies as well as how political shocks generate discontinuities in authoritarian rhetoric.

Where do partisans get their election news in the contemporary media environment? We track the online news consumption of a national sample during the 2016 presidential campaign. We find levels of partisan isolation in news exposure are two to three times greater than in prior studies, although the absolute level of isolation remains modest. The partisan divide for election-related news exceeds the divide for non-political news. This tendency of partisans to follow like-minded news providers occurs despite the relatively small differences in the partisan slant of the content offered by the majority of sources they visited. Finally, we find that partisans who gravitated to congenial news providers did not shift their evaluations of the presidential candidates during the campaign.

Contemporary dictionary-based approaches to sentiment analysis exhibit serious validity problems when applied to specialized vocabularies, but human-coded dictionaries for such applications are often labor-intensive and inefficient to develop. We demonstrate the validity of “minimally-supervised” approaches for the creation of a sentiment dictionary from a corpus of text drawn from a specialized vocabulary. We demonstrate the validity of this approach in estimating sentiment from texts in a large-scale benchmarking dataset recently introduced in computational linguistics, and demonstrate the improvements in accuracy of our approach over well-known standard (nonspecialized) sentiment dictionaries. Finally, we show the usefulness of our approach in an application to the specialized language used in US federal appellate court decisions.

This paper examines whether voters’ experience of extreme weather events such as flooding increases voting in favor of climate protection measures. While the large majority of individuals do not hold consistent opinions on climate issues, we argue that the experience of natural disasters can prime voters on climate change and affect political behavior. Using micro-level geospatial data on natural disasters, we exploit referendum votes in Switzerland, which allows us to obtain a behavioral rather than attitudinal measure of support for policies tackling climate change. Our findings indicate a sizeable effect for pro-climate voting after experiencing a flood: vote-share supporting pro-climate policies can increase by 20 percent. Our findings contribute to the literature exploring the impact of local conditions on electoral behavior.

A growing literature has argued that electoral turnout decreases the more government policy constrained by economic and institutional factors. This paper investigates whether a certain type of policy constraint, fiscal rules, lowers turnout. Since fiscal rules set limits for government fiscal policy, they should lower the incentive for citizens to participate electorally. However, using parliamentary turnout data in a large panel of democratic countries, little robust evidence is found in favor of fiscal rules having a depressing effect on electoral turnout. Analysis of European individual-level data also suggests that national fiscal rules do not affect inequality in electoral turnout between income groups either. Difference-in-discontinuity evidence from Italian municipalities further suggests that the results are causally identified.

Are individuals in violent contexts reluctant to tackle corruption for fear of future violence? Or does violence mobilize them to fight corruption? We investigate these questions looking at the effects of fear and violence stemming from the Mexican Drug War on attitudes toward corruption. We conducted two surveys before the 2012 Mexican presidential election. First, as part of a nationally representative survey, we find a positive correlation between fear of violence and willingness to accept corruption in exchange for lower levels of violence. To disentangle causal effects, we conducted a follow-up survey experiment in Greater Mexico City where we manipulated fear over the Drug War. We find that individuals within this context are not easily scared. Those who received a common fear-inducing manipulation do not report higher levels of fear and are less willing to tolerate corruption. Conversely, we find strong evidence that individuals who have been victims of crime are more likely to report both higher levels of fear and willingness to accept corruption if it lowers violence. Our findings suggest that voters are more strategic and resilient in the face of violence than many extant theories of political behavior suggest.

Voters tend to be richer, more conservative, and more educated than non-voters. While many electoral reforms promise to increase political participation, these policy instruments may have multidimensional and differential effects that can increase or decrease the representativeness of turnout. We develop an approach that allows us to estimate these effects and assess the impact of postal voting on representational inequality in Swiss referendums using individual-level ($N = 79,\; 000$) and aggregate-level data from 1981 to 2009. We find that postal voting mobilizes equally across a wide range of political and sociodemographic groups but more strongly activates high earners, those with medium education levels, and less politically interested individuals. Yet, those who vote are not less politically knowledgeable and the effects on the composition of turnout remain limited. Our results inform research on the consequences of electoral reforms meant to increase political participation in large electorates.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the US is highly technical. Still, the negotiations triggered large-scale protests among citizens with very diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Why has a complex issue such an enormous mobilizing effect although the economic consequences are either unclear or favorable for the participating economies? We argue that the transparency of negotiations is an important consideration for people evaluating the negotiation outcome. Conducting a survey experiment, we show that non-transparent decision-making decreases citizens' appraisal of the agreement independent of its outcome: A non-transparent negotiation is, on average, almost 16 percent less likely to find public approval than a transparent but otherwise identical agreement. Our findings have important implications for democratic decision-making.

Recent years have seen a renaissance of conjoint survey designs within social science. To date, however, researchers have lacked guidance on how many attributes they can include within conjoint profiles before survey satisficing leads to unacceptable declines in response quality. This paper addresses that question using pre-registered, two-stage experiments examining choices among hypothetical candidates for US Senate or hotel rooms. In each experiment, we use the first stage to identify attributes which are perceived to be uncorrelated with the attribute of interest, so that their effects are not masked by those of the core attributes. In the second stage, we randomly assign respondents to conjoint designs with varying numbers of those filler attributes. We report the results of these experiments implemented via Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Survey Sampling International. They demonstrate that our core quantities of interest are generally stable, with relatively modest increases in survey satisficing when respondents face large numbers of attributes.

This study analyzes how migrants affect their host country's foreign policy toward their home country by measuring their influence on bilateral emergency aid. I develop the argument that besides political lobbying and the targeting of aid by the donor country, migrants affect emergency aid by providing a linkage between the countries and increasing the salience of a disaster abroad. The empirical analysis shows that the location and size of a country's diaspora is an important predictor of emergency aid flows after natural disasters. Interaction effects provide support for the linkage argument: while the diaspora effect does not increase with the host country's level of democracy, it is strongest with the least severe and most distant disasters.

Social media may help civil society organize and mobilize for different campaigns. However, the extent to which social media campaigns simply recruit like-minded individuals as compared to exerting a causal impact on joiners’ attitudes is difficult to disentangle. We test both the organizational and transformative potential of a civil society campaign in a randomized field experiment deployed via Facebook or an email newsletter in collaboration with a Bulgarian environmental campaign. As expected, we find that Bulgarian Facebook users who are active in pro-environmental groups, and those who decide to follow the campaign, are more highly educated than those who decide to stay at the sidelines. Moreover, beliefs in the effectiveness of civic society, character traits and prior activism systematically predict whether a Bulgarian Facebook user decides to join the cause on Facebook, or subscribe to the email newsletter. In contrast, we find little evidence that the campaign affected opinions, knowledge, or self-reported behavior. We conclude that social media campaigns that are commonplace among civil society organizations are effective at selecting activist-types, but changing the views and behaviors of the broader social media population may be more difficult than assumed.

The Arab world has historically had limited descriptive representation for women, although that is changing. Will having more women officeholders lead women citizens to become more engaged? Or could it depress engagement due to pervasive gender biases? To answer these questions, this paper uses a nationally-representative experiment in Tunisia. Unexpectedly, people were less likely to want to contact their representatives when primed to think of a mixed-gender group of officeholders compared to an all-women group. This pattern did not vary according to respondents’ gender. Further analyses reveal that the effect was concentrated among Islamists, which is consistent with some Islamists’ support for gender segregation. This finding encourages research examining women's political presence in conservative environments where gender segregation is common.

Existing research has found that American politicians benefit from trying to attract investment and creates jobs. In this paper, we build on this work by describing the drivers of Americans' attitudes toward inward foreign investment (FDI). We posit that foreign and Chinese investment are different than domestic investment in the public imagination and that nationalism and proximity to deindustrialization interact to shape public opinion about them. We propose and test two theories of this interaction using a survey experiment that randomizes whether a respondent is responding to a statement about “business investment,” “foreign business investment,” or “Chinese business investment”. We find that (1) Americans are skeptical of business investments by Chinese, and, to lesser degree, “foreign” firms; (2) the gap in enthusiasm for generic business investment and foreign/Chinese business investment rises with local trade-related job losses; and (3) the distinction between nationalists' and non-nationalists' attitudes toward FDI declines in local job losses.

Why do so many voters in African countries vote for minor ethnic parties instead of unifying into a powerful multi-ethnic opposition coalition? I present a model that demonstrates that as the incumbent devotes more resources to programmatic goods, which voters can access regardless of how they voted, the opportunity cost of voting for a sincerely preferred, but losing, candidate decreases. I provide experimental and cross-national observational evidence that voters are more likely to support a minor party as they perceive more or more valuable goods being distributed programmatically. Those who perceive poor distribution, or only clientelist distribution, instead vote strategically for a major opposition party. In general, support for minor parties increases along with positive outcomes and approval of the incumbent.

We study the effects of municipal mergers using novel geocoded data on local public sector jobs and local politicians' place of residence. We find that the mergers had no effects on municipal expenditures overall after eight years. However, the mergers led to highly unequal geographic political representation in the post-merger councils among the merged municipalities. Small and politically marginalized municipalities experienced a substantial reduction in local public jobs in administration and health and social care services relative to the municipalities with stronger representation. Development of house prices suggests that the quality of the service-tax bundle deteriorated in these politically marginalized municipalities.

We explore mediated representations of parties' campaign interactions in multi-party systems. Actors in multi-party systems can engage with different actors on multiple issues. One crucial aspect of such engagement is the element of negativity—voicing criticisms of other actors' actions and policy proposals. This contribution argues that the media systematically exaggerate patterns of negativity based on issue ownership structures, such that attacks originating from or targeting issue owners are significantly more likely to be covered. We analyze a broad sample of news content from the 2013 Austrian national election campaign with generalized exponential random graph models to capture the complexities of mediated campaign negativity in a multi-party system while controlling for non-mediated campaign negativity. The results show that issue owners are more likely to be featured as attackers and targets in owned policy domains, suggesting a violation of the normative ideal of a fair representation of campaign interactions.