Despite 97 per cent of scientists agreeing on anthropogenic global warming, the remaining 3 per cent play a critical role in keeping the debate about climate consensus alive. Analysis of climate change contrarians from multi-signatory documents reveals 3 per cent of signees to be climate experts, while the remaining 97 per cent do not meet expert criteria and are also involved with organizations and industries who make up the climate change countermovement. The data also reveal most contrarians to be aged sixty-five or older. As a result, we explore other factors (for example, collective memories and ideological views) that may have also contributed to expert and non-expert views.

This study leverages population registry data from Sweden to examine whether immigrants who live in areas with a high concentration of ethnic minorities are more or less likely to be nominated for political office. It exploits a refugee placement program in place in Sweden during the late 1980s and early 1990s that restricted refugees' opportunities to freely choose their place of residence. The article presents evidence that immigrants who live in areas with a high ethnic density are less likely to be nominated for political office. The findings have important implications for local integration policies as well as refugee placement policies, as many countries consider local context when resettling refugees.

The sociocultural divide in Western Europe is increasingly focused on issues of national identity, namely immigration. It is commonly assumed that opponents of immigration also exhibit conservatism on other sociocultural issues. Yet recent research suggests that general social conservatism is declining in the region. Do immigration attitudes fit squarely into the sociocultural dimension? Using survey data from eleven West European countries, as well as a Dutch household panel from 2007–2019, this study finds that gender attitudes, a key sociocultural issue, are subject to change through both cohort and life cycle effects, while immigration attitudes are stable over the course of the panel and exhibit little variation across cohorts. Immigration attitudes also appear to be immune to period effects resulting from the 2015 refugee crisis. Further, those born during and after the ‘post-materialist revolution’ have weakened associations between these two attitudes, while older individuals' attitudes are strongly correlated. The combination of gender egalitarianism and anti-immigrant sentiment may become increasingly common as acceptance of the former spreads, while immigration remains a hotly contested issue.

Scholars have examined the role that negative stereotypes play in electoral discrimination against minority candidates. Incorporating literature on in-group favoritism, the author argues here that some degree of this discrimination can be explained instead by voters holding positive stereotypes of majority candidates and discriminating in their favor. Based on the results of an original moderation-of-process survey experiment carried out in Italy, the study provides evidence of electoral discrimination pertaining to immigrant-origin candidates, concentrated among right-wing citizens. It finds that stereotypes have little mediating effect on discrimination against candidates with a migration background; rather, the primary role played by stereotypes is in discrimination in favor of majority candidates, that is, positive bias that reserves electoral benefits to them. The relevance of in-group favoritism is corroborated by the finding that large segments of the Italian voting population hold distinctively positive stereotypes of majority candidates without also negatively stereotyping immigrant-origin candidates.

Despite evidence that women win when they run for office, the number of women in the US House of Representatives has not increased substantially. I argue that women win when they run because women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in locations where they are most likely to win. While strategic behavior is a necessary condition for increasing women's representation in office, it is not a sufficient condition. Analyzing regularly scheduled elections between 1992 and 2014, I demonstrate that women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in elections where they are most likely to win. However, the electoral opportunities for women are far from “gender neutral” and are shaped by the parties. Democratic and Republican women are most likely to emerge as candidates in districts where they are likely to win the primary and general elections; however, Republican women face even more constrained electoral opportunities.

How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economic opportunities in West Germany increased, the number of East German exit prisoners – political prisoners arrested for attempting to cross the border illegally – also rose. The study's causal identification strategy exploits occupation-specific differences in the changing economic opportunities between East and West Germany. Using differential access to West German television, it also sheds light on the informational mechanism underlying the main finding; cross-national data are leveraged to present evidence of the external validity of the estimates. The results highlight how global economic disparities affect politics within authoritarian regimes.

After decades of relatively high inflows of foreign nationals, immigration is now at the center of substantial political divisions in most European countries and has been implicated in one of the most vexing developments in European politics, the rise of the xenophobic right. However, it is not clear whether high levels of immigration actually do cause a public backlash, or whether publics become habituated to, and supportive of, immigration. This study tests these backlash and habituation theories using novel measures of immigration mood and immigration concern produced by combining over 4,000 opinion datapoints across twenty-nine years and thirty countries. The authors find evidence of a public backlash in the short to medium run, where mood turns negative and concern about immigration rises. Yet the study also finds evidence of a longer-run process of habituation that cancels out the backlash effect within one (concern) to three (mood) decades.

Whether citizens are better represented by politicians ‘like them’ has been the subject of much debate and analysis. Yet, this scholarship has largely ignored the 1 in 5 people who are disabled and experience economic, social and political marginalization. Linking voter and candidate data from the 2015 British general election, this study examines whether disabled citizens are better represented by disabled elites. It analyses the effects of disability on both preferences and preference congruence. The findings reveal that disabled citizens and candidates are more supportive of healthcare and general public spending, even within parties. At the same time, the views of disabled citizens are rarely more congruent with the positions of disabled candidates than those of non-disabled candidates, except on healthcare spending. The study provides ground-breaking insights into the role of disability in policy preferences and political representation while also highlighting broader implications of how the descriptive–substantive representation link is analysed.

Research shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, which should help women in some electoral contexts and hurt them in others. Yet, most research examines a single context at a time—usually US national elections, where partisanship is strong—and employs surveys and experiments, raising concerns that citizens’ responses may not reflect how they actually vote. By analyzing returns from thousands of nonpartisan local elections, we test whether patterns of women's win rates relative to men's match expectations for how the electoral effects of gender stereotyping should vary by context. We find women have greater advantages over men in city council than mayoral races, still greater advantages in school board races, and decreasing advantages in more conservative constituencies. Thus, women fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. These effects are most pronounced during on-cycle elections, when voters tend to know less about local candidates.

Immigrants now constitute a sizeable and rapidly growing group among many Western countries' electorates, but analyses of their party preferences remain limited. Theoretically, immigrants' party preferences might be explained with both standard electoral theories and immigrant-specific approaches. In this article, we rigorously test both perspectives against each other using the most recent data from Germany. Applying the Michigan model, with its three central explanatory variables – party identification, issue orientations and candidate evaluations – to the party preferences of immigrant-origin and native voters, we find that this standard model can explain both groups well. In contrast, we find no direct effects of the most prominent immigrant-specific variables, and neither do these meaningfully moderate the Michigan variables. However, we find strong formative effects on the presence of political attitudes and beliefs: immigrants with a longer time spent in Germany, a stronger German identity and less experience of discrimination report significantly fewer item non-responses for the Michigan model's main explanatory variables.

Fighting corruption is often seen as a crucial step toward building better institutions, but how it affects political selection remains less well understood. This article argues that in systems where corruption functions as an informal incentive for government to attract talent, anticorruption initiatives that curb rent-seeking opportunities may unintentionally weaken both the quality and the representativeness of the bureaucracy. The authors test this argument in China using an original nationwide survey of government officials and an identification strategy that exploits exogenous variations in enforcement levels created by the recent anticorruption campaign. The study finds that intensified enforcement has generated two potentially negative selection effects: a deterrence effect that lowers the average ability of newly recruited bureaucrats, and a compositional effect that discourages the entry of lower-class individuals in favor of those who are affluent and well connected. These findings highlight important hidden human capital costs of corruption elimination in developing countries.

Does enhanced descriptive representation lead to substantive representation? Legislators who share descriptive features with disadvantaged groups do not necessarily represent their group interests. Instead, Members of Parliament (MPs) strategically choose when to engage with the policy topic of their corresponding groups. MPs represent their respective group at the beginning of their career because it confers credibility when they have no legislative track record and few opportunities to demonstrate expertise. These group-specific efforts are replaced by other legislative activities at later stages of their careers. The authors apply this theoretical expectation across four disadvantaged groups – women, migrants, low social class and the young – and thereby offer a broad perspective on descriptive representation. Their sample consists of a unique data base that combines biographical information on German MPs with topic-coded parliamentary questions for the period 1998 to 2013. The study demonstrates the diminishing value of representing the disadvantaged across different types of MPs.

The literature on the relationship between foreign aid and institutions has found that the effects of aid vary across different donor characteristics and delivery mechanisms. This article focuses on China's resource-related development projects, which have been considered controversial due to the relative lack of conditionality. By distinguishing between vertical and horizontal dimensions of political accountability, the study finds that China's resource-related projects are particularly detrimental to the accountability of recipient countries' horizontal (legislative and judicial) institutions. These projects are often delivered to resource-rich countries, in the form of packaging access to resources and infrastructure construction, to improve China's own energy access. Local officials may be tempted to weaken horizontal institutions so that the projects can be implemented quickly. Nevertheless, these projects have little effect on vertical accountability, as China has less intention and capacity to fundamentally restrain electoral competition in recipient countries.

Holding elected officials accountable for their behavior in office is a foundational task facing citizens. Elected officials attempt to influence this accountability process by explaining their behavior with an eye toward mitigating the blame they might receive for taking controversial actions. This article addresses a critical limitation in the literature on elite explanation giving and accountability: the absence of attention to conflicting information regarding the official's behavior. The study shows across three pre-registered survey experiments that explanations are ineffective when other speakers offer counter-explanations that focus on the official's potential ulterior motives. It further demonstrates that this occurs even when the counter-explanation comes from a partisan source with low credibility. These results imply that elected officials enjoy less leeway for their actions than existing work allows, and highlight important tensions concerning the relationship between elite behavior and accountability processes.

Vast research on immigration lumps together native citizens' attitudes toward two different groups: the immigrant stock of non-naturalized resident aliens, and the immigrant flow, that is, the future arrival of foreigners seeking to enter and live in the country. Does popular opposition to immigration distinguish between the two, and if so, how? This article analyzes theoretically the reasons the stock and flow might induce different views among natives, and presents experimental evidence from the United States showing that natives are systematically more accepting of the former. The analysis indicates that this ‘stock premium’ partly stems from a sense of moral obligation toward people residing in the country. Replicating two widely cited experiments, the study shows that the stock–flow distinction has important implications for the interpretation of earlier findings on immigration attitudes, and for understanding voter preferences regarding policies designed to curtail immigration.

We investigate the prevalence and correlates of sexism in the British political context, using a measure of ambivalent sexism that distinguishes between hostile and benevolent sexist attitudes. Drawing on original data from two nationally representative online surveys, we find that more than half of the population hold some sexist attitudes and that these are predicted by gender, education, religiosity and authoritarian values. We demonstrate that the most significant division in sexist attitudes within the British electorate falls along political rather than gender lines, with men and women expressing more similar views about sexism than either Conservative and Labour voters, or Leave and Remain supporters. We also find that endorsing hostile sexism is associated with voting Conservative in the 2019 general election, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and political values. Our findings reveal that sexism is important for political competition in contexts where gender is not obviously salient.

Research on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.

When one political party gains control of American national governing institutions, it increases the prospects of enacting its policy agenda. Faced with this partisan misalignment, the authors expect state governments controlled by the national out-party to respond to the national partisan context with more state policy activism. The study examines changes in state policy liberalism from 1974 to 2019, and finds that both Republican- and Democratic-controlled states have pushed policy further in their preferred ideological directions when the opposing party has greater partisan control over the national policy agenda in Washington. It also identifies differences between the two parties. While the effect of Republican control modestly increases as Democrats gain power at the national level, Democratic-controlled states have shown dramatically larger shifts in policy liberalism during periods of Republican national control. This arrangement, however, appears to be a contemporary one, emerging in the more polarized political environment since the mid-1990s.

Why do states intervene in elections abroad? This article argues that outsiders intervene when the main domestic contenders for office adopt policy positions that differ from the point of view of the outside power. It refers to the split between the government's and opposition's positions as policy polarization. Polarization between domestic political forces, rather than the degree of unfriendliness of the government in office, attracts two types of interventions: process (for or against democracy) and candidate (for or against the government) interventions. The study uses a novel, original data set to track local contenders’ policy positions. It shows that the new policy polarization measurement outperforms a number of available alternatives when it comes to explaining process and candidate interventions. The authors use this measurement to explain the behavior of the United States as an intervener in elections from 1945 to 2012. The United States is more likely to support the opposition, and the democratic process abroad, if a pro-US opposition is facing an anti-US government. It is more likely to support the government, and undermine the democratic process abroad, if a pro-US government is facing an anti-US opposition. The article also presents the results for all interveners, confirming the results from the US case.

Political scientists have long noted the key role racial attitudes can play in electoral politics. However, the 2016 election of Donald Trump raises questions about prevailing theories of racial attitudes and their political effects. While existing research focuses on ‘cultural’ or ‘modern’ forms of racial prejudice, this article argues that a sizeable portion of White Americans, disturbingly, dehumanize Black people: that is, they view Black people as less than fully human. Unsurprisingly, given the blatant racism of Donald Trump's campaign, this study also demonstrates that dehumanizing attitudes toward Black people are more strongly associated with support for Trump than with support for other candidates in the 2016 Republican primary. The authors also find evidence that dehumanizing attitudes toward Black people bolstered Donald Trump's vote share among Whites in the 2016 presidential election. Finally, dehumanizing attitudes are negatively associated with Whites' evaluations of Barack Obama, even after holding standard measures of racial prejudice constant. These findings suggest that a fundamental form of racism – dehumanizing attitudes toward Black people – can powerfully shape candidate evaluations and voting decisions in the twenty-first century.