An increasing number of states have adopted laws that require voters to show photo identification to vote. We show that the differential effect of the laws on turnout among those who lack ID persists even after the laws are repealed. We leverage administrative data from North Carolina and a photo ID law in effect for a primary, but not the subsequent general, election. Using exact matching and a difference-in-differences design, we show that for the 3 percent of voters who lack ID in North Carolina, the ID law caused a 0.7 percentage point turnout decrease in the 2016 primary election relative to those with ID. After the law was suspended, this effect persisted: those without ID were 2.6 percentage points less likely to turnout in the 2016 general election and 1.7 percentage points less likely to turnout in the 2018 general.

Many, especially low-skilled workers, blame globalization for their economic woes. Robots and machines, which have led to job market polarization, rising income inequality, and labor displacement, are often viewed much more forgivingly. This paper argues that citizens have a tendency to misattribute blame for economic dislocations toward immigrants and workers abroad, while discounting the effects of technology. Using the 2016 American National Elections Studies, a nationally representative survey, I show that workers facing higher risks of automation are more likely to oppose free trade agreements and favor immigration restrictions, even controlling for standard explanations for these attitudes. Although pocket-book concerns do influence attitudes toward globalization, this study calls into question the standard assumption that individuals understand and can correctly identify the sources of their economic anxieties. Accelerated automation may have intensified attempts to resist globalization.

The lobbying activity of interest groups has been overlooked as a contributing factor to legislative party polarization in the United States. Using bill-level data from Congress and three state legislatures, I show floor votes on bills lobbied by more non-profit interest groups are more polarized by party. The state legislative data demonstrate the robustness of the relationship between lobbying and polarization, showing it is not an artifact of party agenda control, salience, or bill content. Increased lobbying from these groups in recent years helps explain high levels of partisan polarization in Congress and an uneven pattern across the state legislatures.

A central challenge in understanding public opinion shifts is identifying whose opinions change. Political economists try to uncover this by exploring voters’ economic vulnerability, particularly the relationship between labor-market risk and redistribution preferences. Predominantly, however, such work imputes risk from occupational or sectoral characteristics. Due to within-occupational inequality in exposure to risk, considerable variation remains unexplored. I propose an individual-level, dynamic account of risk inferred from job tenure, contract type, and expectations of job security. These aspects, importantly, account for individual variation in risk and the possibility that one's experience of risk may change across time. The results indicate the usefulness of this approach to risk in understanding changes in social spending preferences.

While the structure of party competition evolves slowly, crisis-like events can induce short-term change to the political agenda. This may be facilitated by challenger parties who might benefit from increased attention to issues they own. We study the dynamic of such shifts through mainstream parties’ response to the 2015 refugee crisis, which strongly affected public debate and election outcomes across Europe. Specifically, we analyse how parties changed their issue emphasis and positions regarding immigration before, during, and after the refugee crisis. Our study is based on a corpus of 120,000 press releases between 2013 and 2017 from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We identify immigration-related press releases using a novel dictionary and estimate party positions. The resulting monthly salience and positions measures allow for studying changes in close time-intervals, providing crucial detail for disentangling the impact of the crisis itself and the contribution of right-wing parties. While we provide evidence that attention to immigration increased drastically for all parties during the crisis, radical right parties drove the attention of mainstream parties. However, the attention of mainstream parties to immigration decreased toward the end of the refugee crisis and there is limited evidence of parties accommodating the positions of the radical right.

If political circumstances are an important cause of unemployment in the Middle East, does this tend to attenuate the influence of economic infrastructure? I approach this question by building a geospatial dataset of the West Bank, an area with high unemployment arguably linked to political problems. I find Israeli army road obstacles, deployed during the Second Intifada, obstructed peri-urban Palestinian commuters from accessing commercial centers and border crossings, inflicting employment losses that were substantially offset by employment gains among their more centrally located Palestinian competitors. The findings suggest that marginal economic interventions, such as removing obstacles or paving roads, have a good chance of altering the spatial distribution of unemployment, but may struggle to reduce overall unemployment levels absent political reform.

Politicians frequently use political speech to foster hostility toward immigrants, a strategy that shapes political preferences and behavior and feeds the success of the populist right. Whether political speech can be used to foster tolerance of immigrants, however, remains unexplored. We identify three mechanisms by which political speech could increase tolerance: (1) stressing in-group conceptions that highlight commonalities with immigrants; (2) emphasizing inclusiveness as an in-group norm; and (3) providing information that counters anti-immigrant stereotypes. Using quotes from US politicians in two survey experiments, we find that pro-immigrant speech that stresses inclusive norms or counters negative stereotypes about immigrants leads to more tolerant attitudes (but not behavior) toward immigrants. These effects are small and detectable only in large samples.

Voters often favor candidates who benefit them individually but may coordinate their support with their social group on other candidates in exchange for policies targeting their group. In a laboratory experiment, I induce group identities to investigate the behavior of voters facing such trade-offs. I find that groups with low within heterogeneity often secure the club good from a candidate who is also individually beneficial to a majority of the group. In more heterogeneous groups, coordination on that candidate often fails and while the group still receives club goods, it is from a candidate whose policies are otherwise individually costly to most of the group. The results highlight the role strategic considerations play in the formation of group-based electoral coalitions.

A great deal of research presents the correspondence between economic conditions and incumbent electoral fortunes as evidence of democratic accountability. A central theoretical mechanism for this phenomenon is that voters have information about performance. Using communications data consisting of more than 110,000 government press releases from cities in the US combined with fine-grained economic and crime data, I leverage the breadth of local variation in conditions to assess the inputs to this mechanism behind accountability. I provide causal evidence that government communication changes as a result of performance in a strategic manner: local politicians are more likely to communicate about both economic conditions and crime when performance is improving—better wages and less crime—than when performance is worse. These findings add direct evidence from the underutilized area of local politics that politicians strategically communicate in a way that threatens accountability.

Although attention to populism is ever-increasing, the concept remains contested. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of populism research and identifies tendencies to a conflation of host ideologies and populism in political science through a two-step analysis. First, we conduct a quantitative review of 884 abstracts from 2004 to 2018 using text-as-data methods. We show that scholars sit at “separate tables,” divided by geographical foci, methods, and host ideologies. Next, our qualitative analysis of 50 articles finds a common conflation of populism with other ideologies, resulting in the analytical neglect of the former. We, therefore, urge researchers to properly distinguish populism from “what it travels with” and engage more strongly with the dynamic interlinkages between thin and thick ideologies.

Can data on government coercion and violence be trusted when the data are generated by state itself? In this paper, we investigate the extent to which data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) regarding the use of force by corrections officers against prison inmates between 2008 and 2017 conform to Benford's Law. Following a growing data forensics literature, we expect misreporting of the use-of-force in California state prisons to cause the observed data to deviate from Benford's distribution. Statistical hypothesis tests and further investigation of CDCR data—which show both temporal and cross-sectional variance in conformity with Benford's Law—are consistent with misreporting of the use-of-force by the CDCR. Our results suggest that data on government coercion generated by the state should be inspected carefully before being used to test hypotheses or make policy.

When the United States intervenes in foreign countries, the lives of both foreign combatants and foreign civilians are put at risk. I examine two rhetorical strategies, the use of sanitized and dehumanizing language that can influence the public's support of foreign intervention. In the context of foreign policy, sanitized language operates by obscuring casualties of war, while dehumanizing language operates by devaluing the lives of groups of individuals. Drawing on data from two experiments, I find that sanitized language operates through creating less of an emotional reaction toward casualties of war, which causes individuals to adopt more hawkish foreign policy attitudes. I find that dehumanizing language also leads to more hawkish foreign policy attitudes, but, contrary to expectations, does not lead to increased disgust or anger toward dehumanized groups.

Previous research reports that parties in established European democracies learn from and emulate the successful election strategies of foreign incumbents, i.e., successful parties are influential abroad. We theorize that—in addition to incumbency (or success)—exchange takes place through transnational party alliances in the European Union. Relying on party manifesto data and spatial econometric analyses, we show that belonging to the same European Parliament (EP) party group enhances learning and emulation processes between national political parties. Estimated short- and long-term effects are approximately two and three times greater when foreign incumbents are in the same EP party group compared to other foreign incumbents. Our results have implications for our understanding of how transnational party groups influence national parties’ policy positions.

How does the Rule of Four affect Supreme Court decisions? We show two effects of changing a “hearing pivot” justice who is decisive for case selection. First, a court with more extreme hearing pivots will hear cases with more moderate precedents. For example, as the conservative hearing pivot becomes more extreme, the court hears a broader range of cases with liberal status quo precedents. Second, more extreme hearing pivots shrink dispositional majorities and lead to more polarized rulings. If the median justice becomes more extreme without changing the hearing pivots, then rulings are more extreme. The effect on the range of cases heard, however, is smaller than that from changing hearing pivots. Finally, we show that case selection can also depend on non-median, non-hearing-pivot justices. Replacing an extreme justice with someone even more extreme can lead to a smaller set of heard cases, as final rulings can shift away from the binding hearing pivot, making status quo precedents more appealing.

Close ties between politicians and businesses affect firms’ performance and political outcomes, and while direct political control over firms has been curtailed by tightened regulation, political connections remain ubiquitous in many countries. Yet, it is unclear through which channels these linkages are maintained in strictly regulated environments. I speculate that one such channel of political control over firms is politicians’ ability to influence corporate appointment decisions. To test the claim, I employ survival models that analyze chairpersons’ turnovers in 90 Spanish savings banks between 1985 and 2010 and find strong evidence for electoral appointment cycles: bank chairpersons are more likely to lose office shortly after regional elections and when new governments enter office.