Male domination is asserted and reproduced through speaking behavior in parliaments. We address the enduring challenge of women’s marginalization by examining the interactive nature of speech. People adjust their speaking behavior based on the gender and status of those with whom they interact. Analyzing over 2,500 question-and-answer sequences in the Croatian Parliament (2004–20), we identify interactional asymmetry: male MPs ask fewer and shorter questions of female ministers than of male ministers, and engage in shorter exchanges with women than with men. Notably, female MPs partially replicate this pattern, posing shorter questions to female ministers. Female ministers, however, use their executive status to assert authority and respond with longer answers than men, despite their marginalization as women. We reveal how non-cooperation through withholding speech and limiting engagement with women operates as a form of power in interactions, reproducing parliaments as masculine institutions whilst affecting the quality of government oversight.

How does the age composition of democratic institutions shape public evaluations of their legitimacy? While most institutions are dominated by older politicians, we argue that incorporating younger representatives can enhance perceptions of legitimacy. To test this claim, we conduct a survey experiment in the United States that varies the age composition of a bipartisan state legislative committee and its decisions. We find that including younger members increases perceptions of procedural fairness and institutional trust, and improves evaluations of decisions on lower-salience policies. These effects are stronger among young people and Democrats. Evidence on mechanisms suggests these legitimacy gains reflect beliefs that younger politicians are more attuned to young people’s experiences and concerns. Observational evidence from US state legislatures and a replication experiment in the United Kingdom yield consistent patterns, suggesting that these findings extend beyond the original experimental context. This suggests that expanding youth representation can meaningfully strengthen democratic legitimacy.

Scientists and policy makers are increasingly exploring solar geoengineering as a tool for combatting anthropogenic climate change. Yet these technologies have drawn intense ethical criticism. One of the most influential critiques – the ‘moral hazard’ objection – holds that pursuing solar geoengineering risks undercutting mitigation efforts; and that, as a result, governments should halt the development of solar geoengineering. This paper argues that the moral hazard objection faces a dilemma: either the proposed solution to the moral hazard effect (that is, stifling geoengineering) is unnecessary, or it expresses a morally troubling form of disrespect. Articulating this dilemma serves three purposes. It shows, first, that the moral hazard objection is substantially more difficult to vindicate than it initially appears. Second, it clarifies what would need to be shown, empirically, to overcome this ethical hurdle. Finally, and crucially, it sheds light, more broadly, on what it means to respect people’s agency when designing and implementing public policies.

How reliable are surveys in autocracies? Using data from wartime Russia, we show why list experiments – commonly used to detect preference falsification – do not always reveal hidden dissent. We identify and test what we call the ‘threshold effect’: respondents may report support for a sensitive item in a direct question but omit it in a list experiment, not because they are lying, but because the list format can create a higher threshold for expressing support. We provide direct evidence of this effect and use two approaches to distinguish preference falsification from weak preferences. Both suggest that outright lying in Russia is limited, but many attitudes are weak and easily shaped by question framing. We conclude that while many Russians genuinely support the war against Ukraine, this support is shallow. Our findings suggest that researchers should take care when designing and interpreting survey questions that measure sensitive attitudes using indirect methods.

Electoral democracies are under strain. Elections and conventional relations of representation between elected politicians and citizens do not seem to be providing sufficient legitimacy for democratic governance. In principle, democratic innovations such as deliberative minipublics or participatory budgeting could supplement electoral systems so that they function more democratically. But elected representatives may resist these innovations due to unfamiliarity, perceived threats to their power, and the belief that traditional electoral methods suffice for democratic legitimacy. This paper theorizes the potential incentives for elected officials to adopt democratic innovations, examining the conditions under which innovations might align with their interests. Democratic deficits may, and often do, present electoral risks and challenges. By mapping democratic deficits onto elite incentives, we suggest when, where, and why the strategic motivations of elected officials might align with democratic innovations. We illustrate the theory with examples of democratic innovations drawn primarily from the Participedia database. We conclude that strategies for deepening democracy should include understanding how democratic innovations relate to incentives structured by electoral institutions, so that innovations might supplement rather than compete with electoral democracy.

International organizations (IOs) monitor compliance with international norms but public criticism of member states remains discretionary. We argue that such criticism depends not only on mandates or political incentives, but on whether IOs can access information they deem credible. This credibility is socially produced. Through repeated interaction, IO staff develop trust in specific local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which become reliable conduits of mandate-aligned and verifiable information. These trust-based ties reduce uncertainty and reputational risk, enabling public criticism. We test this argument using original data on press releases and NGO participation in public hearings at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights from 1996 to 2020. Combining statistical analysis, an instrumental variable strategy, text analysis, and interview evidence, we show that the Commission is more likely to issue and to sharpen critical press releases when it has established ties with local NGOs focused on the relevant country and issue.

How does childhood exposure to large-scale criminal violence and militarized law enforcement shape political attitudes and behavior? We examine the case of Mexico’s drug war, where a generation has been raised amidst the country’s most violent conflict in over a century. Surveying nearly 3,000 urban youth to measure their political and interpersonal trust, we matched respondents to historical data on criminal violence and military confrontations and operations in their childhood municipalities. Disentangling the effects of criminal violence and military interventions, we find that exposure to homicidal violence during childhood erodes interpersonal trust and trust in law enforcement, while military interventions – especially those involving violent confrontations – broadly undermine trust in federal security institutions and generate political backlash against the parties that governed Mexico during the exposure period. These findings have important implications for young democracies affected by high crime and violence and advance our understanding of how criminal wars influence political socialization.

Workplaces are increasingly sorted by education. How does the educational composition at the workplace shape political attitudes? To address this question, I use Swedish population-wide administrative data combined with a representative election survey – an empirical approach that links respondents to their colleagues. The central finding is that the share of university educated at the workplace influences individuals’ attitudes independently of the individual’s own educational background. Further analysis indicates that the effect is partly caused during the time spent in the labor market and varies with the educational field composition of the workplace. The results shed light on how social connections at work, as opposed to personal experiences, shape political attitudes. This has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the politically relevant aspects of the work life, as well as for the formation of the education divide.

For many Americans, religious teachings are central to political identity, yet these teachings often do not align neatly with party platforms. How do voters decide when their faith crosses partisan lines? I examine this question by focusing on Catholic and Muslim Americans, whose moral and social world-views span both sides of the partisan divide. Using a novel ‘dynamic’ choice experiment, I show that religious cross-pressures shape how voters arrive at their choices. Contrary to classic accounts linking cross-pressures to disengagement, I find no evidence of increased decision avoidance; instead, voters remain engaged but simplify their choices. Cross-pressure salience is linked to greater decision difficulty, reduced information search, and greater reliance on issue prioritisation. These findings challenge the view that attitudinal conflict improves the quality of democratic participation, suggesting instead that cross-pressures constrain deliberation and may weaken the representational signal voters send to parties.

Theories of democratic diffusion predict that exposure to liberal democracies fosters support for political liberalism, while recent studies on Chinese overseas students suggest studying abroad generates backlash against liberal values. Using a unique four-year longitudinal dataset of nearly 1,000 Chinese college students in China and the United States, we examine how studying abroad shapes students’ ideology, attitudes, and identity. Our findings challenge both perspectives. Students who study in the United States are already more politically liberal, market-oriented, and cosmopolitan, and less nationalistic than their peers upon departure, underscoring the importance of selection. Ideological preferences remain remarkably stable throughout college, regardless of location. However, support for China’s political system and affective identification with Chinese national identity declines among students in both countries from 2022 to 2023, with a greater decline among students in the United States. These results show that selection, home-country shocks, and host-country context jointly shape overseas students’ political attitudes.

National identity is usually treated as a stable driver of political behaviour, yet we know little about whether it responds to major political events. We examine how two pivotal electoral events – the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and the 2016 EU Referendum – were associated with changes in citizens’ sense of national belonging. Using the 2014–2025 British Election Study Internet Panel, we show that both referendums precipitated significant shifts in national identification, primarily among those on the losing side. Post-referendum changes in Scotland proved temporary, but among Remain voters British identification fell substantially and remained depressed through 2025, with the gap between winners and losers widening over time. These findings suggest national identity is more event-sensitive than commonly assumed, and that divisive referendums may leave durable marks on how citizens in multinational states relate to the state by eroding shared national sentiment.

Obtaining portfolios is one of the most important pay-offs that parties receive from getting into office. Accordingly, we know a lot about how portfolios are distributed between coalition partners, but surprisingly little about how voters react to these distributional outcomes. We address this research gap both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that voters use cues from the quantitative and qualitative portfolio distributions to evaluate coalition partners’ competence in negotiations, which in turn shapes party support. Empirically, we use original experimental and panel survey data from the 2022 Danish general election. We find that voters infer negotiation competence from the number, power, and party-specific salience of the portfolios a party obtains. We also demonstrate that many voters paid attention to the real-world negotiation outcome and withdrew their support for the parties they perceived handled the negotiations less competently.

Which parties can deliver the policies that they promised? In multiparty contexts, parties must bargain to realize electoral promises. Prior work shows that parties influence policy change by using resources such as legislative seats, ministerial posts, and agenda, veto, and policing powers, while only theoretical work considers parties’ bargaining leverage from potentially changing the government. But for parties, fulfilling pledges (not incremental policy change) is paramount and they use their full leverage to achieve it. We offer and test a more complete and politically relevant account of multiparty policymaking that includes parties’ bargaining leverage through coalition options and focuses on the realization of distinct policy promises. We estimate regression analyses of pledge fulfillment in nine parliamentary democracies from 1974 to 2011 as well as local average treatment effects across a discontinuity and find that parties’ bargaining leverage from potential coalition change trumps conventional explanations for policy outcomes.

Existing work shows that minority legislators are more likely to represent their group’s interests compared to dominant group legislators. However, it is unclear whether this is due to intrinsic motivations or electoral incentives. We use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to analyze ethnic minority representation in the UK Parliament. By comparing white MPs who narrowly beat minority candidates to minority MPs who narrowly beat white candidates, the RDD controls for electoral incentives since it holds constant constituency factors correlated with a minority parliamentary win. Analyzing over 1 million parliamentary questions and speeches, we find that minority MPs are more likely than white MPs to discuss issues important to ethnic minorities. Additional evidence suggests that narrowly elected MPs face similar electoral incentives and that minority MPs representing minorities face re-election penalties. Our findings are consistent with the idea that minority substantive representation is driven at least in part by intrinsic motivations.

We examine the effectiveness of electoral propaganda in an autocracy, using Russia as a unique setting. Exploiting the unexpected release of a pro-regime propaganda video about Vladimir Putin shortly before the presidential election, we conducted a field experiment by randomly promoting the video to voters via a telephone survey and measuring self-reported voting behaviour after the election. Our results show that the pro-regime treatment successfully mobilized offline media consumers to vote for Putin, but failed to persuade online media users, and even backfired among respondents dissatisfied with the regime. Using electoral statistics for all major Russian cities and instrumenting public interest in the propaganda video with rainfall, we find a positive, albeit moderate, causal effect of the video on Putin’s vote share. As an alternative treatment, we used a viral anti-corruption video by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which consistently undermined regime support among both offline and online media consumers.

The US working class is less organized along class lines than in other advanced democracies. We propose a new explanation: the absence of education on historical class struggle and labor organizing weakens support for the contemporary labor movement. To test this, we conduct two survey experiments exposing respondents to educational videos about the history of an American union and present-day union drives. Our surveys focus on non-college-educated whites in the US South, where union membership is low and racial conflict has historically constrained class-based solidarity. We find that exposure to labor history increases enthusiasm for unions and cross-racial class coalitions. These effects appear to be driven by greater political efficacy, better understanding of unions’ material benefits, linked fate with the working class, and increased allyship with marginalized groups. Our findings suggest that labor history education can shift political attitudes and foster greater class-based mobilization, even in contexts historically resistant to such organizing.

Public debate is central to most theories of democracy, yet few cross-national studies have examined its association with democratic satisfaction. This article identifies three features of national public spheres – pluralism, information, and respect – and presents annual measures of these features for 175 countries from 2000 to 2020. Among electoral democracies, pluralism remained stable, but the quality of information and the respectfulness of debate tended to decline during that period. Using data from the European Social Survey and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that higher levels of pluralism, information, and respect correlate with greater democratic satisfaction, even after controlling for other democratic institutions, various socio-economic factors, and past levels of satisfaction with democracy. Notably, respect remains associated with higher democratic satisfaction when controlling for the other features of the public sphere. These findings call for further research into the relationship between non-electoral components of democracy and political attitudes.

We theoretically develop and empirically study the concept of geographic representation. We identify an overlooked aspect of (mis)representation in electoral systems: the degree to which within parties, voters residing in some districts are overrepresented at the expense of their co-partisans residing elsewhere. Drawing on district-level data of 113 parties from twelve districted democracies, we find a substantial degree of geographic representational discrepancies within parties. Importantly, we show that the discrepancy is often accompanied by a difference in policy positions between under and overrepresented districts, making it particularly significant politically. We derive a general measure for the discrepancy between the votes a party gains and the seats it holds in different districts, namely, geographic disproportionality (GeoDisp). Unlike malapportionment, GeoDisp is party specific and draws on actual votes. Utilizing geocoded data, we find a substantial degree of geographic disproportionality, which, per our expectations, varies systematically by party.

Despite egalitarian rhetoric, governments often fail to implement redistributive policies. We argue that selective egalitarianism helps to understand this puzzle. Analysing a new dataset of 850,000 manifesto statements and equality policies in 12 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (1970–2020), we show that even parties committed to equality avoid taxing the rich. Instead of engaging in complex top-end taxation, which is perceived as electorally risky, they pursue pre-distribution and welfare policies with less concentrated costs and complexity. Even these policies are primarily adopted if the party’s constituency is not too educated or rich to benefit from them. Our findings suggest that equality-oriented governments adopt an approach that insures the middle, buffers the poor, but spares the rich. The result is a rhetorical commitment to equality that eschews its most redistributive instrument(s). The patterns we reveal help to explain the consequential disconnect between redistributive demand and actual policy, even under ostensibly economically egalitarian governments.