Femonationalism – the use of gendered rhetoric to promote nativist anti-immigration views – is thought to be on the rise across Western European democracies, but scholars lack a systematic understanding of its prevalence across parties and countries, the conditions under which it appears, and the role gender plays in its use. To make progress on these questions, this study explores the use of femonationalism in legislative speeches from five Western European countries from 2009 to 2024. Combining dictionary methods with topic modeling, we find that far-right parties are most likely to use femonationalist rhetoric, increasing these appeals when party opponents threaten their issue distinctiveness by converging towards their anti-immigration policy position. Crucially, our analysis also highlights the role of gender in shaping femonationalist rhetoric: while the overall strategy is party-driven, men and women legislators emphasize different dimensions of femonationalism, with men focusing on security concerns and women invoking gender equality.

How do legislators respond to constituent policy queries? Existing research suggests that legislators vary their responsiveness and tailor response content depending on constituent congruence, raising normative concerns about legislator–constituent communication. We report results from a pre-registered audit study of UK MPs which is the first to test whether legislators in party-centred parliamentary democracies vary substantive response rates and content depending on constituent–party policy congruence. We theorise that electoral incentives lead MPs to respond more to congruent constituents, and to place more emphasis on self over party when doing so. Our audit study uses real constituents as confederates, allowing better measurement of substantive responses. We find little evidence that constituent–party congruence affects MPs’ responsiveness or the personal versus party emphasis of their replies. These null findings refine understanding of legislator behaviour in parliamentary systems and are normatively encouraging regarding the role that legislator–constituent policy communications can play in parliamentary democracies.

Governance principles reflect procedural values that govern the means of implementing public policies. Using survey data from Italy and the United Kingdom, we explore the public’s orientations towards those principles. We model them as instrumental values in belief systems, and as components of a network of attitudes. We find that governance principles largely occupy their own community; their interdependence with each other is far greater than their dependence on any other values or attitudes. Public employment experience neither alters the internal integration of governance principles nor changes their relationship with the larger belief system. We observe low levels of dynamic constraint among governance value orientations and show evidence that higher-order values account for the greatest influence over them. They remain strikingly invariant to simulated shifts in other attitudes, though modestly more constrained in Italy than in the UK. Our results suggest that orientations towards transparency can be most strongly influenced by other beliefs.

Which social groups do political parties appeal to? This is an important question, yet a lack of comparative data has constrained research. To address this gap, we introduce the Parties’ Social Group Appeals (PSoGA) Database, which includes two novel datasets covering 791 election manifestos from 139 parties across Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom from 1970 to 2025. This article outlines the methodology for constructing and validating the datasets, demonstrates compatibility with policy-focused resources like MARPOR, and highlights key aspects. This database provides researchers with unprecedented insight into representation dynamics across space and time by documenting the groups that parties speak about and appeal to.

Political tolerance of others’ civil liberties is an essential and everyday condition of democratic politics without which citizens cannot engage constructively with those of different views. In this paper, we combine insights from political theory and political behaviour to develop and test the concept of ‘partisan intolerance’. We conceptualize partisan intolerance as the gap between a person’s willingness to interfere with contentious activities by in-partisans versus the same activities by out-partisans. Using two pre-registered experiments, we find high levels of partisan intolerance in Britain. Moreover, while partisan intolerance is not associated with abstract measures of political tolerance, we find a strong association with affective partisan polarization. Our findings thus suggest that increasing affective polarization among partisans is accompanied by a high degree of intolerance towards their opponents’ basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.

The immigration debate is a major source of political conflict, yet little is known about how citizens themselves perceive it. This paper uses a survey experiment with open-ended questions to examine which arguments respondents attribute to their opponents, which they consider the strongest for the opposing side, and how both compare to the arguments opponents actually use. The study is conducted in Norway, a low-polarization, consensus-oriented context where relatively accurate and charitable interpretations of opponents’ reasoning might be expected. Still, the findings show that while many recognize legitimate arguments on the other side, they attribute considerably weaker arguments to their opponents. Text analysis reveals that their preferred counterarguments resemble opponents’ own more closely than those they attribute to them. This suggests that mutual understanding in the immigration debate is obstructed less by a failure to appreciate opponents’ arguments than a systematic misrepresentation of them.

Why are electoral winners more willing to support democratic norm violations? Using a mediator blockage survey experiment in the United States, I find that winners endorse norm erosion due to heightened in-party favoritism following their party’s electoral victory. The experiment successfully manipulated in-party favoritism, the mediator, demonstrating that respondents exposed to a winning signal, suggesting their party is likely to secure both the presidency and control of Congress, exhibit greater in-party favoritism. This increase significantly predicts a greater tendency to perceive norm-eroding policies, such as banning protests or disqualifying candidates, as democratic and to support these policies. Additionally, winners are less likely to evaluate these policies through a lens of strategic political calculation, that is, whether these policies benefit their party directly or indirectly, challenging the prevailing view that winners tolerate norm violations for instrumental reasons.

Exclusionary attitudes are often justified by histories of conflict. A large body of literature explores how making in-group victimhood salient can affect attitudes towards out-groups. Much less, however, has been done to study how episodes in history that position the in-group as perpetrators may reduce or exacerbate animosity towards the victimized group. We fill this gap by studying antisemitism in contemporary Spain. Using a well-powered and pre-registered survey experiment, we prime respondents with the historical expulsion of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century. The effects of priming this historical episode are conditional on one’s degree of national attachment: respondents who are less attached to the Spanish nation express lower levels of antisemitism in response to the treatment, while those reporting high levels of attachment appear to exhibit a modest backlash. These results update our understanding of how majority populations confront histories that implicate their own group as perpetrators.

Spatial inequalities in human capital are reshaping the politics of high-income democracies. However, comparative research on the political consequences of spatial inequality is constrained by a lack of data that is geographically detailed and cross-nationally comparable. This letter introduces the Regional Human Capital Database (RHCD), an open-access dataset covering 60,000 units in twenty wealthy democracies from the 1980s onward. The RHCD offers disaggregated data on educational attainment, demographics, urban structure, and voting, enabling analysis of within-region variation with unprecedented precision. We explain the construction of the dataset, including extensive checks to ensure reliability and validity. Our analysis demonstrates its value by showing growing urban–rural divides in educational attainment across countries with differing institutions and links between human capital and populist-right voting even within economically dynamic cities. The RHCD advances comparative research on the spatial dimensions of political change, offering a vital resource for scholars across political science and beyond.

This paper studies how the first wave of globalization shaped electoral populism in the United States. We assemble a new county-level dataset covering presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections between 1870 and 1900 and ask whether deeper integration into international trade increased support for populist parties. We measure globalization exposure with a new port market access index that captures counties’ connectivity to major US ports, weighted by port-level international trade volumes and adjusted for transportation costs. Counties with greater port market access consistently exhibit higher populist vote shares. We then examine the economic mechanisms underlying this relationship. Using a county-level crop portfolio price index constructed from fixed within-county value shares, we show that greater port market access is associated with larger declines in agricultural prices. The political effects of globalization are significantly stronger in counties initially specialized in crops that experienced the largest global price declines. These results highlight the historical origins of the globalization–populism link and suggest that economic dislocation has long been a catalyst for political backlash.

Within political institutions insulated from money in politics and domestic electoral considerations, to what extent are non-state actors able to influence regulations? Many international organizations (IOs) are composed only of state members, but their regulations have far-reaching consequences for non-state actors. This paper sheds new light on the influence of non-state actors, particularly firms, on regulations, with a focus on the case of OECD tax evasion regulations. I argue that firms and industry associations work to build positive reputations with bureaucrats through broad-based and high-quality written public comments to further their policy preferences. I present evidence that bureaucrats make decisions in line with these expectations through quantitative analysis of a new dataset of 3,349 OECD public comments, natural language processing methods, and thirty-three in-depth interviews. The results indicate that stakeholder engagement may be a double-edged sword: while intended to democratize access to the policy-making process, even these fora are susceptible to strategic firm behavior. However, while well-resourced firms and associations are at an advantage in having their voice heard in the creation of regulations, smaller firms that invest substantially in the process can have an outsized influence. International taxation also represents a substantively important case of non-state actor influence given the successful co-ordination of 147 countries on new tax regulations.

Prior work has often studied how focusing events – in particular police killings of unarmed people – affect citizens’ attitudes. Do focusing events also affect citizens’ behaviors – changing the scope of conflict by incorporating prospective voters into the political system? We take as an empirical case the murder of George Floyd. Using nationwide voter file data from the United States, we leverage regression discontinuity in time methods to show that Floyd’s murder noticeably increased voter registration. These effects are present across many individual subgroups, providing evidence of mobilization and counter-mobilization. Floyd’s untimely death sparked many people from previously marginalized backgrounds to register, but simultaneously also increased registrations among the politically advantaged – thus mitigating any impact on the partisan balance of power. In short, high-profile traumatic events like Floyd’s death do not appear to disproportionately advantage groups seeking reforms to change the circumstances surrounding such events.

Women politicians report that social media abuse harms their personal and professional lives. However, prior text-based research finds that men receive more general online hostility than women – except among the most visible politicians. I hypothesize that backlash to perceived gender-role violations – such as public visibility – will include distinctly gendered content, such as slurs and references to appearance. Using a novel and replicable method, I analyze hostile and gendered language in three million social media mentions of US state representatives. I find that hostility towards visible women differs from men in content, not volume. Visible women face similar volumes of generic hostility but twice as much gender-specific abuse as men. This pattern holds across two alternate measures of perceived conformity to traditional gender roles: legislator tone and the presence of women in the chamber. Incorporating gendered content into text-based analyses reconciles discrepancies between observational and self-reported data and validates women politicians’ reports.

Beyond its role in nation and state building, I argue that standard language promotion enables autocrats to increase citizens’ satisfaction with the government by expanding the reach of propaganda. Drawing on large-scale surveys supplemented by original interviews, I test this argument in China, which has successfully promoted a common language, putonghua, in recent decades. By leveraging cross-cohort, cross-locality variations in exposure to putonghua at school following a major language reform in 2001, I find that greater exposure to putonghua increases government satisfaction. Individual-level evidence highlights a potential mechanism: increased consumption of television political news, a key channel for state propaganda delivered exclusively in putonghua. This study has implications for state–society communications and authoritarian control.

How do global market pressures affect domestic politics? A well-established literature documents that import competition fuels the rise of populist leaders and right-wing parties. We shift attention to a thus far unexplored consequence: the place-based nature of globalization pressures moves voters towards candidates with local ties. These effects are most pronounced where import pressures raise the salience of pre-existing local identities, and where import pressures hit key industries in local economic clusters, creating spillovers throughout the community. We offer evidence from elections to the US House of Representatives from 2002 to 2016, focusing on candidates’ place of birth as expression of local ties. Our results provide a novel perspective on how economic globalization affects politics: local ties are a key dimension of descriptive representation, translating the place-based economic consequences of globalization into politics. Moreover, we highlight how indirect exposure to global markets through spillovers shapes the political response to globalization.

Many models of domestic politics in international relations presume that political elites correctly perceive public preferences, even as a growing body of research in political behavior calls this assumption into question. Leveraging seven paired surveys of 4,852 foreign policy elites and 13,687 members of the American public from 2004–24 on twenty-four different questions, we show elites systematically misperceive public opinion in foreign policy, misperceiving the public as more isolationist and inward-looking than it actually is. We replicate this finding with a paired experiment showing that elites effectively underestimate the public’s responsiveness to cues from international organizations, and that elites with isolationist stereotypes underestimate public approval the most. These dynamics – which operate predominantly through stereotyping, rather than projection – have important implications for the study of political elites, public opinion about foreign policy, and efforts to test theoretical models of domestic politics in international relations using public opinion data alone.

Recent research documents that many research designs in the social sciences are underpowered: they can detect only extremely large – often implausible – effects. I show that this problem is structural in the workhorse approach to studying the immigration-crime link: regressing changes in aggregate crime rates on exogenous shifts in local immigrant shares. While this design may identify changes in native criminal behavior, I demonstrate that it is largely uninformative regarding the difference in crime propensities between immigrants and natives. Because immigrants typically comprise a small fraction of the population, even large group-level differences are mechanically diluted. I formalize the minimum detectable gap - the smallest immigrant-native crime difference these regressions can reliably distinguish from zero given standard design parameters. Using Monte Carlo simulations calibrated to real-world immigration and crime data, I demonstrate that conventional designs only achieve adequate statistical power with implausibly large crime differentials and extreme immigration shocks.

Free and open public debate is a cornerstone of democratic representation, yet many politicians refrain from participating in policy debates. This study examines how political violence contributes to such silencing and whether it disproportionately affects historically marginalized groups. Using a unique Swedish politician survey (five waves, N = 43,000), we analyze whether violence reduces marginalized politicians’ participation in debates and whether it disproportionately silences debates challenging hegemonic male interests. We find that women and immigrant-background politicians are significantly more likely than their counterparts to report withdrawing from public debates because of violence and to avoid a broader range of topics. Women are particularly likely to refrain from debates on gender equality, while immigrant-background politicians are not more likely to avoid immigration debates. These chilling effects suggest that violence can narrow the range of voices present in policy debates, potentially diminishing marginalized groups’ ability to represent constituents and reinforcing hegemonic men’s political dominance.

This research note investigates how the involvement of firms in American politics has developed over the past two decades. The central question is whether individual firms have become more active lobbyists compared to business associations in the US Congress over this period. Different subdisciplines in political science have various expectations regarding the evolution of firm lobbying. We test which perspective is most accurate. To evaluate the hypotheses, we use a novel dataset comprising approximately 180,000 instances of lobbying activity by different types of interest organizations across a wide range of sectors and issues. In our analyses, we trace both the relative activity of firms versus business associations and their centrality in lobbying networks. While most theoretical models in the literature suggest a rise of firm lobbying activity, our results highlight a strikingly stable pattern of firm lobbying activity and centrality within the US political system over the past two decades.