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.

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.

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.

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.

The use of AI by government agencies in guiding important decisions (for example, on policing, welfare, education) has triggered backlash and demands for greater public input in AI regulation. Yet it remains unclear what such input would reflect: general attitudes towards new technologies, personal experience with AI, or learning about its implications. We study this question experimentally by tracking the attitudes of over 1,500 workers whose task assignments were randomly determined by either a human or an AI ‘boss’, with task content and valence also randomized. Across a three-wave panel, we find that personal experience with AI-as-boss affected workers’ job performance but not their attitudes on using AI in public decision making. In contrast, exposure to information about the technology produced significant attitudinal change, even when it conflicted with participants’ prior disposition or direct experience. The results highlight the promise of incorporating public input into AI governance.

The growth in economic inequality in the United States over the past forty years has stimulated interest among scholars in the effects of exposure to inequality on the American people. A prominent vein of scholarship explores whether exposure to inequality diminishes belief in a key pillar of the ‘American dream’ – the meritocratic ideal that hard work will translate to economic success. We offer this literature a novel test that explores the relationship between quotidian exposure to economic inequality in one’s adolescent residential context and belief in the American dream among roughly 1.3 million late-adolescent Americans entering college. We find that adolescent residence in high-inequality areas is associated with decreased belief in the American dream upon entering adulthood. Further analysis revealed that this relationship is most pronounced among young Americans raised in higher income households.

Do voters want representatives who share their race, ethnicity, or partisanship? We examine this question with a focus on Asian Americans who face trade-offs between descriptive (that is, Asian American or ‘pan-ethnic’) and partisan representation, as well as trade-offs involving ‘co-ethnic’ (for example, Korean for Korean) and ‘cross-ethnic’ (for example, Indian for Korean) descriptive representation. Across two experiments, we find that when Asian Americans are asked about collective representation in Congress, they prioritize more co-ethnic and pan-ethnic legislators over co-partisan legislators. However, in a competitive electoral setting, they often trade off race/ethnicity for partisanship. Asian Americans are only willing to cross party lines to vote for a co-ethnic candidate, but never for a cross- or pan-ethnic candidate. These findings shed light on the importance of considering heterogeneous preferences along ethnicities within the same racial ‘in-group’, such as Asian Americans, a heavily understudied and heterogeneous group in American politics.

Scholars and political observers, alike, have associated political polarization with the weakening of democratic norms and the undermining of accountability, as partisans trade off the public interest against in-group loyalty. We probe how in-group bias shapes support for collective goods in actual high-stakes settings in an especially polarized democracy. Conducting survey experiments in Poland, we examine two scenarios: electoral integrity during the 2023 parliamentary election that could have entrenched authoritarian rule and national security after Russia’s 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Our findings show pronounced partisan bias undermining support for electoral integrity – approximately 40 per cent of party supporters with an average level of partisanship supported rerunning an election when their party unexpectedly lost – but less bias in judgments about national security, raising the possibility that individuals may view democracy as more of an instrumental than an intrinsic good.

Political news consumption is highly uneven today: few people consume from news outlets directly, while many encounter news incidentally through social media and aggregators. Because outlets depend on direct consumers for revenue, they respond primarily to this core audience’s preferences. Several contemporary styles of news coverage—which emphasize partisan conflict, employ specialized jargon, engage in predictive analysis, and use clickbait language—are attractive to core consumers, but may also make news less accessible for others. In a pre-registered survey experiment (n = 2,233), I show that, relative to a public interest style that prioritizes key information about policy and democratic norms, typical news styles weaken post-exposure recall of key news information—that is, they are under-informative. Recall penalties are especially severe for those with lower baseline political engagement, yet still affect highly engaged consumers as well. This study shows that contemporary approaches to news coverage broadly under-serve the public by inhibiting political learning.

In recent decades, support for the far right has surged in many countries. One common explanation for this is that far-right support is a backlash against left-wing governments and their policies. We investigate the causal effect of the partisan make-up of governments on the electoral results of far-right parties. Evidence from over-time comparative data and a quasi-experimental analysis based on a regression discontinuity design in Spain indicates that far-right parties benefit electorally when the current government is on the left. In further analyses, we employ a novel regression discontinuity design (RDD)-based sampling strategy to examine original individual-level survey data from Spanish municipalities close to the discontinuity cutoff. These data show that the likely mechanism underlying the backlash effect is an ideological shift to the right among the electorate when left-wing parties govern. Overall, the far right benefits more when the mainstream left governs than when the mainstream right does.

Social cohesion suffers when people perceive that they live among others who differ from them, even if such people live in homogeneous neighborhoods. This article shows that (1) two individuals who live in equally diverse local contexts may not perceive the same amount of diversity in that context, nor think of the boundaries of their local community in the same way; and (2) when comparing two individuals who live in equally diverse local contexts, the one who thinks they live with more minorities tends, on average, to see lower social cohesion and less collective efficacy among their neighbors. These descriptive results align with a causal framework that distinguishes the objective environment from that of the subjective context. Revealing that perceptions of social reality matter above and beyond the experience of objective context adds evidence to a theory of context effects that involves perceptions as well as experience.

The 2016 election serves as an important case study in understanding how gendered political contexts can shape emotional reactions and engagement, particularly among women. Two important features of that election, Trump’s treatment of women and Clinton’s historic run for office, influenced emotional reactions to politics in distinct ways. We used two experimental designs in which participants were randomly assigned to read vignettes about Trump’s treatment of women or Clinton’s historic run for office. Reading about the former led to higher anger, especially among Democratic women and men, while reading about the latter increased enthusiasm among highly educated women. These elevated emotions increased intended future engagement. We conducted a third study in which we induced anger about Trump’s treatment of women and found that it led to greater intended engagement.

Do initiative and referendum campaigns enable voters to make coherent decisions? Do the dynamics of opinion formation differ across ballot measures? Despite extensive research on direct democratic processes, these questions remain underexplored. Using rolling cross-section data on two citizen-sponsored initiatives in California and two referendums in Switzerland, we examine the dynamics of voters’ knowledge about party cues and arguments for and against ballot measures in the run-up to direct democratic votes. Moreover, we assess the extent to which these dynamics help voters to cast votes that are in line with their party cue and consistent with their position on arguments. The results present a nuanced picture: while campaigns increase voters’ knowledge and help them to make more coherent choices, there is significant variation across ballots in knowledge acquisition and resulting degree of in-line and consistent voting.

In post-imperial European states, debates about imperial legacies – centred on issues such as colonial statues, police treatment of minorities, and school curricula – have intensified in recent years. Yet little systematic research examines public attitudes towards empire or their political impact. We develop a framework linking imperial nostalgia with political preferences and present findings from Britain using a national survey and conjoint experiment. First, we identify a distinct public opinion dimension on empire, ranging from nostalgic to critical. Second, we show that imperial nostalgia strongly predicts party evaluations and vote intentions, with effects comparable to those of immigration attitudes and left–right economic values. Finally, a conjoint experiment reveals that elite positions on empire influence voter preferences, but do so asymmetrically: right-wing opposition to criticism of the imperial past is stronger than left-wing support. These findings underscore the contemporary political relevance of imperial nostalgia in post-imperial Europe.

Democratic backsliding occurs incrementally, but the empirical study of how citizens respond to undemocratic politicians has been predominantly static. I formulate and test predictions about how different sequences of backsliding shape accountability. Using a novel preregistered experiment ($N = 4,234$) capturing the reality that democratic transgressions are committed by elected officials step by step, I find that a majority of American respondents – against the backdrop of partisan and policy interests – are willing to electorally remove the incumbent as episodes of democratic backsliding unfold. Moreover, incumbents who incrementally decrease the severity of democratic transgressions are held accountable more promptly than incumbents who incrementally increase or sporadically vary the severity. By establishing a new experimental framework to study democratic backsliding, my dynamic approach not only paints a more nuanced picture of Americans’ willingness to defend democracy, but also demonstrates that sequence matters in shaping voter behavior amid incremental transgressions of democracy.

With environmental protests on the rise, we ask: how do they affect support for pro-environment and environment-critical movements? We answer this question using evidence from two studies—a survey experiment and media content analysis—conducted in the Netherlands, a leading country in the green transition. Our experimental findings reveal an asymmetric bias in public support for protests. For the same protest action, public support is higher for environment-critical movements compared to pro-environment ones. This bias is most pronounced among right-leaning individuals with low education and low trust in science and politics. Our content analysis traces the bias back to newspaper reporting. While attention to protest groups is balanced across tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, tabloid reporting is more negative about pro-environment movements. These results highlight an important aspect of the backlash against environmental policies: a bias against pro-environment movements within parts of the public and media.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, subnational regions have become increasingly polarized with regard to anti-immigration attitudes. However, the reasons behind geographical changes over time are unclear. We argue that regional labor market risks are a key and overlooked factor driving residential choices and subsequent attitudinal change. We rely on georeferenced panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) in combination with rich regional labor market data from the German microcensus. Our findings confirm that prospects of economic risk reduction drive moving decisions and subsequently reduce anti-immigration sentiment, especially among workers with transferable skills. This has decisive macro-level implications: regions receiving a large share of risk-reducing movers over time show lower levels of anti-immigration sentiment. Our contribution implies that economic motivations matter for residential choices beyond cultural sorting, individual attitudes adjust to the conditions of destination, and geographical patterns are mostly driven by booming regions becoming ever more liberal.

Can a scandal in one political sphere tarnish – or unexpectedly polish – the reputation of leaders in another? This study investigates the impact of political scandals in multilevel political systems and explores three possibilities: contagion, where trust erodes across all political levels; containment, where evaluations are limited to the specific institutions involved; and contrast, where actors at other levels appear more trustworthy in comparison. We present the first experimental test of vertical contagion, containment, and contrast effects following real-world scandals in UK and Scottish politics: Partygate and Campervangate. We find weak evidence of contagion in the Scottish-level ‘Campervangate’ scandal, although trust reductions were small and often not significant. However, the ‘Partygate’ scandal reveals a distinct contrast effect: trust decreased in UK political actors but increased at the Scottish level. These results suggest that scandals in multilevel polities can influence evaluations of ‘innocent’ political actors, with troubling consequences for democratic accountability mechanisms.

How do women’s pre-election experiences influence their behavior in government? We examine women’s participation in rebel groups as a form of masculine socialization and theorize that former rebel women elected in the national legislature will continue to defy gender norms by being more active than their other women colleagues and more frequently discussing topics that are male-dominated and relate to their wartime experience. Using novel datasets of parliamentary speeches and rebel ties of elected MPs in Uganda and Zimbabwe, we find that women ex-rebels make more legislative speeches, including speeches on topics related to wartime experience. We find mixed evidence for speeches on ‘hard’ topics. These findings contribute to theoretical debates on women’s political representation, gender and conflict, and legislative politics.