Panel surveys and phone-based data collection are essential for survey research and are often used together due to the practical advantages of conducting repeated interviews over the phone. These tools are particularly critical for research in dynamic or high-risk settings, as highlighted by researchers’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, preventing high attrition is a major challenge in panel surveys. Current solutions in political science focus on statistical fixes to address attrition ex-post but often overlook a preferable solution: minimizing attrition in the first place. Building on a review of political science panel studies and established best practices, we propose a framework to reduce attrition and introduce an online platform to facilitate the logistics of survey implementation. The web application semi-automates survey call scheduling and enumerator workflows, helping to reduce panel attrition, improve data quality, and minimize enumerator errors. Using this framework in a panel study of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, we maintained participant retention at 63 percent four and a half years after the baseline survey. We provide guidelines for researchers to report panel studies transparently and describe their designs in detail.

When are far right parties punished for their extreme positions? We argue that the punishments of deviant position-taking are conditional on the degree to which a far right party is normalized or stigmatized in the party system. When the far right is treated as normal, the costs suffered from these parties’ extreme positions decrease, as moderate voters discount the authenticity of their commitment to such positions. We use a survey experiment to test this argument in Spain, finding evidence for discounting on the far right’s extreme anti-LGBTQ+ statements, but not on its embrace of authoritarian history. This study thus shows that normalization and stigmatization of the far right can change how its extreme positions are interpreted by voters.

This study investigates how states leverage leadership positions in international organizations (IOs) to enhance their staff representation. Using an original dataset of 25 United Nations system agencies from 1996 to 2022, we show that leadership roles can help states enhance their staff representation. Two mechanisms drive this influence: leaders secure voluntary contributions from their home countries to create favorable conditions for national representation, and they cultivate positive institutional relationships that facilitate greater staffing opportunities. Further analysis reveals that leaders from developing countries have demonstrated increasing effectiveness in strengthening their nations’ representation over time. Meanwhile, countries closely connected to leadership-holding states also gain staff representation. These dynamics may carry performance costs, raising broader implications for global governance.

Despite widespread adoption of international anti-money laundering standards over the last 30 years, their effectiveness remains poorly understood due to persistent data limitations. I address this gap in the scholarship by leveraging cryptocurrency transaction data to assess how specific regulatory design features shape compliance. Using bunching estimation, I demonstrate that customers strategically adjust transaction sizes to avoid threshold-based screening requirements, while exchanges fail to adequately address this behavior through risk-based monitoring. Analysis of British Virgin Islands exchanges using difference-in-differences estimation before and after regulatory changes provides additional evidence supporting these conclusions. The findings reveal how regulatory design features shape behavior in cryptocurrency markets and suggest specific improvements for regulatory frameworks.

How does a ruler implement state-building at the local level? This paper examines state-building in late 16th-century Japan by focusing on Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s land surveys, which were crucial for establishing a centralized regime. We argue that Hideyoshi strengthened control over the locality via land surveys as a strategic response to the perceived threats emanating from Catholic missionaries. Using various empirical strategies including spatial econometrics, sensitivity analysis, and an instrumental variable approach, we find that the presence of Catholic churches significantly increased the likelihood of a locality being surveyed. These results highlight the importance of information-gathering beyond fiscal purposes for security objectives and emphasize the role of threats from foreign religious institutions in state formation processes.

Classic arguments about federalist governance emphasize an informational or learning role for decentralizing policy authority, but in practice, ideological outcomes frequently motivate this choice. We examine the role of ideology in the allocation of policy-making power by modeling a two-period interaction between an elected central executive and two local governments. Decentralization reduces the executive’s ability to set policy and control externalities but potentially insures against future policy reversals. In this environment, partial decentralization is a common outcome. Complete decentralization arises when executives are unlikely to be re-elected, party polarization is high, and institutional hurdles to policy-making are significant. These results help to clarify existing cross-national empirical findings on the determinants of centralization.

Extant work shows that generative AI such as GPT-3.5 and perpetuate social stereotypes and biases. A less explored source of bias is ideology: do GPT models take ideological stances on politically sensitive topics? We develop a novel approach to identify ideological bias and show that it can originate in both the training data and the filtering algorithm. Using linguistic variation across countries with contrasting political attitudes, we evaluate average GPT responses in those languages. GPT output is more conservative in languages conservative societies (polish) and more liberal in languages used in liberal ones (Swedish). These differences persist from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4. We conclude that high-quality, curated training data are essential for reducing bias.

Many recent applications of the “Unexpected Event during Survey Design” (UESD) analyze single cases of frequently occurring events. In this research note, I question the generalizability of research findings obtained this way and demonstrate the empirical benefits of the “Multiple Unexpected Events during Survey Design” (MUESD). I conduct 15 large-scale replications (total N = 101,940) of a new UESD analyzing the effects of Mediterranean shipwrecks on immigration attitudes. Previous research suggests that such events drastically reduce anti-immigration attitudes among the European public, presumably through an empathy-based mechanism. However, after 15 of the most lethal shipwrecks since 2013, anti-immigration attitudes were reduced in only one case of exceptionally high salience and to a much lesser degree than originally found.

This paper studies voter turnout and selective abstention on voting days with more than one election or referendum. We extend the rational choice model to a setting with multiple concurrent votes. The model is based on a voter’s net benefit, which includes a vote’s salience and information costs. It explains how the net benefit of different concurrent votes enters a voter’s utility function and thereby affects turnout and selective abstention, the tendency to vote in one but not all votes held on the same day. We test our theoretical predictions using data on concurrent propositions in Switzerland from 1988 to 2016. Our results suggest that the proposition with the highest net benefit and the sum of the net benefits of all concurrent propositions are relevant determinants of the individual turnout decision. We also find that a proposition’s net benefit explains variation in selective abstention.

Do economic sanctions negatively affect democracy and human rights in targeted countries? Although often intended to improve these outcomes, their record of doing so has historically been mixed at best. Most canonical studies cover the 1980s–1990s, but sanctions practice has since undergone major innovations following debates on humanitarian harm. Given this move toward ‘targeted’ sanctions, it stands to reason that sanctions may today be achieving their intended purposes. I take up policy and methodological innovations to re-examine the effects of Western sanctions seeking to improve democracy and human rights from 1990 to 2021. I find that negative effects persist, offering an important update to the empirical literature. Beyond this contribution, I present a template for replicating and extending country-year research in international relations (IR).

Much work is concerned with the effects of mainstream parties accommodating the positions of populist radical right parties. Little is known about the role of political rhetoric in mainstream party responses to radical right challengers though. This is a significant gap given the evident shifts in mainstream party discourse across European democracies. Using a pre-registered survey experiment in Germany, I analyze how voters react when mainstream parties engage in populist rhetoric and adopt radical right issue positions. Theoretically, I propose that voters, particularly those with populist attitudes, may use populist rhetoric as a heuristic when evaluating parties. I find that, in line with spatial theories of voting, voters penalize or reward mainstream parties based on their adoption of radical right positions, but that the use of populist rhetoric does not significantly impact voter evaluations. These findings demonstrate the relevance of programmatic party strategies in mainstream-challenger competition and cast doubt on the effectiveness of populist rhetoric.

Politicians appear to overestimate how conservative public opinion is in the U.S. and other Western democracies. Whether this “conservative bias” extends to voters remains unclear but has important implications for belief formation and behavior. I examine this in the context of abortion access after the Dobbs decision. Despite the salience of the topic, original survey data collected post-Dobbs reveal consistent underestimation of public support for abortion access. Individuals identifying as “pro-life” drive most of this underestimation, suggesting the presence of egocentric biases in which “pro-life” Americans overestimate the commonality of their views. Conservative biases among voters may contribute to a skewed information environment for politicians, potentially providing leverage for further restrictions on abortion access.

Recent scholarship highlights that executive orders issued by the president are not truly ‘unilateral,’ but require cooperation from administrative agencies for implementation. I argue that, because of this role for agencies, congressional committees can use oversight to shape executive order implementation. I demonstrate this dynamic using two datasets: a sample of executive orders that have been coded using measures of executive-branch delegation and discretion, and a collection of congressional hearings focusing on an executive order or its implementation. I find that Congress engages in more oversight activity when an order delegates more authority and a wider discretionary window to agencies. This finding reveals a previously overlooked form of interbranch conflict, and broadens our understanding of the politics of unilateralism.

Political professionals and scholars maintain that raising money early in the election season is critical to a successful campaign, having downstream consequences on a candidate’s future fundraising potential, the stiffness of competition she will face, and her likelihood of electoral victory. In spite of early money’s perceived importance, there is no common operationalization for money as “early.” Moreover, existing measures often fail to reflect definitional aspects of early money. In this paper, we first lay out a theoretical framework regarding the utility of early campaign fundraising for candidates. We argue that early fundraising can be expressed as two conceptually distinct quantities of interest centered on either a candidate’s own fundraising performance (candidate-centered) or her fundraising performance relative to her electoral competitors (election-centered). We next lay out steps for operationalizing candidate- and election-centered measures of early fundraising. Lastly, we demonstrate that both our proposed measures for early campaign fundraising are predictive of a candidate’s future fundraising and electoral success. By putting forward a set of best practices for early money measurement and, additionally, producing off-the-shelf measures for early fundraising in U.S. House elections, we fill an important gap in scholarly research on the measurement of money in politics.

Scholars debate whether the presence of multiple parties in the legislature stabilizes dictatorships or promotes their demise. We show that authoritarian regimes face a dilemma: allowing for multipartism reduces the risk of bottom-up revolt, but facilitates protracted top-down democratization. Concessions to the opposition diminish the long-term benefits of authoritarian rule and empower regime soft-liners. We test our theory in Latin America—a region with a broad range of autocracies —using survival models, instrumental variables, random forests, and two case studies. Our theory explains why rational autocrats accept multipartism, even though this concession may ultimately undermine the regime. It also accounts for democratic transitions that occur when the opposition is fragmented and without a stunning authoritarian defeat.

While research shows that public preferences across policy domains tend to move in parallel, the mechanisms behind this dynamic remain unclear. We examine four explanations: (1) alignment in preferred policy levels; (2) parallel policy movement combined with domain-specific thermostatic feedback; (3) feedback to global policy across domains; and (4) responsiveness to presidential partisanship. These mechanisms matter for how we interpret public opinion change and policy responsiveness. We develop and test a theoretical model using data on four social spending domains in the USA. Our findings suggest that spending mood reflects both parallelism in preferred policy levels and responsiveness to overall social spending and presidential party affiliation.

This article describes how and why propaganda affected recipients differently in two distinct situations, namely forced exposure and selective exposure, when they received propaganda during a series of six original survey experiments conducted in China. The prevailing view is that people are more likely to resist information they receive if their exposure to it is forced. But the study addressed in this article found that citizens who prefer not to view propaganda news, when given a choice, actually demonstrate higher average treatment effects on pro-regime attitudes compared to those who willingly read propaganda news (i.e. where participants in the control group were assigned a reading of non-propaganda news). Moreover, this study shows that participants who prefer not to read propaganda news exhibit higher average treatment effects when rating the issue presented in the news as more understandable and important—compared to those who willingly engage with the propaganda. That suggests a possible rationalization pathway in this phenomenon.1

Democracy faces growing threats from authoritarian ideologies, especially in terrorism-affected regions. We test whether citizen-targeted democracy-promotion intervention can bolster democratic support and resist authoritarian appeals. A randomized online experiment in Burkina Faso exposed participants to educational videos focusing on: (1) introduction of civic rights democracies offer, (2) general discussion of democracy’s advantages in combating terrorism, (3) Burkina Faso–specific discussion of democracy’s advantages in combating terrorism, (4) space exploration (placebo). Democracy-promotion videos increased democratic support. The general terrorism-advantage message produced the largest gains, whereas the country-specific message had little effect. Effects are not contingent on respondents’ proximity to attacks or direct experience. These findings highlight how democratic resilience can be strengthened in conflict-affected societies and inform future efforts to promote democracy.

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The state of American politics would be improved, many argue, if more moderate and qualified people served in government. We investigate what draws such individuals to run, focusing on a dimension of politics that has received scant attention within the candidate-entry literature—the ability of candidates, once elected, to exercise meaningful influence over policy. In a conjoint experiment, we find that the opportunity to wield greater authority differentially increases moderates’ interest in seeking office, and that more qualified people express more interest in running for offices with greater authority, lower thresholds for passing legislation, and higher staff support. These findings have implications for political representation, government effectiveness, and the relationship between institutional reform and mass politics.