The US major-party presidential nominating conventions are an essential platform for a political party’s branding and messaging for upcoming presidential and congressional elections. The conventions also can provide revenue and media attention to their host cities and, consequently, convention fundraising has grown substantially in recent decades. Convention fundraising rules were changed in 2014, tripling the limit for contributions to a party’s campaign funds and removing limits on contributions to host-city committees. Although we do not expect these changes to affect individual donors, we expect corporations, banks, and labor unions to have taken advantage of these new rules. Elections since 2014, however, have been unusual in many ways—for instance, in the relationship between the nominees and their parties and, in 2020, the public health precautions required to hold conventions. This study examines developments in political-party convention fundraising since 2014, focusing on the relationships among candidates, their parties, and the cities where conventions have been held. To make this determination, funding reports were collected for the 2000–2024 election cycles. The article explores changes in the characteristics of convention donors—their other contributions and their relationships to candidates, party committees, and host cities—and notes variations that might be attributable to the nominees or the host cities. It considers whether the new convention-funding rules have matured sufficiently that it is possible to make broad claims about the effects of the rules themselves.

Civic engagement benefits both participants and society, but what motivates young adults to decide to become civically engaged? A cost-benefit analysis concludes that resumé-building is a major motivator for young adult civic engagement participation because it has more visible short-term impacts compared to social or community motivators. Using a preregistered survey experiment and follow-up focus groups fielded to college students, I demonstrate that respondents exposed to a treatment describing the social benefits of civic engagement are significantly more willing to increase their civic engagement. Counter to expectations, career benefits are—at best—a secondary motivating factor. These results suggest that civic engagement does not appear to be inherently beneficial to young adults. Non-profit organizations and educators should consider ways to draw attention to the social benefits of civic engagement as a method of attracting additional program interest.

The No Labels Party emerged with claims that it could interrupt the traditional two-party system in the United States. The political science literature on third parties would seem to challenge this assertion, highlighting the difficulty of altering the party ecosystem. In this article we use behavioral and attitudinal data to better understand the life cycle of the No Labels Party in North Carolina. We find that, although it became the second-largest third party (after the Libertarian Party), it struggled to gain and maintain party membership. The plurality of party switchers to the No Labels Party come from the ranks of Unaffiliated, not from the two major parties. Further, attitudinal data reveal that North Carolinians were largely uninformed and agnostic about No Labels. In the end, the No Labels Party’s demise was easily predicted. Despite a rise in independent/unaffiliated party registrants and identifiers, the two-party system is here to stay.

This article analyzes the development paradox posed by the energy transition. It examines the interplay between Zimbabwe’s lithium potential and the dominant role played by China in the sector. Zimbabwe’s attempts to become a leading supplier of lithium through a series of policy interventions coincides with China’s growing electric vehicle and battery markets that fuel the mineral’s demand. However, power asymmetries in the relationship—as well as domestic constraints posed by weak state capacity, political economy challenges, and social costs of mining—limit the Zimbabwe government’s ability to translate its mineral wealth into developmental outcomes. This illustrates the broader dilemma of the global energy transition for producer countries: critical minerals do not automatically yield development; instead, outcomes depend on enhancing domestic agency and regulating external influence.

In Spring 2024, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in Latino-majority communities in Arizona and Texas to test the impact and effects of voter registration campaigns run by local Registrars in high schools. We theorized that bringing election officials into schools dispels informational uncertainty, cultivates positive political attitudes and emotions, and ultimately boosts voter registration rates. Two partner schools were identified in each state and then randomized into treatment and control conditions. Before treatment, seniors at all four high schools were asked to complete a survey about their interest in and attitudes toward politics and voting. Registrars then conducted in-person visits at the two treatment schools. After treatment, the seniors again were asked to complete a survey. We find that the Registrars’ visits increased enthusiasm, encouragement, and interest around voting and decreased anxiety.

Innovations in deliberative and participatory democracy have been rapidly adopted by policy makers. Long-term success of democratic reform hinges on developing research through open, reproducible, and ethical standards that secure trust in findings. This study examines how Democratic Innovations (DI) scholars implement open science practices (OSP). We analyze empirical research published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and 2021. Our analysis reveals limited OSP use: less than 1% of research articles involve replication and approximately 3.5% provide full data access, despite an increase in the past decade to almost 8% of articles published in 2020. Open publishing has increased, reaching almost 50% of publications in recent years. The article concludes by discussing how OSP can contribute to improving the practice of DI and the policy effects of institutional design. Researchers who understand institutional design for inclusive collective action are best placed to make the changes required to promote open science.

This article explores how abortion was framed on Twitter as an issue during the 2022 midterm elections directly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. By leveraging a dataset of all tweets sent by US House of Representatives candidates for two months prior to the midterm elections, this study examines how both gender and partisanship impacted the discussion of abortion and shows that partisanship drove the rhetoric surrounding this issue during those elections. Whereas women candidates in general were significantly more likely to discuss abortion than their male counterparts, Democratic women led the way and were more likely to use “women-invoked rhetoric” to frame the issue.

Using a rolling cross-section survey of 54,000 voters conducted between mid-October and mid-December, a panel survey of 6,000 voters interviewed in both October and December, and surveys of 1,400 local political elites and officials conducted in both October and December, this study characterizes how confidence in the accuracy of national elections changed with the projected election of President Trump on Election Day. Among voters, Republican confidence immediately increased by 31 percentage points (123% change) and Democrats’ confidence declined by 12 percentage points (16% change) such that the confidence among partisan voters was almost identical by mid-December. The most polarized partisans exhibited the largest confidence changes. Among local political elites, the increase in Republicans’ confidence mirrored the increase among Republican voters (106% change), but the confidence among Democratic political elites remained high throughout. These findings highlight troubling concerns for sustaining a shared confidence in the accuracy and legitimacy of future elections.

In 2023, a constitutional amendment that would remove male-only pronouns and replace them with gender-neutral nouns in the state constitution was proposed in South Dakota. Policy changes related to gender pronouns are a sensitive and politically charged issue, particularly in more conservative states such as South Dakota. In April 2024, several months before the vote, we conducted a survey experiment with 727 registered voters in South Dakota to investigate whether providing an additional explanation about the proposed changes in the amendment affected South Dakotans’ support for the proposal. We found that Republicans were less supportive of the proposal across all conditions. The results also showed that participants who were given an explanation of the proposed changes were more supportive of the proposal than those to whom it was described as only introducing gender-neutral language, particularly among women, Independents, and Republicans. Overall, we found that the attitudes toward the proposal were structured along partisan lines and that providing additional information about the proposed changes increased popular support.

Election integrity is paramount to democratic health. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a multistate collaboration that facilitates essential election administration functions, whereby members share administrative data to ensure clean voter registration lists and to encourage individuals who are eligible but unregistered (EBUs) to register to vote. Despite ERIC’s primary focus on maintaining the accuracy of voter rolls, in 2022, some conservatives accused it of being a tool for partisan electioneering, prompting nine Republican-led states to leave ERIC. To assess the validity of a central criticism made against ERIC, we leverage field experiments conducted by member states during the 2016 elections in Pennsylvania and Nevada (i.e., two important swing states). We find no empirical evidence to support the claim that outreach to EBUs yielded a partisan advantage: ERIC’s registration efforts had little differential effect on party registration or turnout. This article discusses the importance of efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls and to encourage greater participation for promoting confidence in our democratic system.

Congress is portrayed as compliant with President Donald J. Trump’s agenda because he is intimidating its members. This neglects an alternative explanation that focuses on the increased congruence of presidential and congressional electoral bases. Trump is the beneficiary of a geographical realignment that took decades and has created a high degree of overlap of the two bases. This analysis tracks that process from 1952 to 2024. It has produced a situation in which policy concerns overlap and encourage congressional compliance.

Current political developments worldwide illustrate that research on democratic backsliding is as important as ever. A recent exchange in Political Science & Politics (February 2024) highlighted again that the measurement of democracy remains a challenge. With many democracy indicators consisting of subjective assessments rather than factual observations, trends in democracy over time could be due to human biases in the coding of these indicators rather than empirical facts. This article leverages two cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) for the coding of democracy indicators from the V-Dem project. With access to huge amounts of information, these models may be able to rate the many “soft” characteristics of regimes at substantially lower costs. Whereas LLM-generated codings largely align with expert coders for many countries, we show that when these models deviate from human assessments, they do so in different but consistent ways. Some LLMs are too pessimistic and others consistently overestimate the democratic quality of these countries. Although the combination of the two LLM codings can alleviate this concern, we conclude that it is difficult to replace human coders with LLMs because the extent and direction of these attitudes is not known a priori.

Student debt heavily shapes the life decisions and outlook of those living with it. This article examines the relationship between undergraduates’ views of President Joe Biden’s actions on student debt and their support for him in the 2024 election prior to his dropping out of the race. Using a representative survey from a large private university in the Northeast, we assess how student views of Biden’s handling of student loan relief correlated with voting intentions among registered student voters. Our analysis reveals that students who believed the Biden administration adequately addressed student debt were significantly more likely to support him compared to those who believed he had done too little. Additionally, our findings suggest that whereas increased student debt relief could have bolstered Biden’s support among liberal and very liberal students, its impact on moderate and conservative students was more limited. This study highlights the electoral implications of student debt relief policies, particularly in shaping young voters’ preferences, and it underscores the potential for targeted economic benefits to influence voter behavior in a highly polarized political environment.

Despite the centrality of tolerance and free expression to liberal democracy, little is known about the American public’s attitudes toward disruptive protest actions that suppress constitutionally protected speech. Drawing on a nationally representative survey, this article examines the acceptance of shouting down speakers, blocking audiences from attending events, and using violence to stop public speeches across two different question formats: (1) an abstract, “non-group” question; and (2) a “most-offensive-idea” question in which respondents evaluate tactics aimed at speech that they find personally offensive. Across both formats, Gen Z is significantly more accepting of shoutdowns, blockades, and violence than older cohorts. Ideological differences, however, depend heavily on the measurement approach, with liberals and conservatives diverging on the non-group questions but converging on the most-offensive-idea questions. Together, these results reveal a robust generational divide in permissiveness toward speech-suppressing protest and more conditional, context-dependent ideological differences.

Research has linked the authoritarian personality with support for political violence, including violence against the government. However, support for political violence is simultaneously a measure of and an outcome of the authoritarian personality, and one key component (submission to authority) is the antithesis of one key measure of political violence (violence against authority). This article makes three contributions. First, we accentuate the importance of using exogenous measures of the authoritarian personality when estimating its effect on support for political violence. Second, leveraging data from an original survey and the American National Election Studies, we find that the relationship between authoritarianism and support for violence is conditional: it can be positive, negative, or null, depending on who is in control of government and the specificity of political-violence measures. Third, we argue that another concept—the securitarian personality—might better predict support for violence. Access to firearms—which we argue is downstream from securitarianism—consistently predicts support for political violence.

Americans rely on the media to learn about the US Supreme Court. Historically, coverage was concentrated among a small set of major newspapers that regularly reported on high-profile decisions. The expansion of digital platforms and the Court’s decision to livestream oral arguments at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic created new opportunities for coverage, but it is unclear whether these changes increased overall media attention on the Court. Using new data to track how often Supreme Court decisions and oral arguments appear in print and broadcast-affiliated outlets, this article shows that the volume of coverage has declined in traditional newspapers but expanded (unevenly) across other outlets. These patterns challenge assumptions about stable and centralized Supreme Court coverage and highlight the need for scholars to account for changing levels of media attention when studying public responses to the Court.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has pushed beyond the limits that have constrained previous presidents, suggesting that he should not be bound by norms, statutes, or constitutional language. The logic of the US Constitution is that majorities are required for change but that it also is necessary to protect minority interests. The system of checks and balances forces most majorities to grow and broaden before they are empowered. The Constitution provides an incentive for public officials to negotiate and compromise. Donald Trump has ignored this constitutional imperative. Instead of persuasion, compromise, and negotiation, he has employed unilateral action.

Most studies on modern state formation assume that enhanced state capacity and institutionalization increase clarity and predictability. We argue that this view fails to consider ambiguity politics—a form of governance in which formal and informal institutions are inconsistent, unclear, or ill-defined, thereby creating space for multiple interpretations, practices, and procedures. Combining inductive insights from research in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and deductive engagement with different strands of literature, we developed a typology that distinguishes mechanisms of ambiguity politics according to the level at which the ambiguation takes place (elite/administrative) and the intentionality of it (strategic/accidental). Although ambiguity politics is particularly visible in conflict and postconflict settings, we show that it is not inevitably a temporary stage toward greater order and predictability but rather a persistent feature of governance in various contexts.

With a larger and more diverse set of countries than Cuzán and Heggen (2023a) studied, this article completes a general path of incumbencies that was partially traced by their “cruise and crash” model of the cost of ruling. The missing piece is a bump in the share of the vote in the party’s first reelection. The electoral “bonus” holds more or less steadily until the crash, at which point the vote plunges about 20% below the original win. The analysis suggests that the path of the vote in long-term incumbencies follows a general pattern that is shaped like an inverted asymmetrical letter U or W.

This goal of this article is to improve our understanding of Morocco’s instrumentalization of migration and border management to pressure Spain. We analyze the literature on critical security studies and North–South relations. This study’s contribution, resulting from the theoretical approach of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies and the Spanish–Moroccan border-crisis case study, is twofold. First, it decenters the study of security and international relations from the dominant concerns with Western interests and policy priorities. Second, it documents a paradigm shift in the study of North–South relations, highlighting the agency of the Global South. This agency, evident in the case of Morocco, indicates that smaller state actors have the capacity to gain leverage over bigger state actors and that they are not merely recipients of the policies of the Global North. Proof of this is Morocco’s successful instrumentalization of the border crisis to obtain Spain’s explicit recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara.