It is widely agreed that politicians are prone to hyperbole, proposing platforms that no one expects them to fully accomplish. We develop a theory of electoral competition focusing on politicians who differ in terms of both ideological preferences and in their capability to “get things done.” An imperfect ability to implement platforms introduces a novel role for status quo policies. We first show that the traditional left-right orientation of political competition arises only when the status quo is relatively moderate. Otherwise, an extreme status quo becomes the dominant dimension of electoral competition, providing a novel rationale for “populist” campaigns. Our second set of results address when campaign platforms can serve as effective empirical proxies for policies. We show that when there is a shock to voter preferences, the effect on platforms and policies is qualitatively the same, hence platforms are good qualitative proxies for policy implications. But when shocks are to the platform-policy linkage, platforms and policies respond in qualitatively different ways.

Presidents are often viewed as national policy leaders. Yet, they increasingly use negative rhetoric to attack the opposition rather than forge legislative compromise, contrary to theories of going public. Why? I argue presidents facing congressional obstruction eschew short-term policy persuasion. They speak as negative partisans to mobilize co-partisans and shape the longer-term balance of power in Congress, improving future policy-making prospects. I collect all presidential speeches delivered between 1933 and 2024 and use transformer methods to measure how often, and how negatively, presidents reference the out-party. They do so when the policy-making environment is unfavorable: when majorities are tenuous, government is divided, and as elections approach. I provide additional support with a case study of Democrats’ 2009 filibuster-proof Senate majority. Finally, this rhetoric has behavioral impact: presidential negative partisanship decreases co-partisan approval of the opposition. This research alters our understanding of going public and reinforces the partisan dimension of modern presidential representation.

Most research on political identities studies how individuals react to knowing others’ political allegiances. However, in most contexts, political views and identities are hidden and only inferred, so that projected beliefs and identities may matter as much as actual ones. We argue that individuals engage in motivated political projection: the identities people project onto target individuals are strongly conditional on the valence of that target. We test this theoretical proposition in two pre-registered experimental studies. In Study 1, we rely on a unique visual conjoint experiment in Britain and the USA that asks participants to assign partisanship and political ideology to heroes and villains from film and fiction. In Study 2, we present British voters with a vignette that manipulates a subject’s valence and solicits (false) recall information related to the subject’s political identity. We find strong support for motivated political projection in both studies, especially among strong identifiers. This is largely driven by negative out-group counter-projection rather than positive in-group projection. As political projection can lead to the solidification of antagonistic political identities, our findings are relevant for understanding dynamics in group-based animosity and affective polarization.

Social scientists often compare survey responses before and after important events to test how those events impact respondent beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. This article offers a formal analysis of such pre-event/post-event survey comparisons, including designs that seek to reduce bias using quota sampling, rolling cross-sections, and panels. Our analysis distinguishes major sources of bias and clarifies the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each approach. We then introduce a modified panel design—the dual randomized survey—to reduce bias in cases where asking respondents to complete the same survey twice could impact their Wave 2 responses. Our formalization of bias and novel research design improve scholars’ ability to study the causal impact of events through surveys.

Our understanding of politics often relies on the ideological placement of political actors—ranging from scaling legislative roll-call voting in the United States to text-based classifications of political parties in Europe. A particularly thorny problem remains estimating individual positions in legislatures with strong partisan discipline. We improve upon recently developed measurement strategies and propose a novel approach for estimating legislators’ ideological positions: an expert survey in which respondents compare pairs of representatives on a left-right dimension. The innovation of our approach lies in the combination of four particular features. First, we rely on political youth leaders who are insightful and easy to recruit. Second, the rating task does not involve numeric scaling and consists of simple pairwise comparisons. Third, we efficiently and automatically detect informative comparisons to reduce the cost and length of the survey without compromising our estimates. Fourth, we use a Bayesian Davidson model with random effects to generate an ideological position for each legislator. As an empirical illustration, we estimate the placement of the 709 members of the 19th German Bundestag. Several validity tests show that our model captures variation within and across political parties. Our estimates offer a thorough benchmark to validate alternative measurement strategies. The presented measurement strategy is flexible and easily extendable to diverse political settings because it can capture comparisons among political actors across time and space.

Did George Floyd’s murder and its ensuing protests produce a racial reckoning? Conventional social-science accounts, emphasizing the stability of racial attitudes, dismiss this possibility. In contrast, we theorize how these events may have altered Americans’ racial attitudes, in broadly progressive or in potentially countervailing ways across partisan and racial subgroups. An original content analysis of partisan media demonstrates how the information environment framed Black Americans before and after the summer of 2020. Then we examine temporal trends using three different attitude measures: most important problem judgments, explicit favorability towards Whites versus Blacks, and implicit associations. Challenging the conventional wisdom, our analyses demonstrate that racial attitudes changed following George Floyd’s murder, but in ways dependent upon attitude measure and population subgroup.

This paper puts forward a theoretically derived measure of firm-level political influence defined over a sample of firms from a diverse set of countries, permitting new inferences into state-business relations. We derive this measure from original surveys of 27,613 firms in 41 countries, which include information on several interactions with political actors. Using a Bayesian item response theory measurement model that incorporates non-ignorable missing data, we estimate influence scores that incorporate survey data on diverse mechanisms by which firms attempt to obtain influence. From the measurement model, we learn that membership in a business association contains the most positive information about a firm’s influence, while bribes, state ownership, firm size, and a reliance on collective lobbying tend to be substitutes for influence in equilibrium. Empirically, we are able to show for the first time how such influence is distributed across different types of political regimes using a measurement model, leading to intriguing hypotheses about how the costs and benefits of political activity structure corporate influence-seeking.

Despite growing interest in the political consequences of the urban–rural divide, we know little about whether urban and rural populations differ in the policy problems they view as most important. This study explores urban–rural differences in policy priorities over an extended period (1939–2020), using data from 850 U.S. surveys. The analysis reveals modest but persistent gaps between urban and rural residents in several key policy areas. However, while urban–rural differences remain stable across diverse economic and political contexts, partisan affiliation significantly outweighs place-based identities in shaping these priorities. The findings suggest that despite geographic distinctions, urban and rural populations predominantly rely on partisan cues when forming policy agendas, which contributes to a nuanced understanding of political representation.

Presidential primary elections arguably represent the most dynamic campaigns in American politics. Television advertising is a key aspect of strategy that candidates can marshal throughout the campaign. We develop a methodology for measuring the impact of advertising in primary elections that accounts for endogeneity and apply it to the 2000 through 2016 elections. We find that advertisements—both positive and negative—improve the favorability and the vote share of the candidate running the ads. We find that negative advertising is more effective than positive advertising, but that only high polling candidates lose support when attacked.

In this article, I study the effect of endogenous challenger entry on electoral accountability in the presence of adverse selection. To this end, I analyze a two-period electoral agency model wherein a potential challenger freely chooses whether to run for office. The effect of endogenous challenger entry on policy decisions in this model is ambiguous: depending on model parameters, it can worsen or ease policy distortions. Analogously, marginally increasing the cost of running for office can deepen or reduce these distortions. This uncertainty regarding the effect of endogenous challenger entry on policymaking leads to equally ambiguous welfare implications. Nonetheless, I identify conditions under which endogenous challenger entry improves policymaking and voter welfare. This suggests that, in some circumstances, imposing higher barriers to entry in elections can improve policymaking and voter welfare.

In this study, we examine the interactions among elections by considering two parties competing in simultaneous elections, where each party fields candidates in every election. We model these interactions through voters’ utility functions, influenced not just by the policies proposed in a specific election but also by those in concurrent elections. The benchmark result indicates that all candidates adopt positions more polarized than those predicted by the Calvert–Wittman model. This shift occurs because candidates leverage the policy stance of their counterparts in co-partisan elections to pursue policies more aligned with their preferences. In multidistrict elections, candidates from areas with strong ideological leanings deviate further from the median voter's stance at the national level. Moreover, this interaction effect may select candidates with more extreme ideology into the local elections.

How can local governments in developing countries, constrained by limited resources, identify and respond to the most pressing public demands? This paper posits that public deliberative platforms, even those with controlled agendas, can be instrumental in this regard by facilitating communication between local elites and ordinary citizens, thereby leading to an observable uptick in political trust over time. Public deliberation serves two functions: firstly, it highlights shifting societal issues, incentivizing bureaucrats to respond more promptly; and secondly, it generates narratives that temporarily improve the public perception of local governments, even among individuals not directly benefiting from government actions. This study provides evidence consistent with these theoretical implications by examining Chinese topical debate programs, during which local officials engage with citizens and respond to their concerns. Empirical results based on a staggered difference-in-differences design suggest that broadcasting such programs in China produces a prompt increase in citizens’ trust in local officials. Our results demonstrate that public deliberation can yield noticeable outcomes in developing countries, even with controlled agendas and constrained resources.

Scholars disagree as to whether Americans’ attitudes toward local issues are structured ideologically and whether these are related to national policy ideology. We use two surveys of American adults to assess whether and to what extent Americans' local policy attitudes exhibit a similar structure as do national policy attitudes. We find that items asking about local policy are just as likely to reflect a latent dimension of policy preferences as those asking about national policy. Additionally, when local and national items are scaled separately, those scales are highly correlated. Our findings indicate that attitudes toward many local issues are aligned with national ideology. A smaller subset of attitudes about local issues appears distinctively local and possibly structured by non-ideological cleavages.

Researchers applying evolutionary theory to political psychology discover that in democracies, most citizens struggle to select political leaders based on their ideologies. Rather, they tend to concentrate on procedural fairness during public decision-making when evaluating their leaders. We re-examine such evolutionary propositions in China using eight Wason selection experiments. In autocracies, where accountability systems are weak or absent, little is known about how citizens judge politicians’ ideologies and their cheating behaviors. Our findings show that Chinese citizens are incapable of identifying political leaders’ ideological orientations; instead, they rely on a cheater-detection mechanism, evaluating leaders based on their adherence to procedural fairness. These results contribute to our understanding of democratic competence and the cognitive mechanisms of political judgment in autocratic contexts.

Restrictive voting laws are an increasingly salient feature of American politics. Yet estimating their direct impact on turnout is challenging, given the strategic actions political actors take to impose and mitigate the costs of these laws. Using individual-level data from Davidson County, Tennessee, we leverage variation induced by an early-morning tornado on Super Tuesday 2020 to estimate the direct causal effect of polling-site consolidations. We find moving to a new polling station decreases in-person turnout by 5.65 percentage points, on average, and that the variable cost—proxied by change in travel distance—drives almost all of this decline. Voting at a consolidated site only decreases turnout when the number of individuals assigned to a station increases by more than 100%.

How do the effects of climate regulation on businesses impact public attitudes toward climate policy? While emissions intensity is the primary frame for understanding the effects of climate policy on business, theoretical scholarship and public discourse often emphasize that large firms will adjust to climate regulations easily while smaller firms will struggle. Because small businesses are sympathetic and large firms are unpopular, individuals who view climate regulation’s effects in line with this firm size account should be less likely to support climate change mitigation. To test this theory, we conduct an original survey of climate policy beliefs and then a survey experiment. We find evidence that distaste for large corporations increases opposition to climate action among people exposed to the idea that big companies can more easily navigate climate regulations than small companies. This work contributes to the literature on moral political economy and on the enduring difficulty of enacting effective climate change regulation within the United States.

The Cox duration model serves as the basis for more complex duration models like competing risks, repeated events, and multistate models. These models make a number of assumptions, many of which can be assessed empirically, sometimes for substantive ends. We use Monte Carlo simulations to show the order in which practitioners assess these assumptions can impact the model’s final specification, and ultimately, can produce misleading inferences. We focus on three assumptions regarding model specification decisions: proportional hazards (PH), stratified baseline hazards, and stratum-specific covariate effects. Our results suggest checking the PH assumption before checking for stratum-specific covariate effects tends to produce the correct final specification most frequently. We reexamine a recent study of the timing of GATT/WTO applications to illustrate our points.

There are two prominent but seemingly contradictory symbols of how Asians are racialized domestically within the United States: “yellow peril” and “model minority.” How do these two racial tropes relate to each other? What effects do they have on the formation of support for race-targeted public policy? In this paper, we propose and empirically test that racialized resentment toward Asian Americans and the congratulatory framing of them as a model minority are both salient in the minds of the American public, reflecting the complexity of prejudices toward Asians in American society. Utilizing two original survey-based measures of anti-Asian resentment and the model minority stereotype, we empirically demonstrate the interconnection between the two racial tropes and highlight the key demographic and dispositional correlates of these multi-faceted contemporary racial attitudes toward Asian Americans. We then show that the two racial tropes, both independently and by interacting with each other, significantly shape racial public policy preferences in the United States.

Can observing opposing partisans engage in dialogue depolarize Americans at scale? Partisan animosity poses a challenge to democracy in the United States. Direct intergroup contact interventions have shown promise in reducing partisan polarization, but are costly, time-consuming, and sensitive to subtle changes in implementation. Vicarious intergroup contact—observing co-partisans engage with outparty members—offers a possible solution to the drawbacks of direct contact, and could potentially depolarize Americans quickly and at scale. We test this proposition using a pre-registered, placebo-controlled trial with a nationally representative sample of Americans. Using both attitudinal and behavioral measures, we find that a 50-minute documentary showing an intergroup contact workshop reduces polarization and increases interest but not investment in depolarization activities. While we find no evidence that the film mitigates anti-democratic attitudes, it does increase optimism about the survival of democratic institutions. Our findings suggest that vicarious intergroup contact delivered via mass media can be an effective, inexpensive, and scalable way to promote depolarization among Americans.

In survey experiments, should all covariates be administered before the experimental treatment? Some scholars argue that post-treatment items should never be used as covariates because the treatment could bias the measurement of those items and disrupt experimental randomization. Other scholars argue certain items—specifically sensitive questions measuring prejudice—should not be administered pre-treatment. They argue if asked pre-treatment, these items may prime respondents in ways that will influence how they engage with the experiment treatment, thereby affecting the overall outcome of the experiment. Using evidence from four studies (two original collections) that vary the placement of sensitive items—pre-treatment, post-treatment, or in a separate wave—we find little evidence that the placement of sensitive items influences the measurement of those items, the experimental outcomes, nor heterogeneously affects the outcome conditional on the treatment. However, we find the placement of sensitive items inconsistently affects the experimental outcome by interacting with both the measurement of the items and the experimental treatment condition. Overall, we find these measures to be robust to where they are administered. It may be best to place items pre-treatment to preserve randomization. If researchers have reason to include sensitive moderators post-treatment, they should transparently discuss this choice and the anticipated trade-offs.