What democratic institutions and practices do citizens prioritize, and how responsive are their preferences to competing concerns such as economic and physical security? We explore this through a conjoint experiment with over 35,000 respondents across thirty-two countries – spanning democracies and autocracies – who evaluate hypothetical countries varying in democratic features, cultural characteristics, economic prosperity, and physical security. Our findings reveal that citizens consistently prioritize free and fair elections, highlighting their salience as a core democratic value. However, executive constraints appear less central to citizens’ preferences, especially when set against the promise of economic prosperity. These patterns hold across a wide range of national and individual contexts. The results suggest that while elections remain symbolically and substantively important, many citizens are responsive to appeals that frame strong, unconstrained leadership as a pathway to economic prosperity – an emphasis often seen in electoral authoritarian regimes.

How does tax regressivity at the top affect public support for taxation? In this article, we run an information provision experiment in the United States with a quota-representative sample of around 4,000 people and randomly present respondents with factual information about total tax rates by income group. We find that informing respondents that the superrich pay lower total tax rates than other people not only increases support for raising taxes on the rich but also lowers support for taxing the middle class. Our results highlight an important hidden cost of tax regressivity at the top: if left unaddressed, it risks undermining public support for broad-based taxation.

Do perceived foreign policy failures shape assessments of a country’s leadership in the eyes of international observers? We explore the consequences of foreign policy failures using global reactions to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some argue that a poorly executed withdrawal heightened concerns about America’s soft power and image abroad. Others believe that the negative consequences of the withdrawal were exaggerated. To adjudicate between these claims, we compile public opinion surveys across 24 countries containing over 17,000 respondents. Analyzing perceptions of US leadership before and after the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021, we find that the Afghanistan withdrawal had a substantive negative impact on global perceptions of US leadership. However, we observe no corresponding evidence that the attractiveness of great powers is ‘zero-sum’: decreases in favorability towards the United States were not paralleled by increases in the perceived attractiveness of alternatives to US leadership like Russia and China.

Political representation is challenged by social acceleration, the rise of populism, and electoral volatility. Politicians’ need for prioritizing time and energy is acute and consequential for democracy. Voters’ preferences constitute one democratically relevant standard for guiding such priorities. However, current research mainly focuses on voters’ preferences for representatives’ personality traits or policy outcomes, which are hard for an individual politician to control. This study provides a conceptual framework for analyzing politicians’ task priority by separating functional legislative tasks from relational representative tasks, and employs this framework in surveys among Danish, German, UK, and US voters. Analyses of open-ended answers, time allocations, and conjoint experiments show that voters assign higher importance to functional tasks compared to relational tasks. The framework offers a new approach to studying political representation in practice, and the results provide guidance for how politicians should prioritize scarce resources for political representation in a high-speed, volatile political context.

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.

Legislative oversight is an important element of the relationship between parliament and government. However, little research explores how the characteristics of ministers incentivize MPs to oversee some more thoroughly than others. This article studies whether and why the oversight activities of parliamentarians are shaped by ministers’ gender. We argue that legislators control women ministers more tightly than men due to stereotypical competence ascriptions and perceptions of lower trustworthiness of women. Studying original data for five European democracies since 1990, we show that legislators ask more written and oral questions to women compared to men ministers. Moreover, we underpin the causal mechanisms behind this pattern using semi-structured interviews with thirty-two parliamentarians inquiring about a specific replacement in that country. Revealing gender bias in legislative oversight has broader implications for women in government and parliamentary democracies.

Successful coordination around a Duvergerian equilibrium requires accurate and consistent information about parties’ expected electoral support. In practice, such information is often unreliable and rarely available at the local level, thus hindering voters’ coordination. In this paper, we leverage Argentina’s Open, Mandatory, and Simultaneous Primary Elections as a large-scale survey of voter preferences. Using data from 135 municipalities in the province of Buenos Aires (2011–23), we show that a narrower margin between the top-two placed parties in the primary increases both turnout and the proportion of positive votes in the general election, while decreasing electoral fragmentation. We further show that the second-placed party in the primary is substantially more likely to win the election than the third-placed one. Also consistent with theory, these effects are more pronounced (a) in concurrent elections; (b) in smaller municipalities; and (c) when the second-placed party is closer to the first-placed one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As the number of immigrants into middle-income countries continues to rise, so do concerns about host nations’ increasing anti-immigration responses. Existing studies in high-income countries present promising pathways to promote immigrant inclusion. In particular, exposing host-nation members to immigrant personal narratives increases positive feelings towards immigrants and support for inclusionary policies. We assess whether, in a middle-income country where immigration’s economic impact is salient to host-nation members, immigrant narratives need to address this impact so that they can influence attitudes. Meta-analysis estimates from three survey experiments in Colombia conducted between 2021 and 2023 suggest that narrative-based interventions need not engage with economic concerns to promote positive affect towards immigrants, but when they address economic concerns they can also increase support for open immigration policies. Given that these narratives also reduce economic concerns, we find that the conditions for inclusionary interventions to be most effective are nuanced in middle-income migrant destinations.

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.

Electoral integrity has come under increasing pressure in the United States. Evidence shows that voters rarely ‘punish’ anti-democratic behavior if doing so implies voting for opponents. However, such electoral defection sets a high bar for detecting voter alienation. Here, I complement the analysis of partisans’ willingness to forego democracy’s rules with a more pliable measure of support: partisan attachments. Three preregistered survey experiments offer a nuanced picture of partisans’ tolerance for electoral subversion. On the one hand, few partisans will defend democracy by voting against their party. On the other hand, electoral violations alienate the party base and can even reduce animosity towards the opposing party, indicating that parties cannot undermine elections with impunity. Finally, the evidence suggests that partisans mainly update partisan attachments when the information is sponsored by a co-partisan source, indicating that credible linkage institutions may play a crucial role in shaping accountability.

Political philosophers writing about civil disobedience have tended to neglect the anxiety of the state about such disobedience. I identify three components of state anxiety – Contagion, Fragility, Value – concerning the contagiousness of disobedience, and the fragility and value of public institutions. I argue that state anxiety can be substantiated or specious, depending on the plausibility of Contagion and Fragility. It can also be significant or trivial, depending on the plausibility of Value. Finally, and focusing on John Rawls’ influential discussions of civil disobedience, I show how political philosophizing can mirror state anxiety about disobedience and, in doing so, bolster it.

Disinformation poses a serious threat to democracy, yet regulating it risks infringing on freedom of speech. This article defends the democratic legitimacy of regulating disinformation by distinguishing it from two similar forms of speech: ‘false opinion’ and ‘toxic persuasion’. I argue that disinformation, as deliberate falsehoods intended to manipulate citizens’ political judgment, does not merit protection. Regulation, on this account, is normatively legitimate and desirable when it safeguards citizens’ ability to function as meaningful decision makers in the democratic common world. I then propose a dual-track model to identify removable content. Paired with regular review, transparency obligations, and an appeal process, this framework offers principles that help democracies to balance between protecting expressive freedom and resisting disinformation.

This article challenges the view that war and interdependence are inherently incompatible by examining how combatants manage collective institutions during conflict. Using the internet as a case of such an institution, we show that belligerents selectively preserve or disrupt mutual access based on battlefield conditions. Disruption is more likely during mobile offensives, which offer greater operational freedom, while static or constrained operations incentivize maintaining interdependence for co-ordination, intelligence, or deception. Drawing on geolocated data from internet outages in the Russia–Ukraine war (2022–3) and qualitative evidence from this conflict and the Armenia–Azerbaijan conflicts (2020, 2023), we find that the disruption likelihood declines as battlefield constraints increase. These findings reveal how interdependence can serve as a tactical asset rather than merely a casualty of war. This has important implications for understanding the relationship between institutions and conflict, as wartime strategies shape not only battlefield outcomes but also prospects for post-war peace building.

Business interests have often stymied progress on climate policy, raising the question of the source of business opposition to decarbonization policy. We bring intertemporal trade-offs into the study of business and climate change to build new theory on the relationship between firm ownership and policy opposition. Climate policy confronts companies with an intertemporal trade-off: incur costs today for gains in the future. Firms with short-term owners face pressure to maximize short-term profits, making them unable to undertake this trade-off. They therefore oppose climate policy. We test our argument using a dataset of US firms and an original firm-level measure of climate policy opposition. Firms most exposed to short-term capital oppose policy more than observably similar firms with long-term ownership. Our theory develops the microfoundations of long-term policy making. The greater an economy’s exposure to impatient capital, the more business opposition policy makers are likely to face in adopting long-term policies.

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.

It has long been argued that paying politicians higher salaries should help decrease corruption. However, the empirical evidence is mixed, partly due to the large variation in contexts, research designs, conceptual definitions and measures of corruption, and the predominance of case studies with potentially limited generalizability. To alleviate these challenges, we evaluate uniformly defined and validated corruption risk indicators from an original dataset of more than 2.4 million government contracts in eleven EU countries, covering more than half of the European Union population and gross domestic product. To aid causal identification, we exploit sizable changes in salaries of local politicians tied to population size across close to 100 discrete salary thresholds. Applying fixed effects estimators, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we consistently find that better-paid local politicians (by about 15 per cent on average) oversee less risky procurement contracts, by a third to one standard deviation on our measure of corruption risk.