Elite cues signal citizens how to interpret political events through a partisan lens. Do these effects occur in real time? We exploit President Trump’s unexpected announcement of US military strikes against Iran during a nationally representative survey to estimate the causal effect of elite cues on public opinion. Leveraging minute-level variation in exposure, we find that partisan divergence emerges almost immediately: support for military intervention increases among Republicans but declines among Democrats. These large effects remain robust across 28,672 model specifications and 57,344 partisan-specific treatment effects. Our quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that elite cues can polarize public opinion within minutes, even before media framing and partisan commentary have diffused, highlighting the speed of partisan opinion formation and its implications for democratic accountability.

Black women have long anchored Black political cohesion, yet little explains why a gender gap persists within a group marked by strong Democratic loyalty. Drawing on historical and sociological work, we argue that Black women’s collective-first orientation—shaped by gendered social roles across enslavement, Jim Crow, and modern civic life—heightens the political significance of the antecedents of Black Democratic partisanship: racial identity salience, perceived discrimination, and racially homogenous social networks. Using an original national survey of 4,200 Black Americans, we find that the partisan gender gap widens because the composition of their social networks more strongly shapes Black women’s political preferences. Accounting for racial identity salience and perceived discrimination substantially reduces the gender gap. These findings illuminate how racialized gender roles structure the pathways through which group-based norms translate into partisan behavior, providing a mechanism for intragroup variation and guiding more nuanced strategies for political engagement and mobilization.

Why do citizens with similar partisan attachments differ in how sharply they affectively differentiate between their party and its rival? This study examines whether right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) help explain variation in affective polarization in South Korea. Building on political science research on partisan identity and ideological conflict, it argues that these orientations condition how citizens experience partisan competition across group lines. Using survey data from South Korea’s 2022 presidential election and 2024 legislative election, the analysis shows that higher RWA is associated with greater affective polarization among conservative partisans, whereas higher SDO is associated with lower affective polarization among liberal partisans. These relationships persist after accounting for partisan identity and ideological distance. The findings suggest that affective polarization is shaped not only by partisan alignment but also by individual-level orientations towards authority, threat, and hierarchy.

Categorizing people into groups is a fundamentally human trait, but we know very little about how people assign political identities to strangers. Across two innovative survey experiments, we consider how people politically categorize others according to a single source of information: faces. We find that displays of emotions, particularly negative emotions, predict the political sorting of strangers. Faces featuring negative emotions are categorized as out-partisans, whereas faces exhibiting happiness are categorized as co-partisans.

Scholarly interest in the evaluation of atheist candidates for office has been growing. In the aggregate, atheists are a political pariah. However, aggregate effects conceal a wide partisan gulf, with Democrats more open and Republicans more averse to atheist candidates for office. Less is known about biases that nonreligious candidates with less stridently secular views might encounter in political evaluation. Focusing on broadly conceptualized nonreligion, I make several contributions to the literature: 1) I partially replicate the findings on the links between nonreligion and political appraisal using a conjoint experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey; 2) I assess the relative importance of nonreligion and other factors that influence candidate appraisal; 3) I investigate how partisanship and religiosity interact to affect receptivity to candidate nonreligion; and 4) I examine how age and religiosity interact to influence Democrats’ and Republicans’ openness to candidate nonreligion.

Non-trivial shares of people of color (PoC) have long identified as Republicans, and many of them helped cement Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election. How durable was this shift toward the political right among some PoC? We test two claims in this brief research note. First, consistent with polarization literature, we claim that partisanship primed three conservative postures among Republican PoC during the 2024 campaign: authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and system justification. Second, aligning with work on expressive survey responses, we argue that these postures faded significantly once Trump’s agenda produced visibly harmful consequences for PoC (e.g., deportation raids; weakened civil rights). Leveraging a three-wave panel of Black, Latino, and Asian adults (N = 3,626), our pre-registered analyses indicate Republican partisanship in June 2024 heightened authoritarianism, social dominance, and system justification among Black, Latino, and Asian adults in December 2024. These patterns were fleeting, with partisanship’s impact on these postures withering by July 2025. We find scattered evidence that these postures intensified PoC’s Republican partisanship during this period, implying our results reflect campaign effects rather than an unerring endorsement of these right-wing inclinations among Republican PoC.

Within-person changes in racial attitudes influence presidential vote switching in the United States, but not all forms of racial attitude change are equally consequential. An analysis of a three-wave panel of American National Election Studies respondents from 2016, 2020, and 2024 contrasts two types of racial attitude change: perceptions of discrimination against Black Americans and relative racial affect (the difference in warmth toward white versus Black Americans). First, difference and fixed-effects models, which leverage within-person variation, reveal that decreases in perceived discrimination predict movement toward the Republican presidential candidate and shifts in relative racial affect show no association with vote choice. Reverse causality tests reinforce a directional effect from attitudinal change to vote change. There is minimal evidence that those who switched from voting for a Democrat to a Republican shift their racial attitudes in response. These findings demonstrate that dynamic grievance about racial injustice is a key driver of partisan realignment, highlighting that cognitive assessments of discrimination, rather than general racial affect, are central to understanding changes in electoral behavior.

We possess a limited understanding of Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and political attitudes. Previous research has mainly focused on explaining Indigenous electoral abstention and has faced constraints, mainly because of small sample sizes. Drawing on data from both the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, which encompass an unprecedented number of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis respondents, we explore Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and attitudes toward public spending at the federal level in Canada. We show that while Indigenous respondents remain more likely to consider abstention, they can also be more supportive of third parties than their non-Indigenous counterparts and adopt views spanning the traditional left–right ideological spectrum. These findings encourage a redefinition of the expectations regarding the political behaviors and attitudes of Indigenous Peoples in order to fully engage with diverse political cultures.

We hypothesize that the public assesses U.S. Supreme Court nominees in light of the contemporaneous Court’s partisan composition. In a preregistered conjoint experiment (n = 9,895), we find that Democrats and Republicans weigh nominee partisanship more heavily when their party is losing the Court and less heavily when their party already enjoys a secure majority. Consistent with affective polarization and threat-based political psychology, however, they care just as much about partisanship when the Court is split as when the other party enjoys a strong majority – even though the new Justice would swing the Court only in the former scenario.

The Speaker of Parliament is potentially a highly influential actor in parliamentary politics. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how they make decisions. In many parliaments, they, for instance, choose who gets to speak in question time. By examining a unique data set from the Netherlands, which lists all proposed oral questions and which ones were selected to be asked in parliament, this paper examines the considerations of the Speaker when selecting questions. This gives a unique insight into their considerations in general. Our central question is as follows: under what conditions are Speakers more likely to select an oral question? We look at the following three options: the neutral arbiter that seeks to treat all parties fairly; the partisan Speaker who defends the interests of their own party; and the asset of the coalition that protects the unity of the governing coalition. Our analyses indicate that Speakers are more likely to block questions that would drive a wedge in the coalition and are more likely to accept questions that meet established norms of urgency and importance.

Previous studies indicate that in the United States, the effects of climate change disproportionately impact communities of color. Accordingly, we would expect racial/ethnic minorities to express greater concern over the environment than white Americans. However, racial/ethnic minorities are not monolithic. Therefore, we examine how intersectional identities within racial groups by partisanship and gender shape attitudes on the environment using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey and the Climate Change in the American Mind (cross-sectional study 2008-2022). Our findings indicate that racial/ethnic minorities are more supportive of policies to combat climate change and are more likely to believe in climate change than white Americans. Latine and Asian American/Pacific Islanders also exhibit higher levels of anxiety about climate change compared to white Americans. In terms of intersectional identities, we find consistent partisan differences for Latine and White individuals, whereas gender and racial identity are inconsistent.