The Constitutional Court’s decision to invalidate the presidential round of elections, organized in December 2024, deeply divided Romanian society and led to the country being downgraded to the status of a hybrid regime characterized by high volatility, high polarization, and the rise of far-right parties. Nicușor-Daniel Dan, the pro-European Mayor of Bucharest, won the presidential elections of May 2025, while the cabinet of Ilie-Gavril Bolojan adopted policies to avoid economic collapse in the summer. However, the structural problems that led to the rise of far-right parties remain unaddressed, whereas the economic austerity measures and the continued hold on power of corrupt politicians could lead to more public dissatisfaction.

This study investigates how parties adjust their offensive communication when facing the strategic dilemma of unowned issues becoming salient. Using party press releases from the two major South Korean parties across the 18th–20th presidential elections, it measures offensiveness with a KcELECTRA model fine-tuned on the Korean Offensive Language Dataset and constructs two outcomes, Aggregate Offensiveness and Offensive Intensity, by issue and day. The analysis reveals that parties generally escalate offensive communication as issue salience rises. Crucially, a significant interaction effect indicates that parties sharply intensify offensiveness specifically when unowned issues become salient. However, this strategic response varied during the 19th election following the presidential impeachment. The findings suggest that offensive communication is a strategic response to unfavourable issue competition environments, and the study demonstrates how deep-learning-based text analysis can quantify offensiveness in party communication.

While studies based on the civic voluntarism model generally suggest that stronger party identification increases electoral participation, other studies report mixed findings on the relationship between partisan strength and voter turnout. This study argues that the participatory effect of party identification depends on whether voters’ partisan identity is consistent with the party affiliation of their preferred candidate. Drawing on conflicted voter theory, we argue that when voters identify with one party but prefer a candidate nominated by another party, the psychological costs generated by betrayal aversion reduce their likelihood of voting. Using pooled survey data from the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) for Taiwan’s presidential elections from 2008 to 2024, our binary logistic regression results support this argument. This study contributes to the literature by showing that conflicted voter status should be incorporated into future studies of voter turnout. It also suggests that political parties should pay closer attention to conflicted voters in closely contested elections, because turnout differences within a small segment of the electorate can have notable political consequences.

Why do women and men vote differently in presidential elections? Much research on gender and vote choice has focused on the United States and Western Europe, with less attention to the Global South. We develop a theory of sex gaps in presidential voting, which shows how ideology, feminism, and gendered personalities may help explain them. To test this, we designed and fielded surveys for presidential elections in Chile in 2021, Brazil in 2022, and Argentina in 2023. Results show that ideology and feminism largely explain men’s and women’s divergent votes for presidential candidates. Leftists, self-identified feminists, and respondents with more feminist attitudes were more likely to vote for Gabriel Boric instead of José Antonio Kast, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over Jair Bolsonaro, and Sergio Massa rather than Javier Milei. Unlike in the United States, Latin Americans’ gendered personalities do not seem to influence their vote choice.

In this paper, we explore the electoral consequences of the opioid epidemic in the United States, particularly its relationship with the Republican vote share in US presidential elections. We argue that the worsening opioid crisis is associated with a shift toward the Republican Party, and that these gains result from a decline in both Democratic support and voter abstention. We test these expectations using county-level presidential election results and individual-level data. The findings show that increasing overdose death rates are associated with an increase in Republican votes and a decline in Democratic votes and voter abstention. Additionally, the survey analyses reveal that this relationship is strongest among independents. Independents are also more likely to support stricter border security and higher spending on law enforcement as drug death rates increase. Our study contributes to the growing literature on the political consequences of the drug crisis in the US by demonstrating how overdose death rates are associated with voting behavior, and identifying which voters are most likely to change their vote in response to this worsening situation.

Richard Nixon won a narrow popular and electoral vote victory in 1968. This article investigates whether newspaper endorsements, which heavily favored Nixon, were pivotal in his victory. Utilizing the shift in endorsements between 1964 and 1968, we find a sizable endorsement effect. This estimated effect was large enough to be pivotal: eliminating Nixon’s endorsement advantage would have deprived him of an Electoral College victory, resulting in a contingent election. Alternatively, if newspapers had endorsed his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, at the same rates they endorsed Johnson in 1964, Humphrey would have won the Electoral College.

Political scientists have long been concerned that a popularly elected presidency may destabilize competitive party systems. We develop and test a new theory holding that the impact is more immediate and severe than previously assumed. Coexisting legislative and presidential coalitions first and foremost impede the evolution of predictable party interactions at the executive level, which is the domain of the cabinet. This quality has become accessible for comparative research thanks to the concept of party system closure. Using a new dataset for all European democracies since 1848, we show that presidential elections undermine party system closure in two ways: (1) by confounding patterns of government formation (notably under powerful presidencies) and (2) by disturbing electoral/legislative politics, which in turn affect executive politics. The former, direct effect emerges as dominant from a series of panel analyses and case illustrations. These findings have important implications for current problems of constitutional design and institutional reform.

The Brazilian military has recently executed an unexpected return to politics by engaging more actively in domestic policymaking and implementation both before and during the Bolsonaro government, thus jeopardising democratic consolidation. To help understand this development, we examine why the military openly challenges civilian authority over some issues, while remaining silent on others. Whereas prior work emphasises external factors like civilians’ threats to military prerogatives, we argue that contestation of civilian authority stems in no small part from internal military conflict over how to utilise power. The military uses contestation to coordinate prerogatives with civilians and to communicate within the armed forces to increase cohesion. We illustrate this argument with case studies of military contestation surrounding political leadership selection and internal security, using the Army Commander's discourse via Twitter posts and public statements, plus key informant interviews and military publications.

Research has shown that first-time voting experiences affect subsequent voting behavior, with salient elections boosting subsequent turnout and non-salient ones suppressing it. We challenge this view. Following research on the context-dependent nature of habit formation, we argue that all elections should affect subsequent turnout in elections of the same type. Comparing individuals that differ only in how salient their first eligible election was (Presidential or Midterm), we find support for this expectation. Individuals are more likely to vote for, and be interested in, elections of the same type as their first voting experience. Leveraging voting age laws in the US, we also show that such laws affect subsequent participation by changing the type of election individuals are first eligible for.

El objetivo de este estudio es analizar hasta qué punto los cibermedios han permeado el ejercicio electoral latinoamericano. Los casos de estudio se centran en las campañas políticas presidenciales de los candidatos que disputaron las elecciones de Colombia y México en el 2018, bajo la perspectiva de la comunicación transmedia que permite la expansión de un relato a través de diversas plataformas. Asimismo, se propone de manera innovadora un modelo de sistemas intermediales transmedia como una propuesta metodológica de comunicación en escenarios electorales propios del contexto de la llamada cultura de convergencia mediática. La hipótesis de partida asume que lo transmedia no se hace todavía patente en los mensajes políticos y electorales. La metodología se centra en los casos de estudio de los principales candidatos y el análisis de contenido de sus webs y redes sociales (Twitter, Facebook y YouTube). El resultado evidencia cómo el discurso político usado por los candidatos migró a las plataformas digitales, pero mantuvo la tipología propia de los medios tradicionales, desconociendo aún las posibilidades que ofrece el transmedia storytelling para incentivar la participación activa de los posibles electores en la producción de contenidos para la campaña.

Do messages that evoke a gendered leadership style affect attitudes toward well-known candidates? If so, among what sorts of voters? I show that voters’ evaluations of national politicians, including Hillary Clinton, can be influenced by presenting candidates as stereotypically masculine or feminine leaders. In two survey experiments of California registered voters (n = 1,800 each) conducted at the height of the 2016 presidential election campaign, I find that, on average, voters seemed to prefer both male and female politicians more when they were described as having feminine leadership styles. However, clear heterogeneous treatment effects occurred: Democrats, liberals, and women from all parties evaluated politicians more favorably when they were described as feminine; Republicans, conservatives, and voters for Donald Trump evaluated the same candidates less favorably when described as feminine. The findings have implications for scholarship that links gender stereotyping, partisanship, and ideology to voter behavior.

Until 2008, only White candidates represented either of the two major parties as presidential nominees. Hence, little is known about how race appeals are framed by or against non-White presidential candidates. Barack Obama's election as the Democratic Party nominee allows us to investigate this issue. In this article, we conduct a content analysis of over 160 advertisements from the 2008 U.S. presidential election to examine how race appeals were framed (or countered) by each campaign. We find that the Republican campaign employed implicit racial appeals that played upon stereotypes of non-Whites as “un-American” and “other” and Blacks as “dangerous,” “criminal,” “incompetent,” and “uppity.” In contrast, the Democratic campaign de-emphasized race, portrayed “other” as positive, reinforced American identity, and spoke out against negative advertisements.