I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, December 11, 2024 using the Crossref API. For the period December 04 to December 10, I found 19 new paper(s) in 11 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Race, shaming, and international human rights
ZoltĂĄn I. BĂșzĂĄs, Lotem Bassan‐Nygate
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Can human rights organizations (HROs) shame governments without fueling racism against diasporas or appearing racist? To what extent can shamed governments recover public support lost to shaming by accusing their critics of racism? Employing two U.S.‐based survey experiments involving 6,739 respondents and 11 prominent HRO interviews, we offer three novel findings. First, shaming decreased support for shamed countries (Israel and China) but did not fuel racism (antisemitism and anti‐Asianism). If shamers face a racial dilemma, it is less about how to shame without fueling racism and more about how to shame without appearing racist. Our second finding points toward a solution: when shaming included an anti‐racist cue denouncing racism, respondents perceived it as less racist. Finally, shamed governments can employ racial countershaming to recover some, but not all, of the public support lost to shaming. We contribute to the international relations shaming literature and offer recommendations about racially responsible shaming.
Geographies of discontent: Public service deprivation and the rise of the far right in Italy
Simone Cremaschi, Paula Rettl, Marco Cappelluti, Catherine E. De Vries
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Electoral support for far‐right parties is often linked to geographies of discontent. We argue that public service deprivation, defined as reduced access to public services, plays an important role in explaining these patterns. By exploiting an Italian reform that reduced access to public services in municipalities with fewer than 5,000 residents, we show that far‐right support in national elections increased in municipalities affected by the reform compared to unaffected ones. We use geo‐coded individual‐level survey data and party rhetoric data to explore the mechanisms underlying this result. Our findings suggest that concerns about immigration are exacerbated by the reform, and that far‐right parties increasingly linked public services to immigration in their rhetoric after the reform. These demand and supply dynamics help us understand how public service deprivation shapes geographic patterns in far‐right support.

American Political Science Review

Representation at Risk: Evaluating Levels and Consequences of Violence against Immigrant-Background Politicians
SANDRA HÅKANSSON, NAZITA LAJEVARDI
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Politicians are increasingly subjected to violence, both online and offline. Recent studies highlight a gendered pattern to this violence. But, as societies diversify and minorities increasingly hold political office, we have yet to assess whether members of these groups face disproportionate levels of violence. Our research investigates levels and types of violence against immigrant background politicians in Sweden, where over one-third is either foreign-born or has a foreign-born parent, using a unique three-wave survey ( $ N=23,000 $ ) on Swedish elected officials. Across every form of violence examined, politicians with immigrant backgrounds report experiencing significantly more physical and psychological violence than their counterparts. These experiences are not without political consequence: immigrant background politicians, and among them especially women, are significantly more likely than their counterparts to consider exiting politics due to harassment. Together, these findings suggest that violence may be driving this already underrepresented group of immigrant background politicians out of office.
Gendered Perceptions and the Costs of Political Toxicity: Experimental Evidence from Politicians and Citizens in Four Democracies
GREGORY EADY, ANNE RASMUSSEN
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Politicians frequently face toxic behaviors. We argue that these behaviors impose a double burden on women, who may not only face higher exposure to toxicity, but experience attacks that they and others understand to be motivated by prejudice and designed to push them out of office. Using large-scale image-based conjoint experiments in the United States, Denmark, Belgium, and Chile, we demonstrate that both politicians themselves and citizens regard messages targeting women politicians as more toxic than otherwise equivalent messages targeting men. This perception intensifies when messages mention gender or come from perpetrators who are men. A second experiment to investigate the mechanisms shows that hostile behaviors toward women are more frequently understood as driven by prejudice and attempts to remove women from politics. These findings highlight the importance of understanding how perceptions of perpetrators’ motives affect the severity of political toxicity, and provide insights into the gendered effects of political hostility.

British Journal of Political Science

Party Positioning Under Populist State Leaders
Marcel Garz, Tanmay Singh
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The implications of rising parliamentary representation of populist parties have been thoroughly studied but little is known about the impact of populist state leaders on party positions. In this article, we study mainstream parties' strategic responses when a populist takes over as the leader of a nation. We use content-analytical data and large language modelling to measure positions expressed in manifestos from parties from 51 democracies between 1989 and 2018. Employing methods for causal inference from observational data, we find that right-wing populist state leaders induce mainstream parties to differentiate their positions on multiculturalism, possibly leading to polarization of the party system. Under left-wing populist leaders, mainstream parties adopt more homogenous or differentiated positions, depending on the policy category and other contextual factors. Parties are generally more responsive in emerging than advanced countries and in presidential than parliamentary systems.

European Journal of Political Research

How do masses react to party polarization? Limited effect of party polarization on mass polarization
SEMIH ÇAKıR
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Elite ideological polarization is rising in Western democracies. Is this elite ideological polarization associated with mass ideological polarization? I argue that when a party adopts a more extreme position, the masses polarize via two mechanisms. In‐partisans should follow the party and adopt a more extreme ideological stance while out‐partisans should backlash and move in the opposite direction. To test these expectations, I exploit a real‐world sudden party polarization when the Labour Party of the United Kingdom suddenly shifted to the left under new leadership. Using British Election Study Internet Panel data, I find limited evidence that elite polarization leads to mass polarization. Overall, neither in‐partisans followed the party, nor out‐partisans backlashed to it. Only ideologically out‐of‐touch in‐partisans adjusted their ideological stance to match their party, indicating the effectiveness of partisan cues, nonetheless. These findings provide insight into how the masses react to increasing party polarization, alleviating pundits' concerns that the masses are blind followers and bound to polarize if political parties polarize.

Party Politics

Populism and democratic attitudes: Comparing populist and non-populist candidates’ views on democracy and its alternatives
JoĂŁo Gaio e Silva, Marco Lisi
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The rise of new populist parties has raised concerns for representative political systems and the quality of democracies, by challenging the liberal checks and balances in the name of the ‘general will’. Empirical research has found that populist voters tend to be more dissatisfied with democracy and supportive of direct procedures, while feelings of misrepresentation increase the display of populist attitudes. However, it remains unclear whether this also applies to candidates. This study investigates the differences in democratic attitudes of candidates from populist and non-populist parties, relying on data from the Comparative Candidates Survey. It explores the factors that account for diverging attitudes, particularly regarding party- and individual-level mechanisms. Results suggest that populist candidates tend to reveal lower levels of democratic satisfaction and more negative attitudes towards elections, as well as stronger preferences for direct procedures. These findings have significant implications for both populist studies and the field of political representation.
Do new participatory rights attract more party members? Evidence from Germany
Javier MartĂ­nez-CantĂł
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Political parties in advanced democracies have slowly but steadily lost members over the last decades. In response to such decline, a common argument is that parties aim to revitalize their internal life by introducing new participatory mechanisms for rank-and-file members. Introducing party primaries or party plebiscites should increase the attractiveness of membership and thus attract new members in aggregate. Although this argument is commonly present in the literature, we need a systematic empirical comparison. To test this argument, this article exploits the federal structure of German political parties and the different timing in introducing new participatory rights. The results of a series of fixed effects regressions, using data from the CDU/CSU and SPD between 1980 and 2020, find that new primaries have an essentially null influence on membership levels while plebiscites appear to reduce the number of members leaving the party.
Creating new participatory linkages? Political parties and democratisation in Germany, Austria, and the UK
Felix Butzlaff
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A modernisation- and individualisation-induced loss of trust, membership, and voters has been addressed in party research for a while. However, social theory authors such as Beck, Bauman, Sennett, and Taylor have pointed to further organisational dilemmas that have not been addressed in depth: a. That demands for flexibility, individualisation and non-bindingness and demands for centralized political leadership might go hand in hand; b. That notwithstanding increasing individualisation citizens might demand new forms of social collectives and belonging. In this article, I compare how different established party families perceive these contradictions and seek to create new party-society linkages. Based on a series of qualitative in-depth interviews with Social Democratic and Conservative party functionaries, I emphasise that different party families and their reform attempts reflect individualisation, flexible and liquid identities differently and thus refashion the way citizens are linked with political parties and representative democracy.

Political Analysis

Improving Computer Vision Interpretability: Transparent Two-Level Classification for Complex Scenes
Stefan Scholz, Nils B. Weidmann, Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld, Eda Keremoğlu, Bastian GoldlĂŒcke
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Treating images as data has become increasingly popular in political science. While existing classifiers for images reach high levels of accuracy, it is difficult to systematically assess the visual features on which they base their classification. This paper presents a two-level classification method that addresses this transparency problem. At the first stage, an image segmenter detects the objects present in the image and a feature vector is created from those objects. In the second stage, this feature vector is used as input for standard machine learning classifiers to discriminate between images. We apply this method to a new dataset of more than 140,000 images to detect which ones display political protest. This analysis demonstrates three advantages to this paper’s approach. First, identifying objects in images improves transparency by providing human-understandable labels for the objects shown on an image. Second, knowing these objects enables analysis of which distinguish protest images from non-protest ones. Third, comparing the importance of objects across countries reveals how protest behavior varies. These insights are not available using conventional computer vision classifiers and provide new opportunities for comparative research.

Political Behavior

The Activation of Anti-Asian Attitudes on Vote Choice
Nathan Kar Ming Chan, Vivien Leung
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Political science research has assessed how racial attitudes influence political behavior. However, less is known about the political effects of anti-Asian views, even as anti-Asian sentiment resurfaced during the pandemic. We theorize that the linkage of COVID-19 to Asian Americans by political elites activated anti-Asian animosity and shaped vote choice during the 2020 election. Using cross-sectional over time and panel data from the American National Election Studies, we find that holding more anti-Asian attitudes was not associated with Republican vote choice between 2008–2016, including when Donald Trump first ran. However, anti-Asian views became strongly related to voting for Trump in 2020. Further panel analysis demonstrates evidence that anti-Asian views measured prior in 2016 increased the likelihood of vote switching to the Republican Party in 2020. We conclude by discussing the potentially persisting political effects of anti-Asian attitudes in an environment continuously characterized by anti-Asian hate and especially during future election cycles that may feature increasingly diverse candidates of Asian heritage, running for elective office across various levels of government—including for the presidency. This study contributes to research on how and when racial attitudes influence political behavior and suggests, again, the centrality of race and ethnicity in American Politics.

Political Geography

Ontological security as 'being-with': Indigenous sovereignty and securing against the colonial nation-state
Kate Botterill
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Three takes on Gulf cities and urban politics
Michael Ewers
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How do governments discursively reconcile plans for expanding oil and gas production with global climate goals? The cases of Colombia and Nigeria
Claudia Strambo, Daria Ivleva, Sophia Bachmann, Elisa Arond
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Political Psychology

Exploring the role of social openness for pro‐diversity attitudes in urban and rural places
Teresa Hummler, Conrad Ziller
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Neighborhoods are important spaces where people participate in social interactions, and existing research has demonstrated that the social and physical environment plays a pivotal role in shaping residents' social and political attitudes. This study investigates the influence of social openness in neighborhoods, defined as residents' perceptions of their co‐residents being open to change, on attitudes toward diversity. Building on existing research on rural–urban differences in socio‐political attitudes, we hypothesize that the link between social openness and pro‐diversity attitudes differs between rural and urban areas. Specifically, we argue that individuals who live in densely populated areas are more frequently exposed to cues of social openness compared to those who live in areas with low population density (even if the average social openness is equal for both). The study leverages data from two large‐N geocoded surveys in Germany to create contextual measures of social openness and assesses their relationship with pro‐diversity attitudes. Empirical results from multilevel models show that social openness is positively related to pro‐diversity attitudes but only in densely populated areas. Our results have important implications for place‐based approaches to immigrant integration and social cohesion more generally.
Engendering equality: Unraveling the influence of family cues on young men's attitudes toward women's rights
Sara Morell, Lauren Hahn, Mara Ostfeld
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What explains the gender gap in support for the protection and advancement of women's rights? We argue that because boys receive less and more delayed information outside the home about gender inequality than girls, the cues boys receive inside the home play an outsized role in their adult attitudes about women's rights. Using a large national survey, we demonstrate that men's attitudes toward women's rights are, in fact, more heavily influenced by the perceived attitudinal norms within their family than are women's. Through a follow‐up survey experiment with a national sample of U.S. teenagers, we explore this further and illustrate that one‐time statements from a single family member shift support for women's rights among young men, but not young women. Importantly, statements from other authority figures do not impact attitudes. Our findings highlight the gendered manner in which familial socialization shapes the gendered attitudes that frame women's lives.

Research & Politics

Gambling on the constitution: Abortion rights and the 2023 constitution-making process in Chile
Eduardo AlemĂĄn, Patricio Navia, Gabriel L. Negretto, Ezequiel GonzĂĄlez-Ocantos
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When submitted to popular ratification, new constitutions tend to be approved. Chilean voters, however, rejected the proposal put forward by the country’s Constitutional Council in 2023. This article examines the reasons for this outcome. Leveraging an original conjoint experiment exploring voter preferences across four policy areas, we demonstrate that most voters disfavored a proposed clause protecting unborn life, which would have likely restricted access to abortion. Despite general support for other provisions in the draft, opposition to the abortion clause proved pivotal. Our analysis underscores the risks of partisan constitutional proposals dependent on the median voter for approval and highlights the importance of abortion as a mobilizing issue in contemporary democracies. The study also suggests that right-wing drafters miscalculated voter support, even as moderate members attempted to amend the controversial clause, showcasing the limitations of compromise-inducing rules when one ideological bloc controls the drafting process.

The Journal of Politics

Consuming Cross-Cutting Media Causes Learning and Moderates Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers
David E. Broockman, Joshua L. Kalla
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The Road to Reelection Is Paved with Good Intentions: Experiments on the Role of Outcomes and Intentions in Voting Behavior
Talbot M. Andrews, Scott E. Bokemper
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