In 2022, an anti-vaccine mandate protest in Canada received millions of dollars in support through online crowdfunding. This event catalyzed political crowdfunding in Canada by demonstrating its ability to disseminate ideological discourse and mobilize collective action. Given its newfound visibility and impact, this study examines the landscape of political crowdfunding in Canada. We examined 60 campaigns from the legal, current events and political categories on the crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo and classified campaigns into: COVID-19-related topics, alternative media and free speech, climate change skepticism, and other political campaigns. Thematic analysis of the interactive discourse between campaign hosts and donors revealed that many campaigns were motivated by defending individual rights and freedoms amidst perceived government overreach, which fuels a distrust towards authority, including the government and mainstream media. Our study suggests that political crowdfunding empowers individuals to symbolically reflect their political and ideological beliefs through financial donations.

This article analyses the fanghuiju 访惠聚 campaign as a core component of grassroots governance in Xinjiang. It traces its evolution from Mao-era mobilization practices to a systematized mechanism of authoritarian control in the Xi Jinping era. Moving beyond institutional and security-centric frameworks, the study situates fanghuiju as a regionally initiated, localized adaptation by the Xinjiang government and grassroots cadres that blends revolutionary traditions in China with contemporary innovations in surveillance, personalized datafication and ideological governance. Drawing on state media, policy documents and extensive analysis of work team literature, this paper argues that fanghuiju work teams represent a localized fusion of Maoist mobilization and Xi-era high-tech governance. They function as tools for grassroots surveillance, political indoctrination and socio-economic restructuring, marking a shift from episodic campaigns to permanent, embedded governance that blends top-down control with bottom-up engagement.

Past research alerts to the increasingly unpleasant climate surrounding public debate on social media. Female politicians, in particular, are reporting serious attacks targeted at them. Yet, research offers inconclusive insights regarding the gender gap in online incivility. This paper aims to address this gap by comparing politicians with varying levels of prominence and public status in different institutional contexts. Using a machine learning approach for analyzing over 23 million tweets addressed to politicians in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we find little consistent evidence of a gender gap in the proportion of incivility. However, more prominent politicians are considerably and consistently more likely than others to receive uncivil attacks. While prominence influences US male and female politicians’ probability to receive uncivil tweets the same way, women in our European sample receive incivility regardless of their status. Most importantly, the incivility varies in quality and across contexts, with women, especially in more plurality contexts, receiving more identity-based attacks than other politicians.

Political professionals and scholars maintain that raising money early in the election season is critical to a successful campaign, having downstream consequences on a candidate’s future fundraising potential, the stiffness of competition she will face, and her likelihood of electoral victory. In spite of early money’s perceived importance, there is no common operationalization for money as “early.” Moreover, existing measures often fail to reflect definitional aspects of early money. In this paper, we first lay out a theoretical framework regarding the utility of early campaign fundraising for candidates. We argue that early fundraising can be expressed as two conceptually distinct quantities of interest centered on either a candidate’s own fundraising performance (candidate-centered) or her fundraising performance relative to her electoral competitors (election-centered). We next lay out steps for operationalizing candidate- and election-centered measures of early fundraising. Lastly, we demonstrate that both our proposed measures for early campaign fundraising are predictive of a candidate’s future fundraising and electoral success. By putting forward a set of best practices for early money measurement and, additionally, producing off-the-shelf measures for early fundraising in U.S. House elections, we fill an important gap in scholarly research on the measurement of money in politics.

Are political activists driven by instrumental motives such as making a career in politics or mobilizing voters? We implement two natural field experiments in which party activists are randomly informed that canvassing is i) effective at mobilizing voters, or ii) effective for enhancing activists’ political careers. We find no effect of the treatments on activists’ intended and actual canvassing behaviour. The null finding holds despite a successful manipulation check and replication study, high statistical power, a natural field setting, and an unobtrusive measurement strategy. Using an expert survey, we show that the null finding shifted Bayesian posterior beliefs about the treatment’s effectiveness toward zero. The evidence thus casts doubt on two popular hypothesized instrumental drivers of political activism – voter persuasion and career concerns – and points toward expressive benefits as more plausible motives.

We analyze how new technologies can be used to foster individual engagement that limits deliberation and reduces people’s capacity for political action within parties. We present the results of an analysis of the case of the Argentinean Propuesta Republicana (PRO). Using data from in-depth interviews with key actors—party elites and political consultants—we show that new technologies helped to mobilize almost 1 million volunteers in presidential elections, without transforming them into party stakeholders. This incorporation, though successful for organization and mobilization, reinforced the existing distribution of power within the party, by activating new adherents without engaging them in a collective organizational structure.

Changing human behaviours is a key facet of addressing global environmental issues. There are many factors (i.e. determinants) that could influence whether an individual engages in pro-environmental behaviour, and understanding these determinants can improve efforts to protect and restore the natural environment. However, despite published criticism of poor survey design, there is little practical guidance on how to capture these determinants accurately in closed-answer surveys (those with predefined answer options). A recent literature review summarized behavioural determinants of pro-environmental behaviour. We build on this by providing practical insights into how 17 key pro-environmental behavioural determinants can be measured through closed-answer surveys. We reviewed 177 papers published during 2013–2023 that met the criteria for inclusion. These papers captured 624 measurements of the 17 determinants. We found seven types of question formats used, including scales (Likert scales, semantic scales and a pictorial scale), multiple-choice questions (where respondents could select either one or more answer options), binary questions and ranking questions. We then synthesized design considerations both specifically for each format and more broadly across surveys. These considerations included using validated measures, reducing cognitive burden and biases (e.g. social desirability bias, order effects, recall bias), selecting the question format (e.g. different formats of multiple-choice or binary questions) and using best practices for scale questions. The insights collected through this review provide practical advice for developing closed-answer surveys that robustly and usefully measure key determinants of pro-environmental behaviour.

Does gender influence how candidates in the United States present their prior political experience to voters? Messaging one’s experience might demonstrate a history of power-seeking behavior, a gender role violation for women under traditional norms. As a result, men should be more likely to make experience-based appeals than women candidates. For evidence, we analyze the contents of 1,030 televised advertisements from 2018 state legislative candidates from the Wesleyan Media Project. We find that ads sponsored by experienced men are significantly more likely to highlight experience than ads sponsored by experienced women. However, we find that women’s and men’s ads are roughly equally likely to discuss work experience, suggesting that men’s greater emphasis on experience is limited to prior officeholding. The results contribute to our understanding of gender dynamics in political campaigns, the information available to voters, and how advertising shapes the criteria voters use to assess candidates.

In recent decades, Canada and other democracies have experienced a significant rise in migrant settlement. This has sparked much interest among scholars and policy makers in the forces that encourage or impede the political incorporation of newcomers. In this research note, we consider a factor that has received relatively little scrutiny, the impact of immigrants’ attention to native-country politics on willingness to participate in residential-country elections and affiliate with a political party in that country. We examine this through an original survey of Americans in Canada conducted during the 2020 US election cycle. A randomized experiment demonstrates that directing the attention of American emigrants to US campaigns can lower interest in Canadian elections and weaken attachments to a Canadian political party, particularly for those who are less integrated into Canadian society. These findings point to a potential tension between political engagement as an emigrant versus as an immigrant.

Canadian election campaigns often see a proliferation of political signs at the start of an election, but are they worth the effort? We examined official results at the poll level (N = 785) from elections agencies and the quantities of household signs recorded in internal political party databases (Green Parties of Canada, Manitoba, and Ontario). Overall, the results suggest that the use of household signs is an effective form of political campaigning in Canada for nongoverning parties. Analyses suggest that every sign placed per 100 registered electors is associated with an increase of 0.5–1.5 per cent vote share. The presence of household signs was associated with an increase of 1.5–3.4 per cent vote share. Further, preliminary evidence also suggests a possible diminishing returns trend: the per-sign rate of increase in vote share may slow down at higher densities. We discuss the implications of the results, including the possible curvilinear trend.

The Internet has spawned a renewed hope for facilitating increased access to candidate information for voters. However, the nationalization and polarization of constituents have left many candidates averse to the risks of personalized campaigns, especially in subnational elections. Under what conditions are state candidates willing to establish a personalized web presence as opposed to relying on partisanship? This study introduces a novel dataset of campaign website presence for the 2018 and 2020 state legislative elections. During this time, approximately one-third of state legislative candidates opted to forgo a personalized campaign website. District-level constituent ideology was significantly correlated with the website use, even when controlling for district education, income, age, and race, and the candidate’s competitive position. District ideological homogeneity encouraged website use across both parties, while adversarial district ideology corresponded to low website use among Republicans. The results indicate that state legislative candidates, especially Republican candidates, are far more likely to preach to their partisan choir rather than incur the risks of proselytizing among their partisan opposition. The results reiterate the divergent responses of the political parties regarding partisan polarization and shed light on the impact of nationalization within state legislative campaigns.