I draw together theories of partisan polarization and motivated reasoning, which suggest that partisanship shapes information processing, and theories of accountability, which argue voters hold elected officials accountable through promise fulfillment. Here, I ask how partisanship influences voter understanding of promise fulfillment and accountability and if voters assess promises through a partisan lens. Two original survey experiments test how respondents react to promise fulfillment on the issues of immigration and human trafficking. I demonstrate that co-partisans differentiate between kept and broken promises, but out-partisans do not. Despite partisan differences, respondents evaluate promise-keeping when asked about accountability but not when asked about approval. Thus, even when voters recognize broken promises, accountability is influenced by partisanship. Immigration, a more polarized issue, is more likely to prime a partisan response than human trafficking, a less polarized issue. Future work must account for partisanship in accountability and what this means for our understanding of fundamental democratic principles.

Do corrupt officials govern differently in elected office? This article develops a theoretical framework and analyzes new data from financial disclosures to estimate the governing costs of corruption. First, I uncover substantial hidden wealth held by roughly one quarter of the legislators in the Russian Duma; these “kompromat deputies” are vulnerable to damaging information being used against them by the regime. Analyzing their behavior in office, I find that these deputies are less active and more absent members of parliament. When called to vote, kompromat deputies from the opposition also more eagerly support the regime’s political agenda. Finally, kompromat deputies are less likely to win reelection, suggesting that they have shorter time horizons as well as that parties have incentives to rotate them out. Autocrats permit and then monitor corruption in order to co-opt potential challengers, who in turn trade loyalty to the regime in exchange for opportunities to self-enrich.

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.

Regularization can improve statistical estimates made with highly correlated data. However, any regularization procedure embeds assumptions about the data generating process that can have counterintuitive consequences when those assumptions are untenable. We show that rather than simply shrinking estimates, regularization can reopen backdoor causal paths, inflating the estimates of some effects, and in the wrong circumstances, even reversing their direction. Recently, Cavari and Freedman (2023), argued that declining cooperation rates in surveys have inflated measures of mass polarization. We show that this finding is driven by large penalty terms in their regularized regressions, which leads to the estimates being confounded with time. Alternative methods do not show a clear positive or negative effect of declining cooperation on estimated levels of mass polarization.

The resurgence of industrial policymaking—particularly for emerging low-carbon industries—challenges social science theories that expect such interventions from centralized states or suggest that different kinds of states specialize in various forms of innovation policy. Interventionist forms of industrial policy have made a comeback among liberal economies. Coordinated economies now make use of market-driven strategies. This paper argues that the new generation of industrial strategies is shaped by the industrial development challenges that policymakers face at the sectoral level. It proposes a new theoretical framework that distinguishes between the policy orientation (targeted or open-ended) and the central agents driving financial and technological decision-making (governments or firms). We show that the choice of strategy is shaped by the level of uncertainty and the position of the domestic industry in global supply chains, that is, whether global supply chains are emerging or mature and whether the domestic industry is an entrant or incumbent.

The Vietnam Draft Lotteries, which randomly assigned men to military service, enable researchers to assess the long-term effects of interracial contact on racial attitudes. Using a new draft status indicator for respondents to the General Social Surveys 1978–2021, we show that white men who were selected for the draft subsequently expressed less negative attitudes toward Black people and toward policies designed to help them. These effects are apparent only for cohorts that were actually drafted into service, suggesting that interracial contact during military service led to attitude change. These findings have important implications for theories of political socialization and prejudice reduction.

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.

Social scientists often classify text documents to use the resulting labels as an outcome or a predictor in empirical research. Automated text classification has become a standard tool since it requires less human coding. However, scholars still need many human-labeled documents for training. To reduce labeling costs, we propose a new algorithm for text classification that combines a probabilistic model with active learning. The probabilistic model uses both labeled and unlabeled data, and active learning concentrates labeling efforts on difficult documents to classify. Our validation study shows that with few labeled data, the classification performance of our algorithm is comparable to state-of-the-art methods at a fraction of the computational cost. We replicate the results of two published articles with only a small fraction of the original labeled data used in those studies and provide open-source software to implement our method.

Although a master category of contemporary social and political thought, the conceptual import of colonialism has long been contested. Turning to the political thought of Jawaharlal Nehru, this article reconstructs the surprising, and often surreptitious, intellectual transformations that rendered colonialism into a generic name for European rule over Asia and Africa. It demonstrates how the dual claims of colonialism—a historical reference for the global event of European expansion and a threadbare analytical definition for a particular form of rule—generated a powerful framework in the anticolonial age. While the expanded juridical uses of colonialism in the Cold War era undermined its historical claims, the priority would reverse with its postcolonial re-signification as a shorthand for studying the paradoxes of global modernity. Reframing these debates, this article argues that reflexive navigation between the dual claims of colonialism is key to a capacious appreciation of its historical and normative contentions.

Migrant labor exploitation is widespread in developed countries, which host growing populations of undocumented migrants. While denouncing by migrants is essential to prosecute exploitative employers, an undocumented community actively hiding from the state is unlikely to whistleblow. I consider an intervention providing migrant farmworkers in Italy information and incentives to report on their racketeers. I leverage the staggered rollout of the intervention to study its effects in a difference-in-differences framework. The intervention empowered migrants to whistleblow, increased the prosecution of criminal organizations responsible for racketeering migrants, and raised awareness among natives, who became more favorable toward immigration and parties supporting it. These findings highlight the conditions under which undocumented migrants can take political action for their socioeconomic advancement. Unlike other integration policies which have been shown to backlash, highlighting migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation might foster solidarity and more liberal immigration attitudes among natives.

Plea bargaining figures heavily in criminal justice systems in the United States and, increasingly, around the globe. Conventional wisdom holds that plea bargaining generates efficiency gains for all parties, while sorting the guilty from the innocent. We build a series of formal models to consider the relationship between a defendant’s guilt and her likelihood of pleading guilty. In an inversion of the conventional wisdom, we show that under a range of empirically plausible scenarios—for example, if criminals are more risk-seeking than the wrongfully accused, or if prosecutors derive a career benefit from trial wins—the innocent are more likely than the guilty to plea bargain.

Stauffer (2021) shows that when Americans perceive their legislatures as having more gender diversity, they perceive these institutions to be more responsive. In this letter, we use an independently fielded survey to validate Stauffer’s findings and investigate whether her findings extend to race. We successfully replicate Stauffer’s analyses. We also newly demonstrate that perceptions of Black representation in legislatures are related to increased external efficacy, and perceptions of gender descriptive representation are associated with increased trust. Such findings underscore the importance of studying citizens’ perceptions of descriptive representation to understand their attitudes toward government.

Since Key and Allport, scholars have argued that racial context affects political behavior, with some finding out-group contact increases intergroup hostility and others showing the opposite. We argue that Americans exist in multiple racial contexts simultaneously that may overlap or conflict, helping to explain past discord. Using novel data, we document in-group embeddedness among the four largest U.S. ethnoracial groups for three kinds of racial context: geographic, social, and psychological. These three contexts are only weakly correlated, we find, with social ties exhibiting distinctly high rates of in-group segregation. We next examine the relationship between racial contexts and political attitudes, showing that individuals who are highly embedded across contexts express notably different views than those who experience cross-cutting pressures. Our results underscore a need for greater care and specificity when examining the relationship between “racial context” and political phenomena.

There is a large literature on the use of cases, hardly anything on examples. They are different: cases get analyzed, examples get deployed. Examples can perform clarifying, didactic, persuasive, universalizing, critical, and cogitative functions. These six functions all have their own logic, and a set of guidelines for how to perform each of them well is developed. However, compelling and persuasive examples can also mislead. Following Kahneman’s distinction between system 1 (fast) and system 2 (slow) thinking, good examples both resonate in system 1 terms and invite system 2 scrutiny. The best examples are good in some aspect, flawed in interesting ways in others. A perfect example is a logical impossibility. The author’s interest in convincing the reader and the discipline’s interest in effective inquiry can diverge, a problem overcome if reason in inquiry is seen as essentially dialogical.

Introducing an international relations perspective into the literature on anti-immigrant attitudes, we hypothesize that immigrants from rival countries will be shunned and immigrants from allied countries preferred, especially by respondents who identify more strongly with the nation. We fielded a forced-choice conjoint experiment in 22 countries, whereby respondents chose between applicants for permanent resident status with randomized attributes. We identified rival and allied countries of origin for each surveyed country, with one such pair sharing a similar racial and cultural make-up as the majority of respondents, and one pair being more dissimilar. We find that discrimination against immigrants from rival states is so pronounced that it results in a net preference for racially and culturally dissimilar immigrants. Since we fielded the surveys amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are able to leverage exogenous changes in the intensity of one rivalry, providing further evidence for the proposed mechanism.

Mainstream parties have often shifted from initially portraying new competitors as undemocratic pariahs (i.e., a delegitimizing strategy) to portraying the same parties later as democratic (i.e., a legitimizing strategy). I argue that voters follow mainstream parties’ legitimizing strategies in their legitimacy evaluations of these parties. I investigate this argument with two independent survey experiments and a quantitative media content analysis in two countries that differ sharply in the nature of party competition—from mainstream parties delegitimizing a far-right party (i.e., Germany) to mainstream parties legitimizing it (i.e., Sweden). I find strong evidence that (a) mainstream parties can effectively legitimize pariah parties in the eyes of voters, (b) turning back to delegitimization has little effect, (c) legitimization is no less effective in the face of a third party’s delegitimizing strategy, and (d) legitimization resonates beyond co-partisans. The results suggest that mainstream party legitimization of pariah parties has far-reaching consequences.

Political scientists have long viewed values as a source of constraint in political belief systems. More recently, scholars have argued that values—particularly moral values—contribute to polarization. Yet, there is little direct and systematic research on which values are perceived as moral values. We examine 21 values, including Schwartz’s values, political values, and moral foundations. Drawing on a broad literature on cooperation, we first develop theoretical expectations for the extent of value moralization both between and within value systems. We next argue that this moralization matters because it intensifies the effects of value disagreement on social polarization. Using a probability-based survey of the US and an embedded conjoint experiment, we find substantial variation in moralization across values, and that highly moralized values are more polarizing. Our research brings together competing literatures on values and shows how moral values differentially shape polarization.

A long-standing debate in political psychology considers whether individuals update their beliefs and attitudes in the direction of evidence or grow more confident in their convictions when confronted with counter-attitudinal arguments. Though recent studies have shown that instances of the latter tendency, which scholars have termed attitude polarization and “belief backfire,” are rarely observed in settings involving hot-button issues or viral misinformation, we know surprisingly little about how participants respond to information targeting deeply held attitudes, a key condition for triggering attitude polarization. We develop a tailored experimental design that measures participants’ core issue positions and exposes them to personalized counter-attitudinal information using the large language model GPT-3. We find credible evidence of attitude polarization, but only when arguments are contentious and vitriolic. For lower valence counter-attitudinal arguments, attitude polarization is not detected. We conclude by discussing implications for the study of political cognition and the measurement of attitudes.