Political finance in liberal democracies is often regarded as a source of pathology accompanied by demands for reform. But on what principles and values should political finance reform be grounded? The existing scholarship provides no more than sketchy advice on such matters. To address this gap, this paper presents a normative framework to evaluate political finance rules, which proposes (a) that the design of such rules should take account of the party system in which the financing rules will operate; (b) that both political finance rules and party systems should be evaluated in terms of three normative dimensions of partisanship (collegiality, systemic voice, and systemic accountability); and (c) that political finance reforms ought to counterbalance the pathologies inherent to different party systems. A set of political finance rules that satisfies these three conditions is an instantiation of what we describe as the ‘civic model of political finance’.

Right-wing candidates have rallied against same-sex marriage, abortion, and ‘gender ideology’ in several recent Latin American elections, attracting socially conservative voters. Yet, these issues are largely irrelevant to voting decisions in other parts of the region. Drawing on theories explaining partisan shifts in the US and Europe, we argue that elite and social movement debates on sexuality politics create conditions for electoral realignment. When politicians take polarized positions on newly salient ‘culture war’ issues, the masses’ voting behaviour shifts. Using region-wide multilevel analysis of the AmericasBarometer and Latinobarómetro and a conjoint experiment in Brazil, Chile, and Peru, we demonstrate that the rising salience of sexuality politics creates new electoral cleavages, magnifying the electoral impact of religion and sexuality politics attitudes and shrinking the impact of economic views. Whereas scholarship on advanced democracies posits the centrality of partisanship, our findings indicate that sexuality politics prompts realignments even in weak party systems.

Traditional research on political parties pays little attention to the temporal focus of communication. It usually concentrates on promises, issue attention, and policy positions. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising, given that voters respond to nostalgic rhetoric and may even adjust issue positions when policy is framed in nostalgic terms. This article presents a novel dataset, PolNos, which contains six text-based measures of nostalgic rhetoric in 1,648 party manifestos across 24 European democracies from 1946 to 2018. The measures combine dictionaries, word embeddings, sentiment approaches, and supervised machine learning. Our analysis yields a consistent result: nostalgia is most prevalent in manifestos of culturally conservative parties, notably Christian democratic, nationalist, and radical right parties. However, substantial variation remains regarding regional differences and whether nostalgia concerns the economy or culture. We discuss the implications and use of our dataset for studying political parties, party competition, and elections.

Courts prosecuting corruption serve a critical horizontal accountability function, but they can also play a role in moments of vertical accountability when voters can sanction corrupt candidates. This article documents the strategic use of corruption lawsuits, demonstrating the presence of an electoral cycle in filing new corruption accusations against politicians. Using an original dataset of daily corruption complaints filed in federal courts against members of Argentina's main political coalitions between 2013 and 2021, we document increased corruption accusations against and by politicians in the periods immediately preceding an election. A second dataset of daily media coverage of corruption accusations in two leading newspapers suggests that corruption is more salient before elections, offering politicians a temporal focal point to prepare and launch especially impactful lawsuits. Our findings shed new light on using courts for accountability and debates about the so-called ‘lawfare’ in Latin America.

The public places an important constraint on funding security in Europe, and austerity risks making the constraint tighter. Several recent studies show that curtailing military spending is a popular way to reduce debt in Europe. Yet it remains unclear if military spending aversion persists when threats are salient. We fielded an original survey experiment in Italy weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine to examine how information about security threats influences military spending preferences and fiscal trade-offs. We found that information about threats increases support for military spending. To validate the survey experiment, we recontacted and remeasured our respondent's preferences three weeks after Russia's invasion and find evidence consistent with our initial experiment. Our findings suggest that, while public opposition to military spending remains high in Italy, external threats dampen the public's opposition to military spending, even under high debt burdens.

One oft-cited reason for women's political underrepresentation is that women express less political ambition than men. We reframe the puzzle of women's ambition deficit, asking why men have an ambition surplus. Drawing on the concept of symbolic representation, we theorize that political symbols convey to men their capacity for exceptional political leadership. We test our expectations with a US-based survey experiment in which respondents watch one of three ‘two-minute civics lessons’. Men who watched a video featuring the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers reported significantly more political ambition than men assigned to the control group. Additional studies indicate that the effects are specific to the Founding Fathers (as compared to early American statesmen). Men are also more likely than women to identify the Founding Fathers as inspiring figures and to feel pride when considering them. Our findings suggest how history is told contributes to men's persistent political overrepresentation.

Policies that promote the common good may be politically infeasible if legislators representing ‘losing’ constituencies are punished for failing to promote their district's welfare. We investigate how varying the local and aggregate returns to a policy affects voter support for their incumbent. In our first study, we find that an incumbent who favours a welfare-enhancing policy enjoys a discontinuous jump in support when their district moves from losing to at least breaking even, while the additional incremental political returns for the district doing better than breaking even are modest. This feature of voter response, which we replicate, has significant implications for legislative politics generally and, in particular, how to construct politically feasible social welfare-enhancing policies. In a second study, we investigate the robustness of this finding in a competitive environment in which a challenger can call attention to a legislator's absolute and relative performance in delivering resources to their district.

A government's decision to communicate in a native tongue rather than a commonly used and understood but non-native language can prompt perception through an ethnically-tinted lens. While native-language communication is commonplace and typically benign, we argue that conveying a threat posed by an outgroup in a native tongue can trigger dehumanizing attitudes. We conducted a pre-registered survey experiment focusing on attitudes toward Muslim and Chinese people in India to test our expectations. In our two-stage design, we randomly assigned respondents to a survey language (Hindi or English) and, after that, to threat-provoking or control conditions. While Muslims and China are associated with recent violence against India, the government has routinely portrayed only the former as threatening. Likely due to this divergence, Hindi language assignment alone triggers Muslim dehumanization. Indians' more innocuous views of Chinese are responsive to exogenously-induced threat, particularly when conveyed in Hindi.

Bølstad and Dinas (2017) propose a model of spatial voting, based on social identity theory, that suggests supporting a candidate/policy on the other side of the ideological spectrum has a disutility that is not accounted for by common spatial models. Unfortunately, the data they use cannot speak directly to whether the disutility arises because individuals perceive their ideology as a social identity. We present the results of an experimental study that measures the norm against crossing the ideological spectrum; tests the cost of doing so, controlling for spatial effects; and demonstrates that this cost increases with the salience and strength of identity norms. By demonstrating the norm mechanism for the disutility of crossing the ideological spectrum, we provide strong support for B&D's model.

Research on negative partisanship and affective polarization shows that wholesale rejections of individual parties are a common and growing phenomenon. This article offers a novel perspective on assessments of parties by considering citizens' legitimacy perceptions of political parties as institutional players. Combining research on political parties and public opinion, I develop a theoretical framework that explains how parties' characteristics shape their perception as legitimate institutional players. I argue that governing experience, age, ideology, and democratic behaviour provide informational cues to citizens about how democratically dangerous a party is. To test my argument, I fielded a cross-sectional survey in seven West European countries and a large-scale survey experiment. The results consistently show that citizens use party-level cues such as ideological moderation and democratic behaviour to form party legitimacy perceptions. The findings have important public opinion implications for political parties and their institutional role in democracies.

What is the relationship between feminism and political participation? How does partisanship moderate this relationship? Prior research shows that gender attitudes, particularly sexism, rather than gender identity per se, increasingly shape vote choice and participation in US elections. However, the role played by feminism in voter behaviour remains scarcely understood. As feminist identification crosses partisanship, we argue that its impact on engagement with campaigns and turnout depends on party ID. Therefore, we expect feminist identity and how it intersects with either aligned or conflicting partisan identity to impact partisans' participation asymmetrically. Using data from the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies, our results support these expectations. Holding the mutually reinforcing identities of Democrat and feminist has a significant mobilizing impact, while holding the cross-cutting identities of Republican and feminist tends to lead to a decline in political participation.

The literature on populist attitudes frequently makes one of two assumptions: populist attitudes are either stable or unstable. However, few studies have examined these diverging assumptions empirically. We use panel data collected over six panel waves between 2017 and 2021 in Germany to assess the stability of populist attitudes. Integrating inter-individual stability (variable-centred) and intra-individual stability (individual trajectories), we find that populist attitudes are neither fully stable (trait) nor fully flexible (state). For example, some respondents constantly changed their view on populism while the attitudes in one out of three individuals remained stable. We also explore empirical consequences and find that populist attitudes are more closely linked to vote choice when they are stable. Accordingly, we argue for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of populist attitudes, both at the variable and individual levels, where these attitudes are stable and consequential for only a subset of individuals.

We argue that policy expertise constrains the ability of politicians to act on voter preferences. Representatives with more knowledge and experience in a given domain have more confidence in their own issue-specific positions. Enhanced confidence, in turn, may lead politicians to discount opinions they disagree with, producing a distorted image of the electorate. Two experiments with Swedish politicians support this argument. First, officials are more likely to dismiss appeals from voters in their areas of expertise and less likely to accept that opposing views may represent the majority opinion. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, in a second experiment we show that inducing perceptions of expertise increases self-confidence. The results suggest that representatives with more specialized knowledge in a given area may be less capable of acting as delegates in that domain. The study provides a novel explanation for variations in policy responsiveness.

With a proliferation of scholarly work focusing on populist, far-left, and far-right parties, questions have arisen about the correct ways to ideologically classify such parties. To ensure transparency and uniformity in research, the discipline could benefit from a systematic procedure. In this letter, we discuss how we have employed the method of ‘Expert-informed Qualitative Comparative Classification’ (EiQCC) to construct the newest version of The PopuList (3.0) – a database of populist, far-left, and far-right parties in Europe since 1989. This method takes into account the in-depth knowledge of national party experts while allowing for systematic comparative analysis across cases and over time. We also examine how scholars have made use of the previous versions of the dataset, explain how the new version of The PopuList differs from previous ones, and compare it to other data. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of The PopuList dataset.

States often use reservations to modify their treaty obligations. Prior research demonstrates why states enter reservations and why states object to reservations, but little work explains why states withdraw them. We argue that states withdraw reservations in response to international social pressure. Using novel data on reservations and reservation withdrawals for the nine core international human rights treaties, our analyses reveal two factors that compel states to withdraw reservations: (1) pressure from peer states and (2) pressure from human rights treaty bodies conducting periodic reviews. While previous work emphasizes domestic factors, our research shows that the international community encourages states to withdraw reservations and strengthen their commitments to human rights and international law.

Terrorism elicits strong public reactions immediately after the attack, with important implications for democratic institutions and individual well-being. Are these effects short-lived? We answer this question using a natural experiment design and combining data on terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom with a Continuous Monitoring Survey. We find that heightened risk perceptions and emotional reactions in the wake of deadly attacks do not dissipate in the very short run but are sustained over time and up to 120 days after the attacks. Whereas large-scale attacks cause a long-lasting shift in risk assessments and emotions, the corresponding effect of smaller-scale terrorism incidents appears to subside within one month. Overall, the impact of terrorism does not fade away easily.

Does landholding inequality undermine democratization? Recent contributions have challenged the argument that landholding elites oppose suffrage extension if geographically fixed assets are unequally distributed. We advance research on this long-standing question by exploiting exogenous variance to reinvestigate the relationship. Using multiple instruments, we find that landholding inequality decreases support for suffrage extension. By focusing on traditional patterns of social control, we explore an empirically neglected mechanism linking landholding inequality and democratization. Taking advantage of four direct democratic votes between 1866 and 1877 in Switzerland, we demonstrate that landholding inequality also influences the political preferences of ordinary citizens who do not control these resources. This paper shows that high levels of landholding inequality provide local elites with the incentive and the means to align the local population's voting behaviour with their political goals. Supplementary analyses using qualitative and quantitative data further substantiate this social control mechanism.

How does protest affect political speech? Protest is an important form of political claim-making, yet our understanding of its influence on how individual legislators communicate remains limited. Our paper thus extends a theoretical framework on protests as information about voter preferences, and evaluates it using crowd-sourced protest data from the 2017–2019 Fridays for Future protests in the UK. We combine these data with ~2.4m tweets from 553 legislators over this period and text data from ~150k parliamentary speech records. We find that local protests prompted MPs to speak more about the climate, but only online. These results demonstrate that protest can shape the timing and substance of political communication by individual elected representatives. They also highlight an important difference between legislators' offline and online speech, suggesting that more work is needed to understand how political strategies differ across these arenas.

Government competence in delivering outcomes is often regarded as foundational to political trust. However, in this article, a different competence dynamic is proposed; specifically, whether political trust is related to government efficiency in achieving promised policy objectives. This article argues that when policy objectives are polarizing, the effect of efficiency on political trust is conditional on whether individuals support or oppose the objective. Using the case of Brexit, where the promised policy objective of leaving the European Union was polarizing, it is hypothesized that Leave voters relative to Remain voters became more trusting in cases of efficiency and less trusting in cases of inefficiency. The predictions are supported through a difference-in-differences analysis of unique real-world data over time from the British Election Study. The findings have important implications for our understanding of Brexit and also inform how political trust relates to government competence in the case of polarizing political issues.

Do negative economic shocks heighten public opposition to immigration, and through what mechanisms? Extant research suggests that economic circumstances and levels of labour market competition have little bearing on citizens' immigration attitudes. Yet personal economic shocks have the potential to trigger the threatened, anti-immigration responses – possibly through channels other than labour market competition – that prior cross-sectional research has been unable to detect. To examine these propositions, we used a unique panel study which tracked a large, population-based sample of Americans between 2007 and 2020. We found that adverse economic shocks, especially job losses, spurred opposition to unauthorized immigration. However, such effects are not concentrated among those most likely to face labour market competition from unauthorized immigrants. Instead, they are concentrated among white male Americans. This evidence suggests that the respondents' anti-immigration turn does not stem from economic concerns alone. Instead, personal experiences with the economy are refracted through salient socio-political lenses.