Civic engagement benefits both participants and society, but what motivates young adults to decide to become civically engaged? A cost-benefit analysis concludes that resumé-building is a major motivator for young adult civic engagement participation because it has more visible short-term impacts compared to social or community motivators. Using a preregistered survey experiment and follow-up focus groups fielded to college students, I demonstrate that respondents exposed to a treatment describing the social benefits of civic engagement are significantly more willing to increase their civic engagement. Counter to expectations, career benefits are—at best—a secondary motivating factor. These results suggest that civic engagement does not appear to be inherently beneficial to young adults. Non-profit organizations and educators should consider ways to draw attention to the social benefits of civic engagement as a method of attracting additional program interest.

Innovations in deliberative and participatory democracy have been rapidly adopted by policy makers. Long-term success of democratic reform hinges on developing research through open, reproducible, and ethical standards that secure trust in findings. This study examines how Democratic Innovations (DI) scholars implement open science practices (OSP). We analyze empirical research published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and 2021. Our analysis reveals limited OSP use: less than 1% of research articles involve replication and approximately 3.5% provide full data access, despite an increase in the past decade to almost 8% of articles published in 2020. Open publishing has increased, reaching almost 50% of publications in recent years. The article concludes by discussing how OSP can contribute to improving the practice of DI and the policy effects of institutional design. Researchers who understand institutional design for inclusive collective action are best placed to make the changes required to promote open science.

Current political developments worldwide illustrate that research on democratic backsliding is as important as ever. A recent exchange in Political Science & Politics (February 2024) highlighted again that the measurement of democracy remains a challenge. With many democracy indicators consisting of subjective assessments rather than factual observations, trends in democracy over time could be due to human biases in the coding of these indicators rather than empirical facts. This article leverages two cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) for the coding of democracy indicators from the V-Dem project. With access to huge amounts of information, these models may be able to rate the many “soft” characteristics of regimes at substantially lower costs. Whereas LLM-generated codings largely align with expert coders for many countries, we show that when these models deviate from human assessments, they do so in different but consistent ways. Some LLMs are too pessimistic and others consistently overestimate the democratic quality of these countries. Although the combination of the two LLM codings can alleviate this concern, we conclude that it is difficult to replace human coders with LLMs because the extent and direction of these attitudes is not known a priori.

Student debt heavily shapes the life decisions and outlook of those living with it. This article examines the relationship between undergraduates’ views of President Joe Biden’s actions on student debt and their support for him in the 2024 election prior to his dropping out of the race. Using a representative survey from a large private university in the Northeast, we assess how student views of Biden’s handling of student loan relief correlated with voting intentions among registered student voters. Our analysis reveals that students who believed the Biden administration adequately addressed student debt were significantly more likely to support him compared to those who believed he had done too little. Additionally, our findings suggest that whereas increased student debt relief could have bolstered Biden’s support among liberal and very liberal students, its impact on moderate and conservative students was more limited. This study highlights the electoral implications of student debt relief policies, particularly in shaping young voters’ preferences, and it underscores the potential for targeted economic benefits to influence voter behavior in a highly polarized political environment.

With a larger and more diverse set of countries than Cuzán and Heggen (2023a) studied, this article completes a general path of incumbencies that was partially traced by their “cruise and crash” model of the cost of ruling. The missing piece is a bump in the share of the vote in the party’s first reelection. The electoral “bonus” holds more or less steadily until the crash, at which point the vote plunges about 20% below the original win. The analysis suggests that the path of the vote in long-term incumbencies follows a general pattern that is shaped like an inverted asymmetrical letter U or W.

Although women leaders assume prominent national offices in the United States (and the world), one of the well-established specializations in political science and psychology (i.e., leadership studies) is inundated with male-centric benchmarks. This research often relies on a reference group to develop leaders’ profiles in comparison to other elites. They are predominantly populated, however, with male leaders. This article suggests a remedy and introduces a women leaders reference group for operational code analysis, which is a quantitative approach measuring leaders’ beliefs about politics. We gathered American women leaders’ speeches from the Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication. Using an automated content analysis, we developed a norming group exclusively for American female politicians in national politics. Whereas our findings indicate noticeable differences and suggest similarities with existing reference groups, we aspire to initiate a conversation and hope that more data will follow and shed more light on women leaders. This reference group can serve as a crucial tool in providing contextualized political-personality profiles of American women leaders and also provide an illustrative example to bridge leadership and gender studies in advancing the study of women leaders in the United States (and beyond).

German federal elections have long drawn international attention due to the country’s economic influence and its pivotal role in the European Union. Over time, forecasting these elections has evolved into a sophisticated discipline, incorporating diverse models and refined methodologies to improve accuracy. Since 2013, PS: Political Science & Politics has played a key role in tracking these developments by publishing three special symposia dedicated to forecasting German elections (Jérôme 2013, 2017; Jérôme and Graefe 2022). This 2025 symposium marks the fourth installment, continuing a tradition of providing scholars with a platform to share insights and reflect on the field’s ongoing expansion.

This article forecasts the German Federal Election of 2025. We used our previous forecasting models to provide national-level forecasts for party-vote shares and district-level outcomes for candidate votes. We show that the combination of both models allowed us to calculate forecasts for both coalition majorities in Parliament and “vacant districts” under recent electoral reforms.

In this article, we predict the result for the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in the upcoming February 2025 German Bundestag election. We develop a parsimonious state-level forecasting model that relies on four variables measuring the state-level political, economic, and social contexts and the national popularity of the CDU/CSU chancellor candidate. Our model is based on Bundestag elections from 1972 to 2021, and we use the most recent values of our measures to generate the forecast. Our model predicts that the CDU/CSU will win between 31.5% and 34.6% of the vote share in the upcoming election.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” said humorist and social critic Mark Twain. Simply put, history often follows recurring cycles, enabling us to identify patterns that will likely repeat. Such supposed steadiness should bode well for prediction. Nevertheless, regarding structural election forecasts, most projections rely on short-term political fundamentals measuring macroeconomic performance or government or leader popularity. In this contribution, we take a structural approach but eschew any macroeconomic or popularity measure and instead rely on historical and structural patterns to predict the 2025 German Federal Election. Using seemingly unrelated regression, our model predicts the vote share of Germany’s two largest blocs—the Union and the SPD—and All Others combined across 19 elections between 1953 and 2021 with solid accuracy (correctly predicting the winning bloc three out of four times), creating circumstances to assume that political history may be a helpful guide as to how the 2025 contest may pan out. Our ex ante central projection for the 2025 German federal election foresees a cliffhanger race, with point estimates suggesting that the Union and the SPD will win 26% of the vote each and All Others 48%, departing from the dominant narrative of the opinion polls of a clear CDU/CSU plurality vote victory and substantial losses for the SPD. The political history model suggests that the formation of another grand coalition is possible.

This article presents a forecast for the 2025 German federal election using the PollyVote method, which combines data from polls, expectations, and models to improve predictive accuracy. Building on its application in previous elections, PollyVote highlights the advantages of integrating diverse forecasting approaches while providing insights into their development and performance over time. Three weeks before Election Day, the PollyVote predicts the CDU/CSU will secure the largest vote share at 30.3%, followed by the AfD (20.6%), SPD (17.3%), Greens (12.6%), and the new leftist party BSW (5.1%). The FDP (4.1%) and the Left (3.9%) are forecast to fall short of the 5% threshold required for parliamentary representation. Although the forecasts from individual components show broad agreement, one model that excludes public opinion data diverges, suggesting that polls may overestimate support for the CDU/CSU and underestimate the SPD’s performance.

In February 2025, German voters will vote for the fifth time since 1949 in early federal elections. In 1972 and 2005, the minority positions of Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schröder, respectively, in the Bundestag led to new elections. In 1990, the elections were triggered by reunification and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1983, the early elections were the result of a change of alliance by the Free Democratic Party (FDP). It is impossible to draw a general rule on the effect of a dissolution on the electoral score of the outgoing chancellor’s party because the incumbents were reelected only two times out of four. In 2024, the departure of the FDP due to disagreement on economic policy, among other issues, ended the “tricolor” or “traffic-light” Social Democratic Party (SPD)–Greens–FDP coalition. For forecasters, these elections represent a challenge not only because of their unexpected nature but also due to multiple parties in the German political landscape.

Deliberative democracy is used increasingly around the world and experiences relevant public support across several countries. However, political parties remain generally reluctant to engage in deliberation. This symposium explains why some parties engage with deliberative practices whereas others disregard them in several countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. The symposium contributes theoretically to the literature by proposing analytical frameworks that explain parties’ approaches toward deliberative practices. The symposium’s empirical contribution lies in the identification of several variables that have been understudied so far in the research about parties and deliberation, including competition gains, organizational conflicts, and information deficit.

In many contemporary migration societies, an increasing percentage of residents do not have suffrage. This also holds true for the city of Vienna. In the 2020 municipal elections, almost a third of the Viennese population was excluded from suffrage; this rate of exclusion had doubled since 2000 (Mokre and Ehs 2021, 716). At the same time, Vienna has a long history of deliberative practices and experiments. A first deliberative experiment dates back to 1990, when a “Forum City Constitution” was initiated by the City Council to discuss the reform of citizens’ participation (Haas et al. 2024, 20). This forum did not lead to concrete political effects, and the deliberative turn reached Vienna only after 2000. Other deliberative practices have been introduced over time. Many of these instruments allow for the participation of the entire resident population irrespective of individuals’ voting rights; however, most of them are neither legally prescribed nor legally binding. These are the most inclusive instruments, and many of them allow people who ordinarily lack voting rights to participate. Normatively, this inclusion can be evaluated positively for two reasons: (1) some form of inclusion of the whole population in democratic decision making is desirable (Bauböck 2001; Gherghina, Mokre, and Mișcoiu 2021); and (2) deliberative practices arguably improve the quality of democracies by broadening inclusion, increasing the efficacy of political decisions, and contributing to civic education (Gherghina and Jacquet 2023, 504).

Deliberative practices have gradually become part of the political discourse, policies, and governance, particularly over the last 30 years in the Republic of Türkiye (Şahin 2024b). However, this period also coincides with a rise in competitive authoritarianism through centralization and regime change (Ergenç and Yüksekkaya 2024; Esen 2021). As debates continue regarding the mechanisms of representative democracy and basic human rights, the ruling party, AKP, presents deliberation as a tool for legitimizing its power, whereas opposition parties see it as a means by which to uphold democratic rights. Despite the wide use of deliberation-related terminology, effective and innovative deliberative examples remain scarce (Tansel 2018).

Participatory budgeting (PB) was first implemented in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in 1989 as a measure to reduce poverty and decrease child mortality. Since then, it has spread all over the world. It empowers citizens in political action, increases their awareness of the social and political shortcomings of their communities, and allows them to decide how a part of the local budget should be spent. Despite these benefits, people generally rarely engage with PB when it is offered. With the exception of a few studies (Gherghina, Tap, and Traistaru 2023), we do not yet know what makes individuals abstain from participating in this process.

In recent decades, deliberative practices have increasingly been used around the world by local, regional, and national institutions (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2018; Gherghina, Soare, and Jacquet 2020; Michels 2011). In Romania, most examples of deliberative practices revolve around local-level practices, including participatory budgeting and citizen councils, and focus on how they function and influence the communities (Gherghina and Tap 2021; Schiffbeck 2019).

Existing research on Chile’s 2022 constitution-making process primarily explained the negative referendum outcome through individual-level factors. The role of political parties in responding to the product of deliberation has been widely overlooked. This article addresses that gap by examining party reactions to the draft constitution, a proposal aligned with the left-wing constitutional project of New Latin American Constitutionalism. Although the proposal embodied this project, party responses proved far more ambivalent, especially in the center-left, where party endorsement often was conditional. This ambivalence weakened the approval campaign and proved decisive in the referendum’s rejection. The analysis underscores that partisan ideology matters in deliberative constitution-making.

Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) are a specific form of deliberative mini-publics that are increasingly used to address complex policy challenges, especially in climate governance (Boswell, Dean, and Smith 2023; Smith 2024; Willis, Curato, and Smith, 2022). They involve randomly selected citizens who deliberate and provide policy recommendations (Curato 2021). However, their implementation and uptake largely depend on political parties and elites, which may perceive these novel instruments as challenging their authority (Elstub and Escobar 2019; Setälä 2017). Given the growing use of deliberative mini-publics by representative institutions (Paulis et al. 2021), research has explored their interaction with political parties (Gherghina 2024; Gherghina, Soare, and Jacquet 2020a).