All regimes require supporters to govern and survive. We discuss the concept of a ‘regime support group’ and present and validate measures from an extensive dataset recording different features of such groups. This Regime Support and Opposition Groups (ReSOG) dataset covers approximately 2,000 political regimes from almost 200 countries, across 1789–2020. Drawing on the knowledge of about 1,000 country experts, we estimate the size and main geographical location of regime support coalitions and key opposition actors. We also map the social basis of regime support coalitions and opponents, using a 14-category scheme covering various social groups. These data provide a unique quantitative history of the social underpinnings of regimes in the modern era. Using them, we show and discuss the broadening of support coalitions over time, especially in autocracies, the rise of major urban groups, and the relative decline of rural elites in politics, globally.

Public sector worker absence has been cited as a reason for the poor performance of public services. This paper argues that the differential attention politicians pay to public services over their tenure cycle can explain levels of absenteeism. Using the case of teachers in India, teachers and politicians are embedded in a dynamic principal-agent relationship that allows for absenteeism when electoral incentives are not salient and results in increased accountability when they are. I constructed a panel of all schools across India between 2006 and 2018, employed an event study design, and found that teacher absenteeism decreases the year before an election and is higher the year after an election. I found inconsistent effects in the private sector, lending support for a channel of political control in the public sector. Political interference has an effect on bureaucratic performance, and relationships between public sector workers and politicians can ameliorate absenteeism.

Across the world, women continue to be underrepresented in parliaments. As gatekeepers to candidate lists, party leaders are in a pivotal position to promote gender balance. But do party elites consider women’s underrepresentation when deciding who to nominate? Leveraging a large-scale conjoint experiment with 1,389 party elites in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, we find that the more underrepresented women are in candidate lists, the better the chances of women aspirants. Awareness of women’s underrepresentation influences selectors for whom promoting gender equality may be a less crystallized priority: centrists and men. Women’s underrepresentation also reinforces preferences for women aspirants among those for whom gender equality may be a core value (left-wing and women selectors) but does not affect those for whom opposing gender equality may bring electoral advantages (right-wing party elites). Our findings shed light on the potential role that signalling underrepresentation may have on party elites’ selection of women aspirants.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the gap in age-adjusted mortality rates between people living in Republican and Democratic counties expanded; people in Democratic counties started living longer. This paper argues that political partisanship poses a direct problem for ameliorating these trends: trust and adherence in one’s personal doctor (including on non-COVID-19 related care) – once a non-partisan issue – now divides Democrats (more trustful) and Republicans (less trustful). We argue that this divide is largely a consequence of partisan conflict surrounding COVID-19 that spilled over and created a partisan cleavage in people’s trust in their own personal doctor. We then present experimental evidence that sharing a political background with your medical provider increases willingness to seek care. The doctor-patient relationship is essential for combating some of society’s most pressing problems; understanding how partisanship shapes this relationship is vital.

Political communication on immigration is often highly moralized, with parties making claims to fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. Yet, what drives parties to use this rhetoric remains unexplored. Contributing to research on parties’ positional shifts on immigration, this study examines their strategic use of moral language in immigration discourse. To this end, we develop multilingual moral dictionaries to analyze parliamentary immigration speeches from eight Western democracies over six decades. While party-level factors do not explain moral language use, increased elite polarization on the issue is associated with greater moralization among all parties. Qualitative analysis shows that moral language is used overwhelmingly to attack political opponents, highlighting its divisive nature. These findings serve as a corrective to the notion that extreme, anti-immigrant, opposition parties are the main drivers of the moralization of immigration; instead, the broader political climate crucially shapes party incentives to (de)moralize.

We identify women’s revealed preferences for legislative proposals to investigate substantive representation of women. We then examine whether female or male politicians in parliament are more responsive to revealed female preferences using data on 47,527 decisions made by all 777 Swiss parliamentarians between 1996 and 2022. Holding party and constituent preferences constant, our results show differences in the substantive representation of women between female and male politicians for legislative proposals related to social policies. For all policies unrelated to social issues, we find that female politicians are no more responsive to female preferences than male politicians. Heterogeneity analyses show that differences in the substantive representation of women by male and female politicians on social policy issues do not depend on the socialization of the politicians, or the underlying political incentives and constraints.

How do episodes of post-conflict violence affect public support for peace? I argue that political messaging about who or what is to blame can influence how violence affects attitudes towards peace agreements. I test this argument in Colombia, a country which has experienced violence after a 2016 peace agreement, and where rival political camps debate whether government failures or noncompliance by rebels is to blame. In an experiment with 1466 respondents in conflict and non-conflict zones, I paired news about post-conflict violence with information supporting these competing messages. I find that emphasizing rebel culpability reduced support for peace agreements, but emphasizing poor government implementation did not have a strong countervailing effect. A probe of the mechanisms suggests that while emphasizing rebel culpability increased perceptions that rebels alone were to blame, emphasizing government implementation failures led respondents to conclude that both parties were to blame, limiting the effectiveness of this message.

LGBTQ+ individuals often display consistent political behaviour despite being internally diverse. We theorize about the importance of group-based heuristics to understand this cohesiveness by proposing the concept of LGBTQ+ linked fate. First, we argue that LGBTQ+ linked fate is stronger among privileged individuals within the LGBTQ+ community (white, cisgender, gays/lesbians) and among those whose life experiences have made their LGBTQ+ identity salient. Then, expanding on social identity theory, we posit that individuals with greater LGBTQ+ linked fate are more likely to hold group-based political attitudes and voice these preferences through electoral participation. We provide support for these claims using a novel oversample of ∼2,000 LGBTQ+ Americans from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. We show that stronger LGBTQ+ linked fate is associated with higher voter turnout, leaning ideologically liberal, and identifying with the Democratic Party. This study contributes to understanding group identity, solidarity, and political behaviour among marginalized communities.

One common explanation for ethnicized politics and limited national identification in Africa lies with colonial boundaries. Europeans frequently divided ethnic groups as they divvied territory in the nineteenth century; this might have long-run repercussions, as individuals prioritize ties with coethnics in neighboring states rather than with non-coethnic co-nationals. Contra these expectations, we argue that divided groups should have weaker attachments to their ethnicity than non-divided groups will, because partition particularly disrupted pre-existing traditional institutions of governance and exchange within these groups. We argue that partition weakened traditional authorities and, consequently, ethnic identities through three mechanisms: (1) administrative shifts that reduced traditional authorities’ power; (2) limitations on leaders’ capacity to raise revenues; and (3) exacerbating intra-group divisions among co-ethnics living on different sides of the borders. We test this using georeferenced data from rounds 3-6 of the Afrobarometer and find support for our argument. These results are robust to different measures of the extent to which an ethnic group was split and various considerations of ethnic groups’ local and national demographic and political power. Our findings have important implications for studies of the legacies of colonialism and identity politics in Africa today.

It is a long-standing view that educational institutions sustain democracy by building an engaged citizenry. However, recent scholarship has seriously questioned whether going to college increases political participation. While these studies have been ingenious in using natural experiments to credibly estimate the causal effect of college, most have produced estimates with high statistical uncertainty. I contend that college matters: I argue that, together, prior effect estimates are just as compatible with a positive effect as a null effect. Furthermore, analyzing two-panel datasets of $n \approx 10,000$ young US voters, using a well-powered difference-in-differences design, I find that attending college leads to a substantive increase in voter turnout. Importantly, these findings are consistent with the statistically uncertain but positive estimates in previous studies. This calls for updating our view of the education-participation relationship, suggesting that statistical uncertainty in prior studies may have concealed that college education has substantive civic returns.

How does cognitive household labour – the ‘mental load’ involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs – influence decisions about whether and how to participate in public life? Studies suggest women take on the vast majority of this load, yet the impact of these private sector inequalities on participation in public life is underexplored. To make progress on these questions, we contribute new causal evidence about the effect of prompting respondents to think about their own mental loads in a survey experiment fielded to employed British parents. Our main argument is that priming the mental load will crowd out interest in political and labour market participation. In line with expectations, our survey experiment finds a strong negative effect of mental load priming on intentions to engage in politics and at work. Our results offer new insights about the continuing relevance of household-based inequalities to gender equality in public life.

Commonsense morality suggests that an unjustly invaded democracy may conscript its own citizens and bar them from emigrating when such a policy is necessary to sustain resistance to the invader. What does this assumption regarding ‘internal conscription’ entail for ‘external conscription’ – for foreign countries who might close their borders to many citizens of the invaded democracy, to push them to fight? Could it have been morally appropriate for Ukraine’s neighbours, for instance, to close their borders to (many) Ukrainians at the onset of the Russian assault on Kyiv, with the aim of sustaining Ukraine’s resistance to Putin’s invasion? I take up such questions by examining the seeming discrepancy between internal and external conscription. I argue that, notwithstanding its surface appeal, a categorical divide between the two kinds of conscription is unwarranted. At the level of fundamental moral principles, the two stand and fall together.

All children have rights to care, education, food, shelter, and more besides. The creation of children is, therefore, the creation of costly entitlements. But who, other than the parents, can be expected to share these costs? And how much can they be expected to contribute? To date, political theorists have only attended to the first question. But without a well-reasoned answer to the second question, we won’t know whether sharing should be generous or very little, equal or unequal. In this paper, I provide the first examination of the extent of cost sharing required if children are public goods. I argue that viewing children as public goods places important limits on the total costs to be fairly shared by non-parents. This casts doubt on the view, assumed by many political theorists, that the costs of all children’s entitlements must be equally shared between parents and non-parents.

This article describes the Global Legislators Database, a new cross-national dataset on the characteristics – party affiliation, gender, age, education, and occupational background – of nearly 20,000 national parliamentarians in the world’s democracies. The database includes 97 electoral democracies with comprehensive information on legislators who held office in each country’s lower or unicameral chamber during one legislative session in 2015, 2016, or 2017. The GLD is the largest individual-level biographical and demographic database on national legislators ever assembled, with a wide range of potential applications. In this article, we provide multiple types of validity checks of the GLD to document the integrity of the data. We also preview three potential applications of the dataset and note other possible uses for this one-of-a-kind resource for studying representation in the world’s democracies.

Perhaps because scholars of political ambition have focused almost entirely on electoral ambition, the presence of elections has been thought to play a major role in shaping who expresses interest in public service. In this article, we examine whether the presence or absence of elections changes women’s political ambition. Using surveys of law students, federal bureaucrats, and the general public, we find the relationship between gender and ambition for elected office is similar to the relationship between gender and ambition for bureaucratic and judicial service. We show that, although women are deterred from public service by the elections that act as gateways to those opportunities, the effects of elections on gendered political ambition duplicate the effects of other components of public service. Rather than unique, elections are duplicative in their effects, reinforcing the relationship between gender and ambition rather than fundamentally changing who expresses ambition for public service.

Illiberal actors in Western democracies increasingly exploit the superficial defence of liberal values like gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights to demonize ethnic out-groups, portraying Muslims as inherently opposed to Western values. This paper investigates whether this stereotype reflects widespread public beliefs and asks: is the stereotypical view of the Muslim community as an illiberal ‘bogeyman’ endorsed by citizens? Leveraging an original double-list experiment design that minimizes sensitivity bias, we identify population-level estimates of this stereotype in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. Our cross-national results reveal a pervasive and ubiquitous stereotype of Muslims as a threat to LGBTQ+ communities across Western democracies. The implications of these findings are concerning as they signal that societal tolerance of ethnic out-groups across liberal democracies remains tainted by prejudicial stereotypes. The results also underscore the alarming electoral potential of far-right parties that exploit homonationalist and femonationalist stereotype-based threat perceptions to their political advantage.

Does prosecuting perpetrators of repression under a dictatorship promote public support for human rights and the courts? We argue that convicting perpetrators in human rights trials reduces public acceptance of these violations. However, while convictions signal judicial efforts to end impunity, they may also call attention to the politicized process by which transitional justice begins. We estimate the effects of human rights trial verdicts on attitudes in Argentina, a country ruled by a military dictatorship from 1976–1983 that, twenty-five years later, initiated sweeping human rights trials for past repression. Using observational day-level opinion data from a survey fielded around the guilty verdict for one of the dictatorship’s top-ranking generals, we find the trial verdict increased the public’s rejection of torture and political killings. Yet belief in judicial fairness declined. These results suggest that trials solidify public commitments to human rights, but confidence in the judiciary is not a necessary condition for this effect.

Do climate change-related extreme weather events affect public concern, knowledge, and attention to climate change in China? Matching extreme weather events data from the Emergency Events Database with the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey, we first test whether people in prefectures with more extreme weather events consider climate change more damaging and have a better knowledge of it. We find no such associations. Moreover, we collect 2020 data on extreme whether events from local newspapers for five Eastern and Southeastern Chinese provinces and test whether these events increase public attention to climate change, measured by Baidu search volume index. No associations are found. Interestingly, in prefecture-days with more Covid cases, local population conducted more Baidu searches on climate change and the environment, supporting the ‘great reflection’ thesis, i.e., major shocks like the pandemic put a spotlight on fundamental challenges facing the humanity and have gotten us to reassess our priorities.

How does party support for gender equality in the labour market affect the gender voting gap? A well-established argument from the literature on gender and political behaviour states that working women tend to vote for left-wing parties more than men because they are stronger supporters of the welfare state. However, no study has assessed whether parties’ welfare positions affect the gender voting gap. Leveraging three decades of public opinion data from sixteen Western democracies, I provide evidence in support of that claim: increases in women’s labour force participation are associated with higher female/male voter ratios for the left, but only when those parties strongly support gender-egalitarian policies in the labour market. These findings confirm and add nuance to the previous understanding of the gap: by focusing on public opinion, previous research overlooked party behaviour. Therefore, my evidence elevates the importance of party strategy in explaining gender differences in voting.

How does the deployment and withdrawal of UN peacekeepers affect local economic development in civil war countries? This study provides a large-N subnational analysis across UN peacekeeping operations that assesses their impact on the local economy both during deployment and after their withdrawal. We expect a positive association between UN peacekeeping and economic development. Besides providing a sizeable cash injection into the economy, peacekeepers can safeguard both the resumption of everyday economic exchanges at the grassroots level and the influx of aid and development projects. To test this, we combine subnational data on peacekeeping deployments with high-resolution data on nightlight emissions. Results from two-way fixed effects models, using matching, show that a more sizable peacekeeping presence can help boost economic activity in their area of operation. Importantly, we identify a slow but positive economic development in areas of deployment after peacekeepers withdraw, which is confirmed in a DiD estimation approach.