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Much of political science involves the study of causal mechanisms, and causal mediation analysis has grown rapidly across different subfields over the past decade. Yet, conventional methods for analyzing causal mechanisms are difficult to use when the causal effect of interest involves multiple mediators that are potentially causally dependent—a common scenario in political science applications. This article introduces a general framework for tracing causal paths with multiple mediators. In this framework, the total effect of a treatment on an outcome is decomposed into a set of path-specific effects (PSEs). We propose an imputation approach for estimating these PSEs from experimental and observational data, along with a set of bias formulas for conducting sensitivity analysis. We illustrate this approach using an experimental study on issue framing effects and an observational study on the legacy of political violence. An open-source R package, paths, is available for implementing the proposed methods.

A very respectable theory (K.R. Popper) argues that civilization tends to limit the use of violence and opposes a state of chaos, madness, barbarism and war. It is a philosophical theory that in its empirical validity can find a minimum (not exclusive) support from a triad of arguments. In fact, by limiting the concept of civilization to that field that we can call "law and legal justice", we can have, in this case, three arguments, to argue that law actually tends to limit the use of violence, without being based exclusively on the force (and violence) of the sanction: (i) A philosophical-juridical argument, the theory of “international regimes; (ii) A sociological one, the theory of companies such as "Small World Networks" and (iii) A mathematical one, the theory of deterministic chaos applied to the phenomenon of sanction (also definable as coercive force, deterrence or even "just war").

How did Iraq’s ethnic and religious minorities survive the Islamic State occupation of Ninewa governorate? Existing accounts of civilian behavior during wartime either essentialize social identity or ignore it altogether by reducing survival to cost-benefit calculations or political opportunism. Against the conventional wisdom, I argue that civilians adopt survival strategies based on the internal resources of their home communities. Specifically, civilians detect and respond to threats by drawing on a set of heuristics to discern combatants’ motives and intentions. I evaluate the key tenets of my theory through a mixed-methods research design of observational data and field interviews. I begin by analyzing migration patterns recorded in the United Nation’s Displacement Tracking Matrix. To understand how Iraqis who remained survived the conflict, I draw on original interviews with Iraqi peacebuilders from minority communities. I find that those who remained survived the conflict by mobilizing self-defense groups and collaborating with members of the anti-ISIS coalition. Opportunistic collaboration between minorities and ISIS insurgents was less common. My findings provide insights for scholars and practitioners interested in refugee return, resettlement, and reintegration in fragile states.

The Hare Quota-Largest Remainders (HQLR) formula promoted consensus-building during Tunisia’s constitution-writing process and in the new democratic regime’s first years but it is now an obstacle to democratic consolidation. HQLR discourages the development of a tractable partisan choice set -- one large enough to afford voters meaningfully distinct options but not so large as to be cognitively overwhelming -- and fosters party fragmentation in parliament, obstructing the formation of workable governing coalitions. One result has been coalitions and national unity governments so heterogeneous as to lack common purpose, frustrating and disillusioning citizens and risking nostalgia for the decisiveness of the previous, authoritarian system. Replacing HQLR with either D’Hondt or St.Lague divisors formula would reverse the incentives toward parliamentary fragmentation, foster a more coherent political party landscape, and, if democratic competition is restored following President Kais Said’s auto coup in July 2021, facilitate Tunisia’s democratic consolidation by clarifying partisan accountability in parliament.

Existing research argues that a ‘democratic constraint’ blocks the path towards fiscal integration in the eurozone: Voters in creditor countries are fundamentally opposed to debt sharing, while voters in debtor countries are unwilling to leave the euro, which constrains the ability of their politicians to negotiate a more equitable distribution of the burden of adjustment. However, this literature neglects that preferences are strategically interdependent across countries and are affected by the type of information processed by individuals. Based on two linked survey experiments in Germany and Italy, conducted at a crucial moment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that Germans respond to information that highlights the possibility of a break-up of the euro as a result of Italexit by increasing their support for debt mutualization. In contrast, Italians are more affected by information about the costs of remaining in the euro than of exiting it and drastically reduce their support for the euro if they are told that austerity and structural reforms are required to remain in it. Our results help to explain why German politicians relaxed their hostility to joint debt and agreed to the introduction of the EU’s pandemic recovery fund in 2020. Introduction Fiscal integration and Europe’s democratic constraint: a brief overview The role of strategic interdependence in the formation of preferences Data and methods Support for fiscal integration vs. breakup in the shadow of the COVID-crisis The debate on coronabonds in Italy and Germany The role of COVID-related solidarity Conclusion Supplemental material Acknowledgements Disclosure statement Additional information Footnotes References

X-GTA (The Cross Topic German Twitter Archive) comprises an extensive assortment of over two billion German-language Tweets, captured in the period spanning from October 2018 to March 2023. Recognizing the significant role that Twitter has come to play as a data source for scholarly investigations, we initiated this project to aggregate German Tweets without subject restrictions, thereby generating a multifaceted dataset reflecting a broad spectrum of themes. Consequently, X-GTA does not merely facilitate comprehensive analyses of topic discourse on Twitter, but also empowers comparative studies of different themes and their temporal popularity shifts. This article elaborates on the methodologies employed in data collection, generation, management, and data access, and serves as a detailed guide to the information contained in the X-GTA dataset.

Commencing in 2016 this project set out to digitize the entire historical census stock of South Africa, covering a century of data from the first census undertaken in the Cape of Good Hope in 1865 and until the 1960s. This note covers background, archive contents and digitisation, and our research agenda and initial outputs. Please cite this note if you use the images in research and publications.

A large amount of scientific literature in social and behavioural sciences bases their conclusions on one or more hypothesis tests. As such, it is important to obtain more knowledge about how researchers in social and behavioural sciences interpret quantities that result from such hypothesis tests, such as p-values and Bayes factors. In the present study, we will explore the relationship between obtained statistical evidence and the degree of belief or confidence that there is a positive effect in the population of interest. In particular, we are interested in the existence of a so-called cliff effect: A qualitative drop in the degree of belief that there is a positive effect around certain threshold values of statistical evidence. We will compare this relationship for p-values to the relationship for corresponding degrees of evidence quantified through Bayes factors, and we will examine whether this relationship is affected by two different modes of presentation.

We plan a collaborative research analysis of the original ‘many analysts’ study by Silberzahn et al.1 testing whether European soccer referees were skin-tone biased in giving red cards. Their study concluded that the answer has great model dependency, and in this sense is unclear. Auspurg and Brüderl2 re-analysed the methods and data and argued the answer is clearer when attending to causal inference and outliers. Researchers involved in the original study and follow-up agreed to an adversarial collaboration to better answer this pertinent research question and sources of variability in answers. They recruited other scholars to provide independent methodological and theoretical insights. The result is this study where together we jointly tackle the skin-tone bias hypothesis and the ‘parsing problem’ of identifying meaningful moderators that explain effect size dispersion across a multiverse of alternative specifications. We build on Auspurg and Brüderl’s proposal that analysts in the original study had very different interpretations of the conceptual research question, leading them to different empirical research questions, which in turn produced results that are not directly comparable. This pre-analysis plan describes our motivation, methods, and plan to contextualize our findings in larger discussions of race bias, multiverse analysis parsing, and subjectivity in science.

En este artículo se propone una definición múltiple de corrupción que tome en consideración los tres tipos de corrupción -individual, institucional y sistémica- susceptibles de ser encontradas en cualquier régimen político. La corrupción no aparece como una conducta «excepcional» o «anormal» sino en directa continuidad con la propensión humana a la cooperación. Se evidencia como la corrupción sistémica ha sido conceptualizada como causa del cambio de régimen político en la tradición política occidental; esta relación causal es muy relevante para explicar las actuales amenazas a las democracias modernas. Se estudian en detalle los impactos de los diferentes tipos de corrupción y se procede al cuestionamiento de la teoría del ciclo de vida de la corrupción y su relación con desarrollo económico. Se señala la necesidad de diferentes y mejores mediciones de la corrupción, que den cuenta de la corrupción sistémica, y de nuevas instituciones diseñadas para revertir su generalización en las democracias modernas.

Theories of retrospective accountability assume that voters punish poor governance and reward improvements, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We extend this research to a new context, assessing the impact of audits on electoral outcomes in South African municipalities. Our novel identification strategy focuses on by-elections triggered by deaths in office of local councilors and compares those taking place before and after audit results are announced each year. We find that timely audit information affects the vote share of the responsible party, with voters rewarding improvements and punishing poor audits by about 5 percentage points. Additional individual-level survey evidence confirms the underpinning behavioral response more generally. Our study is the first to demonstrate electoral accountability effects of audit information at full scale, involving universal spatial and temporal coverage as well as public and organic dissemination.

Policymakers can take actions to prevent local conflict before it begins, if such violence can be accurately predicted. We examine the two countries with the richest available sub-national data: Colombia and Indonesia. We assemble two decades one fine- grained violence data by type, alongside hundreds of annual risk factors. We predict violence one year ahead with a range of machine learning techniques. Models reliably identify persistent, high-violence hot spots. Violence is not simply autoregressive, as detailed histories of disaggregated violence perform best. Rich socio-economic data also substitute well for these histories. Even with such unusually rich data, however, the models poorly predict new outbreaks or escalations of violence. \Best case" scenarios with panel data fall short of workable early-warning systems.

A critical barrier to generating cumulative knowledge in political science and related disciplines is the inability of researchers to observe the results from the full set of research designs that scholars have conceptualized, implemented, and analyzed. For a variety of reasons, studies that produce null findings are especially likely to be unobserved, creating biases in publicly accessible research. While several approaches have been suggested to overcome this problem, none have yet proven adequate. We call for the establishment of a new discipline-wide norm in which scholars post short "null results reports" online that summarize their research designs, findings, and interpretations. To address the inevitable incentive problems that earlier proposals for reform were unable to overcome, we argue that decentralized research communities can spur the broader disciplinary norm change that would bring advantage to scientific advance. To facilitate our contribution, we offer a template for these reports that incorporates evaluation of the possible explanations for the null findings, including statistical power, measurement strategy, implementation issues, spillover/contamination, and flaws in theoretical priors. We illustrate the template's utility with two experimental studies focused on the naturalization of immigrants in the United States and attitudes toward Syrian refugees in Jordan., Political Analysis, 31 (3), ISSN:1047-1987, ISSN:1476-4989

Afghanistan is a profoundly insecure country, with a very high rate of insurgent violence, affecting large swathes of the population. Despite contributing to physical and economic insecurity across the country, Taliban insurgents have succeeded in creating what we call the “paradox of the heavy-handed insurgent.” Insurgents use attacks on government-controlled areas to generate public support by fostering a reputation for effective security provision for the civilian population under its control. For civilians who have a strong unmet need for physical security—especially those in rural and contested communities—heavy-handed insurgents are preferable to government forces who are perceived as either incompetent or unwilling to provide governance. We test this argument using data from the 2018 Asia Society Survey of the Afghan People. We find that the most important factor driving sympathy for the Taliban among Afghan Pashtuns is their sense of insecurity where they live. This indicates that an insurgent group that wears down government forces and weakens their ability to provide public goods and services can actually benefit by appearing as the more viable alternative for governance despite their heavy-handed tactics.

Using descriptive and multiple regression analyses of data from the National Sports and Society Survey (N = 3,993), this study examines public opinions about athletes’ right to protest during the national anthem. Results suggest that public opinion is now more supportive of athletes being allowed to protest during the anthem, although considerable opposition persists. Black individuals and those who recognize racial/ethnic discrimination in society are especially likely to support athletes’ right to protest. Heterosexual, Christian, sports fan, and military identities seem to encourage opposition to the right to protest. Indicators of traditionalism and sports nationalism attitudes are also negatively associated with support for athlete protests.

This paper seeks to show that Bernard Williams’ approach to legitimacy falls short of its aspirations in ways that cast doubt on its fitness for guiding the practice of future realist political theory. More precisely, the paper focuses on the shortcomings of Williams’ realism in establishing a connection to (the practices of) politics, and on how to redeem those shortcomings in a way that would render them suitable for guiding future realist political theory. The first substantive section of the paper considers how compatible Williams’ commitments to diagnosis and interpretation are, with how he spells out his realist thought. The second section argues that making good on Williams’ commitments requires realist political theorists to rethink the sources of their insights and the basis of their claims, and sketches pragmatist and ethnographic approaches as promising examples of how realists could match theoretical commitments in practice.

This paper argues that a normative frame of reference is necessary to redefine the notion of value from a more-than-human societal perspective, differentiating between ‘fetish value’ and ‘true value.’ The former is a product of capital, while the latter is capital's prey but also its antidote. The paper emphasizes the importance of a normative frame of reference that considers the economic, ethical, and political dimensions of value production, and calls for a shift in focus from a purely analytical understanding of capitalism as a social and economic system to a more integrated (analytical-normative) approach. This approach would require a more nuanced understanding of how value is created and distributed, and how it impacts different social groups and the environment. The paper argues that this new approach would enable us to imagine alternative economic systems that prioritize social and environmental well-being over profit maximization and shift the focus from merely challenging existing power relations and economic structures to creating alternative forms of value creation and exchange based on normative principles of social justice and ecological sustainability. The paper highlights the importance of perceiving capital as the product of the perversion of commons that are vital for the creation of true value.

Ever since the Great Recession, public debt has become politicized. Some research suggests that citizens are fiscally conservative, while other research shows that they punish governments for implementing fiscal consolidation. This begs the question of whether and how much citizens care about debt. We argue that debt is not a priority for citizens because reducing it involves spending and tax trade-offs. Using a split-sample experiment and a conjoint experiment in four European countries, we show that fiscal consolidation at the cost of spending cuts or taxes hikes is less popular than commonly assumed. Revenue-based consolidation is especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidation is also contested. Moreover, the public has clear fiscal policy priorities: People do not favor lower debt and taxes, but they support higher progressive taxes to pay for more government spending. The paper furthers our understanding of public opinion on fiscal policies and the likely political consequences of austerity.

The scholarship about the consequences of social revolutions contends that social revolutions boost state capacity and strengthen the state’s developmental projects. Social justice and addressing the needs of ordinary citizens also were central themes in the discourse of the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic that emerged as the post-revolutionary regime with the fall of the monarchy in Iran. In this essay, I assess the performance of the post-revolutionary state in Iran according to different development indicators. Specifically, I compare the record of the post-revolutionary regime with the pre-revolutionary regime. My examination of various indicators relating to health, education, poverty, income inequality, and housing presents more of a mixed result than the overall improvement that previous scholarship anticipated and that the post-revolutionary regime had promised. Furthermore, the evidence points to declines in some important areas of development and welfare provision. Based on this analysis, I propose directions for future research about the developmental outcome of revolutions.

Peace agreements may inadvertently increase selective violence against civilians when they are incomplete in two key dimensions. First, only a fraction of the existing armed groups participates of the agreement. Second, the legitimate government fails to establish institutional presence in the areas previously controlled by those who do participate. Under these two conditions, the resulting vacuum of power may attract active armed groups who engage in selective civilian victimization to obtain control. Studying the recent Colombian experience, we find that the permanent ceasefire declared by the FARC insurgency in 2014 led to a surge in the targeting of community leaders in former FARC strongholds, perpetrated by armed groups excluded from the peace process, with the goal of consolidating their dominance in those areas. Critically, selective victimization is attenuated by some dimensions of state capacity and exacerbated in places which are more valuable as proxied by the existence of recent land conflicts.

Despite the abundance of evidence that peacekeeping works, we know little about what actually makes peacekeepers effective. Recent work suggesting that local agendas are central to modern conflicts make this omission particularly problematic. The article demonstrates that the presence of peacekeepers makes individuals more optimistic about the risks of engagement and the likelihood that members of outgroups will reciprocate cooperation. I use data from a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in Mali, a West African country with an active conflict managed by troops from France and the United Nations (UN), to show that UN peacekeepers increase the willingness of individuals to cooperate relative to control and French enforcers. Moreover, I find that UN peacekeepers are especially effective among those participants who hold other groups and institutions in low esteem as well as those who have more frequent contact with peacekeepers. Follow-up interviews and surveys suggest that perceptions of the UN as unbiased rather than other mechanisms account for its effectiveness.

Who supports high taxes on the rich? Existing accounts of public attitudes focus on egalitarian values and material interests, but make little mention of the ideas people hold about how the economy works descriptively. Drawing on the distinction between positive- and zero-sum beliefs about the economy, and original survey data from five countries, I show that there are systematic differences in tax progressivity preferences across groups within the public who think differently about the economy. Positive-sum thinking is associated with less progressive preferences. However, despite theoretical attention, there is no evidence of systematic zero-sum thinking among the public. On the other hand, some descriptions focus on conflict between rich and poor, and these do predict support for greater progressivity. Further analysis is required to differentiate alternative causal explanations of the patterns observed, but different modes of descriptive economic thinking are an important feature of the mass politics of progressivity.

Does motivated reasoning harm democratic accountability? Substantial evidence from political behavior research indicates that voters have “directional motives” beyond accuracy, which is often taken as evidence that they are ill equipped to hold politicians accountable. We develop a model of electoral accountability with voters as motivated reasoners. Directional motives have two effects: (1) divergence—voters with different preferences hold different beliefs, and (2) desensitization—the relationship between incumbent performance and voter beliefs is weakened. While motivated reasoning does harm accountability, this is generally driven by desensitized voters rather than polarized partisans with politically motivated divergent beliefs. We also analyze the relationship between government performance and vote shares, showing that while motivated reasoning always weakens this relationship, we cannot infer that accountability is also harmed. Finally, we show that our model can be mapped to standard models in which voters are fully Bayesian but have different preferences or information.

How does war affect group identity? Does common threat unite ethnic groups behind the nation? What explains subethnic heterogeneity in identity responses? To answer these questions, scholarship to date has relied on laboratory settings or postwar surveys. The difficulty of conducting social inquiry in wartime means we lack systematic data on identity within real world conflict episodes. The author addresses this gap by exploiting a unique source of exogenous variation—the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)—during the fieldwork for a nationally representative survey in Iraq. He finds systematic differences in the identity responses of Sunni and Shi’iIraqis.While Shi’is cleave to the nation, Sunnis mobilize behind an Arab identity. In tribal areas, however, Sunnis rally behind the nation. Findings are explained with reference to prior attachment and achieved cooperation. Excluded groups are less likely to identify with the nation, but where organization enables interethnic cooperation, wartime mobilization generates national loyalty.

Previous research finds that policy complexity affects important political processes including legislative delegation and policy diffusion. However, policy complexity is not directly observable and the search for a reasonable proxy constitutes a major challenge for scholars. This research note presents a concise and measurable definition of complex policy based on two aspects: a policy's textual sophistication and its ties to other rules and regulations. Using crowdsourcing and a pairwise comparison framework it is shown that the proposed defining features are crucial for humans' understanding of policy text. The proposed definition is then operationalized using a large corpus of European Union rules and is shown to outperform alternative operationalizations of policy complexity in predicting the level of legislative delegation.

Research on the impacts of city–county consolidation often focuses on issues relating to efficiency, effectiveness, and economic development; yet, relatively few studies have addressed the issue of racial and ethnic minority representation. Although existing research is limited, findings indicate that consolidating city and county governments dilutes minority voting strength and has a disparate impact on minority representation. However, it is not clear if this is a nationwide trend, particularly in preclearance states previously covered by the Voting Rights Act. Thus, the question becomes, does consolidation negatively affect minority representation, and to what extent? This study employs a quasi-experimental interrupted time-series analysis to ascertain the overall impact of consolidation on the descriptive representation of African Americans since 1965. Results indicate that while descriptive representation has generally increased in recent decades, there are discernible declines following consolidation and noticeable representational disparities in counties previously covered by the Voting Rights Act.

In much contemporary political discourse, valued cultural characteristics are threatened by interaction with culturally distinct others, such as immigrants or a hegemonic majority. Such interaction often fosters cross-cultural competence (CCC), the ability to interact successfully across cultural boundaries. However, most theories of cultural dynamics ignore CCC, making cultural diversity incompatible with mutually beneficial inter-group interaction, and contributing to fears of cultural loss. Here, interview-based field methods at an Amazonian ethnic boundary demonstrate the prevalence of CCC. These data motivate a new theoretical mathematical model, incorporating competing developmental paths to CCC and group identity valuation, that illuminates how a common strategy of disempowered minorities can counter-intuitively sustain cultural diversity within a single generation: Given strong group identity, minorities in a structurally unequal, integrative society can maintain their distinctive cultural norms by learning those of the majority. Furthermore, rather than a rejection of, or threat to, majority culture, the valuation of a distinctive minority identity can characterize CCC individuals committed to extensive, mutually beneficial engagement with the majority as members of an integrative, multi-cultural society.

Why do populist citizens oppose climate change? Thus far, data constraints limited the ability to test different theoretical mechanisms against each other. We argue that populist attitudes affect climate attitudes through two distinct channels, namely institutional trust and attitudes towards science. The former argument focuses on political institutions as the central actors in implementing climate policy. Individuals who distrust these institutions are more sceptical about climate change. The latter argument claims that populists deny climate change because they distrust the underlying climate science. According to this view, populists would view climate scientists as part of the self-serving elite that betrays the people. Utilising data from the Austrian National Election Study and structural equation modelling, we find strong support for the relationship of populism and climate attitudes via attitudes towards science and institutional trust. Populists systematically hold more negative attitudes towards science and political institutions, and consequently deny climate change.

When do political shocks in core countries reverberate across the global financial system? We identify cross-border banking as a distinct transmission mechanism for political shocks. Democratic processes that advance (undermine) the interests of the global banking industry in core economies benefit (hurt) countries with closer banking ties to these economies. Empirically, we leverage the unanticipated outcomes of the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum to identify the role of cross-border banking in transmitting these shocks. We show that US global banks benefited disproportionately from the US election surprise. Accordingly, countries with closer ties to US banks fared relatively better; exposure to US bank flows cushioned the negative effect of the election. Evidence from Brexit reinforces the banking-channel hypothesis. The findings further our understanding of the role of global banks in the international financial order and underscore the need for more research on the political economy of global banking.

International audience; This article argues that medieval urban authorities developed nodal spatial strategies to mitigate various risks—from accidents, floods, and military vulnerability to sickness and scarcity. Using digital methods (Geographic Information System [GIS]) to map public works during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in one large city (Ghent), it offers a fuller understanding of urban governance in dialogue with a city’s topography and environmental and sociopolitical challenges. Ghent’s authorities invested in gates, bridges, markets, thoroughfares, key buildings, and waterworks. Tracing their interventions reveals the city as an interconnected, moving system, an economy of movement. Attention concentrated on these points because several types of interests related to communal well-being converged there. The city was thus capable of absorbing shocks (war, floods) through regular maintenance and monitoring. Tracing public works that promoted mobility can therefore tell us much about power dynamics and how communities functioned in practice.

Effective grassroots governance is the foundation for the stability of state power, but the "empty busy" behavior of a few grassroots cadres has seriously deteriorated the local political ecology. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanism of "empty busy" behavior of grassroots cadres, this paper, following the analysis of typological research and combined with publicly available data, classifies the "empty busy" behavior of grassroots cadres into eight types, including hedging and self-preservation, drifting with the stream, patchwork response, conforming old rulers, replacing targets, blame avoidance, trace doctrine, and self-waiver. It is found that the "empty busy" behavior of grassroots cadres is shaped by the risk society paradox, local management paradox, incentive intensity paradox and technical governance paradox, and the "empty busy" behavior of grassroots cadres needs to be corrected from the four-dimensional logic of incentive, restraint, deep care, and strict control. This study systematically describes the manifestation, causes and correction mechanism of the "empty busy" behavior of grassroots cadres, which enriches and expands the theoretical research on the performance behavior of grassroots cadres.

Security issues have the propensity to stimulate electorates to adopt positive democratic attitudes that can facilitate safety. Such as following and engaging approaches that proffers a sense of safety, self value and cause the aspiration for leaders who share these common goals. Studies of security and elections in north eastern Nigeria exist however, limited to academic standards. This study examines security issues and factors influencing the outcome of the 2015 general elections in north eastern Nigeria through a qualitative method of data collection and analysis. The study concludes that factors, that caused the victory of an opposition political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2015 general elections includes. The electorates’ evaluations of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) government’s depressing records in securing lives and property, mismanagement of the economy, and challenges in confronting corruption; better election campaign tactics and credible candidates presented by opposition parties; and better preparation by the electoral body, particularly the use of biometric voter cards. But most importantly of the factors is insurgency that occupied the northeast region. This shows the relevance of security, economy, and political concerns as top factors influencing electoral outcomes in north eastern, Nigeria.

Infrastructure comprising road and rail network, health care, and educational facilities have powerful effects on the overall electoral process of people in various political entities. They also play a determining role in setting the bases of the voting choice and change in the orientations of the people towards their political system. Reports on infrastructure in Bauchi state exist but are incomplete to academic principles. This study examines infrastructure deterioration and the outcome of the 2019 gubernatorial elections in Bauchi state Nigeria through a qualitative method of data collection and analysis. Findings of the e study concludes that, part of the underlying principle for the success of an opposition political party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2019 gubernatorial elections includes. The electorates’ assessments of the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration’s discouraging records in the provision and maintenance of Infrastructure comprising: road and rail network, health care system, and educational facilities. Better election campaign strategy and reliable contestant offered by opposition parties; and enhanced training by the electoral body, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This confirms the significance of Infrastructure (road and rail network, health care, and educational facilities) as crucial factors influencing electoral outcomes of the 2019 gubernatorial elections in Bauchi state, Nigeria.

Measuring socio-economic and political value change needs a simple and valid interpretation at both collective and individual levels. However, surveys dealing with value change are limited and defective. This article aims on World Value Survey (WVS) and its academic significance in the study of political behavioural change in Bauchi state Nigeria 1999-2016, through, a qualitative method of data collection and analysis. Conclusion suggests that as a prominent and well-established academic source of data, the WVS instruments, and data are significant for the analysis of the changing political behaviour in Bauchi State. Considering that, the study centres only on the part of the WVS survey data on two dimensions of political behaviour: (1) formal political participation and (2) extra parliamentary activism. These two dimensions comprise nine values which include interest in politics, voting, protests, demonstrations, confidence in political parties, parliament, government, leadership and quality preferences randomly selected and adopted The adoption of these two important segments of the WVS data helped the analysis processes particularly in examining the trends and patterns of the changes in political behaviour as component of democratic attitude and value. WVS is also a means through which governments and its agencies will be influenced to make authoritative decisions (policies) for the continuity and democratic development.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a large shock to the risk of acquiring a disease that represents a meaningful threat to health. We investigate whether individuals subject to larger increases in objective health risk -- operationalised by occupation-based measures of proximity to other people -- became more supportive of increased government healthcare spending during the crisis. Using panel data which tracks UK individuals before and after the outbreak of the pandemic, we implement a fixed-effect design which was pre-registered before the key treatment variable was available to us. While individuals in high-risk occupations were more worried about their personal risk of infection, and had higher COVID death rates, there is no evidence that increased health risks during COVID-19 shifted attitudes on government spending on healthcare, nor broader attitudes relating to redistribution. Our findings are consistent with recent research demonstrating the limited effects of the pandemic on political attitudes.

This codebook was developed through an iterative process (defining and then testing and further refining the definitions and coding procedures) as described by multiple guides (Ratajczyk et al. 2016, Tschan et al. 2018). This codebook is a product of a larger research project with Co-PIs Marco A. Janssen, and Allen Lee, funded by the National Science Foundation: Psychosocial, motivational, and cooperative effects of communication, enforcement, and participatory decision making in resource dilemmas. (2017-2022). National Science Foundation (NSF): Decision, Risk & Management Sciences (Award #1658608) This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1658608. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

A prominent but underspecified explanation for the rise of populism points to individuals’ feelings of being “left behind” by the development of society. At its core lies the claim that support for populism is driven by the feeling of being denied the societal recognition one deserves. Our contribution builds on the insight that individuals can feel to lack recognition in different ways and for different reasons. We argue that—due to this multifaceted character—the common perception of being neglected societal recognition unites otherwise heterogeneous segments of the population in their support for populism. Relying on data from the GLES Pre-Election Cross-Section 2021, we will investigate the multiple roots of populist attitudes in feelings of lacking societal recognition in two steps. First, we will test the hypothesis that distinct feelings of lacking recognition dominate in different social segments. Second, we will test the hypothesis that each of these distinct feelings of lacking recognition are associated with populist attitudes.

With the availability of large volumes of electronic communications data and the increasing sophistication of computational techniques, the development of automated approaches for different kinds of framing analysis is an important goal of researchers. There is as yet no standard method for the ‘unsupervised’ inductive identification of frames based upon the content of articles. Three groups of core approaches underlie a wide range of work in this area, and we compare three techniques based on these approaches against each other and against manual human analysts. The three techniques are a k-means clustering algorithm together with a sophisticated natural language processing (NLP)-based feature selection process; evolutionary factor analysis (EFA), a factor analysis approach; and the structural topic model (STM). We use two datasets – one very focused and one extremely broad – as examples of the kind of frame analysis problems readers may wish to attempt. Even in a highly targeted dataset, we find some distance between the frames generated by computational analysis and those manually produced by our human analysts. The details of each method have a substantial impact on frame quality and interpretation. We find that the STM approach is the most effective for our narrow-scope dataset, but that it returns definite topics, and not frames, when working on our very broad dataset. We also show that we can get results emphasizing different parts of the framing problem by combining parts of different methods as a multi-stage process, rather than viewing available methods as simple plug-and-play models.

Decisions about how to organize and run an election can shape political participation. Policy choices may distribute election resources unequally, skewing voting outcomes. In low- and middle-income countries where electoral capacity and resources are scarce and decision-making highly centralized, election administration has the potential to shape results on a large scale. In the context of Kenya's August 2017 elections, I study the consequences of a legislated threshold that determines the capacity of polling centers to quickly serve voters by reducing election-day lines. Using a regression discontinuity design I find that turnout is 2.4% lower in congested polling places just below the threshold relative to polling places above the threshold. Relative to other hypothetical thresholds, the chosen threshold benefits the incumbent president, as incumbent strongholds receive more polling resources than opposition areas. The results demonstrate how electoral resource allocation shapes political behavior and election outcomes.

Title in Portuguese: Racionalidade online: provimento de razões em discussões virtuaisAbstract: The aim of this article is to discuss the idea of rationality in online debates. Taking a deliberative approach, this article analyzes 2,375 comments about LGBT rights across four different platforms: Facebook, Youtube, News Portals, and Votenaweb (which was specifically designed as a platform for discussions about bills proposed in the Brazilian National Congress). Using reason-giving as a dependent variable, the article tests five hypotheses: (H1) the number of posts presenting arguments for their positions is directly related to the platform on which these comments were posted; (H2) the chances that a post will present arguments is greater when the forum is balanced; (H3) the chances that a post will present arguments is greater when reciprocity is more frequent; (H4) the chances that a post will present arguments is smaller when the level of disrespect is greater; and (H5) the chances that a post will present arguments diminish when the comments are written by anonymous participants. The results show the importance of the nature of the platform and the salience of respect in inducing reason-giving.Resumo: Este artigo se propõe a discutir a ideia de racionalidade que está no coração das abordagens deliberacionistas de democracia. Essa discussão embasa a realização de um estudo empírico focado em um banco de dados com 2.375 comentários sobre direitos LGBT em quatro arenas online: Youtube, Facebook, comentários de notícias e Votenaweb. O objetivo é discutir os principais fatores a influenciar no incremento do provimento de razões por postagens nessas arenas. Na análise, testamos cinco hipóteses: (H1) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas depende da plataforma em que se encontram essas postagens; (H2) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas é maior em debates em que há equilíbrio entre as posições defendidas; (H3) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas tende a ser maior quando há mais reciprocidade; (H4) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas é menor se o nível de desrespeito é maior; e (H5) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas é menor em mensagens enviadas por anônimos. Os resultados indicam que, entre as variáveis testadas, a "plataforma" e a "presença de respeito" são as mais importantes para induzir o provimento de justificativas.

This study evaluates whether 853 municipalities of Minas Gerais have developed one specific strategy of electronic government. We searched for municipalities that have websites for the executive branch, relating this information to a number of secondary data. These data include variables on the Municipal Human Development Index (HDI-M), municipal budgetary revenues, year of founding of municipalities, the mayor’s party affiliation, and a public policy initiative related to the creation of municipal executive branch websites. This analysis was performed to develop descriptive statistics among the variables collected. In addition to exploring descriptive analysis, we attempted to determine statistical models that explain the existence of websites for municipal executives. This allowed us to determine whether municipalities that were established earlier than others, have the highest HDI-M, and have larger budgets are also more likely to have websites. The results indicate that older municipalities, as well as those with higher HDI-M and elevated budgetary revenues, are more likely to have websites. A mayor’s party affiliation indicates that municipalities administered by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT, the center-left-wing party) are more likely to have websites than municipalities governed by the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, or PSDB, the center-right-wing party). Furthermore, municipalities that use the state government program Integra Minas (Connect Minas) are less likely to have their own websites, which is an indication that these locations are using policy resources to communicate electronically with the population. Thus, newly founded municipalities with low HDI-M, with low budgetary revenue, and administered by center-right-wing parties may benefit from public policies that encourage greater transparency in the communication of municipal executives with their population.

The April 2018 article of Diana Mutz “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and contradicts prior sociological research on the 2016 election. Mutz’s article received widespread media coverage because of the strength of its primary conclusion, declaimed in its title. The present article is a critical reanalysis of the models offered by Mutz, using the data files released along with her article. Contrary to her conclusions, this article demonstrates that (1) the relative importance of economic interests and status threat cannot be estimated effectively with her cross-sectional data, and (2) her panel data are consistent with the claim that economic interests are at least as important as status threat. The preexisting sociological literature has offered interpretations that incorporate economic interests and, as a result, provides a more credible explanation of the 2016 election.

Title in Portuguese: A política de segurança pública no Brasil: uma análise dos gastos estaduais (1999-2010)Abstract: This article analyzes the public spending on public safety policy in Brazil in the period of 1999-2010, noting particularly its relations with the ideological perspectives of the parties elected to the Executive (state governments). It was tested especially the hypothesis that spending on public safety policy would be greater in states ruled by right-wing parties, as part of the national literature points to the existence of most concern this political-ideological spectrum with the function social control. We used multivariate regression models and the main findings were: a) increased spending in left-wing and center-wing parties, compared to the right-wing parties; and b) approximation of the percentages of the collection invested in safety policy in the states, regardless of the incumbent parties.Resumo: Este artigo analisa os gastos estaduais em segurança pública no período de 1999 a 2010, observando principalmente suas relações com as perspectivas ideológicas dos partidos eleitos para o Poder Executivo (governador). Testou-se, sobretudo, a hipótese de que o gasto com a política de segurança pública seria maior em estados governados por partidos de direita, uma vez que parte da literatura nacional aponta para a existência de maior preocupação desse espectro político-ideológico com a função de controle social. Foram utilizados modelos de regressão multivariada que indicaram os seguintes achados: a) variação positiva dos gastos quando os partidos são de esquerda e centro, comparados aos partidos de direita; e b) relativa aproximação dos percentuais de arrecadação investidos em segurança nos estados, independentemente dos partidos nos governos.

Research on price trends in informal markets relies on visits to these sites and utilizing some kind of survey instrument. This paper begins with a broader question and adopts a more grounded strategy, asking: what are some elements of an informal commodity market in a developing country, such as a goat market, that can be identified in an ethnographic approach? Based on 18 months of field observations, the paper narrates the presence or absence of formal documentation and informal rules across three categories (price, care, and transportation) at its case study site of the goat market in Bolgatanga, Ghana. It finds that there is an almost complete lack of standard documentation seen in the everyday life of developed countries. It also notes the relatively stable, yet informal, practices with respect to bargaining and exchange and organized transportation to a point of sale. These social and cultural practices are likely important to any planned adjustment or intervention to ensure food security or simply improved market operation.

We develop a new measure of party position based on a scaling of ideology tags supplied in infoboxes on political parties’ Wikipedia pages. Assuming a simple model of tag assignment, we estimate the locations of parties and ideologies in a common space. We find that the recovered scale can be interpreted in familiar terms of “left versus right.” Estimated party positions correlate well with ratings of parties’ positions from extant large-scale expert surveys, most strongly with ratings of general left–right ideology. Party position estimates also show high stability in a test–retest scenario. Our results demonstrate that a Wikipedia-based approach yields valid and reliable left–right scores comparable to scores obtained via conventional expert coding methods. It thus provides a measure with potentially unlimited party coverage. Our measurement strategy is also applicable beyond Wikipedia.

The literature on state-sponsored violence has grown significantly over the last decades. Although scholars have suggested a number of potential correlates of mass killings, it remains unclear whether the estimates are robust to different model specifications, or which variables accurately predict the onset of large-scale violence. We employ extreme bounds analysis and distributed random forests to test the sensitivity of 40 variables on a sample of 177 countries from 1945 to 2013. The results show that GDP per capita, the post-Cold War period, and stable political regimes are negatively associated with mass killings. In contrast, ethnic diversity, civil wars, and previous political turmoils increase the risk of state-led violence. Years since the last episode of mass violence, GDP per capita, urban population, ethnic polarisation, the number of military personnel, and democracy make the greatest contribution to the models' out-of-sample predictive power.

This article proposes a conception of monetary sovereignty that recognizes the reality of today’s global credit money system. Monetary sovereignty is typically used in a Westphalian sense to denote the ability of states to issue and regulate their own currency. This article rejects the Westphalian conception. Instead, it proposes a conception of effective monetary sovereignty that focuses attention on what states are actually able to do in the era of financial globalization. The conception fits the hybridity of the modern credit money system by acknowledging the crucial role not only of central bank money but also of money issued by regulated banks and unregulated shadow banks. These institutions often operate ‘offshore’, outside of a state’s legal jurisdiction, which makes monetary governance more difficult. Monetary sovereignty consists in the ability of states to effectively govern these different segments of the monetary system and thereby achieve their economic policy objectives.

Voters are frequently ill-equipped to monitor politicians’ actions. Politicians are expected to implement projects, whose benefits sometimes partially accrue to interest groups (IGs) and not entirely to voters. IGs thus have an incentive to affect which projects politicians implement by providing implementation subsidies to lower the cost of policymaking that politicians incur. This article shows how these considerations interact in a two-period political agency model with moral hazard and adverse selection. I study how the involvement of IGs in the policymaking process can affect voters’ welfare and show why voters might rationally not perfectly monitor politicians in the presence of IGs that might capture projects’ benefits and affect policymaking. (JEL D72, D73, D83)

This article analyzes the gendered representation of military service in the German YouTube series Die Rekruten (DR) (The Recruits), a popular web series produced on behalf of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) for recruitment purposes, which accompanies 12 navy recruits during their basic training. The article is situated within research on masculinity and the military, in particular military recruitment. It supplements current scholarship by studying a previously neglected case that is of particular interest given Germany’s antimilitarist culture, which should make military recruitment and military public relations more difficult. The article asks how military service is represented in DR, what its discursive effects are, and what role (if any) masculinity plays in this process. We find support for recent feminist research on military masculinities (including in military recruitment) that emphasizes ambiguity and contradiction. What distinguishes the construction of military masculinity in DR from, for example, recruitment advertisements in the United States or the United Kingdom is its markedly civil character. This not only broadens the military’s appeal for a more diverse audience but also increases the legitimacy of the military and its activities. It does so by concealing the violence that has for the past two decades also been a very real part of what the Bundeswehr does.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed new constraints on empirical research, and online data collection by social scientists increased. Generalizing from experiments conducted during this period of persistent crisis may be challenging due to changes in how participants respond to treatments or the composition of online samples. We investigate the generalizability of COVID era survey experiments with 33 replications of 12 pre-pandemic designs, fielded across 13 quota samples of Americans between March and July 2020. We find strong evidence that pre-pandemic experiments replicate in terms of sign and significance, but at somewhat reduced magnitudes. Indirect evidence suggests an increased share of inattentive subjects on online platforms during this period, which may have contributed to smaller estimated treatment effects. Overall, we conclude that the pandemic does not pose a fundamental threat to the generalizability of online experiments to other time periods.