Conventional wisdom claims that racial diversity undermines public goods provision. I show that class-based differences, instead, incentivize cooperation for public goods. Class-based segregation reduces spatial externalities of inequality (e.g., sewage pollution and crime) spilling over from impoverished areas (e.g., slums) to the middle class. Conversely, I argue that in integrated (de-segregated) cities, the scale of such externalities undermines the efficacy of private services (e.g., private security), thereby inducing middle-class preferences for externalities-correcting public goods. Thus, while segregation polarizes preferences, integration aligns the middle class with the poor in coalitions that support public goods over private alternatives. I illustrate the theory using focus groups, a proposed quasi-experimental strategy, and an original face-to-face survey of 4,208 households across 420 neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil. The analysis introduces self-interest in reducing intergroup externalities as a mechanism for cooperation for public goods even in diverse societies. Using mechanism vignettes, I distinguish the mechanism from the affective attitudes—racial tolerance, social affinity—of intergroup contact.

Conflictual cabinet terminations are seismic events in democracies, but their consequences are understudied. I argue that the electoral impacts of conflictual cabinet terminations depend on voters’ perceptions of them. Terminations following non-policy conflicts are electorally costly. They signal parties’ deteriorating governing competence, which reduces parties’ vote shares. In contrast, terminations following policy conflicts signal parties’ unwillingness to compromise their policy positions and clarify parties’ policy profiles, thus allowing them to evade voter punishment and junior coalition parties to reap electoral reward, particularly for those terminations preceded by interparty policy conflicts. Statistical analyses using the Party Government in Europe Database dataset support my argument on policy terminations and reveal more nuanced electoral effects of non-policy conflict terminations. These findings are robust to various alternative explanations, as well as multiple cabinet terminations and time passed from termination to election. The findings have large implications on electoral accountability of intra-cabinet conflicts and the quality of governance.

We are witnessing increasing partisan polarization across the world. It is often argued that partisan “echo chambers” are one of the drivers of both policy and affective polarization. In this article, we develop and test the argument that the political homogeneity of people’s social environment shapes polarization. Using an innovative, large-scale pre-registered “lab-in-the-field” experiment in the United Kingdom, we examine how polarization is influenced by partisan group homogeneity. We recruit nationally representative partisans and assign them to discuss a salient policy issue, either with like-minded partisans (an echo chamber) or in a mixed-partisan group. This allows us to examine how group composition affects polarization. In line with our expectations, we find that partisan echo chambers increase both policy and affective polarization compared to mixed discussion groups. This has important implications for our understanding of the drivers of polarization and for how out-group animosity might be ameliorated in the mass public.

Why is support the radical right higher in some geographic locations than others? This article argues that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical-right support in previous research is in part the result of something different: communities that were in the historical “periphery” in the center–periphery conflicts of modern nation-state formation. Inspired by a classic state-building literature that emphasizes the prevalence of a “wealth of tongues”—or nonstandard linguistic dialects in a region—as a definition of the periphery, we use data from more than 725,000 geo-coded responses in a linguistic survey in Germany to show that voters from historically peripheral geographic communities are more likely to vote for the radical right today.

Do well-informed politicians make more effective spending decisions? In experiments with 70% of all elected politicians in Malawi ($ N=460 $), we tested the effects of information on public spending. Specifically, we randomly provided information about school needs, foreign aid, and voting patterns prior to officials making real decisions about the allocation of spending. We show that these information interventions reduced inequalities in spending: treatment group politicians were more likely to spend in schools neglected by donors and in schools with greater need. Some information treatment effects were strongest in remote and less populated communities. These results suggest that information gaps partially explain inequalities in spending allocation and imply social welfare benefits from improving politicians’ access to information about community needs.

Despite polarization’s growing importance in social science, its quantitative measurement has lagged behind its conceptual development. Political and social polarization are group-based phenomena characterized by intergroup heterogeneity and intragroup homogeneity, but existing measures capture only one of these features or make it difficult to compare across cases or over time. To bring the concept and measurement of polarization into closer alignment, I introduce the cluster-polarization coefficient (CPC), a measure of multimodality that allows scholars to incorporate multiple variables and compare across contexts with varying numbers of parties or social groups. Three applications to elite and mass polarization demonstrate that the CPC returns substantively sensible results, and an open-source software package implements the measure.

What is the gap between scholars’ expectations of media-sourced data and the realities those data actually represent? This letter elucidates the data generation process (DGP) that undergirds media-sourced data: journalistic reporting. It uses semi-structured interviews with 15 journalists to analyze how media actors decide what and how to report—in other words, the “why” of reporting specific events to the exclusion of others—as well as how the larger professional, economic, and political contexts in which journalists operate shape the material scholars treat as data. The letter thus centers “unreported realities”: the fact that media-derived data reflect reporters’ locations, identities, capacities, and outlet priorities, rather than providing a representative sample of ongoing events. In doing so, it reveals variations in the consistency and constancy of reporting that produce unacknowledged, difficult-to-identify biases in media-sourced data that are not directionally predictable.

Local governments have been increasingly active in immigration policy by cooperating with federal immigration enforcement or creating local offices of immigrant affairs (OIA) charged with integrating immigrants. How do these policies shape perceptions of locales following these policy routes? Using a set of pre-registered survey experiments, we find that compared to local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, creating an OIA produces more favorable public attitudes, with minimal differences when undocumented immigrants also receive access to services. Democrats, especially white Democrats, have the most favorable views of cities with an OIA. While Republicans prefer cooperation with ICE, their attitudes toward cities with OIAs remain positive. Our findings suggest that despite partisan polarizing immigration policy debates, establishing OIAs does not attract the negative political attention common in an era of hyperpolarization. OIAs could be a rare immigration policy that may be effective and supported.

Does dual citizenship acceptance increase immigrants’ propensity to naturalize and, if so, for whom does this matter most? We exploit exogenous variation in citizenship legislation in 200 migrant-origin countries to identify the effect of destination country policy reform. We hypothesize that the value of the origin country citizenship moderates the reform effect. We test our identification strategy in two West European countries with contrasting reforms: a canonical liberal reform in Sweden (2001) and an atypical restrictive reversal in the Netherlands (1997). We apply a staggered difference-in-differences model employing administrative data on complete migrant populations. We find reform effects remarkably similar in effect size and heterogeneity, with liberalizing reform increasing naturalization rates by 6.7 percentage points and restrictive change decreasing rates by 6.4 percentage points. The effect is concentrated among immigrants from EU and highly developed countries. Our quasi-experimental evidence informs naturalization scholarship and public debate on migrant political integration.

Recent work suggests that solidarity between people of color (PoC) is triggered when a minoritized ingroup believes they are discriminated similarly to another outgroup based on their alleged foreignness or inferiority. Heightened solidarity then boosts support for policies that benefit minoritized outgroups who are not one’s own. Available experiments on this pathway vary by participants (e.g., Asian, Black, Middle Eastern, and Latino adults), manipulations (similar discrimination as foreign vs. inferior), and pro-outgroup outcomes (support for undocumented immigrants, Black Lives Matter). We report a pre-registered mini meta-analysis of this solidarity mechanism. Across five experiments (N = 3,252), similar discrimination as foreign or inferior reliably triggers solidarity between PoC, which then substantially increases support for pro-outgroup policies. This mediated pathway is robust to possible confounding and emerges across studies and planned contrasts of them. We discuss what the viability of this mechanism implies for further theoretic and empirical innovations in a racially diversifying polity.

In Western democracies, like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, the number of ethnic minority representatives has been steadily increasing. How is this trend shaping electoral behavior? Past work has focused on the effects of minority representation on ethnic minorities’ political engagement, with less attention to the electoral behavior of majority-group members. We argue that increased minorities’ representation can be experienced as a threat to a historically white-dominant political context. This, in turn, politically activates white constituents. Using data from four U.K. general elections and a regression discontinuity design, we find that the next election’s turnout in constituencies narrowly won by an ethnic minority candidate is 4.3 percentage points larger than in constituencies narrowly won by a white candidate. Consistent with our argument, this turnout difference is driven by majority-white constituencies. Our findings have implications for intergroup relations and party politics and help explain recent political dynamics.

Mass media are often portrayed as having large effects on democratic politics. Media content is not simply an exogenous influence on publics and policymakers, however. There is reason to think that this content reflects publics and politics as much as—if not more than—it affects them. This letter examines those possibilities, focusing on interactions between news coverage, budgetary policy, and public preferences in the defense, welfare, and health-care domains in the United States. Results indicate that media play a largely reflective role. Taking this role into account, we suggest, leads to a fundamentally different perspective on how media content matters in politics.

Affective polarization (AP)—the tendency of political partisans to view their opponents as a stigmatized “out group”—is now a major field of research. Relevant evidence in the United States derives primarily from a single source, the American National Election Studies (ANES) feeling thermometer time series. We investigate whether the design of the ANES produces overestimates of AP. We consider four mechanisms: overrepresentation of strong partisans, selection bias conditional on strong identification, priming effects of partisan content, and survey mode variation. Our analysis uses the first-ever collaboration between ANES and the General Social Survey and a novel experiment that manipulates the amount of political content in surveys. Our tests show that variation in survey mode has caused an artificial increase in the mixed-mode ANES time series, but the general increase in out-party animus is nonetheless real and not merely an artifact of selection bias or priming effects.

What explains right-wing radicalization in the United States? Existing research emphasizes demographic changes, economic insecurity, and elite polarization. This paper highlights an additional factor: the impact of foreign wars on society at home. We argue communities that bear the greatest costs of foreign wars are prone to higher rates of right-wing radicalization. To support this claim, we present robust correlations between activity on Parler, a predominantly right-wing social media platform, and fatalities among residents who served in U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at both the county and census tract level. The findings contribute to understanding right-wing radicalization in the US in two key respects. First, it examines widespread, nonviolent radical-right activity that, because it is less provocative than protest and violence, has eluded systematic measurement. Second, it highlights that U.S. foreign wars have important implications for domestic politics beyond partisanship and voting, to potentially include radicalization.