Douglass C. North, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993, became a major leader in historical and comparative political science and in the study of institutions more generally. His work proved particularly relevant for those interested in questions of state building, state variation, development, and long-term secular change.

Although both the idea and the reality of so-called fake news or disinformation campaigns long precede the Trump administration, the frequency and intensity of the discussion around its prevalence and influence have increased significantly since Donald Trump took office. In an era when technological innovations support increasingly inexpensive and easy ways to produce media that looks official, the ability to separate real from artificial has become increasingly complicated and difficult. Some of the responsibility for public manipulation certainly rests with those who present false or artificial information as real. However, their relative success depends on, at least in part, universal psychological processes that often make humans susceptible to believing things that are not true. For example, people often weigh emotional feelings more heavily than abstract facts in their decision making. This discussion examines the psychological foundations that render individuals susceptible to a post-truth media environment and allow it to emerge, escalate, and persist.

In the past year, academics and mass media alike have spoken of populism as a necessary condition for Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 US presidential election. Despite the growing interest in populism for understanding the election, we have yet to provide a systematic analysis of the official campaign discourse and its use of populist rhetoric. To fill this gap, this article proposes an analysis of official campaign statements based on original text data from press releases published from January to June 2016 on campaign websites and tweets published on the official accounts of the three main presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. Data show that the Sanders and Trump campaigns relied on populist discourse to promote two opposing electoral agendas on the left and the right of the political spectrum. Clinton made limited use of populist discourse, mostly in response to the other counter-candidates.

Using content analysis and original survey data, we investigated the news coverage and consequences of Donald Trump’s “rigged-election” claims during the 2016 presidential election. We added to previous literature by showing that the effects of such claims were highly contingent on individual partisan affiliation. Republicans and Independents who believed that the elections were rigged via voter fraud or media bias were more likely to report that they intended to vote or had already voted. Democrats and Independents who believed that Hillary Clinton would benefit from voter fraud or media bias were more likely to vote for Donald Trump.

The surprise outcome of the 2016 presidential election continues to raise more questions as experts grapple with the evidence for why most prognosticators considered a Hillary Clinton victory almost certain. This article uses the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study data to show that a primary explanation for why the election of Donald Trump was difficult to predict is that the bulk of his support did not materialize until Election Day, in the battleground states that he had to carry to win the Electoral College.

Conventional accounts of Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral victory stress idiosyncratic events and media celebrity because most observers assume this unusual candidate won without much organized support. However, considerable evidence suggests that the support of conservative organizational networks, including police unions such as the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), propelled Trump to victory. The FOP is both a public-sector union and a conservative, mass-membership fraternal association that was courted by the Trump campaign at a time of politically charged debates about policing. Four years before, the FOP had refused to endorse Republican candidate Mitt Romney because he opposed public-sector unionism, which provided fruitful and rare variation in interest-group behavior across electoral cycles. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that FOP lodge density contributed to a significant swing in vote share from Romney to Trump. Moreover, survey evidence indicates that police officers reported increased political engagement in 2016 versus 2012. Belying the notion that Trump lacked a “ground game,” this research suggests that he tapped into existing organizational networks, showing their enduring importance in electoral politics.

More than 60 years ago, Angus Campbell offered an explanation for why the president’s party regularly loses congressional seats in midterm elections. He argued that peripheral voters “surge” to the polls in presidential elections and support the president’s congressional co-partisans but “decline” to turn out in the midterm. In his turnout-based explanation for midterm loss, Campbell speculated that “bad weather or an epidemic may affect the vote” but largely dismissed weather’s utility to test his theory (Campbell 1960, 399). I revisit Campbell’s speculation and employ a new identification strategy to investigate the “surge and decline” account of midterm loss. I show that as the costs of voting increase—due to above-average rainfall on Election Day—the strength of the relationship between presidential and congressional voting weakens.

In federal political systems such as the United States, there has long existed a view that citizens should be more politically competent at the local level than at the federal level of government. Recent studies have challenged this view. This article argues that these findings may reflect only one part of the broader picture. Through a review of two recent studies, I contend that research in this realm must consider more than only the level of government. Odd as this sounds, assumptions about varying levels of political competence at different levels of government have always been premised on the notion that local-level politics is smaller and less complex than federal-level politics. However, when local politics takes place today against the backdrop of small villages and towns as well as in large cities, these are assumptions that must be reevaluated.

Presidential candidates frequently hold campaign events on college and university campuses. Yet, the frequency of and motivations for holding these events on-campus has not been subject to systematic empirical analysis. This article analyzes an original database of presidential campaign visits in 2016 to determine how often and why the candidates held their events on-campus. I find that colleges and universities hosted more campaign visits (16.9%) than any other type of venue in 2016. Also, the Democratic candidates apparently used these visits to mobilize young people to register and vote. Democrats (29.5%) visited campuses far more often than Republicans (8.2%), and—unlike Republicans—Democrats were significantly more likely to hold events on-campus, instead of at another venue, as the host-state’s voter registration deadline, its early voting period, or Election Day neared. This research informs scholars’ understanding of the role that young people, as well as colleges and universities, play in American electoral politics.