How does economic inequality affect support for redistribution to native citizens and immigrants? While prior studies have examined the separate effects of inequality and immigration on redistribution preferences, the interaction between inequality and communal identity has been largely overlooked. This article explains that inequality triggers selective solidarity. Individuals exposed to inequality become more supportive of redistribution – but only if the redistribution benefits native-born citizens. Inequality therefore reinforces the already popular opinion that native citizens deserve welfare priority and widens the gap between support for natives and support for immigrants. This study first provides cross-national evidence with survey data linked to contextual socio-economic indicators from advanced industrialized countries. To evaluate causally identified effects, it then presents the results of a survey experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of Italian citizens. The findings imply that economic inequality can increase support for populist radical right parties that advocate discrimination in access to welfare services based on native citizenship.

Does benefit competition affect voters' support for immigrants' social rights? While scholars in political economy expect that benefit competition lowers support among the poor, the evidence is limited. This seems to be largely due to the reliance on highly aggregated analyses and the neglect of the institutional context in which individuals form their preferences. This article argues that lower-income voters are more likely to reduce their support due to competition when benefit eligibility depends on income. Using individual-level panel data from the Netherlands and a novel way to measure benefit competition, the study shows that lower-middle-income voters become less supportive of immigrants' social rights when more social housing in their municipality is allocated to refugees. By contrast, competition does not reduce support among the rich or the very poor. The findings suggest that benefit competition can erode support for immigrants' social rights and influence electoral politics.

Immigration is one of the most salient and important issues in contemporary American politics. While a great deal is known about how cultural attitudes and economics influence public opinion toward immigration, little is known about how attitudes toward government influence support for immigration. Using cross-sectional data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), panel data from the ANES and General Social Survey, as well a Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey experiment, I show that political trust exerts a positive and substantively meaningful influence on Americans' support for immigration. Politically trustful individuals, both Democrats and Republicans, are more supportive of pro-immigration policies. These findings underscore the political relevance of trust in government and show that public attitudes toward immigration are not driven solely by feelings about immigrant groups, partisanship, core political values, nor personality traits, but are also affected by trust in government, the actor most responsible for managing immigration policy.

Recent research on electoral behavior has suggested that policy-informed vote choices are frequently obstructed by uncertainty about party positions. Given the significance of clear and distinct party platforms for meaningful representation, several studies have investigated the conditions under which parties are perceived as ambiguous. Yet previous studies have often relied on measures of perceived positional ambiguity that are fairly remote from the concept, casting doubt on their substantive conclusions. This article introduces a statistical model to estimate a comprehensive measure of perceived ambiguity that incorporates the two principal factors: non-positions and positional inconsistency. The two-faces model employs issue perceptions in an item response framework to explicitly parametrize the perceived ambiguity of party positions. The model is applied to data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and subsequently associated with party characteristics that drive perceptions of party ambiguity. The results suggest that (a) there are notable differences between the proposed and competing measures, highlighting the need to be mindful of the intricacies of political information processing in research on perceptions of ambiguity and (b) involuntary ambiguity might be an underexplored explanation for unclear party perceptions.

Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. This article argues that out-group cues from Democratic elites caused a backlash that resulted in greater climate skepticism. The authors construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 public opinion polls at the quarterly level from 2001 to 2014 and at the annual level from 1986 to 2014. They also build time-series measures of possible contributors to climate skepticism using an automated media content analysis. The analyses provide evidence that cues from party elites – especially from Democrats – are associated with aggregate dynamics in climate change skepticism, including among supporters of the Republican Party. The study also involves a party cue survey experiment administered to a sample of 3,000 Americans through Amazon Mechanical Turk to provide more evidence of causality. Together, these results highlight the importance of out-group cue taking and suggest that climate change skepticism should be examined through the lens of elite-led opinion formation.

Elite partisan polarization has been found to have several potentially problematic effects on citizens, such as creating political distrust and different types of polarization among partisans. However, it remains unclear whether these effects are caused by the parties moving apart in terms of issue positions (issue polarization) or by the rise of disrespectful rhetoric (incivility). In the literature, these two dimensions of elite polarization often appear to affect citizens in similar ways, but typical research designs have not been well suited to disentangling their effects. To determine their unique effects, four studies have been conducted using original designs and a mix of experimental and observational data. The results show that issue polarization and incivility have clearly distinct effects. A more uncivil tone lowers political trust, but increasing issue polarization does not. Conversely, only issue polarization creates attitude polarization among partisans. Both aspects of elite polarization create affective polarization.

A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. This article further develops the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain's 2016 referendum on European Union membership, the study uses surveys and experiments to measure the intensity of partisan and Brexit-related affective polarization. The results show that Brexit identities are prevalent, felt to be personally important and cut across traditional party lines. These identities generate affective polarization as intense as that of partisanship in terms of stereotyping, prejudice and various evaluative biases, convincingly demonstrating that affective polarization can emerge from identities beyond partisanship.

It is well known that regime types affect international conflicts. This article explores political parties as a mechanism through which they do so. Political parties operate in fundamentally different ways in democracies vs. non-democracies, which has consequences for foreign policy. Core supporters of a party in a democracy, if they are hawkish, may be more successful at demanding hawkish behavior from their party representatives than would be their counterparts in an autocracy. The study draws on evidence from paired experiments in democratic Japan and non-democratic China to show that supporters of the ruling party in Japan punish their leaders for discouraging nationalist protests, while ruling party insiders in China are less likely to do so. Under some circumstances, then, non-democratic regimes may be better able to rein in peace-threatening displays of nationalism.

Social norms play an important role in our understanding of why people vote, yet very little is known about the relative importance of descriptive and injunctive norms for voter turnout or how normative influence is affected by the political and social relationship between citizens. Using political discussion network data from the British Election Study, this article examines the joint effect of descriptive and injunctive norms on turnout. It demonstrates that citizens follow the example of those closest to them (descriptive norms), especially their partner, but they also respond to social approval of voting from political discussants regardless of the nature of their relationship.

How does the changing information environment affect the degree to which voters make independent decisions for different offices on their ballots? Leveraging the gradual roll-out of broadband internet across the United States and across congressional districts, this study uses within-district variation over four election cycles to examine the effects of internet access on voting behavior in US legislative elections. The results show that the expansion of broadband resulted in less split-ticket voting and a lower incumbency advantage because voters exposed to increased high-speed internet voted in a more partisan fashion. Consistent with work demonstrating the effect of the internet on local news consumption, the results suggest that the change in the information environment resulting from enhanced internet access led voters to prioritize national considerations over local considerations. This has important consequences for not only how voters act, but the resulting incentives that elected officials confront.

This article revisits the foundations of prior research on the effects of plebiscitarian selection mechanisms on candidates' electoral strength. While previous studies do not nest political parties' decision making, the authors argue that party primary effects entail the interdependence of party procedures for candidate selection. The article assesses the validity of the two approaches. Using original data from seven parties and 296 regional elections in Canada, Germany and Spain, and from sixty-two pre-election polls in Germany and Spain, it shows that, other things equal, primary-selected candidates are not stronger than those selected by other procedures. However, there is evidence of a penalty for parties that do not select candidates by primary when their main rival does, in particular when the primary election is not divisive and is held closer to the general election.

Public faith in politicians and associated systems of governance is desperately low. At the same time, public opinion of politicians is characterized by a vernacular of psychological accusations pertaining to greed, self-interest and careerism. This article tests the verity of these claims by comparing quantitative data on the Basic Human Values (Schwartz 1992) of 106 UK Members of Parliament (MPs) and 134 unsuccessful parliamentary candidates with data collected from the British public in the seventh wave of the European Social Survey. It explores (a) how politicians differ psychologically from those they govern and (b) how personality characteristics such as basic values inform candidate emergence. The study finds that politics is a profession few ‘ordinary’ people care to enter. MPs attribute significantly more importance to Self-Transcendence values than the comparatively conservative population they govern, but the relative importance they ascribe to Power values seems to have an equally strong predictive effect on candidate emergence.

Empirical studies show that many governments gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers. This article investigates governments’ strategies to provide ethnic favors in Africa. Recent studies of ethnic favoritism find that presidents' ethnic peers and home regions enjoy advantages, yet cannot disentangle whether goods are provided to entire regions or co-ethnic individuals. This article argues that local ethnic demography determines whether governments provide non-excludable public goods or more narrowly targeted handouts. Where government co-ethnics are in the majority, public goods benefit all locals regardless of their ethnic identity. Outside of these strongholds, incumbents pursue discriminatory strategies and only their co-ethnics gain from favoritism. Using fine-grained geographic data on ethnic demographics, the study finds support for the argument's implications in the local incidence of infant mortality. These findings have important implications for theories of distributive politics and conflict in multi-ethnic societies.

Scholars have long debated the positive and negative consequences of an aware public for the quality of governance in modern liberal democracies. This article extends this debate to the context of constitutional review by exploring how public awareness can limit the effective exercise of review by courts lacking strong public support. Incorporating aspects of both the legitimacy and separation of powers theories on judicial power, the author argues that public awareness weakens the efficacy of such unpopular courts by creating an electoral incentive for governments to defy adverse rulings, even when doing so may lead to punishment from other institutional stakeholders. The article develops a simple formal model that identifies how and under what conditions public awareness can influence an unpopular court's decision making. An analysis of rulings issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union finds support for the model's empirical implications.

There is an emerging drive to define a new praiseworthy governance goal: a goal that not only implies addressing corruption but going further to establish institutions that are truly worthy of trust. That goal is ‘public integrity’. However, most current accounts of public integrity adopt an ‘officer-first’ approach: defining public integrity primarily as a quality of individual public officers, and only derivatively, if at all, as a quality of public institutions themselves. This article argues that this approach is flawed. Analysing the current debate, it identifies the need to define a role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour for public officers. However, it is only possible to define this role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour by referring to a public officer's contribution to the overall moral ideal of her institution. Assuming that this ideal itself is a form of public integrity, it then follows that such institutional integrity must be defined ‘first’ in order to then define a public officer's praiseworthy contribution to it second. Substantively, this article argues that ‘public institutional integrity’ is an institution's robust disposition to pursue its purpose efficiently, within the constraints of legitimacy, consistent with its commitments. ‘Public officer integrity’ is the robust disposition of an officer to support the integrity of her institution, within the course of her duties, to the best of her abilities.

Migration is often perceived as a challenge to the welfare state. To manage this challenge, advanced welfare states have established transgovernmental networks. This article examines how domestic factors condition the interaction of representatives of advanced welfare states when they cooperate on transnational welfare governance. Based on new survey data, it compares who interacts with whom in one of the oldest transgovernmental networks of the European Union (EU) – the network that deals with EU citizens' rights to cross-border welfare. First, the authors perform a welfare cluster analysis of EU-28 and test whether institutional similarity explains these interactions. Furthermore, they test whether the level and kind of migration explains interaction and examine the explanatory value of administrative capacity. To test what drives interactions, the study employs social network analysis and exponential random graph models. It finds that cooperation in networked welfare governance tends to be homophilous, and that political cleavages between sending and receiving member states are mirrored in network interactions. Domestic factors are key drivers when advanced welfare states interact.

This article provides an accessible introduction to the phenomenon of monotone likelihood in duration modeling of political events. Monotone likelihood arises when covariate values are monotonic when ordered according to failure time, causing parameter estimates to diverge toward infinity. Within political science duration model applications, this problem leads to misinterpretation, model misspecification and omitted variable biases, among other issues. Using a combination of mathematical exposition, Monte Carlo simulations and empirical applications, this article illustrates the advantages of Firth's penalized maximum-likelihood estimation in resolving the methodological complications underlying monotone likelihood. The results identify the conditions under which monotone likelihood is most acute and provide guidance for political scientists applying duration modeling techniques in their empirical research.

Item nonresponse rates across regime assessment questions and nonsensitive items are used to create a self-censorship index, which can be compared across countries, over time and across population subgroups. For many authoritarian systems, citizens do not display higher rates of item nonresponse on regime assessment questions than their counterparts in democracies. This result suggests such questions may not be that sensitive in many places, which in turn raises doubts that authoritarian citizens are widely feigning positive attitudes towards regimes they secretly despise. Higher levels of self-censorship are found under regimes without electoral competition for the executive.

The media's ability to freely gather and disseminate information remains a critical aspect of democracy. Studies link media freedom to other concepts including human rights, corruption, democratic peace and conflict, natural resource wealth, political knowledge and foreign aid. However, media freedom's many facets make it difficult for any single index to fully capture. To develop a more robust measure, this article treats media freedom as a latent variable and analyzes ten extant indicators by fitting an item response theory model. Utilizing a Bayesian approach, the model generates time-series, cross-sectional data on a bounded, unidimensional scale from 0 to 1 that measures media freedom in 197 countries from 1948 to 2017. After numerous validity checks, the authors utilize their new Media System Freedom data to replicate Egorov, Guriev and Sonin's (2009) analysis of media freedom and natural resource wealth. The findings indicate that the published results do not hold once the more robust measure is included.

Numerous empirical studies have examined the role of third-party peacekeeping in reducing violence around the world. Their results reveal an extraordinary relationship between peacekeepers and peace, notwithstanding a number of well-known problems. This review article has three goals. The first is to summarize the results of past empirical research to move the debate beyond the question of whether peacekeeping works to the more pressing questions of how, when and why it works. The second is to reveal the limitations of the current quantitative research in order to identify areas in which scholars can make big, new contributions to the field. The final goal is to propose a new research agenda that is heavily evaluative – one that informs policy makers about the specific practices, mission compositions, and mandates that work, and identifies the local, regional, and international conditions that amplify or diminish peacekeeping's effectiveness. This type of research could help reduce the costs of peacekeeping operations, eliminate some of the negative consequences of interventions and save even more lives.