Do Indigenous peoples in present-day Canada display lower levels of diffuse support than non-Indigenous settlers? Given settler colonial relations (both historic and contemporary) and Indigenous peoples’ own political thought, we can expect that Indigenous peoples would have even lower perceptions of state legitimacy than non-Indigenous peoples. However, there are conflicting expectations regarding whether the descriptive representation of Indigenous peoples in settler institutions is likely to make a difference: on one hand, Indigenous people may see themselves reflected in these institutions and consequently feel better represented; on the other hand, these forms of representation do not challenge the underlying colonial nature of these institutions. Using data from the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, our statistical analysis demonstrates that: (1) diffuse support is significantly lower among Indigenous peoples than non-Indigenous peoples, including people of color; (2) Indigenous respondents across multiple peoples have similarly low levels of diffuse support, and (3) being represented by an Indigenous Member of Parliament does not change the levels of diffuse support among Indigenous peoples. Overall, our research highlights the outstanding challenges to achieving reconciliation through the Canadian state and points to ways large-N analyses may be made more robust.

Are centralized leaders of religious organizations responsive to their followers' political preferences over time even when formal accountability mechanisms, such as elections, are weak or absent? I argue that such leaders have incentives to be responsive because they rely on dedicated members for legitimacy and support. I test this theory by examining the Catholic Church and its centralized leader, the Pope. First, I analyze over 10,000 papal statements to confirm that the papacy is responsive to Catholics' overall political concerns. Second, I conduct survey experiments in Brazil and Mexico to investigate how Catholics react to responsiveness. Catholics increase their organizational trust and participation when they receive papal messages that reflect their concerns, conditional on their existing commitment to the Church and their agreement with the Church on political issues. The evidence suggests that in centralized religious organizations, the leader reaffirms members' political interests because followers support religious organizations that are politically responsive.

This research note investigates how the voting behavior of middle-income citizens explains why right-wing parties tend to govern under majoritarian electoral rule. The growing literature that investigates the ideological effects of electoral systems has mostly focused on institutional explanations. However, whether the electoral rules overrepresent parties with some specific ideologies is also a matter of behavior. Building on Iversen and Soskice (2006), we test two arguments. First, middle-income groups are more likely to vote for the right under majoritarian rules because they fear the redistributive consequences of a victory of the left in these contexts. Second, middle-income earners particularly concerned with tax rates are particularly prone to vote differently across electoral systems. Combining survey evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the New Zealand Election Study, we show that the voting behavior of middle-income citizens is indeed responsible for the predominance of the right under majoritarian systems.

Political scientists know surprisingly little about the political behavior of inventors, or those who produce new technologies. I therefore merged US patent and campaign contribution (DIME) data to reveal the donation behavior of 30,603 American inventors from 1980 through 2014. Analysis of the data produces three major findings. First, the Democratic Party has made significant inroads among American inventors, but these gains increasingly come from only a few regions and flow to a relatively small number of candidates. Second, deeper geographic trends explain most of the change in aggregate donation patterns. Third, inventors do not strategically donate to candidates outside their own district and, since 2006, inventors increasingly contribute to relatively centrist employer PACs with weak ties to the Democratic Party. These findings suggest that the interaction between market-oriented policy and American electoral institutions may inhibit the formation of broad cross-regional coalitions to support the knowledge economy.

Recent election cycles show a reluctance among Black millennials to support the Democratic Party, which suggests that they are not captured by the party like their predecessors. While we know that African Americans have historically remained a loyal voting bloc, it is important to analyze whether there are generational differences with respect to Black Democratic Party loyalty. In this study, I analyze Black millennial partisanship identification and compare it to Black non-millennials (Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers). To test this, I employ a multi-method approach. My results show that while Black millennials continue to identify with the Democratic Party, they are not as loyal to the Democratic Party when compared to Black non-millennials. Further, I find that Black millennials are not changing loyalties to the Republican or a third party. Instead, Black millennials are willing to withhold their vote altogether if they are not satisfied with any Democratic candidates. My work has critical implications in how we understand Black politics and reveals that Democratic candidates will have to earn Black millennials vote going forward.

In autocracies, party membership offers benefits to citizens who join the ruling party. The recruitment process consists of (i) citizens' applying to become party members, followed by (ii) ruling parties' selection among applicants. Hence, I propose that ruling parties can face a “recruitment dilemma” when the citizens who apply for party membership with an eye on its benefits do not overlap with the ruling party's targeted population. Previous research assumes that the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) interest in co-opting white-collar workers is matched by those workers’ interest in becoming party members. However, it is their emergence as an essential social group that changed the CCP membership's pattern, leading it to adapt its co-optation strategy to solve the recruitment dilemma. Using surveys across multiple waves between 2005 and 2017, I show (i) changes in application patterns, (ii) the CCP's recruitment dilemma when they receive applications from more laborers than white-collar workers, and (iii) the CCP solution of rejecting laborers in favor of white-collar workers.

Secularism—i.e., the separation between the state and religious institutions—is a fundamental characteristic of liberal democracies, yet support for secular arrangements varies significantly across Western countries. In Canada, such attitudinal divergences are observable at the regional level, with citizens from Quebec displaying higher levels of support for secularism than other Canadians. In this paper, we test three hypotheses to account for this regional discrepancy: religiosity, liberal values, and out-group prejudice. Using data from an online panel survey (n = 2,000), our findings suggest that support for secularism in Quebec is mostly explained by the province's lower baseline levels of religiosity, anticlerical feelings, and by its distinctive understanding of liberalism. These factors are likely to result from Quebec's unique religious and sociohistorical history. Results also suggest that while negative feelings toward religious minorities are positively correlated with support for secularism across the entire country, negative feelings toward ethnic minorities are associated with lower support for secularism in Quebec. These findings disprove the commonly held assumption according to which support for secularism is driven by ethnic prejudice in Quebec.

How do Black Americans practice a politics of racial group uplift while balancing their individual material interests? Traditionally, scholars have drawn on linked fate theory. However, more recent work argues that Black Americans remain politically unified because they feel race-based social pressure to conform more than a sense of linked fate. Employing a novel research design, I use the competitive reality television series, Survivor, to observe and analyze Black group-based decision-making. Through an inductive thematic content analysis of 13 Survivor episodes, I identified five themes in Black players’ discussions of racialized social obligations when playing the game—what I call narratives of racial duty. Claims that emerged in this storytelling suggested that similar to the political world, Black Survivor contestants were keenly aware of the racialized social obligations for them as contestants in the game. For some, this reality felt like a burden. For others, it presented an opportunity. These reactions led some Black players to work together and others to construct a rationale for defecting from race-based alliances. I conclude by making the case that analyzing entertainment programs offers race and politics scholars a new site for identifying common scripts used to adhere to (and sidestep) racialized social norms.

Several watershed events preceded the dissolution of Yugoslavia. One of these was the toppling of the Vojvodina autonomist leadership in October 1988. This was preceded by a series of rallies throughout Vojvodina in the summer of 1988, which may have seemed like a spontaneous affair and the work of “ordinary citizens.” It was called “the antibureaucratic revolution.” However, these rallies, including a standing group of demonstrators, continually and always referring to the grievances of Kosovo Serbs, turned out to be supported by the Serbian political elite centered in Belgrade. The elite, still headed by the Serbian Communist Chief Slobodan Milošević, gave thrust and coordination to efforts to organize the rallies. The Vojvodina leadership was toppled for their alleged “failing to understand the plight of Kosovo Serbs.” The overthrow was, further, with a view to achieve the Serbian elite’s pet project, the “united Serbia”—that is, doing away with Vojvodina’s and Kosovo’s autonomy. Written sources (including recollections by Yugoslav leaders of the time) and written sources are considered in research on the events.

How can and should we analyze mass mobilization and its outcomes in authoritarian (and potentially democratizing) states as social scientists? Are there any distinctive features to the study of mass mobilization and its outcomes in Eastern Europe? And how much should we focus on comparative analyses versus context and country specificities? The case of the 2020 mass mobilization in Belarus offers an opportunity to engage with and answer these questions in a reciprocal dialogue between scholars of protest and activism, politics of competitive authoritarian and democratizing contexts, and regional and country experts. This symposium brings together a diverse set of scholars and combines comparative and case-specific analyses and empirically driven and interpretive analyses that focus on different political, social, and cultural angles of this episode of mass mobilization and its aftermath.

The gender gap in political knowledge is a well-established finding in Political Science. One explanation for gender differences in political knowledge is the activation of negative stereotypes about women. As part of the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, we conducted a two-stage preregistered and high-powered direct replication of Study 2 of Ihme and Tausendpfund (2018). While we successfully replicated the gender gap in political knowledge – such that male participants performed better than female participants – both the first (N = 671) and second stage (N = 831) of the replication of the stereotype activation effect were unsuccessful. Taken together (pooled N = 1,502), results indicate evidence of absence of the effect of stereotype activation on gender differences in political knowledge. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and put forward evidence that the gender gap in political knowledge might be an artifact of how knowledge is measured.

Current approaches to voting behavior in clientelist contexts either predict that clients leave their preferences aside for fear of having their benefits cut off or voluntarily support politicians they perceive to be reliable patrons. These two approaches cannot account for clients’ vote choices in the Sertão of Bahia, Brazil, where voters were free to choose among competing candidates but supported patrons they knew were unreliable. This article argues that clients voluntarily voted for bad patrons as a strategy to gain symbolic power in their negotiations with politicians. By explaining clients’ paradoxical choices in the Sertão, this article reveals how clientelism can persist without monitoring mechanisms or positive attitudes toward patrons. In addition, this study shows the importance of incorporating voters’ perspectives and their everyday survival strategies to better account for clients’ political behavior.

Economic and health crises have profound political consequences for public support for social policy, historically setting in motion a massive expansion of governmental programs. Is demand for social protection likely to increase among citizens exposed to risk in an era in which populist messages are prominent? We show that this depends critically on the precise targets that populists evoke as enemies of the people. We distinguish between two types of political rhetoric deployed by populist politicians in their claims to represent the authentic people—one opposing the authority of domestic elites, including technocrats, and one attacking foreigners. We examine the extent to which each rhetorical strategy reduces or enhances popular demand for social policies by randomly exposing Americans to these frames as part of a public opinion survey conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results show that the two messages have different consequences for support for redistribution among respondents exposed to risk: populist anti-foreign rhetoric that blames foreign countries for the onset of the pandemic increases demand for expansion of social protection compared to populist anti-elite rhetoric.