Evidence suggests that politicians in advanced democracies are positively selected on characteristics relevant to their suitability for political office. Whereas stereotypes abound, much less is known about the quality of politicians in developing countries. Drawing on unique experimental and survey data on village-level politicians in West Bengal, India, we find some evidence of positive selection into office: elected politicians are more educated, motivated, and have greater integrity than their constituents. However, they also have lower cognitive ability and are more likely to come from politically networked families. Comparing first-timers with re-elected politicians, we observe that experienced politicians display somewhat more political knowledge and motivation than their inexperienced peers, but are also more likely to be wealthy and male. Our findings demonstrate that conclusions about politician quality depend critically on measurement choices and that there may be competing dimensions of politician quality in the developing world.

Ethics guides for political science instruct researchers to avoid retraumatization of human subjects (for example, APSA 2022; Fujii 2012). Meanwhile, human subject research on sensitive topics, including violence and repression, has increased. This paper clarifies what is at stake when we talk about research participant distress and provides recommendations for handling concerns about trauma and retraumatization. It offers a new framework for trauma-informed political science research. This framework reflects the conclusions of the empirical literature on the risk of distress in different research settings as well as critical normative perspectives on consequentialist research ethics. In particular, it identifies two approaches for trauma-informed political science research: one for research in less vulnerable contexts and one for research with contexts that are vulnerable in terms of limited resources, ongoing suffering, and/or geopolitical instability. The framework details best practices for informed consent, debriefing, and more within each approach. The paper also addresses the special challenges of political violence research. While the literature suggests that retraumatization as such is rarely a major risk of research, the paper highlights that a narrowly defined concept of retraumatization can lead us to neglect other trauma-informed concerns.

This paper advances the study of democratic trajectories – whether democracies deepen, stagnate, erode or break down over time. We show that econometric panel models usually neglect cumulative effects, which are implicitly central to many theories of democratic change. Some important factors, such as economic growth, have cumulative effects that shape medium- to long-term regime trajectories. To overcome the limitations of conventional statistical estimators, we propose the use of latent growth curve models, which are better able to capture cumulative processes. We demonstrate the advantages of this approach by analyzing the trajectory of 103 democratic regimes inaugurated after 1974. Conventional estimators fail to predict democratic trajectories, while latent growth curve models properly capture cumulative effects.

While scholars document associations between competing parties’ policy disputes and citizens’ cross-party hostility, that is, affective polarization, we lack causal comparative evidence of how different types of ideological disagreements shape partisan affective evaluations. We investigate this issue with a priming experiment across ten Western publics, which prompts some respondents to answer questions inviting them to discuss debates over either cultural or economic issues versus a control group that receives a non-political prompt. Respondents in the economic and cultural priming conditions expressed greater distrust of out-partisans, and, among respondents who received cultural priming, those who discussed immigration in their open-ended responses expressed far more distrust towards opponents – an effect driven by right-wing respondents who discussed immigration. These findings provide comparative evidence that economic and cultural debates cause affective polarization, with immigration as a primary cultural driver.

The existing literature shows that frequent elections depress electoral participation and contribute to the global decline in voter turnout. However, the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This paper investigates the sources of voter fatigue and hypothesizes that frequent elections make electoral abstention more acceptable to citizens. It tests the main hypothesis via an original pre-registered survey experiment fielded in five countries with a total sample size of 12,221 respondents. The results provide pioneering evidence on the psychological effects of election frequency. They confirm that high election frequency increases the social acceptability of electoral abstention and that this effect is proportional to the number of past elections. It can be equally observed among all major social groups, including politically engaged citizens and those who believe that voting is a civic duty. These findings hold major implications for our understanding of voter turnout and democratic institutional engineering.

How does anxiety influence voting behaviour? Whereas anxiety is usually treated as a unidimensional emotion, we highlight the multiplicity of socially contingent forms it can assume in response to societal threats. Different anxieties, we posit, can create distinct axes of political competition along which anxious voters exhibit widely varying preferences. We illustrate our argument with unique observational and experimental survey data from Spain’s COVID-19 crisis, showing that individuals anxious about the pandemic’s health consequences favoured parties advocating stringent lockdown restrictions, whereas individuals anxious about its economic disruption preferred parties opposing such measures. Analyzing municipality-level results from Madrid’s 2021 regional election, we additionally provide evidence that COVID-19 boosted support for pro-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its health effects and support for anti-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its economic impact. Our findings point to the importance of disaggregating complex emotional states for understanding the determinants of voting behaviour.

How do electoral outcomes affect campaign contributions? We argue that in contexts where personal connections to the candidate and investment motivations dominate ideology and partisanship as drivers of donations, two main factors shape donors’ future behaviour: 1) government benefits accrued by donors (for example, contracts) and 2) whether the supported candidate runs again in future elections. Using data from Colombian mayoral elections, a context with no re-election, weak parties, and non-ideological races, we find that donating to the winning candidate reduces the probability of donating in the next election. We further show that, among donors to the winner, those who receive a contract from the municipality are more likely to continue donating than those without contracts. The findings highlight the importance of personal loyalty to the candidate and the fulfilment of donors’ investment expectations determining campaign contributions in non-established democracies.

Are political activists driven by instrumental motives such as making a career in politics or mobilizing voters? We implement two natural field experiments in which party activists are randomly informed that canvassing is i) effective at mobilizing voters, or ii) effective for enhancing activists’ political careers. We find no effect of the treatments on activists’ intended and actual canvassing behaviour. The null finding holds despite a successful manipulation check and replication study, high statistical power, a natural field setting, and an unobtrusive measurement strategy. Using an expert survey, we show that the null finding shifted Bayesian posterior beliefs about the treatment’s effectiveness toward zero. The evidence thus casts doubt on two popular hypothesized instrumental drivers of political activism – voter persuasion and career concerns – and points toward expressive benefits as more plausible motives.