Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to ‘have their say’ – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust.

Model European Union (MEU) is a simulation of European politics that aims to familiarise young Europeans with the decision-making process of the European Union (EU). Participants simulate the cooperation between the Commission, the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of the EU in the ordinary legislative procedure. About 190 people annually participate at MEU Strasbourg, which takes place on the premises of the EP. This article uses quasi-experimental panel data from surveys with participants of MEU 2012 to test the impact of the simulation conference. While most empirical research on the effects of political simulations addresses the educational effectiveness of classroom simulations, this article tries to answer a research question with a new focus on political attitudes: Do EU simulations influence European identity and political support of the EU?

In this article, we show that the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a pro-democratic reaction from citizens in liberal democracies, which we term the “rally for democracy.” Unlike the conventional “rally ‘round the flag” effect that boosts government popularity, this involves citizens rallying behind democracy as an international ideal. It includes expressing stronger proximity to democratic powers, stronger approval for democratic leaders abroad, and greater aversion to authoritarian regimes. Through a survey quasi-experiment conducted in six countries between February and May of 2022, we provide evidence that the “rally for democracy” emerged immediately following Russia’s invasion. Exploring this observation further via analysis of data from 55 countries between 2014 and 2023, we find this to be the intensification of a longer-term trend in response to the rise of authoritarian great powers. A new cleavage exists in geopolitical loyalties, based on the degree to which citizens feel attachment to democracy, and this divide runs both between and within countries.

Christian evangelicals now represent a significant share of the global population. Notably, they are expected to soon outnumber Roman Catholics in several low- and middle-income countries. This paper examines whether such episodes of religious minority growth can reshape electoral politics. To address this, I combine novel data spanning over two decades (1994–2018) of Christian evangelicals’ expansion across Brazilian municipalities with indicators of structural changes in electoral politics: voter turnout, competition, polarization, and conservatism. Regression models with unit and year-fixed effects reveal no impact of the evangelical boom on electoral competition and polarization, suggestive evidence of increasing conservatism in recent years, and a clear and robust negative effect on turnout. Regression discontinuity design estimates, leveraging an exogenous and discontinuous growth of Christian evangelicals in Brazil’s rural areas, support these findings. The results suggest that the rise of religious minorities may drive gradual transformations in electoral politics.

We shed light on assessing product quality in blind tastings and their potential (gender) biases. We study how phonetic traits of grape varieties suggest product attributes in the context of professional reviews. This study aims to close this research gap and analyze how product variety and phonetic name traits affect expert ratings. We obtained data on 18,609 wines and their ratings from Wine Enthusiast Magazine between 1997 and 2016, yielding a sample of 31,058 observations. We suppose that the gender of the taster needs to be considered to understand what affects tastings and ratings, as women and men might be attracted differently to masculine or feminine names. This study shows that masculine names receive higher evaluations than feminine ones. This phonetic gender gap is driven by lower ratings for white wines by female reviewers and lower ratings for red wines by male reviewers. In addition, white wines are rated lower overall by both men and women.

We investigated both the direct and indirect political dividends of public policies by examining Minha Casa, Minha Vida, a housing programme in Brazil that selects its beneficiaries by lottery. We surveyed the lottery participants and found that the winners were not more likely to support the incumbent politicians. Non-beneficiaries, a much larger group, were aware of the programme and thought well of it while the beneficiaries' responses to the programme were sometimes underwhelming. However, politicians considered the programme to be an electoral asset, and a difference-in-differences analysis of electoral results leveraging the roll-out of the programme across municipalities found that presidential and mayoral incumbent candidates performed better in localities that had implemented MCMV. Overall, when the beneficiaries formed a relatively small group, the benefits were conspicuous and the programme's objectives were widely supported. Government programmes can create electoral payoffs independently of how programmes are perceived or experienced by beneficiaries.

Nudging has become a well-known policy practice. Recently, ‘boosting’ has been suggested as an alternative to nudging. In contrast to nudges, boosts aim to empower individuals to exert their own agency to make decisions. This article is one of the first to compare a nudging and a boosting intervention, and it does so in a critical field setting: hand hygiene compliance of hospital nurses. During a 4-week quasi-experiment, we tested the effect of a reframing nudge and a risk literacy boost on hand hygiene compliance in three hospital wards. The results show that nudging and boosting were both effective interventions to improve hand hygiene compliance. A tentative finding is that, while the nudge had a stronger immediate effect, the boost effect remained stable for a week, even after the removal of the intervention. We conclude that, besides nudging, researchers and policymakers may consider boosting when they seek to implement or test behavioral interventions in domains such as healthcare.

Law enforcement agencies are adopting a variety of new surveillance technologies at a fast pace. These technologies could have substantial benefits in terms of public safety, but, for many of them, their ability to reduce crime is unknown. Although a small experimental literature addresses some of these technologies, many of the implementations have been too small to provide an accurate measurement of their potential. In this paper, I explore the advantages and make general suggestions about the use of quasi-experimental methodologies in estimating the public safety benefits of police technology. I also consider the specific case of license plate readers and provide some examples of difference-in-differences approaches that could be used to study their efficacy.

Teachers constitute one of the professional collectives most affected by psychological problems. The purpose of this quasi-experimental study is to examine the efficacy of a mindfulness training programme to reduce psychological distress in a group of teachers. The sample comprised 68 teachers of Secondary School Education, from various public schools; half of them formed the experimental group, and the another half the control group. The levels of psychological distress were measured, in both groups, by the Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R) before and after the application of the programme. Statistical analysis shows the significant reduction of three general measures of psychological distress (Global Severity Index, Positive Symptom Distress Index, and Positive Symptom Total), as well in all its dimensions (somatization, obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensibility, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism), in the experimental group compared with the control group. Follow-up measures show that these results were maintained for four months after termination of the intervention in the experimental group.