Recent voter turnout data has revealed a consistent and growing turnout gap between Black and White Americans since the 2012 Presidential election. Scholars have attributed this gap to an increase in restrictive voting laws. However, few have considered the decreased effectiveness of long-standing models of political behavior on Black voter turnout as the American political landscape has shifted. This note seeks to uncover patterns in recent Presidential elections that display a lack of effectiveness of prominent voter turnout models for Black Americans due to disparate socializing experiences in a post-Obama context like voter suppression and a global pandemic. It employs models previously used by Leighley and Vedlitz (1999) to evaluate and compare turnout models for Black and White individuals with mini-meta analysis. This paper utilizes the 2016 and 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey (CMPS) and the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Study to establish models and measure their impact on Black and White voter turnout. I find support that prominent turnout models behave differently in a post-Obama context like income, length of residence, group consciousness, and group threat while some models behave differently for Black and white voters like political interest and political efficacy. These findings assert that new turnout models need to be established to better understand the Black electorate in a post-Obama context.

Amid declining public standing, many political parties seek to regain disaffected voters through various institutional strategies. One key approach is democratizing legislative candidate selection to grant party members or voters greater influence and signal improved responsiveness, transparency, and legitimacy. Yet does this strategy pay off electorally? The growing literature on this topic provides conflicting answers and limited evidence. We argue that more inclusive candidate selection does not have meaningful effects at the polls despite its merits. Whereas voters favor such procedures in principle, as some suggest, they underprioritize them in favor of other considerations when electing parties. We support this argument with observational and experimental data, including a matching difference-in-differences estimation of party performance across thirty-four democracies and a survey democracies and a survey experiment in three countries. This article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between party institutions and voter behavior in an age of eroding public trust and rising anti-establishment sentiment.

It is widely believed that high inflation reduces the popularity of incumbents, and contributed to poor incumbent performance in recent elections in the United States and elsewhere. Existing research shows that voters’ inflation perceptions are associated with their evaluations of incumbent parties, but these observational studies cannot eliminate the possibility that the causal relationship runs the other way, where opposition to incumbent governments causes individuals to report higher price increases. To help overcome this inferential challenge, this study draws on a pre-registered experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey fielded just days before the 2024 US Presidential election. We find that priming Americans to think about inflation reduced support for the incumbent party. This effect is most pronounced among Independents and Democrats. These findings suggest that inflation likely contributed to the Democrats’ 2024 electoral defeat, and provide novel evidence that inflation has a causal effect on support for incumbent parties.

It is often assumed that the rural identity is linked to the Republican Party and the urban identity to the Democratic Party, but little scholarship has investigated how voters connect thiese identities to the parties in an electoral context and how that perception may influence their electoral preferences. Furthermore, recent elections have seen various political elites employ rural and Evangelical Christian identity labels in virtually synonymous ways in their association with the Republican Party. But are these partisan stereotypes really how Americans perceive these candidate identities? Utilizing a novel survey experiment, we find important distinctions between religious and place-based candidate cues. Our results show the enduring power of religion in partisan politics and suggest America’s urban-rural divide may be asymmetric in the minds of voters. These findings are subsequently meaningful for the study of religion’s place in America’s growing array of politicized social identities.

Why do some politicians face greater backlash for using insensitive language against identity groups while others do not? Existing explanations focus either on the content of speech or the context in which it occurs. In this article, we propose an integrated framework that considers both and test it using a preregistered conjoint survey on a national U.S. sample. Our findings provide partial support for our expectations. Subjects react most negatively to insensitive speech when the target belongs to their own identity group, when aggravating circumstances exist, and when politicians are of an opposing political party. Our article extends growing scholarship on speech scandals, which has largely explained the fates of politicians as a function of a small number of causative variables in isolation.

When do citizens vote against autocratizing incumbents? A growing body of literature addresses this question, yielding mixed results. I argue that an important component is how visible autocratization is to the average citizen. I conceptualize “visibility of autocratization” and posit that it is essential for understanding when citizens vote out incumbents attempting to entrench their power. I test the relationship between visible autocratization and incumbent re-election in the universe of competitive African elections since 1990. I show that voters punish autocratizing incumbents by voting them out, but they only do so when autocratization is visible. Additional analysis of Afrobarometer data in four countries experiencing autocratization shows that citizens’ perception of autocratization is systematically related to preference for opposition candidates, even after controlling for partisanship and economic performance, and irrespective of levels of partisan animosity. This study contributes both theoretically and empirically to understandings of political behavior under autocratization.

Most political science studies are, at root, about how people make decisions—how voters choose whether and for whom to vote, how prejudice influences political choices, and the effects of emotions and morals on political choice. However, what people are thinking during these decisions remains obscure; currently utilized methods leave us with a “black box” of decision making. Eye tracking offers a deeper insight into these processes by capturing respondents’ attention, salience, emotion, and understanding. But how applicable is this method to political science questions, and how does one go about using it? Here, we explain what eye tracking allows researchers to measure, how these measures are relevant to political science questions, and how political scientists without expertise in the method can nonetheless use it effectively. In particular, we clarify how researchers can understand the choices made in preset software in order to arrive at correct inferences from their data and discuss new developments in eye tracking methodology, including webcam eye tracking. We additionally provide templates for preregistering eye tracking studies in political science, as well as starter code for processing and analyzing eye tracking data.

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.