The relationship between populist attitudes and ideological orientations remains an area of considerable academic interest, yet much is still unknown about the ideological inclinations associated with populist attitudes. While many scholars acknowledge the link between populist attitudes and political ideology, existing studies often treat this relationship as either a given or a peripheral concern. This paper represents an initial exploration into the association between populist attitudes and political ideology. Utilizing data from the fifth wave (2016–2021) of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, which encompasses 43 countries and 52 elections, this study aims to uncover how this relationship manifests cross-nationally. By employing a variety of rigorous methodological models, including the Generalized Additive Model, our results reveal a nonlinear relationship between populist attitudes and political ideology. Specifically, we find that political ideology and populist attitudes exhibit a U-shaped nonlinear relationship and that ideological extremism and populist attitudes demonstrate an exponential nonlinear relationship. These findings emphasize the nuanced interplay between ideological positions and populist attitudes, providing a deeper understanding of how they intersect.

A consistent finding in industrialized democracies is that having a daughter shapes parents’ attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways. We test whether this finding travels to a young middle-income democracy where women’s rights are more tenuous: South Africa. Using a dataset of over 7,500 respondents with information on family structure, we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women’s rights or on partisan identification. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women’s customary status and de facto opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents’ political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies.

Does the importance of the economy change during a government's time in office? Governments arguably become more responsible for current economic conditions as their tenure progresses. This might lead voters to hold experienced governments more accountable for economic conditions. However, voters also accumulate information about governments' competence over time. If voters are Bayesian learners, then this growing stock of information should crowd out the importance of current economic conditions. This article explores these divergent predictions about the relationship between tenure and the economic vote using three datasets. First, using country-level data from a diverse set of elections, the study finds that support for more experienced governments is less dependent on economic growth. Secondly, using individual-level data from sixty election surveys covering ten countries, the article shows that voters' perceptions of the economy have a greater impact on government support when the government is inexperienced. Finally, the article examines a municipal reform in Denmark that assigned some voters to new local incumbents and finds that these voters responded more strongly to the local economy. In conclusion, all three studies point in the same direction: economic voting decreases with time in office.