We study how an intervention combining youth intergroup contact and sports affects intergroup relations in the context of an active conflict. We first conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of one-year program exposure in Israel. To track effects of a multiyear exposure, we then use machine-learning techniques to fuse the RCT with the observational data gathered on multiyear participants. This analytical approach can help overcome frequent limitations of RCTs, such as modest sample sizes and short observation periods. Our evidence cannot affirm a one-year effect on outgroup regard and ingroup regulation, although we estimate benefits of multiyear exposure among Jewish-Israeli youth, particularly boys. We discuss implications for interventions in contexts of active conflict and group status asymmetry.
{"title":"Estimating the effect of intergroup contact over years: evidence from a youth program in Israel","authors":"Nejla Asimovic, Ruth Ditlmann, Cyrus Samii","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.8","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We study how an intervention combining youth intergroup contact and sports affects intergroup relations in the context of an active conflict. We first conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of one-year program exposure in Israel. To track effects of a multiyear exposure, we then use machine-learning techniques to fuse the RCT with the observational data gathered on multiyear participants. This analytical approach can help overcome frequent limitations of RCTs, such as modest sample sizes and short observation periods. Our evidence cannot affirm a one-year effect on outgroup regard and ingroup regulation, although we estimate benefits of multiyear exposure among Jewish-Israeli youth, particularly boys. We discuss implications for interventions in contexts of active conflict and group status asymmetry.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140738449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Do policy priorities that candidates emphasize during election campaigns predict their subsequent legislative activities? We study this question by assembling novel data on legislative leadership posts held by Japanese politicians and using a fine-tuned transformer-based machine learning model to classify policy areas in over 46,900 statements from 1270 candidate manifestos across five elections. We find that a higher emphasis on a policy issue increases the probability of securing a legislative post in the same area. This relationship remains consistent across multiple elections and persists even when accounting for candidates' previous legislative leadership roles. We also discover greater congruence in distributive policy areas. Our findings indicate that campaigns provide meaningful signals of policy priorities.
{"title":"Campaign communication and legislative leadership","authors":"Stefan Müller, Naofumi Fujimura","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.11","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Do policy priorities that candidates emphasize during election campaigns predict their subsequent legislative activities? We study this question by assembling novel data on legislative leadership posts held by Japanese politicians and using a fine-tuned transformer-based machine learning model to classify policy areas in over 46,900 statements from 1270 candidate manifestos across five elections. We find that a higher emphasis on a policy issue increases the probability of securing a legislative post in the same area. This relationship remains consistent across multiple elections and persists even when accounting for candidates' previous legislative leadership roles. We also discover greater congruence in distributive policy areas. Our findings indicate that campaigns provide meaningful signals of policy priorities.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140742185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Various robust communication effects have been identified, but evidence is overwhelmingly based on artificial survey treatments with limited real-world insight. I conducted a natural experiment on the impact of the European–Turkey statement closing the Balkan route during the 2015/16 European refugee crisis in Germany. This design tests the lasting effect of the statement's framing on public sentiment. I identify treatment and control groups based on timing to demonstrate its effect on perceptions of the crisis, asylum attitudes, and policy preferences. Effects are largest immediately following the announcement but decline rapidly. This shows political communication can significantly change opinion within a limited time frame. This study enhances our understanding of real-world communication effects and offers a broadly applicable methodology.
{"title":"Political communication in the real world: evidence from a natural experiment in Germany","authors":"Armin Seimel","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.3","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Various robust communication effects have been identified, but evidence is overwhelmingly based on artificial survey treatments with limited real-world insight. I conducted a natural experiment on the impact of the European–Turkey statement closing the Balkan route during the 2015/16 European refugee crisis in Germany. This design tests the lasting effect of the statement's framing on public sentiment. I identify treatment and control groups based on timing to demonstrate its effect on perceptions of the crisis, asylum attitudes, and policy preferences. Effects are largest immediately following the announcement but decline rapidly. This shows political communication can significantly change opinion within a limited time frame. This study enhances our understanding of real-world communication effects and offers a broadly applicable methodology.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140232254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Technological change often increases demand for high-skilled jobs, with low-skilled losers turning to the populist right in response. The political effects of technological change that increases demand for low-skilled workers are largely unknown. The growth of the salmon fish-farming industry in rural Norway improved the labor-market situation for low-skilled workers, and we find that support for the populist right-wing party increased in municipalities that benefitted from the industry growth. The electoral change is due to a right-wing shift on the economic, but not the cultural dimension. Our results support political economy frameworks that point to lower demand for state interventions after positive labor market shocks, but raise the question of in what contexts support for populism will decline.
{"title":"The political consequences of technological change that benefits low-skilled workers","authors":"Henning Finseraas, O. Nyhus","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.5","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Technological change often increases demand for high-skilled jobs, with low-skilled losers turning to the populist right in response. The political effects of technological change that increases demand for low-skilled workers are largely unknown. The growth of the salmon fish-farming industry in rural Norway improved the labor-market situation for low-skilled workers, and we find that support for the populist right-wing party increased in municipalities that benefitted from the industry growth. The electoral change is due to a right-wing shift on the economic, but not the cultural dimension. Our results support political economy frameworks that point to lower demand for state interventions after positive labor market shocks, but raise the question of in what contexts support for populism will decline.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140258522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Deceiving citizens is typically considered the main political motive behind the spread of fake news. Accordingly, strategies to debunk fake news, such as fact-checking, have been suggested to combat it. However, the spread of fake news persists despite these debunking strategies. We propose an alternative but underexplored motive behind the spread of fake news: Fake news aims not only to deceive citizens but also to induce media skepticism. To support our claim, we present a stylized formal model of media skepticism and demonstrate that the incentive to spread fake news persists even if citizens are not deceived by disinformation coming from fake news. Our model highlights the dilemma embedded in fact-checking.
{"title":"The making of the boy who cried wolf: fake news and media skepticism","authors":"Myunghoon Kang, Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Deceiving citizens is typically considered the main political motive behind the spread of fake news. Accordingly, strategies to debunk fake news, such as fact-checking, have been suggested to combat it. However, the spread of fake news persists despite these debunking strategies. We propose an alternative but underexplored motive behind the spread of fake news: Fake news aims not only to deceive citizens but also to induce media skepticism. To support our claim, we present a stylized formal model of media skepticism and demonstrate that the incentive to spread fake news persists even if citizens are not deceived by disinformation coming from fake news. Our model highlights the dilemma embedded in fact-checking.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140258912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Matthew DiGiuseppe, Roos Haer, Babak RezaeeDaryakenari
Policymakers and scholars have long proposed that willingness to participate in armed conflict is influenced by citizens' income-earning opportunities. Testing this opportunity cost mechanism has led to mixed results. One reason for this might be the fact that current proxies can also serve as indicators to test grievance-based theories. In this study, we construct a more suitable measure. We use crop calendars and crop location data to build an index of agricultural idle time for first administration units on the African continent from 1990 to 2017. We test the explanatory power of this measure by examining its relationship with armed conflict. Our results show that agricultural idle time increases the probability of observing armed conflict by more than 20 percent.
{"title":"Farming then fighting: agricultural idle time and armed conflict","authors":"Matthew DiGiuseppe, Roos Haer, Babak RezaeeDaryakenari","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.6","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Policymakers and scholars have long proposed that willingness to participate in armed conflict is influenced by citizens' income-earning opportunities. Testing this opportunity cost mechanism has led to mixed results. One reason for this might be the fact that current proxies can also serve as indicators to test grievance-based theories. In this study, we construct a more suitable measure. We use crop calendars and crop location data to build an index of agricultural idle time for first administration units on the African continent from 1990 to 2017. We test the explanatory power of this measure by examining its relationship with armed conflict. Our results show that agricultural idle time increases the probability of observing armed conflict by more than 20 percent.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140079740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American politics scholarship has relied extensively on self-reported measures of ideology. We evaluate these widely used measures through an original national survey. Descriptively, we show that Americans’ understandings of “liberal” and “conservative” are weakly aligned with conventional definitions of these terms and that such understandings are heterogeneous across social groups, casting doubt on the construct validity and measurement equivalence of ideological self-placements. Experimentally, we randomly assign one of three measures of ideology to each respondent: (1) the standard ANES question, (2) a version that adds definitions of “liberal” and “conservative,” and (3) a version that keeps these definitions but removes ideological labels from the question. We find that the third measure, which helps to isolate symbolic ideology from operational ideology, shifts self-reported ideology in important ways: Democrats become more conservative, and Republicans more liberal. These findings offer first-cut experimental evidence on the limitations of self-reported ideology as a measure of operational ideology, and contribute to ongoing debates about the use of ideological self-placements in American politics.
{"title":"Self-reported political ideology","authors":"E. S. Yeung, Kai Quek","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.2","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 American politics scholarship has relied extensively on self-reported measures of ideology. We evaluate these widely used measures through an original national survey. Descriptively, we show that Americans’ understandings of “liberal” and “conservative” are weakly aligned with conventional definitions of these terms and that such understandings are heterogeneous across social groups, casting doubt on the construct validity and measurement equivalence of ideological self-placements. Experimentally, we randomly assign one of three measures of ideology to each respondent: (1) the standard ANES question, (2) a version that adds definitions of “liberal” and “conservative,” and (3) a version that keeps these definitions but removes ideological labels from the question. We find that the third measure, which helps to isolate symbolic ideology from operational ideology, shifts self-reported ideology in important ways: Democrats become more conservative, and Republicans more liberal. These findings offer first-cut experimental evidence on the limitations of self-reported ideology as a measure of operational ideology, and contribute to ongoing debates about the use of ideological self-placements in American politics.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140438607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Beatrice Magistro, P. Loewen, Bart Bonikowski, Sophie Borwein, Blake Lee-Whiting
Does providing information about the costs and benefits of automation affect the perceived fairness of a firm's decision to automate or support for government policies addressing automation's labor market consequences? To answer these questions, we use data from vignette and conjoint experiments across four advanced economies (Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US). Our results show that despite people's relatively fixed policy preferences, their evaluation of the fairness of automation—and therefore potentially the issue's political salience—is sensitive to information about its trade-offs, especially information about price changes attributable to automated labor. This suggests that the political impact of automation may depend on how it is framed by the media and political actors.
{"title":"Attitudes toward automation and the demand for policies addressing job loss: the effects of information about trade-offs","authors":"Beatrice Magistro, P. Loewen, Bart Bonikowski, Sophie Borwein, Blake Lee-Whiting","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.1","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Does providing information about the costs and benefits of automation affect the perceived fairness of a firm's decision to automate or support for government policies addressing automation's labor market consequences? To answer these questions, we use data from vignette and conjoint experiments across four advanced economies (Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US). Our results show that despite people's relatively fixed policy preferences, their evaluation of the fairness of automation—and therefore potentially the issue's political salience—is sensitive to information about its trade-offs, especially information about price changes attributable to automated labor. This suggests that the political impact of automation may depend on how it is framed by the media and political actors.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139835060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Beatrice Magistro, P. Loewen, Bart Bonikowski, Sophie Borwein, Blake Lee-Whiting
Does providing information about the costs and benefits of automation affect the perceived fairness of a firm's decision to automate or support for government policies addressing automation's labor market consequences? To answer these questions, we use data from vignette and conjoint experiments across four advanced economies (Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US). Our results show that despite people's relatively fixed policy preferences, their evaluation of the fairness of automation—and therefore potentially the issue's political salience—is sensitive to information about its trade-offs, especially information about price changes attributable to automated labor. This suggests that the political impact of automation may depend on how it is framed by the media and political actors.
{"title":"Attitudes toward automation and the demand for policies addressing job loss: the effects of information about trade-offs","authors":"Beatrice Magistro, P. Loewen, Bart Bonikowski, Sophie Borwein, Blake Lee-Whiting","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2024.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.1","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Does providing information about the costs and benefits of automation affect the perceived fairness of a firm's decision to automate or support for government policies addressing automation's labor market consequences? To answer these questions, we use data from vignette and conjoint experiments across four advanced economies (Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US). Our results show that despite people's relatively fixed policy preferences, their evaluation of the fairness of automation—and therefore potentially the issue's political salience—is sensitive to information about its trade-offs, especially information about price changes attributable to automated labor. This suggests that the political impact of automation may depend on how it is framed by the media and political actors.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139775619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christian Arnold, Luka Biedebach, Andreas Küpfer, Marcel Neunhoeffer
Hyperparameters critically influence how well machine learning models perform on unseen, out-of-sample data. Systematically comparing the performance of different hyperparameter settings will often go a long way in building confidence about a model's performance. However, analyzing 64 machine learning related manuscripts published in three leading political science journals (APSR, PA, and PSRM) between 2016 and 2021, we find that only 13 publications (20.31 percent) report the hyperparameters and also how they tuned them in either the paper or the appendix. We illustrate the dangers of cursory attention to model and tuning transparency in comparing machine learning models’ capability to predict electoral violence from tweets. The tuning of hyperparameters and their documentation should become a standard component of robustness checks for machine learning models.
{"title":"The role of hyperparameters in machine learning models and how to tune them","authors":"Christian Arnold, Luka Biedebach, Andreas Küpfer, Marcel Neunhoeffer","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2023.61","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2023.61","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Hyperparameters critically influence how well machine learning models perform on unseen, out-of-sample data. Systematically comparing the performance of different hyperparameter settings will often go a long way in building confidence about a model's performance. However, analyzing 64 machine learning related manuscripts published in three leading political science journals (APSR, PA, and PSRM) between 2016 and 2021, we find that only 13 publications (20.31 percent) report the hyperparameters and also how they tuned them in either the paper or the appendix. We illustrate the dangers of cursory attention to model and tuning transparency in comparing machine learning models’ capability to predict electoral violence from tweets. The tuning of hyperparameters and their documentation should become a standard component of robustness checks for machine learning models.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139804630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}