American Journal of Political Science最新文献

I study the impact of party campaigns on tactical voting, focusing on voters with tactical incentives. Focusing on three UK Elections, I exploit panel data within each election to address endogeneity in party behavior, which would otherwise bias the estimates of campaign effects. My findings show that party contacts during campaigns have an influence in encouraging loyalty to preferred nonviable parties and defection to alternative viable ones. These findings are important as relatively little is known about what influences voters’ decision to cast tactical votes, beyond their demographic characteristics and the electoral circumstances they may find themselves in.

While causal inference has become front and center in empirical political science, we know little about how to analyze causality with latent outcomes, such as political values, beliefs, and attitudes. In this article, we develop a framework for defining, identifying, and estimating the causal effect of an observed treatment on a latent outcome, which we call the latent treatment effect (LTE). We describe a set of assumptions that allow us to identify the LTE and propose a hierarchical item response model to estimate it. We highlight an often overlooked exclusion restriction assumption, which states that treatment status should not affect the observed indicators other than through the latent outcome. A simulation study shows that the hierarchical approach offers unbiased estimates of the LTE under the identification and modeling assumptions, whereas conventional two-step approaches are biased. We illustrate our proposed methodology using data from two published experimental studies.

Individuals with heightened labor market insecurity express more protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist sentiment. We construct a novel measure of labor market insecurity that combines an individual's industry-based exposure to import competition with an occupation-based measure of job immobility. Immobility captures the similarity of an individual's job to others in the economy, weighted by their prevalence. The holder of a job that is dissimilar to others in the industry or in the state experiences more anxiety regarding their labor market prospects in the face of a globalization shock, and is more likely to express antiglobalization sentiment.

Women in male-dominated organizations often must adopt more stereotypical masculine traits to advance within those hierarchies. While politics, historically male-dominated, should induce women to blend in, increasing numbers of women in parliaments may give women the opportunity to stand out by not adopting a masculine style. This paper investigates how these contradictory incentives influence female Members of Parliament (MPs) in 24 democracies between 1987 and 2022, applying machine learning to 6.8 million parliamentary speeches to measure how feminine is their speaking style. Findings indicate a socialization effect, whereby women adopt a more masculine style the longer they stay in office, even after controlling for their speeches’ topics. The effect is strongest for women in socially progressive parties. This research highlights the role of parliaments as gendered workplaces, which still lead women to adapt to the male norm, and helps us understand the incentives that shape how women represent women in parliament.

We study the effect of expanding trade on societal coalitions through its impact on development. We combine a majoritarian political model with a spatial model of trade to argue that trade-induced economic change—by bringing new workers to locations closer to world markets—can lead to losses rather than gains in political power for the factors of production advantaged by increased trade. We study how this phenomenon explains rising protectionism in the United States from 1880 to 1900. Using county-level changes in transportation costs induced by railroad expansion, our estimates indicate that falling costs increased population and farm values but reduced the proportion of farmers. Reduced transportation costs caused a reduction in vote shares for the Democratic Party, which favored liberal trade policies, and an increase in an original newspaper-based measure of protectionist sentiment. Expanding trade alters not only political interests but also the geographic distribution of those interests.

The elimination of Black voting in the U.S. South after Reconstruction is the most significant instance of democratic backsliding in American history. I use newly collected state legislative roll call data from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, consisting of more than 19,400 unique roll calls, to explore Black disfranchisement's consequences for legislative representation. Using ideal point estimates in a panel design, I demonstrate that disfranchisement is associated with substantial changes in roll call voting. In states where competition between Democrats and Republicans structured roll call voting, disfranchisement precipitated shifts away from more-Republican roll call records. In states already dominated by Democrats before disfranchisement, disfranchisement often led to relative shifts toward the agrarian, reform wing of the Democratic Party. These results demonstrate the centrality of Black disfranchisement for the creation of the Solid South and the significant impact of Black suffrage on southern politics in the years following Reconstruction.

The role of ideals and idealizations is among the most vigorously debated methodological questions in political theory. Yet, the debate seems at an impasse. This paper argues that this reflects a fundamental ambiguity over idealization's intended inferential logic: the precise way in which idealizations might yield normative knowledge. I identify two tacit understandings of idealization—a dominant “telic” understanding and a less overt “heuristic” understanding—which, though importantly different, are rarely distinguished. I argue that delineating these understandings, and shifting from telic to heuristic idealization, recasts various unresolved methodological problems for political theorists, while productively connecting their discussions to work on idealization in political science and the practice and philosophy of science more broadly. I then provide a systematic account of how idealization might be used heuristically in normative reasoning and explicate the advantages of such an approach for promoting rigorous, relevant, and inclusive methodologies in political theory.

Governments have repeatedly adjusted fiscal policy in recent decades. We examine the political effects of these adjustments in Europe since the 1990s using both district-level election outcomes and individual-level voting data. We expect austerity to increase populist votes, but only among economically vulnerable voters, who are hit the hardest by austerity. We identify economically vulnerable regions as those with a high share of low-skilled workers, workers in manufacturing and in jobs with a high routine-task intensity. The analysis of district-level elections demonstrates that austerity increases support for populist parties in economically vulnerable regions, but has little effect in less vulnerable regions. The individual-level analysis confirms these findings. Our results suggest that the success of populist parties hinges on the government's failure to protect the losers of structural economic change. The economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies.

Are nonverbal reactions during parliamentary debate gendered? Do male and female members of parliament (MPs) experience applause or jeering differently? In short, yes, and the gendered nature of a speech matters. Using an original corpus of over 544,000 speeches given in German state parliaments, we first estimate the gendered nature of parliamentary speeches and then examine how reactions to speeches given by male and female MPs differ. Female and male MPs receive similarly positive and negative reactions to their speeches on average, but they receive different reactions depending on the gendered nature of the speeches. Speeches using language associated with women's topics receive fewer reactions overall and even fewer when delivered by men. The gendered nature of parliamentary interjections could affect how women MPs view their position and how women voters view parliament.

The political budget cycle theory has extensively documented how politicians manipulate policies during election years to gain an electoral advantage. This paper focuses on county sheriffs, crucial but often neglected local officials, and investigates their opportunistic political behavior during elections. Using a panel data set covering 57 California county governments over four election cycles, we find compelling evidence of traffic enforcement policy manipulation by county sheriffs during election years. Specifically, a county's per capita traffic fines revenue is 9% lower in the election than in nonelection years. The magnitude of the political cycle intensifies when an election is competitive. Our findings contribute to the political budget cycle theory and provide timely insights into the ongoing debate surrounding law enforcement reform and local governments’ increasing reliance on fines and fees revenue.