Abstract Recent, high-profile acts of partisan violence have stimulated interest among academics and the public in the etiology of support for such violence. Here, we report the results of a study that measures support for partisan violence with both abstract items (e.g., support for general partisan violence) and those focused on more specific acts (e.g., support for a partisan motivated shooting). We additionally examine intra-individual and intergroup correlates of support for partisan violence. Across three data collections (total N = 2003) and using seven unique operationalizations of sup ..read more

Abstract Do nomination rules shape how voters evaluate their representatives? Some scholars argue that, in places where trust in political parties is low, primary elections can be an electoral asset by improving how politicians are regarded by voters. Yet, this claim has received little empirical scrutiny. A survey experiment in Mexico, where parties have employed several nomination rules in recent years, allows us to assess this argument. We find that, by and large, providing information about the method by which a politician was nominated to office—relative to not providing such information ..read more

Abstract Incumbents often make unpopular policy decisions. But can they remedy their negative electoral consequences? We extend the wide literature concerning retrospective voting to the case of unpopular policies and examine whether voters reward a responsive withdrawal of an unpopular policy proposal or punish the disclosed policy intention despite the withdrawal. To test this, we use granular data on Swedish local election results from 2002 to 2018 and the case of widely unpopular school closure proposals, some of which were implemented and others not. We exploit within municipality variati ..read more

Abstract A growing body of research documents how shrinking local newsrooms undermine political accountability and local fiscal and policy performance in the United States. We extend this work to examine political impacts from the level of information content in local news, which has been jeopardized by reductions in newsroom staffing. To understand how information content affects public response to news coverage of a local issue, we focus on the case of preventive spending on infrastructure maintenance and repair. Inefficiently low levels of infrastructure investment are often attributed to l ..read more

Abstract Economic risk and instability are urgent and central facts in the lives of increasing numbers of Americans. Though experienced as “personal,” the causes of life disruptions like unemployment, eviction, and loss of health insurance are also deeply political. In this paper, we build on existing “single crisis” studies to offer a comprehensive theoretical and empirical picture of how life disruptions shape political behavior. We use several large surveys to show that personal crises generally dampen turnout but sometimes spur other political acts. We also find that highly politicized cri ..read more

Abstract Given the rise of populism around the globe, do populist citizens support the exceptional authority of national constitutional courts to make decisions on controversial issues? Or do these individuals view constitutional courts just like any other political institution? To investigate this question, we embedded an experiment in a national survey in Germany in early 2020 that varied the institution (i.e., the federal constitutional court (FCC), the parliament and the EU) and its decision on a controversial civil liberties issue. The results clearly show that citizens with populist atti ..read more

Abstract While a growing body of work suggests that women representatives are less likely to be involved in corruption scandals, we know less about if changes in representation patterns also have implications for citizens’ first-hand experiences with corruption in public service delivery. This study suggests that women elected representatives reduce street level bribery, in particular when the share of women increases in contexts where relatively few women are elected or when the absolute increase in women’s representation is relatively large. Using newly collected data on the share of women i ..read more

Abstract Accountability relies on voters accurately evaluating government performance in addressing the important issues of the day. This requirement arguably applies to an even greater extent when addressing fundamental societal crises. However, partisanship can bias evaluations, with government partisans perceiving outcomes more favorably, or attributing less responsibility for bad outcomes. We examine partisan motivated reasoning in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, using panel data and a survey experiment of over 6000 respondents in which vignettes prime respondents about the UK ..read more

Abstract We explore whether the effects of colorism on evaluations of politicians is moderated by shared partisanship. We hypothesize that colorism will lead Whites to rate darker elected officials of color more poorly. Additionally, we hypothesize that partisanship will moderate this relationship with Whites being less likely to engage in colorism when evaluating co-partisans. We test our hypotheses using a crowd-sourced measure of skin tone based on the Massey-Martin index and the 2016, 2018, and 2020 Congressional Election Studies. We find that darker-skinned elected officials of color from ..read more

Abstract Why do elected officials tend to be much older than most of their constituents? To understand the mechanisms behind the underrepresentation of young people in public office, we conducted two novel survey experiments in Japan. We asked voters in these experiments to evaluate the photos of hypothetical candidates while altering candidates’ faces using age regression and progression software. Contrary to the observed age demographics of politicians, the voters in our experiments strongly disliked older candidates but viewed younger and middle-aged candidates as equally favorable. Voters ..read more