Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 2, April-June 2024. Nostalgia plays an increasingly central and polarizing role in American politics, as the Republican Party has become the primary proprietor of nostalgic rhetoric. This paper explores how feelings of collective nostalgia in a country with an unjust past are inextricably tied to racism and hostile sexism. We expect that nostalgia is strongly related to racist and sexist attitudes. We test these expectations using data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. Our findings reveal a standard deviation increase in nostalgia is associated ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 2, April-June 2024. In their contribution, Tsebelis and Nardi (2016a) examine the impact of constitutional design on economic performance. The authors find evidence of a significant negative relationship between constitutional length and economic performance. As we will show here, the results of Tsebelis and Nardi (2016a) are not robust. Several minor adjustments to the models, each on its own, reduce or eliminate the presumed relevance of constitutional length. Moreover, conceptual considerations raise doubts whether the focus on constitutional length ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-March 2024. Negativity against LGBTQ+ and gender equality symbols is escalating across Western European countries, including those at the forefront of sexual modernism. Drawing on data from Spain, this paper theorizes and finds that state-sponsored LGBTQ+ symbols receive significantly more negativity than other aspects of LGBTQ+ issues related to general and specific attitudes toward formal rights. The negativity is primarily explained by support for Vox, a radical right-wing party, and age. The study provides insights into the complexities o ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-March 2024. Communicating the “97%’’ scientific consensus has been the centerpiece of the effort to persuade climate skeptics. Still, this strategy may not work well for those who mistrust climate scientists, to begin with. We examine how the American public—Republicans in particular—respond when provided with a relatively detailed causal explanation summarizing why scientists have concluded that human activities are responsible for climate change. Based on a preregistered survey experiment (N = 3007), we assessed the effectiveness of detaile ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-March 2024. Why are there so few working-class women in politics? While white-collar representatives dominate legislatures in general, the deficit of working-class members is particularly pronounced among female politicians. To answer this question, this study examines the influence of class and gender in voter evaluation. Through the cross-country comparison of conjoint experiments in the U.S. and the U.K., we find that working-class backgrounds disadvantage women candidates in a way that they do not disadvantage their male counterparts. Vot ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-March 2024. Large-scale text analysis has grown rapidly as a method in political science and beyond. To date, text-as-data methods rely on large volumes of human-annotated training examples, which place a premium on researcher resources. However, advances in large language models (LLMs) may make automated annotation increasingly viable. This paper tests the performance of GPT-4 across a range of scenarios relevant for analysis of political text. We compare GPT-4 coding with human expert coding of tweets and news articles across four variables ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-March 2024. In October 2016, the Colombian electorate narrowly rejected in a plebiscite the final agreement to end the conflict with the longest-running armed insurgency in the Western Hemisphere, the FARC. The plebiscite’s result provides a unique opportunity to assess dynamics in civil conflict termination preferences. I exploit the unexpected victory of the No vote, observed during the AmericasBarometer fieldwork, to estimate the effect of the uncertainty about the trajectory of the conflict generated by the outcome of the plebiscite. The ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-March 2024. Despite their ubiquity, few have used traffic camera networks for social science research. Using 1,312,977 images collected from 768 London-based cameras leading up to the 2015 UK general election, this study not only demonstrates how traffic camera data can be used to effectively measure same-day turnout, but we also provide ways such data can be used to assess political behavior more broadly. Such automated enumeration is especially important in countries where official results are only returned for the current election, making ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-March 2024. Do citizens reveal their valid preferences when asked about a potential foreign threat? This study presents the results of two list experiments implemented in Taiwan, a democratic and independently ruled island that leaders in China have long vowed to reunify with the mainland. Our two experiments—conducted in March 2019 and September 2021—focus on the percentage of Taiwanese who perceive China as a “friend” and those who regard China as an “enemy.” The findings reveal that, first, the proportion of Taiwanese citizens who harbored ..read more

Research &Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-March 2024. All over the world, a very large number of elections take place concurrently with other elections for representatives in different government tiers. A crucial question for understanding electoral outcomes in those elections is the existence of electoral spillovers or coattail effects. Causal identification of coattail effects is challenging because popularity shocks typically affect parties in both concurrent elections. This paper exploits a quasi-experiment—the ban of a party in only one of the concurrent elections—to estimate co ..read more