Open Access Publications

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This collection contains open-access research materials created by members of this department.

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Mayor Pete is Smart and Elizabeth Warren is Unlikable? Coverage of Warmth and Competence Traits in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary
(Politics & Gender, 2025-02-24) Conroy, Meredith; Cassese, Erin; Mehta, Dhrumil; Hammond, Ciera; Beail, Linda; Johri, Al; Long, Sean; Stecula, Dominik
Past work on media coverage of candidates for political office has explored gender differences in quantity, substance, and tone with mixed results depending on the office, race, and context. We draw on the stereotype content model (SCM) to examine gendered patterns of media coverage of candidates on the trait dimensions of warmth and competence in the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primary. Combining Natural Language Processing and manual analysis of news, we find that female candidates receive more negative than positive warmth coverage, while male candidates receive more tonally balanced warmth coverage, which suggests that female leaders are penalized on the dimension of warmth. Additionally, white women received more warmth coverage than women of color and women of color receive more competence coverage than white women. The findings suggest news media may portray white women and women of color candidates as lacking gender congruent traits like warmth but may portray white women as possessing role congruent traits like competence.
State-linked manipulated media in the time of Covid-19: a look at Iran
(Data & Policy, 2025-02-17) Bagozzi, Benjamin E.; Balasubramanian, Karthik; Goel, Rajni; Parker, Chris
What drives changes in the thematic focus of state-linked manipulated media? We study this question in relation to a long-running Iranian state-linked manipulated media campaign that was uncovered by Twitter in 2021. Using a variety of machine learning methods, we uncover and analyze how this manipulation campaign’s topical themes changed in relation to rising Covid-19 cases in Iran. By using the topics of the tweets in a novel way, we find that increases in domestic Covid-19 cases engendered a shift in Iran’s manipulated media focus away from Covid-19 themes and toward international finance- and investment-focused themes. These findings underscore (i) the potential for state-linked manipulated media campaigns to be used for diversionary purposes and (ii) the promise of machine learning methods for detecting such behaviors.
Overruling the Executive: Judicial Strategies to Resist Democratic Erosion
(Journal of Law and Courts, 2025-01-08) Garcia-Holgado, Benjamin
How can autonomous apex courts with specific attitudes and role conceptions counter executive aggrandizement? This article theorizes two causal mechanisms through which justices can resist democratic erosion. The first mechanism involves apex courts employing judicial review to neutralize autocratic legalism by blocking strategies such as institutional conversion, replacement, and layering that executives use to expand their power. The second involves apex courts building coalitions within and beyond the judiciary, enabling diverse actors – including judges, political parties, the media, and NGOs – to leverage their unique resources against executive encroachment. I conceptualize these two mechanisms by combining theory-building process tracing with counterfactual analysis of an unlikely case of democratic resilience: Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Drawing on evidence from 125 elite interviews, over a thousand newspaper articles, hundreds of state documents, memoirs, and other primary sources, this article demonstrates how the Supreme Court nullified President Cristina Kirchner’s attempts to undermine freedom of expression and judicial independence, thereby contributing to democratic resilience.
A Look Back At 20 Years of Research on Gender and Voting in Politics & Gender
(Politics & Gender, 2025-01-08) Cassese, Erin C.; Friesen, Amanda
This essay highlights the impact of Politics & Gender on the discipline’s understanding of how gender shapes the preferences, behavior, and motivations of voters. It provides descriptive information about the prevalence of research on gender and voting in the journal, along with the proportion of articles dedicated to women voters across different regions globally. The bulk of the essay focuses on the substance of this research — drawing out major themes and identifying significant contributions within each theme — and it concludes by offering a future research agenda on gender and voting.
Heated Environment, Armed People: Between “Climate Change Conflict” and “Fragility Conflict” in the Sahel
(Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2024-11-05) Akinyetun, Tope Shola; Fatai-Abatan, Abiodun; Ogunbodede, Nife
The Sahel is a classic example of a region inundated by climate change and conflicts. The region is an ecological hotspot that is on the brink of collapse, as countries in the area are trapped in a vicious cycle of conflict, resource scarcity, and environmental threats, which increase the chances of political instability and civil unrest. Noting that there is a divergent scholarly viewpoint on the relationship between climate change and conflict, this study evaluates the climate change-conflict thesis vis-à-vis the fragility-conflict thesis. It argues that armed conflicts in the Sahel are not exclusively attributable to climate change; rather, other conventional drivers exacerbate the impact of climate change on conflicts. These conventional drivers, framed as fragility indices, play a more significant role in conflict escalation in the Sahel. To this end, this study provides a holistic perspective on conflict dynamics and underscores the intricate interplay between fragility and conflict proliferation. This study adopts a qualitative approach and analyzes secondary data, particularly journal articles, reports, briefs, and developmental indices. The findings show that conditions symptomatic of a fragile state increase the incidence and proliferation of armed conflict in the region. Thus, conflict in the Sahel is a product of amplified pre-existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities and governance challenges.
Individual attendance data for over 30 years of international climate change talks
(Scientific Data, 2024-10-16) Blinova, Daria; Emuru, Rakesh; Bagozzi, Benjamin E.
The international community has formally negotiated over climate change since 1991. The annual meetings that host these negotiations have seen an ever-growing number of individuals representing countries, international organizations, or non-governmental organizations. These meetings and their attendees have accordingly become the focal point of international climate change cooperation for both the international community and scholars studying climate change politics. Yet, researchers have been unable to access and analyze comprehensive attendee-level data pertaining to these negotiations in terms of attendees’ names, genders, job titles, delegations, divisions, and affiliations. In applying text-as-data techniques to attendance roster PDFs, we extract and build attendee-level datasets for all annual negotiations held under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its precursor, 1991–2023. These data include original language and English-translated information on 27,470 unique delegations and 310,200 attendees over a 32-year period. Summaries and validations in turn highlight the promise of our data for the study of attendance patterns and characteristics across delegations and over time.
Left–right political orientations are not systematically related to conspiracism
(Political Psychology, 2024-09-04) Enders, Adam; Klofstad, Casey; Littrell, Shane; Miller, Joanne; Theocharis, Yannis; Uscinski, Joseph; Zilinsky, Jan
Researchers have long sought to make generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. However, this literature remains deeply conflicted. The “extremity hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of extremism, individuals who identify as extremely left or right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than centrists. But the “asymmetry hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of conservatism, individuals who self-identify as right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than those identifying as centrists or left wing. Here, we attempt to reconcile these competing hypotheses and the empirical findings supporting them. First, we demonstrate that the inconsistent findings stem from research designs that cannot support generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. Second, we reexamine the most prominent studies supporting the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses. We find that they suffer from inappropriate measurement and modeling strategies, rendering their conclusions suspect. We then test the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses by reexamining 18 U.S. surveys (2012–21; n = 32,056) and examining new surveys from 18 countries (2022; n = 18,033). In total, our 77 samples spanning a decade and 27 countries (n = 161,492) provide only weak support for either hypothesis. The wide variability in our findings suggests that differences in the relationship between conspiracism and political identities across political and temporal contexts do not stem from sampling variability, but rather from systematic forces that impact ideology, conspiracism, or both. We conclude that there is no single functional form that universally characterizes the relationship between conspiracism and political orientations across countries, or even over time within countries.
Anti-Muslim policy preferences and boundaries of American identity across partisanship
(Journal of Public Policy, 2024-04-12) Lajevardi, Nazita; Oskooii, Kassra A. R.
Does American identity predict preferences for anti-democratic policies that aim to marginalize Muslim Americans? Absent significant priming of inclusive elements of American identity, we argue that individuals with stronger attachments to American identity will be less likely than their counterparts to reject a range of anti-Muslim policies that are antithetical to principles of religious liberty and equality. Across three surveys and multiple measures, American identity powerfully predicts preferences for curbing the civil liberties of Muslim citizens. Particularly striking is the finding that the effect of American identity spans the partisan divide; it consistently explains the endorsement of exclusionary policies among self-identified Democrats, who typically hold more progressive policy positions toward minority groups than Republicans. Overall, our study highlights the contradictory and exclusionary nature of American identity, which has important implications for minority groups constructed as outside the boundaries of Americanness.
Language and LGBTQ Politics: The Effect of Changing Group Labels on Public Attitudes
(American Politics Research, 2024-05-24) Jones, Philip Edward
The labels used to describe sexual and gender minorities in the U.S. have shifted over time and become increasingly inclusive. Movement organizations have changed from describing the “lesbian, gay, and bisexual” (“LGB”) community to adding transgender (“LGBT”) and then also queer (“LGBTQ”) identities. Do these different labels affect public views of the group and support for their rights? I embedded a question wording experiment in a statewide survey, asking respondents about either LGB, LGBT, or LGBTQ people. The labels had no discernible effect on (1) support for requiring businesses to serve the group; nor (2) views of the group’s political leanings. There is no evidence that ideology and partisanship moderated these null effects: liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, were unaffected by the changing designations. This suggests public attitudes are not contingent on how the LGBTQ community is labelled, a finding with implications both for movement organizations and survey researchers.
Courts against backsliding: Lessons from Latin America
(Law & Policy, 2024-05-24) Gamboa, Laura; García-Holgado, Benjamín; González-Ocantos, Ezequiel
The recent wave of autocratization in Latin America has put courts at the center of debates about regime and regime change. Much of the literature on the judicial politics of democratic backsliding focuses on incumbents' efforts to capture judiciaries and weaponize them against the regime. Our approach is different. We provide illustrations of independent courts in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico that successfully fought back when presidents pushed for reforms that jeopardized democratic stability. With the goal of furthering our knowledge of how judges can also complicate autocratization, the paper thus focuses on a type of horizontal accountability intervention that we refer to as “constitutional balancing.” We also shed light on the reasons why constitutional balancing is well-equipped to slow down or stop backsliding via a comparison with another type of horizontal accountability intervention: public administration policing. These interventions are increasingly common in Latin America, usually in the form of high-profile corruption prosecutions. Unlike constitutional balancing, however, public administration policing has proven highly disruptive, and ultimately unable to settle regime-threatening political conflict.
The consolidation of putin’s power through legal and political means: implications for identity construction
(Socrates. Rīga Stradiņš University Faculty of Law Electronic Scientific Journal of Law, 2024-05-28) Vrobļevska, Elīna; Rātfelders, Toms
The sources of identity for the state are subjected to a constant process of change dependent upon, but not reduced to the aspect of who is creating the collective consciousness of the state’s self-awareness at the specific point in time. This paper traces and analyses the legal and political changes made in Russia’s legislature and governance model over the course of the past 20 years. This article argues that constitutional and legal changes have promoted and identify the president of Russia as a ‘curator’ of foreign policy—controlling the decisions made and the state identity that supplements them or enables them. As a result, it can be argued that although in the Russian political elite, several key agents can be identified as the ones shaping and influencing Russia’s foreign policy and constructing its identity, President Vladimir Putin, from a legal and political perspective has the most legal power and authority and thus can be considered the main agent of Russia’s identity construction.
The psychological costs of behavioral immunity following COVID-19 diagnosis
(Scientific Reports, 2024-04-30) Spangler, Derek P.; Li, Evaline Y.; Revi, Gabriela S.; Kubota, Jennifer T.; Cloutier, Jasmin; Lauharatanahirun, Nina
Prior COVID-19 infection may elevate activity of the behavioral immune system—the psychological mechanisms that foster avoidance of infection cues—to protect the individual from contracting the infection in the future. Such “adaptive behavioral immunity” may come with psychological costs, such as exacerbating the global pandemic’s disruption of social and emotional processes (i.e., pandemic disruption). To investigate that idea, we tested a mediational pathway linking prior COVID infection and pandemic disruption through behavioral immunity markers, assessed with subjective emotional ratings. This was tested in a sample of 734 Mechanical Turk workers who completed study procedures online during the global pandemic (September 2021–January 2022). Behavioral immunity markers were estimated with an affective image rating paradigm. Here, participants reported experienced disgust/fear and appraisals of sickness/harm risk to images varying in emotional content. Participants self-reported on their previous COVID-19 diagnosis history and level of pandemic disruption. The findings support the proposed mediational pathway and suggest that a prior COVID-19 infection is associated with broadly elevated threat emotionality, even to neutral stimuli that do not typically elicit threat emotions. This elevated threat emotionality was in turn related to disrupted socioemotional functioning within the pandemic context. These findings inform the psychological mechanisms that might predispose COVID survivors to mental health difficulties.
Originalism and Its Discontents
(Perspectives on Political Science, 2024-04-08) Goldstein, Leslie F.
Edwin Chemerinsky’s book is as much an attack on the defenses of originalism as it is an attack on the theory itself. People who call themselves “originalists” defend it with the simple argument that the Constitution is meant to be a law adopted by “the people” of the United States that not only establishes their government but restrains it. Like other laws, the Constitution can be amended. But until it is, say originalists, it must mean what it always meant. Otherwise, if subsequent officials, such as Supreme Court Justices, willfully alter its meaning on their own, then they are ruling by personal fiat rather than following law. And such rule is wrong; it violates the sovereignty of the people, which the Constitution was meant to establish.
Populism and State Capture: Evidence from Latin America
(European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2023-10-27) Carrión, Julio F.; Korman, James G.
This paper shows that, on average, populism in power produces a decrease in state capture. However, (unconstrained) populism in power that reduces existing levels of rule of law generates greater state capture than (contained) populism that has no negative effects on rule of law. The moderating effect we theorize is that the strength of the rule of law on state capture will show decreased effects at controlling state capture when a country is populist relative to non-populist. Populist leaders may seek to rid the old corruption networks, but once they aggrandize their power and weaken the rule of law, they have incentives to establish corrupt linkages with opportunistic economic elites who are willing to work with them, increasing state capture as a result. To test this theory, the paper employs a random effects model with 6 different specifications across 18 different Latin American countries, throughout the time period 1996-2017.
Social media analysis reveals environmental injustices in Philadelphia urban parks
(Scientific Reports, 2023-08-03) Walter, Matthew; Bagozzi, Benjamin E.; Ajibade, Idowu; Mondal, Pinki
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 11.7 calls for access to safe and inclusive green spaces for all communities. Yet, historical residential segregation in the USA has resulted in poor quality urban parks near neighborhoods with primarily disadvantaged socioeconomic status groups, and an extensive park system that addresses the needs of primarily White middle-class residents. Here we center the voices of historically marginalized urban residents by using Natural Language Processing and Geographic Information Science to analyze a large dataset (n = 143,913) of Google Map reviews from 2011 to 2022 across 285 parks in the City of Philadelphia, USA. We find that parks in neighborhoods with a high number of residents from historically disadvantaged demographic groups are likely to receive lower scores on Google Maps. Physical characteristics of these parks based on aerial and satellite images and ancillary data corroborate the public perception of park quality. Topic modeling of park reviews reveal that the diverse environmental justice needs of historically marginalized communities must be met to reduce the uneven park quality—a goal in line with achieving SDG 11 by 2030.
War, Revolution, and Failed Democratization in Bolivia and Ecuador
(Latin American Research Review, 2023-10-02) Carrión, Julio F.
This essay reviews the following works: The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files. By Marc Becker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2017. Pp. vii + 322. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822369080. The CIA in Ecuador. By Marc Becker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2021. Pp. xi + 317. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478011385. Movilidad y poder en el sur del Ecuador, 1950–1990. By María Mercedes Eguiguren. Quito: Editorial FLACSO Ecuador, 2019. Pp. viii + 274. Open access e-book. ISBN: 9789978675199. Peasant Wars in Bolivia: Making, Thinking, and Living the Revolution in Cochabamba (1952–64). By José M. Gordillo. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 337. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781773854014. A Concise History of Bolivia. 3rd ed. By Herbert F. Klein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xix + 380. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781108948890. Indigenous Struggle and the Bolivian National Revolution: Land and Liberty. By James Kohl. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. xii + 413. $64.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780367471392. Historical Dictionary of Ecuador. By George M. Lauderbaugh. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. Pp. xlviii + 322. $96.84 hardcover. ISBN: 9781538102459. ¡Vamos a avanzar! The Chaco War and Bolivia’s Political Transformation, 1899–1952. By Robert Niebuhr. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 260. $60.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781496207784. Los inconformistas del Centenario: Intelectuales, socialismo y nación en una Bolivia en crisis (1925–1939). By Pablo Stefanoni. La Paz: Plural Editores, 2015. Pp. 383. ISBN: 9789995416430. The Bolivia Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Edited by Sinclair Thomson, Rossana Barragán, Xavier Albó, Seemin Qayum, and Mark Goodale. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. xx + 719. $35.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822371526.
Corporate Social Irresponsibility, an Elastic Wall, and a Fragile State: Sign of Hope’s Unfinished Quest to Mitigate Human Rights Violations in South Sudan
(Business and Human Rights Journal, 2023-10-06) Kinderman, Daniel; Stieglitz, Klaus; Almairac, Laure
This piece recounts the efforts by NGO Sign of Hope (SoH) to rectify human rights violations in South Sudan, which manifested themselves as drinking water pollution by the oil industry. Committed to exposing and remediating this water contamination, SoH was able to prompt the automobile company Daimler’s CSR to engage in extended dialogue with the oil industry stakeholders in Unity State. Despite a tactful use of various methods ranging from cooperation to confrontation, SoH’s campaign did not lead the oil producers to reverse the harm inflicted on the people of Unity State. When SoH tried to hold these companies accountable, SoH had the impression that it was hitting an elastic wall. This piece identifies lessons which may help to counter corporate human rights violations and compensate for the weakness of CSR in fragile states and in the face of corporate irresponsibility.
Political Awareness and the Identity-to-Politics Link in Public Opinion
(Journal of Politics, 2023-03-07) Jones, Philip Edward
Members of different social groups often hold distinctive political attitudes. Research shows substantial divides based on characteristics like religion, race, gender, and sexuality, suggesting a straightforward identity-to-politics link. But making that link requires some knowledge and understanding of politics, which not everyone has. As a result, I show, political awareness often moderates the link between social identity and political views. Among the least engaged, identity is only weakly related to politics, and the differences between groups are muted. As awareness increases, the connection between group membership and political attitudes tightens, and the magnitude of identity gaps grows. The substantive impact of awareness varies across groups, and there are notable exceptions to these findings. In general though, the identity-to-politics link—and thus many of the divisions attributed to demographic characteristics—is conditional on political awareness.
Putting the Political in Political Interest: The Conditional Effect of Politics on Citizens’ Interest in Politics
(American Politics Research, 2022-11-14) Miller, Joanne M.; Peterson, David A. M.; McClurg, Scott D.; Sauncers, Kyle L.
Given that political interest is one of the best predictors of political participation, it remains curious that the causes of interest are undertheorized and understudied. Notably absent from much of the research on political interest is an exploration of how variations in the nature of politics itself might have an impact on individual-level political interest. We develop a theory and a set of testable predictions about how partisanship interacts with the presence of a presidential (vs. midterm) election, the party of the sitting president, and elite polarization, to affect political interest. We report multilevel models that use ANES measures of political interest and partisanship and the DW-NOMINATE Senate polarization measure (from 1960 to 2008) and discuss the implications of our findings for the long-term prospects of an interested electorate.
Is the U.S. Heading for a Civil War? Scenarios for 2024-25
(Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2022-10-25) Kaufman, Stuart J.
This article applies symbolic politics theory to assess the risk of a new civil war in the U.S., finding that all of the factors making civil war likely are currently present. Narratives promoting hostility toward the other party are prominent among Republicans and Democrats alike, as are hostile predispositions and hostile feelings toward the other party. The Republican Party’s rejection of Trump’s 2020 election loss and its links to the January 6 coup attempt and to militia groups position it to organize a more violent insurrection in a scenario in which Trump is again the unsuccessful presidential nominee in 2024.

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