American Political Science Review Research Articles

Does Health Vulnerability Predict Voting for Right-Wing Populist Parties in Europe?

Abstract: Introduction: A recent article by Kavanagh et al. (2021) in American Political Science Review suggested that health vulnerability predicts voting patterns for the populist far-right. Aim: We sought to distinguish socioculturally conservative from antielite voting, expecting health vulnerability to predict only the former. Methods: We combined data from the European Social Survey (round 7) with the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (2014). We preregistered several other hypotheses regarding associations between health and voting and predetermined the smallest effect size of interest (SESOI: r = .05). Results: Health vulnerability did not predict socioculturally conservative voting, and the results for antielite voting were mixed. To investigate why our result differed from Kavanagh et al.’s, we reran their analysis employing covariate specification curve analyses. The statistical significance and the direction of the association between health vulnerability and voting depended on which covariates were included. Across 1,000 models with randomly drawn covariate specifications, 59.6% showed a positive, 29.8% a zero, and 10.6% a negative association between health vulnerability and voting for far-right populist parties. However, all effect sizes were more consistently smaller than our predetermined SESOI. Conclusions: Our study illustrates the necessity of causally justifying and preregistering all covariates and predetermining an SESOI.

The American Political Science Review During the COVID-19 Pandemic

On June 1, 2020, a little more than two months after the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 pandemic declaration, our editorial team assumed the leadership of the American Political Science Review (APSR). Although this confluence of events makes it difficult to isolate the pandemic’s effect on new submissions and review processes, this article describes submission and review patterns in the two and a half years before and after the onset of the pandemic and the editorial transition. It describes our preliminary observations regarding what the patterns suggest about the pandemic’s impact on the APSR.1

Fixed Effects and Post-Treatment Bias in Legacy Studies

Pepinsky, Goodman, and Ziller (2024, American Political Science Review, PGZ) reassess a recent study on the long-term consequences of concentration camps in Germany. The authors conclude that accounting for contemporary (i.e., post-treatment) state heterogeneity in the models provides unbiased estimates of the effects of camps on current-day outgroup intolerance. In this note, we show that PGZ’s empirical strategy rests on (a) a mischaracterization of what regional fixed effects capture and (b) two unrealistic assumptions that can be avoided with pre-treatment state fixed effects. We further demonstrate that results from the original article remain substantively the same when we incorporate regional fixed effects correctly. Finally, simulations reveal that camp proximity consistently outperforms spatially correlated noise in this specific study. The note contributes to the growing literature on legacy studies by advancing the discussion about the correct modeling choices in this challenging field.

Race, electoral pressure, expected judicial ideology, and the vote to confirm Justice Clarence Thomas

ABSTRACT The paper “Courting Constituents? An Analysis of the Senate Confirmation Vote on Justice Clarence Thomas” tests the theory that electoral pressure from Black constituents played a role in the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court (Overby, L. Marvin, Beth M. Henschen, Michael H. Walsh, and Julie Strauss. 1992. “Courting Constituents? An Analysis of the Senate Confirmation Vote on Justice Clarence Thomas.” American Political Science Review 86 (4): 997–1003. https://do.org/10.2307/1964351). This paper reveals several methodological errors in the original paper and also provides a friendly critique of several of the underlying assumptions put forth in the 1992 paper. This paper then offers an alternative explanation that the expected judicial ideology of Clarence Thomas nomination was relatively more important than electoral pressure from Black voters.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Analysing the political effects of ‘fake news’ deflections in the UK

We, the Editors and Publisher of West European Politics, have retracted the following article: Ric Neo (2023) ‘Analysing the political effects of ‘fake news’ deflections in the UK’, West European Politics, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2023.2211836, published online on 21 June 2023. Since publication, significant concerns have been raised about overlaps in concept, theory and design with work made available as a conference panel paper by Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Daniel Schiff and Natália Bueno in 2020, a precursor to their paper recently published in the American Political Science Review. Schiff, Kaylyn Jackson, Daniel Schiff, and Natália S. Bueno. 2020. ‘The Liar’s Dividend: How Deepfakes and Fake News Affect Politician Support and Trust in Media’. Presented at APPAM in November 2020. Schiff, Kaylyn Jackson, Daniel S. Schiff, and Natália S. Bueno. 2024. ‘The Liar’s Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability?’ American Political Science Review. Published online 2024:1–20. doi: 10.1017/S0003055423001454. Upon query, the author has not been able to provide a satisfactory explanation for this significant level of overlap and the inadequacy of accreditation. As this is a serious breach of our Editorial Policies, we are retracting the article from the journal. The author has agreed to retract the article. We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions. The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘Retracted’.

Exiled Activists Mobilize Online

Exile—the banishment of individuals from their home country—is a commonly used form of repression against activists, dissidents, and other political opponents. The aftermath of exile usually limits opposition influence and weakens home-country networks. However, while banishment may keep exiles physically away from home, it does not keep political opponents from promoting their agendas from abroad. In a new article published in the American Political Science Review, authors Jane Esberg and Alexandra A. Siegel demonstrate how exile affects political opponents’ online activism. Their research highlights the importance of digital technologies and social media as an accessible and powerful political tool.

Modeling Spatial Heterogeneity and Historical Persistence: Nazi Concentration Camps and Contemporary Intolerance

A wealth of recent research in comparative politics examines how spatial variation in historical conditions shapes modern political outcomes. In an article in the American Political Science Review, Homola, Pereira, and Tavits argue that Germans who live nearer to former Nazi concentration camps are more likely to display out-group intolerance. Clarifying the conceptual foundations of posttreatment bias and reviewing the historical record on postwar state creation in Germany, we argue that state-level differences confound the relationship between distance to camps and out-group intolerance. Using publicly available European Values Survey data and electoral results from 2017, we find no consistent evidence that distance to camps is related to contemporary values. Our findings have implications for literatures on historical persistence, causal inference with spatial data, Holocaust studies, and outgroup tolerance.

WALTER DEAN BURNHAM: In Memory and Appreciation

Dean Burnham, who died in San Antonio in October at the age of ninety-two, was an active and enthusiastic supporter of this journal from its inception. His loss deprives editors and managing editors of his energetic and assiduous counsel, especially regarding any writings or commentaries devoted to political parties, elections, political realignments, political polling, and the deep literature on the evolution of American democracy from originalist founding days to the rise of reactionary recent presidents.Because this journal was originally housed at MIT, it was both convenient and illuminating to stroll into Burnham’s office and ask his opinion about a submission or about an idea for a special issue, or to request advice about some aspect of American or European political development. Burnham would always answer the precise questions and then, unprompted, provide context and a compendium of intellectual discourse related to the inquiry. He was integral to the growth of the JIH from its formative years, and ever since.A student of Harvard University’s V.O. Key, Burnham in 1965 published a defining article on declining voter turnout, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” in the American Political Science Review. Among his many seminal books were Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (1970), Democracy in the Making: American Government and Politics (1986), and Voting in American Elections: The Shaping of the American Political Universe Since 1788 (2009). In 2014, he co-wrote—with Thomas Ferguson, a former student—“Americans Are Sick to Death of Both Parties: Why Our Politics Are in Worse Shape Than We Thought,” a study of the 2014 American elections. He also commented in print on the 2016 “change election” that brought Donald Trump to the presidency. As the New York Times’ obituary indicated, Burnham was “one of the most influential political scientists of his generation.” Among Burnham’s many intellectual contributions to this journal was his path-breaking article, “Those High Nineteenth-Century American Voting Turnouts: Fact or Fiction?” XVI (1986), 613–644.Before joining the MIT political science department in 1971, Burnham had taught at Boston University, Kenyon College, Haverford College, and Washington University. In 1988, he departed MIT for the University of Texas, Austin. His students there were as devoted to his breadth of learning and his clever wit as those at MIT had been.Burnham was profoundly interdisciplinary in his interests, his discourse, and his approach to political and social history. He extolled the craft of translating compelling theories and concepts into accessible articles and books, thus contributing mightily to the fashioning and qualitative uplifting of this journal for decades. The JIH’s readers and editors will sadly miss his profound insights and unparalleled wisdom.

Change-Point Detection and Regularization in Time Series Cross-Sectional Data Analysis

AbstractResearchers of time series cross-sectional data regularly face the change-point problem, which requires them to discern between significant parametric shifts that can be deemed structural changes and minor parametric shifts that must be considered noise. In this paper, we develop a general Bayesian method for change-point detection in high-dimensional data and present its application in the context of the fixed-effect model. Our proposed method, hidden Markov Bayesian bridge model, jointly estimates high-dimensional regime-specific parameters and hidden regime transitions in a unified way. We apply our method to Alvarez, Garrett, and Lange’s (1991, American Political Science Review 85, 539–556) study of the relationship between government partisanship and economic growth and Allee and Scalera’s (2012, International Organization 66, 243–276) study of membership effects in international organizations. In both applications, we found that the proposed method successfully identify substantively meaningful temporal heterogeneity in parameters of regression models.

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

Increased but Insincere Support? New Evidence from Putin’s Post-Crimea Annexation

Elected leaders tend to enjoy an increase in popular support when the countries they govern become embroiled in international conflict. For example, George W. Bush could boast a 90% approval rating in the wake of 9/11. Existing theories claim that such “rally effects” occur due to favorable media coverage, support from opposition party members, and/or an uptick in patriotism. These existing theories share a basic assumption: rallies or rally effects reflect sincere changes in preferences, or individuals’ beliefs. In his new American Political Science Review article (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs%5b%E2%80%A6%5dpularity-surge-after-crimea/B587ECFA7B1280DE42D914DC101296F4), Henry E. Hale argues for a re-examination of the causal mechanisms in relation to rallying effects.

Notes from the Editors: Increasing Qualitative Submissions

One of the main goals of our editorial team when we became editors of the American Political Science Review was to increase the substantive, methodological, and representational diversity of the APSR while continuing to publish excellent work. As we explained in our 2019 Vision Statement, we seek to broaden the range of research topics that are published in the journal and to diversify the subfields, geographic foci, and methodological approaches represented in the APSR. We also seek to “increase the diversity of authors, reviewers, and citations along various lines, including race, gender, sexuality, ability, national origin, and scholar’s type of home institution.”

Has Political Theory Become More Political? Evidence and Stakes for Future Theory

ABSTRACTThis article presents evidence for a secular increase in political engagement in political theory from 1974 to 2019 and analyzes the implications of this growth. Analysis of 385 theory articles published across three periods (i.e., 1974–1976, 2005–2007, and 2017–2019) found a near doubling in topicality among theory articles published in Polity, American Political Science Review, and Political Theory since the 1970s. This change has been substantial, statistically significant, and previously unnoted in the literature. I suggest that the shift toward topicality entails and is entailed by the production of “real events” amenable to and consistent with the theoretical approaches in which successive generations of theorists have been trained. Finally, I explain this shift toward topicality with respect to theory’s responsiveness to real events and to rising levels of professionalization within the field.

Revisiting negative externalities of US military bases: the case of Okinawa

Abstract In a recently published article, Allen et al. (Outside the wire: U.S. military deployments and public opinion in host states’, American Political Science Review, 114(2), 326–341; 2020) argue that US military deployments nurture favorable attitudes toward the United States among foreign citizens. Their claim is based on social contact and economic compensation theories, applied to a large-scale cross-national survey project funded by the US government. However, their analysis disregards the geographical concentration of US military facilities within the host countries. To examine the relevance of geography and assess both positive and negative externalities, we focus on Japan – a notable case given its status as the country hosting the largest number of US military personnel in the world. We show that residents of Okinawa, a small prefecture hosting 70% of US military facilities within Japan have considerably unfavorable attitudes toward the US military presence in their prefecture. They hold this negative sentiment specifically toward the bases in Okinawa regardless of their contact with Americans and economic benefits and their general support for the US military presence within Japan. Our findings support an alternative theory of not-in-my-backyard. They also shed light on the importance of local foreign public opinion for foreign policy analysis and call for a more balanced scholarly debate on the externalities of the global US military presence.

Explaining confidence in the police within transitional Hong Kong: the influence of postmaterial values

ABSTRACT The Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) has a tradition for being among the most respected national police organisations globally. More recent political events in Hong Kong have however placed the HKPF in highly visible public order situations. A wide array of political factions have emerged as a consequence of the handover of control in Hong Kong, many of which have involved young people protesting the curtailment of democratic rights. In this paper, we utilise Wave 7 of the World Values Survey (n = 2075). We utilise Inglehart’s (1971. The silent revolution in Europe: intergenerational change in post-industrial societies. American political science review, 65 (4), 991–1017) concept of postmaterialism to examine how far young people’s more negative attitudes to the police can be underpinned by cohort-based (or generational) explanations. Our findings identify associations between postmaterialist values and lower confidence in the police. Those that favoured stricter immigration controls, experienced higher fear of crime, perceived drug selling in their area, and consumed certain types of media (notably television and new media) were also less likely to have confidence in the HKPF.

Climate change: Will the parties unite or divide?

Climate change: Will the parties unite or divide?

Preserving Provenance: Ethical and Methodological Challenges Related to Leaked Documents

In the last decade or so, individuals such as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning have leaked classified documents to the public. These documents are now frequently drawn upon in published academic articles within political science journals. In his article in the American Political Science Review, Christopher Darnton asks how researchers, particularly those within political science’s subfield of international relations, should approach the “informational fall out” generated by such leaks and raises both the consequences and challenges that stem from the use of such sources.

Violence and Voting in the United States: How School Shootings Affect Elections

Since the 1980s over 100 indiscriminate school shootings have taken the lives of dozens of adults and children across 40 states. Each school shooting sparked debates about gun control, with Democrats increasingly advocating for stricter gun laws and Republicans increasingly opposing them. Gun violence has certainly divided the country along partisan lines, but has it influenced the public’s political behavior? Political scientists Laura García-Montoya, Ana Arjona, and Matthew Lacombe investigate this question in their recent American Political Science Review study. In particular, they examine whether people who live in counties that experience school shootings change their voting behavior. García-Montoya, Arjona, and Lacombe find that gun violence in schools does not increase voter turnout, but it does shift the public’s vote in favor of Democrats during presidential elections.

The Essential Role of Statistical Inference in Evaluating Electoral Systems: A Response to DeFord et al.

AbstractKatz, King, and Rosenblatt (2020, American Political Science Review 114, 164–178) introduces a theoretical framework for understanding redistricting and electoral systems, built on basic statistical and social science principles of inference. DeFord et al. (2021, Political Analysis, this issue) instead focuses solely on descriptive measures, which lead to the problems identified in our article. In this article, we illustrate the essential role of these basic principles and then offer statistical, mathematical, and substantive corrections required to apply DeFord et al.’s calculations to social science questions of interest, while also showing how to easily resolve all claimed paradoxes and problems. We are grateful to the authors for their interest in our work and for this opportunity to clarify these principles and our theoretical framework.

Implementing Partisan Symmetry: Problems and Paradoxes

AbstractWe consider the measures of partisan symmetry proposed for practical use in the political science literature, as clarified and developed in Katz, King, and Rosenblatt (2020, American Political Science Review 114, 164–178). Elementary mathematical manipulation shows the symmetry metrics to have surprising properties that call their meaningfulness into question. To accompany the general analysis, we study measures of partisan symmetry with respect to recent voting patterns in Utah, Texas, and North Carolina, flagging problems in each case. Taken together, these observations should raise major concerns about the available techniques for quantitative scores of partisan symmetry—including the mean–median score, the partisan bias score, and the more general “partisan symmetry standard”—with the decennial redistricting underway.