While there is little doubt that technological change is generating labor market polarization around the world, we know much less about its translation into partisan polarization. I explore the political polarization driven by the rise of right-wing populist parties and leaders throughout developed democracies. I build a theoretical model to explain how right-wing populists have attracted the votes of routine workers, workers exposed to automation risk, and previously loyal to mainstream left-wing parties, within both majoritarian multi-district and multiparty proportional systems. I empirically evaluate the theory, focusing primarily on the US and Germany, using individual vote-switching data and campaign targeting strategies inferred from the content of political speeches and party manifestos.

This study investigates the impact of exposure to foreign goods in the marketplace on the policy preferences and political behavior of US consumers. Using a survey experiment, we simulate a realistic consumption experience with well-known brands of sports utility vehicles. Our findings reveal that exposure to foreign brands intensifies hostility towards immigrants and trade among respondents holding pre-existing nationalist attitudes while also increasing their support for Trump as a presidential candidate. Exposure to foreign brands has the opposite effect on the preferences and behavior of cosmopolitans. Our results demonstrate that consumption in an increasingly diversified marketplace can drive a bottom-up process of trade policy polarization. Our study has significant implications for understanding the contemporary political backlash against economic globalization and standard models of international trade based on the ``love of variety."

The political science discipline faces significant disparities in the representation and participation of underrepresented minorities in graduate education. This lack of diversity among political scientists results in a narrower range of questions being explored within the field. Furthermore, the underrepresentation is particularly pronounced in the political methodology subfield, limiting the scope of tools and perspectives to those predominantly shaped by white scholars. This article proposes a template for teaching and mentoring undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to enhance their opportunities in graduate programs. We examine the Mobilization and Political Economy program, a summer research initiative aimed at minority-serving institutions and underrepresented minorities, designed to equip participants with the tools to study social movements, political mobilization, and structural inequality.

Do political protests spread across time and space? While scholars of social movements and political behavior have long debated this question, existing studies often fail to simultaneously account for both spatial and temporal dependencies in protest dynamics. Using protest event analysis and a novel spatiotemporal autoregressive distributed lag (STADL) model, we examine the diffusion of protests across 30 European countries from 2000 to 2015. Our findings provide robust evidence that protests exhibit both temporal and spatial contagion: protest activity in one year significantly increases protest frequency in the following year, and protests in one country contribute to the onset of protests in neighboring states. These results underscore the importance of modeling both dimensions of diffusion to avoid biased inferences and contribute to the broader understanding of protest mobilization. Our study highlights the interconnected nature of political activism and has important implications for research on social movements and political instability.

Many legislators do not have consistently progressive or conservative policy positions. How does the mix of issue positions relate to the manner in which the legislators consider their placement on the left-right ideological scale? Analyzing data from the Parliamentary Elites in Latin America (PELA) survey, this paper counterposes combinations of legislators’ moral and economic policy positions with their self-located ideological score. Our results confirm the importance of economics, which is consistent with older studies, but we also find that moral issues are at least consistent with – and perhaps germane– to the left-right placement of many of the region’s legislators. Among the findings are that the left is more heterogeneous, especially with respect to moral views, than is the right. We also show that many centrists are closeted conservatives, supporting the “ashamed right” thesis.

This paper investigates the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on politics by proposing a theoretical framework linking technological change with political apathy. Using hierarchical logistic modeling with varying intercepts by country and survey data from the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2018 for 23 European countries, I present evidence that individuals more exposed to technological change are less likely to feel close to a political party, participate in elections and take part in protests. Those individuals exposed to automation are about 10% less likely to be politically engaged than those respondents without exposure to automation risks. I also demonstrate that income levels and unionization rates substantially moderate the direct link between automation and political engagement. The impact of automation on political engagement is smaller among wealthier citizens and in highly unionized environment. The political message from these interaction effects speaks about the reinforcing forces between economic inequality and automation and the role of collective organization. My findings have important implications for understanding automation politics, political inequality, and the demand (or lack of) for protection.

Many legislators do not have consistently progressive or conservative policy positions. How does the mix of issue positions relate to the manner in which the legislators consider their placement on the left-right ideological scale? Analyzing data from the Parliamentary Elites in Latin America (PELA) survey, this paper counterposes combinations of legislators’ moral and economic policy positions with their self-located ideological score. Our results confirm the importance of economics, which is consistent with older studies, but we also find that moral issues are at least consistent with – and perhaps germane– to the left-right placement of many of the region’s legislators. Among the findings are that the left is more heterogeneous, especially with respect to moral views, than is the right. We also show that many centrists are closeted conservatives, supporting the “ashamed right” thesis.

Same-sex marriage (SSM) has risen to the top of political agendas across Latin America, but there is also great variance in terms of legal status, public support, and the policymaking processes. While the public and social movements have been critical to the advance of SSM, we know little about the views of those who are directly charged with translating public views into policy: the legislators. To fill this gap, we utilize a survey of the region’s legislators to first examine the range in support among countries and show how it correlates with legal changes. We then examine the correlates of legislators’ support for SSM. While we also test gender, age, and ideology, our multivariate models focus on religiosity. We show that in addition to driving support at the individual level (in the expected direction), religiosity also works as a contextual variable such that having more secular colleagues encourages pious legislators to support same-sex marriage.

El matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo (MPMS) ha marcado la agenda política en muchos países de América Latina, aunque aún es ilegal en muchos países del continente. No obstante, el apoyo público varía mucho en la región, así como también los roles de los tribunales, presidentes y legislaturas. En este artículo nos enfocamos en los legisladores, ya que son los encargados de representar al público y convertir sus demandas en política pública. Si bien muchas legislaturas han discutido el tema, la literatura no ha examinado de manera intensiva las actitudes de estos representantes hacia el MPMS. Para analizar este fenómeno aplicamos un marco teórico que amplía las teorías basadas en el contexto y contacto social, y utilizamos una encuesta implementada a legisladores en la región para estudiar las variables que correlacionan con el apoyo al MPMS. Si bien también evaluamos variables a nivel individual (tales como género e ideología), nuestros modelos se enfocan en el rol contextual de la religiosidad. Los resultados muestran que tener más colegas seculares alienta a los legisladores, incluso a los creyentes, a apoyar el matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo.

How does an immigration shock affect politicians’ discourses? This study examines the sudden influx of Venezuelan migrants into Latin American countries. We argue that such events alter politicians’ agendas, creating opportunities to frame new issues from their perspectives. Analyzing over 3 million tweets by parliament members from 2013 to 2021 in Chile and Peru, we employ computational textanalysis methods, from simple dictionaries to complex techniques like unsupervised topic analysis and OpenAI, along with an instrumental variable strategy. Our results suggest that after the immigration shock, politicians emphasized the immigration issue without any party family monopolizing it. We find little evidence that regional exposure explains the issue’s salience, suggesting a disconnection from local experiences. Our findings reveal a novel channel for increased salience: right-wing politicians criticized the Venezuelan regime and socialism instead of increasing anti-immigration sentiment, while left-wing politicians promoted pro-immigration attitudes consistent with contact theory. This work enhances our understanding of the politicization of immigration in South-South contexts in the digital age.

I investigate the impact of automation exposure on political behavior in post-industrial societies, with a specific focus on the support for populism. I examine the potential causal mechanisms by exploring the interplay between economic and cultural factors. Through a parallel encouragement design survey experiment conducted in the US, I divide the sample into two groups: one group is randomly assigned to the treatment condition either related to exposure to robots and AI replacing jobs or a control condition related to technological development; the other group experiences manipulation of both the treatment and the encouragement of mediators (marginalization and nostalgia). My findings reveal that feelings of marginalization and nostalgia mediate the effects of technological change on support for populism and illiberal policies. To enhance external validity, I implement mediation analysis using survey data from the European Social Survey from 2012 to 2016. The results help us understand how structural changes in labor markets and cultural factors impact political behavior and inequality.

Do mainstream parties respond to outsider parties, or vice versa? Previous research suggests an alignment between the issues prioritized by both mainstream and outsider parties, but definitive evidence on who influences whom is limited. I investigate this with fine-grained temporal analyses of YouTube videos posted by political parties in the year leading up to elections since 2015 in the UK and Spain. Using dictionaries, Wordscores, and transformer-based models, I classify the content by issues and communication characteristics, such as whether a message is populist or extreme. I then apply vector autoregression models to explore short-term dynamics of rhetorical influence. In the UK, a majoritarian system, mainstream right and left parties respond to each other, while the outsider right follows mainstream parties. In Spain, a multi-party system, mainstream parties influence each other, and outsider parties influence the mainstream left and each other. More importantly, in both systems, mainstream parties more often lead than follow outsiders' messages. These findings have important implications for understanding party dynamics and competition during electoral campaigns.

Students from underrepresented populations, including women, first-generation students, and racial and ethnic minorities, face persistent barriers in accessing graduate education and professional development opportunities, particularly in the social sciences. To address these disparities, graduate pipeline programs can provide critical support by providing networking and mentoring opportunities, closing methodological and research skill gaps, and preparing participants to apply to competitive graduate programs. This article outlines the principles and goals of a summer program focused on mobilization and political economy by detailing the rationale, implementation strategies, and evaluation framework used to assess its effects. Evaluation of the inaugural program demonstrated the success of a multilayered mentoring approach, tailored curricula, and comprehensive support structures in fostering participants’ academic growth and career readiness. By highlighting best practices and lessons, we provide a template for institutions seeking to develop initiatives associated with greater diversity in graduate programs in the social sciences, the academic market, and, ultimately, higher education.

The analysis of multilevel data is common in political science and the social sciences more generally. We examine the case where random community-level effects cluster geographically in space. Ignoring this spatial dependence leads to inefficient coefficient estimates and overconfident standard errors. We propose a two-step spatial feasible generalized least squares estimator that, under empirically identifiable conditions, provides relatively efficient coefficient estimates and accurate standard errors compared to the maximum likelihood estimation of non-spatial models.