The forthcoming article “Long-run confidence: Estimating uncertainty when using long-run multipliers” by Mark David Nieman and David A. M. Peterson is summarized by the author(s) below.

Our paper tackles a longstanding problem in time series analysis: how to estimate uncertainty for the long-run effect of a predictor in a regression model that includes a lagged dependent variable. This is a pervasive challenge in political science, where time series are often short and the test for ascertaining their properties underpowered. Conventional uncertainty estimates—essential for hypothesis testing—break down under such conditions.

We address this issue using a Bayesian estimator with a semi-informed prior that yields theoretically informed estimates of uncertainty even in short or noisy time series. We start by using a bounded, uniform prior for the estimated coefficient on the lagged DV. The semi-informed prior accommodates series of X and y with unclear dynamic properties by limiting the range of the coefficient on a lagged DV to its theoretical bounds for either stationary or integrated series. By giving equal density to the values between these bounds, however, the prior does not bias point estimates.

We then estimate the model via Markov chain Monte Carlos (MCMC). The use of a sampling-based method, like MCMCs, allow for direct estimation of the variance of the long-run multiplier, without requiring large sample sizes. This is made possible by exploiting a well-known property of MCMC methods, namely, that one can estimate and summarize the distribution of functions of parameters (e.g., ratios of coefficients) directly from the posterior distribution.

Our proposed method leads to more accurate and reliable estimates of uncertainty than alternatives that rely on asymptotic assumptions that may not hold. Moreover, our framework requires minimal additional assumptions over existing approaches and is easy to estimate in most existing software. We highlight the advantages of this approach via Monte Carlo experiments and replicate several studies to show that our method clarifies long-run relationships that were inconclusive using existing techniques.

About the Author(s): Mark David Nieman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Trinity College, as well as an affiliate of the Data Sciences Institute and David A. M. Peterson is the Lucken Professor of  Political Science in the Department of Political Science at Iowa State University. Their research “Long-run confidence: Estimating uncertainty when using long-run multipliers” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Perversity, futility, complicity: Should democrats participate in autocratic elections?” by Zoltan Miklosi is summarized by the author below.

Multiparty, competitive elections are a hallmark of democracy. However, such elections are not unique to democracies. A growing number of countries around the world are described by political scientists as electoral autocracies. They are autocratic because they significantly curtail media freedom, they weaken the independence of the judiciary, and they apply the law unequally: government critics and opposition politicians are often prosecuted on frivolous grounds while allies of the ruling party engage in large-scale corruption with impunity. But they are electoral autocracies, because genuine opposition parties are allowed to compete in elections and sometimes even win. However, autocratic elections are partially unfree and massively unfair: opposition candidates and activists often face physical and legal harassment and intimidation, while the ruling party freely uses the financial and administrative resources of the government. Such regimes confront democrats with a dilemma. On the one hand, if they participate in autocratic elections as voters or candidates, they contribute to the false appearance of democracy and help autocrats claim democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, elections are often though not always the most effective tool to foster democratic regime change, as I hope to show in the paper. Even if rarely, autocrats sometimes lose elections, as happened in Mexico in 2000, Malaysia in 2018, or Poland in 2023, for instance. Therefore, if democrats decide to boycott elections, they give up what is often their best chance to defeat autocracy. Here, I argue that usually, democrats should participate because often that is the least bad option. At the same time, I also argue that while in democracies elections are the only legitimate means of achieving a change of government, this is not so in autocracies. Here, democrats are morally permitted to choose other strategies of challenging autocracy such as boycott or resistance, and the alternatives ought to be assessed case by case in light of facts on the ground.

About the author: Zoltan Miklosi is an Associate Professor at Central European University Their research “Perversity, futility, complicity: Should democrats participate in autocratic elections?” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “What political theory can learn from conceptual engineering: The case of “corruption”” by Emanuela Ceva and Patrizia Pedrini is summarized by the author(s) below.

When people hear “corruption,” they picture bribes or embezzlement. But many practices that impair institutional functioning—clientelism, nepotism, or the tight coupling of politics to private money—do not reduce to simple trades of favors for cash.

Conceptual engineering offers a way to capture and assess this broader reality by deliberately refining the concepts we use. Instead of treating corruption merely as “the use of entrusted power for private gain,” recent studies in political theory have re-engineered the concept as a deficit of office accountability. In this view, officeholders exercise power under a mandate—judges to deliver impartial justice, ministers to serve the public, regulators to ensure fair competition. Corruption arises when the use of that power can no longer be justified with reference to the mandate. Relevant instances may include the misbehavior of some “bad apple,” such as a mayor appointing a cousin to a public post, as well as the ill-design of an entire system, like in the case of campaign-finance arrangements that bind elected officials to major donors. Across such instances corruption occurs as a break in the accountability chain that should link officeholders to their mandates—even without personal enrichment.

The accountability lens thus unifies individual wrongdoing and structural flaws. Nevertheless, its reach is not assumed. Mandates and accountability practices may vary across institutional settings. In authoritarian polities, offices are often personalized and counter-powers weak; in private organizations (corporations, NGOs, sport federations), mandates are defined by institutional purposes that are not public in the democratic sense. To make the characterization of corruption relevant for such plural and complex contexts, engineering the concept of corruption further can help through iterative specification. This means addressing research efforts to build on the core idea (deficit of office accountability), but tailor it to the institutional context rather than exporting a one-size-fits-all definition.

This matters analytically, normatively, and empirically. Analytically, it helps explain cases that standard definitions miss—for example, favoritism in public appointments or procurement inside an NGO where no bribe is paid, yet the use of institutional power cannot be vindicated by that power mandate. Normatively, it shifts anticorruption policy from a focus on criminal sanctions to strengthening accountability practices: mutual supervision among officeholders, deliberative engagement with decision-rationales, protection of whistleblowers, and enhanced responsibility for lobbying and financing. Finally, empirically, it suggests that corruption indicators need to catch up. Measures centered on visible abuses (e.g., bribery perceptions) risk understating corruption where the primary problem is systemic accountability failure. More informative metrics would track the quality of accountability practices themselves.

While conceptual engineering alone cannot settle the debate, it bears a significant promise to reframe it around office accountability and carve out the space for the concrete methodological contribution that political theory can give to corruption studies and beyond.

About the Author(s): Emanuela Ceva is a Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva and Patrizia Pedrini is a Senior Researcher at the University of Geneva. Their research “What political theory can learn from conceptual engineering: The case of “corruption”” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Seeing like a citizen: Experimental evidence on how empowerment affects engagement with the state” by Soeren J. Henn, Laura Paler, Wilson Prichard, Cyrus Samii, and Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra is summarized by the author(s) below.

Our study from the Democratic Republic of Congo reveals a counterintuitive truth: when citizens are empowered to stand up to corrupt officials, they actually end up paying more taxes and fees to the government—not less.

We worked with households and small businesses in Kinshasa to test two approaches to citizen empowerment. Some received weekly phone consultations providing information about what they legally owed for various government services. Others were connected to a powerful civil society organization that could advocate on their behalf against predatory officials demanding bribes.

The results challenge conventional wisdom. Rather than using this newfound power to avoid the state entirely, empowered citizens—particularly those with protection—increased their formal payments to the government by about one-third. They started paying for services they had previously avoided, like electricity connections and business licenses. 

Why would protection from corruption lead to more government payments? The answer lies in understanding the vicious cycle many developing countries face. When citizens expect to be shaken down for bribes, they avoid government services altogether. They stay in the shadows, foregoing benefits like legal protections, official documents, and public services. This creates what researchers call a “low revenue, low engagement equilibrium”—the state collects little revenue and provides few services, while citizens remain disconnected and vulnerable.

By reducing the threat of extortion, the protection intervention made citizens more willing to engage with the state formally. They could access government services without fear of unlimited informal demands. The intervention was especially effective for households and for services that were highly negotiable or uncertain in price. 

This research offers hope for breaking the cycle of weak states and disengaged citizens. It suggests that strengthening civil society and empowering citizens doesn’t undermine government revenue—it can actually enhance it by bringing more people into the formal system. The path to stronger, more accountable government may start with ensuring citizens can engage with the state on fair terms.

About the Author(s): Soeren J. Hennan is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Laura Paler is a Provost Associate Professor in the Department of Government at American University’s School of Public Affairs, Wilson Prichard is an Associate Professor of Global Affairs and Political Science at the University of Toronto, Cyrus Samii is a Professor of Politics at New York University, and Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Their research “Seeing like a citizen: Experimental evidence on how empowerment affects engagement with the state” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Reviewing fast or slow: A theory of summary reversal in the judicial hierarchy” by Alexander V. Hirsch, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Anthony R. Taboni is summarized by the author(s) below.

In recent years, a debate has emerged about the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of its “shadow docket,” which generally describes cases in which the Supreme Court acts without the benefit of full briefing, oral arguments, and signed opinions.  Many critics of the shadow docket have argued the Court’s institutional performance suffers when it decides cases too rapidly. This concern has even been mounted by some of the justices themselves; for example, dissenting in a 2025 shadow docket decision regarding the Trump administration’s termination of federal education grants, Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “The risk of error increases when this Court decides cases–—as here–—with barebones briefing, no argument, and scarce time for reflection.”

In this article we focus on one tool in the shadow docket arsenal through which the Court operates in a mode of “quick review”: summary reversal, when the Court reverses a lower court without written briefs on the merits or full arguments. Summary reversal stands in contrast to the “full review” that the Court undertakes when it holds oral arguments, deliberates over several months, and then provides full written opinions (often with concurrences and dissents).  We develop a formal model that evaluates the tradeoffs between quick review and full review in the judicial hierarchy.

The model shows how access to summary reversal creates both benefits and costs for the Supreme Court. On the benefits side, the possibility of summary reversal causes ideologically distant lower courts to comply more often; as a result, summary reversal can generate additional compliance on top of what is gained from full review. On the other hand, having summary reversal poses a subtle cost on the higher court (and the hierarchy as a whole) – sometimes, a better-informed lower court that is ideologically aligned with the Supreme Court will choose a disposition with which neither court agrees to avoid the risk of being summarily reversed. This result—which we can think of as “pandering” by lower court judges—means that, somewhat counterintuitively, being able to summary reverse lower courts can actually make the Supreme Court worse off than if it were obligated to engage in full review.

Collectively, these results have important implications for understanding the use and consequences of summary reversals by the Supreme Court, and point towards a broader theoretical understanding of the importance of the shadow docket.

About the Author(s): Alexander V. Hirsch is a Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology, Jonathan P. Kastellec is a professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, and Anthony R. Taboni is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research “Reviewing fast or slow: A theory of summary reversal in the judicial hierarchy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “An ecclesiastical court: Christian nationalism and perceptions of the US Supreme Court” by Miles T. Armaly, Jonathan M. King, Elizabeth A. Lane, and Jessica A. Schoenherr is summarized by the author(s) below.

In recent years, the term “Christian nationalism” – previously relegated to academic and activist circles – has entered the mainstream political lexicon. Christian nationalism is an ideology that blends the belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation with the notion that its laws and should reflect and protect Christian values and ways of life. This ideology is not simply about personal faith; it is a political vision that calls for embedding Christianity more deeply into public life and the law.

As Christian nationalism has gained traction, many argue that its influence on American institutions and politicians has grown. The U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly issued rulings that align with the values of Christian nationalists, most notably in decisions like Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (i.e., the football coach prayer case) and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Court observers have also raised concerns that certain justices are demonstrating not just a personal religious faith, but a judicial philosophy sympathetic to Christian nationalism.

With the Court’s public religious profile as a backdrop, our study investigates how Christian nationalism shapes attitudes toward the Supreme Court and its decisions. Using both observational and experimental approaches across two large, nationally representative samples, we examined three main questions:

1. Do Christian nationalists support the Court’s decision to overturn abortion rights? 
2. Are Christian nationalists more likely to agree with the use of religious and non-legal reasoning in Court decisions? 
3. Does seeing a justice associated with Christian nationalist symbols increase support for religious reasoning in the law?

The answer to all three questions is yes. Observationally, individuals who score high on our measure of Christian nationalism were significantly more likely to support the Dobbs decision. They were also more likely to endorse the idea that justices should rely on religious and other non-legal decision making factors, as opposed to strictly legal reasoning, when deciding cases.

Experimentally, we tested the effect of Christian nationalist symbols. Exposure to real-life incidents – one where Justice Alito was caught on tape agreeing that we must “return the country to a place of godliness” and another where he flew an ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag at his vacation home – increased support for the idea that religious logic is acceptable in Supreme Court decisions, especially among those not already sympathetic to Christian nationalism. As Christian nationalism becomes more visible in American politics, it also becomes a more powerful legitimating force for a particular kind of jurisprudence that blurs the lines between church and state.

The implications are profound. If more Americans come to see the Court as aligned with a specific religious-political ideology, its perceived legitimacy may become polarized along those lines. Any skepticism about the Court’s status as neutral arbiters of the law in a pluralistic society may deepen existing rifts. The intertwining of Christian nationalism and judicial authority, as well as the public’s reaction to that intertwining, raise urgent questions about the future of American democracy, constitutional interpretation, and the exact place of religion in American society.

About the Author(s): Miles T. Armaly is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi, Jonathan M. King is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Georgia, Elizabeth A. Lane is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at North Carolina State University, and Jessica A. Schoenherr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Georgia. Their research “An ecclesiastical court: Christian nationalism and perceptions of the US Supreme Court” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “The public agglomeration effect: Urban–rural divisions in government efficiency and political preferences” by Theo Serlin is summarized by the author below.

Why do cities vote for the left? This pattern, which holds in almost all economically-developed democracies, is puzzling, given that urban voters on average have higher incomes and so should stand to lose in relative terms from left-wing economic policies. Typical explanations, especially in the US, focus on the role of cultural issues. Rural voters are more likely to be white, Christian, and socially conservative, and vote Republican because of the parties’ stances on issues around race and abortion. While these factors are important for the urban-rural divide now, they can’t explain the chronology of the urban-rural divide. In the US, the urban-rural divide emerged in the 1930s, before the Republican party was especially popular among white, Christian, or racially conservative voters. 

I introduce an alternative explanation for the urban-rural divide: agglomeration effects. Much research in urban and spatial economics finds that businesses are more productive in cities. The forces behind that phenomenon apply all the more so to public sector provision. The public sector has natural economies of scale due to fixed administrative costs and nonrivalry. If the public sector is more productive in urban areas, the tradeoffs that urban and rural voters face between taxation and government provision are different. Urban voters receive more valuable government services for a given dollar of taxation. We would expect them to be more willing to accept higher taxes in return for more public services.

If this factor explains urban-rural divides in voting, we should only observe cities voting for the left when questions about the size of government divide left from right. This fits the timing of the emergence of the urban-rural divide in the US. In 1932, the main issues dividing the parties were prohibition and the tariff, and there was no clear urban-rural divide in voting. In 1936, the New Deal had reoriented US politics around government spending; cities moved into the Democratic camp. I also develop a number of measures of government efficiency and show that counties with more productive governments moved towards the Democrats as the parties diverged on redistribution. Surveys from the era show that urban voters were more supportive of higher taxes and the New Deal, making it more plausible that the emergent urban-rural divide was driven by this mechanism.

The US is not unique in having an urban-rural political divide. In the UK, the timing of the emergence of the divide also fits with this mechanism. There was no clear relationship between urbanization and left-wing voting at the turn of the 20th century. By the 1930s, when Labour had replaced the Liberals as the main left-of-center party, urbanization strongly correlated with vote choice. In Canada, the urban-rural divide came into being in the 1960s, when the Liberals moved left and set up the single-payer healthcare system. Around the world, the left-right urban-rural divide is a feature of economically-developed democracies with broadly programmatic politics, where the size of government is a major component of the left-right divide. Greater government efficiency in urban areas due to economies of scale and nonrivalry alters preferences for government spending and creates political cleavages.

About the author: Theo Serlin is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. Their research “The public agglomeration effect: Urban–rural divisions in government efficiency and political preferences” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “A drag on the ticket? Estimating top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on down‐ballot races” by Kevin DeLuca, Daniel J. Moskowitz, and Benjamin Schneer  is summarized by the author(s) below.

Do Weak Top-of-the-Ticket Candidates Hurt a Party’s Down-Ballot Candidates?

Political strategists, journalists, and scholars of American politics commonly assert that a strong candidate at the top of the statewide ticket for governor or U.S. Senate boosts their party’s performance in down-ballot races. The idea is that a high-quality top-of-the-ticket candidate will energize partisan voters, boosting their turnout, as well as persuade swing voters to support the party up and down the ballot. Similar arguments persist about ideologically moderate, as opposed to extreme, candidates. As a result, after disappointing election outcomes pundits often point to weak or extreme top-of-the-ticket candidates to explain down-ballot losses.

This narrative spread widely after the 2022 midterm elections. Observers attributed several Republican losses in congressional races to low-quality or extreme governor and Senate candidates like Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz. As one GOP strategist in Pennsylvania stated in the New York Times, “The lack of quality candidates at the top of the ticket, both Mastriano and Oz, severely hurt down-ballot candidates.”

Despite the prevalence of claims on the importance of statewide top-of-the-ticket candidates, there has not been rigorous study of the evidence on the question: Does the conventional wisdom withstand empirical scrutiny? In our new paper, “A Drag on the Ticket? Estimating Top-of-the-Ticket Effects on Down-Ballot Races,” we test whether the quality and ideology of statewide candidates affect the performance of co-partisan down-ballot candidates. To do so, we leverage variation in quality and ideology across statewide races (for governor and senate) to estimate the effect of top-of-the-ticket candidates on down-ballot U.S. House races between 1950-2022.

What We Found

Based on a simple analysis, the data appears to support the conventional view. Without accounting for any of the characteristics of the down-ballot House candidates, we find that when a party runs a meaningfully higher-quality top-of-the-ticket candidate for governor or U.S. Senate, that party’s House candidates in the same state tend to perform 1-2 percentage points better. We observe a similar relationship for the ideology of the top-of-the-ticket candidate. These patterns seem like evidence of a coattail effect.

However, once we account for the quality and ideology of the down-ballot candidates themselves, these apparent top-of-the-ticket effects disappear. The estimates are quite precise, allowing us to rule out meaningful effect sizes with confidence, and the results hold across multiple offices, time periods, and alternative specifications.

What Does Matter? The Candidates Down-Ballot

While top-of-the-ticket candidates don’t seem to have much influence, the quality and ideology of the down-ballot candidates do matter—quite a lot. A one standard deviation increase in a House candidate’s quality equates with about a 4 percentage point increase in vote share, while a one standard deviation increase in down-ballot ideological extremity is linked with about a 2 percentage point decrease in vote share for that candidate. When we extend our data to examine local and state legislative races, we find a similar pattern.

Interestingly, the magnitude of these down-ballot quality and ideology effects has declined somewhat in recent years. This weakened relationship may reflect changes in how voters learn about, evaluate, or reward high-quality and moderate candidates.

What This Means

Our study challenges the long-standing notion that a weak or extreme top-of-the-ticket candidate drags the rest of the party down. There is not strong evidence that top-of-the-ticket candidates in statewide races meaningfully influence the outcomes of down-ballot races, positively or negatively. Voters, it turns out, are discerning. They care about who’s actually running for office down the ballot, not just who’s at the top of the ticket.

About the Author(s): Kevin DeLuca is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, Daniel J. Moskowitz is an Assistant Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and Benjamin Schneer is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Their research “A drag on the ticket? Estimating top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on down‐ballot races” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Grounding the diasporic turn in political theory: Meta-commitment, transnationalism, and political obligation” by Kai Yui Samuel Chan and Anna Closas is summarized by the author(s) below.

The study of diaspora has surged across the social sciences over the past few decades. Curiously, this trend has not spread to the field of political theory. While specific diasporas are occasionally mentioned, diaspora as a broader subject remains largely absent from political theory discussions. This leaves us without the necessary tools to address important normative puzzles that frequent diasporas. Consider the rapidly growing Hong Kong diaspora. The political events in Hong Kong over the past decades have induced not only new waves of emigration but also led many who previously identified as Chinese to now embrace a Hong Kong identity. Should the Hong Kong diaspora be counted as a subgroup within the Chinese diaspora, and if not, how does one distinguish between the members of the Hong Kong and Chinese diaspora? Given the sharp political divides among overseas Hong Kongers, do those who support the Hong Kong Special Administration Region government belong to the same community as those who oppose it? Similarly, if these overseas Hong Kongers, diffused across different countries, are committed to radically different activities – from promoting Hong Kong food and preserving the Cantonese language to advocating for regime change in the city – on what grounds, if any, can they hold each other answerable?

In their paper, Chan and Closas provide the grounds to answer these questions. They identify that the problem has to do with the ontological status of diasporas: since diasporas are neither bounded geographically nor constituted institutionally, we seem to lack the usual grounds to ascertain what kind of group or political community diasporas are, and consequently, to determine which normative and political questions are relevant for diasporas. To overcome this impasse, Chan and Closas develop a meta-commitment framework: individuals constitute a diasporic community by expressing, through disparate practices and narratives, a joint meta-commitment to act as part of that community. Meta-commitments do not require that parties have substantial agreements beyond mutually recognizing each other as part of and contributing to the same community.

The language of commitment implies obligation, which invites the question as to what diasporic members owe to each other. They contend that the meta-commitment to acting as part of a diasporic community entails minimally an obligation of answerability to one’s fellow diasporic members: members owe each other an answer as to how their choices relate to the future of the diaspora. Going back to the case of the Hong Kong diaspora to illustrate the purchase of this framework, once we establish that there is indeed a meta-commitment that makes up the Hong Kong diaspora, then, as long as the otherwise disparate groups recognize each other as sharing this meta-commitment, they have an obligation to answer to each other. For example, they must explain why preserving Cantonese matters to the diaspora and how it impacts their identity. Beyond serving as the groundwork for a diasporic turn in political theory, this framework also contributes to transnational political theory by explaining the conditions under which transnational relations generate obligations.

About the Author(s): Kai Yui Samuel Chan is an Assistant Professor in Politics at Occidental College and Anna Closas is a political theory PhD student at UC Berkeley focusing on Contemporary Political Theory. Their research “Grounding the diasporic turn in political theory: Meta-commitment, transnationalism, and political obligation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Learning by lobbying” by Emiel Awad, Gleason Judd, and Nicolás Riquelme is summarized by the author(s) below.

Interest groups can lobby more effectively if they understand politicians’ preferences, but public statements and voting records don’t always reveal their true positions. What’s less recognized is that lobbying itself can help reveal that information—and this creates strategic dynamics that shape how political relationships evolve over time. We develop a game-theoretic model to analyze how interest groups learn about politicians through lobbying interactions and how this can shape political influence and lobbying relationships over time.

In our model, an interest group is unsure about whether a politician is truly an ally or adversary on a specific issue. This creates strategic tensions on both sides. The group, through carefully designed lobbying offers—menus of policy-transfer packages that combine proposed policy changes with various levels of political support—balances immediate policy gains against long-term learning. Sometimes they provide less-aggressive or overly-generous terms now to better learn a politician’s type, enabling more effective lobbying later. Politicians, recognizing that their responses reveal information, engage in reputation management—even allies may strategically act more adversarial to extract better future terms.

Our analysis reveals several key patterns. Early-career politicians receive more diverse lobbying overtures as groups probe their preferences, while veterans face more targeted and homogeneous strategies. Politicians with secure positions—e.g., those with safe constituencies—often receive surprisingly generous early-career lobbying offers because their stronger reputational incentives force groups to “pay more” for effective screening. More generally, dynamics are shaped by reputational considerations of both groups and politicians: forward-looking interest groups invest more in learning relationships, while patient politicians are more inclined to conceal their true preferences.

These insights shed new light on important empirical patterns: why allies often receive especially favorable treatment, why lobbying relationships evolve systematically rather than randomly, and why newcomers attract intense but varied lobbying efforts. Our learning-by-lobbying mechanism predicts that early-career politicians should exhibit greater policy variance than veterans—not because their preferences change, but because uncertainty about those preferences generates different strategic responses.

Extensions show how institutional features shape these dynamics. Politicians with stronger reputational incentives make learning more expensive, reducing the value of early access. Revolving-door opportunities can facilitate learning by reducing politicians’ incentives to misrepresent preferences. Institutional constraints like voting rules and veto players diminish the value of learning since there’s less policy space to exploit.

Our findings provide new insights into lobbying oriented around information and relationship-building, not just transactional exchanges. This mechanism helps explain the career-long evolution of political influence and suggests that as newcomers increasingly enter office without extensive track records, strategic learning through lobbying becomes ever more central to how policy gets made.

In essence, lobbying isn’t just about winning today’s policy fights—it’s also about using today’s interactions as investments to win tomorrow’s more efficiently.

About the Author(s): Emiel Awad is a political economist at Oxera Consulting LLP in Amsterdam, Gleason Judd is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Nicolás Riquelme is an Assistant Professor in the School of Business and Economics at Universidad de los Andes, Chile and the Director of the Master in Economics. Their research “Learning by lobbying” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.