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.

The forthcoming article “The electoral politics of immigration and crime” by Jeyhun Alizade is summarized by the author below.

Immigration is one of the key issues shaping European politics in the last decades. A particular concern among voters is that it worsens crime problems. Despite the immigration-crime issue’s prominence in public debates and elite rhetoric, there have been comparatively few studies on its political consequences. Most of the literature on the electoral implications of immigration focuses on how (perceptions of) its cultural and economic consequences shape voting behavior and electoral outcomes.

Drawing on European Social Survey data, my article shows that fear of immigrant crime is less ideologically polarized than other immigration-related concerns. Unlike cultural or economic anxieties about immigration, which tend to divide voters along predictable partisan lines, safety-related concerns cut across party boundaries as well as educational and geographic divides, which usually polarize electorates on immigration.

The article introduces the idea of a voter-party mismatch: while Green and other progressive parties often avoid addressing crime among immigrants due to ideological and organizational constraints, many of their supporters express worries about immigrant crime. As a result, the mismatch can push progressive voters—particularly urban, educated ‘cosmopolitans’—toward center-right parties, which are more likely to problematize immigrant crime and push for law-and-order policies.

Empirical evidence from Germany supports this claim. In panel data and in a candidate-choice conjoint experiment, progressive voters concerned about immigrant crime are significantly more likely to switch their support to the center right, especially when the latter adopts stricter positions on issues like deportation of criminal foreigners relative to progressive parties. Notably, this shift does not appear to depend on whether the center-right simultaneously stigmatizes immigrants or adopts conservative socio-cultural positions—suggesting that basic safety threat can outweigh other ideological commitments among progressives.

Overall, my article shows that repercussions of immigration can in fact drive leftist cosmopolitans—usually perceived to be staunch supporters of immigration—to the right. As such, the article qualifies existing theories of electoral cleavages in contemporary knowledge economies, which posit a growing left-right divide on immigration due an educational re-alignment of voters.

About the author: Jeyhun Alizade is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Migration, Integration, Transnationalization research unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Their research “The electoral politics of immigration and crime” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Classification algorithms and social outcomes” by Elizabeth Maggie Penn and John W. Patty is summarized by the author(s) below.

Beyond Labels: How Algorithms Really Shape Our Lives (and Our Behavior) 

Algorithms, from credit scores to job applications, healthcare, and even how police decide where to patrol, influence everybody’s life. Some see these systems as neutral tools that simply categorize or “classify” things, like whether you’re creditworthy or a flight risk. In “Classification algorithms and social outcomes,” we present a theoretical analysis of what happens when algorithms don’t just classify people, but also change how people behave. 

For example, imagine a student preparing for a test. The test is designed to measure their college readiness, but if the student believes a high score will get them into a good college, they’ll likely “study for the test”. Similarly, if an algorithm is designed to detect fraud, people might commit less fraud, even if that wasn’t the algorithm’s direct stated goal. This is the core idea: people adjust their “life choices” based on how they expect an algorithm to classify and reward or punish them. 

This social scientific perspective on algorithmic design leads to some surprising and critical insights: 

• Accuracy Isn’t Always Neutral or Fair: One might assume an algorithm designed purely to be “perfectly accurate” would be “fair.” Our analysis shows that even with highly accurate data, an accuracy-maximizing algorithm can actually worsen inequality, pushing some groups towards desired behaviors (like obeying the law) and actively discouraging it in others.
• Algorithms Might Deliberately “Introduce Noise”: Counterintuitively, an algorithm designed to be accurate might — by design — make seemingly “inaccurate” decisions or reward people probabilistically.  Again, this “noise” isn’t a flaw; it’s a strategic choice by the algorithm to manipulate behavior more effectively.
• A More Punitive Designer Can Sometimes Be Better (for Individuals!): Another surprising finding is that increasing an algorithm’s payoff for punishing individuals (such as a ticketing algorithm) may actually make all individuals being classified better off in expectation. This happens because the algorithm, seeking to penalize more, might make non-compliance more appealing, a trade-off all individuals might prefer.

This research highlights that traditional ideas of “algorithmic fairness,” which often focus on statistical parity in classification errors, might be incomplete. When people’s behavior changes in response to an algorithm (a concept known as “performativity”), we need new ways to think about fairness. We offer one new way, which we call “aligned incentives,” which is satisfied by any algorithm that offers individuals in different groups similar behavioral incentives.  Finally, we believe our findings have implications for public policy, affecting areas like: 

• Housing and Lending: Algorithms influencing who gets housing or credit can shape financial decisions.
• Hiring: AI in hiring affects not just who gets jobs, but also who applies.
• College Admissions: Algorithms here can influence student preparation and application strategies.
• Tax Audits: The IRS’s algorithms, designed to detect under-reporting, also deter fraud, showcasing the tension between accuracy and behavioral goals.

Ultimately, we argue that, to truly understand the impact of algorithms, we must look beyond their technical definitions and consider the goals of those who design them and the resulting, sometimes unexpected, behavioral consequences for society. It’s a call to broaden our perspective on both how algorithms shape our world and how to evaluate the fairness of them. 

About the Author(s): Elizabeth Maggie Penn is a Professor of Political Science and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University and John W. Patty is Professor of Political Science and Data & Decision Sciences at Emory University. Their research “Classification algorithms and social outcomes” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “The nation-state, non-Western empires, and the politics of cultural difference” by Loubna El Amine is summarized by the author below.

In much contemporary political theory, the concept of empire is almost always equated with Western imperialism and colonialism, where non-Western societies were subjected to European domination. But this focus overlooks the fact that, for much of recorded history, vast regions of the world were governed by non-Western precolonial empires. The legacies of these empires continue to shape present-day politics and remain subjects of debate among postcolonial thinkers.

My focus in this article is on these empires’ government of cultural diversity. Examining three cases, the Mughal Empire, the Qing Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, I argue that these empires achieved what I describe as incorporation — a mode of rule that integrated multiple communities without requiring their homogenization. The contrast here is with the modern nation-state, which operates within a rigid majority–minority framework.

I elicit three institutional features that allowed empires to achieve such incorporation. First, their governing structures were plural: a multiplicity of entities with political authority intertwined with a multiplicity of religious, ethnic, and linguistic communities with their own governing structures. Second, relations between the center and the periphery were heterogeneous: different regions and communities were governed according to different legal codes, practices, and degrees of autonomy. The center did not speak in one voice. Third, their authority was non-territorial in a modern sense: boundaries were fluid, overlapping, and not defined by the strict citizen–foreigner divide characteristic of nation-states.

These arrangements made possible ambitious normative ideals of inclusive peace. The Mughals articulated sulh-i kull (“peace toward all”), the Qing invoked the concept of tianxia (“all under Heaven”), and the Ottomans pursued nizam-i alem (“world order”). While these ideals were never fully realized, they were nonetheless made plausible by the imperial framework in a way that they no longer are within the institutional logic of the modern state.

While my aim is not to argue that we should somehow resurrect empires simply because they accommodate cultural difference well, the exploration of non-Western precolonial empires, as historical examples that have not yet been studied by political theorists, aims to contribute, if only indirectly, to the production of new global imaginaries. It is meant to complement what can be broadly identified as cosmopolitan proposals envisioning forms of government beyond the nation-state and, more specifically, to contribute to recent efforts to recover historical alternatives to the state model, primarily federal and other similar arrangements.

About the Author: Loubna El Amine is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. Their research “The nation-state, non-Western empires, and the politics of cultural difference” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Change in migrants’ political attitudes: Acculturation and cosmopolitanization” by Eva Krejcova, Filip Kostelka, and Nicolas Sauger is summarized by the author(s) below.

How does migration shape individuals’ political attitudes? Do migrants retain attitudes acquired in their countries of origin, or adopt those of their new societies? With nearly one in five residents in developed democracies born abroad, the answers carry major implications for democratic politics. Yet, existing evidence remains fragmented and often contradictory. We provide a new theoretical framework, innovative methods, and rich empirical findings that help untangle the complexity of migrants’ political resocialization and reconcile divergent conclusions in earlier studies.

Researchers have long debated whether migrants resist change or acculturate into their host societies. We formalize this debate by constructing a one-dimensional, Euclidean space. The attitudinal distance between sending and receiving countries constitutes a continuum. At one end lies full attitudinal alignment with the country of origin (resistance); at the other, complete adoption of host-country attitudes (acculturation).

Previous studies implicitly assumed that migrants’ attitudes are positioned between those of locals in sending and receiving countries. We argue that certain attitudes may lie beyond this continuum, as they are likely transformed by the migration experience itself. We call them transnational attitudes, distinguishing them from polity-specific attitudes, rooted in national contexts. We hypothesize that migration triggers cosmopolitanization of transnational attitudes and acculturation of polity-specific attitudes: migrants become distinctively supportive on transnational issues, while increasingly resembling locals in their new country on polity-specific issues.

We test our hypotheses using cross-sectional and panel data spanning nearly 380,000 observations from 104 sending and 28 destination countries. We apply our typology to four dimensions of political competition in contemporary Europe: redistribution, homosexuality, European integration, and immigration. Migrants’ embedding in two national contexts—origin and destination—poses challenges for statistical modelling. To address them, we combine the estimated dependent variable method with the logic of counterfactuals. This new approach, applicable to a range of other research problems, allows us to compare migrants with counterfactual locals in both sending and receiving countries.

Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we compare migrants’ and locals’ positions on each of the four issues. Next, we use panel data to examine the evolution of migrants’ attitudes over time. Finally, we pioneer an empirical inquiry into self-selection. Leveraging survey data on migration intentions and panel metadata, we assess whether potential differences between migrants and locals precede migration.

Our results reveal the remarkable malleability of migrants’ attitudes. On polity-specific issues—such as redistribution and homosexuality—migrants’ tend to acculturate to the host country over time. But on transnational issues—immigration and European integration—they hold consistently more supportive views than locals. These patterns are not explained by self-selection: potential and future migrants attitudinally resemble stayers before migrating.

Besides the new theoretical and methodological tools, our readers may take away three main empirical insights. First, while migrants’ polity-specific attitudes acculturate, their transnational attitudes do not—bringing more supportive views on immigration and European integration into their host societies. Second, migrants’ attitudinal change provides strong evidence of adult political resocialization. Finally, individuals sometimes combine culturally conservative and cosmopolitan views—reflecting different logics of attitudinal change. Our theory and findings help explain these hybrid attitudinal configurations in contemporary democracies.

About the Author(s): Eva Krejcova is a Junior Lecturer at IDHEAP, University of Lausanne, Filip Kostelka is a Professor of Political Science, Chair in Political and Social Change, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political and Social Sciences (SPS) at the European University Institute (EUI), and Nicolas Sauger is a University Professor at Sciences Po Paris. Their research “Change in migrants’ political attitudes: Acculturation and cosmopolitanization” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Competitive diplomacy in bargaining and war” by Joseph J. Ruggiero is summarized by the author below.

Diplomacy can advance state interests; however, if each side of a zero-sum dispute can use diplomacy to improve its terms of peace, these efforts are fundamentally competitive. This paper introduces the concept of competitive diplomacy to crisis bargaining, which is defined by three core properties: (1) it is costly, (2) it does not enhance a country’s war payoffs, and (3) it can improve a country’s payoff from cooperation. Competitive diplomacy as such becomes a channel through which characteristics of a potential war can affect the quality of peace, makes cooperation less efficient, and affects a country’s propensity to fight. How does the incentive to compete in diplomacy affect the prospects of cooperation?  Which settings fare well at averting conflict while simultaneously preserving the largest gains from peace?

To answer these questions, I develop a game-theoretic model of war that captures the core trade-off between internalizing the gains from cooperation and exerting costly effort to reach preferable peace deals. There are two key ingredients of the model that establish novel results. First, while existing models treat proposers as either predetermined or randomly recognized by exogenous probability, my approach treats agenda-setting power as endogenous to a country’s performance in pre-bargaining competition. Second, this paper allows periodic outcomes to persist into the future at varying rates, which affects a country’s incentive to cooperate and their willingness to compete.

The analysis reveals new insights. First, I find that costly wars endogenously create costly peace. Even if wars never occur on the path of play, greater costs of war imply a larger surplus from cooperation. As the surplus expands, agenda-setting power becomes more valuable, creating a stronger incentive to engage in competitive diplomacy. The model also identifies when war is more efficient than cooperation. After a division of the pie is reached, through war or cooperation, it persists until an opportunity to renegotiate arises. Countries are then driven to fight efficient wars by two forces: the (exogenous) differential persistence of outcomes and the (endogenous) equilibrium effort in competitive diplomacy. The logic is analogous to that of “ripping off the bandage.”

I then extend the model to examine how frictions to cooperation affect the incentives for diplomatic competition and conflict, finding that states may risk delay in attempt to free ride on their adversary’s efforts in obtaining peace. As a result, frictions simultaneously protect against the erosion of the bargaining surplus caused by competitive diplomacy. Likewise, the model suggests that the Pareto optimal level of competition counterintuitively maximizes the probability of delay when peace deals are reliable. Reliable peace deals that avert efficient wars therefore create a trade-off between welfare and timely settlement.

The model predicts that there will not be an association between competitive diplomatic efforts and cooperative gains in equilibrium across cases. The analysis also highlights that changes to the international environment, as opposed to specific characteristics of a bilateral relationship, can give rise to war. Further, the extension to consider settlement frictions has implications on how peace mediators should approach conflict resolution in contemporary crisis situations: the model suggests that reducing frictions to cooperation—while reducing delay—can actually make both sides worse off.

About the Author: Joseph J. Ruggiero is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Their research “Competitive diplomacy in bargaining and war” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.