Research & Politics

When the party is over: Explaining the rise of the Spanish far-right SALF - Javier Padilla Moreno-Torres, Álvaro Canalejo-Molero, Alberto López Ortega, 2025 Can a second far-right party succeed in a country where the radical right was, until recently, absent? Spain’s 2024 European Parliament elections provided a str...

Can a 2nd far-right party thrive in Spain? SALF shocked in the 2024 EU elections, scoring 4.6% in its debut. New study by Javier Padilla Moreno-Torres, @canalejoalvaro.bsky.social and @bertous.bsky.social analyzes who voted for them—and why.

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@abbymatthews.bsky.social & Rachael Hinkle's analysis of judicial citations demonstrates that diversity in race, gender, *and* partisanship plays a critical role in the evolution of legal doctrine, with judges sharing all 3 salient traits experiencing a 25% increase in citation probability.

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What drives differences between the conflict events datasets UCDP and ACLED? Contrary to previous claims, @magnusoberg.bsky.social and Mert Can Yilmaz find most differences are due to auxiliary coding rules and standards for source evaluation, not sourcing strategies or inclusion thresholds.

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A study by Marianne Kramer, @golovchenko.bsky.social and @fghjorth.bsky.social shows that Large Language Models like GPT-4 & Llama 3 70B can reliably detect pro-Kremlin disinformation, outperforming human annotators and past models—all at lower cost.

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Clareta Treger examines how different outcome variables in conjoint experiments shape political science results. The article urges using both forced-choice and rating outcomes, and reporting descriptive with causal estimates, to gain fuller insights.

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@nilsweidmann.bsky.social and Mina Rulis study the link between university disciplines and political protest in autocracies. They focus on how the composition of academic institutions shapes the likelihood of activism in university cities.

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Validation tests by Yue Hu, Yuehong Cassandra Tai, Kyein Ko, Byung-Deuk Woo & Frederick Solt show that support for democracy is not well captured by one-dimensional latent variable.

Read more here: doi.org/10.1177/2053...

Linking artificial intelligence job exposure to expectations: Understanding AI losers, winners, and their political preferences - Jane Green, Zack Grant, Geoffrey Evans, Gaetano Inglese, 2025 The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the workplace has significant political implications. How can we understand perceptions of both personal ...

@profjanegreen.bsky.social, @zackgp94.bsky.social, Geoffrey Evans, and @gaetanoinglese.bsky.social examine AI’s political impact at work. Social groups perceive both risks and benefits and hold varied political views.

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Exposure to protests and support for different forms of violence: Evidence from the 2019 social outburst in Chile - Sebastian Rivera, Fernando Severino, Giancarlo Visconti, 2025 People living in communities where protests occur are exposed to various forms of violence, including state-perpetrated violence, such as police brutality, as w...

Sebastian Rivera, Fernando Severino and Giancarlo Visconti find that protest exposure in Chile briefly reduces support for state violence, but doesn’t change views on protester violence. A nuanced look at attitudes in unrest.

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Political science suggests liberals are more tolerant of the Supreme Court when it makes decisions they don't like. Kathryn Haglin, Soren Jordan, Alison Higgins Merrill and @joeura.bsky.social ask: does that still hold up with the new-look Court?

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New research by Laurel Elder, @hankgreene.bsky.social, and Mary-Kate Lizotte shows Americans see 6- and 12-week abortion bans as effectively the same, challenging the idea of "moderate" restrictions. Post-Dobbs, abortion is a binary debate: ban vs. no ban, with framing crucial to public reception.

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Kirill Zhirkov & Robert H. Brehm find that calling immigrants “illegal” or “undocumented” doesn’t affect perceptions in experiments. However, people’s preferences for these terms do reflect their broader attitudes toward immigration policy.

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Sarah Maxey and Taryn Butler ask: does it matter if officials handle classified documents responsibly? Yes, even more than you might think! Classification scandals udermine public confidence in democratic institutions across party lines.

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Islamophobia in Western Europe is unrelated to religiosity but highly correlated with far right attitudes - Kai Arzheimer, 2025 The far right’s relationship with religion has become a major focus of current research. Even in Western Europe, one of the most rapidly secularising areas of t...

@kai-arzheimer.com discusses how far-right actors in Western Europe use "Christianism" to frame Muslims as a threat. Survey data shows religiosity is unrelated to far-right ideology; Islamophobia overlaps with nativism & authoritarianism at micro level.

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ConflLlama: Domain-specific adaptation of large language models for conflict event classification - Shreyas Meher, Patrick T. Brandt, 2025 We present ConflLlama, demonstrating how efficient fine-tuning of large language models can advance automated classification tasks in political science research...

Shreyas Meher and Patrick T. Brandt demonstrate how state-of-the-art language models can be efficiently adapted for political event classification, achieving up to 1400% improvement in accuracy while remaining computationally accessible.

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Her research focuses on gender, politics, representation, political institutions, and public opinion. Katelyn’s work explores how the inclusion of historically marginalized groups shapes public attitudes toward institutions and how institutional structures affect women in power.

R&P welcomes our new editor, Katelyn Stauffer!

@kstauffer.bsky.social is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Georgia.

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A study by Marianne Kramer, @golovchenko.bsky.social and @fghjorth.bsky.social shows that Large Language Models like GPT-4 & Llama 3 70B can reliably detect pro-Kremlin disinformation, outperforming human annotators and past models—all at lower cost.

Read more: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Clareta Treger examines how different outcome variables in conjoint experiments shape political science results. The article urges using both forced-choice and rating outcomes, and reporting descriptive with causal estimates, to gain fuller insights.

Read more: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

@nilsweidmann.bsky.social and Mina Rulis study the link between university disciplines and political protest in autocracies. They focus on how the composition of academic institutions shapes the likelihood of activism in university cities.

Read more: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Linking artificial intelligence job exposure to expectations: Understanding AI losers, winners, and their political preferences - Jane Green, Zack Grant, Geoffrey Evans, Gaetano Inglese, 2025 The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the workplace has significant political implications. How can we understand perceptions of both personal ...

@profjanegreen.bsky.social, @zackgp94.bsky.social, Geoffrey Evans, and @gaetanoinglese.bsky.social examine AI’s political impact at work. Social groups perceive both risks and benefits and hold varied political views.

Read more: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Her research is in comparative party politics, political behavior, and political psychology. Jae-Hee focuses on understanding the types of information and messages that voters receive from their representational environment and how they respond to such stimuli.

R&P welcomes our new editor, Jae-Hee Jung!

@jaeheejung.bsky.social is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston.

Validation tests by Yue Hu, Yuehong Cassandra Tai, Kyein Ko, Byung-Deuk Woo & Frederick Solt show that support for democracy is not well captured by one-dimensional latent variable.

Read more here: doi.org/10.1177/2053...

Prominent recent works have measured democratic support using a single latent variable that purports to span a single dimension from steadfast opposition to whole-hearted support, ignoring that support for democracy is complex and multidimensional.

Does descriptive representation lead people to evaluate elected officials and their institutions more favorably? Does it improve political efficacy and engagement? Read what David Doherty, Madeline Schade and Dana Garbarski found based on a pre-registered survey experiment: doi.org/10.1177/2053...

Natalia Aruguete, @tiagoventura.bsky.social
& @ecalvo68.bsky.social examine how exposure to counter- and pro-attitudinal fact-checking messages impacts voters’ perception of the fact-checker: Fact-checking increases the reputation of the fact-checker but creates perceptions of ideological biases.

@damienbol.bsky.social & @phbono.bsky.social evaluate whether ChatGPT can be used to estimate the ideological positions of parties in real time. They find that ChatGPT’s estimations are generally close to those of an expert survey, especially for major and salient political issues.

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Benjamin VanDreew, Joseph Phillips, Kal Munis & Spencer Goidel investigates perceptions of “woke” using a conjoint survey experiment. Despite some differences Democrats & Republicans tend to agree on what woke means. Independents, as a whole, have much less consistent views.

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