The German Constitutional Court has powers that are no weaker than the powers of the US Supreme Court. Justices are openly selected by the political parties. Nonetheless, public and professional perception are strikingly different. Justices at the German court are not believed to be guided by...

Do parties respond to inequality? Despite the growing relevance of economic disparities and their negative political and societal consequences, our understanding of party competition over redistribution remains limited. Thus far, research had to rely on broad salience scores of socio-economic...

How do judicial decisions influence political discourse, particularly in areas as contentious as abortion rights? This study investigates how the overturning of Roe v. Wade affected the narrative strategies of U.S. representatives on social media, focusing on variations by party affiliation and...

Guinaudeau and Jankowski reassess our recent study on the use of strategic descriptive representation among political parties in Europe. The authors successfully replicate the vast majority of our findings and perform a number of additional robustness checks. They claim that one of our key...

Does exposure to violence create more politically engaged citizens? In a PNAS paper, Barceló (2021) asks this provocative question and proposes an intricate and original socio-psychological theory to answer it. Barceló also employs a research design that seeks to account for reverse causality...

Existing research has identified several economic and cultural determinants of populist voting. We focus on a related explanation: whether populist leaders are able to capitalize on a sense of distrust between individuals. There is currently limited causal evidence on the relationship between...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of democratic systems in preventing individuals with criminal backgrounds from holding political office. Unlike many countries, Norway has no legal restrictions against felons running for office. We analyze local election candidates from 2003 to 2019, paired...