How do people understand parties? Using data from two original surveys fielded nearly a decade apart, we shed light on people’s mental images of the parties. In the surveys, we asked which politicians immediately come to mind when you think about …
Research suggests that partisan gaps in political knowledge with partisan implications are wide and widespread. Using a series of experiments, we investigate the extent to which partisan gaps in commercial surveys are a result of differences in …
Most crossnational indices of democracy rely centrally on coder judgments, which are susceptible to bias and error, and require expensive and time-consuming coding by experts. We present an approach to measurement based on observables that aims to …
Multiple well-known democracy rating projects—including Freedom House, Polity, and V-Dem—have identified apparent global regression in recent years. These measures rely on partly subjective indicators, which could, in principle, suffer from rater …
In this book chapter, we use a novel dataset that covers ten advanced democracies between the early 1990s and 2019 to test whether the decline of social democratic parties can be attributed to party leadership changes and especially to the frequency …
Parties spend parts of their campaigns criticizing other parties’ performance and characteristics, such as honesty, integrity, and unity. These attacks aim to negatively affect the target parties’ electoral performance. But do they work? While …
Monarchy was the dominant form of rule in the pre-modern era and it persists in a handful of countries. We propose a unified theoretical explanation for its rise and decline. Specifically, we argue that monarchy offers an efficient solution to the …