working_paper

Extreme Recall: Which Politicians Come to Mind?

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 …

A Measurement Gap? Effect of Survey Instrument and Scoring on the Partisan Knowledge Gap

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 …

Valence Attacks in Multi-Party Elections

How do political parties attack each other in multi-party systems? While voters in multi-party systems respond to attacks on the honesty, integrity, and competence of political actors, it is unclear whether and how political parties use these valence …

Electoral Contestation: A New Measure and an Empirical Test

The study of electoral competition generally focuses on districts or regions (rather than polities) or a narrow slice of democratic polities. We present a new national-level dataset that registers the performance of the top three parties in elections …