PrEP stigma measurement remains a challenge to the validity of studies and interventions addressing HIV prevention. It may lead to inaccurate assessment of the relationship between PrEP stigma and health outcomes such as PrEP persistence and care retention in groups experiencing HIV-related… read more about this publication »
Opponents of climate policy proposals frequently ground their objections in terms of costs. However, it is unclear whether these objections are persuasive to individuals considering whether to support such programs. Not only do people have difficulties in understanding large numbers, partisans in… read more about this publication »
Political philosophers and theorists make arguments about high-stakes problems. This article shows that those theories would be more credible if political philosophers ensured their work was robust: capable of withstanding reasonable changes to their assumptions and to the cases to which their… read more about this publication »
Interstate and intrastate conflicts are nested in broader networks of rivalry and cooperation and can be modeled as such. An intergroup security dilemma logic points to trade-offs states face as they cultivate “support groups”—receiving security assistance has the potential to attract aggression… read more about this publication »
Crises of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic may plausibly affect deep-seated attitudes of a large fraction of citizens. In particular, outcome-oriented theories imply that leaders’ performance in response to such adverse events shapes people’s views about the government and about democracy. To… read more about this publication »
Ex-rebels govern almost a quarter of sub-Saharan Africa today. How does war affect these countries’ long-run political development, and what explains their rebel regimes’ longevity? The article explores the role of coercion in rebel governance: postwar governance draws from wartime strategies,… read more about this publication »
The last decade has given rise to substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the U.S. Manifestations include decreased trust in government, conspiratorial beliefs, contentious protests, and support for political violence. Surprisingly, prior work has not explored how these attitudes and… read more about this publication »
Legislative activity—whether votes or communications—is often represented in a single partisan or ideological dimension. But as lawmakers communicate in various venues (e.g., traditional, direct, or social media), the extent to which these estimates are interchangeable—reflecting a common… read more about this publication »
The existing literature on Pakistan's financial institutions, especially the banking sector, primarily focuses on comparative performance, overlooking the essential question of how banks gained acceptance in a society where they are labeled non-compliant with Islamic principles. This paper fills… read more about this publication »
In any healthy democracy, myriad policy issues compete for the public's attention. Most remain on the periphery of politics, either because they achieve salience only in narrow communities of interest or because they grab headlines only for brief periods of time. But sometimes issues become what we… read more about this publication »
Sexual abuse by clergymen, poisoned water, police brutality—these cases each involve two wrongs: the abuse itself and the attempt to avoid responsibility for it. Our focus is this second wrong—the cover up. Cover ups are accountability failures, and they share common strategies for thwarting… read more about this publication »
The social media platforms of the twenty-first century have an enormous role in regulating speech in the USA and worldwide1. However, there has been little research on platform-wide interventions on speech2,3. Here we evaluate the effect of the decision by Twitter to suddenly deplatform 70,000… read more about this publication »
Patterns in candidate emergence affect who voters can choose from, and thus the quality of representative democracy. Despite extensive work considering factors that contribute to political ambition and factors that contribute to candidate emergence separately, we know less about the transition from… read more about this publication »
Generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, and other human-like outputs is currently transforming many different industries. Yet it is not yet known how such tools might influence social science research. I argue Generative AI has the potential to improve survey research, online… read more about this publication »
Machine learning (ML) methods are proliferating in scientific research. However, the adoption of these methods has been accompanied by failures of validity, reproducibility, and generalizability. These failures can hinder scientific progress, lead to false consensus around invalid claims, and… read more about this publication »
When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics, benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However, little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape… read more about this publication »
This article analyzes the conditions under which major infrastructural investments generate electoral returns. It addresses when and how the constraints imposed by myopic voters under democracy can be overcome. We argue that sustained policy spillovers are critical to broadening the pool of… read more about this publication »
Many international agreements, from routine trade deals to high-stakes nuclear agreements, are negotiated in secret. However, we have a limited understanding of how secrecy in a negotiation shapes attitudes towards the agreement. Public opinion matters because it informs government decisions about… read more about this publication »
We argue that education’s effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We… read more about this publication »
The secretive, illegal, multidimensional, and ubiquitous nature of corruption leads to formidable difficulties in research design and measurement. When research fails to account for these challenges, it can lead to an empirical misalignment with concepts and theories of corruption, with inferential… read more about this publication »
What motivates private firms’ willingness to invest in green technologies and environmentally friendly operations? Some emphasize enhanced government regulation and enforcement, while others point to the greater potential of societal pressure. In this study, we use a survey experiment with more… read more about this publication »