By analyzing social media content generated across the globe, political scientists seek to understand the current wave of populist rhetoric flooding the internet and its threats to democracies.

"Transdisciplinary team to study political instability, health outcomes"

Congratulations to Mike Olson, whose article “Franchise Expansion and Legislative Representation in the Early United States” (co-authored with Stephen Ansolabehere and Jaclyn Kaslovsky) was awarded the 2023 Kenneth A. Shepsle Prize for the best article in volume 3 of the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy!

“Persistence of Gender Biases in Europe” explores using health markers on skeletal records from archaeological sites in Europe to measure differential treatment of women vs. men centuries ago and contemporary survey data on attitudes toward gender equality, we show that modern gender biases have deep historical roots, dating back to the Middle Ages and beyond.

National Council for Eurasian and East European Research’s 2023 TITLE VIII National Research Competition awarded Nomikos with a grant.

"Representation and the Trade Roots of the Gender Wage Gap" won the following awards: Southern Political Science Association 2023 Best Paper, SPSA's 2023 Marian Irish Award and the Midwest Political Science Association's 2023 Sophonisba Breckinridge Award.

Taylor Carlson signed a contract with University of Chicago Press for Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy. Carlson gave a talk on this as part of the American Politics Speaker Series sponsored by the Ash Center for Democratic Convergence and Innovation and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University.

"Women Grab Back: Exclusion, Policy Threat, and Women's Political Ambition" by Amanda Clayton (Vanderbilt), Diana Z. O'Brien (WashU) and Jennifer M. Piscopo (Occidental College)

Anne Wilke became an invited researcher for J-PAL Africa.

Previous work suggests that observing women officeholders increases women’s political ambition. Yet, jumps in women’s representation in the United States’ “Years of the Woman”—following the Anita Hill testimonies and the election of Donald Trump—are linked to women’s exclusion from political decision-making. Drawing on focus groups with prospective women candidates, we theorize that exclusion when combined with a gendered policy threat increases women’s political ambition. Using survey experiments replicated across different samples, we show that women who read about an all-male city council poised to legislate on women’s rights report increased ambition compared with their pretreatment ambition levels and to women in other treatment groups. Women’s increased sense of political efficacy drives these results. 

Politics is increasingly dominated by crises, from pandemics to extreme weather events. These Critical Perspectives essays analyze crises’ gendered implications by focusing on their consequences for women’s descriptive and substantive representation. Covering multiple kinds of crises, including large-scale protests, climate shocks, and war and revolution, the contributions reveal three factors shaping both the theoretical conceptualization and empirical analysis of crisis and women’s representation: (1) the type of crisis, (2) the actors influenced by the crisis, and (3) the aftermath of the crisis. Together, the contributors urge scholars to “think crisis, think gender” far beyond the supply of and demand for women leaders.

Reviews replication data and code for conjoint experiment presented in "Freedom of Expression in Interpersonal Interactions," which examines characteristics of political discussions and discussants that lead people to be more or less willing to express their true political opinions. This is a peer reviewed contribution to a symposium on free expression, edited by Yanna Krupnikov and Eitan Hersh.