Do attacks against politicians exacerbate the political underrepresentation of marginalized groups? Existing research suggests that candidates and officeholders from underrepresented groups are more likely to become targets of political violence, but little is known about the consequences of indirect exposure to political violence for descriptive representation and political ambition. Focusing on the case of women in politics, we study how the prevalence of political violence affects both the descriptive representation and the political ambition of women in Germany – Europe's largest democracy. Combining an analysis of observational data measuring crimes against politicians with evidence from original and pre‐registered survey experiments, we first demonstrate that attacks on political elites are not associated with fewer female candidates on party lists for local elections. Examining political ambitions and underlying microfoundations with different samples of respondents varying in their likelihood of considering political candidacy, we provide survey‐experimental evidence that information about the prevalence of political crime does not reduce willingness to run for office or engage in politics among female respondents with high political interest but may do so among those with low political interest. Taken together, this study highlights the resilience of underrepresented groups in the face of increasing political violence. However, we also show that political violence may create a pipeline problem if it deters the wider population of women from even considering to run for office.

A well‐established body of research has highlighted the importance of geographic representation in party‐centred political systems. In party‐centred systems, geographic ties are commonly expressed through non‐binding legislative instruments such as parliamentary questions. While this literature has advanced our understanding of representation in parliamentary systems, there are notable gaps in the existing research. Most importantly, previous studies have almost exclusively analysed geographic representation in national politics, where legislators represent comparatively large electoral districts. In contrast, this study focuses on patterns of geographic representation at the local level to understand whether and how specific neighbourhoods are represented in local politics. By studying parliamentary questions in 12 German city councils, we assess party efforts to represent their electoral strongholds. Methodologically, we go beyond existing research on geographic representation by building comprehensive dictionaries to assess geographic representation based on geolocated data from Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. The results show that geographic representation is a common feature of local politics and that parties tend to focus on areas where they are electorally strong, particularly when they are incentivized to do so by the electoral system and when their electorate is highly localized.

In this paper we leverage a sudden shift in refugee settlement policy to study the electoral consequences of refugee settlements. After the 2013 Norwegian parliamentary election, the newly elected right‐wing government made a concerted effort to spread newly arrived immigrants across the country, with the consequence that some municipalities with limited experience in settling refugees accepted to do so. We propose that such policy changes have political consequences, increasing the salience of immigration issues and shifting voters’ preferences to the right. We further propose that successful refugee integration can move (parts of) the electorate to the left, with stronger political polarization as a possible effect of the policy change. Applying difference‐in‐differences techniques, we find no evidence of unidirectional shifts in voter sentiments, but support for the hypothesis of stronger political polarization.

Why are women under‐represented even in democratic and egalitarian countries? Previous research considers either demand‐side or supply‐side explanations. We integrate both perspectives in a least‐likely case for the under‐representation of women, namely the municipal councils in Denmark. The data stems from a candidate choice conjoint experiment, a survey among potential candidates, and data on the actual pool of nominated candidates. On the voter demand‐side, we show that there is no pro‐male bias in general or in combination with other candidate traits nor that traits evaluated positively by voters appear more frequently among actual male candidates. On the supply‐side, we find that women are less likely to be interested in running for political office. This is primarily because women assess their own political qualifications significantly lower than men. The under‐supply of female candidates seem to drive the disparity suggesting that we should focus more on supply‐side factors to overcome the gender imbalance.

The article investigates some consequences of immigration on urban politics. On the basis of original data, it first discusses to what extent the councils of big German cities reflect the new immigration-related diversity of the population. Second, it asks to what extent the elected immigrant officials mirror the immigrant population. The article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the selectivity of political careers in diverse societies by addressing immigration-related factors.

This contribution investigates immigrants’ access to elected office in two different political contexts: Amsterdam and Paris. I look at the socio-demographic background and at the political experiences of immigrant councillors and explore what may have favoured their careers. I further consider the role of the electoral and political context in facilitating immigrants’ access to politics. This context plays an important role in immigrants’ rate of access to politics, but similarities exist in their pre-electoral experience.

This paper focuses on the development of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Poland, as a case study of the sector’s development in the Central and Eastern European countries of transition. It is argued that, in this situation, the development and growth of the NGO sector though shaped, as in the West, by a set of legislative, political, economic, cultural, and historical forces, nevertheless is circumscribed by the specific conditions of political transformation. The nature of and the power with which legislative, fiscal, or organizational forces condition the development of the sector varies according to the scale at which they operate (local, national, or international). Moreover, it is argued that the position of NGOs is significantly regulated by the state’s political ideology, and the formative and evolving character of the latter translates into instability in states’ actions vis-à-vis the nonprofit sector.

The Czech Pirate Party is one of the most electorally successful Pirate parties in the world. In this article, we analyse the effect of its intra-party deliberation preceding participation in an executive coalition in the second biggest Czech city, Brno, after the 2018 local election. The study relies on a combination of party open online discussions and discourse from local party elites. We focus on the effects on the coalition formation process, especially the relations with coalition partners, the intra-party effects on the whole party, and the local party organization.

Discussions on populism in Japan have often been overlooked in the comparative politics literature. However, as theoretical and empirical discussions progress, the need for more Japanese contributions to expand observers’ understanding of the global populist phenomenon is evident now more than ever. The sudden rise of Ishimaru Shinji as a populist figure in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election sparked claims that “social media populism” has arrived in Japan. However, although social media certainly played a role in propelling Ishimaru’s popularity during his campaign, limiting considerations of populism to election campaign performances overlooks a greater question: What happens when populists are elected? This article suggests that the Ishimaru phenomenon needs to be contextualized with examples of distinct practices of populist governors. This article argues that, in a neoliberal era of “political reform” (seiji kaikaku) populist political entrepreneurs have introduced “innovations” to governing practices as a way to personalize the executive in pursuit of their policy agendas. Specifically, three governing practices of the populist governors Hashimoto Tōru and Koike Yuriko are identified and considered as a “populist playbook” from which Ishimaru, and future populists, will likely borrow.

Much of the existing behavioral political science literature ignores Black motherhood as a salient factor of political identity and mobilization. However, Black mothers are often at the forefront of numerous political movements, including ones to end police violence against Black Americans. Due to the disproportionality of police contact in Black communities, Black mothers have a personal stake in ending police abuse that is twofold. First, Black mothers are often victims of sexist and racist policing practices, facing verbal, sexual, psychological, and economic abuse at the hands of law enforcement. Second, while dealing with their own oppressive relationship with the police, they must simultaneously take action to protect their loved ones from potential violence and harm at the hands of the state. The goal of this research is to examine how community-based politics serve as an opportunity for Black maternal status to be manifested as a form of resistance. I focus on what I refer to as community-based political activity because it is deeply rooted in the fabric of Black women’s political activism and produces more immediate benefits than other forms of political engagement. To examine the effects of direct and indirect police encounters on Black mothers, I pose several questions: How does negative police contact affect Black mothers’ community-based political activity? Does this difference apply to Black women who are not mothers? Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Elections Survey, my analysis demonstrates that maternal status has a significant impact on Black mothers’ community-oriented political engagement, particularly for those affected by indirect police contact.

Research in political science has begun to explore how to use large language and object detection models to analyze text and visual data. However, few studies have explored how to use these tools for data extraction. Instead, researchers interested in extracting text from poorly formatted sources typically rely on optical character recognition and regular expressions or extract each item by hand. This letter describes a workflow process for structured text extraction using free models and software. I discuss the type of data best suited to this method, its usefulness within political science, and the steps required to convert the text into a usable dataset. Finally, I demonstrate the method by extracting agenda items from city council meeting minutes. I find the method can accurately extract subsections of text from a document and requires only a few hand labeled documents to adequately train.

Sociolegal scholars have long debated the effectiveness of legal mobilization as a strategy for achieving social change. In addition to evaluating outcomes of wins and losses in court, they have identified several indirect effects of legal mobilization on social movements. Mobilizing new rights concepts can increase support for a movement, divide its base, and create new political allies or opponents. A win in court might lead to rights being institutionalized but not enforced, and it can serve to demobilize a movement base. This article contributes to this body of literature by arguing that movement groups can strategically mobilize the law to engage in co-optation from below – learning about an agency in order to build more effective organizing strategies. Using data gathered as a participant ethnographer in a grassroots environmental justice organization, I show how organizers used meetings with state regulators to learn how the agency interprets and enforces environmental laws and adjust their tactics in response. This study also demonstrates the value of conducting in-depth studies of local legal contests even as we seek to understand the role of the law in navigating our most pressing global challenges.

Every year, Americans elect hundreds of thousands of candidates to local public office, typically in low-attention, nonpartisan races. How do voters evaluate candidates in these sorts of elections? Previous research suggests that, absent party cues, voters rely on a set of heuristic shortcuts – including the candidate’s name, profession, and interest group endorsements – to decide whom to support. In this paper, we suggest that community embeddedness – a candidate’s roots and ties to the community – is particularly salient in these local contests. We present evidence from a conjoint survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of American voters. We estimate the marginal effect on vote share of candidate attributes such as gender, race, age, profession, interest group endorsements, and signals of community embeddedness – specifically homeownership and residency duration. We find that voters, regardless of political party, have strong preferences for community embeddedness. Strikingly, the magnitude of the residency duration effect rivals that of prior political experience.

Using a national audit of mayors in the United States, this paper examines responsiveness to Latine lesbian and gay constituents who request that their city issue an LGBTQ pride proclamation. Drawing on theories of intersectionality, descriptive representation, and political institutions, we articulate the conditions under which mayors are responsive to public-facing constituency service requests to issue LGBTQ pride proclamations. We find that mayors are more responsive to requests from lesbian couples than gay couples. In addition, baseline responsiveness to our inquiry was influenced by mayors’ identity characteristics. LGBTQ mayors were more likely to respond than non-LGBTQ mayors, but Latine mayors were less likely to respond than non-Latine mayors. In addition, mayors who represent cities where nondiscrimination ordinances protect LGBT people from discrimination were more responsive than mayors who represent cities where LGBT people are not protected from discrimination. These findings demonstrate how intersectional frameworks can advance audit experiments and that shared descriptive characteristics do not inevitably translate into responsiveness, a common assumption in single-axis studies of representation.

The recent emergence of online crowdfunding campaigns has transformed the charitable landscape in China. This paper examines the participation of one county-level grassroots nonprofit organization (SW) in Tencent's 99 Giving Day to reveal a paradox of organizational success in online crowdfunding, namely that local nonprofits have to wage corresponding offline campaigns with the support of the local government, and thus must co-evolve with local politics. While the online charitable campaign played a crucial role in the founding and professionalization of SW, the successful campaign was soon co-opted by the local government as a source of welfare soft-budgeting and performance management. To ensure the ongoing success of the three-day campaign, the online crowdfunding was transformed into a large-scale offline mobilization. We find that although crowdfunding creates new opportunities for rural grassroots organizations, these organizations must balance dual pressures from both the platform and the local government to successfully crowdfund online.