Recent ucla_polisci items

Safe inference outside of randomized trials: Application of the stability-controlled quasi-experiment to the effects of three COVID-19 therapies

Wed, 3 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When estimating the effects of medical therapies from their use outside of randomized trials, researchers often rely on assumptions that are difficult to justify and typically impossible to verify. The resulting estimates may thus be far from their intended causal targets, potentially making a harmful treatment appear beneficial or vice versa. We review the stability-controlled quasi-experiment (SCQE), a method suited to settings where a treatment's prevalence changes sharply over a short period, and apply it to assess the effects of remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, and dexamethasone on COVID-19 mortality. Rather than requiring debate about the absence (or limited strength) of unobserved confounding, about "parallel trends'', or other well-known strategies, the SCQE asks users to reason about a "baseline trend'' assumption. In this setting, this asks"How much could COVID-19 mortality have changed over a short period, absent the treatment change in question?'' Any plausible range...

Abundance Liberalism: A Critique of Procedural “Neutrality”

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abundance Liberalism: A Critique of Procedural “Neutrality”

Multinodality and Middle Power Adaptation in a Post-Unipolar WorldAn Emerging Model for a Fragmenting World Order

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Multinodality and Middle Power Adaptation in a Post-Unipolar WorldAn Emerging Model for a Fragmenting World Order

Political Elites on International Law Concerns:The US Congress Response to ICC CuesConcerning the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas Conflicts

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Political Elites on International Law Concerns:The US Congress Response to ICC CuesConcerning the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas Conflicts

Leveraging Rivalry: Non-State Actors in U.S.-China Great Power Competition

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Leveraging Rivalry: Non-State Actors in U.S.-China Great Power Competition

How Appearance Affects Female vsMale Candidates:A Potential Mechanism for Women’sUnderrepresentation in the Candidate Pool

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How Appearance Affects Female vsMale Candidates:A Potential Mechanism for Women’sUnderrepresentation in the Candidate Pool

Why Extremist Organizations Moderate:How Organizational Capacity Shapes Ideological Positioning

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Extremist Organizations Moderate:How Organizational Capacity Shapes Ideological Positioning

Institutions and Investment:How Foreign Direct Investment Responds to Political Risk Across Regimes

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Institutions and Investment:How Foreign Direct Investment Responds to Political Risk Across Regimes

Democratic Decline in Comparative Perspective: Executive Overreach, Polarization, and The United States

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Democratic Decline in Comparative Perspective: Executive Overreach, Polarization, and The United States

From Policy Conflict to Constitutional Change:EPA Jurisprudence and the Evolution of Separation of Powers in a Polarized Era

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From Policy Conflict to Constitutional Change:EPA Jurisprudence and the Evolution of Separation of Powers in a Polarized Era

THE REVOLUTION SHALL NOT BE CENSORED:Understanding the role of narrative resonance in grassroots movement resistance against state social media censorship

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

THE REVOLUTION SHALL NOT BE CENSORED:Understanding the role of narrative resonance in grassroots movement resistance against state social media censorship

When Protector Becomes Perpetrator: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Understanding What Accounts for Sexual Violence Variation Among UN Peacekeeping Missions

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Protector Becomes Perpetrator: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Understanding What Accounts for Sexual Violence Variation Among UN Peacekeeping Missions

Critical Formalism: Article 21(3) at the International Criminal Court

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Critical Formalism: Article 21(3) at the International Criminal Court

“The Campus Law Enforcement Web” How Campus Policing Capacity Expands to Suppress Student Free Speech

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“The Campus Law Enforcement Web” How Campus Policing Capacity Expands to Suppress Student Free Speech

“Development and Dissent: Why Student Protests Are More Disruptive in Developing Countries”

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Development and Dissent: Why Student Protests Are More Disruptive in Developing Countries”

Sensitive places, persistent violence: Effectiveness of “Bar Ban” laws in reducing gun violence near alcohol vendors

Wed, 6 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Americans have differing opinions on whether greater regulation of firearms results in improved public safety. One area that seems to enjoy broad support is to limit firearm access in specific locations. “Bar Ban” laws—which prohibit firearms where alcohol is served—represent one such approach, yet their effectiveness remains largely unexamined nationally. This paper provides the first comprehensive evaluation of the impact of Bar Ban laws on shootings near alcohol-related establishments. Using a geospatial panel dataset of over 1.6 million alcohol vendors active across the United States between January 2019 and January 2025, we analyze the relationship between restrictions on carrying a gun where alcohol is served and gun violence. Results show that shootings occur close to alcohol-serving establishments: across 263,464 shooting incidents, the median distance to the nearest alcohol vendor was 222 meters. To assess the effectiveness of Bar Ban laws, we employ a stacked difference-in-differences...

Improving Computer Vision Interpretability: Transparent Two-Level Classification for Complex Scenes

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract Treating images as data has become increasingly popular in political science. While existing classifiers for images reach high levels of accuracy, it is difficult to systematically assess the visual features on which they base their classification. This paper presents a two-level classification method that addresses this transparency problem. At the first stage, an image segmenter detects the objects present in the image and a feature vector is created from those objects. In the second stage, this feature vector is used as input for standard machine learning classifiers to discriminate between images. We apply this method to a new dataset of more than 140,000 images to detect which ones display political protest. This analysis demonstrates three advantages to this paper’s approach. First, identifying objects in images improves transparency by providing human-understandable labels for the objects shown on an image. Second, knowing these objects enables analysis of which...

A causal approach for detecting team-level momentum in NBA games

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper provides new evidence that team-level momentum exists in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The existence of momentum is one of the most prominent and longstanding questions in sports analytics. But for all its importance to announcers, coaches, and players, existing literature has found little evidence of momentum in professional basketball. This paper exploits a natural experiment in the flow of basketball games: television (TV) timeouts. Since TV timeouts occur at points exogenous to momentum, they enable the measurement of the effect of pauses in the game separate from the effect of strategy changes. We find TV timeouts cause an 11.2% decline in the number of points that the team with momentum subsequently scores. This effect is robust to the size of a run, substitutions, and game context. This result has far reaching implications in basketball strategy and the understanding of momentum in sports more broadly.

Digitizing and Generating Social Conflict Data with Artificial Intelligence

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The difficulty of collecting social conflict data has caused its study to focus on recent events predominantly in the West. This paper shows how to use artificial intelligence to generate social conflict data regardless of language, location, or date. Digitizing tertiary books, lightly cleaning their text representation, and submitting that text to a large language model (LLM) produces accurate date, location, and event descriptions. These capabilities and results are demonstrated with books on Latin America after 1492, Imperial Russia, and Tokugawa Japan. Using LLMs requires a larger fixed cost than working a team of research assistants, but it produces results more quickly for most sources. It is less accurate for the Tokugawa Japan source; whether it or human translation is cheaper depends on the cost of correcting the LLM’s work. These results represent the floor of accuracy for artificial intelligence, suggesting researchers should soon use it for creating social conflict...

Do Pre-analysis Plans Hamper Publication?

Thu, 9 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scholars assert that pre-analysis plans (PAPs) generate boring, lab-report style papers and thus hamper publication. We test this claim by comparing the publication rates of experimental NBER working papers with and without PAPs. We find that articles with PAPs are slightly less likely to be published. However, conditional on being published, PAP-generated papers are significantly more likely to land in top-five journals. Also, PAP-based journal articles generate more citations. Our findings suggest that the alleged trade-off between career concerns and the scientific credibility that comes from registering and adhering to a PAP is less stark than is sometimes alleged.

Accordance and conflict between religious and scientific precautions against COVID-19 in 27 societies

Thu, 9 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Meaning-making systems underlie perceptions of the efficacy of threat-mitigating behaviors. Religion and science both offer threat mitigation, yet these meaning-making systems are often considered incompatible. Do such epistemological conflicts swamp the desire to employ diverse precautions against threats? Or do individuals—particularly individuals who are highly reactive to threats—hedge their bets by using multiple threat-mitigating practices despite their potential epistemological incompatibility? Complicating this question, perceptions of conflict between religion and science likely vary across cultures; likewise, pragmatic features of precautions prescribed by some religions make them incompatible with some scientifically-based precautions. The COVID-19 pandemic elicited diverse precautions thus providing an opportunity to investigate these questions. Across 27 societies from five continents (N = 7,844), in the majority of countries, individuals’ practice of religious precautions...

Measuring interethnic marriage in Africa

Thu, 9 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: Interethnic marriage is commonly employed as an indicator of social cohesion. However, intermarriages are a reflection of both preferences and opportunities. If we are to interpret intermarriage rates as indicators of people’s willingness to cross group boundaries, we must find a way of controlling for exposure to out-group members in local marriage markets. In this Note, I exploit census data from Zambia to demonstrate how this can be done. The findings, which reveal significant differences across estimates that do and do not control for local exposure to out-group members, underscore a significant weakness in common approaches. The findings also point to important substantive implications for understanding changes in social cohesion in Zambia—and likely other African societies—over time.

Tensions in Knowledge Accumulation Using Coordinated Intervention Experiments to Improve Public Policy

Thu, 9 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tensions in Knowledge Accumulation Using Coordinated Intervention Experiments to Improve Public Policy

Terms Matter: The Use of 'Tribe' in African Studies

Thu, 9 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Terms Matter: The Use of 'Tribe' in African Studies

Taken at face value: Emotion expression and protest dynamics

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding the role of emotions in protest is a growing field of research, but existing research does not address the role of emotions once protests start. By applying computer vision models to the expressed emotions of 37,558 faces in 7,824 geolocated protest images across twelve protest waves in ten countries, this article contributes to the study of emotions and protest. Most importantly, it measures emotions within protest waves, not before them. It also investigates emotions’ temporal effects, measures multiple emotions simultaneously, connects emotions directly to actual protests, and analyzes data across multiple countries. The results suggest that anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise occur simultaneously throughout a protest, though happiness peaks on the first day. Emotions sometimes correlate with protest size in unexpected directions, and the coefficient signs differ by country. The most consistent finding is that models without lagged terms outperform...

Aid for incumbents: the electoral consequences of COVID-19 relief

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented federal transfers to state and local governments. Did this funding benefit incumbent politicians electorally? The conditions that triggered this funding influx might also affect incumbents for other reasons. We therefore develop an instrument to predict allocations to states based on variation in congressional representation. Using over a decade of election data, we find that incumbents in state-wide races performed significantly better in 2020 and beyond in states that received more relief funding due to their overrepresentation in Congress. These results are robust across specifications and after adjusting for a variety of economic and political controls. We uncover larger effects for governors and other statewide executive office holders than for legislators, providing suggestive evidence on underlying mechanisms. This paper contributes to our understanding of economic voting during times of crisis, the downstream electoral consequences...

From Individual to Collective Memory: South Korea’s Gwangju Uprising

Thu, 8 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From Individual to Collective Memory: South Korea’s Gwangju Uprising

Rethinking Confucianism and constitutionalism: the political thought of John C.H. Wu (1899 - 1986)

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Rethinking Confucianism and constitutionalism: the political thought of John C.H. Wu (1899 - 1986)

Does economic statecraft achieve foreign policy objectives? The case of stability and soft power in the Middle East.

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Does economic statecraft achieve foreign policy objectives? The case of stability and soft power in the Middle East.

Repression in the New Era

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Repression in the New Era

How Black Lives Matter Protests Help or Hinder Black Candidacy

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How Black Lives Matter Protests Help or Hinder Black Candidacy

The Transformative Ambitions of the Abraham Accords: Trust-Building Mechanisms as a Pathway to Regional Cooperation

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Transformative Ambitions of the Abraham Accords: Trust-Building Mechanisms as a Pathway to Regional Cooperation

Identity Politics: The Effect of Affective Polarization on Americans’ Attitudes Toward Outparty-Stereotypical Groups

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Identity Politics: The Effect of Affective Polarization on Americans’ Attitudes Toward Outparty-Stereotypical Groups

The Determinants of Policy Representation: Evaluating the Role of Policy Type in the United States

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Determinants of Policy Representation: Evaluating the Role of Policy Type in the United States

Representation in an Age of Partisanship: The Impact of Competition and Term Lengths on Congressional Polarization

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Representation in an Age of Partisanship: The Impact of Competition and Term Lengths on Congressional Polarization

Regimentation of the Musical Front: How the Soviet Government Used the Censorship of Music to Expand its Power

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Regimentation of the Musical Front: How the Soviet Government Used the Censorship of Music to Expand its Power

From Online Feeds to Hostile Beliefs: The Effect of Social Media on Ideological Intolerance

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From Online Feeds to Hostile Beliefs: The Effect of Social Media on Ideological Intolerance

A Decisional Theory of U.S. Covert and Overt Intervention During the Cold War

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A Decisional Theory of U.S. Covert and Overt Intervention During the Cold War

Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the intellectual formation of the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of “French theory.” Panagia’s book first shows what was missed in the reception of this literature in the Anglophone academy by attending to how France’s pedagogical milieu plays out church and state relations in the form of educational debates around reading practices, the aesthetics of mimesis, French imperialism, and republican universalism. Panagia then shows how such thinkers as Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault develop a sentimental empiricist critical philosophy that distances itself from dialectical critique and challenges the metaphysical premise of inherent relations, especially as it had been articulated in the tradition of Aristotelian...

Threat perceptions, loyalties and attitudes towards peace: The effects of civilian victimization among Syrian refugees in Turkey

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For refugees who have fled civil conflict, do experiences of victimization by one armed group push them to support the opposing armed groups? Or, does victimization cause refugees to revoke their support for all armed groups, whatever side they are on, and call instead for peace? This paper studies the effect of civilian victimization on threat perceptions, loyalties, and attitudes toward peace in the context of Syrian refugees in Turkey, many of whom faced regime-caused violence prior to their departure. Our research strategy leverages variation in home destruction caused by barrel bombs to examine the effect of violence on refugees' views. We find that refugees who lose their home to barrel bombs withdraw support from armed actors and are more supportive of ending the war and finding peace. Suggestive evidence shows that while victims do not disengage from issues in Syria, they do show less optimism about an opposition victory.

The Effects of Proportional Representation on Election Lawmaking: Evidence from New Zealand

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is widely recognised that politicians are self-interested and desire election rules beneficial to their re-election. Although partisanship in electoral system reform is well-understood, the factors that affect partisan manipulation of other democratic ‘rules of the game’–including election administration, franchise laws, and campaign finance–has received little attention to date. New Zealand is so far the only established democracy to shift from a non-proportional to a proportional electoral system and thus presents an ideal case to test the effects of electoral system change on the politics of election reform. This article examines partisan and demobilising election reforms passed between 1970 and 1993 under first-past-the-post and between 1997 and 2020 under mixed-member proportional representation. Moving to a proportional system has failed to diminish the amount of partisan election lawmaking, though voting restrictions have become less common. These results should caution...

Re-Evaluating consensus in New Zealand election reform

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is commonly believed that a norm of consensus-based election reform exists in New Zealand. However, this belief has yet to be tested with systematic study of changes to the democratic rules of the game. This article empirically analyzes the extent to which partisan and restrictive election rules have been proposed and enacted since passage of the Electoral Act 1956. Using a novel matrix of election lawmaking, a wealth of primary textual sources, and interviews with key actors, the data show clear evidence that election reforms are routinely partisan and have occasionally curtailed democratic participation. An analysis of election lawmaking by political party reveals that Labour is responsible for most partisan election reforms, whereas National has passed most demobilising enactments. These trends extend to proposed members’ bills and across multiple governments. The findings highlight the need for scholars to take seriously the importance of a broader array of election reforms...

Black Lives Matter and the Racialized Support for the January 6th Insurrection

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Does support for the January 6th insurrection come mostly from concerned citizens worried over illegal voting, or from racists spurred to action by the highly visible Black Lives Matter protests and Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat? We field a survey experiment aimed at disentangling links between old and new racial grievances, anti-immigrant beliefs, Black activism, and support for the January 6th insurrection. We find that the people most likely to be supportive of the insurrection are whites who hold negative attitudes toward immigrants and subscribe to white replacement theory. Beliefs about the George Floyd protests also explain January 6th support, above and beyond demographics and other racial and political views. These results are validated by the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. We also conduct a survey vignette experiment and find that anti-BLM rhetoric spread by Trump and right-wing news sources likely soured opinions on the movement and set the stage...

Beyond the Trump Presidency: The Racial Underpinnings of White Americans’ Anti-Democratic Beliefs

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How closely related are modern anti-democratic beliefs among white Americans, and to what extent are these beliefs shaped by exclusionary racial attitudes? Using data from the Political Unrest Study, the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape, and the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), we find that support for voting restrictions, opposition to voting expansions, belief in widespread voter fraud, and support for overturning democratic election results load onto a single underlying dimension. While the prevalence of anti-democratic beliefs among white Americans has remained stable over the past decade, these beliefs have become increasingly interconnected. Furthermore, racial attitudes towards out-groups-including racial resentment, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white racial grievance-strongly correlate with anti-democratic beliefs, whereas in-group racial attitudes do not. Analysis of multiple waves of the...

Better individual-level risk models can improve the targeting and life-saving potential of early-mortality interventions

Fri, 7 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Infant mortality remains high and uneven in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Even low-cost, highly effective therapies can only save lives in proportion to how successfully they can be targeted to those children who, absent the treatment, would have died. This places great value on maximizing the accuracy of any targeting or means-testing algorithm. Yet, the interventions that countries deploy in hopes of reducing mortality are often targeted based on simple models of wealth or income or a few additional variables. Examining 22 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, we illustrate the use of flexible (machine learning) risk models employing up to 25 generally available pre-birth variables from the Demographic and Health Surveys. Using these models, we construct risk scores such that the 10 percent of the population at highest risk account for 15-30 percent of infant mortality, depending on the country. Successful targeting in these models turned on several variables other than wealth, while...

Residency Blues: The Unintended Consequences of Police Residency Requirements

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Residency Blues: The Unintended Consequences of Police Residency Requirements

Government Responses to Climate Change

Thu, 7 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Social scientists should be more deliberate in how they define and measure government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors highlight key distinctions among three dimensions of climate policy: the commitments made by governments, the actions that governments take, and the outcomes they produce. In turn, the authors detail the challenges of measuring these dimensions, and discuss the tradeoffs of alternative measurement strategies, including how well they meet the accepted standards for measurement validity. The authors also identify promising avenues for further research.

The Influence of Political Ideology on Carbon Emissions