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AbstractA large body of literature in political science documents differences between elected men and women in their substantive policy preferences, representation styles, and effectiveness as legislators. We know far less about whether female and male representatives respond differently to being held politically accountable for their decisions. Although it is a difficult concept to evaluate empirically with incumbents, this absence of research is nevertheless surprising considering the central role of accountability in legislative behavior and the nonelite evidence that women and men respond differently to attributions of accountability. I provide evidence for the existence of such an accountability gender gap in an experiment with 377 incumbent legislators in three countries, in which they were asked to choose between economic policy plans alternately presented as the status quo, with varying levels of implied task accountability. Elected women and men reacted significantly differently when the political accountability levels of the task increased: female politicians exhibited a stronger preference for policies presented as the status quo, whereas male politicians were more likely to abandon the status quo and favor change. This pattern is unique to politicians and is not observed in nonelites. I discuss processes that motivate this divergence and the implications for research on gender and political representation.

AbstractConcerns about affective polarization are on the rise globally, and it has been associated with negative outcomes such as diminished trust in government and discrimination against out‐partisans. While elected politicians are typically thought to be a major source of mass‐level affective polarization, and despite the policy and representation consequences of heightened partisan hostility in legislatures, existing research has focused almost exclusively on the measurement and explanation of affective polarization among citizens. As a result, we know far less about the magnitude and sources of elite affective polarization. Here, we take a step towards addressing this gap using an original survey of hundreds of Canadian local politicians, a setting uniquely situated for addressing the role of a host of individual‐level and institutional‐level predictors of affective polarization. We find that Canadian local politicians are, on average, less affectively polarized than the citizens they represent. However, levels of affective polarization among these politicians vary considerably, with higher levels of affective polarization among politicians who are ideologues, partisans, and who harbor strong progressive ambition. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for research on affective polarization and describe the need for comparative studies of affective polarization among political elites.

AbstractWhile scholars have closely examined the intensification of negative affect across party lines during elections, less is known about the decline of partisan hostility in the aftermath of election campaigns. Synthesizing insights from research on electoral rules and political psychology, we theorize and empirically test two such mechanisms of post‐election negative affect decline. The first is that of winners' generosity: the expectation that self‐perceived election winners will express warmer feelings towards political opponents. The second is that of co‐governance, which predicts that shared coalition status leads to warmer affective evaluations among governing parties. We provide evidence that these mechanisms operate as pressure valves of negative partisan affect. We also show that while co‐governance reduces negative affect between parties who govern together, it fuels negative affect among supporters of opposition parties. The empirical analyses leverage a uniquely uncertain political period following the 2021 Israeli elections, around which we conducted an original panel study. Our findings advance the comparative polarization literature and connect psychological and institutional accounts of temporal fluctuations in partisan affect.

Politicians' support of or opposition to concrete policies is uniquely consequential for policymaking, public opinion, and a host of other societal outcomes. Explaining their policy positions is therefore a major research agenda in political science. Here, we evaluate the role of politicians' personality traits, measured with the Big Five typology, in shaping how liberal or conservative their economic and social policy positions are. While existing research establishes this link among nonelites, it is far from obvious that the same holds for politicians, who have systematically different personality profiles, and whose positions are constrained by party lines. Using an in‐person study of 893 legislators in five countries who completed personality questionnaires and provided detailed issue positions, we find that Openness to Experience is strongly and positively predictive of politicians' liberal positions on both economic and social policies, but a null relationship for Conscientiousness. We also find that Extraversion predicts more conservative economic (but not social) policy positions. We discuss implications for the role of elites' individual characteristics in policymaking.

Risk management underlies almost every aspect of elite politics. However, due to the difficulty of administering assessment tasks to elites, direct evidence on the risk preferences of elected politicians scarcely exists. As a result, we do not know how consistent are politicians' risk preferences, and under what conditions they can be changed. In this paper, we conduct a survey experiment with 440 incumbent local politicians from across the United States. Using a modified version of the Asian Disease framing experiment, we show that gain/loss frames alter the stated risk preferences of elected officials. We further show that priming democratic accountability increases the tendency to engage in risky behavior, but that this shift in preference only occurs in those politicians who are interested in seeking reelection. These results inform several political science theories that assume stable risk preferences by political elites, or that make no risk assumptions whatsoever. They also provide insights into the role of political ambition and accountability in structuring the behavior of political elites.

AbstractPolitical scientists have long debated whether citizens meet the expectations of a 'folk theory' of democratic representation, in which voters correctly reward and punish politicians for their actions, make choices primarily on the basis of policy preferences and orient their decisions to the future rather than the past. But how do elected politicians themselves theorize voting behaviour? In this paper, we report results from an original survey of more than 2000 elected local politicians in Canada and the United States which allows us to characterize politicians' own democratic theories. We uncover substantial variation in politicians' theories of democracy, and we find examples of a number of well‐known theoretical traditions (democratic realism, partisan retrospection, folk theory) among politicians themselves. We also show that politicians' theoretical perspectives are related to how they undertake representation when in office. We conclude with an outline of a comparative research agenda on the causes and consequences of politicians' democratic theories.

AbstractPoliticians are required to make policy decisions that involve short‐term and long‐term tradeoffs, and existing theory largely expects election‐driven myopic thinking to dominate their reasoning when they do so. Direct evidence on this is surprisingly absent, leaving open questions on whether and when politicians do support future‐oriented policies, and what factors, beyond the shadow of elections, influence such choices. Responding to this gap, we report results of a multi‐year survey of more than 1500 elected politicians who faced an original decision task involving short‐term and long‐term solutions to a local policy problem. First, we show that politicians' theories of voting behavior—specifically, their beliefs about whether voters focus on the short or the long term—strongly predict their decisions when facing inter‐temporal policy tradeoffs. Second, we show that politicians are responsive to changes to short‐run costs associated with long‐term policy investments. Finally, we leverage the panel design of our study and find—in contrast to prevalent assumptions—no evidence that politicians' policy choices are related to their proximity to the next election. In doing so, we expand and refine the theoretical framework on inter‐temporal choice by policymakers, and outline a comparative research agenda for studying how politicians think about the future.

These are challenging times for journalists' relationship with their audiences. Attacks against "the media" and the increasing weaponization of social media to harass journalists have drawn the attention of scholars worldwide. In the current climate, journalists are not only distrusted but also hated, which creates a series of distinct ramifications. In this article, we suggest a new framework to study journalists–audiences relationship, particularly in times of hostile populism: the imagined journalists approach. A mirror image of the much-studied concept of imagined audiences, imagined journalists refers to the entirety of ideas, feelings, stereotypes, and imaginaries that audiences hold regarding their imagined news producers. It brings together the research on media trust, audiences' perceptions, antimedia populism, and the emotional turn in journalism—to generate a comprehensive understanding of people's criticisms, narratives, and priorities. We demonstrate the potential of this approach by analyzing 1,215 responses to an open-ended question regarding journalists' traits in Israel in 2021. Employing qualitative and quantitative analyses, we find that: (a) right-wing and pro-populist voters hold more negative views of journalists, as expected; (b) voters express three different types of criticism of journalists (professional, personal, and national)—only one of which directly relates to their professional conduct; (c) different types of voters express different types of criticism; and (d) while objectivity and bias remain main concerns, democracy is not a dominant factor in respondents' thinking on journalists. These findings contribute theoretically and methodologically to future research in the field, as well as to urgent attempts to improve our information environment.