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While the popularity of using the item count technique (ICT) or list experiment to obtain estimates of attitudes and behaviors subject to social desirability bias has increased in recent years among political scientists, many of the empirical properties of the technique remain untested. In this paper, we explore whether estimates are biased due to the different list lengths provided to control and treatment groups rather than due to the substance of the treatment items. By using face-to-face survey data from national probability samples of households in Uruguay and Honduras, we assess how effective the ICT is in the context of face-to-face surveys-where social desirability bias should be strongest-and in developing contexts-where literacy rates raise questions about the capability of respondents to engage in cognitively taxing process required by ICT. We find little evidence that the ICT overestimates the incidence of behaviors and instead find that the ICT provides extremely conservative estimates of high incidence behaviors. Thus, the ICT may be more useful for detecting low prevalence attitudes and behaviors and may overstate social desirability bias when the technique is used for higher frequency socially desirable attitudes and behaviors. However, we do not find strong evidence of variance in deflationary effects across common demographic subgroups, suggesting that multivariate estimates using the ICT may not be biased. Adapted from the source document.

How does the presence of a large group of remittance recipients in the electorate affect the way
political parties in Latin America plan their vote-buying operations during electoral campaigns?
Existing research claims that remittances bolster the political autonomy of recipients, allowing
them to escape clientelistic networks and making them less attractive targets from the point of view
of party machines. Although in the long run remittances may undermine the effectiveness of
clientelistic inducements, parties still have strong incentives to distribute gifts and favors among
these voters. Cross-national survey evidence and an original list experiment fielded in the
aftermath of El Salvador's 2014 presidential race support the view that remittances alter key
attitudes and patterns of political behavior among recipients in ways that are relevant for the
electoral strategies of party machines. In particular, remittance recipients are appealing targets
for clientelistic exchanges due to the uncertainty of their turnout propensity and their
distributive preferences.

AbstractThis article elaborates relative deprivation theory to a societal level to argue that political unrest is rooted in the polarization of citizens' grievance judgments, rather than the mean level of societal grievance. Using data from twelve cross-national survey projects, it examines the relationship between citizen polarization and political protest in eighty-four democracies and semi-democracies from 1977 to 2010. The study finds that countries with more polarized citizens are more likely to experience nonviolent protest. Protests are most likely in countries where average citizen grievances are low but citizens are polarized, which is consistent with the elaborated theoretical expectations of relative deprivation theory.