Jennifer Oser

Privileged citizens are more likely to participate in politics and to be better politically represented. Does unequal participation drive unequal representation? Or are politicians biased toward privileged citizens, regardless of their political activity? While politicians’ biases toward high-status citizens have been documented, the role of political participation therein remains empirically under-researched. Using nearly 40 years of uniquely comprehensive survey data on Swedish politicians and citizens, we provide the most robust observational evidence to date that politicians’ perceptions of public opinion are more consistently aligned with the opinions of the politically active. Motivated by this background evidence, a novel pre-registered survey experiment with Swedish politicians will test whether politicians give greater weight to an identical political activity based solely on the participator’s status. Our integration of observational and experimental findings will provide new answers to the important question of whether low-status citizens could increase their political influence by participating more.

Privileged citizens are more likely to participate in politics and to be better politically represented. Does unequal participation drive unequal representation? Or are politicians biased toward privileged citizens, regardless of their political activity? While politicians’ biases toward high-status citizens have been documented, the role of political participation therein remains empirically under-researched. Using nearly 40 years of uniquely comprehensive survey data on Swedish politicians and citizens, we provide the most robust observational evidence to date that politicians’ perceptions of public opinion are more consistently aligned with the opinions of the politically active. Motivated by this background evidence, a novel pre-registered survey experiment with Swedish politicians will test whether politicians give greater weight to an identical political activity based solely on the participator’s status. Our integration of observational and experimental findings will provide new answers to the important question of whether low-status citizens could increase their political influence by participating more.

This article synthesizes the key opportunities and challenges for researchers to consider when launching and leading research projects that include survey data harmonization. Focusing on the ex-post harmonization of cross-national survey data from multiple survey programs on topics related to political attitudes and behavior, we integrate insights from relevant literature with interviews of researchers who have expertise in survey data harmonization. We conclude by identifying best practices to inform future research.

1. Introduced by Lazarsfeld and Henry in 1968, latent class analysis (LCA) is used to identify distinct sub-groups of individuals based on a set of observed behaviors. The LC model takes these obse...

Political discourse now circulates through sprawling social media networks where multiple actors wield influence in addition to traditional elites. Yet scholarly conclusions about who actually shapes that discourse diverge because leading studies operationalize “political influencer” in fundamentally different ways. To clarify the stakes of those choices—and advance more coherent theorizing—we examine six definitions that are prevalent in the literature and are rooted in audience size, elite ties, network importance, and message engagement. We then apply these distinctive definitions to a single dataset, namely a panel of 597,815 registered U.S. voters on Twitter during the 2020 presidential campaign to identify convergence and divergence across definitions. Three patterns emerge. First, conceptual boundaries matter: definitions that differ in scale rarely converge on the same influencers, confirming that different lenses reveal largely distinct influencer groups. Second, definitional emphasis reshapes the portrait of influence itself: elite-based criteria surface highly political, centrally positioned senders with compact but engaged followings, whereas follower- and engagement-based criteria net vastly larger, more heterogeneous groups that address politics only episodically. Third, upstream choices about conceptual boundaries and definitional emphases cascade downstream to the characteristics of influencers’ audiences, producing systematic shifts in followers’ age, gender, racial, and partisan characteristics. By showing how conceptual decisions impact both who counts as a political influencer and which citizens follow their messages, this study lays the groundwork for clearer conceptualization of the relevant dimensions for advancing the accumulation of knowledge on this increasingly important political phenomenon.

The evolution of social movements in the age of datafication has challenged prevailing social movement theories. Contrary to scholarly forecasts, datafication empowered social movements by reducing the cost of participation and removing barriers to disseminating information, while also facilitating authoritarianism and imposing new constraints on movements’ organizational dynamics and long-term impact. While literature reviews of the field suggest that these gaps have largely been overcome, little is known about how the field as a whole has evolved to address these questions. Using bibliometric tools to visualize and analyze a dataset of 6701 studies on social media and social movements published between 2005 and 2023, we identify the canonical literature, research approaches, and research methods used to study these developments. Our findings highlight a consistent scarcity in experimental research that isolates causal mechanisms, and we point to experimental work in related fields that could advance this line of research. We conclude by discussing opportunities for next-step research that emerge from our findings, including the use of big data analysis as well as qualitative and experimental studies to address unresolved questions about social movements in the age of datafication.

Political participation is considered an important path for people to influence politics. However, whether those who participate actually see more of their preferred policies implemented remains an open question. We address this question by analyzing cross-national data connecting opinions to subsequent policy implementation on multiple policy issues. Based on an analysis of data on more than 270,000 survey respondents in 40 countries from 1996 to 2016, we show that voters are at most only slightly, but not substantially better represented than nonvoters. In contrast to the negligible effect sizes for voting, citizens who are active in multiple types of nonelectoral political activity are better represented than those who are inactive. We subsequently examine whether the observed relationships can be explained by socio-economic status, as well as attitudinal engagement such as political trust and political efficacy. Our findings show that the cross-national positive association between nonelectoral participation and opinion-policy congruence remains even when controlling for these factors. Our concluding discussion highlights directions for future research that pinpoint the causal mechanisms that link nonelectoral participation with subsequent opinion-policy congruence.

At a time when the influence of external cues on opinion formation is gaining attention due to their relevance for preference formation, this research note investigates how external cues from political elites and close friends shape individual policy preferences. Building on prior studies by Barber and Pope (2019, 2024) regarding Donald Trump's impact on people's policy preferences during his 2017–2021 presidency, we examine whether this influence persists soon after Trump's first presidential tenure concludes in late 2021 through a survey experiment. We also assess the influence of a second external cue that has gained attention due to the growing role of social media in political processes: a close friend, who might also serve as a relevant figure for policy position formation. We find that Trump's liberal cues shift Republican preferences in a liberal direction, while close friend cues show diverse patterns, including some backlash effects where individuals adopt positions opposite to conservative friend advocacy. These effects vary with individuals' party identification, political knowledge, and social conformity levels. Individual characteristics moderate political elite influence, while peer influence operates through reactance mechanisms rather than conformity, revealing that social networks shape opinions through more complex pathways than commonly theorized.

Political efficacy is a key attitudinal measure that captures individuals’ perceptions of their connection with the state. Measures of political efficacy are among the most frequently used survey questions of political attitudes and are considered to be centrally important empirical indicators of the positive functioning and health of democratic systems.

We consider estimation of two-level latent class models for clustered data, when the measurement model for the observed measurement items includes non-equivalence of measurement with respect to some observed covariates. The parameters of interest are coefficients in structural models for the latent classes given covariates. We propose a two-step method of estimation. This extends previously proposed methods of two-step estimation for models without non-equivalence of measurement by specifying the model used in the first step in such a way that it correctly accounts for non-equivalence. The properties of these two-step estimators are examined using simulation studies and an applied example.