Thomas B. Pepinsky

In the 1990s, a sharp divide emerged between area studies advocates and methodologically oriented political scientists. We revisit that debate, arguing that tensions between political science and area studies are neither intrinsic nor static but instead evolve in tandem with theoretical and methodological trends, as well as with broader political and technological developments. Drawing on an original survey of American Political Science Association members and an analysis of roughly 4,500 comparative politics articles in leading journals, we identify four shifts in the discipline: from a theoretical to an empirical orientation, from cross-national datasets to country- and region-specific studies, from macro- to micro-level analyses, and from descriptive to causal inference. We also document evolving patterns in language training, fieldwork, methods use, and data collection. Our findings suggest that political science and area studies are experiencing a reconciliation, but that the state of area studies is fragile and the subdiscipline of comparative politics must support it.

Political economy models of elections study how electoral incentives encourage parties to be responsive to voters. Election results can be informative about how platforms diverge from voter preferences, but the complexity of the environment and cognitive biases may inhibit learning. We develop a repeated model of elections with motivated reasoning and uncertainty about the fairness of the electoral system. A party who wants to believe the electorate is close to their preferences picks more extreme platforms, which in turn causes the other party to be more extreme as well. Motivated beliefs also allow parties to infer from poor results that elections are unfair rather than that their platforms are unpopular. Repeated elections exacerbate this problem: disagreement about the fairness of the electoral system increases over time, even if platform divergence decreases.

We revisit the divide that emerged in the 1990s between area studies advocates and methodologically oriented political scientists. We argue that tensions between political science and area studies are neither intrinsic nor static, but instead evolve in tandem with theoretical and methodological trends, as well as with political and technological developments. Drawing on a survey of American Political Science Association members and analysis of roughly 4,500 articles in leading journals, we identify four shifts in the discipline: from a theoretical to an empirical orientation; from cross-national datasets to country- and region- specific studies; from macro- to micro-level analyses; and from descriptive to causal inference. We also document patterns in language training, fieldwork, methods use, and data collection. Our findings suggest political science and area studies are increasingly compatible and well-positioned for reconciliation, but that the state of area studies is fragile and the subfield of comparative politics must support it.

The three articles in this special section on presidentialism and democracy in Indonesia analyse the state of Indonesian democracy through a careful study of the 2024 elections and the presidential transition from Joko Widodo to Prabowo Subianto. The three articles examine this election and its significance using different but complementary approaches, analysing elite politics, voting behaviour, political cleavages and electoral institutions. Together, these articles contribute to ongoing debates about the quality of Indonesian democracy, the drivers of democratic backsliding, and the institutional and demographic factors that shape vote choice in a diverse society.

Indonesian democracy is characterised by large governing coalitions and a dominant presidency, coupled with weak parties with few programmatic differences. These features of coalitional presidentialism are the product of a presidential form of government and proportional representation with high district magnitudes and have implications for electoral politics in a diverse socioeconomic context. This manuscript shows that the core features of Indonesian party politics and electoral competition in the 2024 elections can be explained by applying the comparative literature on electoral institutions to Indonesia's social structure and political cleavages. Analysing the interaction of electoral rules, social structure, and politicians’ incentives provides insights into the roots of Indonesia's democratic decline and the pathways towards reform.

A foundational premise in democratic theory is that political competition encourages parties to be responsive to voters. Parties have incentives to respond to the median voter's preferences in order to win elections, and should learn from the results of elections where their platforms diverge from what the electorate wants. However, parties may be subject to motivated reasoning, wanting to believe that the electorate favors their own policy preferences. We develop a repeated model of elections with motivated beliefs to explore how this bias affects how parties compete with one another for popular support. Motivated beliefs lead to excessive platform divergence, and allow parties to infer from poor electoral outcomes that elections are unfair rather than that their platforms are unpopular. Disagreement about the fairness of the electoral system increases over time, even if platform divergence decreases. Our analysis reveals how motivated beliefs inhibit parties' ability to learn what voters want while encouraging partisans to distrust the electoral process itself.

Democratic theorists hold that voting contributes to some political good: individual and collective autonomy, equality, justice, pluralism, stability, better policies, and many others. But elections are common under authoritarianism, and empirical research finds that holding elections can stabilize authoritarian regimes. This creates what we term the democrat’s dilemma, where citizens who vote in authoritarian elections may bolster the regimes they wish to unseat, even when they cast a vote for the opposition. We identify three major ways of thinking about the democratic value of electoral participation—justice-based, epistemic, and proceduralist approaches—and use them to examine the complex moral considerations that confront voters in authoritarian regimes. We contend that authoritarian elections’ residual democratic value can justify voting, even when doing so could further entrench the autocrat. Our argument also implies that the democratic principles that justify voting in authoritarian elections oblige citizens to choose the most democratic alternative.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was a watershed moment in European politics. The invasion prompted a massive influx of refugees into Central Europe, a region in which immigration has proven highly contentious and politically salient in recent decades. We study public opinion toward refugees in Hungary, a highly exclusionary political environment in which anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiments are commonly invoked by the ruling government. Combining historical public opinion data from the past decade with two rounds of original survey data from 2022, we demonstrate that the Ukrainian refugee crisis was accompanied by a large increase in tolerance for refugees, reversing what had previously been one of the most anti-refugee public opinion environments in Europe. To explain this reversal, we use a series of survey experiments coupled with detailed settlement-level demographic data to investigate how conflict proximity and racial, religious, and national identity shape openness to refugees. We find that the distinguishing feature of the 2022 refugee crisis was that refugees were mostly white European Christians driven from their home country by conflict. We discuss the implications of our argument for Hungary, for European politics in times of crisis, and for the politics of public opinion in competitive authoritarian regimes.

A wide range of empirical scholarship has documented a partisan gap in health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, but the political foundations and temporal dynamics of these partisan gaps remain poorly understood. Using an original six-wave individual panel study (n = 3,000) of Americans throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that at the individual level, partisan differences in health behavior grew rapidly in the early months of the pandemic and are explained almost entirely by individual support for or opposition to President Trump. Our results comprise powerful evidence that Trump support (or opposition), rather than ideology or simple partisan identity, explains partisan gaps in health behavior in the United States. In a time of populist resurgence around the world, public health efforts must consider the impact of charismatic authority in addition to entrenched partisanship.