Johan A. Elkink

Recent debates have raised concerns about how academia and policy makers alike rely on country experts when trying to understand the politics of authoritarian regimes. This study argues that one possible source of bias is the experts’ network of affiliations and interactions with one another and that we therefore should make the social background and networks of country experts more transparent. We implemented this by examining experts on contemporary Chinese politics using a nomination process to establish a list of 2,200 such experts. We find that US-based and US-educated male academics continue to form the core of this community but that younger cohorts appear to be more diverse in terms of educational background, gender, and geographic location. Our findings provide not only the first analysis of the global China Watcher community but also speak to current debates about the reliability of aggregated expert assessments.

Understanding plant physiological response to a rising atmospheric CO₂ concentration (c_a) is key in predicting Earth system plant–climate feedbacks; however, the effects of long-term rising c_a on plant gas-exchange characteristics in the tropics are largely unknown. Studying this long-term trend using herbarium records is challenging due to specimen trait variation. We assessed the impact of a c_a rise of ~95 ppm (1927–2015) on the intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE) and maximum stomatal conductance (g_smax) of five tropical tree species in Fiji using the isotopic composition and stomatal traits of herbarium leaves. Empirical results were compared with simulated values using models that uniquely incorporated the variation in the empirical g_smax responses and species-specific parameterisation. The magnitude of the empirical iWUE and g_smax response was species-specific, ranging from strong to negligible. Stomatal density was more influential than the pore size in determining the g_smax response to c_a. While our simulation results indicated that photosynthesis is the main factor contributing to the iWUE gain, stomata were driving the iWUE trend across the tree species. Generally, a stronger increase in the iWUE was accompanied by a stronger decline in stomatal response. This study demonstrates that the incorporation of variation in the g_smax in simulations is necessary for assessing an individual species’ iWUE response to changing c_a.

The simplification of the political landscape in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’ is common across most democracies, if not most of the world. This would suggest that the terminology has a shared core meaning in different political contexts. While no such stable element has been established in the political science literature, various potential dividing lines that may form the core meaning have been proposed. This paper is the most extensive comparative study to our knowledge that evaluates these proposals by studying responses to open‐ended survey questions on what voters associate with the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. Data from eight different democratic political contexts are analysed using quantitative text analysis methods. The results demonstrate varied support for the different explanations. Evidence is found in all contexts for the hypothesis that acceptance of inequality divides left‐ from right‐wing politics. That the left‐right dimension is a divide between those for and against government intervention in the economy, or between those for change and against change, is mostly congruent with our findings. We find less evidence that either secular/religious divisions, or different conceptions of equality, consistently differentiate left from right. Our findings point towards the existence of a context‐independent underlying dimension of left‐right competition.

The study of international relations by definition deals with interdependencies among countries. One form of interdependence between countries is the diffusion of country-level features, such as policies, political regimes, or conflict. In these studies, the outcome variable tends to be categorical, and the primary concern is the clustering of the outcome variable among connected countries. Statistically, such clustering is studied with spatial econometric models. This article instead proposes the use of a statistical network approach to model diffusion with a binary outcome variable. Using a statistical network instead of spatial econometric models allows for modeling autocorrelation in policy outcomes rather than the corresponding latent variable, and it simplifies the inclusion of temporal dynamics, higher level interdependencies, and interactions between network ties and country-level features. In our simulations, the performance of the Stochastic Actor-Oriented Model (SAOM) estimator is evaluated. Our simulation results show that spatial parameters and coefficients on additional covariates in a static binary spatial autoregressive model are accurately recovered when using SAOM. To demonstrate this model, the paper applies SAOM to original data on the international diffusion of same-sex marriage and gives practical instructions for using such models.

This research note has two functions. It first sets the scene for this special issue using the 2020 Irish National Election Study (INES), which comprises several discrete data sets. The note also reports on findings from one part of the INES – an online poll of voters of polling day, which included a battery of questions related to attitudes and behaviours relevant to national politics. The note provides an empirical analysis of the vote choice in this election. Rather than taking a theory-testing approach, we use a more data-driven strategy and identify the key variables in the data set that are of relevance to an understanding of vote choice. Our findings support the views of other recent commentaries of Irish elections that Irish electoral politics is undergoing major transformation. The new electoral politics that is emerging is personified by a clear left vs. right divide in which strongly held ideological positions separate the voters of the main parties.

How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of career paths and generalizes based on the duration, quality and breadth of an individual's experience in politics. The analysis draws on a novel data set of around 2,000 leaders from 1950 to 2017 and uses a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate PolEx. The article illustrates how the new measure can be used comparatively to assess whether democracies select more experienced leaders. The authors find that while on average they do, the difference with non-democracies has declined dramatically since the early 2000s. Future research may leverage PolEx to investigate the role of prior political experience in, for example, policy making and crisis management.

Economic voting is one of the most studied aspects of electoral behaviour. The dominant view is that sociotropic economic considerations are more important to voters in national elections. However, other research suggests that utilitarian motivations are key to understanding support for the EU. An EU integration referendum offers the opportunity to explore whether and when sociotropic or utilitarian motivations are more important in determining vote choice. The unusual combination of two successive referendums in Ireland on the Lisbon Treaty, either side of the global financial crisis, provides the ideal opportunity to test these assumptions. Using data from two post-referendum surveys, we demonstrate that the economy mattered in both referendums but that different economic motivations drove vote choice in each, with sociotropic motivations more critical as a result of the global financial crisis. Our study has implications for economic voting and referendums and demonstrates that context is crucial in determining a voter’s economic motivations in a plebiscite.