Many researchers have identified polarization as problematic for democracy and disruptive for society in general. Because the increase of polarization is so dangerous, its mitigation becomes more urgent. We claim that cross-party contact might reduce affective polarization among party activists even in less established democracies. We leverage a pre-registered unique longitudinal dataset of party activists in a multi-party European post-communist democracy using a difference-in-difference framework. We study whether contact between strong partisans who act as party delegates in precincts on election day reduces affective polarization, while comparing with strong partisans without delegate responsibilities. We demonstrate that party activists are affectively polarized and that they are mostly polarized against the out-party elites and the party itself. Election-day contact with out-party peers has a limited effect on reducing animus towards the members and voters of the party the partisans are most polarized against. Similar to the mass public, party activists de-polarize immediately after elections and the effect persists for at least two months.

It is commonly viewed that violence against politicians increases support for the victim’s party. We revisit this conjecture drawing on evidence from an assassination of an opposition politician in Poland. First, we analyze engagement with Twitter content posted by opposition and government politicians using a difference-in-differences framework. Second, we use a public opinion survey collected in the days around the attack and compare party preferences of respondents interviewed just before and respondents interviewed just after the attack. Our results reveal decreased support for the victim’s (opposition) party relative to support for the government. To explain this finding, we show that the opposition antagonized the public by engaging in negative campaigning against the government over their politician’s assassination.

This study tests through an experiment the hypothesis that heavy emphasis on conflicts in the news undermines political trust and has an impact on citizens’ cynicism and political participation. Findings do not support a uniform negative impact of the conflicts covered in the news but demonstrate a cumulative effect of their levels of intrusiveness and incivility. In addition, we found consistent evidence that personal characteristics influence people’s reactions to conflicts. For extrovert individuals, who are typically more assertive in public matters, have higher levels of political knowledge and feel more politically efficacious, exposure to conflict frames does not necessarily result in lower political trust.

An analysis of the 2006 primary campaigns for the Ohio governorship found that candidates offering the media easier access enjoyed substantially more positive coverage that reflected an imbalance in their favor both in candidate-driven news and in the use of candidate quotes.

In much of Europe, partisans help supervise elections. Working with a political party from a mid-sized EU democracy which assigns activists to monitor polling stations on a rotating, close-to-random basis, we follow activists in pre-registered panels around the 2020 and 2024 elections. Additionally, we leverage data from individual interviews of partisans who monitored elections. We show that monitoring does not reliably make partisans more satisfied with democracy, while satisfaction rises for all activists after both elections. We propose that this happens because partisans experience even classic civic tasks such as election monitoring as partisans, as opposed to other citizens.

Six pre-registered experiments with party-crafted messages, run with a major Romanian party during the 2024 campaigns and reaching nearly 400,000 supporters, show that identity-based threat appeals barely mobilize, while a strategic-voting message raises vote intention by two points.

Where young women have left rural areas, we show the surplus of young men is associated with higher radical-right vote shares in Europe and in Germany through both macro and micro-level data. In German survey data the effect appears among men, not women, and among men who report difficulty finding a partner.

Political differences can push people out of the places they live. In eastern Germany, an AfD plurality in a municipality causes other partisans to leave, which can feed further far-right growth.

After the surprise first-round win of a radical-right candidate in Romania’s 2024 presidential election, mainstream voters grew colder toward the radical right and warmer toward other mainstream parties, as democratic values became more salient.

Indoctrination poses a unique threat in educational content, often preceding radicalization. Despite its societal impact, it remains under-explored in NLP due to the lack of materials where different mechanisms of indoctrination — including subtle ones — can be contrasted. To address this gap, we present a dataset of historical educational texts from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and a novel framework that captures ideological positioning and social value judgments through the lens of in-/out-group representations. We apply this framework to analyze how educational discourse encodes social alignment across GDR and FRG. Lastly, we benchmark multiple models including popular closed-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) on tasks based on our framework and find that automatic indoctrination analysis remains challenging.

Political leaders, irrespective of the regime or ideology they represent, use their influence over state institutions to maximize political control. A growing literature looks at the non-violent means used by political leaders to create political legitimacy and regime stability, especially under the form of information control. This literature focuses on ad-hoc information control and anti-regime coordination that are threatening; this overlooks the possibility of information control that is meant to shape not only the political information received, but the filter through which political information is processed.

In this book, I study the precise means of narrative control that guide political indoctrination in the form of a process to shape collective political national identity and information filtering. I propose indoctrination is a multi-level socialization-based process aimed at creating a political identity that is both supportive of the regime and skeptical of the regime’s opponents. I argue that the purest avenue for indoctrination is schooling and especially schooling via nation-building school subjects which also have the capacity to generate a self-reinforcing pro-regime loop through an individual’s collective memory. Nation-building is essentially a political instrument delivered primarily through schooling; this reinforces the need for political scientists to study education tied into the nation-building process, as a potential avenue for social identity creation, indoctrination, and political control. To understand how indoctrination through schooling is exercised, this study identifies a case study where two competing regimes (one democratic and one autocratic) with the same history share the same national history and then compares the schooling materials of the competing regimes referring to the same historical periods. By contrasting how the same history is used in two different nation-building narratives, I draw the core tactics used for indoctrination by the autocratic political regime.

The book’s main contribution is to bring forward a comprehensive theoretical framework to study political indoctrination in schooling materials, thus opening the way for a more in-depth study of indoctrination input and information control largely based on social identity theory. The book also stresses the importance of schooling materials as a readily available new data source for political science scholarship in both democratic and non-democratic political regimes.

The COVID-19 crisis generated a series of smaller crises in EU member states, especially in the states with the weakest pre-existing political institutions. This chapter analyses the socio-political context of 2020 and the way political institutions reacted to the pandemic. Political party activity was generally muted, despite the existence of local and general elections in the country.