Nicolás de la Cerda

As we wrap up another semester, my public opinion students have put together a great survey. If you have 5 minutes to spare, my students and I would thrilled if you'd take it: virginia.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Every so often reminded measurement in social science takes a back seat to hypothesis testing which isn't great for knowledge accumulation.

More folks should read:

eiko-fried.com/wp-content/u...

We also use agree-disagree scales too much (myself included)

@dpzollinger.bsky.social and I are thrilled "Cleavage Politics in Western Democracies" is out as an SI at @wepsocial.bsky.social!

Its papers explore the foundations of the cleavage pitting new left against radical right parties, and how it compares to the classic cleavages of Lipset & Rokkan:

🧵⬇️

🌟 Latin Americanist Meetups (LAM) at #APSA2025!
📍 Malone’s, 608 W Pender St, Vancouver
🗓️ Fri, Sept 12 @ 6PM — 16-min walk from Convention Centre
✨ Drop-in, no RSVP, pay your way
✨ Come & go freely
Questions? Ask @ndelacerda.bsky.social 🍻 #LAM #Vancouver

🚨🚨 NEW PRE-PRINT 🚨🚨

Prominent theories in political psychology argue that threat causes increases in conservatism. Early experimental work supported this idea, but many of these studies were (severely) underpowered, and examined only a few threats and ideological DVs. 1/n osf.io/preprints/ps...

LAPIS los invita a enviar propuestas para paneles patrocinados sobre instituciones políticas para LASA 2026. Postulece antes del 8 de agosto a través de este formulario: forms.gle/EhLLj5fkdWba.... Los paneles seleccionados tendrán aceptación garantizada en la conferencia.

Joséphine Lechartre Receives the 2025 Gabriel A. Almond Award for “Genocide and Cultural Change: Civilian Survival Strategies and the Reinvention of Political Culture During Guatemala’s Mayan Genocide” The Gabriel A. Almond Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of comparative politics. Citation from the Award Committee: After reviewing a large number of excellent dissertations, the committee has unanimously selected for the Gabriel A. Almond Award Joséphine Lechartre’s exceptional work, “Genocide and Cultural Change: Civilian Survival Strategies and the Reinvention of Political Culture During Guatemala’s Mayan Genocide.”

Joséphine Lechartre Receives the 2025 Gabriel A. Almond Award for “Genocide and Cultural Change: Civilian Survival Strategies and the Reinvention of Political Culture During Guatemala’s Mayan Genocide”

The Gabriel A. Almond Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association…

American Journal of Political Science | MPSA Journal | Wiley Online Library We provide a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between campaign finance pressures and the wealth of politicians. We argue that the heavily right-skewed wealth distri...

Now out in @ajpseditor.bsky.social:

@luciamotoliniac.bsky.social, Marko Klašnja and I show that greater pressures to spend more money on campaigning leads not just to more politicians who are rich, but especially to more politicians who are are *super* rich

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thanks, Rodolfo! Definitely, we have a working paper with @rcastrocornejo.bsky.social on how clientelism can engender positive affects. Paula Muñoz has a great book on clientelism as signals.

1/11 How does justification of violence against the police change when you live near protests that are actively policed?

In this article, just published in @sfjournal.bsky.social, we address this question using the 2019 Chilean social uprising as a case study.
doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...

For scholars of comparative politics, this highlights the need to study opinion formation in diverse institutional contexts beyond established democracies. 🧵/END.

This research shows partisan categories aren't always central to political reasoning. When parties aren't reliable information sources, citizens find alternative ways to organize their political environment.

2) Affective Polarization Patterns: In Peru, outgroup animosity substantially outweighs ingroup favoritism across multiple measures. Citizens are more motivated to oppose the "other side" than support their own.

Why this asymmetry? Two potential explanations:

1) Low Political Trust: When citizens receive political cues, they face conflicting signals, a shared identity (Fujimorismo/anti-Fujimorismo) from a distrusted source (politicians). This creates cross-pressure that weakens ingroup effects.

But here's the twist: only outgroup cues matter. Exposure to opposing group cues decreases support, but ingroup cues have no positive effect.

This asymmetry challenges core assumptions of the Social Identity Perspective, which emphasizes ingroup favoritism over outgroup hostility.

I conducted a survey experiment with 1,546 Peruvians, randomly exposing them to Fujimorista or anti-Fujimorista cues attached to real policy proposals currently discussed in Congress. Results show that political cues significantly influence policy preferences even without strong partisan brands.

Yet despite these harsh conditions for partisan attachments, Peru has two enduring non-partisan political identities: Fujimorismo and anti-Fujimorismo. These are defined not by party loyalty, but by opposing stances on the country's authoritarian past under Alberto Fujimori.

I test this argument in Peru, an extreme case of party system breakdown. Between 2015 and 2024, Peru had seven presidents, averaging just 1.1 years per president.

I argue that in contexts where party labels do not provide meaningful information, citizens turn to alternative political markers. From this perspective, partisan cueing is just one instance of a broader process: ingroup and outgroup cueing.

We know citizens use partisan cues to understand policy positions. But what happens when political parties are weak, unstable, and deeply distrusted?

In these contexts, parties offer little heuristic value and have limited capacity to shape citizens' political beliefs.

Cueing Without Parties: Experimental Evidence from Peru - Political Behavior Citizens infer policy information from partisan cues, yet their utility varies cross-nationally. In weakly institutionalized democracies with short-lived political parties and volatile party systems, ...

🚨 NEW RESEARCH ALERT 🚨

My latest article is now available at @polbehavior.bsky.social!

"Cueing Without Parties: Experimental Evidence from Peru" explores how citizens navigate politics in contexts without stable parties and deeply-rooted partisan predispositions.

📖 doi.org/10.1007/s111...

Is Accountability Polarizing?

Holding anti-democratic leaders accountable is often seen as a risky endeavor. But a recent study in Brazil complicates that assumption.
www.lawfaremedia.org/article/is-a... via @lawfaremedia.org @ndelacerda.bsky.social @isabellatingley.bsky.social Ayelén Vanegas

Check out our new article in @lawfaremedia.org - with @ndelacerda.bsky.social and Ayelén Vanegas - which covers our our working paper "Institutional Accountability and Support for Democracy: Evidence from a Natural Experiment". You can see the article below.

A bonus to being a member of the @chesdata.bsky.social team is being involved in *super* cool projects, like this one - led by @ndelacerda.bsky.social and just out in @thejop.bsky.social 👇

Check out this Lawfare article discussing our working paper on the effects of accountability measures on democratic attitudes in Brazil! You can read the full working paper @apsa-preprints.bsky.social here: tinyurl.com/4429dwu6

A global scale of economic left-right party positions: cross-national and cross-expert perceptions of party placements | The Journal of Politics: Vol 0, No ja

With much thanks to @ndelacerda.bsky.social & a great @chesdata.bsky.social team, we have a new JOP article (early access) comparing expert evaluations of party positions from Europe to Israel to North America to Australia. doi.org/10.1086/736578

Party brands, issue salience, and electoral volatility Rates of vote switching and electoral volatility have risen across Europe. The degree of programmatic differentiation between parties is a crucial determinant of volatility. When parties take simil...

Really pleased to see "Party brands, issue salience, and electoral volatility" published at @jeppjournal.bsky.social .

I argue that if electoral volatility increases as parties become more similar, that logic applies to both positional and salience differences.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Thank you :)!

Thanks, Abby! Looking forward to seeing your new psych work!

Affect, Not Ideology: The Heterogeneous Effects of Partisan Cues on Policy Support - Political Behavior How do individuals process political information? What behavioral mechanisms drive partisan bias? In this paper, we evaluate the extent to which partisan bias is driven by affect or ideology in a thre...

Our findings suggest that affective polarization—not ideological consistency—drives responses to political messaging, with important implications for democratic discourse and political communication.

The article is open access and free for anyone who would like to read it! doi.org/10.1007/s111...