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This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis, namely that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.

When voters support parties in multi-party democracies, it is often uncertain what coalition government the party is likely to join. How do voters deal with this type of uncertainty? In this paper, we use a conceptual analogy between coalition-directed voting and participating in a lottery to develop a novel conceptualization of coalition- directed voting. We present observational and experimental evidence that supports the idea that voters are risk-averse when considering coalition government options. The perception of uncertain coalition prospects of a party negatively affects the propensity to vote for parties, even when holding the expected coalition government payoffs constant. In a survey vignette experiment during the 2021 German federal election, we find that uncertain coalition prospects reduce the propensity to support a party, compared to certain coalition prospects with the same expected coalition government payoffs. The findings provide important insights for research on strategic voting theories and parties’ coalition strategies.

In times of crisis, citizens tend to increase their approval of the government and its leader which might shift the balance of power. This ‘rally effect’ is a persistent empirical regularity, however, the literature does not identify its underlying causal mechanisms. We argue that crises induce threat and anxiety, and theorize that perceived threat increases approval of the incumbent leader, whereas anxiety decreases it. By analyzing German panel data from the COVID-19 pandemic, we causally identify both mechanisms and provide systematic evidence supporting this theory. Moreover, we increase the scope of our theory and show that both mechanisms are also at work when citizens approve cabinet members who manage key port- folios. Finally, we also leverage a comparative survey design across eleven countries to show that our evidence generalizes beyond a single country. Our findings have highly important implications for our understanding of the rally effect and crises politics in democracies.

Inter-party communication is crucial in representative democracies, enabling in- formation exchange and dialogue among political parties. Despite its importance, research on this topic remains limited due to a lack of comprehensive conceptualization and challenges in large-scale measurement. This article proposes a holistic definition of inter-party communication as public communication by parties about others with a positive, neutral, or negative stance, focusing on collaboration, policy, or personal issues. To effectively measure inter-party communication, we introduce a novel transfer learning approach capable of automatically classifying large volumes of textual data. Two case studies on coalition signals in Germany and negative campaigning in Austria demonstrate its effectiveness. The study contributes to our understanding of political discourse and the dynamics of party competition. Our approach advances automatic text classification methodologies and opens new avenues for studying political communication.

The German electoral law to the federal parliament was reformed in 2011 and in 2013. While political scientists have extensively …

With the emergence of digital technologies, the mass media exploited new distribution channels. This differentiation of communication platforms led to a fragmentation of the public sphere. Based on a comparative discourse analysis on the German Renewable Energy Act Amendment 2014, including both print and online media, this article investigates the influence of media platforms on the public discourse. We find that, in our application, the online and print discourses differ significantly from each other with regard to both the standing of actors and the framing of the main arguments. This variation is on a similar level to the differences between newspaper publishers. Despite this variation, the main structures of the print media and the online media discourses do not differ fundamentally.

The German Renewable Energy Act (EEG) is an essential pillar of the energy transition in Germany and reveals objectives of the overall German energy policy. This article analyses the public discourse on the German Renewable Energy Act Amendment 2014. This allows us to detect which actors predominantly impact the discussion and which arguments they use. Our main findings are that (i) political parties and institutions dominate the discourse, (ii) the Act is criticized more often than it is defended, (iii) economically framed arguments occur much more often than ecological statements, (iv) in particular, the distributive effects of the amended EEG 2014 are criticized very often and that (v) the government as supporter of the reform is largely isolated and split by internal discussions on its evaluation.