Do political preferences translate into behavior? I argue that when individuals support a stigmatized party, they have an incentive to conceal that support to avoid social sanctions. I provide real-world, causal evidence of this falsification of political preferences by leveraging a unique decision by the Electoral Commission in one region of Spain that made voting not private in one of four elections in the same day. Qualitative evidence shows that this decision made voters feel that their vote choice could be observed.

Research suggests that when women stand as candidates for elected office, they do not face an electoral penalty. However, this ignores potential heterogeneity in voters’ willingness to support female candidates. We explore how sexism – specifically ambivalent sexism – affects voters’ decisions to vote for male and female candidates in three Anglo-Saxon majoritarian countries: Britain, the United States, and Canada.

The post-WWII era saw junior military officers launch revolutionary coups in a number of post-colonial states. How did these events transform colonial-era state elites? We theorize that the inexperienced leaders of revolutionary coups had to choose between purging threats and delivering radical policies, leading to important variation in elite turnover and survival. To illustrate our argument, we trace the careers of 674 high-ranking officials in Egypt following the Free Officers' seizure of power in July 1952.

Who gets to "speak up" in politics? Whose voices are silenced? We conducted two field experiments to understand how harassment shapes the everyday experiences of politics for men and women in the US today. These experiments randomized the names campaign volunteers used to text supporters reminders to participate in a protest and call their representatives. We find that female-named volunteers receive more offensive, silencing, and withdrawal responses than male-named or ambiguously-named volunteers. However, supporters were also more likely to respond and agree to their asks.

In association with Creation Theatre, we will be presenting a workshop-performance of Meerut (1931), one of the most important of the Workers’ Theatre Movement’s early agit-prop sketches. Meerut describes the trial and imprisonment of a group of trade union leaders in India through ‘mass declamation’ and was described by Ewan MacColl, founder of the Red Megaphones, as ‘quite the most exciting bit of theatre’ he ever saw. Following the performance, discussion of the play’s context will be led by Nicholas Owen, Associate Professor of Politics.