↓ 跳过正文

Political Participation

Revisiting the Link Between Political Trust and Political Participation

·497 字·1 分钟
Polihot 政治行为 Political Trust Political Participation Twin Studies Heritability Political Behavior
JOP 88/3 pp. 1048-1065 2026-07-01 Original Revisiting the Link Between Political Trust and Political Participation Edmund Kelly, James Tilley, Sven Oskarsson Abstract Political trust is typically seen as a cause of political participation, and thus, declining levels of trust in politicians and institutions are often blamed for political disengagement. By revisiting the formation of political trust, we argue that this blame may be misplaced. We show that the correlation between political trust and participation is largely explained by heritable predispositions that make some people simultaneously more likely to trust political authorities and to participate in politics. Using variance decomposition models and co-twin control designs with data from three twin studies from the United States, Sweden, and Australia, we demonstrate that trust is moderately heritable and that previous estimates of the association between trust and participation are overstated. This result is robust to multiple operationalizations and specifications. We conclude that political trust may be less likely to affect political behavior than previously thought.

Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: How Politics Is Embedded in Residential Design

·591 字·2 分钟
Polihot 政治行为 比较政治 Vernacular Architecture Urban Politics Compound Housing Political Participation Ghana
APSR — pp. 1-24 2026-06-17 Original Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: How Politics Is Embedded in Residential Design PAIGE BOLLEN, NOAH L. NATHAN Abstract The physical structures in which urban life occurs are an underappreciated determinant of how grassroots urban politics unfolds. In many rapidly growing cities, housing scarcity forces residents into multifamily buildings that create daily exposure to neighbors. We argue that these exposures affect political behavior by shaping residents’ access to political information and capacity for collective action. We focus on the informal, vernacular architecture of West Africa’s dominant urban housing form—the compound house. Compound house residents in urban Ghana participate more in politics than similar residents of other housing types. Leveraging an original survey, including novel measures of tenants’ spatial network centrality within their residential buildings, we suggest that key mechanisms for this relationship emerge from the effects of architectural design on visibility and social ties among co-tenants. Ultimately, built environments must be studied alongside demographic environments to best understand contextual effects on political behavior.