Research

In protracted conflicts, civilians frequently encounter low-level, hostile actions from adversary civilians in nearby communities, yet the political consequences of these events remain understudied. We investigate this question in the Israeli-Palestinian context, examining how community-level exposure to hostile actions by Israeli settlers shapes Palestinian political attitudes in the West Bank. Leveraging a novel dataset containing thousands of geo-coded conflict events from 2010-2020 paired with 46 Palestinian public opinion polls in the West Bank, we find that district-level increases in settler hostilities are significantly associated with heightened political militancy among local Palestinians, associations that are larger and more robust than those from local Israeli military actions. A second empirical strategy examining changes in Palestinian attitudes before and after the establishment of nearby settler outposts reveals that this form of civilian land expropriation likewise leads to modest increases in political militancy among Palestinians in proximate towns. These findings highlight the distinct political impact of localized, low-level civilian actions and territorial expropriation—central but often overlooked features of sectarian territorial conflicts—offering insights for territorial and ethnic disputes globally.

How does war affect states’ tolerance toward foreign culture? It is well documented by historians that democratic countries, despite their heralded values of liberty and diversity, acquiesce and even promote the practice of cultural intolerance in wartime. The available evidence, however, remains either anecdotal or limited to a specific context, and the extent to which war-induced cultural intolerance persists has so far rarely been examined. In order to investigate the short- and long-term effects of war on the degree of foreign cultural acceptance, this article focuses on patterns of classical music performances before, during, and after the two World Wars, based on a novel dataset assembled from concert program notes of ten renowned symphony orchestras from five countries (Austria, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) between 1900 and 1960, covering 29,135 concerts and 125,530 pieces. Quantitative analysis suggests that the rate of performing pieces originating from belligerent countries in wartime declines markedly for music written in relatively modern times and that the defeat in wars led to a swift recovery of the exclusionary tendency against former enemy music. These findings demonstrate that states’ security concerns and relative power, rather than political regime types, dictate international transaction patterns, including cultural flows across sovereign state borders.

Despite initial delay, Japan’s COVID-19 vaccination accelerated remarkably from May to September 2021 under the leadership of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. His “campaign” for vaccination, however, did not yield uniform results nationwide. To highlight political determinants for the regional variation, we employ ordinary least squares regression analyses to investigate how the share/presence of incumbent politicians belonging to the governing parties, the Liberal Democratic Party and Komei Party, influenced the varying progress of rollouts across prefectures as well as across cities/towns/villages. The data on the vaccination rate for all 47 prefectures was obtained from Government Chief Information Officer (CIO)’s Portal, Japan (GCPJ) approximately one month prior to the anticipated general election, the national election for the more important House of Representatives of Japan’s bicameral parliament (Diet). The data for lower administrative units, though its availability was limited to only three prefectures, was obtained from the respective governments of Kagawa and Ehime and from a local newspaper in Gifu. The findings reveal that at both prefectural and sub-prefectural administrative levels, the share/presence of the governing parties’ representation in the national parliament had a positive and statistically significant effect on the region’s vaccination progress, after controlling for the local proliferation of COVID-19 and demographic characteristics. Our findings contribute insights into the understudied area of the contemporary COVID-19 health environment, namely how the political dynamics of democracy affect the pattern of vaccine dissemination in Japan.

How do individuals respond to discrimination against their group? The authors help answer this normatively important question by conducting a survey with a large, national, quota-based sample of 2,482 Asians living in the United States during December 2020. In the survey, the authors provide respondents with truthful information about the increasing prevalence of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and ask them to write about what this makes them feel or think about life in America. Using automatic text analysis tools to analyze this rich, novel set of personal reflections, the authors show in this visualization that Asian reactions to discrimination do not meaningfully differ across partisan identification. These findings extend the large literature showing partisan differences in perceptions of racial discrimination and its effects by the general public and show at least one way in which partisan polarization does not influence American views.

Does large-scale violence amid interstate war leave an enduring influence on public attitudes toward foreign policy? This study examines the long-term impact of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. I argue that exposure to such devastation makes survivors more risk-averse, reinforces moral opposition to war, and diminishes support for aggressive foreign policy, and that these attitudes are transmitted across generations through familial and community-level channels. Using original survey data from Japan, I find that the two channels are associated with distinct foreign policy orientations. Familial ties are associated with skepticism toward conventional military expansion but not with attitudes toward nuclear weapons, whereas community-level exposure is most consistently associated with opposition to nuclear weapons. The legacy of the atomic bombings is thus not uniform but channel-specific, with families and community institutions transmitting different orientations and community exposure most closely tied to the durable anti-nuclear stance.

Interstate war is said to bind domestic society together, but it also reveals who bleeds for the state. I argue that unequal sacrifice can sustain wartime support while also creating conditions for its erosion. When losses fall disproportionately on marginalized groups, political costs may shift toward the periphery. Yet, this disparity does not foment dissent as long as exposure appears individually chosen. Compulsory call-ups remove this cover, making the state visibly responsible, and existing disparities then generate grievance among burdened groups, weakening support for the leadership and its war. I test this argument using Russia’s September 2022 call-ups, combining fatality records with protest events, survey data, and Telegram posts. After the announcement, pre-existing war burden disparity predicts anti-war protest, greater anger and lower leadership approval among minority respondents, and a rise in anti-war content on Telegram. These findings suggest that the political consequences of war depend not only on how many die, but on who dies relative to whom.