Sciences Po Political Behavior Seminar

Upcoming seminars

29 May 2026

Johanna Dunaway (Syracuse University)

Local Newspapers and Down-Ballot Political Competition

This paper examines whether declining local news access contributes to incumbency advantage and uncontested elections in down-ballot races. We merge county-level election outcomes for prosecutors, sheriffs, county executives, and legislators (2008–2021) with demographic, economic, and local media data. Reduced local newspaper market penetration is associated with both higher incumbent win rates and greater likelihood of uncontested races. These findings suggest that the collapse of local journalism may be undermining electoral competition precisely where Americans encounter government most directly.

29 June 2026

Herbert Kitschelt (Duke University)

Unfreezing Party Systems and Voter Alignments? The new challenges of AI-Knowledge Society

Party alignments of democratic Western Knowledge Societies since the 1990s appear to have been “frozen” for more than a generation with parties distributed in a two-dimensional space, anchored by extreme left-libertarian and right-authoritarian populist parties and structuring electorates primarily along lines of income/wealth and education. The volume Beyond Social Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2024) provides a retrospective that captures numerous elements of how these systems have worked. But a multitude of challenges may be about to upset them and change the games of party competition, if not the viability of Western democracy itself. All these challenges are generating sharp conflicts of interests about resource allocation in an environment of increasing scarcity and low economic growth and increasing inequality of wealth. But the politically salient lines of conflict may shift from divisions along lines of asset control and levels of education to the epistemic of occupational task structures and gender. The presentation will advance hypotheses to make this case plausible with respect to four challenges: (1) changes in the occupational structure; (2) the global security crisis of Western democracies; (3) the demographic crisis; and (4) the climate crisis. The hypotheses focus on two components of change, socio-demographic divisions anchored in everyday life experiences with the new political-economic and societal challenges and the dimensionality of party systems. On the supply side, chances are that Western party systems transit from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional pattern of competition …. or to a uni-dimensional pattern exacerbating the crisis of democracy that is associated with deepening resource struggles.