Numerous representation studies suggest that political elites are responsive to the expressed preferences of their voters, but scholars in the field have called for experimental research on the topic to shed light on the underlying mechanisms. This paper responds to this call. Results from a survey experiment with members of parliament in Belgium show, for the first time, that an important mechanism driving responsiveness is opinion adaptation by political elites. Just like ‘ordinary’ citizens adapt their opinions when learning where their preferred party stands on an issue, politicians update their position when learning that it opposes the preferences of a majority of their electorate. This implies that elite responsiveness involves less discord between politicians’ own preferences and voter preferences than is often assumed.

Evidence has emerged demonstrating that whites no longer reject negative, explicit racial appeals as they had in the past. This seeming reversal of the traditional logic of the powerlessness of explicit appeals raises the question: Why are explicit racial appeals accepted sometimes but rejected at other times? Here, I test whether the relative acceptance of negative, explicit racial appeals depends on whites’ feelings of threat using a two-wave survey experiment that manipulates participants’ feelings of threat, and then examines their responses to an overtly racist political appeal. I find that when whites feel threatened, they are more willing to approve of and agree with a negative, explicit racial appeal disparaging African Americans—and express willingness to vote for the candidate who made the explicit racial appeal.

This paper examines the impact of local participatory democracy initiatives on individual voter turnout in ordinary elections, using the example of participatory budgeting (PB). Such initiatives often aspire to create more activated citizens, but there is still limited empirical research validating these claims. We link participants in New York City’s participatory budgeting process to their state voter file records to test whether PB increases participants’ likelihood of voting in regular elections. We use coarsened exact matching to identify similar voters from council districts where PB was not implemented. Comparing PB voters to similar individuals who were not exposed to PB, we find that engaging with participatory budgeting increased individuals’ probability of voting by an average of 8.4 percentage points. In addition, we find that these effects are greater for those who often have lower probabilities of voting—young people, lower educated and lower income voters, black voters, and people who are the minority race of their neighborhood.