Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.

Political candidate ideologies shift during elections

A new dataset of U.S. house and French parliamentary candidates’ websites suggests that candidate ideologies move towards the center between primary and general elections.

Author(s)
Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec, and Vincent Pons
Journal
American Economic Review
Citation
Di Tella, Rafael, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec, and Vincent Pons. 2025. "Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during US and French Elections." American Economic Review 115 (8): 2488–2528. Copy
Abstract

We study changes in political discourse during campaigns, using a novel dataset of candidate websites for US House elections, 2002–2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections, 1958–2022. We find that candidates move to the center in ideology and rhetorical complexity between the first round (or primary) and the second round (or general election). This convergence reflects candidates' strategic adjustment to their opponents, as predicted by Downsian competition: Using an RDD we show that candidates converge to the platform of opponents who narrowly qualified for the last round as opposed to those who narrowly failed to qualify.

Political corruption and terrorism

A study of 175 countries finds that higher levels of local political corruption lead to increased terrorist activity.

Author(s)
Daniel Meierrieks and Daniel Auer
Journal
American Political Science Review
Citation
MEIERRIEKS, DANIEL, and DANIEL AUER. “Bribes and Bombs: The Effect of Corruption on Terrorism.” American Political Science Review 119, no. 2 (2025): 670–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424000418. Copy
Abstract

We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. We find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. We also show that corruption adversely affects the provision of public goods and undermines counter-terrorism capacity. Thus, our empirical findings are consistent with predictions from a game-theoretical representation of terrorism, according to which corruption makes terrorism relatively more attractive compared to peaceful contestation, while also decreasing the costs of organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks.

Political affiliation and school district hiring

Ten years of mixed-methods data on hiring outcomes in Florida and California school districts suggests that partisan affiliation does not affect superintendent hiring outcomes.

Author(s)
Greer Mellon
Journal
American Sociological Review
Citation
Mellon, G. (2025). Competence over Partisanship: Party Affiliation Does Not Affect the Selection of School District Superintendents. American Sociological Review, 90(4), 561-593. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251346993 (Original work published 2025) Copy
Abstract

In recent decades, affective polarization and partisan animosity have risen sharply in the United States. To what extent have these trends affected hiring decisions? I examine partisan biases in hiring by considering the case of school district superintendent appointments: chief executives of local U.S. elementary/secondary education systems. I analyze mixed-methods data on a decade of hiring outcomes in Florida and California from 2009 to 2019. Despite rising polarization, the data consistently show that partisan affiliation is not a primary factor in these hiring decisions. Quantitative analyses reveal no significant relationship between changes in board partisan composition and superintendent hiring outcomes within school districts. I find no relationship between board-level partisan composition and superintendent exits. Qualitative findings show hiring decisions are primarily shaped by evaluations of candidates’ interpersonal skills and competence, even among board members with strong partisan views on other policy issues. Board members discuss a strong commitment to building consensus in their selections. While I cannot rule out very small effects, these results show that school boards do not routinely prioritize applicants from their own political party. This study advances research on affective polarization and social closure by demonstrating the contingent nature of partisan affiliation on decision-making and by providing evidence of a strong respect for professionalism in a critical U.S. public sector setting.

Trends in record-breaking temperatures

The spatial modeling of record-breaking temperatures in Spain shows the effects of global warming and other geographic factors on the frequency of these events. 

Author(s)
Jorge Castillo-Mateo, Alan E. Gelfand, Zeus Gracia-Tabuenca, Jesús Asín and Ana C. Cebrián
Journal
Journal of the American Statistical Association
Citation
Castillo-Mateo, J., Gelfand, A. E., Gracia-Tabuenca, Z., Asín, J., & Cebrián, A. C. (2024). Spatio-Temporal Modeling for Record-Breaking Temperature Events in Spain. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 120(550), 645–657. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.2024.2427430 Copy
Abstract

Record-breaking temperature events are now very frequently in the news, viewed as evidence of climate change. With this as motivation, we undertake the first substantial spatial modeling investigation of temperature record-breaking across years for any given day within the year. We work with a dataset consisting of over 60 years (1960–2021) of daily maximum temperatures across peninsular Spain. Formal statistical analysis of record-breaking events is an area that has received attention primarily within the probability community, dominated by results for the stationary record-breaking setting with some additional work addressing trends. Such effort is inadequate for analyzing actual record-breaking data. Resulting from novel and detailed exploratory data analysis, we propose rich hierarchical conditional modeling of the indicator events which define record-breaking sequences. After suitable model selection, we discover explicit trend behavior, necessary autoregression, significance of distance to the coast, useful interactions, helpful spatial random effects, and very strong daily random effects. Illustratively, the model estimates that global warming trends have increased the number of records expected in the past decade almost 2-fold, 1.93 (1.89,1.98), but also estimates highly differentiated climate warming rates in space and by season. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

Resistance through local practices

In Guatemala, local practices generate forms of disruption, resistance, and refusal that challenge institutional constraints. 

Author(s)
Mallory E. Matsumoto
Journal
American Anthropologist
Citation
Matsumoto, Mallory E. 2025. “ Friction in the field: Milpa, missionary, and scales of refusal in 1960s highland Guatemala.” American Anthropologist 127: 266–277. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28054 Copy
Abstract

This article takes a scalar view of “friction” (Tsing 2005) and “refusal” (Ortner 1995) between ethnography and the archive. The concept of friction was originally formulated in the context of a globalizing world, but friction's perception and experience are highly local. By recurrently destabilizing interactions, friction generates the constant possibility of contestation at the same time that it fosters ongoing renewal and reshuffling of social relations. Refusal, in turn, is shaped by a combination of individual agency and the contextual parameters delimiting any given social interaction. Based on a K'iche’ Maya narrative recorded by Catholic missionary James L. Mondloch in the area of Nahualá, Sololá, Guatemala, I illustrate how refusal not only informs interpretation of the oral history but shaped its 1968 telling. As debate continues over the ethics and logistics of working with legacy fieldwork data, I consider the frictions that anthropologists have to live with when working with archival data and those that we ourselves may generate.

Counter-revolutionists in the Global South

An article explores the life and beliefs of a Lebanese diplomat, espousing the idea that counter-revolutionism and anti-colonialism equally shaped the history of the Global South.

Author(s)
Nathaniel George
Journal
The American Historical Review
Citation
Nathaniel George, “Survival in an Age of Revolution”: Charles Malik, Philo-Colonialism, and Global Counterrevolution, The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 2, June 2025, Pages 600–637, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaf007 Copy
Abstract

While great effort has been invested in analyzing the role of revolutionary intellectuals in history, much less attention has been paid to the counterrevolution and its guides. This is especially the case in the former colonial world in the era of decolonization, where anticolonial politics are often portrayed as having been the default position. Lebanese philosopher and statesman Charles Malik was a candid opponent of what he theorized as the “great Asian and African revolution” against imperial rule. Instead, he advocated consciously counterrevolutionary politics that sought to purify the corruptions of “collectivism, materialism, and secularism” brought forward by an age of anticolonial and socialist revolutions. Primarily known as a principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was in the Lebanese arena that his global political commitments were most directly expressed. This included his decisive role in securing US military intervention during Lebanon’s 1958 civil war, and more fundamentally in his founding role in the Front for Freedom and Man in Lebanon (FFML), the counterrevolutionary, Christian-supremacist alliance in Lebanon’s international civil war (1975–90). Malik’s praxis highlights an overlooked philo-colonial trend in the era of decolonization: native advocates for continued imperial sovereignty over a dependent and rigidly stratified nation-state without equal citizenship. Malik’s ideological and material entanglements on multiple scales foreground the defining part of counterrevolutionary networks in shaping the global history of twentieth century and its inheritance.

Loneliness in the United States

A study uses nationally representative longitudinal panel surveys to show that overall levels of loneliness are consistently higher in the United States than in any European nation. 

Author(s)
Frank J. Infurna, Nutifafa E. Y. Dey, Tita Gonzalez Avilés, Kevin J. Grimm, Margie E. Lachman, Denis Gerstorf
Journal
American Psychologist
Citation
Infurna, F. J., Dey, N. E. Y., Gonzalez Avilés, T., Grimm, K. J., Lachman, M. E., & Gerstorf, D. (2025). Loneliness in midlife: Historical increases and elevated levels in the United States compared with Europe. American Psychologist, 80(5), 744–756. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001322 Copy
Abstract

Loneliness is gaining attention globally as a public health issue because elevated loneliness increases one’s risk for depression, compromised immunity, chronic illness, and mortality. Our objective is to zoom into how loneliness has historically evolved through midlife and investigate whether elevations in loneliness are confined to the United States or are similarly transpiring across peer European nations. We use harmonized data on loneliness from nationally representative longitudinal panel surveys from the United States and 13 European nations to directly quantify similarities and differences in historical change of midlife loneliness trajectories. Compared with any other European nation/region, overall levels of loneliness in the United States are consistently higher by a magnitude of 0.3–0.8 SDs. Middle-aged adults in the United States, England, and Mediterranean Europe today report higher levels of loneliness than earlier born cohorts, whereas no historical changes (if not historically lower levels) were observed in Continental and Nordic Europe. Our discussion focuses on possible reasons for cross-national differences in midlife loneliness, including cultural factors, social and economic inequalities, and differences in social safety nets.

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