This study advances our understanding of voter behavior in the digital era and underscores the importance of online search as a critical channel for political learning.

✅ However, this informational gap narrows when the two major parties form a grand coalition.

Together, these results suggest voters act as “cognitive misers,” strategically focusing their attention on parties with the greatest informational deficits.

✅ Programmatic change (e.g., ideological rebranding) further increases information-seeking, especially for major, established opposition parties.
✅ Voters also seek more information about established opposition parties the longer those parties have been out of power.

🔍 Key findings:
✅ Voters search significantly more for political information in proximity to national election campaigns. But their behavior is more nuanced than just timing:
✅ Opposition parties attract more search interest than governing parties.

Using two decades of Google search data from major parties across 11 democracies, I investigate how voters actively seek out political information, and how a party’s incumbency status and programmatic shifts shape this behavior.

(5/5)
This work contributes to ongoing debates about gender, voter behavior, and political representation.

(4/n)
💡 Our findings highlight yet another barrier for women in politics: while flexibility is often necessary in volatile electoral environments, women are held to stricter standards of consistency than men.

(3/n)
✅ Men face limited penalty for similar position changes—and may even be rewarded in some cases.
✅ Interestingly, liberal respondents punish women more than conservatives do, suggesting gendered double standards cut across ideology.

(2/n)
✅ Women candidates face greater backlash than men for repositioning.
✅ The penalties are strongest when women shift in anti-women directions (e.g., on abortion or childcare).

(1/n) 🔑 Our central question: Are women punished more than men when they change their policy positions?

Using a conjoint survey experiment in the U.S., we find that:

(7/7) This is still work in progress. Feedback is more than welcome!

(6/n) This reveals a strategic recalibration: tempering moral appeals to govern effectively, while maintaining loyalty from their base through stronger issue focus.

The broader implication: parties can moderate how they speak without abandoning what they stand for.

(4/n) Findings:
✅ Green parties are systematic “moralizers” of the environment in their manifestos, especially compared to right-wing parties.
✅ After joining government in 2021, the German Greens significantly reduced moral rhetoric on environmental issues.

They rely on moral appeals to mobilize, but once in government, such language risks alienating coalition partners.

In my new paper, I examine this tension by combining: Manifesto data from 21 Western democracies and a novel dataset of German party press releases (2010–2024) (3/n)