Do strategies of state-sponsored homophobia translate into electoral gains? While a growing body of literature documents the increasing politicization of LGBTQ- and gender-related issues by illiberal elites, little is known about the electoral effects of these strategies. We address this important question by studying whether anti-LGBTQ mobilization pays off electorally for government parties. Empirically, we study the adoption of anti-LGBTQ resolutions in many Polish municipalities prior to the 2019 parliamentary election. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences design, we find that these resolutions significantly depressed turnout in affected municipalities, with opposition parties showing less mobilization capacity. By contrast, turnout for the incumbent Law and Justice Party increased. Overall, this study's findings are relevant for understanding the electoral consequences of both elite-led mobilization against stigmatized and discriminated groups and policies of subnational democratic backsliding.

Anti-immigration campaigns have helped far-right parties to establish themselves in party systems around the world. We examine whether mainstream parties can employ wedge issue campaigns that divide the far-right anti-immigration vote to win back electoral support. Wedge issues that cross-cut the anti-immigration vote may enhance the electoral support of mainstream parties, as long as they do not simultaneously alienate pro-immigration voters. We evaluate this expectation using a panel survey experiment conducted during the 2021 German federal election. While our results show that wedge issue strategies are not effective on average, exploratory analyses reveal the potential of strategically targeted messaging in winning back support of some anti-immigration voters.

Can legislative measures against discrimination in court reduce bias-motivated behavior? This study examines the impact of criminal code reforms that prohibit the LGBTQ+ "panic" defense, a legal strategy that attributes a defendant's violent actions to a victim's sexual orientation or gender identity, on the incidence of hate crimes. I argue that such reforms operate through two mechanisms: first, by increasing the material costs of engaging in bias-motivated violence through heightened legal sanctions, and second, by signaling institutional disapproval of violence as a means of enforcing heteronormative and masculinist norms. To assess the causal effect of these reforms, I exploit the staggered adoption of LGBTQ+ "panic" defense bans across US states and employ a difference-in-differences design. The findings indicate that states implementing bans experience a significant reduction in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes.

What shapes public concern about crime? Previous research points to (biased) news exposure, in particular about out-group crime. We shift focus to the step before the news media: police press offices' discretion over which offenses to disclose and how to describe suspects. We classify 2.65 million German police press releases from 2014 to 2025 using a validated open-weight language model and benchmark them against official crime statistics. We find that violent offenses are overrepresented about threefold and foreign suspects more than twofold, rising to more than sevenfold for suspects from North Africa. Selective disclosure thus amplifies the offenses and origins that trigger threat perceptions. Drawing on large-scale geocoded survey data, we show that support for right-leaning parties increases in the days after a press release attributes a violent crime to an out-group suspect. Our findings provide a supply-side explanation for the disconnect between public concern about crime and recorded crime.

Despite decades of scholarship on protest effects, we know little about how bystanders, citizens who observe protests without participating, are affected by them. To credibly assess the effects of protests on observers, we design and implement a field experiment in Berlin in which we randomly route pedestrians past (treatment) or away from (control) three large-scale Fridays for Future climate strikes. We find evidence for a substantial increase in immediate donations to climate causes but no detectable impact on climate attitudes, vote intentions, or norm perceptions.

What drives the supply of crime news? While prior research focuses on the news media, we study a crucial upstream gatekeeper of information: the police. We argue that the police act as strategic bureaucrats who increase the disclosure of out-group cues (ethnicity, nationality) when immigration is salient to signal competence and transparency to the public. To test this, we use LLMs to annotate a novel dataset of about one million press releases published by local police stations across Germany between 2014 and 2024. Using a regression discontinuity in time design, we demonstrate an increase in out-group cues in police communications (1) following a nationwide shock to immigration salience (the 2015/16 Cologne New Year's Eve assaults), and (2) in the days before regional elections in which immigration is a salient campaign issue. Our findings demonstrate how bureaucratic discretion shapes the supply of politically charged information.

What are the electoral consequences when mainstream parties breach the cordon sanitaire locally? While research focuses on national accommodation, initial breaches typically occur at the municipal level. Using original data on cooperations between the radical-right AfD and mainstream parties in East Germany (2019--2024), we estimate the electoral effects of joint legislative voting and committee appointments. Difference-in-differences and synthetic difference-in-differences estimates reveal that local cooperation leads to relative electoral losses for the AfD of about 2 percentage points. A pre-registered survey experiment and local newspaper analysis show that cooperation with the AfD does not shift issue priorities. Instead, respondents more often evaluate how local politics is conducted, and local newspapers report more on political pragmatism. This evidence is consistent with cooperation shifting voters from issue-based evaluations toward process evaluations, where the AfD's advantage on issues carries less weight. Thus, while local breaches of the Brandmauer may risk normalizing the radical right long-term, they impose local electoral costs at the next municipal election.