We describe a strategy for applying multilevel regression and post-strati cation (MRP) methods to pre-election polling. Using a combination of contemporaneous polling, census data, past election polling, past election results, as well as other sources of information, we are able to construct probabilistic, internally consistent estimates of national vote and the sub-national electoral districts that determine seats or electoral votes in many electoral systems. We report on the performance of three applications of the general framework conducted and publicly released in advance of the UK Referendum on EU Membership, the US Presidential Election, and the UK General Election.

Which parties benefit from open-list (as opposed to closed-list) PR elections? We show that a move from closed-list to open-list competition is likely to be more favorable to parties with more internal disagreement on salient issues; this is because voters who might have voted for a unified party under closed lists may be drawn to specific candidates within internally divided parties under open lists. We provide experimental evidence of this phenomenon in a hypothetical European Parliament election in the UK, in which using an open-list ballot would shift support from UKIP (the Eurosceptic party) to Eurosceptic candidates of the Conservative Party. Our findings suggest that open-list ballots could restrict support for parties that primarily mobilize on a single issue.

Do female leaders amplify the voices of other women in politics? The author addresses this question by examining parliamentary debates in the UK House of Commons. In the context of a difference-in-differences design that exploits over-time variation in the gender of cabinet ministers, the article demonstrates that female ministers substantially increase the participation of other female MPs in relevant debates, compared to when the minister is male. It also uses a measure of debate influence, based on the degree to which words used by one legislator are adopted by other members, to show that female ministers also increase the influence of female backbenchers. To explore the mechanisms behind these results, the author introduces a new metric of ministerial responsiveness and shows that female ministers are significantly more responsive than their male counterparts to the speeches of female backbenchers.

Which types of political rhetoric are most persuasive? Politicians make arguments that share common rhetorical elements, including metaphor, ad hominem attacks, appeals to expertise, moral appeals, and many others. However, political arguments are also highly multidimensional, making it difficult to assess the relative persuasive power of these elements. We report on a novel experimental design which assesses the relative persuasiveness of a large number of arguments that deploy a set of rhetorical elements to argue for and against proposals across a range of UK political issues. We find modest differences in the average effectiveness of rhetorical elements shared by many arguments, but also large variation in the persuasiveness of arguments of the same rhetorical type across issues. In addition to revealing that some argument-types are more effective than others in shaping public opinion, these results have important implications for the interpretation of survey-experimental studies in the field of political communication.

The European Union's policy response to the recent global economic crisis transferred significant powers from the national to the European level. When exogenous shocks make status quo policies less attractive, legislators become more tolerant to proposed alternatives, and the policy discretion of legislative agenda setters increases. Given control of the EU agenda-setting process by pro-integration actors, we argue that this dynamic explains changes in voting patterns of the European Parliament during the crisis period. We observe voting coalitions increasingly dividing legislators along the pro-anti integration, rather than the left-right dimension of disagreement, but only in policy areas related to the crisis. In line with more qualitative assessments of the content of passed legislation, the implication is that prointegration actors were able to shift policy further toward integration than they could have without the crisis. C rises are commonly assumed to be catalysts for political action, opening "windows of opportunity" for dramatic and far-reaching reform (Cortell and Peterson 1999; Keeler 1993; Kingdon 1995). Similarly, crises can represent "critical junctures" that are central to explanations of the punctuated dynamic of institutional change (