Why are democratic publics reluctant to use force against fellow democracies? We hypothesize that the democratic peace in public opinion owes, in large part, to racialized assumptions about democracy. Rather than regime type per se doing the causal work, the term “democracy” inadvertently primes the presumption that target countries are predominantly white. This implicit racialization, in turn, explains the reluctance of the American public to support aggression against fellow democracies, most notably among respondents higher in ethnocentrism who disproportionately drive the democratic peace treatment effect. Two original survey experiments, a large-scale word embedding analysis of English texts, and reanalyses of published studies support this expectation. Our results suggest that the democratic peace in public opinion is, largely, an ethnocentric and racialized peace. The findings hold implications for the role of racism and racialization in foreign policy opinion research generally.

The profession has been increasing efforts to ensure ethical research in politics and international relations (IR) with robust institutional review procedures. But this ethics turn has not been evaluated systematically to date. Drawing on two original datasets that record reporting on the ethical practices of research in key political science and IR journals (2000–18), we analyze how scholars report on ethics of research involving human participants as well as archival, social media, and textual data from the perspective of feminist ethics of care. We find that women report ethics more than men, women and men report on different dimensions of ethics, and these differences are starker at the intersection of gender and method. We identify a new dimension of gender-based inequality in the profession which, we argue, stems from voluntary practices of ethics reporting that persist globally in academic publications. An agreed international standard of reporting research ethics is needed.

This article is the first comprehensive treatment of countermajoritarian roll call outcomes in the U.S. Senate, 1789–2022. Divergences from majoritarian principles are rooted in part in malapportionment and equal representation by state. Roll calls where a majority of the chamber votes one way while the other side represents most of the U.S. population are frequent across Senate history, depending on the proportion of the population covered by the majority party and the degree of conflict in the agenda. Other departures from majoritarian principles derive from the presence of supermajority requirements within the chamber. Such decision thresholds likewise are prevalent across Senate history, with significant increases since the 1970s. Although the two sources of countermajoritarian potential tend to be mutually reinforcing, under certain conditions they work against one another. The partisan impact varies over time, but in the modern chamber, Republicans have benefited more from Senate countermajoritarianism than have Democrats.

Expanding suffrage is critical for democratic inclusion. In the United States, noncitizen residents are the latest focus of such (re)enfranchising efforts. Public opinion plays a significant role in the passage of legislation expanding or restricting noncitizen access to local elections. Although elite support for noncitizen suffrage is well-documented, little is known about public opinion toward such noncitizen voter policies. What accounts for voter support for noncitizen electoral participation? We argue that the partisan alignment between noncitizens and U.S. voters shapes U.S. voters’ support for noncitizen voting rights. Evidence from two survey experiments suggests that U.S. voters are pragmatic in their enfranchising preferences: voters increase their support for co-partisan enfranchisement but oppose this same policy when considering out-partisans. These dynamics are present among both Republicans and Democrats, underscoring the societal implications of heightened partisanship on American democracy.

Congressional observers have long been interested in the distinction between legislative “workhorses” and “showhorses.” However, when scholars operationalize this by measuring legislator productivity, they often neglect many realities of modern lawmaking by focusing on the traditional bill sponsorship and passage process. To better align measurement with practice, we compile widely available data on bill sponsorship, cosponsorship, and amendments; we also use text-as-data methods to credit instances of behind-the-scenes lawmaking via text reuse between bills. We weight achievements from each of these lawmaking methods to create the Lawmaking Productivity Metric for House Members of the 101–113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship provides important insights about who the congressional workhorses are. In particular, we find that traditional measures systematically undercount the legislative successes of women and likely Black Members of Congress because they disproportionately legislate in less visible ways.