What is the relationship between interpretive methods and decolonizing projects? Decolonial thinkers often invoke pre-colonial traditions in their efforts to fashion “national cultures”— modes of being, understanding, and self-expression specific to a de-colonizing collectivity’s experience. While the substantive contributions of precolonial traditions to decolonial thought have received well-deserved attention in postcolonial and comparative political theory, this paper focuses on the role that interpretive methods play in generating the emancipatory sensibilities envisioned by decolonial thinkers. It draws on the contemporary Moroccan philosopher Mohammed ‘Abed Al-Jabri’s interpretive method to show that its decolonial potential lies in its “reader-centric” approach. This approach is concerned with transforming its postcolonial reader’s relationship to precolonial traditions, and not only with establishing the truth of historical texts or making use of their insights in the present as is more common in political-theoretical modes of interpretation. It does so through a tripartite process of disconnection, reconnection, and praxis.

Now largely forgotten, Lindsay Rogers addressed public and scholarly audiences, crossed intradisciplinary boundaries, and wrote about developments in political science. His career illuminates key changes in American political science, including a turn away from traditional institutionalism and engagement as a public intellectual and toward quantification and the academy, and a separation of political theory from empirical research. Understanding why his work was left behind reveals important events and mechanisms that produced disciplinary change. Rogers's work was lost from the canon because of political and institutional developments in political science, including academic survey researchers' efforts to maintain polling's legitimacy after the 1948 election; efforts by proponents of the behavioral revolution that oriented the discipline toward hypothesis-testing but also made it more internally segmented; and the scholarly entrepreneurs' creation and cultivation of institutions, curricula, and networks of scholars, which developed and promulgated empirically oriented quantitative approaches.

An unprecedented number of major U.S. companies announced changes to their campaign contributions following the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. We analyze the role of corporate stakeholders in these announcements as well as their implications for democratic institutions and business–government relations. Mirroring polarized public reactions to the Capitol insurrection, companies with more Democratic-leaning stakeholders (e.g., employees, consumers, shareholders) were more likely to publicly refuse contributing to Republican legislators who objected to the electoral college results. Moreover, these pledges held up in available campaign finance records through the third quarter of 2021, implying significant losses in corporate political action committee contributions for said Republican legislators. Given increasing polarization and heightened expectations of the civic responsibility of businesses, the partisanship of corporate stakeholders may prove important in mobilizing businesses to protect democratic institutions. However, such stakeholder pressure may also weaken businesses’ bipartisan legislative coalitions and compel corporate influence-seeking activities to go dark.

Those who have had occasion to make a special study of colonial affairs cannot have failed to observe that the subject of colonial administration is one which is assuming from year to year a higher degree of importance, and is drawing to itself a constantly increasing share of public attention.

This access of interest in a branch of investigation hitherto very generally regarded as a curious by-product rather than as a vital part of Political Science, has served the useful purpose of disclosing to the student in this neglected field the failure of the great majority of recent writers to approach the colonial problem in that scientific spirit which in other departments of study is alone held to justify a public expression of opinion.

Indeed, so wide is the range of occupations which have added their followers to the ranks of writers upon colonial government—a range which embraces lawyers, doctors, soldiers, sailors, politicians, presidential candidates, ministers of the gospel, labor leaders, poets, geologists, engineers, and professors of subjects as wide apart as ethics and zoology—that one is almost tempted to believe that a knowledge of calligraphy is regarded as the only qualification necessary for a writer on colonial topics.

How does representation by politicians from specific communities influence these communities’ political participation? Analyzing a natural experiment from Mexico in which a party uses lotteries to select candidates for public office, this paper presents new insights into how representation shapes the political participation of underrepresented segments of society. I find that participation in subsequent elections is significantly higher among constituents who have been represented by randomly selected legislators with a similar social background who are part of local organizational networks (embedded representatives). Furthermore, I show that these represented constituents feel more empowered and that the party that provides this “grassroots” representation is rewarded with more support in the subsequent election. The findings highlight the importance of community embeddedness for political mobilization and have important implications for debates about democratic inclusion and representation.

How do international audiences perceive, and respond to, gender equality reforms in autocracies? For autocrats, the post-Cold War rewards associated with democracy create incentives to make reforms that will be viewed as democratic but not threaten their political survival. We theorize women’s rights as one such policy area, contrasting it with more politically costly reforms to increase electoral competition. A conjoint survey experiment with development and democracy promotion professionals demonstrates how autocracies enhance their reputations and prospects for foreign aid using this strategy. While increasing electoral competition significantly improves perceived democracy and support for aid, increasing women’s economic rights is also highly effective. Gender quotas exhibit a significant (though smaller) effect on perceived democracy. A follow-up survey of the public and elite interviews replicate and contextualize the findings. Relevant international elites espouse a broad, egalitarian conception of democracy, and autocrats accordingly enjoy considerable leeway in how to burnish their reputations.

MacKinnon responds that her theory, while not liberalism in denial or disguise, is engaged in dialogue with liberalism (as well as with other theoretical traditions).

Political candidates use Spanish-language appeals in efforts to increase their support among Hispanic voters. We argue that candidates, Hispanic or not, can use Spanish to signal closeness to Hispanics and posit that the effectiveness of these appeals is conditional on proficiency. To test this, we run two experiments where participants listen to an audio clip of a hypothetical candidate’s stump speech. We vary the ethnicity of the candidate (Anglo or Hispanic) and the language of the speech (English, non-native Spanish, and native-like Spanish). We find that Hispanic support for the Anglo and Hispanic candidates is higher in the native-like Spanish condition compared with the English-only condition. Relative to the English condition, non-native Spanish does not increase support for the Anglo candidate, but it decreases support for the Hispanic candidate. We find mixed effects for Anglo participants. Our results suggest that candidates can effectively appeal to Hispanic voters using Spanish-language messages.

Political obligations vary in force. Though we have strong obligations to obey certain laws, our obligations to obey others appear to be considerably weaker. Because the weakness of the obligations to obey certain laws has been employed as an argument against the existence of general prima facie political obligations, an adequate theory of political obligation must account for this. By employing the obligation to keep promises as a model, I sort out the factors that contribute to the force of prima facie political obligations. Their varying force can be explained according to a general theory of political obligation founded on the principle of fairness.

The Mutual Defense Assistance Program represents the military portion of an important foreign policy of the United States, that of aid to free nations. While assisting allies by grants of money and supplies is by no means a new undertaking, even for the United States, the scope of this program, under which expenditures may soon exceed $7 billion annually, makes it a good laboratory specimen to illustrate the impact of a positive foreign policy on the structure of the national government. Furthermore, analysis of the program clearly shows the tremendous changes that have taken place in the methods of formulating and administering American foreign policy since the end of World War II.

For more than a generation prior to 1916, the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy occupied the same building at the seat of government.

During the past half dozen years or so, beginning in the mid-1950's, a somewhat revolutionary change has been taking place in the research orientation of the political science profession toward what traditionally has been called the study of public law. Typical of the metamorphosis now in process are the recent publication of a volume of research studies in judicial behavior in a yearbook series dedicated to the analysis of political behavior from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural point of view, and the contributions of several political scientists to a law journal which recently devoted an entire issue to a symposium on the prediction and measurement of judicial behavior. Although it would hardly be accurate to say that the new approach is characteristic of anything approaching a majority of the political scientists who are teachers of constitutional law, the judicial process, and allied subjects, it is certainly no exaggeration to state that the bulk of the research on these same subjects, published in political science journals during this period, has been produced by the behavioralists, as they tend to be called. The purpose of this paper is to summarize this recent research in judicial behavior.

Fifteen years ago the principle of majority elections became applicable to all phases of public life in Sweden; and along with the movement for democratization there developed the idea of proportional representation. This principle was urged especially by Conservatives, who feared that if elections to Andra Kammaren (the Lower House) should be based upon universal suffrage with the retention of the majority system, the Conservative party would be completely annihilated.

In spite of common challenges stemming from the common environment shared by all cities in a metropolitan region, continued and even increasing social and economic differentiation among and within cities rather than ho-mogenization and integration are the most significant features of the contemporary metropolitan scene.1 Cities within the same metropolitan region are not only maintaining but also developing distinct and unique “public life styles.” Urban sociology and urban geography have raised a multitude of questions and given a multitude of answers in seeking to account for the fact that cities facing basically similar challenges from the environment react so differently to these challenges. Most relevant research deals with the problem of differentiation and its effects on the development of cities in terms of historical settlement patterns, economic location and growth, or geographical space distribution.3

But differences in municipal life styles may also be the result of differences in public policies deliberately pursued by local governments in the metropolitan area. If this is so, the common pressures from the environment are evidently interpreted differently in the process of public decision-making that seeks to cope with them. It would seem, then, that metropolitan cities are in different stages of policy development. Leaving aside momentarily the meaning of “stages of policy development,” we can ask a number of questions that may shed light on the relationship between environmental pressures and public policies designed to meet these pressures.

The main point of this article is to identify some traditions of American thought that figure in analysis of the distinctively democratic aspects of government. The discussion is centered on doctrines of “representation.” While that term has a generally understood meaning, its application in specific contexts depends upon values and expectations closely related to other largely procedural aspects of politics; and together these perspectives figure in appraisals and decisions of policy.

The “distinctively democratic aspects of government” have broadly to do, I think, with relations between public officials and the population. These can be conceptualized and described in terms of institutions, influence, identification, or exchange, and are so treated in various positive or empirical approaches. At the points where normative critique and empirical description join, the literature of American political science seems to have converged on several broad concerns that tend to organize and orient discussion—e.g., representation, responsibility, rationality, and lately, the “public interest,” of which “representation” surely has the clearest empirical reference. These are overlapping or intersecting concerns. They emphasize different aspects of government and different blends of calculation and control (or intellectual versus institutional elements); but they do not refer to distinct phenomena, and they relate to common normative traditions. Such terms are often, I think, of dubious utility because they tend to obscure the more detailed values at stake in action or discussion and perhaps thereby to discourage more pointed empirical inquiry relevant to those values. However that may be, the interrelatedness of these concerns and the broad relevance of “representation” can be briefly indicated.

Since the establishment of the Nationalist régime in Canton in the year 1925 by the Kuomintang, the government of China has undergone only one major structural change. At the beginning, aside from the machinery which assured control of the government by the Kuomintang, the one organ of political power was the State Council, under which functioned the various departments of administration, civil and military, of law-making and of adjudication. The State Council was a going concern, and the various departments were subordinate organs. In October, 1929, there occurred a change. The Five Yuan were set up, each responsible to the Party machinery and each functioning independently. The State Council was retained, but, except for a brief interval, it no longer enjoyed substantial power.

The government of China, as it stood at the beginning of the war, was very much the government as set up in 1929, though necessarily with many important modifications. Supreme power rested with the Central Political Committee, which was a committee of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang, charged with the direction and supervision of the government. It was not to be confused with the Central Executive Committee itself. While the Central Executive Committee met only at very long intervals, usually once or twice a year, and, being a large body of 300-odd persons, did little more than hear speeches and reports and pass resolutions, the Central Political Committee was a going concern and met every week to decide on important matters of state.

In dealing with the evolution of political thought, most historians and social scientists, until recently at least, have tended to view political behavior and the changing patterns of power in society as rational implementations of dynamic ideas. They have accordingly concerned themselves more with the development of abstract philosophical systems than with the social-psychological contexts conditioning this development. To other observers, more Marxian than Hegelian in their outlook, all political ideas are but reflections of the economic interests and class ideologies of the various strata of society. This school therefore probes for the secrets of political and social change, not in the surface phenomena of ideas, but in the progress of technology and in the shifting economic relations of groups and classes within the social hierarchy. Still others, few in number as yet, have adopted Freud as their guide.