American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its political consequences are often neglected. We argue that this ostensibly apolitical content can create unique opportunities for politicians to build parasocial ties with voters. We study this question in the context of Donald Trump’s unconventional political trajectory and investigate the electoral consequences of The Apprentice. Using an array of data—content analysis, surveys, Twitter data, open-ended answers—we investigate how this TV program helped Trump brand himself as a competent leader and foster viewers’ trust in him. Exploiting the geographic variation in NBC channel inertia, we find that exposure to The Apprentice increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primary. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the rise of nonconventional politicians in this golden age of entertainment.

Can autocratic policy generate incentives for the accumulation of social capital and political engagement? This question is important to understand stability in authoritarian regimes that increasingly rely on governance to build legitimacy and social support. While existing research shows that the incentives for societal interaction embedded in policies can yield new forms of social capital and political engagement in democratic regimes, the top-down nature of policy and the corrupt and information-poor context of policy implementation could undermine this mechanism in authoritarian regimes. We explore this question by examining the effect of the Moscow Housing Renovation Program, a massive urban renewal project, that required residents to organize to obtain new housing. Comparing a matched sample of 1,300 residents living in buildings included and excluded from the program, we find that interactions induced by the program led to changes in the level of social capital among residents in included buildings. We also find spillover effects on political engagement and collective action against pension reform.

Does foreign interference help or harm protest movements? An extensive literature has debated this question but focuses on observational data, obscuring a crucial mechanism for protest success: its effect on public attitudes. We argue that public accusations of foreign meddling damage protest groups by reducing public support. In survey experiments conducted in the United States and Canada, we find that credible accusations of foreign interference erode support by discrediting protester groups among sympathizers and inflaming nationalist fears. Indeed, such accusations delegitimize protest movements even among those sympathetic to the cause. Conditional factors, such as the type of foreign assistance or the identity of the meddling state, have no impact. These findings reveal how referencing foreign backing is a potent discrediting tactic—it influences public opinion, a critical determinant for protest outcomes.

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.

The importance of citizen trust in government derives from its role in democratic theory. Presumably, the decisions of trusted authorities and institutions are more likely to be accepted as legitimate and worthy of support than are those of distrusted leaders and institutions.

The Ferguson case in 1917 represents the only instance of the impeachment and conviction of a state official in Texas. The law of impeachment must then be sought in the proceedings of the Ferguson trial, the opinions of the attorney-general, and the opinion of the supreme court in 1924 in the case of Ferguson v. Maddox, which reviewed the legality of the 1917 proceedings in determining whether Mr. Ferguson was eligible to have his name placed on the primary election ballot as a candidate for governor.

Impeachment at a Special Session. The constitution provides that the governor may on extraordinary occasions convene the legislature in special sessions limited to thirty days' duration, during which there shall be no legislation upon subjects other than those designated in the proclamation of the governor calling the session or presented by him. The facts in the Ferguson case may be reviewed briefly. The speaker of the House of Representatives, on his own motion, had issued a call for the House to meet in special session on August 1, 1917, to consider the impeachment of the governor. Before the members could assemble, the governor issued a call for a special session of the legislature to meet at the same time as that set by the speaker's call for the purpose of considering the matter of university appropriations. The House proceeded with the investigation and impeached the governor, who was thereupon suspended from office.

This essay makes a distinction between the roles that activists and social critics can play in democratic societies and defends the separate tasks of a non-activist social critic. Drawing on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings, I argue that non-activist social critics are better situated than activists to reach certain audiences, cultivate certain democratic capacities, and preserve their audience’s agency while doing so. In Emerson’s case, his concerns about his activist contemporaries led him to craft new ways of critically engaging his peers. At the same time, as Emerson’s life also illustrates, non-activist critics are limited by their roles and must forgo some of their distinctive advantages in order to do activist work. Clarifying the scope of the social critic’s role in this way helps critics to draw on the benefits of their position and avoid overstepping its constraints, thereby allowing them to more effectively promote political reform.

The low value of reproductive labor, and the related “crisis of care,” are often attributed to gendered attitudes about work. This article traces this explanation to the attempted synthesis of Marxist and feminist theories of ideology in the 1970s and offers a sympathetic critique with implications for both contemporary theories of labor and the “new ideology critique.” It reconstructs the explanatory role of ideology in feminist analyses of unwaged housework and tracks its uptake in theories of “reproductive labor” more broadly, via what I call the “naturalization thesis.” While these analyses have been influential, I show that they do not provide a convincing account of either gender oppression or the low value of reproductive labor. I offer an alternative explanation for the latter rooted in labor processes and patterns of capital accumulation and argue for the reintegration of ideology critique with the critique of political economy.

Jack Walker was the author of three of the 100 most cited articles in the history of the Review. Nowhere is his creativity and imagination more on display than in his “Diffusion” article. Comparing the three articles allows some conclusions about why “Diffusion” had such a great impact and illustrates the thinking of a great scholar, mentor, and colleague.

Wedges and frames, two much-studied strategies of American political combat, are generally thought to be partisan weapons, meant to manipulate voters into making trade-offs that favor the political actor wielding them. My inquiry here explores whether there exists anything comparably schematic to wedges and frames at work in attempts by American politicians not to polarize but to find consensus, not to cater to extremes but moderate them. Despite the seeming paucity of such efforts in American public discourse, there is one such common and as-yet untheorized scheme, which uses the two issue positions involved in wedges to overcome the ill effects of reframing and the two value dimensions involved in reframing to overcome the ill effects of wedges. I elaborate this discursive structure by examining its presence in a number of American political debates, showing how it differs from other contemporary normative-theoretic frameworks for understanding compromise in American politics.