Democratic theorists have long argued that states can create more resilient democracies through education. Educational investments are thought to produce more economic equality and instill in citizens greater capacity and responsibility to participate in politics. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design and township-level data from Antebellum New York State, we examine whether state funding for common schools led to higher voter turnout as well as higher earnings and lower inequality. Our estimates support the view that a participatory democratic culture emerged not only because of initial favorable endowments but also because of subsequent government decisions to fund education. New York townships that received more school funding later had higher median earnings, lower earnings inequality, and higher levels of voter turnout. Our findings support the view that maintaining democracy requires active investments by the state, something that has important implications for other places and other times—including today.

A growing body of evidence attests that legislators are sometimes responsive to the policy preferences of citizens in single-party regimes, yet debate surrounds the mechanisms driving this relationship. We experimentally test two potential responsiveness mechanisms—elections versus mandates from party leaders—by provisioning delegates to the Vietnamese National Assembly with information on the policy preferences of their constituents and reminding them of either (1) the competitiveness of the upcoming 2021 elections or (2) a central decree that legislative activities should reflect constituents’ preferences. Consistent with existing work, delegates informed of citizens’ preferences are more likely to speak on the parliamentary floor and in closed-session caucuses. Importantly, we find that such responsiveness is entirely driven by election reminders; upward incentive reminders have virtually no effect on behavior.

Competition among candidates or parties is a necessary condition for democracy. But who counts as a candidate and what counts as competition? The influence of money in American elections makes fundraising an appropriate alternative to vote totals, and it provides a new vantage point to assess the quality of electoral competition. I draw on a dataset of preelection campaign receipts to measure competition in U.S. House primaries from 1980 to 2020. When competition is measured with receipts, it looks markedly worse than vote share measures suggest. Moreover, the difference between vote share and fundraising measures is largest in open-seat primaries, or the best-case scenarios of competition. The disparity between measures is driven largely by candidates who have little chance of winning. The findings shed new light on resource disparities in elections and demonstrate that our conclusions about the quality of competition are tied to our measures.

How do different types of motivation influence the politics of collective action? We study a model of endogenous rebellion and repression to understand how different types of individual motivation affect participation, state repression, and the mechanisms by which state violence affects political contention. Unlike psychological rewards, material rewards are divided among successful rebels. Thus, in material rewards settings, repression that decreases mobilization and chances of success also increases participants’ share of the rewards, reducing repression’s effect. Consequently, materially rather than psychologically motivated groups are less affected by repression and face less repression, but they are also less able to turn early failures into future successes. Moreover, because repression is more effective and used more when rebels are psychologically motivated, rebel motivations are a confounder in estimates of the relationship between repression and mobilization. This can lead to overestimation of repression’s effect and to more statistically significant results exactly when repression is more effective.

What drove an entire region in the Global South to significantly expand refugee protection in the early twenty-first century? In this paper, we test and build on political refugee theory via a mixed-methods approach to explain the liberalization of refugee legislation across Latin America. First, we use data from the new APLA Database, which measures legislative liberalization over a 30-year period, and test both general and region-specific immigration and refugee policy determinants through a series of nested Tobit and linear spatial panel-data regressions. Our models do not support some consistent predictors of policy liberalization identified by the literature such as immigrant and refugee stocks, democratization, and the number of emigrants, but they offer statistical evidence for the importance of leftist government ideology and regional integration. We then shed light on the causal mechanisms behind these correlations for two extreme but diverse cases: Argentina and Mexico. Based on process tracing and elite interviews, we suggest that the reason that leftist political ideology rather than institutional democratization and number of emigrants matters for policy liberalization is that Latin American executives embarked on symbolic human and migrant’s rights discourses that ultimately enabled legislative change.

Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal–conservative dimension. We find that a single ideological dimension accurately describes most, but not all, Americans’ policy views. Using the classifications from our model, we demonstrate that moderates and those whose views are not well explained by a single dimension are especially consequential for electoral selection and accountability. These results suggest a need for renewed attention to the middle of the American political spectrum.

Research continues to find gender inequality in politics and political communication, but our understanding of the variation in the degree of bias across systems is limited. A recent meta-analysis reveals how, in countries with proportional representation (PR), the media pay considerably more attention to men politicians. In plurality systems, this bias is absent. The present study proposes a new explanation for this finding, emphasizing how the size of electoral districts moderates both the demand for and supply of women politicians in news reporting. Analyzing more than 600,000 news appearances made by Norwegian and British MPs from 2000 to 2016, we produce a detailed picture of gender biases in news visibility that speaks in favor of single-member districts in plurality systems. Although PR is generally recognized as advantageous for the political representation of women, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the link between electoral systems and gender equality.

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.

Histories of political science and of the laws of war identify the nineteenth-century scholar Francis Lieber as their modern founder. His 1863 General Orders 100 codified the modern laws of war, internationalizing his political thought. Yet, relatively unremarked is that Lieber wrote his foundational texts during U.S. settler colonization, which he justified in whole. I argue that GO100 facilitated settler colonial violence by defining modern war as a public war, arrogating it to sovereign states; distinguishing revenge from retaliation, attributing revenge to the “savage”; and elevating a certain racialized/gendered governance, ascribing it to the Cis-Caucasian race. Producing Native peoples and Native wars as lacking in the proper characteristics of sovereign belligerency resulted in a subordination of status and a legitimation of exterminatory tactics that were subsequently universalized and (re)internationalized through GO100’s determinative influence on the laws of war. Tracing GO100 further exposes the founding of the discipline in Native peoples’ dispossession and extermination.

What is the relationship between armed violence and patriarchal values? This question is addressed with the help of a survey of young men in the conflict-affected southern provinces of Thailand. In Study 1 we find that men with more patriarchal values are more prone to volunteer for paramilitary service. Study 2 uses a natural experiment made possible by the conscription lottery in Thailand to compare survey responses of men who were involuntarily enlisted to do Military Conscription Service (treatment group) with the responses of men who participated in the lottery but were not enlisted (control group). We find no difference between the treatment and control groups in patriarchal values. We conclude that patriarchal values drive voluntary participation in armed conflict, whereas military service as a conscript in a conflict zone does not cause patriarchal values.

The right to vote is a keystone of democracy, but many groups, including those that were long excluded from the ballot, fail to exercise their rights in large numbers. In the United States, cutting edge research has argued that the first women to cast ballots were “peripheral” voters: their decisions to participate were even more sensitive to electoral competition than were men’s, producing larger gender gaps in turnout in less competitive districts. This paper argues that the portability of the peripheral voting thesis depends on the electoral institutions when suffrage was granted. Using the example of Norway, which transitioned from majoritarian rules to proportional representation just a few years after women won the vote, I show that proportional representation, which increases competition on average, produces a dramatic fall in the gender turnout gap, particularly in previously uncompetitive districts. These findings suggest that electoral systems, more than gender, made women peripheral voters

A prominent and publicly influential literature challenges the quality of democratic decision making, drawing on political science findings with specific claims about the ubiquity of cognitive bias to lament citizens’ incompetence. A competing literature in democratic theory defends the wisdom of crowds, drawing on a cluster of models in support of the capacity of ordinary citizens to produce correct outcomes. In this Letter, we draw on recent findings in psychology to demonstrate that the former literature is based on outdated and erroneous claims and that the latter is overly sanguine about the circumstances that yield reliable collective decision making. By contrast, “interactionist” scholarship shows how individual-level biases are not devastating for group problem solving, given appropriate conditions. This provides possible microfoundations for a broader research agenda similar to that implemented by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues on common-good provision, investigating how different group structures are associated with both success and failure in democratic decision making. This agenda would have implications for both democratic theory and democratic practice.

Gender differences in concern about climate change are highly correlated with economic development: when countries are wealthier, a gap emerges whereby women are more likely than men to express concern about our changing climate. These differences stem from cross-national variation in men’s attitudes. Men, more than women, tend to be less concerned about climate change when countries are wealthier. This article develops a new theory about the perceived costs and benefits of climate mitigation policy to explain this pattern. At the country level, the perceived benefits of mitigation tend to decrease with economic development, whereas the perceived costs increase. At the individual level, the perceived costs of mitigation tend to increase with economic development for men more than for women. Evidence from existing surveys from every world region, an original 10-country survey in the Americas and Europe, and focus groups in Peru and the United States support the theory.

Research from the United States and Europe suggests that affluent citizens enjoy considerably more policy influence than do average citizens and the poor. I examine the extent of unequal policy responsiveness in one of the countries that have gone farthest in reducing economic inequality and restricting money in politics: Norway. I use an original dataset on public opinion and public policy containing 603 specific issues over five decades (1966–2014). The results show that although policy is certainly skewed toward the preferences of the privileged, Norway stands out among previously studied cases for two reasons: (1) The preferences of the poor seem to have some sway on economic issues and (2) not all affluent citizens get their way: educational attainment appears to be the more important determinant. The Norwegian case suggests that influence need not be as dependent upon affluence as in the United States.

We study the international origins of the neo-welfare state in Britain during the era of globalization before World War I. We introduce a new mechanism linking trade to the expansion of the state. In addition to increasing assessments of the volatility of employment in a market economy, trade shocks changed beliefs about the deservingness of the poor. Employing a shift-share measure of local exposure to German imports, we show that rising imports caused worse labor market outcomes from 1880 to 1910. Import competition led to a decrease in support for the Conservative Party in national elections after 1900, when the Liberal Party supported welfare state reforms. We further show that rising imports increased the use in local newspapers of scientific terms like “unemployment” relative to pejorative terms like “vagrancy” to describe the poor. Political responses to globalization helped shape voter support for the modern British welfare state at its inception.

Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) has become a touchstone of democratic theory. Commentators of unusual ideological range uphold the book as politically exemplary. This article demonstrates that recent theoretical celebrations of Democratic Vistas are sanitized and incomplete. I expose the antidemocratic side of Democratic Vistas by analyzing (1) its philosophy of death and (2) its politics of race. Whitman framed his immortalist response to death within an imperialist historical teleology. That teleology entailed violations of Native sovereignty, the political inequality of Black Americans, and the projection of both Black and Native peoples’ evolutionary extinction. Democratic Vistas emerges from this analysis as both necropolitical and white supremacist. If, as Richard Rorty argues, Vistas models a salutary form of reformist “national pride,” then it also illustrates the dangerous susceptibility of such pride to moral innocence and self-deceit.

Police, like other bureaucratic agencies, are responsible for collecting and disseminating policy-relevant data. Nonetheless, critical data, including killings by police, often go unreported. We argue that this is due in part to the limited oversight capacity of legislative bodies to whom police are accountable. Although many local assemblies lack the means for effective oversight, well-resourced state legislatures may induce transparency from state and substate agencies. This argument is evaluated in two studies of police transparency in the United States. First, we examine the compliance of 19,095 state, county, and municipal police agencies with official data requests over five decades, finding strong positive effects of state legislative capacity on transparency. Second, we examine the accuracy of transmitted data on killings by police, finding that lethality is systematically underreported in states with lower-capacity legislatures. Collectively, our study has implications for research on policing, legislatures, agency control, and analyses of government data.

Popular discourse about freedom of speech tends to default to the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, notwithstanding empirical evidence undermining this concept. Its persistence illustrates the profound attachment freedom of speech inspires, despite the difficulty of justifying it in epistemic terms. I suggest that the ancient Greek historian Herodotus offers a compelling alternative to the marketplace metaphor with his account of isegoria at Athens. In Herodotus’s telling, Athenian equal right of speech is worthwhile not because of its effects on speech but because of its effect on political culture; equal speech energizes the Athenians and Athens. He thus offers a nonepistemic defense of the right to speak, defending it instead in terms of power and belonging. Yet his account also highlights how Athenian equal speech unleashes political harms and therefore offers a way to defend free speech without minimizing its dangers. Herodotus thus helps us productively reframe contemporary free speech debates.

There is a notable gap in the academic literature on racism within European Union institutions. This article scrutinizes racism and normative whiteness in one of these institutions—namely, the European Parliament. The article asks how European whiteness, as a norm, is related to and sustains racism in the European Parliament and how this affects efforts to tackle racism and formulate internal antiracist practices within the institution. The research material consists of interviews, parliamentary ethnography, and official document data, and the empirical analysis is divided into three levels: individual, political group, and parliamentary. An important contribution is to demonstrate the techniques of reproducing whiteness as an institutional norm and racialized power relations in the European Parliament. This avoids linking racism to only the actions and attitudes of individuals and enables the article to address how racism is reproduced through the Parliament as an institution.

Developmentalism is the idea that progress entails the temporal movement of societies along a universal trajectory. Prevailing accounts conceptualize Eurocentric developmental discourses as ideological weapons of imperial domination, specifically because they defer colonial claims to popular self-rule. Rejecting the idea that these historical entanglements exhaust the meanings of developmental thought, this article sheds light on anticolonial debates over developmentalism. Turning to Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney, it reconstructs what I call “popular anticolonial developmentalism,” as a way of construing popular legitimation in actual contexts of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. From the premise that capitalist-imperialism “deflected” the historical motion of colonized societies, popular anticolonial developmentalism places the agencies of progressive transformation with democratically empowered popular subjects. Shifting the lens of “decolonizing political theory” from epistemic critique to worldly anticolonialism shows how developmentalism became a primary idiom for contesting and reimagining anticolonial futures. In turn, anticolonial practices reshaped developmentalism’s very conceptual parameters.