Why do some, but not all oil-rich states provide generous welfare to their populations? Building on a case study of Oman in the 1960s and 1970s, we argue that anti-systemic subversive threats motivate ruling elites in oil states to use welfare as a tool of mass co-optation. We use the generalized synthetic control method and difference-in-difference regressions for a global quantitative test of our argument, assessing the effect of different types of subversion on a range of long-term welfare outcomes in oil-rich and oil-poor states. We demonstrate that the positive effect of subversion appears limited to center-seeking subversive threats in oil-rich countries. The paper addresses a key puzzle in the literature on resource-rich states, which makes contradictory predictions about the impact of resource rents on welfare provision.

Unequal patterns of cultural exchange between the Global South and Global North are sometimes labeled “neo-colonial.” What, if anything, is wrong with these patterns? Debates surrounding cultural globalization have traditionally divided proponents of free trade and cultural preservation. The article develops an alternative account grounded in a global application of the ideal of social equality. Citizens of privileged societies ought to regard and relate to citizens of disadvantaged societies as social equals. Patterns of cultural exchange play an important role in promoting these relationships. Historically, colonized peoples were often regarded as inferior based on perceived failures to produce cultural achievements. To the extent that unequal global cultural production and exchange persist, the colonial pattern remains. The duty to relate to foreigners as equals implies that Global North countries should stop pressing for cultural trade concessions and instead favor the import of cultural goods from the Global South.

Alexander Berkman’s 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is a significant book in the development of American anti-prison politics, not despite, but because of its ambivalent approach to prisons. I trace through Berkman’s book and archive an unresolved tension between two approaches to the prison: advocacy for political prisoners, whereby the prison is a state tool for suppressing radical ideas, and advocacy against the politics of prisons, whereby the prison is an “aggravated counterpart” of social structures and a site of struggle. Berkman’s ambivalence between these approaches amid his memoirs and activism exemplifies the complex development of U.S. thinking on prisons and enduring tensions in contemporary prison politics.

Mass media are often portrayed as having large effects on democratic politics. Media content is not simply an exogenous influence on publics and policymakers, however. There is reason to think that this content reflects publics and politics as much as—if not more than—it affects them. This letter examines those possibilities, focusing on interactions between news coverage, budgetary policy, and public preferences in the defense, welfare, and health-care domains in the United States. Results indicate that media play a largely reflective role. Taking this role into account, we suggest, leads to a fundamentally different perspective on how media content matters in politics.

How do citizens hold local politicians accountable? I argue that citizens, especially through neighborhood associations, can use bloc voting as a bottom-up, grassroots strategy to pressure politicians for public services. Politicians monitor polling station voting, and communities switch allegiance if politicians do not deliver. I measure the perceived and actual relationships between community characteristics, bloc voting, and water access—an essential resource prone to political manipulation. I analyze an original household survey and conjoint experiment merged with electoral data in rural Brazil, and qualitative interviews illustrate theoretical mechanisms. Bloc voting is more likely in communities with high trust and participation, and bloc voting improves water access for association members. However, this strategy is only worthwhile for communities that can demonstrate their vote at their polling station. In contrast to top-down explanations of bloc voting, I highlight the interaction of collective action and electoral institutions for accountability and public service provision.

This article presents a theory of lobbying by firms for trade liberalization, not through political contributions, but instead through contributions to the litigation process at the World Trade Organization (WTO). In this “litigation for sale” model, firms signal information about the strength and value of potential cases and the government selects cases based on firms’ signals. Firms play a key role in monitoring and seeking enforcement of international trade law by signaling information and providing a bureaucratic subsidy, which increases a state’s ability to pursue the removal of trade barriers and helps explain the high success rate for WTO complainants. The theory’s implications are consistent with in-depth interviews with 38 trade experts and are tested through an analysis of WTO dispute initiation.

The notion that popular vigilance is central to safe-guarding democratic freedoms is a key pillar of republican political thought. Yet, this conception does not translate well to postcolonial contexts without some reconceptualization. In this article, I take up the ways in which two African statesmen and political theorists, Julius Nyerere and Thomas Sankara, reconceptualize the practice of vigilance in the postcolonial context. Both theorists demonstrate that the collective exercise of vigilance is a qualitatively different political practice in the postcolonial context because citizens must simultaneously target internal domination from elites and external domination from international institutions and former colonial powers. Furthermore, they underscore that a shared political vision in the form of a national ethic is crucial for generating and guiding mass practices of vigilance. Doing so, Nyerere and Sankara articulate a distinct tradition of postcolonial republicanism that better conceptualizes the challenges of stabilizing state–society relations in postcolonial Africa.

Can nativist attitudes condition support for LGBT+ rights? The sustained advance in pro-LGBT+ attitudes in the West often contrasts with the greening of anti-immigrant sentiment propagated by nativist supply-side actors. We argue that these parallel trends are causally connected, theorizing that exposure to sexually conservative ethnic out-groups can provoke an instrumental increase in LGBT+ inclusion, particularly among those hostile toward immigration. Leveraging experiments in Britain and Spain, we provide causal evidence that citizens strategically liberalize their levels of support for LGBT+ rights when opponents of these measures are from the ethnic out-group. In a context where sexuality-based liberalism is nationalized, increasing tolerance toward LGBT+ citizens is driven by a desire among nativist citizens to socially disidentify from those out-groups perceived as inimical to these nationalized norms. Our analyses provide a critical interpretation of positive trends in LGBT+ tolerance with instrumental liberalism masking lower rates of genuine shifts in LGBT+ inclusion.

Under conditions of anarchy, the predominant assumption is that scarcity leads to conflict. I contrast traditional Inuit walrus hunt practices to Rousseau’s stag hunt to demonstrate how mainstream international relations has it wrong on three counts: (1) radical scarcity need not lead to conflict-prone outcomes, (2) the historical eighteenth-century context of the stag hunt does not prove a predisposition against cooperation, and (3) the conditions of anarchy are irreducible to cultural institutions or to material constraints alone. I leverage Latour’s “symmetrical anthropology” to demonstrate that ideas and things have an equal potential to structure the culture of anarchical relations and to build on the literature which has established that comparative cultural data can be used to theorize anarchy. Rethinking the logic of anarchy is especially important in the age of the Anthropocene, given the prospects for radical ecological change in the near future.

How does political representation affect conservation? We argue that the mixed evidence in the literature may be driven by institutional arrangements that provide authority to marginalized communities, but do not make adequate arrangements to truly boost their voice in resource management. We study a 1996 law that created local government councils with mandated representation for India’s Scheduled Tribes (ST), a community of one hundred million. Using difference-in-differences designs, we find that the dramatic increase in ST representation led to a substantial increase in tree cover and a reduction in deforestation. We present suggestive evidence that representation enabled marginalized communities to better pursue their interests, which, unlike commercial operations such as mining, are compatible with forest conservation. While conservation policy tends to stress environmentally focused institutions, we suggest more attention be given to umbrella institutions, such as political representation, which can address conservation and development for marginalized communities in tandem.

How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concerns the extent to which leaders reflect the demographic features of the population they represent. To address this important issue in a systematic manner, we propose a unified approach for measuring descriptive representation. We apply this approach to newly collected data describing the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender identities of over fifty thousand leaders serving in 1,552 political bodies across 156 countries. Strikingly, no country represents social groups in rough proportion to their share of the population. To explain this shortfall, we focus on compositional factors—the size of political bodies as well as the number and relative size of social groups. We investigate these factors using a simple model based on random sampling and the original data described above. Our analyses demonstrate that roughly half of the variability in descriptive representation is attributable to compositional factors.

The literature on early modern state-building in Europe has focused on war as its main driver and therefore on states’ relationships with men. Feminist scholars have critiqued the Weberian conceptions this literature relies on as being gender biased. I suggest an alternative theoretical starting point for theories of early modern state-building: the political imperatives created by the demographic fluctuations of the Malthusian trap. Harnessing Foucault’s concept of biopower and its application to the construction of gender, I argue that population fluctuations incentivized demographic regulation, in particular of childbearing, in order to keep birth rates high and maternal and infant mortality low, implying that early modern European states were constituted through the construction and maintenance of gender regimes. I propose strategies for empirical investigation and argue that a more accurate account of early modern European state-building needs to incorporate demographic regulation and therefore requires gender to be at its center.

In this letter, we assess whether the contributions of judges from underrepresented groups are undervalued or overlooked, thereby reducing these judges’ influence on legal policy. Drawing on an original dataset of discretionary citations to over 2,000 published federal appellate decisions, we find that the majority of opinions written by female judges receive less attention from other courts than those by similarly situated men and that this is largely attributable to disparities in citing Black women and Latinas. We also find that additional efforts by Black and Latinx judges to ground their opinions in precedent yield a much lower rate of return in subsequent citations by outside circuits than comparable work by white men and women judges. This suggests that, despite gains in diversification in the federal judiciary, stereotypes about social identities will play a powerful role in determining whose ideas receive recognition.

The Historical Social Conflict Database (HiSCoD) is an ongoing project designed to provide to scholars and society at large with a set of resources for analyzing social conflict from the Middle Ages to the second half of the nineteenth century (c. 1000–c. 1870). Based on original archival research and existing repositories, the aim is to provide a global database of social conflict in past societies by collecting, aggregating, documenting, and harmonizing instances of conflict. As of today, the database contains data on more than twenty thousand events, from fiscal scuffles to urban revolts involving thousands of individuals. For every event, we provide information on the date, location, type of conflict, and, when possible, number of participants, participation of women, and a summary of events.

Theories of discrimination typically select properties such as race, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity as being of special concern. These properties, which are customarily identified as genuine grounds of discrimination, are also at the forefront of constructionist efforts to understand reality as a product of social interactions. Theories of discrimination have so far neglected the important question of how understanding the nature of these properties impacts our theoretical views of the kind of phenomenon discrimination is. This article outlines some pitfalls of assuming away complexities regarding the ontology of the underlying properties, and systematically develops a constructionist account of discrimination, which I call Discrimination without Traits. I argue pursuing a constructionist view of grounds reveals discrimination to be not a discrete process involving a discriminator and a victim, but an ongoing process of (re)negotiating social reality that is fundamentally political. This uncovers neglected avenues for designing political remedies to discrimination.

There has been scant empirical evidence linking associational membership to general trust and trustworthiness. This study explores urban youth clubs in Mali and asks: is membership in these groups associated with greater trust and trustworthiness toward society? It leverages 18 months of fieldwork, including 375 group surveys, 2,525 individual surveys, over 1,300 trust games, and transcripts from 66 focus groups. We use propensity score matching to analyze how members and nonmembers play the trust game with strangers. Members are more trustworthy; they return 12% more to their partners than nonmember peers. We do not find a systematic effect of membership on trust. Trustworthiness in the game is also positively correlated with self-reported trust and tolerance as well as real-world behaviors including volunteering and helping friends. Focus group data highlight five mechanisms by which membership fosters general trustworthiness: bonding among diverse members, bridging, public goods provision, socialization, and psychological support.

A majority of Americans spend a substantial amount of time at work where they have little to no say over many issues—a phenomenon that philosophers have likened to a “private government” that resembles a dictatorship. Is this because Americans are indifferent to or even prefer to work for firms that resemble dictatorships? To answer this question, we field a conjoint experiment on a nationally-representative sample of Americans to isolate public preferences over “corporate regime type.” We find that Americans prefer workplace democracy. In a second experiment, we find that most Americans support workplace democracy even after being exposed to framing emphasizing democratization’s costs. The results suggest that social scientists must look beyond public opinion to understand the lack of workplace democracy in the United States. This article forges new ground by applying a political science lens to corporate governance—a field ripe with politics but bereft of political science.

American liberalism has long been divided between early “classic” and modern forms, a transformation associated with the rise of the social welfare state and the New Deal. The long-running critique of Hartzian consensus theory has left intact that division, which is likewise expressed in literature on the Reconstruction Amendments. This article offers a new staged theory of American liberal development in the nineteenth century, accomplished through the prism of public law. Newly elaborating and theorizing the governing frameworks of the antebellum “well-regulated society” and reading judicial disagreement in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873, 83 U.S. 36) in terms of these institutional frameworks, I show how the dual liberty paradigm of the well-regulated society was rearranged in Bradley’s dissent. By elevating a conceptual split between the dissents of Field and Bradley and by tracing in Bradley’s dissent the reorganization of police powers jurisprudence, I illuminate the fashioning and rapid diffusion of modern rights individualism.

Socioeconomic disadvantage is a major correlate of low political participation. This association is among the most robust findings in political science. However, it is based largely on observational data. The causal effects of early-life disadvantage in particular are even less understood, because long-term data on the political consequences of randomized early-life anti-poverty interventions is nearly nonexistent. We leverage the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to test the long-term effect of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods—and thus out of deep poverty—on turnout. MTO is one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments ever implemented in the United States. Although MTO ameliorated children’s poverty long term, we find that, contrary to expectations, the intervention did not increase children’s likelihood of voting later in life. Additional tests show the program did not ameliorate their poverty enough to affect turnout. These findings speak to the complex relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and low political participation.