Without formal avenues for claims-making or political participation, refugees must find their own means of securing services from state and non-state providers. This article asks why some refugee communities are more effective than others in mitigating community problems. I present a framework for understanding how refugees’ social networks shape the constraints and capabilities for collective action. I analyze a field experiment where I organized community meetings with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, randomly assigning the recruitment method for meetings to introduce exogenous variation in network structure. During meetings, participants were tasked with resolving collective action problems. I examine the dynamics of subsequent group discussion. Results show that although densely networked refugee groups exhibit more cooperation, they suffer from a resource diversity disadvantage. Group diversity facilitates access to resources that may help refugee communities confront community problems. The novel experimental design allows for separately identifying group-level and individual-level mechanisms.

Recent work suggests that solidarity between people of color (PoC) is triggered when a minoritized ingroup believes they are discriminated similarly to another outgroup based on their alleged foreignness or inferiority. Heightened solidarity then boosts support for policies that benefit minoritized outgroups who are not one’s own. Available experiments on this pathway vary by participants (e.g., Asian, Black, Middle Eastern, and Latino adults), manipulations (similar discrimination as foreign vs. inferior), and pro-outgroup outcomes (support for undocumented immigrants, Black Lives Matter). We report a pre-registered mini meta-analysis of this solidarity mechanism. Across five experiments (N = 3,252), similar discrimination as foreign or inferior reliably triggers solidarity between PoC, which then substantially increases support for pro-outgroup policies. This mediated pathway is robust to possible confounding and emerges across studies and planned contrasts of them. We discuss what the viability of this mechanism implies for further theoretic and empirical innovations in a racially diversifying polity.

Does dual citizenship acceptance increase immigrants’ propensity to naturalize and, if so, for whom does this matter most? We exploit exogenous variation in citizenship legislation in 200 migrant-origin countries to identify the effect of destination country policy reform. We hypothesize that the value of the origin country citizenship moderates the reform effect. We test our identification strategy in two West European countries with contrasting reforms: a canonical liberal reform in Sweden (2001) and an atypical restrictive reversal in the Netherlands (1997). We apply a staggered difference-in-differences model employing administrative data on complete migrant populations. We find reform effects remarkably similar in effect size and heterogeneity, with liberalizing reform increasing naturalization rates by 6.7 percentage points and restrictive change decreasing rates by 6.4 percentage points. The effect is concentrated among immigrants from EU and highly developed countries. Our quasi-experimental evidence informs naturalization scholarship and public debate on migrant political integration.

Democratic governments produce more policies than they can effectively implement. Yet, this gap between the number of policies requiring implementation and the administrative capacities available to do so is not the same in all democracies but varies across countries and sectors. We argue that this variation depends on the coupling of the sectoral bureaucracies in charge of policy formulation and those in charge of policy implementation. We consider these patterns of vertical policy-process integration an important feature of bureaucratic quality. The more the policymaking level is involved in policy implementation (top-down integration) and the easier the policy-implementing level finds it to feed its concerns into policymaking (bottom-up integration), the smaller the so-called “burden-capacity gap.” We demonstrate this effect through an empirical analysis in 21 OECD countries over a period of more than 40 years in the areas of social and environmental policies.

Even as The Federalist is frequently read to illuminate the origins of the American constitutional order, it advances a powerful account of the political future to be created and encountered by the polity the Constitution would found. Central to this account is a proleptic mode of analysis used to anticipate probable political developments and future patterns of constitutional politics, depict their systemic consequences, and identify how those consequences would feed back into the political system. Publius’ proleptic analyses comprise a descriptive theory of constitutional development according to which success on the terms stipulated—namely, the realization of a stable and well-administered constitutional union—would both bolster the new national government and supply the conditions for the expansion of its authority. Together, The Federalist’s proleptic analyses and the developmental theory they comprise disclose a dynamic constitutional imagination characterized by the changeability of authority relations.

Political polarization is one of the most discussed challenges facing contemporary democracies and is often associated with a broader epistemic crisis. While inspiring a large literature in political science, polarization’s epistemic problems also have significance for normative democratic theory, and this study develops a new approach aimed at understanding them. In contrast to prominent accounts from political psychology—group polarization theory and cultural cognition theory—which argue that polarization leads individuals to form unreliable political beliefs, this study focuses on system-level diversity. It argues that polarization’s epistemic harms are best located in its tendency to reduce the diversity of perspectives utilized in a democratic system and in how this weakens the system’s ability to identify and address problems of public concern. Understanding such harms is also argued to require a greater consideration of the political dynamics of polarization and issues of elite discourse, alongside political psychology.

While there is disagreement over the value of public shaming, scholars largely agree that social media introduce pathologies. But while scholars rightly identify the effects of online public shaming (OPS), they misidentify the cause. Rather than solely a problem of scale, OPS’s effects are also shaped by the network structure within which they take place. In this article, I argue that the social conditions necessary for productive public shaming are more likely to obtain in a closed social network structure. Using the cases of Twitter, Wikipedia, and Reddit, I show how the design of social media platforms facilitates different network structures among users, with differing results for OPS. In evaluating OPS by way of network structure, I argue, we can not only better understand why OPS works productively in some cases and not in others, but also derive lessons for how to deploy, discuss, and respond to it more effectively.

Local governments have been increasingly active in immigration policy by cooperating with federal immigration enforcement or creating local offices of immigrant affairs (OIA) charged with integrating immigrants. How do these policies shape perceptions of locales following these policy routes? Using a set of pre-registered survey experiments, we find that compared to local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, creating an OIA produces more favorable public attitudes, with minimal differences when undocumented immigrants also receive access to services. Democrats, especially white Democrats, have the most favorable views of cities with an OIA. While Republicans prefer cooperation with ICE, their attitudes toward cities with OIAs remain positive. Our findings suggest that despite partisan polarizing immigration policy debates, establishing OIAs does not attract the negative political attention common in an era of hyperpolarization. OIAs could be a rare immigration policy that may be effective and supported.

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.

The Trump administration implemented a controversial performance quota policy for immigration judges in October 2018. The policy’s political motivations were clear: to pressure immigration judges to order more immigration removals and deportations as quickly as possible. Previous attempts by U.S. presidents to control immigration judges were ineffective, but this quota policy was different because it credibly threatened judges’ job security and promotion opportunities if they failed to follow the policy. Our analysis of hundreds of thousands of judicial decisions before and after the policy’s implementation demonstrates that the quota policy successfully led immigration judges to issue more immigration removal orders (both in absentia and merits orders). The post-policy change in behavior was strongest among those judges who were less inclined, pre-policy, to issue immigration removal decisions. These findings have important implications for immigration judge independence, due process protections for noncitizens, and presidential efforts to control the federal bureaucracy.

In this article, we offer a framework for understanding the role that racial group consciousness (RGC) plays in influencing Black Americans’ engagement in costly political action. Attempting to add clarity to decades of inconsistent and at times contradictory findings, we argue that the effect of RGC at inspiring political action among Black Americans is conditional on (1) the relevance of the political activity to achieving a well-recognized racial group outcome and (2) individual capacity to assume the cost of engaging in the activity. Analyzing data from the ANES and two behavioral experiments, we find that RGC exhibits a consistently strong relationship with engagement in low-cost political behavior, regardless of whether the behavior has some explicit group-relevant outcome. When engagement becomes more costly, however, Blacks high in RGC are only willing to assume these costs if the engagement has some clear potential for racial group benefit.

What explains right-wing radicalization in the United States? Existing research emphasizes demographic changes, economic insecurity, and elite polarization. This paper highlights an additional factor: the impact of foreign wars on society at home. We argue communities that bear the greatest costs of foreign wars are prone to higher rates of right-wing radicalization. To support this claim, we present robust correlations between activity on Parler, a predominantly right-wing social media platform, and fatalities among residents who served in U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at both the county and census tract level. The findings contribute to understanding right-wing radicalization in the US in two key respects. First, it examines widespread, nonviolent radical-right activity that, because it is less provocative than protest and violence, has eluded systematic measurement. Second, it highlights that U.S. foreign wars have important implications for domestic politics beyond partisanship and voting, to potentially include radicalization.

Are women disadvantaged whilst accessing justice? I chart, for the first time, the full trajectory of accessing justice in India using an original dataset of roughly half a million crime reports, subsequently merged with court files. I demonstrate that particular complaints can be hindered when passing through nodes of the criminal justice system, and illustrate a pattern of “multi-stage” discrimination. In particular, I show that women's complaints are more likely to be delayed and dismissed at the police station and courthouse compared to men. Suspects that female complainants accuse of crime are less likely to be convicted and more likely to be acquitted, an imbalance that persists even when accounting for cases of violence against women (VAW). The application of machine learning to complaints reveals—contrary to claims by policymakers and judges—that VAW, including the extortive crime of dowry, are not “petty quarrels,” but may involve starvation, poisoning, and marital rape. In an attempt to make a causal claim about the impact of complainant gender on verdicts, I utilize topical inverse regression matching, a method that leverages high-dimensional text data. I show that those who suffer from cumulative disadvantage in society may face challenges across sequential stages of seeking restitution or punitive justice through formal state institutions.

Conflictual cabinet terminations are seismic events in democracies, but their consequences are understudied. I argue that the electoral impacts of conflictual cabinet terminations depend on voters’ perceptions of them. Terminations following non-policy conflicts are electorally costly. They signal parties’ deteriorating governing competence, which reduces parties’ vote shares. In contrast, terminations following policy conflicts signal parties’ unwillingness to compromise their policy positions and clarify parties’ policy profiles, thus allowing them to evade voter punishment and junior coalition parties to reap electoral reward, particularly for those terminations preceded by interparty policy conflicts. Statistical analyses using the Party Government in Europe Database dataset support my argument on policy terminations and reveal more nuanced electoral effects of non-policy conflict terminations. These findings are robust to various alternative explanations, as well as multiple cabinet terminations and time passed from termination to election. The findings have large implications on electoral accountability of intra-cabinet conflicts and the quality of governance.

In Western democracies, like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, the number of ethnic minority representatives has been steadily increasing. How is this trend shaping electoral behavior? Past work has focused on the effects of minority representation on ethnic minorities’ political engagement, with less attention to the electoral behavior of majority-group members. We argue that increased minorities’ representation can be experienced as a threat to a historically white-dominant political context. This, in turn, politically activates white constituents. Using data from four U.K. general elections and a regression discontinuity design, we find that the next election’s turnout in constituencies narrowly won by an ethnic minority candidate is 4.3 percentage points larger than in constituencies narrowly won by a white candidate. Consistent with our argument, this turnout difference is driven by majority-white constituencies. Our findings have implications for intergroup relations and party politics and help explain recent political dynamics.

Political philosophers and theorists make arguments about high-stakes problems. This article shows that those theories would be more credible if political philosophers ensured their work was robust: capable of withstanding reasonable changes to their assumptions and to the cases to which their arguments apply. The world is varied and inconstant. As a result, scientists and social scientists recognize the virtue of robustness. This article shows why political philosophers should also do so. It defines robustness, demonstrates its value, and shows how it can be evaluated. Illustrating the stakes of robustness, the article assesses prominent arguments concerning multiculturalism and open borders. Avoiding misunderstanding and confusion should be a central aim of political philosophy. To sidestep these outcomes and to reassure scholars that one’s theory is not subject to concerns about its credibility, it will often be reasonable for philosophers to explicitly test their theories for robustness.

Despite polarization’s growing importance in social science, its quantitative measurement has lagged behind its conceptual development. Political and social polarization are group-based phenomena characterized by intergroup heterogeneity and intragroup homogeneity, but existing measures capture only one of these features or make it difficult to compare across cases or over time. To bring the concept and measurement of polarization into closer alignment, I introduce the cluster-polarization coefficient (CPC), a measure of multimodality that allows scholars to incorporate multiple variables and compare across contexts with varying numbers of parties or social groups. Three applications to elite and mass polarization demonstrate that the CPC returns substantively sensible results, and an open-source software package implements the measure.

Women remain underrepresented in cabinets, especially in high-prestige, “masculine” portfolios. Still, a growing number of states have appointed women to the finance ministry—a powerful position typically reserved for men. Drawing on the “glass cliff” phenomenon, we examine the relationship between financial crises and women’s ascension to, and survival in, this post. With an original dataset on appointments to finance ministries worldwide (1972–2017), we show that women are more likely to first come to power during a banking crisis. These results also hold for currency and inflation crises and even when accounting for the political and economic conditions that might otherwise explain this relationship. Subsequent examination of almost 3,000 finance ministers’ tenures shows that, once in office, crises shorten men’s (but not women’s) time in the post. Together, these results suggest that women can sometimes seize on crises as opportunities to access traditionally male-dominated positions.