We present novel evidence that attitudes toward nonpartisan social groups structure political belief systems. First, we show that most Americans have a rich knowledge of the social groups that support and oppose group-related policies. This knowledge often exceeds people’s awareness of where Democrats and Republicans stand on these same issues. Then, we show that this knowledge promotes what Philip Converse called ideological coherence: Americans who know which groups support and oppose a policy are more likely to hold stable policy positions over time and to organize their attitudes into consistently liberal or conservative bundles. In the twentieth century, knowledge of social groups’ issue positions rivaled knowledge of parties’ positions in its ability to generate attitude stability and constraint. However, as party identification has strengthened in recent decades, knowledge of parties’ positions has become the most important source of structure in most Americans’ belief systems.

Research on the welfare state has devoted considerable attention to social policy expansion. However, little is known about why governments expand social policies serving groups with limited power on issues with low visibility. I call these “benevolent policies.” This class of social policies improves population well-being but produces minimal political gains for the governments enacting them. Why do governments expand benevolent policies if political incentives for reform are weak? I investigate this question by focusing on government responses to malnutrition. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including 71 interviews, I argue that the origins of policy expansion can be found in the government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats with technical expertise—technocrats—can play a defining role, deploying international pressure to court executive support and orchestrate policy change. Their actions help explain the Indonesian government’s unexpected expansion of nutrition policies, which serve low-income women and children and address micronutrient malnutrition.

Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties’ incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills’ scrutiny.

Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means.

Terrorist attacks routinely produce rallies for incumbent men in the executive office. With scarce cases, there has been little consideration of terrorism’s consequences for evaluations of sitting women executives. Fusing research on rallies with scholarship on women in politics, we derive a gender-revised framework wherein the public will be less inclined to rally around women when terrorists attack. A critical case is UK Prime Minister Theresa May, a right-leaning incumbent with security experience. Employing a natural experiment, we demonstrate that the public fails to rally after the 2017 Manchester Arena attack. Instead, evaluations of May decrease, with sharp declines among those holding negatives views about women. We further show May’s party loses votes in areas closer to the attack. We then find support for the argument in a multinational test. We conclude that conventional theory on rally events requires revision: women leaders cannot count on rallies following major terrorist attacks.

Since the 1960s, “the stakeholder,” or affected party, has emerged as a novel democratic subject whose participation in varied institutional sites—from universities to government agencies, corporate boardrooms to international organizations—is seen as necessary for the management of complex problems. However, few specifically attend to the stakeholder as a distinct political subject and consider its implications for democratic practice. This paper presents a genealogy of the stakeholder, documenting its appearance in corporate managerialism and US public administration and showing how racial mobilization, rapid technological progress, and the political rationality of systems thinking provided the conditions of possibility for its emergence. Though orienting democracy around stakeholders permits opportunities for participation in political life, I argue that this subject is predicated on a circumscribed form of participatory politics that erodes habits of discovering a common good, erases distinctions between individuals and corporate bodies, and amplifies the problem of expertise.

Social scientific evidence suggests that labor migration can increase resilience to climate change. For that reason, some have recently advocated using labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation. This paper engages with the normative question of whether, and under what conditions, states may permissibly use labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation. I argue that states may use labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation and may even have a duty to do so, subject to two moral constraints. First, states must also provide acceptable alternative options for adaptation so that the vulnerable are not forced to sacrifice their morally important interests in being able to remain where they are. Second, states may not impose restrictive terms on labor migrants to make accepting greater numbers less costly for themselves because doing so unfairly shifts the costs of adaptation onto the most vulnerable.

Dictators confront a guardianship dilemma: military agents are needed to defeat mass outsider movements, but these agents can overthrow the ruler from within. In existing theories, rulers prioritize coup-proofing measures unless they anticipate strong outsider threats. Then dictators prioritize military competence. I reframe the guardianship dilemma around the central idea that militaries can choose between dual disloyalty options. In addition to staging a coup, militaries can defect by not fending off popular uprisings or rebellions. Dictators fear competent militaries not primarily because of their coup threat but instead because they often survive intact following a regime transition. Low motivation for competent militaries to save the ruler undermines their rationale of guarding against outsider threats, even if they pose a low coup threat. Consequently, rulers prioritize competence under narrow circumstances. Only radically oriented outsider movements that pose an existential threat to all regime elites induce loyalty from a competent military.

Is local attention a substitute for policy representation? Fenno (1978) famously described how legislators develop personal ties with their constituents through periodic visits to their districts and carefully crafted communications. Existing work suggests that such interactions insulate incumbents electorally, creating less need to represent constituents’ policy preferences. Surprisingly, this important argument has never been tested systematically. In this paper, I use data on senator travel and staffing behavior along with survey data from the 2011–2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to investigate this claim. In addition to showing that areas with important campaign donors are significantly more likely to receive resources, I find that local visits may decrease approval among ideologically opposed constituents. Furthermore, I find inconsistent evidence regarding the effectiveness of local staff. These results suggest that local attention does not always cultivate goodwill in the district. Under polarized politics, home style does not effectively substitute for policy representation.

Constitutions empower people to ask judges for binding orders directing state agents to remedy rights violations, but state agents do not always comply. Scholars propose that by making it easier to observe noncompliance, courts can leverage public pressure for compliance when it exists. Yet, exposure to information about noncompliance might lead individuals to accept high levels of noncompliance and reduce support for judicial remedies. We estimate the rate of noncompliance with judges’ orders via a rigorous tracking study of the Colombian tutela. We then embed this rate in three survey experiments fielded with online national quota samples. We show that people find the noncompliance rate in the tutela highly unacceptable regardless of a variety of mitigating factors. We also show that public reactions to this information depend on prior expectations, a finding that stresses the importance of scholarship in cognitive psychology for studies of compliance in law and politics.

Concerned with poor service delivery, a large literature studies accountability of politicians to voters. This article instead considers accountability relationships within governments—the ability of politicians to implement policies by holding bureaucrats responsible for their actions. In collaboration with the Ugandan government, I conducted a field experiment across 260 local governments. The objective of the reform was to empower local politicians to exercise closer oversight over the bureaucracy through training and the dissemination of financial information. Lowered oversight costs increase politicians’ monitoring effort and the quality of services, but only in areas where the political leadership is not aligned with the dominant party. In areas under ruling-party control, politicians fear uncovering mismanagement of funds. In contrast to scholars arguing that insulating bureaucrats allows them to do their jobs more effectively, these findings imply that increased political oversight can improve government responsiveness in settings with a modicum of party competition.

In his ethnography of industrialized slaughter, Every Twelve Seconds, Timothy Pachirat coins a label to describe political interventions that use visibility as a catalyst for reform—the “politics of sight.” We argue that the politics of sight rests on three premises that are all mistaken or misspecified: (1) that exposing morally repugnant practices will make us see them, (2) that seeing such practices will stop us from acquiescing to them, and (3) that owning up to such practices is preferable to keeping them concealed. To develop our argument, we propose an alternative interpretation of Pachirat’s own ethnographic material informed by theories from social psychology—one that leads to a different critique of the politics of sight than the one Pachirat offers and to a different understanding of the conditions under which it can succeed. Methodologically, we seek to illustrate the value of reanalyzing interpretive research through close reading.

Whether international crises end in conflict frequently depends on the information that leaders possess. To better explain how leaders acquire information, I develop and test an informational theory of bureaucracies during crises. Time-constrained leaders delegate information collection to advisers who lead bureaucracies. A division of labor between bureaucracies breeds comparative specialization among advisers. Some emphasize information on adversaries’ political attributes, which are harder to assess; others stress military attributes, which are easier to assess. Bureaucratic role thus affects the content and uncertainty that advisers provide. I use automated and qualitative coding to measure adviser input in 5,400 texts from US Cold War crises. As hypothesized, advisers’ positions affect the information and uncertainty they convey but not the policies they promote as canonical theories suggest. For individuals advising leaders during crises, what you know depends on where you sit. Consequently, the information leaders possess hinges on which bureaucracies have their attention.

A classic question about democratic elections is how much they are able to influence politician behavior by forcing them to anticipate future reelection attempts, especially in contexts where voters are not paying close attention and are not well informed. We compile a new dataset containing roughly 780,000 bills, combined with more than 16 million roll-call voting records for roughly 6,000 legislators serving in U.S. state legislatures with term limits. Using an individual-level difference-in-differences design, we find that legislators who can no longer seek reelection sponsor fewer bills, are less productive on committees, and are absent for more floor votes, on average. Building a new dataset of roll-call votes and interest-group ratings, we find little evidence that legislators who cannot run for reelection systematically shift their ideological platforms. In sum, elections appear to influence how legislators allocate their effort in important ways even in low-salience environments but may have less influence on ideological positioning.

Scholars and policy makers debate whether elites and citizens hold different views of the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Until now, sparse data has limited our ability to establish such gaps and to formulate theories for explaining them. This article offers the first systematic comparative analysis of elite and citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of IOs. It examines legitimacy beliefs toward six key IOs, drawing on uniquely coordinated survey evidence from Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States. We find a notable elite–citizen gap for all six IOs, four of the five countries, and all of six different elite types. Developing an individual-level approach to legitimacy beliefs, we argue that this gap is driven by systematic differences between elites and citizens in characteristics that matter for attitudes toward IOs. Our findings suggest that deep-seated differences between elites and general publics may present major challenges for democratic and effective international cooperation.

Sometimes, people engaged in politics actively refuse to speak for anyone but themselves. These unrepresentative claims multiply in social movements in times of crisis. During the French Yellow Vest movement of 2018–2019, such unrepresentative claims were routinely made by Yellow Vest leaders, to the point of being a condition for having a leadership position in the movement. By making these unrepresentative claims, they declined any representative mandate, asserting their freedom from any instituted influence. However, by claiming to speak only for themselves, they also selected the aspects of their identity they performed. This allowed them to embody the people sharing this identity, recalling the medieval repraesentatio identitatis, but in a way adjusted to today’s greater personalization of politics. Drawing on this movement and on other examples of unrepresentative claims, we can delineate three broad ideal-types of identities that may be put forward by unrepresentative claims: generality, particularity, and individuality.

Many scholars blame partisan polarization for collapsing politics into social life. But these diagnoses lack any sophisticated theoretical basis for distinguishing “social” from “political” forms of identity. This article offers such a framework, providing better grounding for evaluating polarization. Drawing on work on the politics of difference, I first argue that the harms of polarized partisanship mirror long-standing criticisms of essentialist social identities, including the constriction of agency and reduction of compromise. I then show how a more political form of partisan identity could not only mitigate these concerns but also positively contribute to democracy through the promotion of civic republican ideals of active citizenship. I conceptualize partisan identity between the view of the social-identity literature (partisanship as cultural identity) and an idealizing tendency within some recent normative views (partisanship without identity), offering a novel evaluation of polarization and a conceptual map useful for both empirical and normative scholars.

Interest groups representing the marginalized regularly neglect advocacy on behalf of their most vulnerable constituents—those with intersectional disadvantage. Yet, they claim that such advocacy is central to their missions. I argue that interest groups representing women, people of color, Native nations, and the poor strategically conduct intersectional advocacy through coalitional lobbying. I test this claim using a new dataset of cosignature patterns within public comments on proposed federal agency rules submitted by a set of such groups between 2004 and 2014. I find that these groups are significantly more likely to pursue intersectional advocacy in coalitions but that coalition work, alone, does not relate to influential intersectional advocacy. Rather, it is particular coalition characteristics, including organizational diversity and financial capacity, that predict such influence. I conclude that collaborative lobbying is an effective tactic for mediating representational bias in interest group advocacy and promoting more pluralistic administrative policy making.

Many social movements face fierce resistance in the form of a countermovement. Therefore, when deciding to become politically active, a movement supporter has to consider both her own movement’s activity and that of the opponent. This paper studies the decision of a movement supporter to attend a protest when faced with a counterprotest. We implement two field experiments among supporters of a right- and left-leaning movement ahead of two protest–counterprotest interactions in Germany. Supporters were exposed to low or high official estimates about their own and the opposing group’s turnout. We find that the size of the opposing group has no effect on supporters’ protest intentions. However, as the own protest gets larger, supporters of the right-leaning movement become less while supporters of the left-leaning movement become more willing to protest. We argue that the difference is best explained by stronger social motives on the political left.

Do elected officials update their policy positions in response to expert evidence? A large literature in political behavior demonstrates a range of biases that individuals may manifest in evaluating information. However, elected officials may be motivated to accurately incorporate information when it could affect the welfare of their constituents. I investigate these competing predictions through a national survey of local and state policy makers in which I present respondents with established expert findings concerning three subnational policy debates, debates that vary as to whether Republicans or Democrats are more likely to see the findings as confirmatory or challenging. Using both cross-subject and within-subject designs, I find policy makers update their beliefs and preferences in the direction of the evidence irrespective of the valence of the information. These findings have implications for the application of mass political behavior theories to politicians as well as the prospects for evidence-based policy making.