In this analysis of how electoral rules and outcomes shape the internal organization of political parties, we make an analogy to primary elections to argue that parties use preference-vote tallies to identify popular politicians and promote them to positions of power. We document this behavior among parties in Sweden's semi-open-list system and in Brazil's open-list system. To identify a causal impact of preference votes, we exploit a regression discontinuity design around the threshold of winning the most preference votes on a party list. In our main case, Sweden, these narrow “primary winners” are at least 50% more likely to become local party leaders than their runners-up. Across individual politicians, the primary effect is present only for politicians who hold the first few positions on the list and when the preference-vote winner and runner-up have similar competence levels. Across party groups, the primary effect is the strongest in unthreatened governing parties.

We conduct a theoretical and empirical re-evaluation of move-the-median (MTM) models of Supreme Court nominations—the one theory of appointment politics that connects presidential selection and senatorial confirmation decisions. We develop a theoretical framework that encompasses the major extant models, formalizing the tradeoff between concerns about the location of the new median justice versus concerns about the ideology of the nominee herself. We then use advances in measurement and scaling to place presidents, senators, justices, and nominees on the same scale, allowing us to test predictions that hold across all model variants. We find very little support for MTM theory. Senators have been much more accommodating of the president’s nominees than MTM theory would suggest—many have been confirmed when the theory predicted they should have been rejected. These errors have been consequential: presidents have selected many nominees who are much more extreme than MTM theory would predict. These results raise serious questions about the adequacy of MTM theory for explaining confirmation politics and have important implications for assessing the ideological composition of the Court.

My aim in this article is to show that there is distinctive normative value to thinking about a liberal polity as an agent with integrity that can be threatened, paralleling the integrity of an individual person. I argue that the idea of liberal integrity organizes and clarifies important moral intuitions concerning the policies of liberal democracies, especially with regard to their global conduct. This idea provides a novel organizing framework for liberal values that currently seem disparate. It also captures important moral intuitions as to how the tainted histories of actual liberal societies should bear on their global conduct. Finally, this idea explains, in a way that a simple appeal to familiar liberal values arguably cannot, why liberal polities have identity-based moral reasons not to entangle themselves in manifestly illiberal practices beyond their borders—reasons whose significance becomes apparent in scenarios and real-world cases that global political theory overlooks.

Do citizens respond to policy-based information signals about government performance? Using multiple big datasets—which link for the first time large-scale school administrative records and individual validated voting behavior—I show that citizens react to exogenous school failure signals provided by No Child Left Behind. These signals cause a noticeable increase in turnout in local school board elections and increase the competitiveness of these races. Additionally, I present evidence that school failure signals cause citizens to vote with their feet by exiting failing schools, suggesting that exit plays an underexplored role in democratic accountability. However, performance signals elicit a response unequally, with failure primarily mobilizing high propensity citizens and encouraging exit among those who are white, affluent, and more likely to vote. Hence, while performance signals spur a response, they do so only for a select few, leaving many others behind.

Due in part to the influence of Michael McConnell, free exercise exemptionism is generally thought to be compatible with, if not dictated by, the founders’ church-state political philosophy. This article rejects that position, arguing instead that America's constitutional tradition offers two distinct conceptions of religious liberty: the founders’ natural rights free exercise and modern moral autonomy exemptionism. The article aims to distinguish these two approaches by clarifying how they are grounded upon divergent philosophical understandings of human freedom and by explaining how they advance different views of what religious liberty is, how it is threatened, and, accordingly, how it is best protected. The article also attempts to demonstrate how our modern approach expands the protection for religious liberty in some ways but limits it in others.

A large literature examining advanced and consolidating democracies suggests that education increases political participation. However, in electoral authoritarian regimes, educated voters may instead deliberately disengage. If education increases critical capacities, political awareness, and support for democracy, educated citizens may believe that participation is futile or legitimizes autocrats. We test this argument in Zimbabwe—a paradigmatic electoral authoritarian regime—by exploiting cross-cohort variation in access to education following a major educational reform. We find that education decreases political participation, substantially reducing the likelihood that better-educated citizens vote, contact politicians, or attend community meetings. Consistent with deliberate disengagement, education’s negative effect on participation dissipated following 2008’s more competitive election, which (temporarily) initiated unprecedented power sharing. Supporting the mechanisms underpinning our hypothesis, educated citizens experience better economic outcomes, are more interested in politics, and are more supportive of democracy, but are also more likely to criticize the government and support opposition parties.

Is our moral cognition “colored” by the language(s) that we speak? Despite the centrality of language to political life and agency, limited attempts have been made thus far in contemporary political philosophy to consider this possibility. We therefore set out to explore the possible influence of linguistic relativity effects on political thinking in linguistically diverse societies. We begin by introducing the facts and fallacies of the “linguistic relativity” principle, and explore the various ways in which they “color,” often covertly, current normative debates. To illustrate this, we focus on two key Rawlsian concepts: the original position and public reason. We then move to consider the resulting epistemic challenges and opportunities facing contemporary multilingual democratic societies in an age of increased mobility, arguing for the consequent imperative of developing political metalinguistic awareness and political extelligence among political scientists, political philosophers, and political actors alike in an irreducibly complex linguistic world.

Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations—and thus electoral information about broker performance—in Mexican electoral precincts, we find that greater monitoring capacity increases turnout and votes for the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the effect of monitoring capacity on PRI votes varies nonlinearly with the distance of voters to the polling station: it first increases because rural voters—facing larger costs of voting—generally favor the PRI, before declining as the cost of incentivizing brokers increases. This nonlinearity is not present for the PAN, who stand to gain less from mobilizing rural voters.

Across the developed world, the last 50 years have seen a dramatic wave of municipal mergers, often motivated by a quest for economies of scale. Re-examining the theoretical arguments invoked to justify these reforms, we find that, in fact, there is no compelling reason to expect them to yield net gains. Potential savings in, for example, administrative costs are likely to be offset by opposite effects for other domains. Past attempts at empirical assessment have been bedeviled by endogeneity—which municipalities amalgamate is typically nonrandom—creating a danger of bias. We exploit the particular characteristics of a recent Danish reform to provide more credible difference-in-differences estimates of the effect of mergers. The result turns out to be null: cost savings in some areas were offset by deterioration in others, while for most public services jurisdiction size did not matter at all. Given significant transition costs, the finding raises questions about the rationale behind a global movement that has already restructured local government on almost all continents.

This article defends the value of partisanship for political commitment. It clarifies what political commitment is, how it resembles and differs from other forms of commitment, and under what conditions it can prosper. It argues that political commitment is sustained and enhanced when agents devoted to particular political projects form a lasting associative relation that coordinates future action both on behalf of their future selves and of similarly committed others. Partisanship contributes to the feasibility of such projects, and helps strengthen them from a motivational and epistemic perspective. Although partisanship is also often criticized for sacrificing individuals’ independence of thought and action, if we value political commitment, this is a necessary trade-off.

A representation is always a selective and limited reproduction of the thing represented, an idea captured in the metaphor of a map. What is left out of a representation is as important as what is included. A specifically political conception of representation implies limits to the scope of that conception, the nature and character of the represented constituency, and the relationship between constituent and representative, irrespective of variations in institutional design and practice. The limits of political representation reflect normative commitments; consequently, a focus on those limits is central to an evaluation of representative practices. While it is important to look beyond familiar institutional forms, excessively inclusive descriptions of “representative,” “constituency,” or “representation” deprive those conceptions of their substantive content. The limits of political representation are not defects to be overcome by an ever-expanding definition of representation, they are an essential focus in the normative or empirical analysis of representative institutions and practices.

Most electoral fraud is not conducted centrally by incumbents but rather locally by a multitude of political operatives. How does an incumbent ensure that his agents deliver fraud when needed and as much as is needed? We address this and related puzzles in the political organization of electoral fraud by studying the perverse consequences of incentive conflicts between incumbents and their local agents. These incentive conflicts result in a herd dynamic among the agents that tends to either oversupply or undersupply fraud, rarely delivering the amount of fraud that would be optimal from the incumbent’s point of view. Our analysis of the political organization of electoral fraud explains why even popular incumbents often preside over seemingly unnecessary fraud, why fraud sometimes fails to deliver victories, and it predicts that the extent of fraud should be increasing in both the incumbent’s genuine support and reported results across precincts. A statistical analysis of anomalies in precinct-level results from the 2011–2012 Russian legislative and presidential elections provides preliminary support for our key claims.

Do parties learn from or emulate parties in other political systems? This research develops the argument that parties are more likely to employ the heuristic of learning from and emulating foreign successful (incumbent) parties. Spatial-econometric analyses of parties’ election policies from several established democracies robustly confirm that political parties respond to left-right policy positions of foreign political parties that have recently governed. By showing that parties respond to these foreign incumbent parties, this work has significant implications for our understanding of party competition. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature on public policy diffusion, as we suggest that political parties are important vehicles through which public policies diffuse.

This article explores the diffusion of criminal justice policy in the American states. Drawing on policy design theory, I code newspaper coverage of 44 criminal justice policies adopted across state governments from 1960–2008, identifying the image and power of target populations—the group singled out for special treatment under law. I test whether electoral pressure leads governments to disproportionally emulate innovations that reinforce popular stereotypes regarding who is entitled to policy benefits or deserving of policy burdens. I find strong support for this theory: State governments are more likely to adopt innovations that extend benefits to strong, popular, and powerful target populations or that impose burdens on weak and politically marginalized groups. This bias can be explained by pressures for responsive policy making, as my findings indicate that it is the national salience of the crime problem—but not the competitiveness or timing of state elections—that influences state adoption of popular “law and order” policy innovations.

In most democracies, lawmakers tend to be vastly better off than the citizens who elect them. Is that because voters prefer more affluent politicians over leaders from working-class backgrounds? In this article, we report the results of candidate choice experiments embedded in surveys in Britain, the United States, and Argentina. Using conjoint designs, we asked voters in these different contexts to choose between two hypothetical candidates, randomly varying several of the candidates’ personal characteristics, including whether they had worked in blue-collar or white-collar jobs. Contrary to the idea that voters prefer affluent politicians, the voters in our experiments viewed hypothetical candidates from the working class as equally qualified, more relatable, and just as likely to get their votes. Voters do not seem to be behind the shortage of working-class politicians. To the contrary, British, American, and Argentine voters seem perfectly willing to cast their ballots for working-class candidates.

Why does prison social order vary around the world? While many of the basic characteristics of prisons are similar globally, the extent and form of informal inmate organization varies substantially. This article develops a governance theory of prison social order. Inmates create extralegal governance institutions when official governance is insufficient. The size and demographics of the prison population explain why inmates produce extralegal governance institutions in either decentralized ways, such as ostracism, or through more centralized forms, such as gangs. Comparative analysis of Brazil, Bolivia, England, Scandinavia, and men's and women's prisons in California provide empirical support.