The Chinese government is revolutionizing digital surveillance at home and exporting these technologies abroad. Do these technology transfers help recipient governments expand digital surveillance, impose internet shutdowns, filter the internet, and target repression for online content? We focus on Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications provider, which is partly state-owned and increasingly regarded as an instrument of its foreign policy. Using a global sample and an identification strategy based on generalized synthetic controls, we show that the effect of Huawei transfers depends on preexisting political institutions in recipient countries. In the world’s autocracies, Huawei technology facilitates digital repression. We find no effect in the world’s democracies, which are more likely to have laws that regulate digital privacy, institutions that punish government violations, and vibrant civil societies that step in when institutions come under strain. Most broadly, this article advances a large literature about the geopolitical implications of China’s rise.

Scholarly work in American politics has yet to confront one of the nation’s starkest inequalities: lethal violence. The risk falls disproportionately on Black Americans, but much like poverty and inequality, lethal violence is a broadly American problem that African Americans are disproportionately likely to experience. The lack of attention to life-threatening violence has limited our understanding of race, criminal justice, and the nature of the American state. We draw on work in American political development and racial politics to extend a racialized state failure framework for understanding the United States as a high-violence society. Life-threatening violence declined dramatically in the nineteenth century in countries where state building involved the integrated consolidation of centralized violence monopolization and universal male suffrage. Such efforts faltered in the US, however, and violence thrived. We argue that this racialized state failure is the result of two reinforcing features of American politics: anti-transformative racial orders and institutional fragmentation. Fragmentation has long provided opportunities for anti-transformative racial orders to limit national intervention in violence control and enfranchisement, even during critical junctures when institutions are less determinate, and actions by decision makers are more likely to generate change. We illustrate the disruption of state building by racial orders, which minimized the state’s capacity to delegitimize violent self-help during two critical junctures in the US: Reconstruction and the crime wave of the mid- to late twentieth century. The resulting institutional configuration, which we refer to as forced localism, reinforces the jurisdictional authority of highly constrained state and local institutions in violence attenuation. The consequence is exceptionally high rates of serious violence and a harsh and exclusionary criminal justice system, with Black Americans exceptionally vulnerable to both.

A schism between political theory and the broader discipline frequently shapes political science. How, when, and why did this occur? Deploying new archival evidence, I show how a cadre of leading political theorists between the 1940s and 1970s identified their vocation with humanism, presenting it as eternally opposed to the practices of “positivists” and “methodists.” To tell this story, I focus on key figures, Leo Strauss and Sheldon Wolin, and critical institutions—the Conference for the Study of Political Thought and the journal Political Theory—to recount how political theory went its own way and the consequences of it doing so.

Authoritarian states are intensifying bloc-building efforts. While the authoritarian regionalism literature suggests that membership in these “clubs of autocrats” can bolster domestic support for authoritarian leaders, such external recognition can also pose challenges, especially when aligning with “toxic” authoritarian partners. We argue that authoritarian regimes attempt to solve this problem by crafting strategic narratives and communicating them through regime-loyal media to the general public. The study examines strategic narratives of bloc building used by Russia and China in the first year after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022. Using “text-as-data” methods and qualitative analysis, we find important similarities and differences in the narratives of these two countries. Both use narratives highly critical of the United States and NATO. However, while Russia has crafted a “fortress narrative” that focuses on external threats and non-Western resilience, China promotes a “bridge narrative,” advocating for spanning geopolitical gaps and championing global integration. Both narrative strategies converge in their criticism of shared adversaries but diverge in their portrayals of the blocs they lead.

In public life, the problem of civility is often presented as a choice over whether citizens should recover social norms of civility to sustain politics in the face of polarization or else contest demands for civility to politicize social inequalities. Political theorists often respond by treating this as an epistemological problem requiring conceptual clarification. By distinguishing between civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness, for instance, they promise to clarify when it is appropriate to conform to social norms and when it might be morally permissible to be rude or disrespectful. While valid in its own terms, such an approach presupposes an impoverished conception of both the subject and the politics of civility. Rather than ask when and why we should choose to be civil (or not), in this article we ask: what is produced when citizens are civil or uncivil within a given situation? We consider this by turning to two feminist interlocutors: Anna Julia Cooper and Hannah Gadsby. Engaging with their reflections on and interventions within situations in which civility rises to the level of explicit attention provides the basis for a more adequate understanding of the subject of civility. Cooper and Gadsby each highlight how the subject does not simply choose whether to conform to social norms but is both constituted by the situation within which they act while also constituting the situation of which they are a part. This opens the way to a more adequate understanding of the politics of civility. As an embodied negotiation of social norms and political principles, Cooper and Gadsby show how this involves reading situations, expanding situations to interpellate others, and disclosing the limits of a situation.

Imagining oneself in another’s position can soften animus and promote empathy. When one’s loved ones have intense contact with carceral institutions, it can provoke a sense of injustice and political mobilization. Drawing on these insights, I design a survey experiment which assigns respondents to a no-treatment condition, an informational control, an egocentric perspective-taking exercise (imagining they are incarcerated), or a surrogate perspective-taking exercise (imagining someone close to them is incarcerated). I test the effects of the treatments on attitudes toward prisoner release and a semi-behavioral measure—whether respondents write a message to their sheriff in support of release. Relative to the no-treatment condition, the informational control doesn’t elicit changes. However, egocentric and surrogate perspective-taking can increase pro-release attitudes and mobilize respondents to write in support of release. These results push forward the literature on punitive attitudes by considering what forces might mobilize Americans against the carceral state.

When deciding whether to support a military operation, do citizens in democracies weigh whether soldiers themselves support the operation? Recent research has concluded that, in the United States, public support for military operations rests in part on people’s beliefs that soldiers favor their own deployment. However, it is not known whether this finding extends beyond the United States to democracies with diverse national citizenship discourses and threat profiles, and its theoretical basis is not well understood. This article addresses both these gaps. Using novel survey data and an experiment in four democracies with divergent citizenship traditions—France, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States—we show that, in all four nations, support for military operations depends significantly on whether people believe that soldiers themselves favor the operation. We highlight two reasons: (1) battlefield performance (respondents think that soldiers who favor their mission fight better), and (2) soldier consent (humans’ capacity for empathy makes them sensitive to whether soldiers are willingly sent into harm’s way). This article has significant implications for debates on public support for the use of military force, the nature of citizenship in modern democracies, and contemporary militarism.

Few studies examine how often people of color voice their views or shape the discussion in civic or political decision-making groups. Existing studies do not link participants’ private preferences to what they say and lack data on racial inequalities in individuals’ public speech. We analyze a large sample of citizens randomized to groups tasked with deciding on punishment for corporate malfeasance, an issue of consequence for communities of color. We develop systematic measures of racial inequality in voice and uptake during discussion. We find that members of color speak less and are less likely to mention their own preferences. These effects are not explained by racial differences in preferences or by being the lone racial minority. Race also shapes the uptake of preferences during discussion. A seat at the table does not suffice for equal voice.

There is growing attention to the role of organized labor in maintaining and expanding democratic institutions in the United States. In this article, we investigate the effect of right-to-work laws on electoral democracy in the states. We theorize a series of mechanisms by which labor unions contribute to the maintenance and expansion of democratic institutions, including contributing money to campaigns and influencing the electorate. Right-to-work laws, by limiting labor unions’ ability to raise funds, reduce the strength of these mechanisms and send signals to political elites about the organizational balance of power in their states. Using recent advances in difference-in-differences analysis, we find that right-to-work laws had a substantial negative effect on state-level electoral democracy in recent decades, even net of Republican control of government. Although the difficulty of causal identification in this context warrants caution, the findings speak to the importance of organized labor in shaping democratic institutions.

The theory and practice of what has come to be called “deliberative democracy” have been revived for the modern era with a focus on deliberative microcosms selected through random sampling or “sortition.” But might it be possible to spread some of the benefits of deliberation beyond mini-publics to the broader society? Can technology assist with scaling an organized deliberative process? In particular, would those who experience such a process become more deliberative voters? Would their considered judgments from deliberation influence their voting? We draw on a larger than usual experiment with public deliberation and a one-year follow-up in the mid-term U.S. elections to suggest answers to these questions. It has implications for whether spreading an organized deliberative process could, in theory, be used to create more deliberative elections.