Some analysts have raised serious concerns about the foreign and domestic policy implications of the large numbers of Muslims living in Western Europe. The fear is that Muslims as a bloc will co-opt the domestic and foreign policy of various European states, subsuming it to those of Muslims from a variety of Islamic states in the Middle East and Asia, and transform the secular nature of most European states. The historic and ingrained fear of Islam present in the populations of Europe (and, for that matter, the United States) has produced an inability to see the political nature of Islamic groups, especially outside the Islamic world. For example, both Europeans and Americans were quick to question the political motives and actions of Muslims in Europe and the U.S. when there was no organized and orchestrated condemnation of the attacks of September 11, 2001. What such critics fail to take into account is precisely one of the themes analyzed in the paper: the myriad divisions found among the Muslims of Europe. Western fears and criticisms are partly based on serious ignorance of the characteristics of Islam and of the people in Europe who adhere to it. Because Islam is a highly decentralized religion, it is structurally biased against facilitating large-scale collective action by its adherents. The one version which is hierarchically organized, the Shi'a, is barely present in Europe. In addition, Muslim immigrants are divided by their ethnic differences. Islam, being decentralized, allows for a myriad of practices in the different countries from which the immigrants came. Divided by ethnicity and by their own religious beliefs, Muslims in Europe will not constitute a group which will be able to impose its goals on European foreign and domestic policy. Muslims will, instead, be a diverse population with which European states find it difficult to negotiate, because of Islam's decentralized structure.Carolyn M. Warner is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Studies, Arizona State University ([email protected]). Manfred W. Wenner is Visiting Scholar, Department of Political Science, Arizona State University ([email protected]). The authors wish to thank Guity Nashat Becker, Jocelyne Cesari, Colin Elman, Miriam Fendius Elman, Roger Finke, Paul Froese, Anthony Gill, Phillip Hardy, Michael Hechter, Jennifer Hochschild, Kevin Jacques, Ramazan Kilinc, Timur Kuran, Peter McDonough, Michael Mitchell, Christopher Soper, Hendrik Spruyt, Robert Youngblood, three anonymous reviewers, the participants at the University of Washington Center for European Studies/European Union Center “September 11, Immigration and Nationalism in Europe” seminar, and the participants at the University of Wisconsin Madison “East and West: the Experience of Islam in an Expanding Europe” conference for their critical comments and suggestions. Errors and shortcomings remain our responsibility. The authors thank Beatrice Buchegger, Anita Clason, Katie Jordan, Megan McGinnity, and Seth Turken for research assistance, and the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict for financial support.

Armed actors are often involved in electoral politics, from the fusing of ballots and bullets in armed political parties to insurgents covertly backing politicians. We develop new concepts and theory to better understand these complex relationships between violent actors and democratic practice. We first offer a novel conceptualization of armed groups’ electoral strategies that systematically maps out variation in the organizational directness and public openness of groups’ involvement in elections. We then use comparative case studies to develop theory about the conditions under which each of these electoral strategies is most likely, and what can trigger changes between them. The interaction of armed groups’ power and expectations of popular support with governments’ policies of toleration or repression determines the strategies of electoral participation that groups pursue. These concepts and arguments lay the foundation for a systematic research agenda on when and how “normal” and armed politics become intertwined.

Debates over the extent to which racial attitudes and economic distress explain voting behavior in the 2016 election have tended to be limited in scope, focusing on the extent to which each factor explains white voters’ two-party vote choice. This limited scope obscures important ways in which these factors could have been related to voting behavior among other racial sub-groups of the electorate, as well as participation in the two-party contest in the first place. Using the vote-validated 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, merged with economic data at the ZIP code and county levels, we find that racial attitudes strongly explain two-party vote choice among white voters—in line with a growing body of literature. However, we also find that local economic distress was strongly associated with non-voting among people of color, complicating direct comparisons between racial and economic explanations of the 2016 election and cautioning against generalizations regarding causal emphasis.

All qualitative research faces fundamental hurdles in overcoming issues of access and ensuring the credibility of one's observations. These issues are particularly acute when conducting research in hybrid regimes when the area of investigation is explicitly political and local authorities are sensitive to scrutiny. In the study of Russian politics, growing authoritarianism has meant a shrinking of the field and a corresponding adjustment in fieldwork practices. The disciplinary silence concerning the impact of regime type on fieldwork further threatens the quality and usefulness of comparative research on non-democratic regimes beyond Eurasia. The danger is that interesting and necessary questions about hybrid regimes are sacrificed as scholars opt to conduct fieldwork in more congenial locales where high status methods may be utilized. One can already see this effect as Russianists leave Russia rather than risk isolation within the discipline.

In recent decades, prominent national leaders like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez gained power through democratic institutions, only to undermine those institutions once in office as part of a broader effort to consolidate authoritarian power. Yet attempts at “executive aggrandizement” have failed in other countries, with varying consequences for democratic institutions. We develop an agency-based perspective to enhance the understanding of aggrandizement and to explain when it results in democratic breakdown. Relying on comparative case studies of five countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela—our analysis suggests that the contingent decisions of opposition actors during the process of aggrandizement have a significant effect on regime outcomes. Irregular opposition attempts to remove incumbents from office, which are especially likely after electoral defeats, contribute to democratic breakdown. More moderate responses to aggrandizement, on the other hand, help the opposition actors to buy time until the next election, hence offering the possibility for democratic survival.

Through a discussion of the 2008 mortgage crisis and its similarities to the Great Depression of the 1930's and the Great Recession of 2007–09, I argue that the very notions of economic “crisis” and “recovery” are politically and ideologically constructed, and that conditions of vulnerability, often simply taken for granted as part of the normal social landscape when they affect marginalized populations, become regarded as crises when they affect dominant groups. Each of these crises, I argue, reveals different facets of the ways in which the power, normativity, and privilege of those perceived to be affected by economic hard times serve (1) to construct some economic troubles as “normal” and others as “crises;' (2) to prevent economic problems related to structural inequalities from being treated as crises by dominant political actors and institutions; and (3) to shape ideas about the ostensible solutions and ends to economic crises. By calling attention to these features of economic “crisis,” I aim to demonstrate the relevance of scholarship on race, class, gender, and intersectionality to the understanding of fundamental questions of contemporary political economy not often viewed from this perspective.

Wars have been underexamined as causal factors in American political history. The nation's freestanding hot wars seem to have generated at least four kinds of major effects: policy changes of lasting consequence, new issue regimes, durable changes in electoral alignments, and durable changes in party ideologies. Considered here are the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.David R. Mayhew is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]). His publications include Party Loyalty among Congressmen; Congress: The Electoral Connection; “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals”; Placing Parties in American Politics; Divided We Govern; America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich; and Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre. The author thanks Alan Gerber, Matthew Green, Jacob Hacker, Sonam Henderson, Rogan Kersh, Philip Klinkner, Heinz Kohler, Joseph LaPalombara, Bruce Russett, Abbey Steele, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

In an extractive economy with territorially uneven costs and benefits, who should decide the fate of oil and mining projects: directly affected minorities or national citizenries? I reframe this question empirically: How are the collective identities and interests attached to various scales of democracy politically constructed in the increasingly frequent conflicts over resource extraction in Latin America, and what can we learn from these conflicts about broader dynamics of democratic contestation? To answer this question, I propose the concept of scaling democracy: the agonistic processes by which the scales of democratic decision-making and the democratic people are contested, established, and transformed. The concept of scaling democracy draws our attention to the ways in which the collective identities and interests attached to the various scales of democracy are constructed. These interest-articulations and collective identities are shaped by available institutional norms, organizational infrastructures, and social meanings. I draw on data from participant observation of a community mining consultation in Ecuador, and show that participatory institutions in the arena of resource extraction have fueled a contentious process of scaling democracy, with broader implications for the study of participatory democracy and scholarship on the relationship between resource-dependency and democracy.

What has changed since William Riker's statement was written? No doubt Political Science has made considerable headway in going beyond traditional methods. For example, social choice theory, formal models of party systems, and statistical methods for analyzing electoral and roll-call data have made it possible to make scientific progress in the study of democratic institutions and party systems.The authors thank Chris Achen, John Aldrich, Bill Bernhard, Norman Bradburn, Brian Humes, Mark Jones, Richard Lempert, Phil Shively, Joan Sieber, Duncan Snidal, and Paul Wahlbeck for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. They also thank Henry Brady and Jennifer Hochschild for their comments and assistance through this process. We dedicate this paper to the memory and scientific accomplishments of EITM Workshop participant Richard McKelvey.

Randomized field experiments have gained attention within the social sciences and the field of democracy promotion as an influential tool for causal inference and a potentially powerful method of impact evaluation. With an eye toward facilitating field experimentation in democracy promotion, I present the first field-experimental study of international election monitoring, which should be of interest to both practitioners and academics. I discuss field experiments as a promising method for evaluating the effects of democracy assistance programs. Applied to the 2004 presidential elections in Indonesia, the random assignment of international election observers reveals that even though the election was widely regarded as democratic, the presence of observers had a measurable effect on votes cast for the incumbent candidate, indicating that such democracy assistance can influence election quality even in the absence of blatant election-day fraud.

Critics charge President Donald Trump with racism, but he insists he opposes bigotry and is an American nationalist, not a white nationalist. We use analysis of Trump’s campaign rhetoric, his administration’s policies, and their reception to assess these rival claims. In his campaign, Trump narrated American identity as a tale of lost greatness in which a once-unblemished America gave way to globalist elites who have victimized many Americans, particularly traditionalist, predominantly white Christian Americans. His policies have systematically expanded protections for such Americans and sought to increase their share of the American electorate and citizenry, while reducing or eliminating initiatives designed to assist and increase the numbers of non-white, non-Christian American voters and citizens. The evidence thus shows that although Trump does not explicitly endorse white nationalism, his rhetoric and policies articulate not a consistent race-blind nationalism, but a vision of white protectionism.

A burgeoning literature in IR asserts there is a relationship between pop cultural artifacts and global policy processes, but this relationship is rarely explored using observational data. To fill this gap, I provide an evidence-based exploration of the relationship between science-fiction narratives and global public policy in an important emerging political arena: norm-building efforts around the prohibition of fully autonomous weapons. Drawing on in-depth interviews with advocacy elites, and participant-observation at key campaign events, I explore and expand on constitutive theories about the impact of science fiction on “real-world” politics.

The legitimacy of democratically elected governments rests in part on widespread acceptance of the outcome of elections, especially among those who lost. This “losers’ consent” allows the winners to govern, and when the incumbent is the losing party, it allows for a peaceful transition of power. What happens in a democratic system when one side not only refuses to concede but also actively perpetuates lies about the outcome? This article studies the evolution of public opinion about Donald Trump’s “big lie” using a rolling cross-sectional daily tracking survey, yielding 40 days of polls and more than 20,000 responses from US voters from October 27, 2020, through January 29, 2021. We find that the lie is pervasive and sticky: the number of Republicans and independents saying that they believe the election was fraudulent is substantial, and this proportion did not change appreciably over time or shift after important political developments. Belief in the lie may have buoyed some of Trump supporters’ self-esteem. In reaction to the lie and the threat it brought to the transition of power, there was a significant rise in support for violent political activism among Democrats, which only waned after efforts to overturn the election clearly failed. Even if these findings merely reflect partisan cheerleading, we nonetheless find significant and potentially long-term consequences of the lie. A conjoint experiment shows that Republican voters reward politicians who perpetuate the lie, giving Republican candidates an incentive to continue to do so in the next electoral cycle. These findings raise concerns about the fragility of American democracy.

Europeanization has brought radical change to the governance practices of all European Union (EU) member states, and these practices have clashed with traditional ideas about democracy. The degree to which EU member states have been affected is largely a matter of institutional fit. The EU, as a compound supranational polity in which governing activity is highly diffused through multiple authorities, has been more disruptive to simple national polities such as Britain and France, in which governing has traditionally been channeled through a single authority, than to compound national polities such as Germany and Italy, in which it has traditionally also been diffused through multiple authorities.

The main problem for EU member states, however, is that national leaders have generally failed to develop new ideas and discourses to reflect Europeanized realities. But here too institutional differences matter. Simple polities are better positioned to address changes because their concentration of authority ensures them a more elaborate communicative discourse with the general public, in which they are able to speak with one voice, than are compound national polities, let alone the EU, given the number of potentially authoritative voices with differing messages.Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University ([email protected]). Her recent books include Policy Change and Discourse in Europe, coedited with C. Radaelli (2005), and The Futures of European Capitalism (2002). Her forthcoming book Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities (2006) explores the impact of the European integration on national democracies. This article is a revision of a paper prepared for presentation to the American Political Science Association National Meetings in Chicago, September 1–5, 2004.

Qualitative historical knowledge is essential for validating natural experiments. Specifically, the validity of a natural experiment depends on the historical processes of treatment assignment and administration, including broader macro-historical dynamics. But if validating a natural experiment requires trust in the ability of qualitative evidence to establish the causal processes through which the data were generated, there is no good reason for natural experiments to be considered epistemically superior to historical research. To the contrary, the epistemic status of natural experiments is on a par with that of the historical research on which their validation depends. They are two modes of social-scientific explanation, each with its own pros and cons; neither is privileged. We illustrate this argument by re-examining an important recent contribution to the literature on violent conflict: Ferwerda and Miller’s 2014 natural experiment estimating the causal effect of the German decision to devolve authority to the Vichy French government on violent resistance during World War II.

Despite their importance to one another, the current literatures on political parties and normative democratic theory continue to develop largely in mutual isolation. Empirical studies of contemporary political parties and party systems tend to have little to say about the meanings and possibilities of democracy, and therefore also about the varied potential roles of political parties within it. Meanwhile, contemporary democratic theorists quietly sidestep the issue of whether political parties perform a legitimate function in democracies. This lack of mutual engagement is regrettable, in particular given the pervasive erosion of popular support and legitimacy of political parties as representative institutions. In this article we explore the key reasons for democratic theorists and scholars of political parties so rarely taking on each others' core concerns, and we outline the key ways in which this mutual disengagement is mutually impoverishing. We will also suggest ways forward, by pinpointing and illustrating potentially productive areas of engagement which might serve to deepen our understanding of democracy's present and its possible futures.Ingrid van Biezen is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK ([email protected]). Michael Saward is Professor of Politics at the Open University, UK ([email protected]). The authors are grateful to Richard S. Katz and Jeremy Jennings and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. In developing our arguments, we also benefited from conversations with Robert Dahl, Russell Dalton, Ian Shapiro, workshop participants at the ECPR Joint Sessions, and graduate students at Yale University. Part of this research was supported by the British Academy (research grant SG 38612).

I examine the political consequences of prison development in the United States. I theorize that the prison apparatus not only upholds a system of racial hierarchy and class stratification, but also links the economic stability of lower-class, rural whites to the continued penal confinement of poor, urban minorities. Analysis of an original dataset suggests that local reliance on existing prison infrastructure throughout many economically-depressed rural communities strengthens political support for harsh criminal punishments and militates against reform efforts. Political representatives have powerful interests in protecting rural prison investments, regardless of their actual economic impact in host communities. The evidence indicates that rural prison development contributes to the perceived economic viability and political power of rural areas, while reinforcing forms of punishment that destabilize poor urban neighborhoods and harm politically marginalized populations.

Humanitarian and human rights movements have gained influence as impartial ethical responses to injustice and suffering, yet their claims to impartiality are commonly dismissed as misleading, naïve, or counterproductive. To date, little attention has been paid to the very different ways human rights and humanitarian movements have conceptualized impartiality in relation to distinct and conflicting activist goals.Bronwyn Leebaw is Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Riverside ([email protected]). The author is grateful to Hanna Pitkin, Lisa Disch, John Cioffi, Mark Reinhardt, Jennifer Hochschild, and three insightful anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. In developing ideas for this article, she also benefited from conversations with Helen Kinsella, Mark Drumbl, Chandra Sriram, Eric Stover, Harvey Weinstein, Lon Troyer, Kateri Carmola, David Pion-Berlin, Chris Laursen, John Medearis, Juliann Allison, Victor Peskin, Ruti Teitel, Targol Mesbah, Helen Lennon, Tom Reifer, Dean Mathiowetz, and the graduate students at UC Riverside.

In striking contrast to the legislatures in most modern democracies, Congress retains an important place in American politics and policy making. Especially in recent years, this has led many observers to question the importance of the presidency and bureaucracy to the real work of American governance and the extent to which political actors in the executive branch generally exercise power. This narrative of congressional dominance has been particularly bolstered by recent scholarly interest in principal-agent models of interbranch relations. The assumption of congressional centrality, however, obscures many important features of American politics. Over the course of American history, institutional development in particular has often been driven by either autonomous executive action or conflicts between Congress and the executive. We develop an approach for assessing executive power in institutional politics and illustrate the logic of executive influence with three cases: the rise of federal food-and-drug and forestry regulation, and the growth of the federal farm extension service in the early twentieth century; the rise of the national security state in the mid-twentieth century; and the evolution of budgeting and spending practices over the course of the twentieth century.

Following racially charged events, individuals often diverge in perceptions of what happened and how justice should be served. Examining data gathered shortly after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri alongside reactions to a novel officer-involved shooting, we unpack the processes by which racial divisions emerge. Even in a controlled information environment, white Americans preferred information that supported claims of a justified shooting. Conversely, Black Americans preferred information that implied that the officer behaved inappropriately. These differences stemmed from two distinct processes: we find some evidence for a form of race-based motivated reasoning and strong evidence for belief updating based on racially distinct priors. Differences in summary judgments were larger when individuals identified strongly with their racial group or when expectations about the typical behaviors of Black Americans and police diverged. The findings elucidate processes whereby individuals in different social groups come to accept differing narratives about contentious events.