The Democratic and Republican Parties both make strong claims that their policies benefit racial and ethnic minorities. These claims have, however, received little systematic empirical assessment. This is an important omission, because democracy rests on the ability of the electorate to evaluate the responsiveness of those who govern. We assess Democrats’ and Republicans’ claims by compiling census data on annual changes in income, poverty, and unemployment over the last half century for each of America’s racial and ethnic groups. Judged by the empirical record, it is clear which party truly benefits America’s communities of color. When the nation is governed by Democrats, racial and ethnic minority well-being improves dramatically. By contrast, under Republican administrations, blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans generally suffer losses.

Studies conducted between the 1950s and 1970s found that the principles embodied in the First Amendment constituted a “clear norm” endorsed by large majorities of community leaders and virtually all legal practitioners and scholars. This consensus has since weakened under the strain of arguments that racist slurs, epithets, and other forms of expression that demean social identities are an intolerable affront to egalitarian values. Guided by the theory that norms are transmitted through social learning, we show that these developments have spurred a dramatic realignment in public tolerance of offensive expression about race, gender, and religious groups. Tolerance of such speech has declined overall, and its traditional relationships with ideology, education, and age have diminished or reversed. Speech subject to changing norms of tolerance ranges from polemic to scientific inquiry, the fringes to the mainstream of political discourse, and left to right, raising profound questions about the scope of permissible debate in contemporary American politics.

The New Orleans Katrina Memorial is located at the upper end of Canal Street, an inexpensive and relatively short trolley car ride from the city's tourist hub in the French Quarter. Despite its ease of access, and close proximity to the more famous cemeteries to which tourists regularly make pilgrimage, the memorial is little visited and largely unknown, even to many of the city's own residents. In this it stands in stark contrast to the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, which drew its millionth visitor less than four months after its opening on September 12, 2011. Recent work in political theory on memory, mourning, and memorialization—as well as Ancient Greek concerns about the same—point to the ways in which the manner of remembrance, grieving, and commemoration employed by a democratic polity help to shape political outcomes. In what follows, I trace the history and design of the New York City and New Orleans memorials to suggest the ways in which they embody and perpetuate national strategies of remembrance and forgetting, in which injustices perpetrated against the polity are prioritized over injustices perpetrated within it. Drawing on John Bodnar's distinction between national and vernacular commemoration, I nevertheless conclude with a counter-intuitive suggestion: that while on a national level the public's relative ignorance of the Katrina Memorial is indeed indicative of a polity more concerned with injustices perpetrated against it than within it; on a local level the erection and subsequent forgetting of the Katrina Memorial is a manifestation of a mode of vernacular memory, mourning and commemoration with far more democratically-productive potential than its counterpart in New York City. In particular, I argue that it cultivates, and historically has cultivated, a more forward-looking, progressive, and polyphonic response to loss than the type of dominant national narratives embodied by the 9/11 Memorial. Whereas the latter continually replays the loss in ways that rob the polity of its capacity to move beyond its initial response, the former acknowledges and incorporates the loss while steeling the community for the challenges ahead.

What are social science theorists' responsibilities for the effects of their theories in the real world? I maintain that politicians and ideologues place theories in their political agendas without necessarily heeding their actual content. Hence, the ramifications of theories in the real world are mostly the result of political uses and, at times, political abuses. Consequently, theorists cannot be held morally responsible for these. They do, however, bear the obligation to examine if there are some intrinsic features of theorization and theory that render these susceptible to public misinterpretation and vulnerable to political abuse. Pointing to the rhetorical capital inherent in theories, and supported by examples involving democratic-peace theory and its political destinies, I conclude that, to discharge this task, social science theorists should substitute the prevailing objective ethic with a normative one.

American Political Development (APD) is among the fastest-growing areas in political science. Barely two decades ago, the “field” consisted of a handful of works by a few scholars. Since then political scientists have been joined under the APD banner by researchers from other disciplines in issuing dozens of books and hundreds of articles, organizing a biennial APD conference, and teaching numerous graduate and undergraduate courses. The flagship APD journal, Studies in American Political Development, in print since 1986, is ranked among the top political science journals; also well regarded is the Journal of Policy History, begun three years later. The Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association, likewise founded recently, has the eighth largest membership of the discipline's 35 subgroupings. Newly minted PhDs list APD as a specific research and teaching interest, and political science departments are matching that surging interest with job postings. And overviews of recent scholarship on the American polity separately highlight APD approaches. Perhaps inevitably, however, the rapid emergence of APD as a full-fledged disciplinary concentration has been accompanied by developmental problems.Rogan Kersh is associate professor of political science and public administration at Syracuse University's Maxwell School ([email protected]). He is the author of Dreams of a More Perfect Union, as well as articles on APD in numerous journals. For helpful advice and commentary, the author thanks Brian Balogh, Dan Galvin, Jennifer Hochschild, Shelley Hurt, David Mayhew, Suzanne Mettler, Sid Milkis, Jim Morone, three anonymous Perspectives reviewers, and audience members at the APD workshop at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

Attitudinal differences between urban and rural voters in America have been in the spotlight in recent years and engaging rural populations politically has been growing in importance, particularly since the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, social and geographic sorting is increasing the salience of a rural identity that drives distinct policy preferences. While recent research has examined how rural identities drive social and economic policy preferences, rural Americans are also particularly relevant to the fate of environmental policy. Farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners manage huge portions of American lands and watersheds and are important stakeholders in the implementation of environmental policies. Despite this, the environmental policy preferences of rural Americans have received little attention from the research community. This study fills a gap in the literature by investigating how collective identities among rural Americans drive environmental policy preferences. Through eight focus groups and thirty-five interviews with rural voters across America (total n=105), this study explores how four components of rural American identity—connection to nature, resentment/disenfranchisement, rootedness, and self-reliance—inform specific rural perspectives on environmental policy. The findings have implications for how to best design, communicate, and implement environmental policies in a way that can better engage rural Americans on this issue.

The historically constructed nature of ethnicity has become a widely accepted paradigm in the social sciences. Scholars have especially have focused on the ways modern states have been able to create and change ethnic identities, with perhaps the strongest case studies coming from colonial Africa, where the gap between strong states and weak societies has been most apparent. I suggest, however, that in order to better understand how and when ethnic change occurs it is important to examine case studies where state-directed ethnic change has failed. To rectify this oversight I examine the case of the “lost counties” of Uganda, which were transferred from the Bunyoro kingdom to the Buganda kingdom at the onset of colonial rule. I show that British attempts to assimilate the Banyoro residents in two of the lost counties were an unmitigated failure, while attempts in the other five counties were successful. I claim that the reason for these differing outcomes lies in the status of the two lost counties as part of the historic Bunyoro homeland, whereas the other five counties were both geographically and symbolically peripheral to Bunyoro. The evidence here thus suggests that varying ethnic attachments to territory can lead to differing outcomes in situations of state-directed assimilation and ethnic change.

We live in “one world.” The globe is an ecological whole, sufficiently connected that it is now possible to envision climate changes and catastrophes that affect the entire planet. The world's economy is increasingly becoming interconnected. Human beings recognize a common humanity, including a body of human rights. But we are not the “single nation state” hypothesized by the South Commission. We are divided into many peoples, governed by the slightly more than the 191 states recognized by the United Nations as members. But the existence of many peoples does not answer the normative questions implicit in the South Commission's warning. Should we be trying to govern the one world as if we were one people—and take on the task of building a single stable world order, bridging the divides between the much better-off top fifth and much less well-off bottom four-fifths? Or, should the one world be governed as if it were two sets of peoples, one set free and the other not? Or, should a third order shape the world, one that encompasses many peoples who develop the rules, agreements and accommodations that are needed to keep those peoples at peace where possible and promote mutually advantageous cooperation, while taking those measures that address the emergencies and extremes to which all decent states would concur?

The 2002 enactment of the first major reform of U.S. federal campaign-finance law in a quarter century featured a more substantial engagement of political scientists—through research, public advocacy, and expert testimony—than had been the case in the past. This essay reviews the evolution of research on campaign finance from the early twentieth century to the present, the intellectual tensions between the scholarly and reform communities, the conditions in the 1990s that promoted collaborationamong these groups, and the continuing disagreements over how best to manage the problems associated with money and politics—in the United States and in democracies around the world.He gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Emily Bailard, a Brookings summer intern from Yale University, and Larissa Davis. Bruce Cain, Anthony Corrado, and Trevor Potter provided valuable commentary as discussants when a version of this paper was presented at the 2002 meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston. Special thanks to Sarah Binder, Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Charles O. Jones, Sheilah Mann, Norman Ornstein, this journal's editors, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The author would like to note that he alone is responsible for whatever errors of fact and judgment remain.

The institutionalization of race-conscious inclusion policies in employment, education, and contracting has largely endured in post-civil rights America despite predictions of their demise. However, scholarship has continued to mislabel many of the specific policies in these organizations and governments as “affirmative action” policies, even though many such policies lack the civil rights roots necessary to warrant this label. In this article, I explain how many organizations have recast, supplemented, or replaced their rights-based affirmative action policies with utilitarian diversity policies. While the conventional, civil rights framework for analyzing affirmative action obscures the rise of such organizational diversity policies, an alternative body of scholarship that employs a diversity framework has shed light on the causes, content, and consequences of this policy and political realignment. The Supreme Court's 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision and the political activism surrounding Michigan's Proposal 2 in 2006 both exemplify the trademark signs of this shift from rights-based affirmative action to organizational diversity policies. The article concludes by assessing the promise and dangers of this trend of rooting racial inclusion policies in a utilitarian diversity logic rather than a civil rights logic.

Concerns about public opinion-based threats to American democracy are often tied to evidence of partisan bias in factual perceptions. However, influential work on expressive survey responding suggests that many apparent instances of such bias result from respondents insincerely reporting politically congenial views in order to gain expressive psychological benefits. Importantly, these findings have been interpreted as “good news for democracy” because partisans who knowingly report incorrect beliefs in surveys can act on their correct beliefs in the real world. We synthesize evidence and commentary on this matter, drawing two conclusions: (1) evidence for insincere expressive responding on divisive political matters is limited and ambiguous and (2) when experimental manipulations in surveys reduce reports of politically congenial factual beliefs, this is often because such reported beliefs serve as flexible and interchangeable ways of justifying the largely stable allegiances that guide political behavior. The expressive value of acting on political commitments should be viewed as a central feature of the American political context rather than a methodological artifact of surveys.

Hate groups are often thought to reveal a paradox in liberal thinking. On the one hand, such groups challenge the very foundations of liberal thought, including core values of equality and freedom. On the other hand, these same values underlie the rights such as freedom of expression and association that protect hate groups. Thus a liberal democratic state that extends those protections to such groups in the name of value neutrality and freedom of expression may be thought to be undermining the values on which its legitimacy rests. In this paper, I suggest how this apparent paradox might be resolved. I argue that the state should protect the expression of illiberal beliefs, but that the state (along with its citizens) is also obligated to criticize publicly those beliefs. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action—coercive and expressive—I contend that such criticism should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities in its roles as speaker, educator, and spender. Here I extend the familiar idea that law, to be legitimate, must be widely publicized; I contend that a proper theory of the freedom of expression obligates the legitimate state to publicize the reasons that underlie rights, in particular reasons that appeal to the entitlement of each citizen subject to coercion to be treated as free and equal. My theory of freedom of expression is thus “expressive” in two senses: it protects the entitlement of citizens to express any political viewpoint, and it emphasizes a role for the state in explaining these free-speech protections and persuading its citizens of the value of the entitlements that underlie them.

Refugees are often considered to be among the world’s most powerless groups; they face significant structural barriers to political mobilization, often including extreme poverty and exposure to repression. Yet despite these odds refugee groups do occasionally mobilize to demand better services and greater rights. In this paper I examine varying levels of mobilization among Syrian refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan in order to explain how marginalized and dispossessed groups manage to develop autonomous political strength. I explain the surprisingly high levels of mobilization in Jordan’s Za’atari Camp compared to the relative quiescence of refugees in Turkish camps and Lebanese informal settlements as the product of a set of strong informal leadership networks. These networks emerged due to two unique facets of the refugee management regime in Jordan: the concentration of refugees in the camp, and a fragmented governance system. In Turkey and Lebanon, where these two conditions were absent, refugees did not develop the strong leadership networks necessary to support mobilization. I develop this argument through structured comparison of three cases and within-case process tracing, using primary source documents from humanitarian agencies, contentious event data, and 87 original interviews conducted in the summer of 2015.

Political science is far behind the other social science disciplines in incorporating neurobiological concepts, techniques, and theory. In recent years progress has been made in closing this gap but many in the political science mainstream view the movement with concern or even horror. Though a healthy dose of skepticism is appropriate and beneficial to the scientific endeavor, negative reactions to viewing politics through a neurobiological lens are often based on fundamental misconceptions regarding both neurobiology and politics. In this Reflections essay, I address ten of these misconceptions, including the beliefs that biology is deterministic, reductionist, unnecessary, irrelevant, normatively dangerous, and ideologically biased. The goal is to encourage a constructive dialogue on the relevance of neurobiology to political life—a dialogue that would in turn improve research in the fledgling subfield and lead to innovations in political science by encouraging new ways of conceptualizing and analyzing the variables at the discipline's core.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) is a landmark in American social policy that is disrupting America’s “liberal tradition.” It is successfully expanding access and compelling insurers to change their business models to serve more socially-useful purposes; cost control enjoyed initial success but confronts barriers rooted in America’s resilient political economy. The ACA is disrupting long-standing patterns of American politics, introducing new developmental paths that unsettle or, in certain respects, offset the familiar patterns of selectivity, deference to private markets, and “drift” that tend to produce government inaction as economic insecurity increases. New policy arrangements for financing and delivering medical care is ushering in a new politics of US health care that are resetting the terms of future debate; the ACA is also challenging familiar approaches to studying politics including analyses of framing, policy effects and political development, and American political thought.

What accounts for the glaring inattention to work on gender within mainstream political science? Part of the problem lies in the substance of scholarship itself. The concepts, central questions, and key variables that predominate in the mainstream literature on comparative democratization and in the literature on gender and democratization have contributed to the gulf between them. But a more fundamental explanation lies in the starting assumptions of scholars in the two camps. Mainstream scholars rarely question whether gender is relevant to politics, and gender scholars rarely question whether gender isn't relevant to politics. I illustrate some ways in which gender could be incorporated into mainstream work, and discuss how gender research could be made more broadly comparative.

Political scientists are increasingly engaged with the importance of the “visual turn,” asking questions about how we understand what we see and the social and political consequences of that seeing. One of the greatest challenges facing researchers is developing methods that can help us understand visual politics. Much of the literature has fallen into the familiar qualitative versus quantitative methodological binary, with a strong bias in favor of the former, and has consequently been unable to realize the advantages of mixed-methods research. We advance the study of visual politics as well as the literature on bridging the quantitative versus qualitative divide by showing that it is possible to generate quantitative data that is rooted in, and amenable to, qualitative research on visual phenomena. Our approach to conducting mixed-methods research is an alternative to the more common strategy of seeing various research methods as an assortment of tools, as it is directed at developing an organic relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy for research on visual politics by discussing our own efforts to create a dataset for quantifying visual signifiers of militarism.

Knowledge creation is a social enterprise, especially in political science. Sharing new findings widely and quickly is essential for progress. Scholars can now use Twitter to rapidly disseminate ideas, and many do. What are the implications of this new tool? Who uses it, how do they use it, and what are the implications for exacerbating or ameliorating existing inequalities in terms of research dissemination and attention? We construct a novel dataset of all 1,236 political science professors at PhD-granting institutions in the United States who have a Twitter account to answer these questions. We find that female scholars and those on the tenure track are more likely to use Twitter, especially for the dissemination of research. However, we consistently find that research by men shared on Twitter is more likely to be passed along further by men than research by women.

School choice has attracted much attention from academic policy analysts. Their data analyses, however, have become entangled in the politics surrounding debates over market-driven reform rather than serving as foundations for utilitarian policy making. High-profile research programs generate an increasing number of empirical studies, which are often valued for how well they fit ideological preferences rather than how useful they may be in offering practical guidance on workable and politically feasible strategies. In this paper I assess what supportable policy message(s) can be extracted from the large research literature on choice and vouchers.Kevin Smith is an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln ([email protected]). His most recent book is The Ideology of Education: The Market, the Commonwealth, and America's Schools.

We seek to explain variation in the descriptive representation of Muslim minorities in national legislatures, relying on an original data set that includes 635 seats filled by Muslim-origin MPs in the lower chambers of national parliaments of twenty-six European polities in three legislative cycles between 2007 and 2018. We argue that the image of a polity as a union of multiple ethnocultural groups, reflected in concrete state policies and institutional arrangements, may be conducive to better descriptive representation of Muslim minorities, who were not originally envisioned as one of the communities constituting the nation. The results of multivariate regression analysis provide support for our hypothesis that the extent to which ethnocultural diversity is recognized and institutionalized helps explain variation in the levels of descriptive representation of European Muslims. We supplement our findings with congruence testing in four brief case studies: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria.