Survey research can generate knowledge that is central to the study of collective action, public opinion, and political participation. Unfortunately, many populations—from undocumented migrants to right-wing activists and oligarchs—are hidden, lack sampling frames, or are otherwise hard to survey. An approach to hard-to-survey populations commonly taken by researchers in other disciplines is largely missing from the toolbox of political science methods: respondent-driven sampling (RDS). By leveraging relations of trust, RDS accesses hard-to-survey populations; it also promotes representativeness, systematizes data collection, and, notably, supports population inference. In approximating probability sampling, RDS makes strong assumptions. Yet if strengthened by an integrative multimethod research design, it can shed light on otherwise concealed—and critical—political preferences and behaviors among many populations of interest. Through describing one of the first applications of RDS in political science, this article provides empirically grounded guidance via a study of activist refugees from Syria. Refugees are prototypical hard-to-survey populations, and mobilized ones are even more so; yet the study demonstrates that RDS can provide a systematic and representative account of a vulnerable population engaged in major political phenomena.

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.

The notion that states pursue a monopoly over the use of force rings increasingly hollow. From vigilantes that patrol the United States’ southern border, to thugs for hire in China, states are characterized by non-state violent actors. These trends are more pronounced in comparatively lower-capacity states. Employing the concept of “security assemblages,” I propose that it is crucial to consider historically embedded relations among violent actors and institutions in order to understand their socio-political role and implications for state authority. This approach offers three insights: first, in low-capacity states, violence is not zero-sum. Rather, it is assembled among diverse actors, which each have historically embedded comparative advantages. Second, therefore, state efforts to monopolize violence should be taken as an empirical question rather than an assumption grounding analysis. Third, relationships between violent actors occur in thick institutional environments, meaning that violent actors, including state actors and institutions, often must act under significant constraints. To illustrate these points, I conduct a mixed-methods nested study of vigilantes in Uganda, finding that vigilantes are more common where other authorities are present, and are more helpful when other authorities are also more helpful. Focusing on dynamics between vigilantes and police, I pinpoint their historically distinct roles: the police were established as a colonial-era institution to suppress political dissent, while vigilantes have long been socially embedded actors tasked with everyday security provision. Thus, in this case, police and vigilantes are not substitutes; instead they play distinct and complementary roles.

Controversies over Mexican immigrants and undocumented aliens in Arizona and elsewhere show the need for fresh approaches to immigration. The “principle of constituted identities” holds that the more a government has coercively constituted the identities of non-citizens in ways that have made having certain relationships to it fundamental to their capacities to lead free and meaningful lives, the greater the obligations that government has to facilitate those relationships–all else being equal. The U.S. has coercively constituted the identities of many persons of Mexican descent, inside and outside its boundaries, in ways that have fostered aspirations for dual economic, cultural, and political “citizenships.” It has also shaped the identities, values, and interests of many whites in immigrant-receiving states in ways that make Mexican immigrants seem threatening, even as it has made those states pay most of the costs of absorbing immigrants. In consequence, the U.S. should adopt policies that give priority to Mexicans in immigration and that facilitate dual citizenships, while providing more aid to immigrant-receiving states.

Scholars generally assume that authoritarian regimes will not curb corruption because autocrats benefit from it politically, use anti-corruption campaigns as excuses to purge rivals, and reject democratic institutions widely thought to reduce corruption, such as judicial independence. However, I argue that authoritarian regimes curb corruption more frequently—and sometimes more effectively—than scholars realize. Using a novel scoring system for anti-corruption efforts, I find that there have been at least twenty-five substantial anti-corruption efforts and nine successful reforms by authoritarian regimes in recent decades. Despite the association between democracy and corruption control, successful reforms have been by fully authoritarian regimes, rather than hybrid regimes, and employed a decidedly authoritarian approach, rather than the conventional approach emphasizing democratic institutions. This authoritarian approach to corruption control commonly involves power centralization, top-down control and penetration, and regime propaganda. I illustrate these points with a “least likely” case study of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s controversial anti-corruption campaign. At the theoretical level, I suggest that authoritarian regimes succeed in overcoming challenges—corruption being a hard challenge—through their own institutional strengths, rather than by mimicking democracies. This points to the need to reconsider certain influential views in the study of authoritarianism.

What does the rise and election of Donald J. Trump as president mean for the future of conservatism? Republican elites continue to argue about whether Trump is changing the definition of conservatism for better or worse, although many Republicans seem content to let him shape the issues, direction, and brand of the traditional party of conservatism. We examine the ideological characteristics of different groups of Republican voters across three types of ideology: symbolic, operational, and conceptual. We find distinct differences between Republicans who consistently supported Trump and other groups that either supported him in the general election only and those who never supported him. The Never Trump camp stands out as a group that is less symbolically and operationally conservative but also better able to articulate what it means to be a conservative than do Trump’s core supporters, who look very much the opposite. These results suggest a contemporary Republican Party that is far from unified in what it means to be a conservative.

The West is turning inward. Donald Trump’s presidency, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, and the spread of populist parties in Europe are the most visible signs of this retreat. The shift is not as recent as these examples suggest, however. Drawing on an array of cross-national data for twenty-four industrialized democracies and hundreds of political parties in those democracies, we show that domestic support for liberal internationalism has been receding for twenty-five years across the West. We show that since the end of the Cold War a large and widening gap has opened up between Western democracies’ international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. As Western governments came to rely increasingly on economic globalization, institutionalized cooperation, and multilateral governance, mainstream parties that backed these efforts lost electoral ground to parties on the radical-left and increasingly, the anti-globalist radical-right that have been the vehicles of the current backlash. We discuss the implications of these trends for the Western liberal international order and the strategies now on offer to repair it.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a powerful journalistic account of the oppression of women worldwide, and of the ways that some women and men have struggle against this oppression and discovered new forms of economic empowerment. The book—in its eleventh printing in less than a year, and with testimonials from the likes of Angelina Jolie and George Clooney—is also a publishing sensation. Half the Sky brings much attention to an important and timely topic, and it creatively combines narrative, analysis, and policy prescriptions, and so we invited three prominent scholars of gender inequality and development to reflect on the book's strengths and weaknesses: Ayelet Shachar, Uma Narayan, and Valentine M. Moghadam.

Over the last two decades alone, the United States has suffered well over ten thousand religion-motivated hate crimes. While racism and religion-motivated prejudice have received considerable attention following the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that resulted in deadly violence, there is little systematic scholarship evaluating where and when incidents targeting ethnoreligious minorities by non-state actors are likely to occur. Utilizing the FBI’s reported anti-Semitic hate crime data from 2001–2014, my main theoretical and empirical exercise is to determine which factors best explain where and when American ethnoreligious groups are likely to be targeted. I propose that there are four essential mechanisms necessary to explain variation in minority targeting: “opportunity” (target group concentration), “distinguishability” (target group visibility), “stimuli” (events increasing target group salience) and “organization” (hate group quantity). My models show that variables falling within each of these theoretical concepts significantly explain variation in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Of particular importance for scholars and practitioners alike, Israeli military operations and the number of active hate groups within a state play a major role in explaining anti-Semitic incident variation.

Few transformations have been as important in American politics as the incorporation of African Americans into the Democratic Party over the course of the 1930s–60s and the Republican Party's growing association with more conservative positions on race-related policies. This paper traces the relationship between New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism in the mass public. A key finding is that by about 1940, economically-liberal northern white Democratic voters were substantially more pro-civil rights than were economically-conservative northern Republican voters. While partisanship and civil rights views were unrelated among southern whites, economic conservatives were more racially conservative than their economically liberal counterparts, even in the south. These findings suggest that there was a connection between attitudes towards the economic programs of the New Deal and racial liberalism early on, well before national party elites took distinct positions on civil rights. Along with grassroots pressure from African American voters who increasingly voted Democratic in the 1930s–40s, this change among white voters likely contributed to northern Democratic politicians' gradual embrace of civil rights liberalism and Republican politicians' interest in forging a coalition with conservative white southerners. In attempting to explain these linkages, I argue that the ideological meaning of New Deal liberalism sharpened in the late 1930s due to changes in the groups identified with Roosevelt's program and due to the controversies embroiling New Dealers in 1937–38.

The very idea that authoritarian regimes (“autocracies”) may enjoy popular support is hard to fathom for democrats. Models of authoritarian regimes often entail tacit ideological assumptions, and many are driven by methodological fashions. They ignore the efforts of rulers to provide what people value. The psychology they assume is inadequate to predict actions. They are often too abstract to generate testable predictions. “Support” for any regime is difficult to assess.

Guided by the thesis that fascism was the outcome of a dialectic of instrumental reason, I argue that Trumpism is the result of a dialectic of neoliberal reason. The 2008 crisis revealed that widely distributed consumption could no longer be sustained through escalating debt, as it had been since neoliberalizing reforms in the 1970s. Economic crisis has been interpreted through a culture market in which pseudo-individual consumers choose what hyperreal public they prefer and participate in pseudo-activity through social media. Retreat into insular hyperrealities and hostility to dissonant alternatives reinforce each other in an escalating logic generating partisan incivility and fake news. The de-democratization of the state through subservience to private interests and political dysfunction has combined with the consumer’s uncompromising mentality as a dissatisfied customer to channel politicization into populism. It aggregates negatively through shared dissatisfaction, driving escalating antagonism between technocratic responsibility and populist responsiveness. These escalating economic, cultural, and political contradictions heighten negative “freedom from” restraints while subverting positive “freedom to” relate meaningfully to the world. This intensifies anxieties and receptivity to authoritarianism as a self-defeating escape from neoliberal freedom. Trumpism exploits precarity, corrupts democratic norms, and licenses misdirected aggression. This neoliberal authoritarianism is inverted fascism. Trump’s presidency is more effect than cause.

Strong institutions and accountable governments are imperative for any country’s long-term prosperity. Yet the development of such institutions has presented a continuous challenge for many countries around the world. Using Russia as a case, this study brings attention to the unexpected negative impact of global interdependence and shows that institutional arbitrage opportunities have enabled economic actors to solve for institutional weaknesses and constraints in the domestic realm by using foreign institutions, thereby limiting the emergence of a domestic rule of law regime. We argue that such opportunities lower the propensity of asset-holders, normally interested in strong institutions at home, to organize collective action to lobby for better institutions. We demonstrate the main ways through which Russia’s capital-owners make use of foreign legal and financial infrastructures such as capital flight, the use of foreign corporate structures, offshore financial centers, real estate markets, the round-tripping of foreign direct investment, and reliance on foreign law in contract-writing and foreign courts in dispute-resolution.

I offer a conceptual framework for assessing the normative legitimacy of coercive disobedience—involving threats, disruption, force, and deceit—by social movements. A standard liberal view is that while coercion may be required to resist authoritarian regimes, it is illegitimate in a democratic state since it conflicts with majority rule and mutual respect. In restricting disobedience to a form of moral persuasion, this perspective neglects how social power and material interests can distort the conditions for open, fair deliberation. I offer a principled defense of coercive disobedience, not only in repressive states but in plausibly democratic societies. I argue that coercion can be justified on democratic republican grounds as a means to collectively contest objectionable forms of political domination. The use of coercion can be justified as a surrogate tool of political action for those who lack effective participation rights; as a remedial tool to counteract the dominating influence of powerful actors over the process of democratic will formation, and as a mobilizational tool to maintain participation and discipline in collective action. I conclude by proposing democratic constraints on the use of coercive tactics designed to offset the potential movements themselves become a source of arbitrary power.

How do resource-poor Black populations participate in the policy process? And what are the interpretive impacts of their participation? Using multiyear qualitative data on mass school closures in two large U.S. cities—in which nearly 90% of the population targeted were Black and low-income—I investigate how 1) the school district and local organizations provide resources for those affected to participate in the policy process; 2) affected participants interpret their engagement as contributing positively to the development of civic skills and perceptions of internal efficacy but negatively to their perceptions of politics, policy, and future participation; and that 3) these negative attitudes persist even among those who secure success in fighting the policy. I conceptualize this last phenomenon as indicative of “collective participatory debt” and raise serious questions about the utility of participating while poor and Black in American democracy.

Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy. By Mark R. Warren; Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life. By Harry C. Boyte; Going Public. By Michael Gecan; and Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice. By Edward T. Chambers with Michael A. Cowan.

These are not easy times for democracy. In the face of multinational corporations, an increasingly corrupt and deceitful political system, mega-media conglomerates, and militaristic televangelists, it is easy to understand how some radical democrats succumb to a politics of the bullhorn. The objective of such politics is to hone the correct line and strategize ways to project it clearly, loudly, and righteously into the public arena. Yet the success of politics thus framed has been marginal in recent decades, and its democratic credentials questionable—if by democratic we mean a politics that engages a manifold people in the difficult reciprocities of active critical judgment, organizing, action toward common goods, more egalitarian distributions, and deepening acknowledgments of plural modes of being. Most Americans are Teflon to it.Romand Coles is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University ([email protected]). The author wishes to acknowledge helpful comments and criticisms from Susan Bickford, Kimberley Curtis, Jeffrey Isaac, Sanford Schram, and anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics. Romand Coles is the author of Self/Power/Other: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas, and most recently Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy.

Few contemporary political scientists would disagree that race has been a pivotal force in American politics since this country's founding. The magnitude and scope of its impact on current political life is, however, a matter of intense debate. Political theorists have conspicuously not been at the forefront of these race-specific discussions. This is not because political theory has ignored race per se. On the contrary, contemporary political theorists increasingly include race in their descriptive and normative analyses of democratic politics. Debates about identity politics, multiculturalism, the redress of invidious discrimination, and feminist discourse on intersecting social identifications have moved from the margin to the center of political theory and typically involve at least some attention to racial difference. But these discussions have for the most part not examined racial meaning in a sustained, focused manner. While there are exceptions, political theory, as a discipline, has not given theoretical priority to American race.See, for example, Balfour 2001; Appiah and Gutmann 1996; Young 1990.