Legitimacy is a key concept in political science. It has deep normative roots in democratic theory and refers usually to righteous, just, fair, and therefore acceptable rule. However, non-democracies also try to create a following among their citizens. They also engage in justifying their rule through politicization, be it of religion, ethnicity, or ideologies ranging from left-wing communism to right-wing nationalism. Against this backdrop, I pose the question: does it make sense to use the concept of legitimacy for both types of regimes, democracies and autocracies alike? Or, do we overstretch the concept when transplanting it to the non-democratic realm? And, empirically, how can we assess to what degree a non-democracy is viewed as legitimate by its citizens? I aim therefore at defining what legitimacy and legitimation is in autocratic settings; drawing a semantic map of rival concepts like support, trust, and loyalty; and tackling concrete challenges in measuring this elusive concept.

To many observers across the political spectrum, American democracy appears under threat. What does the Trump presidency portend for American politics? How much confidence should we have in the capacity of American institutions to withstand this threat? We argue that understanding what is uniquely threatening to democracy requires looking beyond the particulars of Trump and his presidency. Instead, it demands a historical and comparative perspective on American politics. Drawing on insights from the fields of comparative politics and American political development, we argue that Trump’s election represents the intersection of three streams in American politics: polarized two-party presidentialism; a polity fundamentally divided over membership and status in the political community, in ways structured by race and economic inequality; and the erosion of democratic norms. The current political circumstance threatens the American democratic order because of the interactive effects of institutions, identity, and norm-breaking.

Welfare programs distribute benefits to citizens. Perhaps even more importantly, by conveying powerful messages about how the state views poor people, welfare programs shape people’s views about themselves as subjects or citizens. Theoretical debates on how public policies can enhance democratic citizenship inspire our study of Brazil’s Bolsa Família (Family Grant). Has this conditional cash transfer program, which forms a major point of contact between the state and millions of poor Brazilians, elevated feelings of social inclusion and agency? A prominent perspective in the welfare-state literature would not expect a positive outcome given the strict means testing and behavioral requirements entailed. Yet our focus group research with Bolsa Família recipients suggests that the program does foster a sense of belonging and efficacy. Policy design and government discourse matter. This innovative welfare program yields rich insights on alternative paths to citizenship development for middle- and low-income countries in the third wave of democracy.

The past decade has brought an unprecedented boom in the study of courts as political actors in Latin America. We examine the extraordinary diversity of academic research on judicial politics in the region, identifying the key questions, findings, and theoretical debates in the literature, highlighting important conceptual disjunctions, and critiquing the research methods scholars of judicial politics in Latin America have employed in their work. We close by suggesting new avenues of inquiry to help advance the collective effort to understand the roles courts play in Latin American politics.

In the 1970s I was among a group of scholars endlessly debating theories of the state. Others in the discussion were my recent predecessor as APSA President, Theda Skocpol, and my immediate successor, Ira Katznelson. What intrigued us was a vast literature, grounded in neo-Marxism and covering huge swaths of history and geography. Nearly all the important books and articles were by sociologists and historians, but with Structure and Change in Economic History, my then-colleague, economist Douglass North, transformed the debate by using economic models of transaction costs and property rights to model the state's role in economic prosperity over time. Most political scientists now acknowledge the importance of this perspective, but it nonetheless helped precipitate twenty years of divergence between historical and new economic institutionalists.Margaret Levi is Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle ([email protected]). Among her books are the single-authored Consent, Dissent and Patriotism (1997) and Of Rule and Revenue (1988) and the co-authored Cooperation Without Trust? (2005) and Analytic Narratives (1998). Many people offered me comments. I did not always take their advice, but I am grateful to Amit Ahuja, Paloma Aquilar, Marcelo Bergman, Maureen Eger, Ann Gryzmala-Busse, Bea Kelleigh, Bob Kaplan, Edgar Kiser, Victor Lapuente-Giné, Michael Lipsky, Kenneth Kollman, José-Maria Maravall, Peter May, Leonardo Morlino, Steve Pfaff, Kate Pflaumer, Frances Fox Piven, Christoph Pohlmann, Nancy Rosenblum, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Bo Rothstein, Susan Stokes, Katherine Stovel, Joan Tronto, and Ashutosh Varshney. My greatest debt is to the two graduate students who read and commented on several drafts as well as located the materials I needed to write this presentation: John Ahlquist and Audrey Sacks.

While studies typically find that women know less about politics than do men, feminist scholars have argued that these findings reflect gender-biased measures that underestimate women's political knowledge. This article evaluates the feminist critique by taking a more expansive view of what constitutes political knowledge. Using data from a large Canadian urban sample, we show that gender gaps close or even reverse when people are queried about more practical aspects of political knowledge, such as government benefits and services. Our results also demonstrate that this type of knowledge is more equally distributed than its conventional counterpart, though the women who are the most likely to need government services and benefits are often the least likely to know about them. Finally, we show that knowledge of government services and benefits has a significant effect on women's intended vote choice. This article thus shows that more practical types of political knowledge might serve as meaningful additions to existing definitions and measures of political knowledge.

The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts represent dramatic legislative breakthroughs. Taken together, they have fundamentally reshaped the nation's fiscal landscape. In view of the voluminous and largely sanguine literature on American democratic responsiveness, one might assume that this policy turnaround was broadly consistent with voters' priorities. In this article, we show that—in contradiction to this prevailing view, as well as the claims of Larry Bartels in this issue—the substance of the tax cuts was in fact sharply at odds with public preferences. Tax policy was pulled radically off center, we argue, by the intersection of two forces: (1) the increasing incentives of political elites to cater to their partisan and ideological “base”; and (2) the increasing capacity of politicians who abandon the middle to escape political retribution. In accounting for these centrifugal forces, we stress, as others have, increasing partisanship and polarization, as well as the growing sophistication of political message-control. Yet we also emphasize a pivotal factor that is too often overlooked: the deliberate crafting of policy to distort public perceptions, set the future political agenda, and minimize the likelihood of voter backlash. By showing how politicians can engineer policy shifts that are at odds with majority public preferences, we hope to provoke a broader discussion of voters' capacity to protect their interests in America's representative democracy.Jacob S. Hacker is Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]) and author of The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States and The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security. Paul Pierson is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley ([email protected]), where he holds the Avice Saint Chair in Public Policy. He is the author of Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis and Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. The authors are grateful for the comments and suggestions of Akhil Amar, Daniel Carpenter, Peter Hall, Michael Heany, Jennifer Hochschild, Richard Kogan, Theodore Marmor, Andrew Martin, David Mayhew, Nolan McCarty, Bruce Nesmith, Peter Orszag, Eric Schickler, Theda Skocpol, Richard Vallely, Robert van Houweling, Joseph White, and three anonymous reviewers, as well as participants in a workshop at Harvard University sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Rachel Goodman, Pearline Kyi, Joanne Lim, and Alan Schoenfeld provided able research assistance. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

The finding that the preferences of middle-income Americans are ignored when they diverge from the preferences of the rich is one of the most widely accepted and influential conclusions in political science research today. I offer a cautionary note regarding this conclusion. I demonstrate that even on those issues for which the preferences of the wealthy and those in the middle diverge, policy ends up about where we would expect if policymakers represented the middle class and ignored the affluent. This result emerges because even when middle- and high-income groups express different levels of support for a policy (i.e., a preference gap exists), the policies that receive the most (least) support among the middle typically receive the most (least) support among the affluent (i.e., relative policy support is often equivalent). As a result, the opportunity of unequal representation of the “average citizen” is much less than previously thought. The analysis also shows, however, that substantial opportunity exists for unequal representation of strong partisan preferences. Together, these results reinforce the importance of party identification for understanding policy outcomes and who gets represented.

How should feminist theorists respond when women who claim to be feminists make “choices” that seemingly prop up patriarchy, like posing for Playboy, eroticizing male dominance, or advocating wifely submission? This article argues that the conflict between the quest for gender equality and the desire for sexual pleasure has long been a challenge for feminism. In fact, the second-wave of the American feminist movement split over issues related to sexuality. Feminists found themselves on opposite sides of a series of contentious debates about issues such as pornography, sex work, and heterosexuality, with one side seeing evidence of gender oppression and the other opportunities for sexual pleasure and empowerment. Since the mid-1990s, however, a third wave of feminism has developed that seeks to reunite the ideals of gender equality and sexual freedom. Inclusive, pluralistic, and non-judgmental, third-wave feminism respects the right of women to decide for themselves how to negotiate the often contradictory desires for both gender equality and sexual pleasure. While this approach is sometimes caricatured as uncritically endorsing whatever a woman chooses to do as feminist, this essay argues that third-wave feminism actually exhibits not a thoughtless endorsement of “choice,” but rather a deep respect for pluralism and self-determination.

When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of interruptions when speaking, and these women then lose influence in their own eyes and in others’. But when the group is assigned to unanimous rule, or when women are many, women experience a positive balance of interruptions, mitigating the deleterious effect of small numbers. Men do not experience this pattern. We draw implications for a type of representation that we call authoritative representation, and for democratic deliberation.

Platform companies disrupt not only the economic sectors they enter, but also the regulatory regimes that govern those sectors. We examine Uber in the United States as a case of regulating this disruption in different arenas: cities, state legislatures, and judicial venues. We find that the politics of Uber regulation does not conform to existing models of regulation. We describe instead a pattern of “disruptive regulation”, characterized by a challenger-incumbent cleavage, in two steps. First, an existing regulatory regime is not deregulated but successfully disregarded by a new entrant. Second, the politics of subsequently regulating the challenger leads to a dual regulatory regime. In the case of Uber, disruptive regulation takes the form of challenger capture, an elite-driven pattern, in which the challenger has largely prevailed. It is further characterized by the surrogate representation of dispersed actors—customers and drivers—who do not have autonomous power and who rely instead on shifting alignments with the challenger and incumbent. In its surrogate capacity in city and state regulation, Uber has frequently mobilized large numbers of customers and drivers to lobby for policy outcomes that allow it to continue to provide service on terms it finds acceptable. Because drivers have reaped less advantage from these alignments, labor issues have been taken up in judicial venues, again primarily by surrogates (usually plaintiffs’ attorneys) but to date have not been successful.

In recent years, Central and Eastern Europe have furnished several examples of illiberalism in power. The most prominent and consequential cases are Fidesz, which has ruled in Hungary since 2010, and Law and Justice (PiS), which has ruled in Poland since 2015. In both cases, illiberal governments have embarked upon an extensive project of political reform aimed at dismantling the liberal-democratic order. We examine the nature, scope, and consequences of these processes of autocratisation. We first argue that illiberal changes are ideologically founded and identify how both populism and nativism figure in the policymaking of illiberals in power. We then show how these practices emerge from a common “illiberal playbook”—a paradigm of policy change comprising forms of forging, bending, and breaking—and elaborate on the notion that illiberal governments are using legalism to kill liberalism. The fine-grained approach that we employ allows us to distinguish between different rationales and gradations of illiberal policymaking, and assess their implications for the rule of law, executive power, and civil rights and freedoms

The positive literature on judicial behavior has not received nearly the attention it deserves. That literature has a great deal to offer, both to legal scholars and to those who are concerned about the role of legal institutions generally. For example, the literature has the potential to help shed light on the ability of courts to protect rights and foster economic development. This article argues that the positive literature has failed to see its due in large part because positive scholars often do not take law and legal institutions seriously enough.

The article identifies three specific sets of problems with the positive scholarship, offering detailed suggestions on how positive scholars can avoid them. The first is the problem of normative bite: Too often positive scholars of judicial behavior seem to be trapped in their own disciplinary debates, without pausing to examine why it is that they are studying what courts and legal institutions do. Second, positive scholars need to pay greater attention to the norms of the law, i.e., how law and legal institutions operate. A skeptical stance toward law is fine, but that skepticism should not get in the way of accurately understanding properly the mechanics of law and legal institutions. Finally, empiricists in particular must take great care regarding the data upon which they rely. It is difficult to obtain good data on the workings of legal systems. Data that are readily available often present a distorted picture of the system being studied.Barry Friedman is Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at New York University School of Law ([email protected]). The author thanks Chuck Cameron, Lee Epstein, Jennifer Hochschild, Jeff Lax, Stefanie Lindquist, Liam Murphy, Jeff Segal, Seana Shiffrin, Jim Spriggs, and three anonymous reviewers for invaluable comments on prior drafts. All errors are the author's own. Jane O'Brien and Kathleen O'Neill provided terrific research assistance.

Samuel Huntington argues that the sheer number, concentration, linguistic homogeneity, and other characteristic of Hispanic immigrants will erode the dominance of English as a nationally unifying language, weaken the country's dominant cultural values, and promote ethnic allegiances over a primary identification as an American. Testing these hypotheses with data from the U.S. Census and national and Los Angeles opinion surveys, we show that Hispanics acquire English and lose Spanish rapidly beginning with the second generation, and appear to be no more or less religious or committed to the work ethic than native-born whites. Moreover, a clear majority of Hispanics reject a purely ethnic identification and patriotism grows from one generation to the next. At present, a traditional pattern of political assimilation appears to prevail.Jack Citrin is Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley ([email protected]). Amy Lerman is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley ([email protected]). Michael Murakami is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley ([email protected]) and Kathryn Pearson is Assistant Professor Political Science at University of Minnesota ([email protected]).

As researchers, when do our ethical obligations end? How should our ethical obligations respond to dynamic and unstable political contexts? Political scientists frequently work in dynamic political situations that can pose new ethical questions beyond those existing at the point of fieldwork. Yet, research ethics are often conceived in terms of a static, if not hermetically sealed, field site that remains frozen in time at the point we conduct fieldwork and collect data. I argue, first, that we need to consider more systematically how a dynamic field intersects with ethical obligations. Second, I argue that new and unexpected ethical questions can emerge after exiting the field, including responsibilities to research participants, dissemination, and publication, and returning to the field, which should be a part of how we conceive of ethical obligations.

How grave is the threat that populist leaders pose to democracy? To elucidate the prospects of the United States under president Donald Trump, I conduct a wide-ranging comparative analysis of populism’s regime impact in Europe and Latin America. The investigation finds that the risks have been overestimated. Populist leaders manage to suffocate democracy only when two crucial conditions coincide. First, institutional weakness, which comes in various types, creates vulnerabilities to populist power grabs. Second, even in weaker institutional settings populist leaders can only succeed with their illiberal machinations if acute yet resolvable crises or extraordinary bonanzas give them overwhelming support which enables them to override and dismantle institutional constraints to power concentration. Because none of these conditions prevail in the United States, an undemocratic involution is very unlikely. First, the federal system of checks and balances, rooted in an unusually rigid constitution, remains firm and stable. Second, President Trump encountered neither acute crises nor a huge windfall; consequently, his mass support has remained limited. Facing strong resistance from an energized opposition party and a vibrant civil society, the U.S. populist cannot destroy democracy. Instead, Trump’s transgressions of norms of civility have sparked an intense counter-mobilization that may inadvertently revitalize U.S. democracy.

When Jeffrey Isaac approached us to review some recent works in American politics from a comparative perspective, we gladly accepted the task, believing it important to help overcome what some see as the “splendid isolation” of American politics. Indeed, the invitation arrived at a propitious time because, after completing our most recent book, we critically reflected on the fact that we had unfortunately written almost nothing on the oldest, and one of the most diverse, democracies in the world, the United States. We thus agreed to contribute some thoughts on the matter, recognizing the limits of our knowledge of the entire field of American politics, but acknowledging, too, our belief that the current distancing of the study of America from the analysis of other democracies impoverishes modern political science.

Scholarship on Syria has traditionally been limited by researchers' difficulty in accessing the reflections of ordinary citizens due to their reluctance to speak about politics. The 2011 revolt opened exciting opportunities by producing an outpouring of new forms of self-expression, as well as encouraging millions to tell their stories for the first time. I explore what we can learn from greater attention to such data, based on thick descriptive analysis of original interviews with 200 Syrian refugees. I find that individuals' narratives coalesce into a collective narrative emphasizing shifts in political fear. Before the uprising, fear was a pillar of the state's coercive authority. Popular demonstrations generated a new experience of fear as a personal barrier to be surmounted. As rebellion militarized into war, fear became a semi-normalized way of life. Finally, protracted violence has produced nebulous fears of an uncertain future. Study of these testimonials aids understanding of Syria and other cases of destabilized authoritarianism by elucidating lived experiences obscured during a repressive past, providing a fresh window into the construction and evolution of national identity, and demonstrating how the act of narration is an exercise in meaning making within a revolution and itself a revolutionary practice.

This article offers an anti-naturalist philosophical critique of the naturalist tendencies within qualitative concept formation as developed most prominently by Giovanni Sartori and David Collier. We begin by articulating the philosophical distinction between naturalism and anti-naturalism. Whereas naturalism assumes that the study of human life is not essentially different from the study of natural phenomena, anti-naturalism highlights the meaningful and contingent nature of social life, the situatedness of the scholar, and so the dialogical nature of social science. These two contrasting philosophical approaches inspire, in turn, different strategies of concept formation. Naturalism encourages concept formation that involves reification, essentialism, and an instrumentalist view of language. Anti-naturalism, conversely, challenges reified concepts for eliding the place of meanings, essentialist concepts for eliding the place of contingency, and linguistic instrumentalism for eliding the situatedness of the scholar and the dialogical nature of social science. Based on this philosophical framework, we subject qualitative concept formation to a philosophical critique. We show how the conceptual strategies developed by Sartori and Collier embody a reification, essentialism, and instrumentalist view of language associated with naturalism. Although Collier's work on concept formation is much more flexible and nuanced than Sartori's, it too remains attached to a discredited naturalism.