The relationship between Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-police brutality movements abroad reveals the variety of ways in which Black feminist theories of justice have taken root in public discourse. The EndSARS movement in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and the world’s largest Black nation, illustrates the influence of BLM transnationally and some of the continuities and discontinuities between anti-police brutality movements across contexts. I examine these two movements in tandem and develop a theory of political behaviour that builds on transnational Black and African feminist insights. More specifically, I consider how Black feminist articulations of intersectionality, personal politics, and Black liberation have informed the language and organizational praxis of two of the largest anti-police brutality movements to have taken place in the midst of a global pandemic. Here, I argue that organizers, many of whom were women, leveraged social power, in the form of embeddedness in politically active communities, to effectively organize protests and demand for justice. Through this comparative analysis, I contribute substantively to our understanding of how social power engenders political empowerment for individuals and communities in spite of patriarchal systems of exclusion.

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.

We examine economic policy responses to the COVID-19 induced economic collapse in Germany (a coordinated market economy) and the UK (a liberal market economy). The two countries responded to the symmetric economic shock with very similar furlough and business credit schemes to stabilize the demand and supply sides of the economy. However, since these policies fed into very different political-economic structures in both countries, they produced very different results. We attribute this divergence to the effect of “institutional complementarities,” the notion in Varieties of Capitalism that different elements of a system are mutually articulated and, therefore, mutually reinforcing beyond their initial contribution, or vice versa. Our results serve as a cautionary tale to policymakers that introducing policy elements developed in other institutional contexts is complex and challenge us to consider systematically the way in which institutional frameworks actively shape policy outcomes.

Populist discourse—which tends to benefit anti-systemic parties—has been on the rise in the world’s democratic states. Powerful non-democratic states have both the means and the incentive to spread such discourse to democratic states. We clarify the incentives illiberal states have to produce such communication, and delineate how this type of political communication fuses traditional state-to-state propaganda with election interventions. We draw on the case of Kremlin-sponsored communication on the issue of refugees in Germany to illustrate the mechanisms through which the discourse operates in target countries. We create a corpus of over a million news stories to identify the prevalence of illiberal discourse and its timing relative to Germany’s elections. We show that the Kremlin intervened in the 2017 federal elections by promoting refugee stories over and above the rate at which German outlets did. We discuss the broader implications for the use of directed political communication as a form of election intervention.

We investigate how the outbreak of epidemics can affect host governments’ targeting of refugees and violation of their physical integrity rights. We argue that governments target repression against refugees for two reasons. First, refugees are easily scapegoated for the arrival of epidemics at a time when governments are looking to shift the blame for their own poor performance. Second, crises provide circumstances for governments to engage in opportunistic repression to further their goal of coercing existing refugees to depart and deterring new refugees from arriving. Drawing upon a global dataset of countries for the years 1996 to 2015, we demonstrate that epidemic outbreaks do indeed increase the likelihood and scale of government repression targeting refugee populations. These effects are especially pronounced in countries with higher proportions of refugees hosted and in less democratic countries. Identification of this potential for government repression of refugees during epidemics is important in light of the grave scale of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest the international community should be vigilant for signs of governments’ mistreatment of vulnerable refugee populations to shift focus away from their own poor handling of crises such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and opportunistically advance their goal of reducing the numbers of refugees hosted locally.

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

Congregations, with their size, breadth, and legacy of shaping political activism, have the potential to be important sites of action for addressing racial injustice in America. Yet historical legacies of racism and persistently high levels of racial animus have made white evangelical communities in particular resistant to addressing racism. Most efforts to address racism in these communities begin with prejudice reduction programs that often fail. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, we examine the effectiveness of a different kind of six-week racial justice program in one of the nation’s largest evangelical megachurches that focuses on animating action among people open to tackling racial injustice in their church. We find that program participation is associated with increased feelings of efficacy, amplified perceptions of community, a greater commitment to cross-racial perspective taking, and greater likelihood of engaging in meaningful action. We argue that the program works by focusing on cross-racial relationship building to equip a people pre-disposed to action to actually take action. Developing such leaders is potentially the first step in a program other congregations can take to tackle racial injustice.

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.

Because of its genealogy and a shared commitment to racial justice, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement might be expected to have strong cooperative links with community organizing groups. Close, localized study of the interactions between these two approaches to social change reveals, however, something quite different. Far from being harmonious, the relations between BLM and community organizing prove to be marked by distrust, sometimes competition, and, more sporadically, cooperation. This article, based on ethnographic surveys in Los Angeles and Chicago, investigates how the BLM movement deployed and took root at the local level and how it interacted with community organizing groups in both cities. Emphasizing the importance of blending a meso-sociological level of analysis with a micro-sociological approach, we argue that the relations of competition and distinction, embodied in distinct group styles, repertoires of action, and organizational forms, can be explained by taking into account the actors’ resources, social properties, socializations, and trajectories. The article’s comparative perspective also shows that forms of cooperation may exist despite competition, and that cooperation is made possible in particular by younger people playing a bridging role.

We document the broad patterns of COVID-19 as it affects minority communities. We present a theoretical framework rooted in Global North democracies’ racial and ethnic legacies to analyze the health and economic disparities between these communities and the white majority population. Marshalling first-cut empirical evidence from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden, we find patterns of the pandemic’s distribution consistent with how the burden of racial and ethnic legacies endures: people from minority communities have worse health and economic outcomes under normal circumstances, inequalities the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated. The comparison shows that the impact of racial and ethnic discrimination on pandemic policy outcomes is not unique to the United States. Health inequalities stemming in part from patterns of institutional racism and discrimination perversely help reproduce these societal inequities. We find that governments’ initial responses have failed to mitigate the disproportionate impact of this health and economic crisis on minority communities because they did not acknowledge or address the particular challenges that these groups face.

We explain how two landmark Supreme Court cases, Motor Vehicles Manufacturers Association of the U.S. v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. (1983) and Chevron U.S.A., Inc., v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984), have constrained congressional and presidential control of the bureaucracy. We provide an overview of these cases, and we note how the dominant theories of bureaucratic policy making in the political science literature fail to account for judicial doctrine in a meaningful way. We illustrate the implications of these cases for recent debates regarding regulatory rollbacks in the Trump administration, and we argue that bureaucratic control over the past forty years has tilted in favor of the judicial branch of American national government.

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.

We examine the democratic legitimacy of popular referendums asking whether they should be understood as bypassing or complementing representative institutions. To answer this question, we focus on the distinction between legislative referendums and consultative ones, noting that even though referendums of the latter kind are by far more prevalent from an empirical point of view, their specific role in democratic decision-making remains under-theorized in the existing literature. We therefore focus on consultative referendums as a possible way of reconciling the referendum procedure with representative democracy. First, we clarify the specific conception of representative democracy that underscores our study; second, we develop the idea that consultative referendums are to be understood to specify the political mandate of elected representatives; finally, we apply the results of this conceptual work to the case of the Greek bailout and the Brexit referendums, aiming to dispel some lingering misconceptions concerning the normative implications of their results and thereby clarifying the normative significance of our theory.

Why did some Bolivian departments have more success containing COVID-19 than others? We argue that low government legitimacy hampers coordinated responses to national crises, particularly where political polarization is severe and the crisis response becomes politicized. Low legitimacy can intensify the challenges of poverty and poor infrastructure. An original dataset of daily observations on subnational coronavirus policy and cell phone mobility data, paired with administrative data on cases and deaths, suggests that political divisions influenced governors’ policy implementation and citizens’ compliance. In departments that opposed the president, policies were more likely to deviate from the stricter national policy while mobility and protest activity were high. In departments aligned with the president, local policy followed national policy and citizens complied with policy and quarantine restrictions for a longer period of time.

Many were taken aback by the initial spike in support for Black Lives Matter among white Americans during the summer of 2020. But will these antiracist attitudes translate into antiracist behavior? Accordingly, I ask under what conditions do white Americans engage in antiracist behavior? To answer this question, I build upon the insights of Martin Luther King, Jr., and A. Philip Randolph to theorize contemporary white antiracism. I argue that, under neoliberal capitalism, the conditions they laid out as necessary for the cultivation of productive antiracist politics have been difficult to satisfy. In lieu of that, in many instances, has been the privatization of racial responsibility, which I coin to describe a form of antiracist politics that relies upon white individuals’ sympathetic (and often symbolic) gestures rather than the implementation of more state programs to address structural racial injustices. I discuss what this development might mean for the Black Lives Matter movement—and the Black Freedom Struggle writ large—moving forward.

The electoral connection incentivizes representatives to take positions that please most of their constituents. However, on votes for which we have data, lawmakers vote against majority opinion in their district on one out of every three high-profile roll calls in the U.S. House. This rate of “incongruent voting” is much higher for Republican lawmakers, but they do not appear to be punished for it at higher rates than Democrats on Election Day. Why? Research in political psychology shows that citizens hold both policy-specific and identity-based symbolic preferences, that these preferences are weakly correlated, and that incongruous symbolic identity and policy preferences are more common among Republican voters than Democrats. While previous work on representation has treated this fact as a nuisance, we argue that it reflects two real dimensions of political ideology that voters use to evaluate lawmakers. Using four years of CCES data, district-level measures of opinion, and the roll-call record, we find that both dimensions of ideology matter for how lawmakers cast roll calls, and that the operational-symbolic disconnect in public opinion leads to different kinds of representation for each party.

We seek to answer a deceptively simple question: why do private citizens in liberal democracies offer hospitality to undocumented migrants? Through qualitative interviews with French citizens, we propose three reasons. The first is widely recognized in the scholarly literature: hospitality is offered out of a care and concern for vulnerable and precarious migrants. However, we uncover two additional reasons that are not acknowledged in studies on hospitality. One is the desire by citizens to uphold the basic principles and ideals of their own society (what we call “care for the world”). Another is the desire on the part of citizens themselves to become a different and better kind of person by practicing hospitality (what we call “care of the self”). We provide a multifaceted account of what motivates citizens to offer hospitality even in situations where it is outlawed by their own governments.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement arose to put a much-needed spotlight on police brutality and systemic racism. In two comprehensive studies, we sought to investigate the determinants of support for the BLM movement. First, in a systematic review 1,588 records were identified and findings from twenty-four studies (Npooled =27,691) were narratively synthesized along five categories relating to demographics, race, partisanship and ideology, discrimination and prejudice, and psychology. Second, we exhaustively examined the determinants of BLM support across thirteen probability-based nationally representative datasets (Npooled =31,779), finding thirty-seven common predictors for which individual meta-analyses were conducted to estimate the strength and robustness of their associations. Our results suggest a near perfect match between BLM opposition and positive attitudes towards political actors and institutions rooted in systemic racism in the United States. The present work contributes to a broad categorization of correlates of support for BLM across social, psychological, and political domains.

Scholars have long been skeptical of citizens’ ability to vote on the basis of their policy views. Voters lack incentives to pay attention to politics and so are often unaware of the policy stances adopted by presidential candidates and parties. However, some scholars have suggested that voter attention may increase when policy issues become important to them, such as when a crisis disrupts their lives. The coronavirus pandemic provides an opportunity to test this proposition. It is one of the most severe crises the United States has faced. It has disrupted almost everyone’s lives, and many people know someone who has tested positive or died from the virus. It is thus salient and important to many—if not most—voters. Despite this context, we find that many voters remain unaware of the 2020 US Presidential candidates’ stances on coronavirus policies. Their levels of knowledge are about typical for other policies, which is middling. In the absence of knowledge, voters cannot connect their policy views on the virus with their presidential voting decisions.

Mainstream political science literature on clientelism tends to focus on its supply side and on vote-buying, whereas ethnographic work often emphasizes client agency and incentives and paints a more diverse image of clientelism. We bridge the gap between these literatures by conducting a meta-analysis of ethnographic literature on clientelism from the client perspective. We code characteristics of clientelistic exchanges described in this work. We use cluster analysis and principal component analysis to systematize these data. Cluster analysis groups exchanges into three core subtypes of clientelism (“vote-buying”, “relational”, and “collective”); principal component analysis delivers two fundamental dimensions of clientelism: equal-unequal and individual-universal. We show that the two dimensions are associated with different aspects of client welfare and trade-offs from the client perspective. Our results reaffirm and reconcile existing deductive typologies of clientelism and can serve as a basis for a structured study of the demand side of clientelism.