Despite the proliferation of rooftop solar in the United States, its deployment and associated benefits have not been distributed equitably. Many states have adopted targeted incentives to improve access to rooftop solar and increase its uptake among low- and moderate-income (LMI) communities. This article examines the policy feedback effects of energy efficiency policies and electricity-sector portfolio standards on the adoption and diffusion of LMI solar incentives across states. Event History Analyses indicate that between 2010 and 2019, the adoption and diffusion of the incentives have been conditional on a state’s portfolio standards but independent of energy efficiency policies. Feedback effects from the portfolio standards in neighboring states are found to have a regressive impact on the likelihood of adoption. Hence, the feedback effects of previously adopted renewable energy policies are helping states to better serve vulnerable communities. However, there is no evidence of geographic clustering in the diffusion of incentives.

The conflict over abortion in the United States shows no sign of abatement. Both supporters and opponents of abortion rights have mobilized movements, engaged in collective action, suffered defeats and won victories, and survived over many decades. To understand how the current battle is likely to progress, we need to examine the movement/countermovement dynamics that drive the mobilization and outcomes of the opposing movements (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996). This article demonstrates how ongoing mobilization is fueled by the strategies and tactics of each side, which are strongly influenced by the actions of their opponents.

Latin America historically has had some of the strictest abortion laws in the world, making unsafe procedures a main cause of mortality among women and girls. However, in the context of the Green Wave, three countries recently have amply decriminalized access to abortion: Mexico (2021, 2023), Colombia (2022), and Argentina (2020) (Uruguay did so in 2012). The recent wave of decriminalization is the culmination of larger, historical processes that involved the gradual judicialization of reproductive rights in the region. Courts have been a central part of the story. In these three cases, arguments advanced by state and nonstate actors in favor of decriminalization significantly built on jurisprudence developed over many years. The process of abortion decriminalization has been partly a tale of gradual judicialization.

Sweeping changes in abortion politics are underway in the Americas. Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay have legalized abortion in recent years, marking a sea change in the most Catholic region of the world. At the same time, several states in the United States have restricted abortion access following the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, and numerous Central American countries have moved to fully criminalize the practice. Abortion is now legal in countries where it was long taboo, whereas the United States is characterized by a patchwork of laws that spans from some of the most progressive in the world to near-total bans. What explains this changing panorama in terms of reproductive rights in the Americas?

As the US Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Mexican Supreme Court issued a series of sweeping rulings to liberalize abortion—part of a larger trend across Latin America (Daby and Moseley 2022; Fernandez Anderson 2017; Reuterswärd 2020; Ruibal 2014). Mexico has created a nationwide standard of access to abortion services, whereas the United States has abandoned universal legal abortion and embraced a patchwork system in which each state has different laws regulating reproductive healthcare. Why are these two neighbors on such divergent paths? This contribution to the symposium compares the ways that federalism and judicial politics have interacted in Mexico and the United States to explain the different trajectories of abortion policy. The divergent paths of the United States and Mexico can be explained by the two countries’ different experiences with democracy and political and institutional differences between the judiciaries. A different civil-society and constitutional context also has played a role.

The Southern Cone has been at the forefront of the fight for abortion rights in Latin America. Due to the legacies of Hispanic legal traditions and the overwhelming political influence of the Catholic Church, the region historically has been known for its restrictive policies on abortion and reproductive rights more broadly.1 However, in the past 15 years, Southern Cone countries began to challenge those restrictions and embarked on a feminist revolution that led to what is now widely known as the “Green Wave” because of the color embraced by abortion-rights activists. Uruguay began this trend of legalizing abortion on demand in 2012, followed by Argentina in 2020. Chile experienced a moderate reform in 2017 when it moved from a total ban to a system of exceptions. Feminists have been trying ever since to pass abortion on demand through both legislative and constitutional reforms, which have not yet yielded the expected results.

Across Latin American countries, there is remarkable heterogeneity in abortion legislation, ranging from full prohibition to legal elective abortion.1 However, abortion policy does not seem to clearly map onto implementation on the ground. On the one hand, even in countries with very restrictive abortion laws, (clandestine) abortion rates are comparatively high, and legislation that criminalizes abortion is rarely enforced (Blofield 2006; Htun 2003). On the other hand, in countries that allow abortion under all or some circumstances, access to abortion is not guaranteed. In Argentina, for instance, different reports have stressed the difficulty in accessing abortion procedures both before and after legalization was enacted in early 2021.2

In 2023, both Democratic and Republican elected officials supported banning official use of the gender-neutral term “Latinx.” Using a nationally representative survey sample, this study examines whether opposition to the gender-neutral term “Latinx” suggests a potential wedge issue that cuts across partisanship. We find that opposition to “Latinx” is significantly higher among Republican partisans, those who disapprove of Joe Biden as president, and those with “colder” feelings toward Democrats. Opposition to “Latinx” generally converges with factors that predict existing partisan divisions; where it diverges, it does not affect respondent evaluations of Biden or feelings about Democrats. Based on these findings, we conclude that gender-neutral language currently shows little potential as a wedge issue.

Scientific expertise is crucial for responding effectively to environmental crises. Nevertheless, under conditions of political inequality, expert policy making can inhibit policy solutions by altering incentives of powerful interest groups. This is the situation facing the predominantly Alaska Native communities of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, which have long relied on salmon for subsistence and are now experiencing a collapse of the salmon population. Scientific evidence indicates that climate change is a primary cause, and experts therefore have opposed demands by Native subsistence fishers for ameliorative measures—especially restricting pollock fishing—as likely to be ineffective. However, this approach eliminates incentives for the influential pollock industry to support policies to address the salmon crisis, including climate-change mitigation. This article presents a simple formal model that demonstrates these incentive effects. This argument contributes to theories of business power and shows how expert policy making can inadvertently force marginalized communities to bear the burden of climate change.

Understanding why people choose to adapt or emigrate when facing slow-onset climate events is central to the design and implementation of policy addressing displacement spurred by climate change, especially climate-refugee programs. In this article, we leverage extensive field interviews and a novel survey in the Federated States of Micronesia, a country at high risk of environmental degradation but whose citizens have carte blanche access to the United States. We find that despite a general awareness of environmental risks, these play a minor role in migration decision making. Instead, other factors like work, health, and family obligations take precedence.

The dramatic impacts of climate change presage an inevitable surge in mass migration; however, advanced democracies are ill-equipped for this impending crisis. Moreover, we know very little about how publics evaluate this group of prospective migrants, who are estimated to increase from 100 million to 200 million worldwide within decades. This study investigates American attitudes toward climate-related migrants in a conjoint experiment of more than 1,000 US adults, in which respondents evaluated fictional refugee profiles that varied across multiple attributes. Findings reveal that Americans (1) prefer political refugees over climate-related refugees; and (2) prefer climate-related and economic migrants to a similar extent, and that these preferences are not driven by concerns over climate-related refugees’ integration into American society. Subgroup analyses indicate that younger individuals, those with high climate-change anxiety, and those who previously engaged in climate-related political activities discriminated less against climate-related migrants. Analyses of open-ended responses reveal that climate anxiety is a driver of positive evaluations of climate-related migrants.

Existing literature on climate politics predominantly concentrates on democracies. However, there is a pressing need to examine how authoritarian regimes respond to climate change, given their growing impact on global carbon emissions and their populations’ acute climate vulnerability. Extant research often assumes that authoritarian regimes have inherent advantages in addressing climate change, leading to overly optimistic perspectives on their capabilities. This study highlights the necessity of qualifying those assumptions and evaluates the comparative advantages and disadvantages of autocracies relative to democracies throughout the policy process: policy formulation (or outputs), implementation, and outcomes. I argue that whereas climate-conscious autocracies may efficiently produce policy outputs based on scientific evidence, they often face more challenges related to information about local enforcement during implementation. This may result in greater hurdles than democracies, even with adequate state capacity and monitoring infrastructure. Furthermore, this analysis contends that a country’s developmental stage, rather than its regime type, is related more directly to the effectiveness of translating implementation efforts into tangible policy outcomes. Therefore, this article posits that the political science discourse, which often juxtaposes democracies with autocracies, should expand its scope to better understand how a country’s developmental level influences the success of its climate strategies.

As more people are displaced by climate change, public acceptance of migrants is an increasingly relevant geographical and political issue. How willing are Americans to accept climate migrants and how does this support compare to others who are fleeing conflict? We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment (N=1,027) with prompts that varied the context of refugee resettlement, including a control condition without context, those displaced by global warming, refugees from Ukraine, and refugees from Afghanistan. Respondents expressed marginally lower willingness to admit climate migrants and significantly higher willingness to admit Ukrainian refugees. These differences were amplified by partisanship, religion, and race. These results suggest that some migrants experience a more welcoming public than others and highlight a challenge for those who are made vulnerable by climate change.

This article focuses on the everyday emotions of the populations impacted by the 2022 flood in Nigeria by exploring the affectivities embodied in flooding and the unfurlings of political emotions and agency in these dire circumstances. By foregrounding the everyday emotions of flooding, I address a subject that too often is overlooked in political science, too often shunted to the margins of politics. I advance knowledge of the disparate impacts of flooding on the vulnerable and how these survivors are improvising affective ways of negotiating a complex emergency that spared their lives but left them in a state of injury.

Climate change is a global phenomenon affecting millions of people. Low-income people and communities are particularly at risk because of limited capacities to cope with climate-related stresses. Differential access to social and economic resources determines the level of adaptive potential; thus, the variations in social vulnerability to climate change. This article explores how unequal power relations influence the level of vulnerability in rural agrarian Bangladesh. Using data from the coastal region, it specifically discusses ethnicity, religion, gender, and farm size as the sources and manifestations of power relations in Bangladeshi rural society. I argue that the deeply rooted institutions of power in the country shape access to important resources that might increase adaptive capacity and thus resilience in the context of rapid climate change.

Research has shown that as the size of government assistance programs grow, and the recipients of such programs are increasingly non-white and/or non-citizen, public support for them declines. Our study examines this phenomenon on the question of deservingness in federal disaster assistance. Using a 2018 survey experiment that leverages two devastating hurricanes—Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Harvey—that hit different parts of the United States in 2017, we explore how the social identities of race/ethnicity and partisanship affect attitudes about disaster deservingness. Our results demonstrate that although federal disaster assistance has broad support, it is contingent on perceptions about the disaster victim and the type of assistance. Respondents were less likely to support disaster assistance to Hurricane Maria–affected people than those affected by Hurricane Harvey. Moreover, white and Republican respondents were more likely to favor market-based assistance whereas race-/ethnic-minority and Democratic respondents were more likely to support more generous forms of disaster assistance. These findings have important implications for the allocation of disaster funds as climate change intensifies and the frequency of billion-dollar disaster events increases. This is exacerbated by political polarization and heightened social vulnerability due to changing population demographics.

The central question guiding this research is whether municipal councils governed by mayors with party membership differ significantly in their transparency from those governed by non-partisan mayors. Although this is an exploratory study that does not seek to test hypotheses, there are ongoing lively theoretical debates about the implications stemming from the decline of traditional parties and partisanship, and the rise of independent local lists (ILLs) (as well as the rise of new challenger parties). Dealing with unbalanced panel data from 308 Portuguese municipal councils from 2013 to 2017, we use a Bayesian hierarchical model based on a Beta regression. Our findings suggest that there are no differences in local transparency levels—as measured by the Municipal Transparency Index—in municipal councils governed by mayors with party membership and those by non-partisan mayors. Given that transparency is a common concern for both party- and non-party–aligned local governments as well as voters, this preliminary analysis asks important substantive questions about the promises that many ILLs make about their ability to clean up party politics and return power to “the people.”

How can political scientists rigorously evaluate the predictive power of theories? Many peer-reviewed political science articles include predictions about future outcomes, and scholars make predictions on social media and other public forums. The prevalence of predictions suggests that scholars recognize the utility of leveraging theories for this purpose; however, the predictions often are not made in a manner that allows for rigorously evaluating their accuracy. Building on the increasing popularity of study preregistration in the social sciences, this article proposes “prediction registration” as a means for scholars to publish falsifiable, systematic, and verifiable theory-based predictions. Increasing the rigor of predictive theory testing can advance often-circular debates about accuracy and presents a “win-win” for scholars who aim to test the predictive power of theories. With a more rigorous approach, correct predictions would better demonstrate a theory’s ability to forecast outcomes, and missed predictions would reveal information that can be used to calibrate the theory.

Recent research suggests that master’s (MA) education in the United States could be restructured to better meet the expectations of students who seek nonacademic careers. This article considers the state of terminal MA degree programs in political science to assess whether they are preparing students to enter the workforce. We examine programs across various dimensions and supplement this analysis with survey data to gain additional information about the purpose of terminal MA degree programs. The results suggest that their reconceptualization is needed in the discipline of political science.

Twitter has been a prominent forum for academics communicating online, both among themselves and with policy makers and the broader public. Elon Musk’s takeover of the company brought sweeping changes to many aspects of the platform, including public access to its data; Twitter’s approach to censorship and mis/disinformation; and tweaks to the affordances of the platform. This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their “engagement” with the platform, measured by either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets). We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others’ tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others’ content).