In an effort to manage carbon emissions, nitrogen runoffs, and other externalities, governments are increasingly resorting to a drastic policy measure: paying workers to stop working. Though such initiatives may be, strictly speaking, welfare enhancing, they are increasingly politicized, and often meet with protests. What explains public attitudes to “wage buyouts”? This article compares the explanatory power of two ideal-type theories in deriving a set of testable expectations. The first views work primarily as a means of earning a living; the second envisions it as a source of personal identity and social recognition. We test these opposing accounts using three survey experiments fielded on a combined sample of over 7,500 U.S. respondents. Overall, a sizeable portion of workers are resistant to being freed from work. Strikingly, individuals are more willing to reduce their work hours by half than to cease work entirely, even when offered full compensation. Those whose occupations are threatened by structural factors like offshoring or automation show lower identification with their jobs, and are accordingly more willing to accept government compensation for giving up those jobs. Program design matters: respondents are significantly more likely to accept compensation from their former employer than from the government. While partisanship drives attitudes towards government handouts, it is not significantly associated with attitudes towards (non)work. On the other hand, Protestants show consistently greater resistance to non-work, even when this results from a lottery windfall. These findings hold significant implications for climate and technology-driven labor displacement in years to come.

The discovery of CRISPR has fuelled the debate surrounding new genomic techniques (NGTs). This is of paramount importance given their potential impact on societies and ecosystems. Despite early enthusiasm about the potential of NGTs to “democratize” genome editing, it is increasingly evident that their introduction poses substantial challenges from a democratic point of view. Although greater engagement with the public sphere is urgently needed, it is something that is currently not widely studied from a political science standpoint. In this paper we offer an overview of the actors who have mobilized in relation to NGTs, with a particular focus on unduly neglected actors, such as civil society organizations. We also consider the views of those who have made proposals regarding the governance of NGTs more generally. The perspectives of these actors are not easy to reconcile with those of stakeholders, and we reflect on the democratic implications of this aspect.

Neoliberalism provides a compelling explanation for how city governments satisfy private capital interests by slashing social welfare spending and criminalizing the racialized poverty it unleashes. However, neoliberalism cannot account for why the politics of law and order also often find support from within overpoliced communities. This article claims that underlying broken windows policing is a neoconservative theory of democracy aimed not so much at directly reducing crime or enforcing disorder but at empowering organic community authorities. Specifically, I show how neoconservatives developed this theory of democracy in response to the urban crisis, which they argued was a crisis of authority and not of material deprivation, as welfare liberals believed. This article thus suggests that we understand the project of neoconservatism as aimed at making modern conservatism appealing within an increasingly diverse democracy by cultivating (authoritarian) political attachments between traditional authorities in the community and the police.

Government programs often fail because administrative actors receive insufficient financial and personnel resources for their implementation. Despite the importance of resource provision for policy implementation, we know very little about when and why implementers are equipped with the resources they need. We examine the conditions under which new policies go hand in hand with resource increases for the administration. We match data on policy adoptions and budgetary changes in the area of social policy for 15 European countries over 30 years (1990 to 2020). The analysis reveals that governments tend to provide more financial resources when 1) an issue is prominently discussed among parties, and when 2) institutional fragmentation is low. Moreover, governments provide fewer additional resources for policy implementation 3) when their chances of getting re-elected are low due to intense political competition. These findings contribute to our broader understanding of democracy and public administration.

In political science, positivist scholars often approach intuition cautiously as something best avoided or improved by methodological training. Meanwhile, interpretive scholars typically laud “hunches” as necessary guiding logics. This article introduces the novel concept of “informed intuition,” drawing on understandings of intuition in cognitive psychology and organizational behavior that emphasize the importance of learning and feedback in developing and using intuition. Many political scientists agree privately that they use intuition but rarely acknowledge it in published works. As such, the article argues for harnessing, acknowledging, recognizing, and legitimizing the role of informed intuition across methodological and epistemic divides. Specifically, it demonstrates the importance of acknowledging the role of informed intuition in the logics of research (inductive, deductive, or abductive) and case selection. In doing so, the article aligns with discussions of transparency to argue that researchers should also consider demonstrating intuitive openness to enhance research integrity.

In this paper, I explore how two recent politically charged deaths—those of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt—illuminate the broader dynamics inherent in the concept of political martyrdom and its relationship to American democracy. Political martyrdom (as distinct from that associated with religious communities) offers martyrs a life beyond the grave, not by promising eternal life or paradise, but by ensuring them a role in a community’s collective memory. It involves three components: death, in what we might call “unnatural” circumstances, generally connected to an individual’s identity (or identities) or political commitments; consecration of that death, embedding it in a community’s collective memory and ascribing to it transcendent meaning; and transmission, the passing down of martyrdom narratives over time through media, ritual, and commemorative practices. The paper uses the examples of Floyd and Babbitt to illustrate the value of this conceptual category, one that focuses less on the personal qualities of individuals and more on communities’ narrations of their lives and deaths; highlights such narratives’ capacity to build collective identities over time, often in contexts far removed from the martyrs’ own lives and deaths; and offers new interpretive lenses for considering twenty-first-century issues of systemic violence and structural injustice.

This article examines how drug gangs establish commitments of silence (CS) with communities in Montevideo, Uruguay. CS involve tacit agreements through which communities exchange silence—that is, not reporting illicit gang activities to the authorities—for gang-provided tranquility, thus ensuring relative stability. Unlike previous research that has focused on contexts of low state presence, this study explores a context, Montevideo, with higher state presence, emphasizing the increased importance of CS when states can receive reports of criminal activity and respond; that is, in low-corruption and high-capacity settings. Gangs use various methods from forced violence to negotiated loyalty to secure community silence. I argue that the structure of local reciprocity networks, characterized by long-term exchange ties, influences the type of CS established and determines prevalent strategies for maintaining community silence. Homegrown gang members embed the CS within the community’s existing reciprocity network. The argument is developed through case studies in Montevideo’s Casavalle neighborhood, using a process-tracing design based on interviews, press articles, and historical records to uncover the logics behind drug gang operations and their relationship with the local community.

A growing literature has challenged some of the more influential accounts regarding the role of courts in the development of social and economic policy in the United States. We highlight some of the more durable features of the American federal judiciary that together tend to privilege ideologically conservative outcomes on matters of politics and public policy. Situating the United States in a comparative perspective, we build our argument in three parts. First, we review interdisciplinary accounts documenting how institutional features of US courts—including the unusually strong powers of judicial review—can tilt outcomes in a conservative-leaning direction. Second, we document how these formidable powers interact with judicial selection processes that currently skew the composition of the judiciary in favor of conservative candidates. Third, we show how the combination of the two factors—institutional and compositional—biases federal courts’ interventions toward privileging conservative policy outcomes.

Criminal actors are widely assumed to maintain a low profile, exerting power through coercion and clandestine networks. Scholarship addressing public action by criminal actors focuses largely on visible violence. However, an ample empirical record demonstrates that criminal actors also communicate publicly to broad audiences. To better understand this practice, my study focuses on campaigns of narco-messaging in Mexico. I ask: how do criminal actors represent themselves when they speak publicly? How does such self-portrayal interact with other practices of criminal governance and control? I identify three patterns of self-representation: Ruler of territory, Scourge of enemies, and Guardian of people. Overall, public communication expands the repertoires of criminal actors, offering ways to modify public perceptions of better-known practices such as costly signaling through violence. Different representations are deployed strategically in the contexts of establishing regimes of governance, maintaining regimes, and fighting criminal wars.

Opponents of authoritarian regimes are often assumed to desire democracy in place of the current regime. In this paper, we show that authoritarian dissidents hold divergent attitudes towards democracy and identify a key bloc within the regime opposition: “non-democratic critics” (NDCs) or those who are dissatisfied with the current regime but resist adopting democracy. We develop the concept of NDCs, theorize why they exist and how they differ from supporters of democracy and the status quo, and test implications of this framework using interviews and an original survey across China. We find that nearly half of respondents who oppose the current Chinese regime are non-democratic critics who also do not support democracy. Compared to democracy and status quo supporters, NDCs have a distinct set of political and socio-economic demands and higher uncertainty about the performance of democracy in meeting these demands. We also find that NDCs are economically better off than democracy supporters, suggesting that unequal access to the benefits of state-led economic development may motivate differing attitudes toward democracy among regime opponents. These findings put forth an important explanation for why the world’s largest authoritarian regime endures—those who oppose the regime have divergent and unclear visions of what political system should be adopted in its place.

Entrenched ethnoracial hierarchies that persist alongside formal democratic rules threaten commitments to democracy. Previous research has shown how marginalization and oppression harm minoritized group members, but has rarely considered the potential harm entrenched group-based hierarchies pose for democratic society overall. This paper offers two innovations. First, we argue that ethnoracial hierarchies have society-wide implications. Entrenched systems of ethnoracial marginalization undermine support for democracy and respect for democratic rights, even among members of privileged groups. Second, group consciousness conditions the effects of ethnoracial hierarchy among minoritized group members. Specifically, when minoritized individuals hold a structural dimension of group consciousness, they tend to sustain commitments to democracy. Insights from interviews with Indigenous and Afrodescendant activists and policy makers conducted during field research in Peru facilitate development of these theoretical expectations. Subsequent analysis of survey data cross-nationally throughout Latin America and over time in Bolivia demonstrates that ethnoracial hierarchies are associated with weaker democratic commitments across society, while reducing these hierarchies strengthens support for democracy. Among minoritized group members, however, structural group consciousness helps to mitigate these negative effects. This paper contributes a theoretical framework and empirical evidence concerning the challenges ethnoracial hierarchies pose for democratic commitments not only among those who belong to minoritized groups, but for people across society.