Seminal theories in political science argue that military service is a critical driver of minority integration. However, a major obstacle bedeviling the study of military service is self-selection: individuals who are better integrated may be more likely to join the military in the first place. We address the selection problem by examining the effects of military conscription during the Vietnam War using an instrumental variables approach. Conscription during 1970–72 was decided on the basis of national draft lotteries that assigned draft numbers based on an individual’s date of birth. Using the draft lottery instrument, we find no evidence of a causal effect of military service on a range of integration outcomes from the 2000 decennial census. At least for the Vietnam era, the link between service and long-term integration is largely driven by self-selection, which points to important scope conditions for the integrationist view.

In this article, I show that in contexts where the state fails to deliver order and security, criminal organizations can paradoxically facilitate economic development. I consider the case of the Primeiro Comando da Capital [“First Capital Command”] (PCC)—a Brazilian prison gang that has achieved hegemony over the criminal market of a large region and become the de facto regulator of violence and organized crime in São Paulo. Employing a robust difference-in-differences approach on granular administrative employment data, firm creation registries, and satellite-based nighttime luminosity (as a proxy for informal economic activity), I provide causal evidence that the PCC’s stable, rule-based criminal governance significantly increased local economic opportunities. My findings challenge conventional wisdom on the negative economic externalities of crime, demonstrating that hegemonic, institutionalized, and non-extractive criminal governance can generate positive economic externalities by reducing violence and uncertainty.

In a recent article published in this journal, Holman, Merolla, and Zechmeister (2022; 2024) report a decrease in support for U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May following the 2017 Manchester bombing, using data from the British Election Studies. Our analysis, however, reveals that once a linear time trend is considered, the bombing does not significantly affect public reactions. We replicate their study with Gallup World Poll data and likewise find no decline in May’s approval rating. Extending the analysis, we examine major terrorist attacks in African countries led by men and similarly find no rally effect. Together, these results cast doubt on terrorism’s capacity to trigger rally ’round the flag dynamics and challenge claims of a gendered pattern whereby women leaders face unique penalties in crises. We argue that broader comparative evidence is necessary before concluding whether citizens rally around, or retreat from, leaders in the wake of terrorism.

This article reconciles conflicting views about the political landscape of corporate America with new data on the revealed political preferences of 97,469 corporate directors and executives at 9,005 different U.S. companies. Driven largely by turnover, I find that average observed ideology for directors and executives has shifted meaningfully to the left over time, changing from modestly conservative in 2001 to roughly centrist by 2022. This finding supports a middle-ground position between conventional wisdom casting “big business” as a conservative stronghold and revisionist views holding the opposite. Counterfactual simulations and a difference-in-differences design suggest multifaceted reasons for these changes, and hand-collected data on corporate stances on LGBTQ-related legislation suggest a strong connection between corporate political activity and individual views. Overall, this transformation has profound implications for American politics, as the individuals comprising one of the most powerful interest groups—corporate elites—appear to be fracturing ideologically and to some degree even switching sides.

How effective are democratic systems in preventing individuals with criminal backgrounds from holding political office? We investigate this question for the case of Norway, which has no legal restrictions against felons running for office. We analyze local election candidates from 2003 to 2019, paired with administrative records of criminal offenses. We demonstrate that individuals with criminal records are systematically penalized at every stage of their political careers. Candidates are less likely to have criminal records than the general population, with elected officials less likely to have criminal backgrounds than their unelected peers, and mayors being the most lawful. In Norway’s flexible-list PR system—where parties rank candidates and voters can cast personal votes for preferred candidates—our evidence shows that party gatekeeping accounts for most filtering, while personal votes contribute little at the margin.

Contrary to the conventional view that minority regimes are vulnerable to breakdown, many of these regimes exhibit remarkable durability. From 1900 to 2015, minority autocracies that exclude a single majority ethnic group (e.g., regimes in Bahrain, Syria, and Apartheid South Africa) remained in power twice as long as other autocracies. This article argues that this durability is rooted in their unique ethno-political configuration, which enables them to foster a largely unconditional loyalty due to the ruling minority’s fear of being subjected to majoritarian rule. Such loyalty endows them with an exceptional capacity to withstand major challenges by fostering in-group demobilization and policing, pro-regime countermobilization, and coethnic elite loyalty. This article employs a multi-method approach, using a novel dataset of minority regimes and a case study of Bahrain based on original interviews. The findings highlight the conditions under which ethnic group loyalty can play a central role in autocratic survival.

Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans are politically visible yet institutionally invisible, long categorized as “white” by the U.S. government despite neither self-categorizing nor racially assigned as such. Most forms—across public and private sectors—still lack a “MENA” category option. What are the political consequences of institutional invisibility? Across two survey experiments and in-depth interviews, I find that exclusion from official identity categories triggers the experience of categorization threat, a psychological response rarely linked to political behavior. When MENA Americans experience categorization threat, they respond by expressing opinions on politics in ways that attempt to signal and assert their MENA identity and, to a lesser extent, Person of Color (POC) identity. Such identity assertion demonstrates that bureaucratic categorization influences expressions of public opinion on politics, not simply how people self-categorize. Researching the effects of category exclusion on public opinions creates opportunities for more accurate and democratic scholarship.

This article introduces a novel empirical method for estimating the ideological orientations of U.S. regulatory agencies across different presidential administrations. Employing a measurement model based on item response theory and analyzing data on planned regulations from the Unified Agenda and the president’s discretionary review of those regulations, as implemented by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the study provides dynamic estimates of agency ideal points from the Clinton through the Trump administrations. The model uses NOMINATE ideal points of presidents to link the estimated agency ideal points to legislative ideal points. The resulting estimates correlate positively with existing measures of agency ideology, highlight controversial regulators, and demonstrate that agency ideologies shift over time due to emerging issues that divide the parties. The study also finds that agencies located ideologically closer to the president are more productive, as evidenced by their regulatory output.

State legislatures are critical policymaking bodies, yet recent studies suggest that elections rarely hold state legislators accountable for their representation and voters generally know little about legislative politics. Would state legislatures function differently if voters had access to more information about legislative politics? Leveraging the haphazard overlap of newspaper markets and legislative districts, I construct and validate a measure of legislative press coverage in all 49 partisan state legislatures for the years 2000–2022 that is plausibly uncorrelated with other district-level variables. Drawing on this large-scale dataset, this article traces the impact of press coverage on state legislative voters, elections, and, ultimately, representation. I find that robust local press coverage substantially augments down-ballot voter engagement, the electoral return to ideological moderation, and the incumbency advantage. Once in office, I further document that state legislators who receive stronger press coverage work more for their constituencies and diverge less from their district’s median voter. Overall, these results suggest that state legislators would be more moderate, representative, and productive were local press coverage strengthened.

When deciding new issues, judges face uncertainty about how cases map into their existing understanding of the law. This uncertainty can lead to conflicting decisions on the same legal question, generating inconsistent law. I develop a formal theory of judicial decision making, where courts learn about and rule on new legal issues. I find that courts learn most from their ideological allies; however, increasing the ideological distance between courts can either increase or decrease legal uniformity. Using an original dataset of cases of first impression in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, I find that increasing the ideological distance between two courts increases the probability of disagreement if the previous court’s decision is in-line with their relative bias, and decreases disagreement when the decision runs counter to their relative bias. My findings highlight the ways that courts can use decisions from even ideologically distant peers to learn about new legal issues.

We re-examine recent influential claims that repeated measure experimental designs offer large precision gains without biasing treatment effect estimates in survey research. We test these claims by experimentally varying the design of six classic political science experiments across three distinct large samples of U.S. adults (total $ N=\mathrm{13,163} $). In contrast to prior evidence, we observe consistent attenuation of treatment effects in repeated measure designs. However, we show in simulations that this average design effect is small enough, and the precision gains large enough, that we recommend repeated measure designs for broad application—though (large-N) post-only designs may be preferable when research priorities include estimating the precise magnitude of a treatment effect. We additionally explore how several design considerations affect the bias-precision trade-off, such as within-subject versus between-groups designs, the relative separation of repeated measures within single surveys, and differences in respondent characteristics across sample types.

Early modern European powers were beset by episodic unrest as they sought to consolidate their authority and build empires. We examine how growing state communication networks and the penetration of society impacted unrest by combining original and detailed parish-level data from pre-Revolutionary France on the expansion of the horse-post relay network with rebellion in this period. Using a staggered difference-in-differences framework, we find that new horse-post relays are associated with more local rebellion. We argue that the main mechanisms are the material consequences of state centralization. New horse-post relays are linked with more rebellion against state agents and associates—the military, police, tax collectors, and the judiciary—that conscripted civilians, enforced taxes and laws, and increasingly monopolized roads. Pre-existing state and administrative fragmentation also mediated this relationship. Our findings have implications for the scholarly understanding of the co-evolution of states and order.

Authoritarian survival theories maintain that dictators distribute rents to elites who can control the masses. Yet, it is unclear how dictators choose beneficiary elites. We argue that elites centrally placed in their locality’s family network enjoy greater influence on other community members and, thus, are more likely to be co-opted through distribution. We test this argument by compiling a novel dataset of Paraguayan family networks that we link to families who illegally benefited from public land grants from 1954 to 2007. Using a difference-in-differences in reverse design, we find that local families with higher network centrality were more likely to receive these grants during the 1954–88 dictatorship. We also show more affiliations with the ruling Colorado Party and incidents of repression—indicators of social control—in localities with more central families before 1989. Our work shows that family ties can serve to build authoritarian ruling coalitions.

This article analyzes three kinds of privilege—roughly, the monopoly or near-monopoly of a prized social good by a group—in terms of the political barriers facing attempts to reform them. Extending previous work, it distinguishes among discrimination privileges, which are zero-sum and relative, benefiting some groups at others’ expense; monopolized social right privileges, involving goods enjoyed only by some that can and should be extended to all; and differential treatment privileges, involving disagreement over whether a good currently monopolized by some should be extended to all or to none. The political barriers to reforming discrimination privilege involve group interest; those to reforming monopolized social rights include privilege, ignorance, cost, priorities, policy uncertainty, and the psychological wage. Differential treatment privilege is complicated. An exercise in applied political realism, this article treats normative categories as political inputs rather than philosophical conclusions and seeks to demonstrate the insights enabled by doing so.

As elected officials and citizens struggle to understand the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States, some have pointed to the introduction of “gavel-to-gavel” camera coverage in legislative bodies as driving the downward trajectory of these institutions. Advocates of increased transparency suggest cameras empower voters, producing more moderate behavior among legislators, whereas opponents suggest cameras encourage partisanship and dysfunction. Previous research offers mixed conclusions, in part, because of a focus on national legislatures where the introduction of cameras occurs only once. Using an original dataset of the adoption of gavel-to-gavel coverage in state legislative chambers, we examine whether cameras are associated with a range of chamber- and individual-level outcomes. The findings suggest that there are no systematic impacts from the introduction of gavel-to-gavel coverage. Normative concerns about cameras in legislatures may be overstated, an important finding given their proliferation in public proceedings since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fundraising is a critical element of legislative elections, yet problems of measurement and strategic candidate emergence have prevented researchers from evaluating how running extremist candidates affects parties’ fundraising prospects. This article combines an original candidate ideology scaling with a regression discontinuity design in primary elections in Congress, 1980–2022, and state legislatures, 1996–2022, to assess whether donors punish extremist nominees in general elections. I find that the “coin-flip” primary nomination of an extremist over a more moderate opponent decreases their party’s share of general-election contributions by 7 percentage points in the median contest and 18–19 percentage points when the ideological contrast between candidates is largest. This financial penalty is larger among corporate PACs than individual donors and is driven symmetrically by donors withdrawing support from extremist nominees and rallying behind their opponents. Applying a complementary panel-based identification strategy, I replicate these core findings and further document that the financial penalty to extremist nominees has fallen by nearly half since 2000. Overall, these results show how general-election donors act as a marked, yet waning, moderating force in American politics when parties run extremist candidates.

Interstate conflict is rare not primarily because states settle disputes peacefully but largely because they have no serious dispute. To address this simple but oft-neglected reality, I provide a comprehensive measurement of states’ claimable areas. Focusing on three international norms that emerged after the world wars (territorial integrity, minority protection, and maritime sovereignty), I code geographical extents of states’ claimable areas for 1946–2024. I illustrate the usefulness of this dataset by applying it to oil and conflict. By leveraging the records of over 600,000 wildcat drills, natural experiments, and difference-in-differences, I demonstrate that fuel resources increased interstate conflicts only when discovered in areas claimable to multiple states. The extensive analyses of validity, heterogeneity, and mechanisms, as well as the “most-similar” case study, provide further evidence. These findings expand the emerging literature on territorial norms by providing comprehensive, rigorous, and contemporary evidence for claimability in international relations.

How does racial inequality shape who dies in war? Focusing on the era of United States military segregation, we argue that discriminatory societal institutions and prejudicial attitudes combined to reduce commanders’ beliefs about Black soldiers’ combat effectiveness. These biased assessments decreased the likelihood that Black soldiers were assigned combat occupational specialties, and that Black combat units received key frontline assignments. However, commanders’ biases also created a desire to preserve white lives. Accordingly, we expect Black soldiers received worse support. These choices shaped soldiers’ risk of death. Analyzing the case of World War I (WWI), we leverage data on over 44,000 infantry fatalities and show that white units incurred four times as many combat fatalities as comparable Black units. However, holding fixed exposure to combat, Black units suffered higher levels of noncombat deaths. Commanders thus deemed Black soldiers insufficiently qualified to fight as equals, but sufficiently expendable to die in war’s least consequential conditions.

Standard arguments for the moral duty to vote in nationwide elections or referendums appeal to citizens’ general duty of reciprocity not to free ride on the provision of the public goods of democratic governance and its benefits, to a nonreciprocal duty to maintain and strengthen democratic institutions, or to a general duty to bring about just outcomes. In this article, I argue that citizens are under an expressive duty to vote, as grounded in a more general duty to manifest support for just and democratic laws, and for democratic institutions as the instantiation of the requirement to treat one another with equal concern and respect. Even if (in circumstances I elucidate) citizens are morally permitted not to vote for either of the options on offer, it does not follow that they are morally permitted to abstain: sometimes, participating in the poll and voiding one’s ballot is, on expressive grounds, the right thing to do.

Two-way fixed effects (TWFE) models are widely used in political science to establish causality, but recent methodological discussions highlight their limitations under heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) and violations of the parallel trends (PT) assumption. This growing literature has introduced numerous new estimators and procedures, causing confusion among researchers about the reliability of existing results and best practices. To address these concerns, we replicated and reanalyzed 49 studies from leading journals that employ TWFE models for causal inference using observational panel data with binary treatments. Using six HTE-robust estimators, diagnostic tests, and sensitivity analyses, we find: (i) HTE-robust estimators yield qualitatively similar but highly variable results; (ii) while a few studies show clear signs of PT violations, many lack evidence to support this assumption; and (iii) many studies are underpowered when accounting for HTE and potential PT violations. We emphasize the importance of strong research designs and rigorous validation of key identifying assumptions.