Do parties respond to inequality? Despite the relevance of inequality and its consequences, existing studies fail to capture parties’ emphasis on economic equality and redistribution or to differentiate between existing levels of inequality and increases in inequality. Based on 850,000 party statements from 12 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries (1970–2020), we introduce a crowd-coded dataset that allows us to distinguish positive references to economic equality and redistribution from upward-trending equal-rights/anti-discrimination rhetoric. We show that responses found in previous studies do not capture economic equality and redistribution. In reassessing the impact of inequality, we argue that low visibility, status quo bias, and turnout effects discourage party responses to high inequality levels, while rising inequality poses a visible status quo change and a threat that left parties respond to. We find that left parties respond to inequality increases (except less tangible gains among the most affluent) but not to (high) inequality levels. This helps to understand why inequality is not self-correcting.

Some scholars argue that democratic stability requires political elites to practice forbearance: roughly speaking, “restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018). The article proposes a novel conception of forbearance as a mechanism of democratic stability. According to this view, public officials exercise forbearance when they refrain from actions of uncertain legitimacy, actions that, while in fact compatible with democracy’s constitutive rules, are not commonly known to be. The argument is that such actions, by provoking divergent reactions among citizens, create uncertainty about the extent to which others are willing to resist breaches of democracy’s rules. This uncertainty undermines their ability to coordinate responses to genuine abuses of power in the future. The article concludes with observations about the normative implications of the theory, introducing the concept of the “Democrat’s Dilemma” to illustrate the difficulties of knowing when democrats ought to practice forbearance.

Turnbull-Dugarte and López Ortega (2024) argue that increasing exposure to sexually conservative ethnic out-groups causes instrumental support for LGBT+ rights among those predisposed to disfavor the ethnic out-group. The article presents results from two related experiments, one conducted in the UK and a follow up in Spain, where respondents were randomly assigned to read vignettes about anti-LGBT+ protests, and the identity of the protesters was varied. I outline a series of concerns with the article, primarily related to ad hoc empirical choices. The authors use weights (of undisclosed origin) that follow a peculiar bimodal distribution in the second study but use no weights in the first, and inconsistently use robust standard errors throughout. These choices create a pattern of statistically significant results consistent with their theory, a pattern that disappears when either choice is varied. Additional analyses show that, rather than supporting their theory, the second experiment contradicts it.

Contributing to a growing interest in disability in political science, this article makes the case for the central role of disability in upholding the belief in work as requisite for full citizenship. Turning to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it shows how disability and the figure of the disabled worker were used to fortify emergent understandings of work against the changes wrought by industrial capitalism. Focusing on three sites of disabled labor—the school-based workshop, custodial institution, and industrial factory—it reveals the crucial ideological work performed by disability in sustaining the myth of the independent worker-citizen. Where existing scholarship has focused on disability either as an identity category or as a target of rights and policy, this article models an alternative approach, arguing for the relevance of disability as a concept that is integral to, and productive of, the ways we understand citizenship and political belonging.

Do individuals in Western democracies shift their views on LGBT+ inclusion when exposed to opposition from Muslim out-groups? And is this “homonationalist” responsiveness stronger among anti-immigration individuals? Our article “Instrumentally inclusive […]” addressed these questions using representative data from Britain (Study 1) and crowd-sourced data from Spain (Study 2). We revisit Study 2 in response to concerns about post-stratification weighting a convenience sample and erroneously inconsistent use of robust standard errors. Varying population reference parameters, weight caps, variance estimators, subgroup definitions, and covariate adjustments, we find strong support for the original findings. Neither reasonable alternative weighting schemes nor corrected variance estimators substantively change the results. In fact, the originally published point estimates are equal to or smaller than the median across alternative specifications. Consistent with the Article, we find that treatment increases support for LGBT+ inclusion in Spain, without consistent identifiable variation by immigration attitudes.

While Supreme Court nominations have become increasingly high-salience political events, we know little about their prioritization relative to other issues by core constituency groups. We examine how individual donors and the mass public prioritize nominations, as well as factors they believe presidents should consider when selecting judges. To do so, we constructed original questions for a survey of over 7,000 validated donors and a comparison general population sample. We find donors are substantially more likely to prioritize nominations than their general public co-partisans, particularly Republican donors. Further analysis suggests the prioritization gap is consistent with theories that donors are motivated to move policy toward the ideological extremes. Analyzing policy positions, the largest donor-public difference occurs for diversity in appointments, but for all positions we find smaller differences than for prioritization. Overall, the findings highlight donors’ policy priorities may diverge from those of the public even more than policy positions do.