Migrant Acceptance and Inclusion

With an estimated 281 million international migrants around the globe, nearly 120 million of whom are forcibly displaced, migration is one of the most important issues in the world today (McAuliffe and Oucho Reference McAuliffe and Oucho2024). From Venezuela to Syria and from Myanmar to Sudan, the outflow of migrants and refugees remakes countries and entire regions. As demonstrated in recent elections around the world, the inflow of migrants also critically shapes political competition and debates. While campaign rhetoric about migration is often a key strategy for mobilizing votes, it also reflects deeper understandings about the boundaries of the nation, the proper role of migration in the public interest, and ultimately how open or closed countries should be to those seeking to make new lives or livelihoods on their soil.

The four articles in this section offer varied perspectives on these pressing questions related to admitting, accepting, and including migrants and refugees. The first two works provide innovative reconsiderations of the political theory of migration policy ethics. In “Morality in the Refugee Regime? Arguing for More (Political) Realism in Admitting Refugees,” Felix Bender notes that prevailing arguments for admitting refugees emphasize moral grounds such as the duty to rescue. Proposing that moral reasons fail because they misrepresent the political world, Bender contends that political realism offers a stronger case. He demonstrates that states admit refugees to serve ends such as reinforcing the structures of liberal democracy, building trust among allies, or destabilizing rival regimes. If states take the disruptive political force of refugee admittance seriously, the author concludes, then they should widen the conception of refugeehood to include all who are politically oppressed; they should admit more refugees to gain international power; and, viewing refugees as allies in a political struggle rather than passive recipients of aid, they should provide refugees with political resources to support their efforts opposing and changing their home states. The analysis advocates for political realism as a new lens through which to approach migration debates, and also uses migration as a case with which to evaluate new forms of political normativity derived from political realities.

“From Openness to Inclusion: Toward a Democratic Approach to Migration Policy” shifts focus from why states should admit migrants to how they can approach migrants’ positioning within the polity. Nathan Pippenger posits that many conversations in migration studies center on the openness of borders. Taking up an alternative democracy-centered approach, he argues that the guiding principle of migration should instead be inclusion, given that full membership for all residents in a state is central to democratic self-rule. Pippenger notes that democratic legitimacy does not require decisions made by a collective with common traits, but is an outcome of collective processes in which compatriots who identify with each other as long-term partners exchange perspectives on their shared future. Inclusion in this sense does not require a static, shared identity among members, but rather can build from a dynamic, future-orientated, intersubjective identification. The shift from a focus on border openness to inclusion has important implications both for the study of migration and for policy, as it calls on democratic states to design a wide range of policies on the assumption that most migrants are citizens-to-be.

“The Ukrainian Refugee Crisis and the Politics of Public Opinion: Evidence from Hungary” turns from the question of admitting migrants in theory to how societies accept migrants in practice. Thomas B. Pepinsky, Ádám Reiff, and Krisztina Szabó investigate public opinion about refugee inflows in highly exclusionary political contexts and ask if shifts in public opinion are driven by the composition of the refugee population. Probing the case of Hungary following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the authors conduct and analyze original survey experiments alongside existing survey data to produce two major findings. First, Hungary—a setting where anti-migrant and anti-refugee attitudes previously prevailed and have been politically important for the incumbent government—has seen a shift toward increasingly tolerant attitudes toward refugees. Evidence suggests that this shift may be the consequence of perceptions of Ukrainian refugees as white, Christian, and European. Second, public opinion is not only a reflection of the illiberal regime’s policies and narratives, as attitudes toward refugees also change in response to current events. These empirical contributions highlight the role of public opinion in processes of migrant acceptance and encourage further research on how public opinion is shaped by the characteristics of migrants and forced migrants themselves.

Public opinion on migration inclusion can also be deeply grounded in social dynamics in receiving societies. The final article in this special section, “Embracing the Status Hierarchy: How Immigration Attitudes, Prejudice, and Sexism Shaped Non-White Support for Trump,” contextualizes opposition to immigration in a larger constellation of exclusionary and discriminatory views. Jessica R. Geiger and Tyler T. Reny hypothesize that entrenched societal norms can lead to hierarchy-reinforcing beliefs and stereotypes about subordinate groups among members of subordinate group members no less than among dominant groups. Using large-N surveys fielded between 2011 and 2021, they test this proposition with a focus on attitudes related to immigration, out-group prejudice, and sexism. They show that substantial numbers of Black, Latino, and Asian respondents support traditional status hierarchies and that those attitudes strongly predict support for Donald Trump. These findings point to the value of embedding debates about immigration attitudes in broader frameworks for understanding identity and beliefs across diverse populations. They also encourage us to continue to investigate how preferences typically associated with white Americans might be similarly consequential among non-white Americans and also to draw out implications of these patterns for elections, political rhetoric, policymaking, and more.

Law and Politics

At the time of writing, we await the 2024 US presidential election. This highly anticipated contest has highlighted the intersection of law, courts, and politics. From debates on the current Supreme Court to Donald Trump’s legal battles and Kamala Harris’s prosecutor background, judicial questions emerged in various forms across the campaign. The next section offers three articles that help us to understand these issues by offering varied approaches to examining legal actors, advocacy, and influence, as well as their enduring political consequences.

In “Courts-First Federalism: How Model Legislation Becomes Impact Litigation,” Dylan L. Yingling and Daniel J. Mallinson set out to answer how political actors at the state level have managed to achieve their policy goals nationally in recent years, most notably and controversially in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Building upon recent literature that discusses the rise of model legislation, the authors theorize that ideologically aligned states and interest groups can nationalize their policy preferences by crafting model bills to seed highly impactful litigation in the federal court system. The authors term the strategy “courts-first federalism” and describe the result as “leg-judicial diffusion,” a new method of policy diffusion that is effectively restructuring American federalism. They perform a preliminary test of their argument on a sample of 45 state laws derived from model legislation produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council between 2005 and 2012. The authors find that a relatively large percentage of state laws derived from model bills have been the subject of federal litigation and a disproportionate percentage have reached the Supreme Court. Explaining how conservative states and interest groups have worked together to advance their agenda and diminish federal power, this reflection essay suggests the need to expand our study of modes of power sharing and adopt a broader definition of policy diffusion.

Brian Libgober and Daniel Carpenter further delve into the oft-unrecognized actors shaping legislation in “Lawyers as Lobbyists: Regulatory Advocacy in American Finance.” Asking what describes the nature of lobbying in American politics today, the authors suggest that prevailing theories fall short because they do not include the advocacy of regulatory policies by high-powered lawyers. Even though these lawyers are not registered as lobbyists, they engage in the articulation and defense of positions on behalf of their clients in the policy-making process. To demonstrate their argument, the authors conduct an in-depth case study of the Dodd-Frank Act, landmark financial reform legislation passed after the 2008 financial crisis. Under prevailing theories, researchers would have missed much about the population of lobbyists and the extent of lobbying activity during the crucial implementation phase. By analyzing bureaucratic meeting logs and matching names to LinkedIn profiles and other personnel databases specific to lawyers, the authors demonstrate that (1) the number of unregistered individuals engaged in the advocacy of regulatory policies is much greater than the number of registered lobbyists working on the law, and (2) these individuals are systematically different from registered lobbyists. Revealing a more accurate picture of influence seeking, the study underscores the costs of outdated concepts of lobbying and generates a new explanation for classic questions about the sources of inequality in American politics.

Moving from the sources of law and public policy to how they endure over time, “Litigating Policy Drift: Frozen Categories and Thresholds in Court” investigates why inflexible and outdated policies are so resilient in the United States. Ursula Hackett argues that policy drift can come from two distinct forms of policy rigidity: interval freezing and categorical freezing. Whereas the former refers to the inability to easily change numerical thresholds, the latter accounts for the inability to adjust category boundaries. With changing political, economic, or social circumstances, both types tend to provoke legal disputes, but each possesses several sources of legal resilience. Hackett attributes this resilience to factors such as institutional predispositions toward restraint among judges, low-salience injuries and slow-moving change, textualist forms of originalism, and plausible deniability from legislators and executive agencies. She generates her theory from a wide range of recent and historical cases pertaining to voting rights, racial discrimination, religious conscience protections, and other hot-button issues. Providing new tools to better understand why a variety of policies have become less effective over time yet stayed in place, this reflection essay illuminates that drift is not an automatic or inevitable process but the outcome of political and legal contestation.

Crisis and Belief Formation

In an era of global disruptions, rampant misinformation, and escalating polarization, understanding the formation and evolution of political beliefs is increasingly crucial. Our third section explores how threats, crises, and social pressures influence a broad spectrum of political beliefs and behaviors, including support for democracy, populist sentiments, conspiracy theories, and gun buying. Drawing on innovative concepts and empirical evidence from wartime Ukraine, pandemic-era United States, Polish social media, and Central European classrooms, these articles collectively enhance our understanding of the origins, influencing factors, and persistence of political beliefs.

Opening this section, “Geosocietal Support for Democracy: Survey Evidence from Ukraine” develops a novel theoretical framework to explain widespread support for democracy in the wake of interstate war. Mikhail A. Alexseev and Serhii Dembitskyi introduce the concept of geosocietal legitimation of democracy, where wartime support for democracy is driven by external threats and the ability of society to mobilize around a shared civic national identity. Based on multiyear survey data from three settings in wartime Ukraine, the authors find that pride in Ukrainian citizenship and identifying authoritarian Russia as the primary aggressor in the ongoing Ukrainian–Russian war were the strongest predictors of support for democracy. This scholarship has implications for our understanding of how war and violence affect polity preferences and how mobilization around civic identity can induce support for political systems, including democracy. The study also revisits and contributes to the literature on second-image-reversed theory—which highlights how the international context can reshape internal politics—suggesting that societal mobilization may be crucial for democracy support.

Taking on the effects of a different type of crisis, Matthew J. Lacombe, Matthew D. Simonson, Jon Green, and James N. Druckman document links between feelings of threat and the purchase of firearms in “Social Disruption, Gun Buying, and Anti-System Beliefs.” Seeking to explain the spike in gun buying that took place in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors begin from the premise that gun ownership is a meaningful political behavior. They hypothesize that the tendency to buy guns is related to beliefs about the inadequacy of state-provided security, especially during threatening times. Using a survey with 24,448 respondents, the authors find that gun ownership is associated with experiences of economic hardship during the pandemic and household COVID-19 diagnoses. They also find that new gun buyers at the height of the pandemic were more likely than preexisting gun owners to hold conspiracy beliefs, were less likely to trust institutions, and were more likely to have purchased a gun due to feelings of threat as opposed to hobbyist interest. With data from mid-2021, the authors propose a new theory of gun ownership and the pandemic gun-buying spike, while also gaining broader insight about political attitudes within the gun-owning community. Contrary to predictions that the pandemic gun-buying spike could moderate the population, they expect it to continue moving gun owners in a conspiratorial, mistrustful direction.

Further developing our understanding of political beliefs, Courtney Blackington and Frances Cayton investigate the conditions under which conspiracy theories prevail. In “How to Stay Popular: Threat, Framing, and Conspiracy Theory Longevity,” the authors argue that the credible threat invoked by a conspiracy theory explains its persistence and popularity. Drawing on social movement scholarship, the study posits three factors determining the extent to which conspiracy theory entrepreneurs stir online engagement with a conspiracy theory: whether the theory references an established out-group threat, elite endorsement, and “focusing events” that reactivate the conspiracy theory’s relevance. To test their hypotheses, the authors quantitatively analyze more than five thousand hand-coded tweets related to the 2010 Smolensk plane crash—a major event resulting in the death of Poland’s president and 95 other officials, spurring various conspiracy theories—and monthly commemorations of the crash. The authors find that conspiracy theories referencing existing domestic and foreign threats receive more retweets and likes than those that do not reference these divisions, and this relationship is accentuated during focusing events. While elite endorsements of conspiracies do not regularly appear to have a meaningful effect on the popularity of a conspiracy theory, tweets from elites endorsing conspiracy theories attract greater attention in the wake of focusing events. This work contributes new theoretical and empirical insights to scholarship on political disinformation and on how focusing events and historical narratives contribute to people’s engagement with disinformation. It also encourages research on how these patterns might extend across different political contexts and regime types.

Closing this section, “Populist Attitudes among Teenagers: How Negative Relationships with Socialization Agents Are Linked to Populist Attitudes” breaks new ground by focusing on the emergence of populist ideas during adolescence—a time when environmental factors are particularly consequential for belief formation. Sebastian Jungkunz and Julia Weiss examine how negative relationships with parents, teachers, and peers influence the development of populist attitudes among youths aged 12 to 18. Based on an original, representative sample of adolescents in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, their findings reveal that, while the influence of peers and parents is limited, perceived unjust interactions with teachers positively correlate with populist attitudes among the surveyed youth. Panel survey data from the UK further corroborate the impact of perceived negative relationships with teachers. This study has implications for theories of political attitude formation in adolescents and highlights the normative importance of fostering political trust among children. By shedding light on the early roots of populist attitudes, the study opens up new avenues for research on the timing of attitude development, strategies for mitigating populist beliefs, the role of gender in populist attitude formation, and how young populations understand “populism.”

Addressing Transnational Challenges

This section examines how international institutions and movements respond to pressing global issues such as antimicrobial resistance, climate change, perceived democratic deficits, and representation within feminist movements. By proposing new concepts, analyzing public perceptions of international governance, and investigating the role and impact of global institutions and networks, these studies demonstrate the importance of research on effective governance and activism on a global scale.

In “‘Fit for Purpose?’ Assessing the Ecological Fit of the Social Institutions that Globally Govern Antimicrobial Resistance,” Isaac Weldon and Steven J. Hoffman analyze the evolving and complex interplay between human societies and invisible microbial worlds and conceptualize the ecological characteristics of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a social and political challenge. AMR is the process by which previously curable infections are transformed into untreatable and often deadly diseases. The authors argue that AMR necessitates robust institutions that can manage human–microbial interactions to minimize drug resistance and maximize effective antimicrobial use. They leverage the concept of “ecological fit,” which suggests that effective governance requires institutions tailored to the specific attributes of the ecological problem they address. The study identifies 18 ecological “misfits” between the health threat and the institutions governing AMR and proposes five institutional design principles for approaching AMR as a socioecological problem rather than a purely medical one. This approach can improve the effectiveness of global health institutions by transforming the use of antimicrobial drugs in human societies, thereby reducing AMR and improving our ability to treat and prevent infections. By advocating for an approach that considers the fit between global institutions and the biophysical features of the problems that they are meant to address, the authors call for a fundamental shift in our approach to global public health governance.

Another factor shaping global governance is the character of global institutions themselves. In this context, “Perceptions of a Global Democratic Deficit: An International Survey Experiment” examines the extent to which citizens around the world perceive there to exist a democratic deficit in global institutions and the factors that shape these views. Drawing on a large-scale survey experiment involving approximately 42,000 respondents across 17 countries, Farsan Ghassim measures perceptions of global democratic deficits in both absolute and relative terms. Contrary to common assumptions, he finds that most people do not perceive a significant global democratic deficit; in fact, global governance—particularly in international organizations—is often viewed as more democratic than governance in developing democracies. The study also finds that world politics is generally seen as less democratic than international organizations. While global governance is perceived as less democratic in terms of public participation (input aspects), it is viewed more favorably with regard to the actions and benefits provided by international organizations (output aspects). This empirical study, which brings fresh insights to a field traditionally dominated by normative arguments, shows the importance of considering public perceptions in global governance research.

Nils Kupzok and Jonas Nahm turn to another urgent global challenge: climate change. In “The Decarbonization Bargain: How the Decarbonizable Sector Shapes Climate Politics,” the authors investigate why some countries adopt more ambitious decarbonization policies than others, arguing that shifts in industry incentives are fundamental to this green fiscal expansion. The paper introduces the concept of “decarbonizable sector,” which includes industries able to transition to low-carbon technologies, distinguishing them from the fully "green" and "fossil fuel" sectors. Traditionally aligned with fossil coalitions, these carbon-intensive industries now have incentives to decarbonize in exchange for policies that expand green markets while reducing transition costs and risks—a dynamic the authors term the “decarbonization bargain.” The authors argue that countries with larger and more politically influential decarbonizable sectors have higher green spending. Their comparative study of Germany, the U.S., and the U.K. supports this argument, revealing that fractures within fossil coalitions and new alliances between the decarbonizable sector, environmentalists, and labor groups are key to shaping climate policy. Kupzok and Nahm suggest that the success of these policies may influence whether more industries embrace decarbonization bargains, potentially expanding the coalition supporting emissions cuts.

Finally, Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson, Amber Lusvardi, Summer Forester, and S. Laurel Weldon investigate how different organizational forms of transnational feminist movements impact their ability to represent marginalized women, especially in the Global South. In “Dimensions of Transnational Feminism: Autonomous Organizing, Multilateralism and Agenda-Setting in Global Civil Society,” they develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes between autonomous transnational feminist mobilization, which operates independently of state and male-dominated authority structures, and multilateral mobilization, which is tied to official agendas, structures, and issues. This distinction broadens our understanding of transnational feminist mobilization and highlights how autonomous campaigns may better represent marginalized women by amplifying geographically dispersed activists. Factor analysis demonstrates that, while related, transnational and domestic feminist activism represent distinct dimensions of feminist mobilization. Within the realm of transnational movements, network analysis and case-level comparisons reveal that autonomous networks are denser and more connected, while multilateral networks are influenced by intergovernmental organizations. The authors conclude that grassroots organizations from the Global South have a stronger voice in autonomous networks relative to multilateral ones. This research highlights the significance of organizational structure in feminist movements and calls for broader analyses that include more diffuse forms of activism.