What is the role of law in imperial state-building projects? We study this question of historical significance with an empirical focus on Russian arbitrazh (commercial) courts in Crimea. We document the increase in the number of disputes that involve the Russian state and strong pro-government favoritism in court decisions. We also find that arbitrazh courts are used as a check on local political elites. At the same time, our analysis establishes favoritism toward local businesses in disputes with Russian businesses. Most importantly, we highlight that this stick-and-carrot legal politics is not only imposed from above: Local judges who defected to Russia act more favorably than outsider judges appointed from Russia toward the Russian state and businesses, plausibly because local judges want to signal their loyalty. The implication is that imperial legal domination emerges not only through directives from the metropole but also through the everyday contributions of local imperial intermediaries.

The recent ascendance of American conservative ideology within Israel’s political Right is puzzling given its historical absence. Furthermore, prevailing theories—which focus on the role of other countries, experts, or transnational networks as ideational importers—cannot account for it. Accordingly, utilizing insights from the diaspora politics literature, we develop an alternative explanation that focuses on the cooperation between diaspora actors and local actors (diaspora–local cooperation, DLC) as a source of ideational importation and ideological change. Like other sources of outside ideas, DLC-based ideational importation depends on the establishment of organizational infrastructure for ideological dissemination—and ideational localization—for the adaptation and translation of external ideas to the local context. Unlike other kinds of transnational ideational networks, such cooperation is primarily based on national kinship that transcends specific ideational commitments. Such national kinship, we argue, legitimizes DLC and supports multidimensional ideational importation that can potentially amount to ideological change. We further suggest that the actual ideological change this process triggers depends on how imported ideas align with core ideological components and how they serve the needs of local actors in a given political context. We use detailed process-tracing analysis to demonstrate how DLC has led to an ideological change in Israel’s political Right.

We identify a rise in educational polarization among members of the US Congress mirroring the educational polarization in the American mass public. Over the past half-century, the percentage of Republican representatives who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15%, and the percentage of similarly educated Republican senators declined from 55% to 35%, while the ranks of elite-educated Democrats rose in both chambers. These changes across the parties have mapped into observable differences in behavior and approaches toward lawmaking. We find that elite-educated legislators are much more liberal in their voting patterns, suggesting a link between the decline in elite-educated Republicans and ideological polarization in Congress. We also demonstrate that, in the House, elite-educated Democrats are especially effective lawmakers, but not so for elite-educated Republicans. In the Senate, we establish a link between the decline of elite-educated Republicans and the rise of partisan warrior “Gingrich Senators.” Overall, these patterns offer initial glimpses into how political elites are being drawn from different educational cohorts, representing an important transition in American governance.

There is growing attention to the role of organized labor in maintaining and expanding democratic institutions in the United States. In this article, we investigate the effect of right-to-work laws on electoral democracy in the states. We theorize a series of mechanisms by which labor unions contribute to the maintenance and expansion of democratic institutions, including contributing money to campaigns and influencing the electorate. Right-to-work laws, by limiting labor unions’ ability to raise funds, reduce the strength of these mechanisms and send signals to political elites about the organizational balance of power in their states. Using recent advances in difference-in-differences analysis, we find that right-to-work laws had a substantial negative effect on state-level electoral democracy in recent decades, even net of Republican control of government. Although the difficulty of causal identification in this context warrants caution, the findings speak to the importance of organized labor in shaping democratic institutions.

Is smaller better for economic development? We argue that states’ past population size can be a powerful determinant of current development. Among states that gained independence shortly after World War II, states with smaller populations in their early years of independence had stronger incentives to adopt more open trade policies and employ larger public sectors. These policies “embedded” smaller newly independent states into the global economy during the Cold War, building the foundations for more inclusive economic institutions and greater political stability. When the Cold War ended, smaller newly independent states were more likely to have developed the institutional infrastructure to prosper in the globalizing yet politically volatile early twenty-first century. We test this argument by examining the developmental trajectories of 83 states that became independent between 1946 and 1975. Newly independent states with smaller populations during this period have had on average higher levels and rates of post-Cold War development. They also had more open trade policies and larger public sectors during the Cold War. These policies correlate with more inclusive economic institutions and greater political stability in the post-Cold War era. A comparative case study of Oman and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen illustrates the mechanisms linking the size of newly independent states at independence and their post-Cold War development.

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.

Housing scarcity is a widespread social and economic problem. Prior studies have attributed this scarcity to local control over land use, which has been seen as making policy makers more responsive to small electorates. Challenging this argument, we suggest that smaller jurisdictions have stronger incentives and greater capacity to raise tax revenue by building housing. Therefore, expanding the electorate that policy makers are responsive to could lead to a more restrictive housing policy. To explore this question empirically, we study a reform that consolidated some Danish municipalities, increasing the size of their jurisdiction. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that consolidated municipalities issue fewer permits and complete less housing than smaller jurisdictions. Our study thus shows that politicians permitted more housing when they were accountable to a smaller electorate. This upends conventional wisdom and suggests that local control need not be at odds with more liberal land use policy.

The aspiration of representative democracy is that the legislature will make decisions that reflect what the majority of people want. The US Constitution, however, created a Congress with both majoritarian and counter-majoritarian forces. We study public opinion on 103 important issues on the congressional agenda from 2006 to 2022 using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Congress made decisions that aligned with what the majority of people wanted on 55% of these issues. Analysis of each issue further reveals the circumstances under which Congress represents the majority and the many ways that representation fails. The likelihood that the House passes a bill is usually a reflection of public support for that policy, but Senate passage depends on how divided the public is on the issue and whether party control of the two chambers of Congress is divided. Legislative institutions make it difficult to pass popular bills but even more difficult to pass unpopular ones. As a result, most representational failures occur because Congress failed to pass a popular bill, rather than because it passed a bill that the public did not want.

How do societies navigate the symbolic and artistic heritage of troubled pasts? I build on Bernhard and Kubik’s (2014) theorization of official memory regimes to demonstrate how memory regimes govern the public mnemonic space beyond the official level. I trace such governance within what Bernhard and Kubik call a unified memory regime, in which official actors prefer not to fight battles in and around memory. I argue that unified memory regimes order, discipline, and govern not only the official but also the everyday spaces of judgment and affection. Posited on unity at the official level, these hegemonic frames of meaning-making relegate mnemonic tension to the societal level where discursive battles continue to take place. I further argue that unified memory regimes can open pitfalls for pluralists during moments of mnemonic contestation. Because pluralists acknowledge and agonistically deliberate on multiple interpretations of the past, they may attempt to discursively reconcile the emerging societal-level mnemonic fracture with the official unified memory regime. But this strategy can backfire, reinforcing the unified regime and disciplining the societal-level challenger through three discursive practices that I call the traps of consensus: semantic alignment, a syntax of disavowal, and the juxtaposition of “universal” and “particular” narratives about the past. Pluralists may be especially vulnerable to these traps when they face unified memory regimes in which the consensus narrative appears superficially pluralist (or “underspecified”) because it eschews normative judgments that distinguish between perpetrators and victims. I illustrate these dynamics through tracing the case of a contested soundscape in postcommunist Albania.

Labor organizations increasingly rely on political communication campaigns to win broader support from bystanders. How do framings of worker mobilization influence public support for strikers’ demands? This paper explores the effects of different framings of teacher strikes on support for labor unions and strikes in Mexico by employing an original vignette experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey. We find that how strikes are framed alters responses to them. Our treatment effects indicate that mentioning the political interest of union leaders decreases support for unions, while informing voters about teacher grievances increases support for ongoing strikes. Our finding suggests the importance of disaggregating attitudes toward strikes and unions and proposes new avenues for research on how media strategies are used by various actors to gain political leverage during labor conflicts.

This article uses the literature on subnational undemocratic regimes (SURs) and regime juxtaposition in Latin America to gain analytical leverage on the recent process of subnational democratic erosion in the United States. Based on a review of five key dimensions of federalism, we argue that the institutional landscape for the emergence and continuity of SURs is, comparatively speaking, more favorable in the US than in any of Latin America’s three federations (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico). In addition to showing how federal structures are more detrimental for subnational democracy in the US, we assess how the two main theoretical approaches that have been developed to understand SURs in Latin America and elsewhere can be applied to the US.

As America’s racial composition shifts, states that minimize changes to existing districts in successive redistricting cycles can entrench racial disparities in representation, a process I term dilutive drift. Using novel spatial measures of US House district change between successive congresses, I show that packing and cracking can occur passively, and not only through deliberate gerrymandering. States with long histories of racial exclusion, such as Alabama and Louisiana, make persistently fewer changes to their districts than other states. Minimal-change redistricting, I argue, can entrench unequal representation just as effectively as overt gerrymandering.

Conventional-politics approaches, emphasizing party ideology, electoral dynamics, committee membership, campaign donations, and industry clout, exercise a powerful hold over assessments of public policies and their distributional effects. Emerging from pluralist and business power perspectives, such accounts see “who gets what and why” as the result of how politics and power shape policies, their implementation, and distributional outcomes. This pervades our understanding of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the US government’s effort to avert mass unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic by lending $786 billion to small businesses to keep employees on the payroll. Yet contrary to prior studies of the PPP, we find that conventional-politics factors were strikingly uncorrelated with distributional outcomes, revealing limits to such approaches to this case. Instead, we find that an institutional politics or politics-in-time (IP-PIT) analysis better explains the program and its trajectories. IP-PIT revises the causal sequence by emphasizing how institutions and policies generate politics, distributional outcomes, and feedback loops. We engage both approaches via a mixed-methods analysis of the PPP and two new datasets. We conduct a qualitative process tracing of temporal variation in policy architectures, politics, policy revisions, and access to loans across the program’s three periods, and present quantitative analyses of loan flows across congressional districts and periods using data on the entire corpus of PPP loans. In so doing, we advance research and debate over the PPP, the dynamics and outcomes of US policy making during crises, and the American political economy in general. Ours is the first study of the PPP to conduct a mixed-methods analysis of loans across congressional districts or to use conventional and institutional approaches to address its politics, policy, and outcomes. More broadly, we document varieties of critical junctures, contribute arguments about what might shape policy or institutional innovation in those moments, and use the PPP to identify conditions under which systems are “their own grave diggers,” fueling negative-transformative rather than positive-reproductive feedback.

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.

The emergence of the so-called gig economy has reshaped the labor market and, potentially, the politics of the safety net. Much of the American welfare state is based on a traditional model of employment, excluding most gig workers from benefits like subsidized employer-provided health insurance and unemployment insurance. Despite these trends, there is little research on how these changes might affect politics. Are gig workers likely to become a relevant constituency on social welfare and other issues? To address this, we conducted a unique online survey examining policy attitudes and political behaviors among gig workers compared with traditional workers. Our findings indicate that people who view gig work as their “main job” tend to lack access to traditional social insurance and employer-provided benefits, as expected, and rely more on means-tested assistance programs (e.g., food stamps). Consequently, gig workers exhibit higher support than traditional workers for expanding social welfare programs, and are more engaged on issues that affect gig workers. In terms of participation, gig workers are less likely to vote but more likely to engage in nonvoting political activities like protest than traditional workers. This study contributes to the understanding of social welfare politics in the new era of the labor market and highlights a growing constituency for expanding the safety net.

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.

At times of political catastrophe, what spaces remain for disenfranchised voices? This essay explores an early seventeenth-century compendium of urban folksongs, compiled by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), to explore a new kind of political action outside the institutions of the state—the act of transmission, that is, the recording of materials from the past or present for the moral cultivation of posterity. When Feng inserts non-elite voices into this process by recording and transmitting their poetry in a textual record that takes account of their regional and oral features, inflected by differences of class and gender, his act is both inclusive and meaningfully political. Feng’s act of transmission sustains voices—including those of the marginalized—whose circumstances otherwise render them precarious. Transmission thus draws attention to the forward-looking acts that can shape future practice and theory, on the basis of the very voices being obstructed by the mainstream realities of their time.

Ethnographic methods of all varieties contend with the idea of the “truth” of accounts and the meanings attached to them, as well as the importance of context in mitigating truth or falseness in how these accounts are presented. Discerning truth from lies and the purpose of both in the context of making meaning in a time and place is at the heart of the ethnographic enterprise. Because powerful images or messages evoke emotional reactions on social media or contributory websites like message boards, the relative accuracy of the representations they make is often less important than their reach and the ways they make and remake “reality” for their audiences. A picture or an image, even one attributed to a context or a meaning wholly independent of the context from which it emerged, becomes part of how people online see or experience an event. The context in which information is presented and the speakers or presenters of this information also condition its uptake and resonance. This paper argues that ethnography is uniquely suited to understand the effects and reach of decontextualized information and the ways it makes meaning, both on- and offline.

The Biden-Harris administration launched two important initiatives to expand public participation in the administrative state. These initiatives aimed to increase public engagement in developing federal regulations and reducing burdens in accessing public benefits. These two initiatives built on social science, especially political science. In this piece, I draw from my experience helping to lead the work to describe how political science research informed the design and implementation of both initiatives. I aim to open the “black box” of how federal policy makers use political science research. I also describe future research that could advance these initiatives. I conclude with a case study of such research, examining the barriers faced by food assistance applicants to sharing their experiences with government with a survey of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applicants. The survey points to barriers government must overcome to expand participation among SNAP applicants and strategies policy makers might use to do so.