How do citizens want to be represented in politics? We investigate citizens’ multidimensional preferences regarding six conceptions of representation that are derived from political theory. Using original item batteries and a conjoint experiment, we elicit the relative importance of the dimensions and the types of representation people prefer on each dimension. Our results from surveys fielded in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany show that 1) descriptive representation has comparatively limited appeal for citizens at large, but is more important for historically marginalized groups; 2) citizens do not focus on local politicians when thinking about who represents them, but also seek representation from politicians in other districts; 3) while citizens strongly value substantive representation, they are largely indifferent as to whether their representatives are responsive to electoral sanctions. Our findings have important implications for how political scientists study democratic representation.

Authoritarian states are intensifying bloc-building efforts. While the authoritarian regionalism literature suggests that membership in these “clubs of autocrats” can bolster domestic support for authoritarian leaders, such external recognition can also pose challenges, especially when aligning with “toxic” authoritarian partners. We argue that authoritarian regimes attempt to solve this problem by crafting strategic narratives and communicating them through regime-loyal media to the general public. The study examines strategic narratives of bloc building used by Russia and China in the first year after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022. Using “text-as-data” methods and qualitative analysis, we find important similarities and differences in the narratives of these two countries. Both use narratives highly critical of the United States and NATO. However, while Russia has crafted a “fortress narrative” that focuses on external threats and non-Western resilience, China promotes a “bridge narrative,” advocating for spanning geopolitical gaps and championing global integration. Both narrative strategies converge in their criticism of shared adversaries but diverge in their portrayals of the blocs they lead.

From speech to privacy, broad public interests are increasingly governed online by policy decisions taken by private companies. We examine when and how firms make such decisions. In contrast to the shadow of hierarchy and functionalist explanations of private authority, we build an analytical framework based on business power and the economics literature concerned with two-sided markets. We argue that companies operating as digital platforms may use private actor governance to consolidate their influence. More precisely, public-interest regulation on one side of the market (e.g., protecting the privacy of end-users) may increase the dependence of firms on the other side of the market (e.g., increasing the price paid for information by advertisers). We probe our argument by looking at the privacy policy implemented by Apple in 2021. Our findings demonstrate the growing role played by digital companies in global regulatory debates and call attention to how market structures can simultaneously incentivize public-interest regulation and become a source of business power.

Extremism and terrorism are thought to go hand in hand in civil wars. Yet do they? Are rebel groups with more extreme goals more likely than moderate ones to use terrorism, as commonly assumed? Arguments linking extremism to terrorism are often circular: groups are tagged as extremist because they do extreme things. Our article addresses this problem by articulating a novel conceptualization of extremism as the distance of group goals from the status quo. Understanding the relationship between what groups want and how they try to achieve it has obvious theoretical and policy implications. We theorize mechanisms that might connect extremist goals to terrorism and use new data on rebel group aims in civil wars from 1970 to 2013 to examine the empirical relationship between extremism and terrorism in a nontautological way. The results show that some extremist goals are associated with terrorism but not others. Groups with goals that involve changing the political ideology of the state or transforming political power across identity groups are more likely to use terrorism or to use more of it. Secessionist groups, however, are no more likely to produce terrorism than are those with less extreme territorial aims such as autonomy.

The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.

In authoritarian regimes, governments regularly use overt and heavy-handed visual propaganda to effectively signal regime strength and deter protests. Can democratic leaders also use this so-called hard propaganda to project strength, or does this kind of authoritarian-style messaging potentially backfire because of societal norms for leaders’ behavior? Focusing on a rare instance in which outright visual hard propaganda was used in a democratic setting, we study how US citizens perceived its use by the Trump administration during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In a preregistered online survey fielded from June 12 until June 16, 2020, we exposed participants from both sides of the political spectrum to randomized pairs of real-world propaganda images. This allowed us to explore how partisanship influenced perceptions of hard propaganda during the height of the protests. Our findings reveal that, compared to standard political messaging, hard propaganda can communicate greater strength to both government supporters and opponents in a democracy. Yet, in contrast to autocratic settings, it fostered opposition among Trump opponents. Trump supporters, however, did not find such propaganda any more or less appropriate than standard political communication, consistent with an increased acceptance of authoritarian practices within polarized democracies.

This article presents new empirical evidence about the impact of Jihadist terrorist attacks on far-right preferences using the “unexpected event during survey” research design. This strategy allows us to match individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) to data on Jihadist terrorist attacks to compare respondents’ party preferences before and after a terrorist attack during the same survey period in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Germany. We theorise and test three distinct hypotheses about how different combinations of attitudinal changes including out-group prejudice and trust in institutions impact far-right preferences. We find no statistically significant effects. Analyses of the two indirect mechanisms— i.e., prejudice and trust—yield mixed results consistent with the null effect on far-right party preferences. By showing that terrorist attacks are unlikely to decisively change party support despite attracting significant public attention and affecting political attitudes, our results challenge the argument that Jihadist terrorism necessarily benefits the far-right and highlight the importance of null effects for overcoming confirmation bias in the study of voting behaviour.

The concept of political knowledge is foundational to American politics, but we know little about the extent to which its two dimensions—objective knowledge and knowledge confidence—covary over time as citizens learn about the American political system. We employ a two-wave survey to study whether individuals gain both objective knowledge and knowledge confidence such that they calibrate over time when exposed to civic education coursework. We find students gain both objective knowledge and knowledge confidence over the semester and that, on average, the gap between them shrinks after taking Introduction to American Government. However, we also see evidence that a student’s initial levels of knowledge shape growth in these two concepts and whether they become more closely aligned over the semester. The results shed light on the relationship between what individuals know about politics and what they think they know, and the role of civic education in shaping an active and informed electorate.

Few studies examine how often people of color voice their views or shape the discussion in civic or political decision-making groups. Existing studies do not link participants’ private preferences to what they say and lack data on racial inequalities in individuals’ public speech. We analyze a large sample of citizens randomized to groups tasked with deciding on punishment for corporate malfeasance, an issue of consequence for communities of color. We develop systematic measures of racial inequality in voice and uptake during discussion. We find that members of color speak less and are less likely to mention their own preferences. These effects are not explained by racial differences in preferences or by being the lone racial minority. Race also shapes the uptake of preferences during discussion. A seat at the table does not suffice for equal voice.

Racial violence is central to the American polity. We argue that support for violence, specifically anti-Black violence, has a long historical arc in American politics dating back to chattel slavery. In this paper, we argue that the racial violence associated with the “great replacement” conspiracy is much more pervasive among the white American public because of the historical legacy of anti-Black violent sentiment. To investigate the prevalence of this idea, we conducted a preregistered simple priming experiment aimed to tap into top-of-mind ideas about racial demographic change. Our experimental design spans multiple data sources, including two probability samples, over the course of a year. We ultimately find that simply priming attitudes about racial demographic change through a single open-ended question consistently leads to increased support for political violence, increasing racial resentment, and expressed anti-Black views. Our approach allows us to test this question through variant methodological means, all of which confirm strong associations Americans have between racial demographic change, anti-Blackness, and violence. Our findings demonstrate that Black threat is an important driver of democratic backsliding in the realm of political violence that requires further attention.

How can public opinion change in a pro-immigration direction? Recent studies suggest that those who support immigration care less about it than those who oppose it, which may explain why lawmakers do not enact pro-immigration reforms even when voters are pro-immigration. To see if the personal issue importance of immigration can be changed, I conducted a probability-based, nationally representative US survey experiment (N = 3,450) exposing respondents to verifiable arguments about the broad national benefits of expanding legal immigration and the costs of not doing so. Using new measures of issue importance, my descriptive results show that only one-fifth of voters who prioritize the issue have a pro-immigration preference. Furthermore, while anti-immigration respondents prioritize policies regarding law enforcement and (reducing) future immigration, pro-immigration respondents prioritize (helping) immigrants already here. The experimental results confirm that the provided arguments raised immigration’s importance among pro-immigration voters but did not backfire by mobilizing anti-immigration voters. Contrary to expectations, the arguments increased pro-immigration policy preferences, but did not change voters’ subissue priorities within immigration or their willingness to sign a petition. Overall, the treatment was effective beyond changing minds by shifting stated issue positions and priorities in a pro-immigration direction. It can thus be used in a nontargeted information campaign to promote pro-immigration reforms.

Current research suggests that all states share a perpetual appetite for extraction and standardization. However, this research overlooks the fact that subnational regions present different appeals and challenges to ruling coalitions. While states seek to extend bureaucratic rule over peripheries with valuable assets and favorable geography, they might instead seek to preserve local patrimonial bastions when those areas offer substantial electoral support. In turn, these strategies lead to broad subnational heterogeneity in the reach of the state. This paper focuses on regions’ ecological, military, and clientelistic features to explain local trajectories of bureaucratic rule and country-level state capacity. Empirically, I examine Chile, a successful case of capacity-building in Latin America. Prompted by a fiscal crisis in the mid-1850s, Chile’s central government launched state-building projects to offset its budgetary deficit. Using GIS and original data from censuses, budgets, and other primary sources, I show that Chile’s ruling coalition paradoxically modernized the country’s peripheries while deepening its own traditionalism. These results challenge prevailing narratives about the projection of political authority and Chile’s territorial uniformity.

Why do soldiers engage in unauthorized atrocities? This article explores this question by analyzing the use of postmortem mutilation by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. I show that such acts were remarkably frequent, despite being explicitly prohibited by military policy, and argue that individual-level variation in participation in such violence is explained by social dynamics within military units. Soldiers used mutilation mostly as a means of avenging enemy atrocities or deaths among comrades. Revenge motives were stronger when soldiers shared particularly strong social bonds. Whether these motives resulted in unauthorized atrocity, however, depended on the extent to which discipline was maintained within military units. In units characterized by “deviant cohesion”—strong social ties and weak discipline—informal combatant norms diverged from organizational policies and promoted unauthorized atrocities as a unit-level practice. Evidence for this theory comes from a combination of archival sources and survey data gathered from a representative sample of Vietnam War veterans. A case study of a single Army unit illustrates the mechanism implied by the theory.

Imagining oneself in another’s position can soften animus and promote empathy. When one’s loved ones have intense contact with carceral institutions, it can provoke a sense of injustice and political mobilization. Drawing on these insights, I design a survey experiment which assigns respondents to a no-treatment condition, an informational control, an egocentric perspective-taking exercise (imagining they are incarcerated), or a surrogate perspective-taking exercise (imagining someone close to them is incarcerated). I test the effects of the treatments on attitudes toward prisoner release and a semi-behavioral measure—whether respondents write a message to their sheriff in support of release. Relative to the no-treatment condition, the informational control doesn’t elicit changes. However, egocentric and surrogate perspective-taking can increase pro-release attitudes and mobilize respondents to write in support of release. These results push forward the literature on punitive attitudes by considering what forces might mobilize Americans against the carceral state.

Presidents possess vast authority to change policy unilaterally. But their power depends on the compliance of unelected officials, who typically have more information. We examine the conditions under which presidents invest in costly oversight of the bureaucracy. We identify an underlying political process—the polarization of an agent’s potential principals—and argue that because this increases the potential for future policy losses for presidents, they create new means of overseeing agency behavior. To test this argument, we examine abortion restrictions in foreign aid, leveraging archival records and interviews with former officials. Most importantly, this allows us to study prohibitions that were proposed but not adopted. We find that as abortion became an essential part of party competition for the presidency, Republican presidents increased their investment in oversight, which eroded bureaucrats ability to moderate presidential power over abortion abroad.

Pernicious polarization is an antagonistic Us versus Them division, where the other group is perceived as an existential threat. It is often intertwined with the erosion of democratic norms and institutions. Although studies on polarization abound, there are still some blind spots to be filled. Our contribution is the focus on the mesolevel of civil society and the theoretical development of (de)polarization mechanisms at this level. Empirically, we study think tanks, a special type of civil society organization, in the context of democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland. The analysis is based on 53 interviews with Hungarian and Polish think tankers conducted between 2020 and 2022. We contend that through a shift in perceptions of Us, Them, and the middle ground, think tanks contribute to both polarization and depolarization. Rather than being passive receptors of polarization dynamics, we showcase think tanks’ agentic roles as they emerge through these three mechanisms and through think tanks resorting to specific patterns of discourse and interactions.

Most analyses of the intersection of police, politics, and violence—which center on the police’s use of force as a means to control subordinate classes, repress political dissidents, or confront non-state armed actors—conceptualize the police as an instrument of political incumbents. In this paper, I problematize the relationship between the police and its political principals by focusing on how police administer violence as a political response in compliance or defiance of political incumbents. While elected officials may enact policy changes that restrain or incite police violence, police forces can either abide with or disregard these directives. Building on this interaction of policy shifts and police responses, I develop a typology of four variants of police administration of violence: peacekeeping, punishing, shirking, and sabotaging. I illustrate this typology with various examples from developed and developing democracies.

Women legislators face a variety of gendered barriers both outside and inside the legislature. Yet, little previous scholarship has quantitatively examined whether legislative insiders are biased against women and their accomplishments. We explore a new potential explanation for gender inequity in legislatures: that women in office may get less credit than men for similar achievements. If legislative insiders systematically undervalue women’s work, women will have a harder time gaining influence within the chamber; alternatively, those working in and with the legislature may be uniquely aware of the effort that goes into representational activities and can observe the work that women perform firsthand. To examine this question, we combine elite evaluations of legislators from the North Carolina General Assembly with data on committee assignments, legislative effectiveness, electoral performance, and more. We find little systematic evidence that women legislators’ accomplishments are valued less than those of the men with whom they serve.

From 1965 to 2020, the National Science Foundation constituted the single largest funding source for political science research. As such, the NSF played a central role in defining the cutting-edge of our discipline. This study draws on historical records of the American Political Science Association to examine the political and administrative contexts that shaped the funding priorities of the NSF Political Science Program. Additionally, the study presents a new dataset and analysis of the nearly three thousand projects funded over the 55-year life of the program. The dataset shows that NSF funding was principally channeled toward quantitative research, whereas qualitative methods received little support, and work advancing normative, critical, or interpretive approaches received virtually no support. The archival record and awards-level data make visible the material forces that shaped knowledge production, and they underline the NSF’s instrumental role in consolidating behavioralism and marginalizing non-positivist approaches. The study sheds new light on the history of the discipline and helps to contextualize some of the distinctive features of American political science.

In public life, the problem of civility is often presented as a choice over whether citizens should recover social norms of civility to sustain politics in the face of polarization or else contest demands for civility to politicize social inequalities. Political theorists often respond by treating this as an epistemological problem requiring conceptual clarification. By distinguishing between civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness, for instance, they promise to clarify when it is appropriate to conform to social norms and when it might be morally permissible to be rude or disrespectful. While valid in its own terms, such an approach presupposes an impoverished conception of both the subject and the politics of civility. Rather than ask when and why we should choose to be civil (or not), in this article we ask: what is produced when citizens are civil or uncivil within a given situation? We consider this by turning to two feminist interlocutors: Anna Julia Cooper and Hannah Gadsby. Engaging with their reflections on and interventions within situations in which civility rises to the level of explicit attention provides the basis for a more adequate understanding of the subject of civility. Cooper and Gadsby each highlight how the subject does not simply choose whether to conform to social norms but is both constituted by the situation within which they act while also constituting the situation of which they are a part. This opens the way to a more adequate understanding of the politics of civility. As an embodied negotiation of social norms and political principles, Cooper and Gadsby show how this involves reading situations, expanding situations to interpellate others, and disclosing the limits of a situation.