We combine newly collected election data with records of public denials of the results of the 2020 election to estimate the degree to which election-denying Republican candidates over- or underperformed other Republicans in 2022 in statewide and federal elections. We find that the average vote share of election-denying Republicans in statewide races was approximately 3.2 percentage points lower than their co-partisans after accounting for state-level partisanship. However, we find no such underperformance on aggregate for U.S. House elections, perhaps due to the more-partisan nature of many House districts. Together, the results suggest that the types of candidates in American elections who take more-extreme positions tend to underperform, but that these performance gaps are relatively small in the present, polarized political environment.

The coloniality of power stands as a major framework for theorizing race within the context of Latin America, providing an influential account of the origin of race in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Without abandoning the task of theorizing the ways in which race functions in Latin America, this article asks: what is obscured by an insistence on 1492 as the moment when race emerged, and what different understandings of race can be made available by connecting the colonization of the Americas to a different set of temporal and spatial referents? Specifically, I develop a “prismatic” approach to analyze the impact of fifteenth-century Iberian blood purity statutes on the development of race without positing these as the new, singular origin of race. This article thus suggests an alternative genealogy of racialization while providing a critical engagement with the coloniality of power’s account of race.

We investigate how hardships affect rural politics, considering the case of hospital closures. In the last two decades, more than two hundred rural hospitals have closed their doors or drastically reduced their services. Drawing from resource models of voting, our hypothesis is that personal- and community-level deprivations brought about by hospital closures should reduce election turnout. Empirical tests pair geographic information on the location of open and closed hospitals with data from state voter files to create a panel of over 10 million rural residents for the 2016, 2018, and 2020 national elections. Results show that individuals whose nearest hospital closed prior to the proximate election were less likely to vote than their unaffected counterparts. These effects are strongest for older and lower-income residents, but they decay over time so that voting likelihood resembles a pre-closure baseline within 12 months.

This article reframes understandings of pluralism in democratic theory by showing that the management of late and post-colonial identitarian conflict was integral to its incorporation into twentieth-century political science. It does so by reconstructing the central but underexamined place of theories of consociational democracy in efforts to reform South Africa’s apartheid constitution in the 1970s and 80s. Consociational democratic theory offered such promising resources for apartheid reform, it contends, because it entwined (a) a conception of social pluralism that redescribed apartheid’s racial hierarchy as identitarian difference with (b) a conception of institutional pluralism that curtailed the most transformative possibilities of decolonization through universal suffrage. Recovering pluralism’s colonial genealogies clarifies the conditions under which the recognition of identitarian diversity can function as a disavowal of racial domination, positioning democratic theory as an adjunct to projects of neo-colonial order.

The low value of reproductive labor, and the related “crisis of care,” are often attributed to gendered attitudes about work. This article traces this explanation to the attempted synthesis of Marxist and feminist theories of ideology in the 1970s and offers a sympathetic critique with implications for both contemporary theories of labor and the “new ideology critique.” It reconstructs the explanatory role of ideology in feminist analyses of unwaged housework and tracks its uptake in theories of “reproductive labor” more broadly, via what I call the “naturalization thesis.” While these analyses have been influential, I show that they do not provide a convincing account of either gender oppression or the low value of reproductive labor. I offer an alternative explanation for the latter rooted in labor processes and patterns of capital accumulation and argue for the reintegration of ideology critique with the critique of political economy.

This article develops an account of territorial justice to understand what is owed to people at risk of climate displacement. I argue that the aim of territorial justice is to secure a globally recognized status, the status of being an equal common possessor of the earth. As a common possessor, every inhabitant of the globe has a claim to a “place” in the world where they can access minimally just material conditions and political institutions, securely pursue their located practices, and exercise self-determination together with others. I apply this theory to generate prescriptions for a just policy response to the risk of climate displacement. Where possible, I argue that a just response should focus on mandatory global taxation to support in situ adaptation. In cases where relocation becomes inevitable, I outline the implications for how just relocation regime should be structured.

Civic associations underpin American democracy. How can politically cross-cutting associations engage members who hold divergent viewpoints amidst increasing partisan polarization and nationalization of politics? I examine this question in the context of labor unions, studying how unions engage members who hold conservative views at odds with some of the union’s political actions. Using original surveys of local union presidents, members, and non-members along with in-depth interviews in selected local unions, I show how local union leaders can foster norms of participation among politically cross-pressured members. Norms of participation increase conservative members’ perceptions of political representation and engagement in politics, including participation in the union’s political action committee and support for union political mobilization. These findings have implications for understanding civic associations and participation in an era of political division, as well as the role unions continue to play in politics.

How might the ideas and practices of Global South migrants and activists inform normative frameworks and conceptual repertoires that political theorists and activists bring to bear on questions regarding justice and migration? Taking seriously the call for conceptual innovation to move beyond Eurocentrism this article builds on oral histories collected from refugees and migrants from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan to argue that the concept of haqq raises important questions about the reliance on statist justice in contemporary theorizing about migration ethics and provides insights into alternative ethical concerns. Ideas and practices of haqq foreground social relationships as well as the imbrication of responsibility and entitlement for communities and individuals. Crucially, engagement with haqq helps dislodge assumptions regarding state-enforced rights as universal vehicles of justice. Consequently, different ethical questions and imaginaries become available for consideration that resonate much beyond debates about migration.

Tens of millions of individuals are displaced due to violence, and most are hosted by other households in their home countries. We ask what motivates people to host the forcibly displaced. We are interested in whether empathy increases the willingness to host but also consider alternative explanations. To explore the correlates of hosting we collected survey data from 1,504 households in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fielded in-depth interviews, and implemented an experiment. We employ a novel strategy to measure hosting behavior, where household characteristics are measured prior to the arrival of displaced persons. We find that households with higher empathy are more likely to host in the 10-month period following the survey. There is no evidence that ethnicity, religiosity, or wealth affect hosting behavior. Results from the experiment suggest that it is difficult to increase hosting propensity in the longer term (4+ months) through simple interventions.

Contrary to dominant theories of postindustrial society, this article advances an alternative account of digital capitalism that repositions the factory—so often associated with industrial manufacturing—as a defining yet largely overlooked feature of the internet economy. I pursue this claim by interpreting data centers and microwork platforms as digital embodiments of the factory system through a historical theory of the factory model that reconstructs the consistent mechanisms of control and extraction that have distinguished factories as consolidated infrastructures of production since their inception. I define these “protocols of production” as formal rules deployed by a combination of technological systems, spatial arrangements, and management regimes devised to fragment tasks, discipline workers, and supervise production. By probing the socioeconomic consequences of the factory’s algorithmic redeployment and adaptation to global data production, I contend that these absent factories have amplified alienation and precarity as structural social qualities of the digital labor process.

Studies have found that women’s representation is more likely to spike after corruption scandals. However, the mechanism underlying this increase remains unclear: are parties more likely to nominate women after corruption scandals, are voters more likely to support women candidates, or is it a combination of both? Using an original dataset of audit results and the gender of 47,000 candidates running in over 10,000 mayoral elections in Mexico (2000–2019), we find that voters drive the effect. While political parties are not more likely to nominate women as candidates in municipalities with recent revelations of spending irregularities, women candidates are more likely to win elections after corruption is uncovered. In contrast to previous studies, which expect strategic parties to be behind the increases in women’s representation following corruption scandals, our findings underscore that increases in women’s representation can happen despite parties and not because of parties.

Must absolutist states resort to intimidation and coercion to tackle subjects’ disobedience driven by their pursuit of reputation? Since canonical early modern Western thinkers broached but did not solve this question, I turn to the most renowned ancient Chinese Legalist Han Feizi’s understudied account of reputation for answers. Whether as a means or an end, individuals’ pursuit of reputation always challenges the authority of the absolute monarchy that endeavors to centralize state power. Forcefully confronting this pursuit is the barely but only acceptable way for the state to tackle this challenge, as non-confrontational strategies favored by many Western thinkers inevitably fail due to their incompatibility with the logic of political absolutism. Thus, Han Feizi unwittingly exposes the tension between political absolutism and reputation. This exposure adds nuances to his view of human nature and helps us understand how individuals’ morally ambiguous pursuit of reputation obstructs the centralization of state power.

This article challenges the common assumption that the partisan identification of bureaucratic elites is fixed over time. Building on principal-agent and organization theory, we hypothesize that bureaucratic elites may respond to political turnover by adjusting their partisan identification toward that of their (new) elected principals. We test this prediction using data from the American State Administrators Project (ASAP) over the 1964–2008 period, which allows us to study the same US agency leaders (N=951 individuals) before and after partisan shifts in their agency’s elected principals. We find significant evidence that agency leaders remaining in office following a shift in the party in power on average reorient their partisan identity in response to such turnover events. These adjustments are stronger for agency leaders directly appointed by, or in more frequent contact with, their elected principals. Our results suggest a malleability of partisanship seldom attributed to bureaucratic elites in public and academic discourse.

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) sector assumes increasing the number of women involved in peace negotiations drives better outcomes for local women. However, empirical support for this assumption is inconsistent. This article tests how power alters the relationship between women’s formal (Track 1) involvement in peace negotiations and the inclusion of women-specific provisions in peace agreements. Using an original dataset comprised of 2,299 Track 1 delegates involved in 116 comprehensive peace agreements finalized between 1990 and 2021, I find women’s involvement in peace negotiations is positively correlated to comprehensive agreements containing provisions for women. However, this correlation is dependent on women holding positions of power—simply having women in the room is insufficient. This article offers a novel quantitative approach to WPS studies, provides nuance to theories linking descriptive and substantive representation, and casts doubt on the longstanding assumption that increasing women’s involvement inherently enhances gender equality.

Many political scientists hold that vitriolic speech against high-profile women has only negligible effects on other women in politics. They also contend that the prevalence of such vitriol is consistent with gender bias having no significant negative impact on most women in politics. This article argues that these sanguine positions rest on inadequate and untested assumptions regarding misogyny, and the role it plays in politics. In the service of putting us in a position to test the relationship between gendered discourse in particular elections and the structural obstacles faced by women in politics, this article develops a conceptualization of political misogyny: nasty claim-making that instills repugnant connotations into women’s collective political identities (e.g., their partisan identities). Attention is also paid to how political misogyny can distribute hatred burdens disproportionately among different groups of women.

A long-standing debate in political psychology considers whether individuals update their beliefs and attitudes in the direction of evidence or grow more confident in their convictions when confronted with counter-attitudinal arguments. Though recent studies have shown that instances of the latter tendency, which scholars have termed attitude polarization and “belief backfire,” are rarely observed in settings involving hot-button issues or viral misinformation, we know surprisingly little about how participants respond to information targeting deeply held attitudes, a key condition for triggering attitude polarization. We develop a tailored experimental design that measures participants’ core issue positions and exposes them to personalized counter-attitudinal information using the large language model GPT-3. We find credible evidence of attitude polarization, but only when arguments are contentious and vitriolic. For lower valence counter-attitudinal arguments, attitude polarization is not detected. We conclude by discussing implications for the study of political cognition and the measurement of attitudes.

Introducing an international relations perspective into the literature on anti-immigrant attitudes, we hypothesize that immigrants from rival countries will be shunned and immigrants from allied countries preferred, especially by respondents who identify more strongly with the nation. We fielded a forced-choice conjoint experiment in 22 countries, whereby respondents chose between applicants for permanent resident status with randomized attributes. We identified rival and allied countries of origin for each surveyed country, with one such pair sharing a similar racial and cultural make-up as the majority of respondents, and one pair being more dissimilar. We find that discrimination against immigrants from rival states is so pronounced that it results in a net preference for racially and culturally dissimilar immigrants. Since we fielded the surveys amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are able to leverage exogenous changes in the intensity of one rivalry, providing further evidence for the proposed mechanism.

Plea bargaining figures heavily in criminal justice systems in the United States and, increasingly, around the globe. Conventional wisdom holds that plea bargaining generates efficiency gains for all parties, while sorting the guilty from the innocent. We build a series of formal models to consider the relationship between a defendant’s guilt and her likelihood of pleading guilty. In an inversion of the conventional wisdom, we show that under a range of empirically plausible scenarios—for example, if criminals are more risk-seeking than the wrongfully accused, or if prosecutors derive a career benefit from trial wins—the innocent are more likely than the guilty to plea bargain.

Social scientists often classify text documents to use the resulting labels as an outcome or a predictor in empirical research. Automated text classification has become a standard tool since it requires less human coding. However, scholars still need many human-labeled documents for training. To reduce labeling costs, we propose a new algorithm for text classification that combines a probabilistic model with active learning. The probabilistic model uses both labeled and unlabeled data, and active learning concentrates labeling efforts on difficult documents to classify. Our validation study shows that with few labeled data, the classification performance of our algorithm is comparable to state-of-the-art methods at a fraction of the computational cost. We replicate the results of two published articles with only a small fraction of the original labeled data used in those studies and provide open-source software to implement our method.

I draw together theories of partisan polarization and motivated reasoning, which suggest that partisanship shapes information processing, and theories of accountability, which argue voters hold elected officials accountable through promise fulfillment. Here, I ask how partisanship influences voter understanding of promise fulfillment and accountability and if voters assess promises through a partisan lens. Two original survey experiments test how respondents react to promise fulfillment on the issues of immigration and human trafficking. I demonstrate that co-partisans differentiate between kept and broken promises, but out-partisans do not. Despite partisan differences, respondents evaluate promise-keeping when asked about accountability but not when asked about approval. Thus, even when voters recognize broken promises, accountability is influenced by partisanship. Immigration, a more polarized issue, is more likely to prime a partisan response than human trafficking, a less polarized issue. Future work must account for partisanship in accountability and what this means for our understanding of fundamental democratic principles.