One of the main goals of our editorial team when we became editors of the American Political Science Review was to increase the substantive, methodological, and representational diversity of the APSR while continuing to publish excellent work. As we explained in our 2019 Vision Statement, we seek to broaden the range of research topics that are published in the journal and to diversify the subfields, geographic foci, and methodological approaches represented in the APSR. We also seek to “increase the diversity of authors, reviewers, and citations along various lines, including race, gender, sexuality, ability, national origin, and scholar’s type of home institution.”

Conventional wisdom treats politicization in the international human rights regime as invariant: for any given violation, states condemn adversaries while coddling friends. However, we find that politicization patterns vary markedly across human rights issues. Some norms are more politicized than others, and states are more likely to punish geopolitical partners on certain violations. We offer a novel theory of politicized enforcement wherein states punish human rights violations discriminatively based on their perceived “sensitivity” for the target state. Using data from the UN Universal Periodic Review, an elaborate human rights mechanism, we show that states tend to criticize their adversaries on sensitive issues that undermine the target regime’s power and legitimacy while addressing safer topics with friends. By uncovering a strategic logic of human rights enforcement, this research contributes new theoretical insights on the relationship between norms and power politics in global governance.

It is common for combatants to deliberately force civilians to flee their homes, resulting in incalculable loss for millions around the world. Existing accounts suggest combatants displace civilians whom they suspect are loyal to their opponents. And yet violence is also frequently motivated by local actors taking advantage of war to pursue private interests unrelated to wartime loyalties. However, little evidence exists of these dynamics with respect to displacement. Drawing on theories of opportunistic violence, I test an account in which surges in demand for land create incentives for elites to prey on peasants for their land. Combining new municipal and survey data from the Colombian armed conflict, I find evidence that the expansion of a land-intensive industry—African palm oil—precipitated opportunistic displacement by elites and paramilitary allies. The results demonstrate how elites can take advantage of war to engage in private accumulation and have implications for transitional justice policy.

Is the public backlash against human rights rulings from European courts driven by substantive concerns over case outcomes, procedural concerns over sovereignty, or combinations thereof? We conducted preregistered survey experiments in Denmark, France, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom using three vignettes: a foreigner who faces extradition, a person fighting a fine for burning Qurans, and a home owner contesting eviction. Each vignette varies with respect to whether a European court disagrees with a national court (deference treatment) and whether an applicant wins a case (outcome treatment). We find little evidence that deference moves willingness to implement judgments or acceptance of court authority but ample evidence that case outcomes matter. Even nationalists and authoritarians are unmoved by European court decisions as long as they agree with the case outcome. These findings imply that nationalist opposition to European courts is more about content than the location of authority and that backlash to domestic and international courts may be driven by similar forces.

Global capital mobility is a crucial determinant of economic, political, and social life. While much has been written about the ethics of human movement, political theory has remained nearly silent on the ethics of capital movement. In this article, we intend to develop a general account of the ethics of global capital mobility—identifying both the forms of mobility that merit protection and those that merit restriction. By integrating normative theorizing with an economic analysis of global investment, we argue that the movement of capital, with important exceptions, should be much more restricted than it is today. We make the case, on both grounds of global justice and international assistance, for imposing coercive limits on cross-border inflows and outflows of capital. To enable them, we also propose a radical reform of the international monetary system—a new global currency—that would simultaneously facilitate beneficial capital movements.

A large literature establishes the benefits of central bank independence, yet very few have shown directly negative economic consequences. Furthermore, while prevailing monetary theory suggests CBI should enhance management of economic distress, I argue that independent central banks exhibit tepid responsiveness to banking instability due to a myopic focus on inflation. I show that banking crises produce larger unemployment shocks and credit and stock market contractions when the level of central bank independence is high. Further, I show that these significant economic costs are mitigated when central banks do not have the inflation-centric policy mandates predominantly considered necessary. When the bank has high operational and political independence, banks’ whose policy mandate does not rigidly prioritize inflation produce significantly better outcomes during banking crises. At the same time, I show that this configuration does not produce higher inflation, suggesting it achieves a more flexible design without incurring significant costs.

What does the superhero—an icon of the American imaginary—communicate about the politics of violence? Responding to nationwide protests of police brutality in 2020, law enforcement officers adopted the skull logo of The Punisher, an exceptionally violent fictional vigilante. That adoption signals what I call the privilege of violence: the force individuals may deploy based on normative expectations concerning gender and race. Comparing Marvel-Netflix productions including The Punisher series, I identify three modes of violence in operation: the unrestricted rage of a white male vigilante, the vulnerability of a feminist heroine, and the sacrificial control of a Black male hero. The article demonstrates the gendered and racialized conditions under which heroic violence is rendered legitimate to American audiences. As I conclude, Punisher’s unrestricted violence valorizes white male grievance, and this is precisely what appeals to armed agents of the American state.

This article develops and tests a new theoretical framework, gendered political socialization, which offers important insights into how children perceive gender in politics and the consequences of these perceptions on sex differences in political interest and ambition. Based on data from 1,604 children who live in four different regions across the United States, we find that children not only perceive politics to be a male-dominated space, but with age, girls increasingly see political leadership as a “man’s world.” Simultaneously, as children grow older, they internalize gendered expectations, which direct their interests toward professions that embody the gendered traits that fit with their own sex. One result of this mismatch between women and politics is that girls express lower levels of interest and ambition in politics than do boys.

This article examines the interplay between gendered electoral financing (GEF) and other crucial factors in democratic elections worldwide to determine whether, how, and why these understudied mechanisms help achieve gender balance in national parliaments. Integrating qualitative comparative analysis and minimalist causal mechanism case studies, the sequential mixed methods study of GEF implementation in 31 elections in 17 countries shows that enhanced gender balance is achieved when GEF is combined with several conditions, providing a much-needed financial incentive—payments and penalties—for party gatekeepers and eligible women to change their behavior. In successful cases of top-down GEF implementation, gender quotas combine with a PR electoral system or a 15% minimum of women MPs, a measure developed for this study. Success in bottom-up GEF implementation is unexpected and complex and occurs without a quota. The article ends with a discussion of the research agenda, policy recommendations, and implications for the pursuit of democratic quality.

We study how officeholder gender affects issue accountability and examine whether constituents evaluate women and men legislators differently on the basis of their policy records. Data from 2008 through 2018 show that constituents’ approval ratings and vote choices in US House elections are more responsive to the policy records of women legislators than of men legislators. These patterns are concentrated among politically aware constituents, but we find no evidence that the results are driven disproportionately by either women or men constituents or by issues that are gendered in stereotypical ways. Additional analyses suggest that while constituents penalize women and men legislators at similar rates for policy incongruence, women legislators are rewarded more than men as they are increasingly aligned with their constituents. Our results show that accountability standards are applied differently across legislator gender and suggest a link between the quality of policy representation and the gender composition of American legislatures.

This article argues that Ella Baker’s ideology of radical democracy shaped her theory of organizing, including her theories of mass action and indigenous leadership. Against the emerging consensus in realist and radical democratic theory that both Baker’s praxis and democratic organizing more broadly are nonideological, I argue that all organizing is ideological if, with Stuart Hall, we understand ideology not as a rigid set of beliefs but as a dynamic framework for understanding society. Organizers make decisions based on their own ideologies and they attempt to maintain or reshape the dominant ideologies. In this sense, organizers are political theorists: they have self-conscious theories of how society works and changes based on which they make strategic decisions. I demonstrate a method for interpreting organizers’ political theories and argue that Baker’s theory of radical democracy offers democratic theory insight into the practices and organizational structures that advance democratization.

How does the recognition of collective self-governance rights for indigenous communities affect national unity and state consolidation? In recent decades, many states have recognized such rights, devolving de jure control over land and local governance to indigenous institutions. Prominent perspectives in the state-building literature suggest that these policies are likely to threaten state consolidation by strengthening nonstate authorities at the expense of state authority and subnational identities at the expense of a national identity. Yet few studies have tested whether these policies have the consequences their critics claim. I address this gap, leveraging spatial and temporal variation in the granting of communal land titles to indigenous communities in the Philippines. Using difference-in-differences and panel designs, I find that titling increases both indigenous self-identification and compliance with the state. Results from an original survey experiment suggest that recognizing collective self-governance rights increases identification with the nation.

Does physical surveillance hinder or foster antiregime resistance? A common view holds that surveillance prevents resistance by providing regimes with high-quality intelligence on dissident networks and by instilling fear in citizens. We contrast this view using formerly classified data from Communist Poland. We find that communities exposed to secret police officers were more likely to organize protests but also engaged in less sabotage. To ensure that the relationship is causal, we use an instrumental variable strategy, which exploits the exogenous assignment of Catholic “spy priests” to local communities. To trace the underlying mechanisms, we draw on qualitative interviews and archival sources. We document that Poland’s comprehensive use of surveillance created widespread anger as well as an incentive for citizens to reveal their true loyalties, thus facilitating antiregime collective action. Once on the streets, protesters refrained from sabotage to signal their political motivation to bystanders and authorities alike.

When international conflict causes an authoritarian leader’s popularity to soar, extant theories lead us to treat such “rallying” as sincere preference change, the product of surging patriotism or cowed media. This study advances a theory of less-than-fully sincere rallying more appropriate for nondemocratic settings, characterizing it as at least partly reflecting cascading dissembling driven by social desirability concerns. The identification strategy combines a rare nationally representative rally-spanning panel survey with a list experiment and econometric analysis. This establishes that three quarters of those who rallied to Putin after Russia annexed Crimea were engaging in at least some form of dissembling and that this rallying developed as a rapid cascade, with social media joining television in fueling perceptions this was socially desirable.

Contemporary political behavior is often affected by historical legacies, but the specific mechanisms through which these legacies are transmitted are difficult to pin down. This paper argues that historical political conflicts can affect political behavior over several generations when they trigger an enduring organizational mobilization. It studies how the oppression of German Catholics in the nineteenth century led to a regionally differentiated mobilization of political Catholicism that still affects political support for the radical right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) today. Using newly collected data on historical oppression events, it shows that Catholic regions where oppression was intense saw greater mobilization of Catholic lay organizations than Catholic regions where oppression was milder and show lower support for the AfD today. The paper thus contributes to the literature on the historical determinants of political behavior as well as to the question of which regional context effects strengthen or weaken the radical right.

Research on the welfare state has devoted considerable attention to social policy expansion. However, little is known about why governments expand social policies serving groups with limited power on issues with low visibility. I call these “benevolent policies.” This class of social policies improves population well-being but produces minimal political gains for the governments enacting them. Why do governments expand benevolent policies if political incentives for reform are weak? I investigate this question by focusing on government responses to malnutrition. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including 71 interviews, I argue that the origins of policy expansion can be found in the government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats with technical expertise—technocrats—can play a defining role, deploying international pressure to court executive support and orchestrate policy change. Their actions help explain the Indonesian government’s unexpected expansion of nutrition policies, which serve low-income women and children and address micronutrient malnutrition.

Since the 1960s, “the stakeholder,” or affected party, has emerged as a novel democratic subject whose participation in varied institutional sites—from universities to government agencies, corporate boardrooms to international organizations—is seen as necessary for the management of complex problems. However, few specifically attend to the stakeholder as a distinct political subject and consider its implications for democratic practice. This paper presents a genealogy of the stakeholder, documenting its appearance in corporate managerialism and US public administration and showing how racial mobilization, rapid technological progress, and the political rationality of systems thinking provided the conditions of possibility for its emergence. Though orienting democracy around stakeholders permits opportunities for participation in political life, I argue that this subject is predicated on a circumscribed form of participatory politics that erodes habits of discovering a common good, erases distinctions between individuals and corporate bodies, and amplifies the problem of expertise.

Is local attention a substitute for policy representation? Fenno (1978) famously described how legislators develop personal ties with their constituents through periodic visits to their districts and carefully crafted communications. Existing work suggests that such interactions insulate incumbents electorally, creating less need to represent constituents’ policy preferences. Surprisingly, this important argument has never been tested systematically. In this paper, I use data on senator travel and staffing behavior along with survey data from the 2011–2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to investigate this claim. In addition to showing that areas with important campaign donors are significantly more likely to receive resources, I find that local visits may decrease approval among ideologically opposed constituents. Furthermore, I find inconsistent evidence regarding the effectiveness of local staff. These results suggest that local attention does not always cultivate goodwill in the district. Under polarized politics, home style does not effectively substitute for policy representation.

A classic question about democratic elections is how much they are able to influence politician behavior by forcing them to anticipate future reelection attempts, especially in contexts where voters are not paying close attention and are not well informed. We compile a new dataset containing roughly 780,000 bills, combined with more than 16 million roll-call voting records for roughly 6,000 legislators serving in U.S. state legislatures with term limits. Using an individual-level difference-in-differences design, we find that legislators who can no longer seek reelection sponsor fewer bills, are less productive on committees, and are absent for more floor votes, on average. Building a new dataset of roll-call votes and interest-group ratings, we find little evidence that legislators who cannot run for reelection systematically shift their ideological platforms. In sum, elections appear to influence how legislators allocate their effort in important ways even in low-salience environments but may have less influence on ideological positioning.

Do elected officials update their policy positions in response to expert evidence? A large literature in political behavior demonstrates a range of biases that individuals may manifest in evaluating information. However, elected officials may be motivated to accurately incorporate information when it could affect the welfare of their constituents. I investigate these competing predictions through a national survey of local and state policy makers in which I present respondents with established expert findings concerning three subnational policy debates, debates that vary as to whether Republicans or Democrats are more likely to see the findings as confirmatory or challenging. Using both cross-subject and within-subject designs, I find policy makers update their beliefs and preferences in the direction of the evidence irrespective of the valence of the information. These findings have implications for the application of mass political behavior theories to politicians as well as the prospects for evidence-based policy making.