Contemporary analyses of Athenian democracy have focused on binaries such as mass/elite, free/slave, and male/female, overlooking the urban/rural divide. In this article, I argue that urban/rural was a central cleavage in the Athenian demos. Ancient thinkers including Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle paid close attention to urban/rural differences and their consequences during the fifth century. Plato and Aristotle in particular developed sophisticated institutions and strategies to mitigate urban/rural divisions. Attending to the Athenian urban/rural divide deepens our understanding of the demos and highlights the importance of attachments to place, home, and customary ways of life for democratic stability.

In this article, I show that Richard Rorty’s unduly neglected normative political theory advances a far more distinct and demanding form of liberalism than is usually attributed to him. Attention to how Rorty understands solidarity—and its corresponding conception of public obligations—encourages analysis of his nonjuridical vision of liberal community. Through examination of his oft-ignored, revealing interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov and instructive comparison with the thought of Judith Shklar, I argue that, for Rorty, the sustainability of a liberal community requires an ethos of curiosity, whereby citizens feel moved to uncover and understand the personal experiences of cruelty and humiliation endured by others. We can make sense of this ethos and its demands of us through rethinking the idea of political conversation. This understanding of Rorty’s intellectual project not only enriches our appreciation of his complex political theory but also contests the meaning and implications of liberalism itself.

Campaigns regularly dispatch activists to contact voters. Much research considers these conversations’ effects on voters, but we know little about their influence on the implementing activists—an important population given the outsized influence politically active Americans wield. We argue personal persuasion campaigns can reduce affective polarization among the implementing activists by creating opportunities for perspective-getting. We report unique data from three real-world campaigns wherein activists attempted to persuade voters who had opposing viewpoints: two campaigns about a politicized issue (immigration) and a third about the 2020 presidential election. All campaigns trained activists to persuade voters through in-depth, two-way conversations. In preregistered studies, we find that these efforts reduced affective polarization among implementing activists, with reductions large enough to reverse over a decade’s increase in affective polarization. Qualitative responses are consistent with these conversations producing perspective-getting, which reduced animosity by humanizing and individuating out-partisans. We discuss implications for theories of prejudice reduction.

Strategic voting is thought to underlie Duverger’s Law and lead to two-party outcomes in single-member district plurality (SMDP) systems. We examine the extent of strategic voting in the world’s most populous democracy, India, where frequent exceptions to Duverger’s Law have long puzzled political scientists. Using an original voter survey from the 2017 Uttar Pradesh state election, we find extremely low rates of strategic voting. Why? We show that the vast majority of respondents believe that their preferred party is likely to win in their constituency. For most voters, their partisan preferences overwhelmingly predict their beliefs about which party will win. Their election forecasts correspond to objective electoral outcomes only with respect to parties that they like less.