Climate disasters raise the salience of climate change’s negative consequences, including climate-induced migration. Policy action to address climate displacement is especially contentious in the United States, where weak support for tackling climate change intersects with high opposition to migration. Do climate disasters foster receptivity toward climate migrants and broader willingness to combat climate change? To study this question, we leverage the occurrence of Hurricane Ian during fielding of a preregistered survey in autumn 2022. Hurricane exposure increased concern about and support for policies to address climate migration. Hurricane exposure also increased support for climate action and belief in anthropogenic climate change. Effects of hurricane exposure cross-cut partisanship, education, age, and other important correlates of climate attitudes but decay within 6 months. Together, these results suggest that climate disasters may briefly increase favorability toward climate migrants and climate policy action but are unlikely to durably mobilize support even in severely impacted areas.

The notion that popular vigilance is central to safe-guarding democratic freedoms is a key pillar of republican political thought. Yet, this conception does not translate well to postcolonial contexts without some reconceptualization. In this article, I take up the ways in which two African statesmen and political theorists, Julius Nyerere and Thomas Sankara, reconceptualize the practice of vigilance in the postcolonial context. Both theorists demonstrate that the collective exercise of vigilance is a qualitatively different political practice in the postcolonial context because citizens must simultaneously target internal domination from elites and external domination from international institutions and former colonial powers. Furthermore, they underscore that a shared political vision in the form of a national ethic is crucial for generating and guiding mass practices of vigilance. Doing so, Nyerere and Sankara articulate a distinct tradition of postcolonial republicanism that better conceptualizes the challenges of stabilizing state–society relations in postcolonial Africa.

Alexander Berkman’s 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is a significant book in the development of American anti-prison politics, not despite, but because of its ambivalent approach to prisons. I trace through Berkman’s book and archive an unresolved tension between two approaches to the prison: advocacy for political prisoners, whereby the prison is a state tool for suppressing radical ideas, and advocacy against the politics of prisons, whereby the prison is an “aggravated counterpart” of social structures and a site of struggle. Berkman’s ambivalence between these approaches amid his memoirs and activism exemplifies the complex development of U.S. thinking on prisons and enduring tensions in contemporary prison politics.

Unequal patterns of cultural exchange between the Global South and Global North are sometimes labeled “neo-colonial.” What, if anything, is wrong with these patterns? Debates surrounding cultural globalization have traditionally divided proponents of free trade and cultural preservation. The article develops an alternative account grounded in a global application of the ideal of social equality. Citizens of privileged societies ought to regard and relate to citizens of disadvantaged societies as social equals. Patterns of cultural exchange play an important role in promoting these relationships. Historically, colonized peoples were often regarded as inferior based on perceived failures to produce cultural achievements. To the extent that unequal global cultural production and exchange persist, the colonial pattern remains. The duty to relate to foreigners as equals implies that Global North countries should stop pressing for cultural trade concessions and instead favor the import of cultural goods from the Global South.

Political philosophers and theorists make arguments about high-stakes problems. This article shows that those theories would be more credible if political philosophers ensured their work was robust: capable of withstanding reasonable changes to their assumptions and to the cases to which their arguments apply. The world is varied and inconstant. As a result, scientists and social scientists recognize the virtue of robustness. This article shows why political philosophers should also do so. It defines robustness, demonstrates its value, and shows how it can be evaluated. Illustrating the stakes of robustness, the article assesses prominent arguments concerning multiculturalism and open borders. Avoiding misunderstanding and confusion should be a central aim of political philosophy. To sidestep these outcomes and to reassure scholars that one’s theory is not subject to concerns about its credibility, it will often be reasonable for philosophers to explicitly test their theories for robustness.

In this article, we offer a framework for understanding the role that racial group consciousness (RGC) plays in influencing Black Americans’ engagement in costly political action. Attempting to add clarity to decades of inconsistent and at times contradictory findings, we argue that the effect of RGC at inspiring political action among Black Americans is conditional on (1) the relevance of the political activity to achieving a well-recognized racial group outcome and (2) individual capacity to assume the cost of engaging in the activity. Analyzing data from the ANES and two behavioral experiments, we find that RGC exhibits a consistently strong relationship with engagement in low-cost political behavior, regardless of whether the behavior has some explicit group-relevant outcome. When engagement becomes more costly, however, Blacks high in RGC are only willing to assume these costs if the engagement has some clear potential for racial group benefit.

The Trump administration implemented a controversial performance quota policy for immigration judges in October 2018. The policy’s political motivations were clear: to pressure immigration judges to order more immigration removals and deportations as quickly as possible. Previous attempts by U.S. presidents to control immigration judges were ineffective, but this quota policy was different because it credibly threatened judges’ job security and promotion opportunities if they failed to follow the policy. Our analysis of hundreds of thousands of judicial decisions before and after the policy’s implementation demonstrates that the quota policy successfully led immigration judges to issue more immigration removal orders (both in absentia and merits orders). The post-policy change in behavior was strongest among those judges who were less inclined, pre-policy, to issue immigration removal decisions. These findings have important implications for immigration judge independence, due process protections for noncitizens, and presidential efforts to control the federal bureaucracy.

While there is disagreement over the value of public shaming, scholars largely agree that social media introduce pathologies. But while scholars rightly identify the effects of online public shaming (OPS), they misidentify the cause. Rather than solely a problem of scale, OPS’s effects are also shaped by the network structure within which they take place. In this article, I argue that the social conditions necessary for productive public shaming are more likely to obtain in a closed social network structure. Using the cases of Twitter, Wikipedia, and Reddit, I show how the design of social media platforms facilitates different network structures among users, with differing results for OPS. In evaluating OPS by way of network structure, I argue, we can not only better understand why OPS works productively in some cases and not in others, but also derive lessons for how to deploy, discuss, and respond to it more effectively.

Political polarization is one of the most discussed challenges facing contemporary democracies and is often associated with a broader epistemic crisis. While inspiring a large literature in political science, polarization’s epistemic problems also have significance for normative democratic theory, and this study develops a new approach aimed at understanding them. In contrast to prominent accounts from political psychology—group polarization theory and cultural cognition theory—which argue that polarization leads individuals to form unreliable political beliefs, this study focuses on system-level diversity. It argues that polarization’s epistemic harms are best located in its tendency to reduce the diversity of perspectives utilized in a democratic system and in how this weakens the system’s ability to identify and address problems of public concern. Understanding such harms is also argued to require a greater consideration of the political dynamics of polarization and issues of elite discourse, alongside political psychology.

Many look to the federal courts as an avenue of control of the growing administrative state. Some advocate the creation of specialized federal courts of appeals in areas such as immigration and social security. Yet, little is known about whether repeat exposure to specific types of cases enables federal judges to overcome doctrines of deference and whether such an effect would be policy-neutral. Gathering a sample of over 4000 cases decided by the U.S. Courts of Appeals between 2002 and 2017, we demonstrate that exposure to asylum cases over time emboldens federal judges to challenge administrative asylum decisions, asserting their personal policy preferences. The effect is particularly strong when the legal issue should prompt deference based on bureaucratic expertise. These findings not only address important questions raised by bureaucracy and court scholars but also inform a salient public debate concerning the proper treatment of those seeking refuge within our borders.

The literature on “racial capitalism” exhibits a tension between the term’s evocative power and its conceptual imprecision. This article navigates this tension by developing the mid-level concept of “capitalist racialization,” which specifies the role of capitalist abstractions in the construction of racial hierarchies. I elaborate this notion around the racialization of Chinese migration in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. I focalize the figure of the “Chinese colonist” as an index of the capitalist standards by which British observers ordered colonial populations in their reflections on imperial political economy. I argue that the racial stereotype of “the Chinese” as commercial, industrious, and “colonizing” people emerged from the subsumption of colonial land and labor under capital. Their “colonizing” capacity rendered Chinese migrants simultaneously an economic asset to the British Empire and a potential threat to the white world order. “Capitalist racialization” therefore highlights new inroads into the entwined histories of capitalism, racism, and empire.

If states are permitted to create and maintain a military force, by what means are they permitted to do so? This article argues that a theory of just recruitment should incorporate a concern for moral risk. Since the military is a morally risky profession for its members, recruitment policies should be evaluated in terms of how they distribute moral risk within a community. We show how common military recruitment practices exacerbate and concentrate moral risk exposure, using the UK as a case study. We argue that the British state wrongs its citizens by subjecting them to excessively morally risky recruitment practices. Since, we argue, this risk exposure cannot be justified by appealing to the benefits of a military career for recruits, our argument calls for reform of existing practices. Our method of evaluation is generalizable and therefore can be used to assess other states’ practices.

Ongoing, spirited debates from around the globe over statues, street names, symbols, and textbooks call for a greater understanding of the political effects of different historical representations. In this paper, we theorize that inclusive (exclusive) historical representations can increase (decrease) marginalized group members’ perceived centrality to the nation, entitlement to speak on its behalf, and likelihood of becoming leaders. In an online experiment in India ($ N=1,592 $), we randomly assign participants exercises sourced from official state textbooks containing either an exclusive, inclusive, or a neutral representation of history. We subsequently assess the supply of and demand for Muslim leadership using both an original, incentivized game and additional survey and behavioral measures. We find that inclusive historical narratives increase Muslim participants’ perceived centrality and entitlement, desire to lead, and demand for real-world Muslim leaders. Battles over history can carry consequences for the leadership ambitions of marginalized individuals, for themselves and their communities.

While existing scholarship recognizes the centrality of social organizations for party-building efforts, how network structures condition party-building remains underexamined. This article argues that a core property of the network environments within which proto-parties emerge—structural resilience—shapes opportunities for proto-parties’ expansion and consolidation. More resilient network structures—those with multiple pathways available for expansion—decrease proto-parties’ vulnerability to structural threats and allow them to circumvent competition. To evaluate this theory, I examine the organizational networks of three comparable indigenous party-building efforts in Bolivia. Using original network data and a mixed-methods approach, I demonstrate that MAS-IPSP succeeded in establishing itself as the indigenous party because of the structural resilience of the network environment within which it originated. By contrast, its counterparts failed when targeted network attacks undermined their access to organizational spaces critical to their expansion strategies. The findings reveal often-overlooked variation in the relationship between social organizations and political parties.

What international issues become national interests worth fighting for, and why? Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that issues without clear economic value, such as barren lands, are more likely to be perceived as national interests because they do not benefit any single domestic group. Since who benefits is unclear, politicians have an easier time framing such issues as benefiting the whole nation. I test this argument using survey experiments on the American public. The results show that first, issues providing diffuse benefits to citizens are more likely to be considered national interests than issues providing concentrated benefits to certain domestic groups. Second, issues with clearer economic value are harder to frame as having diffuse benefits because they are more easily associated with specific beneficiaries. This study proposes a new theory of national interest and offers a potential explanation for why people frequently support conflict over issues without obvious benefits.

This article highlights a new way in which descriptive representation enhances democracy through inclusive party building. We theorize that parties retain and promote incumbents based on gendered criteria, disproportionately incentivizing women to recruit party members. However, gendered resource inequalities lower women’s access to the patronage required for recruitment. Women respond by recruiting more women members, as it lowers recruitment costs, is role-congruent, and eases credit claiming. Using rich administrative data on party membership from 2004 to 2020 and a regression discontinuity design in Brazil, we find that, despite resource disparities, women mayors recruit new members at similar rates as men but reduce the gender gap in party membership. As expected, women are more likely to be promoted in constituencies where they most lower the gender gap in party membership. We also find that women’s increased membership improves party resilience. Our findings suggest that descriptive representation strengthens party building by including underrepresented citizens.

Why does an authoritarian regime adopt meritocracy in its political selection? I argue that meritocracy can be used to co-opt large numbers of ordinary citizens by providing them with an opportunity of socioeconomic advancement instead of income redistribution, as long as the selection process is viewed as inclusive and rule-based. Focusing on the civil service examination in contemporary China, I examine how this meritocratic selection has shaped the relationship between college graduates and the Chinese regime. Exploiting a spatial-cohort variation in applicant eligibility, I find that the exam boosts college graduates’ perceived upward mobility, which in turn weakens their demand for redistribution even in the face of growing inequality. These findings point to an alternative mode of authoritarian co-optation and highlight the role of upward mobility in regime stability.

The gap between women’s representation in the Democratic and Republican parties has grown significantly in the last three decades. We argue existing explanations undervalue voters’ contributions to this trend by focusing on voter responses to candidate sex rather than candidate gender. We theorize that Republican voters (especially the most conservative) prefer masculine candidates in intraparty and entry-level elections. Because sex and gender are correlated, this limits the number of Republican women who advance through the political pipeline. Experimental vignettes from two rounds of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (N = 2,000) and two large surveys of Republicans (N > 10,000) show that Republican (but not Democratic) voters penalize candidates with “feminine” self-presentation regardless of the candidate’s sex. Original data on the self-presentation of Republican candidates for entry-level office (N = 459) confirm Republican candidates often present themselves in gender-stereotypical ways. In short, voters play an underappreciated role in the partisan gap in women’s representation.

When is speech on social media toxic enough to warrant content moderation? Platforms impose limits on what can be posted online, but also rely on users’ reports of potentially harmful content. Yet we know little about what users consider inadmissible to public discourse and what measures they wish to see implemented. Building on past work, we conceptualize three variants of toxic speech: incivility, intolerance, and violent threats. We present results from two studies with pre-registered randomized experiments (Study 1, $ N=\mathrm{5,130} $; Study 2, $ N=\mathrm{3,734} $) to examine how these variants causally affect users’ content moderation preferences. We find that while both the severity of toxicity and the target of the attack matter, the demand for content moderation of toxic speech is limited. We discuss implications for the study of toxicity and content moderation as an emerging area of research in political science with critical implications for platforms, policymakers, and democracy more broadly.