We revise the conventional wisdom that Africa’s international borders were drawn arbitrarily. Europeans knew very little about most of Africa in the mid-1880s, but their self-interested goals of amassing territory prompted intensive examination of on-the-ground conditions as they formed borders. Europeans negotiated with African rulers to secure treaties and to learn about historical state frontiers, which enabled Africans to influence the border-formation process. Major water bodies, which shaped precolonial civilizations and trade, also served as focal points. We find support for these new theoretical implications using two original datasets. Quantitatively, we analyze border-location correlates using grid cells and an original spatial dataset on precolonial states. Qualitatively, we compiled information from treaties and diplomatic histories to code causal process observations for every bilateral border. Historical political frontiers directly affected 62% of all bilateral borders. Water bodies, often major ones, comprised the primary border feature much more frequently than straight lines.

We develop State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for state legislators across 97 legislative chambers over recent decades, based on the number of bills that they sponsor, how far those bills move through the lawmaking process, and their substantive importance. We assess the scores through criterion and construct validation and reveal new insights into effective lawmaking across legislators. We then offer two illustrations of the immense opportunities that these scores provide for new scholarship on legislative behavior. First, we demonstrate greater majority-party influence over lawmaking in states featuring ideological polarization and majority-party cohesion, and where there is greater electoral competition for chamber control. Second, we show how institutional design choices—from legislative rules to the scope of professionalization—affect the distributions of policymaking power from state to state.

In recent decades, the term “politics” has become almost synonymous with conflict. Results from eight studies show that individuals averse to conflict tend to select out of surveys and discussions explicitly labeled as “political.” This suggests that the inferences researchers draw from “political” surveys, as well as the impressions average Americans draw from explicitly “political” discussions, will be systematically biased toward conflict. We find little evidence that these effects can be attenuated by emphasizing deliberative norms. However, conflict averse individuals are more willing to discuss ostensibly political topics such as the economy, climate change, and racial inequality, despite reluctance to discuss “politics” explicitly. Moreover, they express greater interest in politics when it is defined in terms of laws and policies and debate is deemphasized. Overall, these findings suggest the expectation of conflict may have a self-fulfilling effect, as contexts deemed explicitly “political” will be composed primarily of conflict seekers.

U.S. homesteading has been linked to establishing federal sovereignty over western lands threatened by the Confederacy, foreign powers, and the Indian Wars in the last half of the nineteenth century. However, the bulk of homesteading actually took place in the early twentieth century, long after these threats to federal ownership ceased. We argue that this “late homesteading” was also an effort to enforce federal rights, but in response to a different threat—a legal one. Questionable federal land policies in the late nineteenth century dispossessed massive amounts of Indigenous lands, and exposed the federal government to legal, rather than violent, conflict. Late homesteading was used to make the dispossession permanent, even in cases where a legal defeat eventually occurred. Examining the qualitative evidence, and using data on the universe of individual homesteads and federal land cessions across the 16 western states, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis.

This study addresses the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians “crying wolf” over fake news. Strategic and false claims that stories are fake news or deepfakes may benefit politicians by helping them maintain support after a scandal. We posit that this benefit, known as the “liar’s dividend,” may be achieved through two politician strategies: by invoking informational uncertainty or by encouraging oppositional rallying of core supporters. We administer five survey experiments to over 15,000 American adults detailing hypothetical politician responses to stories describing real politician scandals. We find that claims of misinformation representing both strategies raise politician support across partisan subgroups. These strategies are effective against text-based reports of scandals, but are largely ineffective against video evidence and do not reduce general trust in media. Finally, these false claims produce greater dividends for politicians than alternative responses to scandal, such as remaining silent or apologizing.

To safeguard peace in multi-ethnic countries, scholars and practitioners recommend territorial autonomy. However, there is limited cross-national research on how autonomy affects subnational ethnic conflict, and increasing concern that it redirects ethnic violence from the national to the subnational level. Addressing this gap, I argue that autonomy generates tensions over subnational government control and the distribution of local economic goods. However, whether these turn violent depends on ethnic representation in the central government. If groups are unequally represented, violent escalation is more likely due to information and commitment problems and subnational majoritarianism. To test these arguments, I provide new time-variant data on subnational boundaries, territorial autonomy, and ethnically attributed violence. I conduct a systematic analysis of all multi-ethnic countries between 1989 and 2019, instrumental variable analyses, and tests of my argument’s intermediate implications. My findings underline the importance of complementing autonomy with inclusive central governments to attenuate the risks of subnational violence.

Scholars have long questioned whether and how courts influence society. We contribute to this debate by investigating the ability of judicial decisions to shape issue attention and affect toward courts in media serving the LGBTQ+ community. To do so, we compiled an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases over an extended period covering major decisions, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003), and Lofton v. Secretary of Department of Children & Family Services (2004). We argue these cases influence the volume and tone of LGBTQ+ media coverage. Combining computational social science techniques with qualitative analysis, we find increased attention to same-sex marriage after the decisions in Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton, and the coalescence of discussions of courts around same-sex marriage after Lawrence. We also show how LGBTQ+ media informed readers about the political and legal implications of struggles over marriage equality.

Social movements often appeal to the politics of sight, meaning that if people knew about a given injustice, political transformation would follow. Jasmine English and Bernardo Zacka articulate two central premises of the politics of sight: “(1) exposing morally repugnant practices will make us see them, (2) seeing such practices will stop us from acquiescing to them.” Considering the case of slaughterhouse workers, Timothy Pachirat and English and Zacka challenge the previous premises. This article complements their contributions by theorizing what I call Western conceptuality/language and the role this plays in forming our subjectivities not to recognize violence on the one hand, and to be sovereign masters over animals on the other. I conclude by discussing the political implications of these arguments for the politics of sight, including the role of concealment and exposure, and the conditions needed for humans to see animals in their full ethical weight.

This study examines how protesters’ gender shapes public reactions to protests and protest repression. Using an original survey experiment, I demonstrate that protests involving extensive participation by women are perceived as less violent and meriting of repression than male-dominated protests. But perceptions of female protesters vary. Patriarchy-defiant female protesters like feminists are deemed more deserving of repression despite being perceived as equally likely to be peaceful as female protesters who emphasize patriarchy-compliant femininities, such as women who highlight their roles as mothers and wives. This, I show, is because patriarchy-defiant women are viewed as more immoral, which renders their protest accounts less trustworthy when they clash with government propaganda seeking to legitimize repression. These findings underscore the value of disaggregating the binary category of man or woman when examining sentiments toward political agents and of considering stereotypes when studying perceptions, and ultimately the risks and effectiveness, of protest movements.

How does politics affect, and possibly distort, how resources are allocated? I show that where the federal government provides public goods and financial assistance depends not only on who has power within Congress but also on the characteristics of their constituents. In a federal system like the United States, the central government provides resources by allocating grants to subnational governments based on demographic characteristics. Thus, to maximize funding for their states, members of Congress must also distribute funding to states with similar characteristics. Using panel data on education spending and a difference-in-differences design, I demonstrate that grants disproportionately benefit states represented by Senate committee chairs, but this benefit spills over to similar states. However, I find no evidence of committee influence over grants in the House. These findings contribute to our understanding of distributive politics and shed light on the consequences of allocating resources within a federal system.

This article takes as its starting point a 1961 conversation between James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, where the latter first posed the question that would recur in Baldwin’s writings in the following years: “Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?” Although the phrase is often associated with Baldwin, who mostly used it as a metaphor for the racist nation, most famously in The Fire Next Time (1963), this article shows how Hansberry’s analysis of many African Americans’ skepticism toward integration into a “burning house” was situated in a global context of anticolonial, anti-capitalist, and feminist struggle. Writing within networks of Black internationalist feminists and presenting a multivalent and relational account of home, Hansberry revealed household labor and relations of intimacy to be central to the making and maintenance of empire, racism, and capitalism, as well as their contestation through acts and affects of insurgency.

This essay proposes a novel paradigm for a political theory of climate justice: wages for earthwork. Indigenous peoples have disproportionately contributed to the sustainable stewardship of the natural world through ecological systems of governance, which I theorize as “earthwork.” Proponents of climate reparations have focused on reparations for unequal climate damages from emissions. By contrast, I propose “wages” or reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work. This framework makes use of an analogy to the 1970s feminist wages for housework movement, which sought to reveal the exploited and yet indispensable character of systematically devalued work rendered natural and invisible. I contend that (re)valuing earthwork must also be central to projects aimed at decolonizing climate justice, that is, anticolonial climate justice. More than monetary transfers alone, wages for earthwork prioritize the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and land and wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.

This article offers a reconceptualization of US empire by foregrounding a central concept of its theory and practice: development, an ideology and attendant set of material practices that purport to uplift a defined population through political, economic, and social interventions. Because developmental ideology promises benefits and allocates specific roles to different groups, it has worked as a racializing technology, not only defining and assigning clusters of people to hierarchies of different stages but also establishing possibilities, however limited, for movement between these stages. The article demonstrates how developmental ideas and practices have been persistent, if flexible, features across the racialized government of formerly enslaved persons and Native Americans after the Civil War, overseas expansion to the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century, and US participation in transnational debates about empire in the early twentieth century and its pursuit of global hegemony after World War II.

In electoral autocracies, why do some people actively support political parties while others choose to not get involved in politics? Further, what differentiates those who choose to support the ruling party from those who support the opposition? Existing research has proposed that people support ruling parties primarily to extract economic benefits from the state while people support opposition parties primarily for ideological reasons. However, we lack a unified theory of partisanship, leading to indeterminant predictions about the individual predictors of partisanship. This article instead considers the social nature of partisanship in authoritarian regimes. Qualitative data collected in Cameroon highlight different processes of political socialization in an autocratic context, and data from an original survey show not only that partisan homogeneity in social networks is highly predictive of individual-level partisanship but also, at least to some extent, that partisanship can be contagious through the process of socialization within these networks.

Classic political behavior studies assert that childhood socialization can contribute to later political orientations. But, as adults consider how to introduce children to politics, what shapes their decisions? We argue socialization is itself political with adults changing their socialization priorities in response to salient political events including social movements. Using Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and race socialization as a case, we show the summer 2020 information environment coupled movement-consistent concepts of race with child-rearing guidance. A survey of white parents after the summer activism suggests that many—but especially Democrats and those near peaceful protest epicenters—prioritized new forms of race socialization. Further, nearly 2 years after the protests’ height, priming BLM changes support for race-related curricular materials among white Americans. Our work casts political socialization in a new light, reviving an old literature, and has implications for when today’s children become tomorrow’s voters.

Work on the electoral effects of gun violence in the U.S. relying on difference-in-differences designs has produced findings ranging from null to substantively large effects. However, as difference-in-difference designs, on which this research relies, have exploded in popularity, scholars have documented several methodological issues including potential violations of parallel-trends and unaccounted for treatment effect heterogeneity. These pitfalls (and their solutions) have not been fully explored in political science. We apply these advancements to the unresolved debate on gun violence’s effects on U.S. electoral outcomes. We show that studies finding a large positive effect of gun violence on Democratic vote shares are a product of a failure to properly specify difference-in-differences models when underlying assumptions are unlikely to hold. Once these biases are corrected, shootings show little evidence of sparking large electoral change. Our work clarifies an unresolved debate and provides a cautionary guide for scholars currently employing difference-in-differences designs.

Politicians’ ability to provide national security to the public is deeply enmeshed in conceptions of the state and of leadership. This article incorporates securitization, feminist, and political communication theories to consider whether gendered and militarized conceptions of national security have different effects for politicians who are women and those who are men. Although scholarship suggests that signaling military bona fides—such as invoking one’s veteran status—can help politicians claim that certain policies are a matter of national security, we consider whether this ability will be gendered. Relying on two national studies, we find results that are contrary to our original predictions. First, we find that military bona fides do help women be seen as leaders. However, we do not find evidence that bona fides increase the “authority” to identify and address national security threats for any politicians.

Rural areas are conservative electoral strongholds in the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. But this was not always the case. What explains the rise of rural conservatism? This paper argues that technological change transformed not only agriculture but rural political preferences during the twentieth century. It studies a natural experiment: the post-World War II introduction of new irrigation technologies, which enabled farmers to irrigate otherwise arid land in the Great Plains using groundwater. Difference-in-differences analyses exploiting the shock’s differential impact on counties overlying the Ogallala Aquifer—a pattern validated with remote-sensing data—show that technological change contributed significantly to the region’s long-term conservative electoral transformation. Additional analyses, including comparison of individual policy preferences inside/outside the Ogallala Aquifer boundary, suggest that this was due to the rise of capital-intensive agriculture and the growing power of agribusiness. The findings demonstrate how new technologies made new politics in rural America.

What normative compass can appropriately ground a theory for contemporary “non-Western” societies? This question has become urgent amid the pressure to decolonize political science and academia. The hybridity of numerous contemporary non-Western societies means that political theorists cannot refuse to engage with either Western-originated or premodern Indigenous concepts and ways of thinking that bear on the local public culture. However, these normative strands alone are unsuitable for grounding a contemporary theory. This methodological dilemma can be overcome if theorists adopt normative hybridity as a methodological stance. Normative hybridity suggests that hybridity is not only a feature of the theorist’s context of reference but should also be their modus operandi. Normative hybridity already underpins relevant works in contemporary Confucian political theory. Drawing from these works, I illustrate three methods to apply normative hybridity to theory building. This novel methodological approach uniquely addresses current political theory discussions and influences non-Western policymaking.