More than 1,100 studies have been published that examine the effects of democracy using cross-national data since 2000. This article examines whether these analyses have sufficient statistical power to detect an effect of democracy. Using Monte Carlo simulation and examining consensus effects previously reported in the literature, the article finds that studies are only powered to detect very strong effects of democracy when examining countries over time. This raises questions about what sort of relationships can be analyzed using cross-national data.

We examine how the effects of initiatives intended to promote programmatic competition are conditioned by candidates’ often mixed incentives to participate in them. In a nationwide debate initiative designed to solicit and widely rebroadcast policy promises from Liberian legislative candidates, we analyze the randomized encouragement of debate participation across districts. The intervention substantially increased the debate participation of leading candidates but had uneven electoral consequences, with incumbents benefiting at the expense of their challengers. These results are driven by incumbents’ more positive selection into participation on the basis of their policy alignment with voters; voters’ heightened attention to them; and how candidates’ campaigns responded in turn. The results underscore wide variation in candidates’ suitability for programmatic politics and highlight important challenges in transitioning away from clientelistic political equilibria.

Popular discourse about freedom of speech tends to default to the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, notwithstanding empirical evidence undermining this concept. Its persistence illustrates the profound attachment freedom of speech inspires, despite the difficulty of justifying it in epistemic terms. I suggest that the ancient Greek historian Herodotus offers a compelling alternative to the marketplace metaphor with his account of isegoria at Athens. In Herodotus’s telling, Athenian equal right of speech is worthwhile not because of its effects on speech but because of its effect on political culture; equal speech energizes the Athenians and Athens. He thus offers a nonepistemic defense of the right to speak, defending it instead in terms of power and belonging. Yet his account also highlights how Athenian equal speech unleashes political harms and therefore offers a way to defend free speech without minimizing its dangers. Herodotus thus helps us productively reframe contemporary free speech debates.

Conflictual cabinet terminations are seismic events in democracies, but their consequences are understudied. I argue that the electoral impacts of conflictual cabinet terminations depend on voters’ perceptions of them. Terminations following non-policy conflicts are electorally costly. They signal parties’ deteriorating governing competence, which reduces parties’ vote shares. In contrast, terminations following policy conflicts signal parties’ unwillingness to compromise their policy positions and clarify parties’ policy profiles, thus allowing them to evade voter punishment and junior coalition parties to reap electoral reward, particularly for those terminations preceded by interparty policy conflicts. Statistical analyses using the Party Government in Europe Database dataset support my argument on policy terminations and reveal more nuanced electoral effects of non-policy conflict terminations. These findings are robust to various alternative explanations, as well as multiple cabinet terminations and time passed from termination to election. The findings have large implications on electoral accountability of intra-cabinet conflicts and the quality of governance.

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.

Congressional observers have long been interested in the distinction between legislative “workhorses” and “showhorses.” However, when scholars operationalize this by measuring legislator productivity, they often neglect many realities of modern lawmaking by focusing on the traditional bill sponsorship and passage process. To better align measurement with practice, we compile widely available data on bill sponsorship, cosponsorship, and amendments; we also use text-as-data methods to credit instances of behind-the-scenes lawmaking via text reuse between bills. We weight achievements from each of these lawmaking methods to create the Lawmaking Productivity Metric for House Members of the 101–113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship provides important insights about who the congressional workhorses are. In particular, we find that traditional measures systematically undercount the legislative successes of women and likely Black Members of Congress because they disproportionately legislate in less visible ways.

It is a well-established fact, from decades of research on political socialization, that the children of politically active parents are more likely to become politically active themselves. This poses a challenge for democracy, as it means that inequalities in political influence are reproduced across generations. The present study argues that this problem may be more severe than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reason for this is that previous research on the topic has focused almost exclusively on political transmission between parents and their children, whereas the role played by more distant forebears, such as grandparents, has been largely neglected. In this study, we use Swedish register data to analyze multigenerational associations in electoral participation. The empirical results clearly indicate that the traditional two-generation approach to the study of political transmission tends to underestimate intergenerational persistence in voting behavior and that this excess persistence has both genetic and social roots.