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.

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.

The coloniality of power stands as a major framework for theorizing race within the context of Latin America, providing an influential account of the origin of race in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Without abandoning the task of theorizing the ways in which race functions in Latin America, this article asks: what is obscured by an insistence on 1492 as the moment when race emerged, and what different understandings of race can be made available by connecting the colonization of the Americas to a different set of temporal and spatial referents? Specifically, I develop a “prismatic” approach to analyze the impact of fifteenth-century Iberian blood purity statutes on the development of race without positing these as the new, singular origin of race. This article thus suggests an alternative genealogy of racialization while providing a critical engagement with the coloniality of power’s account of race.

As one of the most powerful executive actions, rulemaking by U.S. federal agencies involves all three branches and governs many issue areas, but some rules are routine and others are highly consequential. We build a new rule universe composed of nearly forty-thousand considered rules listed in the Unified Agenda since Spring 1995 and employ an item response model with 15 raters to generate integrated estimates of rule significance for each of the rules. To showcase the usefulness of this new measure, we propose and test competing models on agency productivity, finding that the president and Congress influence rule promulgation in a nuanced way. The president is dominant when agencies consider moderately noteworthy rules, and Congress has more influence over the most significant regulations, suggesting that the branches’ influences vary with the consequential nature of the issues considered.

Although the effects of non-state actor violence on public health outcomes are well known, the effects of public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic on non-state actor violence are not. Lockdown measures, widely used to stop the spread of disease in crises, we argue, are likely to reduce non-state actor violence, especially in urban and non-base areas. These measures deplete actors’ resources, reduce the number of high-value civilian targets, and make it logistically more difficult to conduct attacks. Using the example of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and taking advantage of the exogenous nature of COVID-19 lockdowns, we find that curfews and travel bans significantly reduce violence, especially in populated and non-base areas. These effects are most likely due to short-term changes in ISIS’s targets and logistics rather than its resources. These findings provide important insights into the security aspects of public health crises and offer novel findings into the general effectiveness of two common counterinsurgency tools.

Recruiting a large number of ground workers is crucial for running effective modern election campaigns. It is unclear if party leaders can influence the quality and quantity of the unpaid rank-and-file workforce as they can with prized nominations for candidates. We analyze a field experiment conducted by an Indian party that randomized recruitment messages reaching 1% of a 13-million-person electorate to join its rank and file. Contrary to concerns that parties can only attract a few poor-quality volunteers, we show that elite efforts can shape the rank and file. In fact, specific strategies can increase the size, enhance the gender and ethnic diversity, and broaden the education and political skills of recruits. Strategies that signal gender inclusiveness have a lasting impact on some dimensions up to 3 years later. Taken together, this article provides the first causal evidence that rank-and-file recruitment is an opportunity for elites to influence long-term party development.

A growing literature links experiences of armed conflict with postwar political behavior. This paper examines how legacies of wartime violence shape dynamics of protest in twenty-first-century Iraq. We argue that experiences of shared violence against civilians generate strong social and organizational ties, as individuals turn to neighbors, friends, and communal organizations or social groups to help them cope. These strengthened social networks endure beyond the end of the conflict, forming important vehicles that can facilitate the organization of protest when new grievances or opportunities arise. Further, we posit that these effects will be strongest when the perpetrator of wartime violence is a clear out-group—e.g., a foreign army or non-coethnic militia—which facilitates network strengthening by creating a sense of collective victimization and in-group solidarity. We support these arguments using an original database of Iraqi protests from 2010 to 2012 and data on civilian casualties during Iraq’s 2004–2009 conflict. We further test our argument with geo-referenced Arab Barometer surveys. We leverage a case study of Fallujah, based on original interviews and other qualitative data, to unpack mechanisms of network strengthening, endurance, and reactivation during the Iraqi protest wave of 2011.

As part of their state legislative research project, Professors Wahlke, Eulau, Buchanan, and Ferguson subjected Edmund Burke's classical phrasing of the dilemma of representation to an empirical examination. Burke postulated the style of representation in terms of either-or: the legislator is either a mere spokesman for his constituents or he represents them as he believes best. The 4-state survey findings did not bear Burke out; rather, they disclosed a trichotomy, three major representational role types, with a classification of “Politico” appearing along with “Delegate” and “Trustee.” The Politico expresses an overlap of both orientations, so that representative types can be conceived of along a continuum, rather than constituting two polar positions, with the Politico placed toward the mid-point. In numerical frequency, as well, the Politico type was also found to fall between the other two. Left to be determined is the universality of the 4-state formulation of representational roles.

Over the last decade I have periodically observed the evolution of legislatures functioning in the American-administered regions of the Pacific. Here are to be found a number of under-developed societies, or to employ a more informative description, distinctive cultures in transitional status adapting introduced political forms to customary political practices. These traditional practices are fundamentally premised upon the resolving of differences through the reaching of consensus for taking political action.

Observations on Soviet Government. Over a year and a half has passed since soviet government was declared in Russia. That is not a long period of time in the history of a great revolutionary movement. Developments which loom large during these years and which impress even thoughtful men and women may prove to be of little consequence in the final determination of things, while the still small voices which are often unheard and usually unheeded by contemporaries swell into the chorus of decisive opinion which settles the course of affairs. It is a matter for trepidation, therefore, when one ventures to search mid the political and institutional debris for the foundation stones upon which a new democracy is to rest, or to attempt to appraise the undried, rough-hewn timbers hastily thrown into the erection of a temporary political superstructure. Only the hope that the tentative observations of one who was there may assist others to interpret this titanic movement justifies the present note.