Angry protests against racial discrimination were a prominent part of American public life during the 1960's. The decade opened with the sit-ins and freedom rides, continued through Birmingham, Selma, and the March on Washington, and closed with protests in hundreds of American cities, often punctuated by rioting and violence. During this troubled decade the rhetoric of protest became increasingly demanding, blanket charges of pervasive white racism and hostility were more common, and some blacks began to actively discourage whites from participating either in protest demonstrations or civil rights organizations. Nothing better symbolized the changing mood and style of black protest in America than recent changes in the movement's dominant symbols. Demonstrators who once shouted “freedom” as their rallying cry now were shouting “black power”—a much more provocative, challenging slogan.

The larger and more diverse a political movement's constituency, the more vague and imprecise its unifying symbols and rallying cries are likely to be. A slogan like black power has no sharply defined meaning; it may excite many different emotions and may motivate individuals to express their loyalty or take action for almost contradictory reasons. As soon as Adam Clayton Powell and Stokely Carmichael began to use the phrase in 1966 it set off an acrimonious debate among black leaders over its true meaning. Initially it was a blunt and threatening battle cry meant to symbolize a break with the past tactics of the civil rights movement.

Governments, militaries, and aid organizations all rely on economic interventions to shape civilian attitudes toward combatants during wartime. We have, however, little individual-level evidence that these “hearts and minds” programs actually influence combatant support. We address this problem by conducting a factorial randomized control trial of two common interventions—vocational training and cash transfers—on combatant support among 2,597 at-risk youth in Kandahar, Afghanistan. We find that training only improved economic livelihoods modestly and had little effect on combatant support. Cash failed to lift incomes, producing a boom-and-bust dynamic in which pro-government sentiment initially spiked and then quickly reversed itself, leaving a residue of increased Taliban support. Conditional on training, cash failed to improve beneficiaries’ livelihoods but did increase support for the Afghan government for at least eight months after the intervention. These findings suggest that aid affects attitudes by providing information about government resolve and competence rather than by improving economic livelihoods.

Are men and women legislators equally loyal to their parties? We theorize that parties select candidates based on gendered criteria, leading to the (s)election of more disciplined women. Moreover, we argue that gendered expectations about proper behavior limit women legislators’ ability to act independently from their parties. Using surveys from over 800 parliamentarians across 17 African legislatures, we find that women report significantly higher levels of party discipline than do their men copartisans. From this survey data and new legislative speech data, we also find support for our proposed causal mechanisms. Further, we find that among women parliamentarians, party discipline is negatively correlated with the prioritization of womens rights. A qualitative case study of the Namibian Parliament illustrates our findings. We discuss the implications of our results for women’s legislative effectiveness, for the substantive representation of women’s interests in policy making, and for the continued democratization of emerging party systems.

This paper examines certain major demographic bases of ethnic identity change among the mass populations of the non-Russian nationalities of the USSR. Ethnic identity is defined here as an individual's affective attachment to certain core symbols of his nationality group: the group name and its historic language. The hypotheses tested concern the impact of social mobilization, contact with Russians, and traditional religion on ethnic identity change. The levels of Russification of 46 indigenous nationalities whose official national homelands have Autonomous Oblast status or higher are examined on the basis of 1959 Soviet census materials. By use of regression analysis it is shown that: (a) social mobilization is strongly conducive to the Russification of non-Russian nationalities residing in their official areas; (b) exposure to Russians is conducive to the Russification of both mobilized and unmobilized local populations, but the Russification effect of exposure to Russians is much smaller for the unmobilized than for the mobilized populations; (c) even where exposure to Russians is extensive and enduring, both socially mobilized and unmobilized Muslim ethnic groups are much less likely to be Russified than non-Muslims; it is proposed that a Muslim ethnic ideology mediates between the dynamic demographic influences on Russification and the actual manifestation of Russification.

This article has two purposes. The first is to show how some of the central principles of classical Greek political theory became anachronistic as a result of massive transformations in the underlying structure of European society. These principles, it is argued, were originally dependent on an empirical premise that the polity is a “whole” encompassing individual “parts,” or (stated differently) that the polity is identical with total society. This whole/part schematization of the polity seemed plausible in the ancient city since most sectors of polis life had political connotations or overtones. The same schema, however, became an archaism in modern Europe, chiefly because of the emphatic emergence of a distinction between state and society–one aspect of a more general increase in the structural differentiation of society. The second and closely related purpose is to explore the feasibility of a claim once advanced by Benjamin Constant: that the organizational transformations involved in the modernization of European society have created a novel rhetorical opportunity, the possibility of defending tyranny in the name of freedom and democracy.

Scholarship on separation of powers assumes executives are constrained by legislative approval when placing agents in top policy-making positions. But presidents frequently fill vacancies in agency leadership with unconfirmed, temporary officials or leave them empty entirely. I develop a novel dataset of vacancies across 15 executive departments from 1977 to 2016 and reevaluate the conventional perspective that appointment power operates only through formal channels. I argue that presidents’ nomination strategies include leaving positions empty and making interim appointments, and this choice reflects presidents’ priorities and the character of vacant positions. The evidence indicates that interim appointees are more likely when positions have a substantial capacity to act on presidential expansion priorities and suggest that presidents can capitalize on their first-mover advantage to evade Senate confirmation. The results further suggest that separation of powers models may need to consider how deliberate inaction and sidestepping of formal powers influence political control and policy-making strategies.

Although candidates are very concerned about garnering prenomination group endorsements, there is virtually no research on the effects of such endorsements at the presidential level. In 1984, teachers', women's, and labor groups all endorsed Mondale for the Democratic nomination. Using a survey of Democratic caucus participants, we examine the effects of these endorsements on both candidate support and prenomination activity for the endorsed candidate. We find substantial effects of labor and teachers' group endorsements on the candidate choice of their members, but virtually no effect of women's groups. Labor union membership also had the greatest impact on campaign activity for Mondale.

Leo Strauss's epic rendition of the history of Western political philosophy has been a principal factor in the establishment and perpetuation of the myth of the tradition or the belief that the conventional series of classic works from Plato to Nietzsche represents the development of modern political ideas and constitutes the core of an inherited pattern of thought which, in turn, provides the basic context for interpreting particular texts. Much of the scholarly commentary on the history of political philosophy has been directed toward a critique of contemporary political thought and action, and the idea of the tradition has served as a vehicle for this historical etiology. In Strauss's argument, the concept of the tradition plays a strategic rhetorical function, but the myth of the tradition in its various forms has become a pervasive regulative assumption in both teaching and research.

The 2000 U.S. census was the first in which respondents were permitted to self-identify with more than one race. A decade later, multiple-race identifiers have become one of the fastest-growing groups in the nation. Such broadening multiracial identification poses important political ramifications and raises questions about the future of minority group political solidarity. Yet we know little about the opinions of multiple-race identifiers and from where those opinions emerge. Bridging literatures in racial politics and political socialization, and drawing upon a multimethod approach, this article provides insight into the consequences of the U.S.’s increasingly blurred racial boundaries by examining the attitudes of Americans of White-Black parentage, a population whose identification was traditionally constrained by the one-drop rule. Findings show that on racial issues such as discrimination and affirmative action, biracials who identify as both White and Black generally hold views akin to Blacks. But on nonracial political issues including abortion and gender/marriage equality, biracials who identify as White-Black or as Black express more liberal views than their peers of monoracial parentage. Being biracial and labeling oneself a racial minority is thus associated with a more progressive outlook on matters that affect socially marginalized groups. Two explanations are examined for these findings: the transmission of political outlook from parents to children, and biracials’ experiences straddling a long-standing racial divide.

Social norms are thought to motivate behaviors like political participation, but context should influence both the content and activation of these norms. I show that both race and neighborhood context moderate the social value of political participation in the United States. Using original survey data and a survey experiment, I find that Whites, Blacks, and Latinos not only conceptualize participation differently, but also asymmetrically reward those who are politically active, with minority Americans often providing more social incentives for participation than Whites. I combine this survey data with geographic demography from the American Community Survey and find that neighborhood characteristics outpace individual-level indicators in predicting the social value of political participation. The findings suggest that scholars of political behavior should consider race, place, and social norms when seeking to understand participation in an increasingly diverse America.

The external validity of causal findings is a focus of long-standing debates in the social sciences. Although the issue has been extensively studied at the conceptual level, in practice few empirical studies include an explicit analysis that is directed toward externally valid inferences. In this article, we make three contributions to improve empirical approaches for external validity. First, we propose a formal framework that encompasses four dimensions of external validity: $ X $-, $ T $-, $ Y $-, and C-validity (populations, treatments, outcomes, and contexts). The proposed framework synthesizes diverse external validity concerns. We then distinguish two goals of generalization. To conduct effect-generalization—generalizing the magnitude of causal effects—we introduce three estimators of the target population causal effects. For sign-generalization—generalizing the direction of causal effects—we propose a novel multiple-testing procedure under weaker assumptions. We illustrate our methods through field, survey, and lab experiments as well as observational studies.

Online intermediaries such as social network sites or search engines are playing an increasingly central role in democracy by acting as mediators between information producers and citizens. Academic and public commentators have raised persistent concerns that algorithmic recommender systems would negatively affect the provision of political information by tailoring content to the predispositions and entertainment preferences of users. At the same time, recent research indicates that intermediaries foster exposure to news that people would not use as part of their regular media diets. This study investigates these unresolved questions by combining the web browsing histories and survey responses of more than 7,000 participants from six major democracies. The analysis shows that despite generally low levels of news use, using online intermediaries fosters exposure to nonpolitical and political news across countries and personal characteristics. The findings have implications for scholarly and public debates on the challenges that high-choice digital media environments pose to democracy

Although manifestations of pain and loss phenomena are treated in various parts of the discipline, the focus is seldom on pain and loss as a distinctive form of political experience or as one that offers a broad canvas on which the workings of the political process can be depicted. By contrast, this article makes four arguments: (1) pain and loss experiences cut to the core of everyday lives and frequently infuse them with politics; (2) responses to pain and loss events occupy a prominent place in the domains of public opinion and issue activism; (3) these events and responses have some unique properties; and (4) major research questions can be organized around the study of pain and loss phenomena.

The conventional wisdom about presidential campaigning in midterm Senate elections is that presidential efforts lack impact or have negative impact. We discuss conceptual problems with the conventional view and offer an alternative that views presidential campaigning as strategic. We test this alternative and find support for it. Further, we find that presidential campaign efforts have a positive impact on the vote through the mobilization of nonvoters. Finally, in a significant number of cases, presidential campaigning may have been the margin of victory for candidates of the president's party. We discuss the implications of these findings on assessments of the president and relations with Congress during the second half of the term.

While the UNHCR promotes voluntary repatriation as the preferred solution to refugee situations, there is little understanding of variation in refugees’ preferences regarding return. We develop a theoretical framework suggesting two mechanisms influencing refugees’ preferences. First, refugees’ lived experiences in their country of origin prior to displacement and in their new host country create a trade-off in feelings of being anchored to their origin or host country. Second, firsthand exposure to traumas of war provides some refugees with a sense of competency and self-efficacy, leading them to prefer to return home. We test these relationships with data from a survey among Syrian refugees hosted in Lebanon. We find refugees exposed to violence during the war have a sense of attachment to Syria and are most likely to prefer return. Refugees who have developed a detachment from Syria or an attachment to Lebanon are less likely to prefer return.

Judicial power is central to democratic consolidation and the rule of law. Public support is critical for establishing and protecting it. Conventional wisdom holds that this support is rooted in apolitical factors and not dependent on who is in political power. By contrast, we argue that support may be driven by instrumental partisan motivations and therefore linked to partisan alignment with the executive. We test the argument with survey evidence from 34 African countries. To provide causal evidence, we conduct difference-in-differences analyses leveraging Ghana’s three presidential transitions since 2000. Across Africa, support for judicial power is high, while trust in courts is lower. However, presidential co-partisans are less supportive of horizontal judicial power over the president and more supportive of vertical power over the people. The article demonstrates the importance of partisan alignment with the executive in shaping support for judicial power, with implications for judicial behavior and legitimacy.

The vote is widely considered the southern Negro's most important weapon in his struggle for full citizenship and social and economic equality. It is argued that “political rights pave the way to all others.” Once Negroes in the South vote in substantial numbers, white politicians will prove responsive to the desires of the Negro community. Also, federal action on voting will be met with less resistance from the white South—and southerners in Congress—than action involving schools, jobs, or housing.

Such, at least, seems to have been the reasoning behind the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, both of which deal primarily with the right to vote. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and his predecessor, Herbert Brownell, are both reported to believe that the vote provides the southern Negro with his most effective means of advancing toward equality, and recent actions of the Justice Department seem to reflect this view. Many Negro leaders share this belief in the over-riding importance of the vote. Hundreds of Negro registration drives have been held in southern cities and counties since 1957. Martin Luther King, usually considered an advocate of non-violent direct action, recently remarked that the most significant step Negroes can take is in the “direction of the voting booths.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, historically identified with courtroom attacks on segregation, is now enthusiastically committed to a “battle of the ballots.” In March, 1962, the Southern Regional Council announced receipt of foundation grants of $325,000 to initiate a major program to increase Negro voter registration in the South. The Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee are among the organizations now participating in the actual registration drives.

Prior scholarly analysis of Israeli military spending has focused on national security questions. We present a mathematical model incorporating security threats as well as electoral cycles and corporate profits. The parameters are estimated empirically. The results support the idea that in Israel the military budget at the margins is also employed as a political-economic instrument to help manage the economy and to provide a favorable election climate for incumbents. It is suggested that the politicaleconomic dynamic widely attributed to Western industrialized societies may be of increasing importance in other societies throughout the world.

Do foreign occupiers face less resistance when they increase the level of native governing authority? Although this is a central question within the literature on foreign occupation and insurgency, it is difficult to answer because the relationship between resistance and political devolution is typically endogenous. To address this issue, we identify a natural experiment based on the locally arbitrary assignment of French municipalities into German or Vichy-governed zones during World War II. Using a regression discontinuity design, we conclude that devolving governing authority significantly lowered levels of resistance. We argue that this effect is driven by a process of political cooptation: domestic groups that were granted governing authority were less likely to engage in resistance activity, while violent resistance was heightened in regions dominated by groups excluded from the governing regime. This finding stands in contrast to work that primarily emphasizes structural factors or nationalist motivations for resistance.

I employ a simple game to suggest the effects of information and expectations on bargaining strategies and responses. I make use of members' predispositions in order to identify actors likely to be bargaining. Using administration headcounts, I show that while very few members misrepresent their preferences during the coalition-building process, those who do represent a large proportion of the administration's core supporters, make their misrepresentations unsystematic to avoid a costly reputation, and convert more readily than those who are not. Strategic considerations drive conversion among bluffing members, while identification with the administration determines conversion among other members. Compromise generates few conversions. A conservative estimate of bluffing suggests that the conversion of bluffers decided more than half the administration's critical votes. I speculate about a model to account for the observed bluffing.