There is no more analyzed image in the history of political thought than the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), yet the tiny figures making up the giant have largely escaped scholarly attention. So, too, have their hats. This article recovers what men’s failure to “doff and don” their hats in the frontispiece might have conveyed to readers about their relationship to the Sovereign and each other. Sometimes big ideas—about the nature of representation, for example, or how to “acknowledge” equality—are conveyed by small gestures. When situated textually and contextually, Hobbes’s hats shed important light on the micropolitics of everyday interaction for those who, like Hobbes himself, hope to securely constitute a society of equals.

Recent years have witnessed significant democratic erosion, particularly in eastern Europe. This article suggests that the explanations of democratic backsliding, largely focused on historical and post-communist experiences of the this region, fail to note the striking and counterintuitive influence of ethnic politics. Departing from an observation that democratic practices have deteriorated significantly more in eastern European countries without mobilized ethnic minorities, this article argues for the central role of ethnic politics in buttressing democracy in the region. In countries with politically organized ethnic minorities, democratic institutions and practices remain more resilient. This is because mobilized ethnic minorities provide socially rooted electorates with almost an existential need for political rights and civil liberties. Active minority engagement in politics reinforces a constitutionally liberal pole of political competition and provides a counterbalance to the primary carriers of democratic regression—illiberal parties.

Women have more protectionist trade preferences than men do. We assess whether this well-documented relationship between gender and protectionism in the mass public carries over into a relationship between women’s political representation and (a) party platforms, and (b) governments’ trade policy choices. Looking across countries and over time, we demonstrate that with an increase in women’s representation, political party trade policy positions become more protectionist. For government trade policy choices, we identify more nuanced results. The protectionist effect of women’s representation is limited to the most visible products: consumption goods. Women’s representation has no effect on intermediate inputs, where firm demands for trade liberalization are more pronounced and policy makers are thus constrained in implementing a protectionist agenda. These findings contribute to scholarship on the descriptive–substantive representation link, add a new dimension to our understanding of trade politics, and demonstrate the importance of applying a gendered lens to international political economy research.

Existing research largely ignores Black support for punitive policies that target group members, even as this support challenges expectations of in-group favoritism and group solidarity. The current research fills this gap by leveraging a familiar concept: “the politics of respectability.” Building on historical and qualitative accounts of this worldview, which focuses on the behavior of group members, I develop a social psychological framework to understand how identity-based concerns motivate Black support for punishment that targets members of their racial group. I also develop a novel measure of respectability–the Respectability Politics Scale. Findings demonstrate that adherents of respectability feel more ashamed about the public view of their racial group, endorse more negative racial stereotypes, and feel relatively less close to other Black people. They are also more likely to support a range of punitive policies that target group members, including restrictive dress code policies, tough-on-crime policies, and paternalistic welfare policies.

Social scientists commonly seek to make statements about how word use varies over circumstances—including time, partisan identity, or some other document-level covariate. For example, researchers might wish to know how Republicans and Democrats diverge in their understanding of the term “immigration.” Building on the success of pretrained language models, we introduce the à la carte on text (conText) embedding regression model for this purpose. This fast and simple method produces valid vector representations of how words are used—and thus what words “mean”—in different contexts. We show that it outperforms slower, more complicated alternatives and works well even with very few documents. The model also allows for hypothesis testing and statements about statistical significance. We demonstrate that it can be used for a broad range of important tasks, including understanding US polarization, historical legislative development, and sentiment detection. We provide open-source software for fitting the model.

This article explicates and critiques an understanding of markets that is dominant in much contemporary political theory. Drawing on the insights of new materialist economic sociology, it argues that the divide between “the political” and “the market” that grounds many recent analyses cannot ultimately be sustained. Conceptualizing markets not as abstract, impersonal mechanisms but as polyvalent assemblages, the paper develops a view of markets as material devices subject to a wide variety of political inflections and deployments. This understanding is then used to clarify some of the disputes between market-friendly neo-republican theorists and their critics. The article argues that markets are best conceptualized as political institutions (rather than as alternatives to politics). It commends an approach to political theorizing that moves beyond “pro-” and “antimarket” positions, focusing instead on the material details of market configurations and their consequences for agency and social power.

During violent conflict, governments may acknowledge their use of illegitimate violence (e.g., noncombatant casualties) even though such violence can depress civilian support. Why would they do so? We model the strategic incentives affecting government disclosures of illegitimate violence in the face of potential NGO investigations, where disclosures, investigations, and support are endogenous. We highlight implications for the analysis of conflict data generated from government and NGO reports and for the emergence of government transparency. Underreporting bias in government disclosures positively correlates with underreporting bias in NGO reports. Furthermore, governments exhibit greater underreporting bias relative to NGOs when NGOs face higher investigative costs. We also illustrate why it is difficult to estimate negative effects of illegitimate violence on support using government data: with large true effects, governments have incentives to conceal such violence, leading to strategic attenuation bias. Finally, there is a U-shaped relationship between NGO investigative costs and government payoffs.

How does exile affect online dissent? By internationalizing activists’ networks and removing them from day-to-day life under the regime, we argue that exile fundamentally alters activists’ political opportunities and strategic behavior. We test the effect of exile on activists’ public discourse in the case of Venezuela, through an analysis of over 5 million tweets by 357 activists spanning seven years. Our results suggest that after going into exile activists increasingly emphasize foreign-led interventions to shape their home country politics, focus less on local grievances, and become more harshly critical of the regime. This is partly due to the changes in exiles’ networks: after leaving, activists increase their interactions with foreign actors and tweet more in English. This work contributes to our understanding of the relationship between exile—one of the most ubiquitous yet understudied forms of repression—and dissent in the digital age.

What type of revolutions are most vulnerable to counterrevolutions? I argue that violent revolutions are less likely than nonviolent ones to be reversed because they produce regimes with strong and loyal armies that are able to defeat counterrevolutionary threats. I leverage an original dataset of counterrevolutions from 1900 to 2015, which allows us for the first time to document counterrevolutionary emergence and success worldwide. These data reveal that revolutions involving more violence are less at risk of counterrevolution and that this relationship exists primarily because violence lowers the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success—but not counterrevolutionary emergence. I demonstrate mechanisms by comparing Cuba’s nonviolent 1933 uprising (which succumbed to a counterrevolution) and its 1959 revolutionary insurgency (which defeated multiple counterrevolutions). Though nonviolence may be superior to violence when it comes to toppling autocrats, it is less effective in bringing about lasting change and guaranteeing that these autocrats never return.

What is the point of ideology critique? Prominent Anglo-American philosophers recently proposed novel arguments for the view that ideology critique is moral critique, and ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice or oppression. We criticize that view and make the case for an alternative and more empirically oriented approach, grounded in epistemic rather than moral commitments. We make two related claims: (a) ideology critique can debunk beliefs and practices by uncovering how, empirically, they are produced by self-justifying power and (b) the self-justification of power should be understood as an epistemic rather than moral flaw. Drawing on the recent realist revival in political theory, we argue that this genealogical approach has more radical potential, despite being more parsimonious than morality-based approaches. We demonstrate the relative advantages of our view by discussing the results of empirical studies on the contemporary phenomenon of neopatriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa.

The role of domestic public opinion is an important topic in research on international negotiations, yet we know little about how exactly it manifests itself. We focus on government rhetoric during negotiations and develop a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit manifestations of public opinion. Drawing on a database of video recordings of negotiations of the Council of the European Union and a quantitative text analysis of government speeches, we find that public opinion matters implicitly, with the exact pattern depending on governments’ stance toward the EU. Pro-EU governments are responsive to public opinion in their support for compromises and attempts to stall negotiations, whereas Euroskeptic governments tend to remain silent when confronted with a public positively disposed toward the EU. Our results show that although governments implicitly represent public opinion, they do not systematically invoke their voters explicitly, suggesting the public matters but in different ways than often assumed.

The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this burgeoning literature, few analyses directly investigate the causal effect of lower-level police contact on voter turnout. To do so, we leverage individual-level administrative ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida. We show that traffic stops materially decrease participation for Black and non-Black residents alike, and we also find temporal variation in the effect for Black voters. Although stops reduce turnout more for Black voters in the short term, they are less demobilizing over a longer time horizon. Although even low-level contacts with the police can reduce political participation across the board, our results point to a unique process of political socialization vis-à-vis the carceral state for Black Americans.

The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the US has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level. Using 51 indicators of electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018, I develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index. I then test theories of democratic expansion and backsliding based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of national party coalitions. Difference-in-differences results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period. This result calls into question theories focused on changes within states. The racial, geographic, and economic incentives of groups in national party coalitions may instead determine the health of democracy in the states.

Realism can mean many things in political theory. This article focuses on “common-sense realism,” an approach to decision making under uncertainty characterized by its posture toward risk. Common-sense realist arguments have become popular in recent democratic theory. One prominent example is found in debates over the responsible party institutional model (RPIM). RPIM’s main features are two-party competition for full control of government and party organizations that empower officeholders, not activists. Proponents of RPIM defend it in realist terms. They claim that efforts to pursue more ambitious democratic ideals jeopardize goods that RPIM can readily secure. In this article I articulate a realist approach to institutional evaluation that assesses proposals on three dimensions: robustness, feasibility, and stability. Using this approach, I demonstrate that the realist argument for RPIM is weaker than it initially appears. The debate over RPIM is not a debate between realism and idealism but between competing democratic ideals.

This research note argues that political theorists of refuge ought to consider the experiences of refugees after they have received asylum in the Global North. Currently, much of the literature concerning the duties of states toward refugees implicitly adopts a blanket approach, rather than considering how varied identities may affect the remedies available to displaced people. Given the prevalence of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in the Global North, and the growing norm of dissident persecution in foreign territory, protection is not guaranteed after either territorial or legal admission. This research note considers the case of LGBTQ refugees in order to demonstrate the analytical potential of more inclusive and diverse normative approaches. Taking the origin and extension of harm seriously requires a conceptualization of sanctuary after asylum that accurately reflects the experiences of the displaced. In doing so, questions arise regarding the nature and efficacy of territorial asylum.

I surveyed the universe of recent applicants to the Indonesian civil service to study the effects of high-stakes examinations on political attitudes. Leveraging applicants’ scores on the civil service examination, I employ a regression discontinuity design to compare the attitudes of applicants who narrowly failed with those who narrowly passed. I show that the simple fact of failure on the civil service examination decreased applicants’ belief in the legitimacy of the process and levels of national identification while increasing support for in-group preferentialism. Next, I find that applicants who were offered—and accepted—employment in the civil service reported higher satisfaction with the process, greater amity toward out-groups, and higher national identification. Because more applicants fail than pass, these results suggest that civil service examination outcomes may have unintended consequences for social cohesion—particularly in contexts where successful applicants disproportionately hail from specific ethnic, racial, or religious groups.

How does the central state affect public goods provision by local actors? I study the effect of state capacity on local governance in sub-Saharan Africa, which I argue depends on whether traditional authorities are integrated in the country’s constitution. I use distance to administrative headquarters as a measure of state capacity and estimate a regression discontinuity design around administrative boundaries. If traditional authorities are not integrated, then the state and traditional authorities compete with each other, working as substitutes. That is, a stronger state undermines the power of traditional authorities. If traditional authorities are integrated, then the two work as complements. A stronger state then increases the power of traditional authorities. I show that these relationships are crucial to understanding the influence of state capacity on local economic development.

When does collective memory influence behavior? We highlight two conditions under which the memory of past events comes to matter for the present: the associative nature of memory and institutionalized acts of commemoration by the state. During World War II, German troops occupying Greece perpetrated numerous massacres. Memories of those events resurfaced during the 2009 Greek debt crisis, leading to a drop in German car sales in Greece, especially in areas affected by German reprisals. Differential economic performance did not drive this divergence. Multiple pieces of evidence suggest that current events reactivated past memories, creating a backlash against Germany. This backlash also manifested in political behavior, with vote shares of anti-German parties increasing in reprisal areas after the start of the debt crisis. Using quasi-random variation in public recognition of victim status, we show that institutionalized collective memory amplifies the effects of political conflict on economic and political behavior.

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.