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.

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.

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.

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.

Valid inference in an observational study requires a correct control specification, but a correct specification is never known. I introduce a method that constructs a control vector from the observed data that, when included in a linear regression, adjusts for several forms of bias. These include nonlinearities and interactions in the background covariates, biases induced by heterogeneous treatment effects, and specific forms of interference. The first is new to political science; the latter two are original contributions. I incorporate random effects, a set of diagnostics, and robust standard errors. With additional assumptions, the estimates allow for causal inference on both binary and continuous treatment variables. In total, the model provides a flexible means to adjust for biases commonly encountered in our data, makes minimal assumptions, returns efficient estimates, and can be implemented through publicly available software.

The insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, was the most dramatic contemporary manifestation of deep political polarization in the United States. Recent research shows that violent protests shape political behavior and attachments, but several questions remain unanswered. Using day-level panel data from a large sample of US social media users to track changes in the identities expressed in their Twitter biographies, we show that the Capitol insurrection caused a large-scale decrease in outward expressions of identification with the Republican Party and Donald Trump, with no indication of reidentification in the weeks that followed. This finding suggests that there are limits to party loyalty: a violent attack on democratic institutions sets boundaries on partisanship, even among avowed partisans. Furthermore, the finding that political violence can deflect copartisans carries the potential positive democratic implication that those who encourage or associate themselves with such violence pay a political cost.

Despite broad public support, investment in US infrastructure has not kept pace with growth, population shifts, and rising exposure to climate change risks. One explanation lies in politicians’ electoral incentives: because, in the short term, voters see only the costs of investment and not its benefits, politicians have incentive to pander and spend less than what they or their fully informed constituents would prefer. Local newspapers could help reduce this constraint by increasing politicians’ confidence that voters will receive information that justifies higher spending. In a survey experiment, we found that informing US city and county elected officials about news coverage of infrastructure failures increased support for a costly investment for those in competitive electoral settings. When motivated by reelection, politicians need the benefits of investment to be visible in order to justify its costs. Our results demonstrate the political importance of the nonpolitical news covered in local newspapers.

This letter explores the prevalence of misperceptions about refugee policy and tests whether correcting these misperceptions changes attitudes toward refugees. Large numbers of people hold misperceptions about both the nature and effects of refugee policy. An experiment directly compares the effects of correcting misperceptions about existing refugee policy (e.g., the refugee admission process) with correcting misperceptions about the outcomes of refugee policy (e.g., the proportion of refugees in the United States and the percentage who receive welfare benefits). Corrective information about existing policy substantially increases support for refugees, but corrective information about policy outcomes has no effect on attitudes. The results suggest that including descriptive information about existing U.S. policy in media coverage of refugees could both correct misperceptions and change attitudes.

Political parties sometimes adopt unpopular positions that condemn them to electoral defeat. This phenomenon is usually ascribed to expressive motives—namely, parties’ desire to maintain their ideological purity. Could ideological parties instead have strategic incentives to lose? To answer this question, I present a model of repeated spatial elections in which voters face uncertainty about their preferred policy and learn via experience. The amount of voter learning, I show, depends on the location of the implemented policy: a more radical policy generates more information. For a party whose ideological stance is unpopular with the electorate, this creates a trade-off between winning the upcoming election so as to secure policy influence and changing voters’ preferences so as to win with a better platform in the future. Under some conditions the party gambles on the future. It chooses to lose today to possibly change voters’ views and win big tomorrow.

The European renewable energy transition is a leading model for responding to the urgent threat of climate change, which it does by empowering citizens. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of German neoliberalism, this article argues that despite some measure of empowerment, the economic constraints structuring the transition ultimately disempower citizens, undermining the attainment of environmental goals. Specifically, the transition gives citizens control of their energy while burdening them with entrepreneurial tasks to do so, substitutes economic activity for political citizenship, and shifts the epistemological terrain they take for granted when determining what environmental crises society faces and how best to respond. Understanding the transition as composed of theories for sustainability governance, policies, and practices of implementation, this article analyzes the “energetic society” governance theory, the Clean Energy for all Europeans Package, and the renewable energy organization REScoop.eu.

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.

An unprecedented number of major U.S. companies announced changes to their campaign contributions following the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. We analyze the role of corporate stakeholders in these announcements as well as their implications for democratic institutions and business–government relations. Mirroring polarized public reactions to the Capitol insurrection, companies with more Democratic-leaning stakeholders (e.g., employees, consumers, shareholders) were more likely to publicly refuse contributing to Republican legislators who objected to the electoral college results. Moreover, these pledges held up in available campaign finance records through the third quarter of 2021, implying significant losses in corporate political action committee contributions for said Republican legislators. Given increasing polarization and heightened expectations of the civic responsibility of businesses, the partisanship of corporate stakeholders may prove important in mobilizing businesses to protect democratic institutions. However, such stakeholder pressure may also weaken businesses’ bipartisan legislative coalitions and compel corporate influence-seeking activities to go dark.

Existing research finds that leaders develop international reputations based on their past behavior on the international stage. We argue that leaders’ domestic choices can also influence their international reputations, perhaps as much as their past foreign policy decisions do. Using formal theory and intuitive argumentation, we develop an overarching framework to predict how much any domestic choice will affect a leader’s international reputation. We theorize that certain domestic choices can inform expectations about future international crisis behavior based on the extent to which (1) the costs at stake are similar to those of an international crisis and (2) the domestic issue is salient relative to foreign policy. We use conjoint experiments and other evidence to show that many domestic choices have significant international reputational effects. There is some evidence that the reputational effect of certain domestic choices may equal that of fighting in a previous international crisis.

The claim that workers are subject to structural domination in the labor market is a central contention of the recent radical turn in republican political theory, but it remains undertheorized. Two core components—the claim that workers have “no reasonable alternative” to selling their labor to capitalists and the relevance of exposure to potential interference in such cases—remain unclear. Without a more precise specification of the conditions of structural domination, it is difficult to assess how well republican prescriptions minimize it. I develop a revised defense of the central claim through an analysis of these components. I clarify what it is to have reasonable alternatives in the labor market but show that holding such options is insufficient to avoid structural domination. I argue that the dependence at the heart of structural domination can be constituted multifariously and develop an additional criterion directed at capturing such dependence in production.