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

Sometimes, people engaged in politics actively refuse to speak for anyone but themselves. These unrepresentative claims multiply in social movements in times of crisis. During the French Yellow Vest movement of 2018–2019, such unrepresentative claims were routinely made by Yellow Vest leaders, to the point of being a condition for having a leadership position in the movement. By making these unrepresentative claims, they declined any representative mandate, asserting their freedom from any instituted influence. However, by claiming to speak only for themselves, they also selected the aspects of their identity they performed. This allowed them to embody the people sharing this identity, recalling the medieval repraesentatio identitatis, but in a way adjusted to today’s greater personalization of politics. Drawing on this movement and on other examples of unrepresentative claims, we can delineate three broad ideal-types of identities that may be put forward by unrepresentative claims: generality, particularity, and individuality.

Research on the welfare state has devoted considerable attention to social policy expansion. However, little is known about why governments expand social policies serving groups with limited power on issues with low visibility. I call these “benevolent policies.” This class of social policies improves population well-being but produces minimal political gains for the governments enacting them. Why do governments expand benevolent policies if political incentives for reform are weak? I investigate this question by focusing on government responses to malnutrition. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including 71 interviews, I argue that the origins of policy expansion can be found in the government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats with technical expertise—technocrats—can play a defining role, deploying international pressure to court executive support and orchestrate policy change. Their actions help explain the Indonesian government’s unexpected expansion of nutrition policies, which serve low-income women and children and address micronutrient malnutrition.

When are inequalities in political power undemocratic, and why? While some writers condemn any inequalities in political power as a deviation from the ideal of democracy, this view is vulnerable to the simple objection that representative democracies concentrate political power in the hands of elected officials rather than distributing it equally among citizens, but they are no less democratic for it. Building on recent literature that interprets democracy as part of a broader vision of social equality, I argue that concentrations of political power are incompatible with democracy, and with a commitment to social equality more generally, when they consist in some having greater arbitrary power to influence decisions according to their idiosyncratic preferences. A novel account of the relationship between power and social status clarifies the role of social equality in the justification of democracy, including a representative democracy in which public officials have more political power than ordinary citizens.

Since the 1960s, “the stakeholder,” or affected party, has emerged as a novel democratic subject whose participation in varied institutional sites—from universities to government agencies, corporate boardrooms to international organizations—is seen as necessary for the management of complex problems. However, few specifically attend to the stakeholder as a distinct political subject and consider its implications for democratic practice. This paper presents a genealogy of the stakeholder, documenting its appearance in corporate managerialism and US public administration and showing how racial mobilization, rapid technological progress, and the political rationality of systems thinking provided the conditions of possibility for its emergence. Though orienting democracy around stakeholders permits opportunities for participation in political life, I argue that this subject is predicated on a circumscribed form of participatory politics that erodes habits of discovering a common good, erases distinctions between individuals and corporate bodies, and amplifies the problem of expertise.

A classic question about democratic elections is how much they are able to influence politician behavior by forcing them to anticipate future reelection attempts, especially in contexts where voters are not paying close attention and are not well informed. We compile a new dataset containing roughly 780,000 bills, combined with more than 16 million roll-call voting records for roughly 6,000 legislators serving in U.S. state legislatures with term limits. Using an individual-level difference-in-differences design, we find that legislators who can no longer seek reelection sponsor fewer bills, are less productive on committees, and are absent for more floor votes, on average. Building a new dataset of roll-call votes and interest-group ratings, we find little evidence that legislators who cannot run for reelection systematically shift their ideological platforms. In sum, elections appear to influence how legislators allocate their effort in important ways even in low-salience environments but may have less influence on ideological positioning.

How does the recognition of collective self-governance rights for indigenous communities affect national unity and state consolidation? In recent decades, many states have recognized such rights, devolving de jure control over land and local governance to indigenous institutions. Prominent perspectives in the state-building literature suggest that these policies are likely to threaten state consolidation by strengthening nonstate authorities at the expense of state authority and subnational identities at the expense of a national identity. Yet few studies have tested whether these policies have the consequences their critics claim. I address this gap, leveraging spatial and temporal variation in the granting of communal land titles to indigenous communities in the Philippines. Using difference-in-differences and panel designs, I find that titling increases both indigenous self-identification and compliance with the state. Results from an original survey experiment suggest that recognizing collective self-governance rights increases identification with the nation.

This article develops and tests a new theoretical framework, gendered political socialization, which offers important insights into how children perceive gender in politics and the consequences of these perceptions on sex differences in political interest and ambition. Based on data from 1,604 children who live in four different regions across the United States, we find that children not only perceive politics to be a male-dominated space, but with age, girls increasingly see political leadership as a “man’s world.” Simultaneously, as children grow older, they internalize gendered expectations, which direct their interests toward professions that embody the gendered traits that fit with their own sex. One result of this mismatch between women and politics is that girls express lower levels of interest and ambition in politics than do boys.

Contemporary political behavior is often affected by historical legacies, but the specific mechanisms through which these legacies are transmitted are difficult to pin down. This paper argues that historical political conflicts can affect political behavior over several generations when they trigger an enduring organizational mobilization. It studies how the oppression of German Catholics in the nineteenth century led to a regionally differentiated mobilization of political Catholicism that still affects political support for the radical right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) today. Using newly collected data on historical oppression events, it shows that Catholic regions where oppression was intense saw greater mobilization of Catholic lay organizations than Catholic regions where oppression was milder and show lower support for the AfD today. The paper thus contributes to the literature on the historical determinants of political behavior as well as to the question of which regional context effects strengthen or weaken the radical right.

Does physical surveillance hinder or foster antiregime resistance? A common view holds that surveillance prevents resistance by providing regimes with high-quality intelligence on dissident networks and by instilling fear in citizens. We contrast this view using formerly classified data from Communist Poland. We find that communities exposed to secret police officers were more likely to organize protests but also engaged in less sabotage. To ensure that the relationship is causal, we use an instrumental variable strategy, which exploits the exogenous assignment of Catholic “spy priests” to local communities. To trace the underlying mechanisms, we draw on qualitative interviews and archival sources. We document that Poland’s comprehensive use of surveillance created widespread anger as well as an incentive for citizens to reveal their true loyalties, thus facilitating antiregime collective action. Once on the streets, protesters refrained from sabotage to signal their political motivation to bystanders and authorities alike.

A growing literature finds that nonviolence is more successful than violence in effecting political change. We suggest that a focus on this association is incomplete, because it obscures the crucial influence of ethnic identity on campaign outcomes. We argue that because of prevalent negative stereotypes associating minority ethnic groups with violence, such groups are perceived as more violent even when resisting nonviolently, increasing support for their repression and ultimately hampering campaign success. We show that, cross-nationally, the effect of nonviolence on outcomes is significantly moderated by ethnicity, with nonviolence increasing success only for dominant groups. We then test our argument using two experiments in the United States and Israel. Study 1 finds that nonviolent resistance by ethnic minorities is perceived as more violent and requiring more policing than identical resistance by majorities. Study 2 replicates and extends the results, leveraging the wave of racial justice protests across the US in June 2020 to find that white participants are perceived as less violent than Black participants when protesting for the same goals. These findings highlight the importance of ethnic identity in shaping campaign perceptions and outcomes, underscoring the obstacles that widespread biases pose to nonviolent mobilization.

What does the superhero—an icon of the American imaginary—communicate about the politics of violence? Responding to nationwide protests of police brutality in 2020, law enforcement officers adopted the skull logo of The Punisher, an exceptionally violent fictional vigilante. That adoption signals what I call the privilege of violence: the force individuals may deploy based on normative expectations concerning gender and race. Comparing Marvel-Netflix productions including The Punisher series, I identify three modes of violence in operation: the unrestricted rage of a white male vigilante, the vulnerability of a feminist heroine, and the sacrificial control of a Black male hero. The article demonstrates the gendered and racialized conditions under which heroic violence is rendered legitimate to American audiences. As I conclude, Punisher’s unrestricted violence valorizes white male grievance, and this is precisely what appeals to armed agents of the American state.

This article examines the interplay between gendered electoral financing (GEF) and other crucial factors in democratic elections worldwide to determine whether, how, and why these understudied mechanisms help achieve gender balance in national parliaments. Integrating qualitative comparative analysis and minimalist causal mechanism case studies, the sequential mixed methods study of GEF implementation in 31 elections in 17 countries shows that enhanced gender balance is achieved when GEF is combined with several conditions, providing a much-needed financial incentive—payments and penalties—for party gatekeepers and eligible women to change their behavior. In successful cases of top-down GEF implementation, gender quotas combine with a PR electoral system or a 15% minimum of women MPs, a measure developed for this study. Success in bottom-up GEF implementation is unexpected and complex and occurs without a quota. The article ends with a discussion of the research agenda, policy recommendations, and implications for the pursuit of democratic quality.

Recent literature on racial capitalism has overwhelmingly focused on the Atlantic settler-slave formation, sidelining the history of European imperialism in Asia. This article addresses this blind spot by recovering the aborted project of British settler colonialism in India through the writings of its most prominent advocate, John Crawfurd. It is argued that Crawfurd’s vision of a liberal empire in India rejected slavery and indigenous dispossession yet remained deeply racialized in its conception of capital, labor, and value. Crawfurd elaborated a “capital theory of race,” which derived racial categories from a civilizational spectrum keyed to the capitalist organization of production. His proposals accordingly revamped the conventional terms of colonization by representing India as overstocked with labor but vacant of capital and skill that only European settlers could provide. The article concludes with the broader implications of a transimperial analytic framework for writing connected histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

Does working in the public rather than the private sector have a causal effect on electoral participation? Extant evidence using cross-sectional survey data remains unpersuasive due to data limitations and concerns posed by preference-based job selection. We address these challenges using population-wide individual-level register data on voter turnout covering four Norwegian local and national elections between 2013 and 2019. We identify causal effects by tracking the same individuals over time during (a) shifts between private- and public-sector employment, (b) relocations between municipalities, and (c) shifts into retirement. We find that local public-sector employees display 1–3 percentage points higher voter turnout compared with private-sector employees. These effects arise particularly when working in their residential municipality, but they largely dissipate upon retirement.

Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties’ incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills’ scrutiny.

Scholars and policy makers debate whether elites and citizens hold different views of the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Until now, sparse data has limited our ability to establish such gaps and to formulate theories for explaining them. This article offers the first systematic comparative analysis of elite and citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of IOs. It examines legitimacy beliefs toward six key IOs, drawing on uniquely coordinated survey evidence from Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States. We find a notable elite–citizen gap for all six IOs, four of the five countries, and all of six different elite types. Developing an individual-level approach to legitimacy beliefs, we argue that this gap is driven by systematic differences between elites and citizens in characteristics that matter for attitudes toward IOs. Our findings suggest that deep-seated differences between elites and general publics may present major challenges for democratic and effective international cooperation.

What are the origins of the ethnic landscapes in contemporary states? Drawing on a preregistered research design, we test the influence of dual socioeconomic revolutions that spread throughout Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—export agriculture and print technologies. We argue these changes transformed ethnicity via their effects on politicization and boundary-making. Print technologies strengthened imagined communities, leading to more salient—yet porous—ethnic identities. Cash crop endowments increased groups’ mobilizational potential but with more exclusionary boundaries to control agricultural rents. Using historical data on cash crops and African language publications, we find that groups exposed to these historical forces are more likely to be politically relevant in the postindependence period, and their members report more salient ethnic identities. We observe heterogenous effects on boundary-making as measured by interethnic marriage; relative to cash crops, printing fostered greater openness to assimilate linguistically related outsiders. Our findings illuminate not only the historical sources of ethnic politicization but also mechanisms shaping boundary formation.

Research on personality and political preferences generally assumes unidirectional causal influence of the former on the latter. However, there are reasons to believe that citizens might adopt what they perceive as politically congruent psychological attributes, or at least be motivated to view themselves as having these attributes. We test this hypothesis in a series of studies. Results of preregistered panel analyses in three countries suggest reciprocal causal influences between self-reported personality traits and political preferences. In two two-wave survey experiments, a subtle political prime at the beginning of a survey resulted in self-reported personality traits that were more aligned with political preferences gauged in a previous assessment. We discuss how concurrent assessment within the context of a political survey might overestimate the causal influence of personality traits on political preferences and how political polarization might be exacerbated by political opponents adopting different personality characteristics or self-perceptions thereof.