How does the representation of women in international organizations affect the implementation of gender mainstreaming policies? Many international organizations have adopted policies to prevent gender discrimination in their operations, but their implementation is often lackluster. We argue that these shortcomings appear due to a combination of institutional incentives and an underrepresentation of women in their staff. We test the argument in the case of the World Bank, drawing on highly disaggregated staffing data, an instrumental variable strategy, and an elite survey experiment. Our results show that most staff incorporate at least shallow gender mainstreaming in their projects. Deeper implementation of gender mainstreaming is more likely when women staff supervise projects, hold positions of authority, and are more represented as coworkers. These results contribute to understanding the disconnects between talk and action on mainstreaming policies and inform debates on representation in global governance.

Does foreign interference help or harm protest movements? An extensive literature has debated this question but focuses on observational data, obscuring a crucial mechanism for protest success: its effect on public attitudes. We argue that public accusations of foreign meddling damage protest groups by reducing public support. In survey experiments conducted in the United States and Canada, we find that credible accusations of foreign interference erode support by discrediting protester groups among sympathizers and inflaming nationalist fears. Indeed, such accusations delegitimize protest movements even among those sympathetic to the cause. Conditional factors, such as the type of foreign assistance or the identity of the meddling state, have no impact. These findings reveal how referencing foreign backing is a potent discrediting tactic—it influences public opinion, a critical determinant for protest outcomes.

Politicians’ ability to provide national security to the public is deeply enmeshed in conceptions of the state and of leadership. This article incorporates securitization, feminist, and political communication theories to consider whether gendered and militarized conceptions of national security have different effects for politicians who are women and those who are men. Although scholarship suggests that signaling military bona fides—such as invoking one’s veteran status—can help politicians claim that certain policies are a matter of national security, we consider whether this ability will be gendered. Relying on two national studies, we find results that are contrary to our original predictions. First, we find that military bona fides do help women be seen as leaders. However, we do not find evidence that bona fides increase the “authority” to identify and address national security threats for any politicians.

What normative compass can appropriately ground a theory for contemporary “non-Western” societies? This question has become urgent amid the pressure to decolonize political science and academia. The hybridity of numerous contemporary non-Western societies means that political theorists cannot refuse to engage with either Western-originated or premodern Indigenous concepts and ways of thinking that bear on the local public culture. However, these normative strands alone are unsuitable for grounding a contemporary theory. This methodological dilemma can be overcome if theorists adopt normative hybridity as a methodological stance. Normative hybridity suggests that hybridity is not only a feature of the theorist’s context of reference but should also be their modus operandi. Normative hybridity already underpins relevant works in contemporary Confucian political theory. Drawing from these works, I illustrate three methods to apply normative hybridity to theory building. This novel methodological approach uniquely addresses current political theory discussions and influences non-Western policymaking.

Rural areas are conservative electoral strongholds in the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. But this was not always the case. What explains the rise of rural conservatism? This paper argues that technological change transformed not only agriculture but rural political preferences during the twentieth century. It studies a natural experiment: the post-World War II introduction of new irrigation technologies, which enabled farmers to irrigate otherwise arid land in the Great Plains using groundwater. Difference-in-differences analyses exploiting the shock’s differential impact on counties overlying the Ogallala Aquifer—a pattern validated with remote-sensing data—show that technological change contributed significantly to the region’s long-term conservative electoral transformation. Additional analyses, including comparison of individual policy preferences inside/outside the Ogallala Aquifer boundary, suggest that this was due to the rise of capital-intensive agriculture and the growing power of agribusiness. The findings demonstrate how new technologies made new politics in rural America.

Work on the electoral effects of gun violence in the U.S. relying on difference-in-differences designs has produced findings ranging from null to substantively large effects. However, as difference-in-difference designs, on which this research relies, have exploded in popularity, scholars have documented several methodological issues including potential violations of parallel-trends and unaccounted for treatment effect heterogeneity. These pitfalls (and their solutions) have not been fully explored in political science. We apply these advancements to the unresolved debate on gun violence’s effects on U.S. electoral outcomes. We show that studies finding a large positive effect of gun violence on Democratic vote shares are a product of a failure to properly specify difference-in-differences models when underlying assumptions are unlikely to hold. Once these biases are corrected, shootings show little evidence of sparking large electoral change. Our work clarifies an unresolved debate and provides a cautionary guide for scholars currently employing difference-in-differences designs.

Classic political behavior studies assert that childhood socialization can contribute to later political orientations. But, as adults consider how to introduce children to politics, what shapes their decisions? We argue socialization is itself political with adults changing their socialization priorities in response to salient political events including social movements. Using Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and race socialization as a case, we show the summer 2020 information environment coupled movement-consistent concepts of race with child-rearing guidance. A survey of white parents after the summer activism suggests that many—but especially Democrats and those near peaceful protest epicenters—prioritized new forms of race socialization. Further, nearly 2 years after the protests’ height, priming BLM changes support for race-related curricular materials among white Americans. Our work casts political socialization in a new light, reviving an old literature, and has implications for when today’s children become tomorrow’s voters.

In electoral autocracies, why do some people actively support political parties while others choose to not get involved in politics? Further, what differentiates those who choose to support the ruling party from those who support the opposition? Existing research has proposed that people support ruling parties primarily to extract economic benefits from the state while people support opposition parties primarily for ideological reasons. However, we lack a unified theory of partisanship, leading to indeterminant predictions about the individual predictors of partisanship. This article instead considers the social nature of partisanship in authoritarian regimes. Qualitative data collected in Cameroon highlight different processes of political socialization in an autocratic context, and data from an original survey show not only that partisan homogeneity in social networks is highly predictive of individual-level partisanship but also, at least to some extent, that partisanship can be contagious through the process of socialization within these networks.

New evidence suggests that the world recently changed for the U.S. Supreme Court owing to its decision to abrogate the abortion rights first announced in Roe v. Wade. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Court support is little undermined by unpopular rulings, the Dobbs decision generated a substantial knock on the Court’s legitimacy. Two crucial frailties limit these findings, however. First, no one has determined whether the lost legitimacy has persisted, since earlier research relied on a one-shot survey conducted shortly after the decision. Second, no analysis has addressed the “values-based regeneration” hypothesis—that support reemerges not long after a legitimacy hit is inflicted. Based on a nationally representative 2023 survey, my analysis finds that the lost legitimacy has lingered, but institutional support may be being rebuilt owing to its close connection with democratic values. Overall, I conclude that understanding persistence is more complicated than many may have assumed.

This essay proposes a novel paradigm for a political theory of climate justice: wages for earthwork. Indigenous peoples have disproportionately contributed to the sustainable stewardship of the natural world through ecological systems of governance, which I theorize as “earthwork.” Proponents of climate reparations have focused on reparations for unequal climate damages from emissions. By contrast, I propose “wages” or reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work. This framework makes use of an analogy to the 1970s feminist wages for housework movement, which sought to reveal the exploited and yet indispensable character of systematically devalued work rendered natural and invisible. I contend that (re)valuing earthwork must also be central to projects aimed at decolonizing climate justice, that is, anticolonial climate justice. More than monetary transfers alone, wages for earthwork prioritize the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and land and wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.

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.

Donating to a campaign is inherently costly, and as a result the composition of campaign donors differs from the composition of the electorate. What happens when the financial barriers to campaign finance participation are removed? This paper analyzes Seattle’s recent campaign finance reform, where all registered voters receive four $25 vouchers to donate to candidates abiding by stricter campaign finance restrictions. Utilizing individual- and census block group-level data combined with administrative donation records, I find that those most mobilized by the availability of vouchers belong to groups already overrepresented within the donor pool. This finding is significant across race, income, past political participation, age, and partisanship. In some cases, the availability of vouchers appears to pull the donor pool further from parity with the larger electorate.

This article takes as its starting point a 1961 conversation between James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, where the latter first posed the question that would recur in Baldwin’s writings in the following years: “Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?” Although the phrase is often associated with Baldwin, who mostly used it as a metaphor for the racist nation, most famously in The Fire Next Time (1963), this article shows how Hansberry’s analysis of many African Americans’ skepticism toward integration into a “burning house” was situated in a global context of anticolonial, anti-capitalist, and feminist struggle. Writing within networks of Black internationalist feminists and presenting a multivalent and relational account of home, Hansberry revealed household labor and relations of intimacy to be central to the making and maintenance of empire, racism, and capitalism, as well as their contestation through acts and affects of insurgency.

In this research letter, we examine whether gender and racial bias affect interruption rates at one of the most visible events in American politics: US Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Using original data from 1939 to 2022, we find that male and white participants are more likely to interrupt women and person of color speakers, respectively, relative to male and white speakers. This finding holds for both senators and nominees as interrupters. Our results provide evidence that biased interruptive behavior occurs in even the most public and salient of political settings and that it can be mitigated (or intensified) by shared (or opposite) partisanship among speaking pairs. We also find interruption inequalities are not isolated to women as the interrupted, revealing that people of color in political and legal settings are subject to heightened rates of interruptions as well.

How does politics affect, and possibly distort, how resources are allocated? I show that where the federal government provides public goods and financial assistance depends not only on who has power within Congress but also on the characteristics of their constituents. In a federal system like the United States, the central government provides resources by allocating grants to subnational governments based on demographic characteristics. Thus, to maximize funding for their states, members of Congress must also distribute funding to states with similar characteristics. Using panel data on education spending and a difference-in-differences design, I demonstrate that grants disproportionately benefit states represented by Senate committee chairs, but this benefit spills over to similar states. However, I find no evidence of committee influence over grants in the House. These findings contribute to our understanding of distributive politics and shed light on the consequences of allocating resources within a federal system.

Social movements often appeal to the politics of sight, meaning that if people knew about a given injustice, political transformation would follow. Jasmine English and Bernardo Zacka articulate two central premises of the politics of sight: “(1) exposing morally repugnant practices will make us see them, (2) seeing such practices will stop us from acquiescing to them.” Considering the case of slaughterhouse workers, Timothy Pachirat and English and Zacka challenge the previous premises. This article complements their contributions by theorizing what I call Western conceptuality/language and the role this plays in forming our subjectivities not to recognize violence on the one hand, and to be sovereign masters over animals on the other. I conclude by discussing the political implications of these arguments for the politics of sight, including the role of concealment and exposure, and the conditions needed for humans to see animals in their full ethical weight.

We revise the conventional wisdom that Africa’s international borders were drawn arbitrarily. Europeans knew very little about most of Africa in the mid-1880s, but their self-interested goals of amassing territory prompted intensive examination of on-the-ground conditions as they formed borders. Europeans negotiated with African rulers to secure treaties and to learn about historical state frontiers, which enabled Africans to influence the border-formation process. Major water bodies, which shaped precolonial civilizations and trade, also served as focal points. We find support for these new theoretical implications using two original datasets. Quantitatively, we analyze border-location correlates using grid cells and an original spatial dataset on precolonial states. Qualitatively, we compiled information from treaties and diplomatic histories to code causal process observations for every bilateral border. Historical political frontiers directly affected 62% of all bilateral borders. Water bodies, often major ones, comprised the primary border feature much more frequently than straight lines.

Emotions shape strategic conflict dynamics. However, the precise way in which strategic and emotional concerns interact to affect international cooperation and contention are not well understood. We propose a model of intergroup conflict under incomplete information in which agents are sensitive to psychological motivations in the form of anger. Agents become angry in response to worse-than-expected outcomes due to actions of other players. Aggression may be motivated by anger or by beliefs about preferences of members of the other group. Increasing one group’s sensitivity to anger makes that group more aggressive but reduces learning about preferences, which makes the other group less aggressive in response to bad outcomes. Thus, anger has competing effects on the likelihood of conflict. The results have important implications for understanding the complex role of anger in international relations and, more generally, the interplay between psychological and material aims in both fomenting and ameliorating conflict.

To safeguard peace in multi-ethnic countries, scholars and practitioners recommend territorial autonomy. However, there is limited cross-national research on how autonomy affects subnational ethnic conflict, and increasing concern that it redirects ethnic violence from the national to the subnational level. Addressing this gap, I argue that autonomy generates tensions over subnational government control and the distribution of local economic goods. However, whether these turn violent depends on ethnic representation in the central government. If groups are unequally represented, violent escalation is more likely due to information and commitment problems and subnational majoritarianism. To test these arguments, I provide new time-variant data on subnational boundaries, territorial autonomy, and ethnically attributed violence. I conduct a systematic analysis of all multi-ethnic countries between 1989 and 2019, instrumental variable analyses, and tests of my argument’s intermediate implications. My findings underline the importance of complementing autonomy with inclusive central governments to attenuate the risks of subnational violence.

Scholars have long questioned whether and how courts influence society. We contribute to this debate by investigating the ability of judicial decisions to shape issue attention and affect toward courts in media serving the LGBTQ+ community. To do so, we compiled an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases over an extended period covering major decisions, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003), and Lofton v. Secretary of Department of Children & Family Services (2004). We argue these cases influence the volume and tone of LGBTQ+ media coverage. Combining computational social science techniques with qualitative analysis, we find increased attention to same-sex marriage after the decisions in Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton, and the coalescence of discussions of courts around same-sex marriage after Lawrence. We also show how LGBTQ+ media informed readers about the political and legal implications of struggles over marriage equality.