When is speech on social media toxic enough to warrant content moderation? Platforms impose limits on what can be posted online, but also rely on users’ reports of potentially harmful content. Yet we know little about what users consider inadmissible to public discourse and what measures they wish to see implemented. Building on past work, we conceptualize three variants of toxic speech: incivility, intolerance, and violent threats. We present results from two studies with pre-registered randomized experiments (Study 1, $ N=\mathrm{5,130} $; Study 2, $ N=\mathrm{3,734} $) to examine how these variants causally affect users’ content moderation preferences. We find that while both the severity of toxicity and the target of the attack matter, the demand for content moderation of toxic speech is limited. We discuss implications for the study of toxicity and content moderation as an emerging area of research in political science with critical implications for platforms, policymakers, and democracy more broadly.

As a discipline centered on power, political science provides an important window into potential responses to episodes of heightened attention to long-standing racial violence and inequality in the United States. During the summer of 2020, political science departments, like many other entities, issued public statements in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd and the long and ongoing history of deadly violence against Black people at the hands of law enforcement. This paper examines these statements, providing a descriptive analysis of themes raised and types of commitments to action. Rhetorical responses to racism constitute important sites for understanding how discursive power is deployed. Ultimately, we observe that proposed solutions contained in statements are not commensurate with the structural understanding of racism encapsulated in statements. These statements suggest that the status quo prevails even among those who study power. We document limited commitments to addressing racism in political statements.

Why does an authoritarian regime adopt meritocracy in its political selection? I argue that meritocracy can be used to co-opt large numbers of ordinary citizens by providing them with an opportunity of socioeconomic advancement instead of income redistribution, as long as the selection process is viewed as inclusive and rule-based. Focusing on the civil service examination in contemporary China, I examine how this meritocratic selection has shaped the relationship between college graduates and the Chinese regime. Exploiting a spatial-cohort variation in applicant eligibility, I find that the exam boosts college graduates’ perceived upward mobility, which in turn weakens their demand for redistribution even in the face of growing inequality. These findings point to an alternative mode of authoritarian co-optation and highlight the role of upward mobility in regime stability.

This article highlights a new way in which descriptive representation enhances democracy through inclusive party building. We theorize that parties retain and promote incumbents based on gendered criteria, disproportionately incentivizing women to recruit party members. However, gendered resource inequalities lower women’s access to the patronage required for recruitment. Women respond by recruiting more women members, as it lowers recruitment costs, is role-congruent, and eases credit claiming. Using rich administrative data on party membership from 2004 to 2020 and a regression discontinuity design in Brazil, we find that, despite resource disparities, women mayors recruit new members at similar rates as men but reduce the gender gap in party membership. As expected, women are more likely to be promoted in constituencies where they most lower the gender gap in party membership. We also find that women’s increased membership improves party resilience. Our findings suggest that descriptive representation strengthens party building by including underrepresented citizens.

What international issues become national interests worth fighting for, and why? Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that issues without clear economic value, such as barren lands, are more likely to be perceived as national interests because they do not benefit any single domestic group. Since who benefits is unclear, politicians have an easier time framing such issues as benefiting the whole nation. I test this argument using survey experiments on the American public. The results show that first, issues providing diffuse benefits to citizens are more likely to be considered national interests than issues providing concentrated benefits to certain domestic groups. Second, issues with clearer economic value are harder to frame as having diffuse benefits because they are more easily associated with specific beneficiaries. This study proposes a new theory of national interest and offers a potential explanation for why people frequently support conflict over issues without obvious benefits.

Ongoing, spirited debates from around the globe over statues, street names, symbols, and textbooks call for a greater understanding of the political effects of different historical representations. In this paper, we theorize that inclusive (exclusive) historical representations can increase (decrease) marginalized group members’ perceived centrality to the nation, entitlement to speak on its behalf, and likelihood of becoming leaders. In an online experiment in India ($ N=1,592 $), we randomly assign participants exercises sourced from official state textbooks containing either an exclusive, inclusive, or a neutral representation of history. We subsequently assess the supply of and demand for Muslim leadership using both an original, incentivized game and additional survey and behavioral measures. We find that inclusive historical narratives increase Muslim participants’ perceived centrality and entitlement, desire to lead, and demand for real-world Muslim leaders. Battles over history can carry consequences for the leadership ambitions of marginalized individuals, for themselves and their communities.

States in conflict often have divergent interpretations of the past. They blame each other for starting the conflict and view their own actions as justified retaliation, which makes them reluctant to cooperate. This phenomenon, while common in international relations, is not well understood by existing formal theories of cooperation. In the context of the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma framework, we show that strategies that demand atonement for past misdeeds are outperformed by strategies that do not. The latter are able to get out of retaliatory cycles and return to cooperation more quickly when there are divergent perceptions of the past. We conclude with a case study of Chinese and U.S. responses to the Tiananmen protests of 1989. China and the United States strongly disagree about the cause of the Tiananmen uprising and the legitimacy of the Chinese response, but nevertheless returned to cooperation after a limited period of mutual punishment.

The article provides experimental evidence of the effect of candidate-citizen town-hall meetings on voters’ political behavior. The intervention took place prior to the March 2011 elections in Benin and involved 150 randomly selected villages. In the treatment group, candidates held town-hall meetings where voters deliberated over their electoral platforms. The control group was exposed to the standard campaign—that is, one-way communication of the candidate’s platform by himself or his local broker. We find that town-hall meetings led to a more informed citizenry and higher electoral participation, which diverged little along socioeconomic lines. We also observe a lower effectiveness of vote-buying attempts where town halls took place. This is consistent with town-hall deliberation promoting what we call more “ethical” voters.

Enacting stringent climate policy has proven politically challenging, not least because of concentrated losses in fossil fuel-producing communities. “Just transition” strategies have been proposed to mitigate this distributional challenge. Yet, little is known about how such strategies affect voting behavior. Using a mixed-methods approach, we exploit a local climate policy in Spain—a “Just Transition Agreement” (JTA) to phase out coalmining, support affected workers, and invest in affected municipalities—which was negotiated by the incumbent Socialist Party (PSOE) government with affected unions and businesses shortly before a national election. A difference-in-differences study shows that PSOE’s vote share in coalmining municipalities increased at the 2019 election relative to similar municipalities, implying that the JTA was electorally successful. Further statistical tests and elite interviews suggest that this electoral boost was driven by unions’ support of the JTA. Our findings have implications for how parties can craft popular climate policy.

We are witnessing increasing partisan polarization across the world. It is often argued that partisan “echo chambers” are one of the drivers of both policy and affective polarization. In this article, we develop and test the argument that the political homogeneity of people’s social environment shapes polarization. Using an innovative, large-scale pre-registered “lab-in-the-field” experiment in the United Kingdom, we examine how polarization is influenced by partisan group homogeneity. We recruit nationally representative partisans and assign them to discuss a salient policy issue, either with like-minded partisans (an echo chamber) or in a mixed-partisan group. This allows us to examine how group composition affects polarization. In line with our expectations, we find that partisan echo chambers increase both policy and affective polarization compared to mixed discussion groups. This has important implications for our understanding of the drivers of polarization and for how out-group animosity might be ameliorated in the mass public.

If states are permitted to create and maintain a military force, by what means are they permitted to do so? This article argues that a theory of just recruitment should incorporate a concern for moral risk. Since the military is a morally risky profession for its members, recruitment policies should be evaluated in terms of how they distribute moral risk within a community. We show how common military recruitment practices exacerbate and concentrate moral risk exposure, using the UK as a case study. We argue that the British state wrongs its citizens by subjecting them to excessively morally risky recruitment practices. Since, we argue, this risk exposure cannot be justified by appealing to the benefits of a military career for recruits, our argument calls for reform of existing practices. Our method of evaluation is generalizable and therefore can be used to assess other states’ practices.

The literature on “racial capitalism” exhibits a tension between the term’s evocative power and its conceptual imprecision. This article navigates this tension by developing the mid-level concept of “capitalist racialization,” which specifies the role of capitalist abstractions in the construction of racial hierarchies. I elaborate this notion around the racialization of Chinese migration in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. I focalize the figure of the “Chinese colonist” as an index of the capitalist standards by which British observers ordered colonial populations in their reflections on imperial political economy. I argue that the racial stereotype of “the Chinese” as commercial, industrious, and “colonizing” people emerged from the subsumption of colonial land and labor under capital. Their “colonizing” capacity rendered Chinese migrants simultaneously an economic asset to the British Empire and a potential threat to the white world order. “Capitalist racialization” therefore highlights new inroads into the entwined histories of capitalism, racism, and empire.

How do ordinary people choose survival strategies during intense, surprising political violence? Why do some flee violence, while others fight back, adapt, or hide? Individual decision-making during violence has vast political consequences, but remains poorly understood. I develop a decision-making theory focused on individual appraisals of how controllable and predictable violent environments are. I apply my theory, situational appraisal theory, to explain the choices of Indian Sikhs during the 1980s–1990s Punjab crisis and 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms. In original interviews plus qualitative and machine learning analysis of 509 oral histories, I show that control and predictability appraisals influence strategy selection. People who perceive “low” control over threats often avoid threats rather than approach them. People who perceive “low” predictability in threat evolution prefer more-disruptive strategies over moderate, risk-monitoring options. Appraisals explain behavior variation even after accounting for individual demographics and conflict characteristics, and also account for survival strategy changes over time.

What is the gap between scholars’ expectations of media-sourced data and the realities those data actually represent? This letter elucidates the data generation process (DGP) that undergirds media-sourced data: journalistic reporting. It uses semi-structured interviews with 15 journalists to analyze how media actors decide what and how to report—in other words, the “why” of reporting specific events to the exclusion of others—as well as how the larger professional, economic, and political contexts in which journalists operate shape the material scholars treat as data. The letter thus centers “unreported realities”: the fact that media-derived data reflect reporters’ locations, identities, capacities, and outlet priorities, rather than providing a representative sample of ongoing events. In doing so, it reveals variations in the consistency and constancy of reporting that produce unacknowledged, difficult-to-identify biases in media-sourced data that are not directionally predictable.

Do well-informed politicians make more effective spending decisions? In experiments with 70% of all elected politicians in Malawi ($ N=460 $), we tested the effects of information on public spending. Specifically, we randomly provided information about school needs, foreign aid, and voting patterns prior to officials making real decisions about the allocation of spending. We show that these information interventions reduced inequalities in spending: treatment group politicians were more likely to spend in schools neglected by donors and in schools with greater need. Some information treatment effects were strongest in remote and less populated communities. These results suggest that information gaps partially explain inequalities in spending allocation and imply social welfare benefits from improving politicians’ access to information about community needs.

Although space colonization appears to belong to the world of science fiction, private corporations owned by Silicon Valley billionaires—and supported by the US state—have spent billions making it a reality. Analyses of space colonialism have sometimes viewed these projects as distinct from earthly histories of colonialism, instead locating them within traditions of libertarianism, neoliberalism, or techno-utopianism. By reconstructing technology elites’ political visions for celestial settlements within the literature on colonial-era corporations and property, this study argues that the idea of outer space as an empty frontier relies on the same logic of territorialization that was used to justify terrestrial colonialism and indigenous dispossession. It further traces how the idea of “engineering territory” has inspired wider Silicon Valley political exit projects such as cyberspace, seasteading, and network states, which, rather than creating spaces of anarchical freedom, are attempting to recreate the territorial state in new spaces.

Without formal avenues for claims-making or political participation, refugees must find their own means of securing services from state and non-state providers. This article asks why some refugee communities are more effective than others in mitigating community problems. I present a framework for understanding how refugees’ social networks shape the constraints and capabilities for collective action. I analyze a field experiment where I organized community meetings with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, randomly assigning the recruitment method for meetings to introduce exogenous variation in network structure. During meetings, participants were tasked with resolving collective action problems. I examine the dynamics of subsequent group discussion. Results show that although densely networked refugee groups exhibit more cooperation, they suffer from a resource diversity disadvantage. Group diversity facilitates access to resources that may help refugee communities confront community problems. The novel experimental design allows for separately identifying group-level and individual-level mechanisms.

Recent work suggests that solidarity between people of color (PoC) is triggered when a minoritized ingroup believes they are discriminated similarly to another outgroup based on their alleged foreignness or inferiority. Heightened solidarity then boosts support for policies that benefit minoritized outgroups who are not one’s own. Available experiments on this pathway vary by participants (e.g., Asian, Black, Middle Eastern, and Latino adults), manipulations (similar discrimination as foreign vs. inferior), and pro-outgroup outcomes (support for undocumented immigrants, Black Lives Matter). We report a pre-registered mini meta-analysis of this solidarity mechanism. Across five experiments (N = 3,252), similar discrimination as foreign or inferior reliably triggers solidarity between PoC, which then substantially increases support for pro-outgroup policies. This mediated pathway is robust to possible confounding and emerges across studies and planned contrasts of them. We discuss what the viability of this mechanism implies for further theoretic and empirical innovations in a racially diversifying polity.

Does dual citizenship acceptance increase immigrants’ propensity to naturalize and, if so, for whom does this matter most? We exploit exogenous variation in citizenship legislation in 200 migrant-origin countries to identify the effect of destination country policy reform. We hypothesize that the value of the origin country citizenship moderates the reform effect. We test our identification strategy in two West European countries with contrasting reforms: a canonical liberal reform in Sweden (2001) and an atypical restrictive reversal in the Netherlands (1997). We apply a staggered difference-in-differences model employing administrative data on complete migrant populations. We find reform effects remarkably similar in effect size and heterogeneity, with liberalizing reform increasing naturalization rates by 6.7 percentage points and restrictive change decreasing rates by 6.4 percentage points. The effect is concentrated among immigrants from EU and highly developed countries. Our quasi-experimental evidence informs naturalization scholarship and public debate on migrant political integration.

Democratic governments produce more policies than they can effectively implement. Yet, this gap between the number of policies requiring implementation and the administrative capacities available to do so is not the same in all democracies but varies across countries and sectors. We argue that this variation depends on the coupling of the sectoral bureaucracies in charge of policy formulation and those in charge of policy implementation. We consider these patterns of vertical policy-process integration an important feature of bureaucratic quality. The more the policymaking level is involved in policy implementation (top-down integration) and the easier the policy-implementing level finds it to feed its concerns into policymaking (bottom-up integration), the smaller the so-called “burden-capacity gap.” We demonstrate this effect through an empirical analysis in 21 OECD countries over a period of more than 40 years in the areas of social and environmental policies.