Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout. Our article strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backsliding. Drawing on spatial models of electoral competition, we argue that, by reducing more extreme voters’ ability to threaten to abstain due to alienation, the introduction of compulsory voting can push party platforms toward the median voter’s preferences. This directly decreases party polarization, defined as the distance between party platforms. We examine potential normative and empirical objections to this argument and provide scope conditions under which compulsory voting is likely to decrease polarization.

In many theories of electoral accountability, voters learn about an incumbent’s quality by observing public goods outcomes. But empirical findings are mixed, suggesting that increasing the visibility of these outcomes only sometimes improves accountability. I reconcile these heterogeneous findings by highlighting bureaucrats’ role in the production of public goods. In a simple model of electoral accountability involving a voter, a politician, and a bureaucrat, I show that accountability relationships yield distinct empirical implications at different levels of bureaucratic quality. To illustrate how this model rationalizes otherwise mixed or heterogeneous results, I develop a new research design—a theoretically structured meta-study—to synthesize existing findings. Meta-study evidence on the accountability of Brazilian mayors suggests that a common model of electoral accountability that allows for variation in bureaucratic quality predicts observed heterogeneity in politician and voter behavior and beliefs across multiple studies with distinct samples, treatments, and outcomes.

Pepinsky, Goodman, and Ziller (2024, American Political Science Review, PGZ) reassess a recent study on the long-term consequences of concentration camps in Germany. The authors conclude that accounting for contemporary (i.e., post-treatment) state heterogeneity in the models provides unbiased estimates of the effects of camps on current-day outgroup intolerance. In this note, we show that PGZ’s empirical strategy rests on (a) a mischaracterization of what regional fixed effects capture and (b) two unrealistic assumptions that can be avoided with pre-treatment state fixed effects. We further demonstrate that results from the original article remain substantively the same when we incorporate regional fixed effects correctly. Finally, simulations reveal that camp proximity consistently outperforms spatially correlated noise in this specific study. The note contributes to the growing literature on legacy studies by advancing the discussion about the correct modeling choices in this challenging field.

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.