This article explicates and critiques an understanding of markets that is dominant in much contemporary political theory. Drawing on the insights of new materialist economic sociology, it argues that the divide between “the political” and “the market” that grounds many recent analyses cannot ultimately be sustained. Conceptualizing markets not as abstract, impersonal mechanisms but as polyvalent assemblages, the paper develops a view of markets as material devices subject to a wide variety of political inflections and deployments. This understanding is then used to clarify some of the disputes between market-friendly neo-republican theorists and their critics. The article argues that markets are best conceptualized as political institutions (rather than as alternatives to politics). It commends an approach to political theorizing that moves beyond “pro-” and “antimarket” positions, focusing instead on the material details of market configurations and their consequences for agency and social power.

Survey data are commonly cited as evidence of widespread misperceptions and misinformed beliefs. This paper shows that surveys generally fail to identify the firm, deep, steadfast, confidently held beliefs described in leading accounts. Instead, even those who report 100% certain belief in falsehoods about well-studied topics like climate change, vaccine side effects, and the COVID-19 death toll exhibit substantial response instability over time. Similar levels of response stability are observed among those who report 100% certain belief in benign, politically uncontested falsehoods—for example, that electrons are larger than atoms and that lasers work by focusing sound waves. As opposed to firmly held misperceptions, claims to be highly certain of incorrect answers are best interpreted as “miseducated” guesses based on mistaken inferential reasoning. Those reporting middling and low levels of certainty are best viewed as making close-to-blind guesses. These findings recast existing evidence as to the prevalence, predictors, correction, and consequences of misperceptions and misinformed beliefs.

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.

What drove an entire region in the Global South to significantly expand refugee protection in the early twenty-first century? In this paper, we test and build on political refugee theory via a mixed-methods approach to explain the liberalization of refugee legislation across Latin America. First, we use data from the new APLA Database, which measures legislative liberalization over a 30-year period, and test both general and region-specific immigration and refugee policy determinants through a series of nested Tobit and linear spatial panel-data regressions. Our models do not support some consistent predictors of policy liberalization identified by the literature such as immigrant and refugee stocks, democratization, and the number of emigrants, but they offer statistical evidence for the importance of leftist government ideology and regional integration. We then shed light on the causal mechanisms behind these correlations for two extreme but diverse cases: Argentina and Mexico. Based on process tracing and elite interviews, we suggest that the reason that leftist political ideology rather than institutional democratization and number of emigrants matters for policy liberalization is that Latin American executives embarked on symbolic human and migrant’s rights discourses that ultimately enabled legislative change.

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.

Democracy often confronts citizens with a dilemma: stand firm on democracy while losing out on policy or accept undemocratic behavior and gain politically. Existing literature demonstrates that citizens generally choose the latter—and that they do so deliberately. Yet there is an alternative possibility. Citizens can avoid this uncomfortable dilemma altogether by rationalizing their understandings of democracy. When a politician advances undesired policies without violating democratic rules and norms, people find ways to perceive the behavior as undemocratic. When a politician acts undemocratically to promote desired policies, citizens muster up arguments for considering it democratic. Original survey experiments in the United States, and 22 democracies worldwide, provide strong support for this argument. It is thus not deliberate acceptance, but a fundamentally different perceptual logic that drives the widespread approval of undemocratic behavior in today’s democracies.

Although political science increasingly investigates emotions as variables, it often ignores emotions’ larger significance due to their inherence in research with human subjects. Integrating emotions into conversations on methods and ethics, I build on the term “ethnographic sensibility” to conceptualize an “emotional sensibility” that seeks to glean the emotional experiences of people who participate in research. Methodologically, emotional sensibility sharpens attention to how participants’ emotions are data, influence other data, and affect future data collection. Ethically, it supplements Institutional Review Boards’ rationalist emphasis on information and cognitive capacity with appreciation for how emotions infuse consent, risk, and benefit. It thereby encourages thinking not only about emotional harm but also about emotions apart from harm and about emotional harms apart from trauma and vulnerability. I operationalize emotional sensibility by tracking four dimensions of research that affect participants’ emotions: the content of research, the context in which research occurs, researchers’ positionality, and researchers’ conduct.

Women in Congress are highly effective legislators. Yet, if women are more likely than men to be interrupted during committee work, they may face a gender-related impediment. We examine speech patterns during more than 24,000 congressional committee hearings from 1994 to 2018 to determine whether women Members are more likely to be interrupted than men. We find that they are. This is especially true in Senate committees—where women are about 10% more likely to be interrupted. Furthermore, in hearings that discuss women’s issues, women are more than twice as likely to be interrupted than while discussing other issues. We see a similar pattern for rapid-fire “interruption clusters,” an aggressive form of interruption. We further consider a range of moderating factors, which yields little evidence that women change their communication strategy as they gain experience in Congress. We also find suggestive evidence that interruptions are driven by mixed-gender interactions.

How are politicians informed and who do politicians seek information from? The role of information has been at the center for research on legislative organizations but there is a lack of systematic empirical work on the information that Congress seeks to acquire and consider. To examine the information flow between Congress and external groups, we construct the most comprehensive dataset to date on 74,082 congressional committee hearings and 755,540 witnesses spanning 1960–2018. We show descriptive patterns of how witness composition varies across time and committee and how different types of witnesses provide varying levels of analytical information. We develop theoretical expectations for why committees may invite different types of witnesses based on committee intent, interbranch relations, and congressional capacity. Our empirical evidence shows how committees’ partisan considerations can affect how much committees turn to outsiders for information and from whom they seek information.

A growing body of evidence attests that legislators are sometimes responsive to the policy preferences of citizens in single-party regimes, yet debate surrounds the mechanisms driving this relationship. We experimentally test two potential responsiveness mechanisms—elections versus mandates from party leaders—by provisioning delegates to the Vietnamese National Assembly with information on the policy preferences of their constituents and reminding them of either (1) the competitiveness of the upcoming 2021 elections or (2) a central decree that legislative activities should reflect constituents’ preferences. Consistent with existing work, delegates informed of citizens’ preferences are more likely to speak on the parliamentary floor and in closed-session caucuses. Importantly, we find that such responsiveness is entirely driven by election reminders; upward incentive reminders have virtually no effect on behavior.

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.

Social scientists commonly seek to make statements about how word use varies over circumstances—including time, partisan identity, or some other document-level covariate. For example, researchers might wish to know how Republicans and Democrats diverge in their understanding of the term “immigration.” Building on the success of pretrained language models, we introduce the à la carte on text (conText) embedding regression model for this purpose. This fast and simple method produces valid vector representations of how words are used—and thus what words “mean”—in different contexts. We show that it outperforms slower, more complicated alternatives and works well even with very few documents. The model also allows for hypothesis testing and statements about statistical significance. We demonstrate that it can be used for a broad range of important tasks, including understanding US polarization, historical legislative development, and sentiment detection. We provide open-source software for fitting the model.

Democratic theorists have long argued that states can create more resilient democracies through education. Educational investments are thought to produce more economic equality and instill in citizens greater capacity and responsibility to participate in politics. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design and township-level data from Antebellum New York State, we examine whether state funding for common schools led to higher voter turnout as well as higher earnings and lower inequality. Our estimates support the view that a participatory democratic culture emerged not only because of initial favorable endowments but also because of subsequent government decisions to fund education. New York townships that received more school funding later had higher median earnings, lower earnings inequality, and higher levels of voter turnout. Our findings support the view that maintaining democracy requires active investments by the state, something that has important implications for other places and other times—including today.

Unprecedented quantities of data that could help social scientists understand and ameliorate the challenges of human society are presently locked away inside companies, governments, and other organizations, in part because of privacy concerns. We address this problem with a general-purpose data access and analysis system with mathematical guarantees of privacy for research subjects, and statistical validity guarantees for researchers seeking social science insights. We build on the standard of “differential privacy,” correct for biases induced by the privacy-preserving procedures, provide a proper accounting of uncertainty, and impose minimal constraints on the choice of statistical methods and quantities estimated. We illustrate by replicating key analyses from two recent published articles and show how we can obtain approximately the same substantive results while simultaneously protecting privacy. Our approach is simple to use and computationally efficient; we also offer open-source software that implements all our methods.

Popular discourse about freedom of speech tends to default to the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, notwithstanding empirical evidence undermining this concept. Its persistence illustrates the profound attachment freedom of speech inspires, despite the difficulty of justifying it in epistemic terms. I suggest that the ancient Greek historian Herodotus offers a compelling alternative to the marketplace metaphor with his account of isegoria at Athens. In Herodotus’s telling, Athenian equal right of speech is worthwhile not because of its effects on speech but because of its effect on political culture; equal speech energizes the Athenians and Athens. He thus offers a nonepistemic defense of the right to speak, defending it instead in terms of power and belonging. Yet his account also highlights how Athenian equal speech unleashes political harms and therefore offers a way to defend free speech without minimizing its dangers. Herodotus thus helps us productively reframe contemporary free speech debates.

How do international sports events shape repression in authoritarian host countries? International tournaments promise unique gains in political prestige through global media attention. However, autocrats must fear that foreign journalists will unmask their wrongdoings. We argue that autocracies solve this dilemma by strategically adjusting repression according to the spatial-temporal presence of international media. Using original, highly disaggregated data on the 1978 World Cup, we demonstrate that the Argentine host government largely refrained from repression during the tournament but preemptively cleared the streets beforehand. These adjustments specifically occurred around hotels reserved for foreign journalists. Additional tests demonstrate that (1) before the tournament, repression turned increasingly covert, (2) during the tournament, targeting patterns mirrored the working shifts of foreign journalists, (3) after the tournament, regime violence again spiked in locations where international media had been present. Together, the article highlights the human costs of megaevents, contradicting the common whitewashing rhetoric of functionaries.

During violent conflict, governments may acknowledge their use of illegitimate violence (e.g., noncombatant casualties) even though such violence can depress civilian support. Why would they do so? We model the strategic incentives affecting government disclosures of illegitimate violence in the face of potential NGO investigations, where disclosures, investigations, and support are endogenous. We highlight implications for the analysis of conflict data generated from government and NGO reports and for the emergence of government transparency. Underreporting bias in government disclosures positively correlates with underreporting bias in NGO reports. Furthermore, governments exhibit greater underreporting bias relative to NGOs when NGOs face higher investigative costs. We also illustrate why it is difficult to estimate negative effects of illegitimate violence on support using government data: with large true effects, governments have incentives to conceal such violence, leading to strategic attenuation bias. Finally, there is a U-shaped relationship between NGO investigative costs and government payoffs.

How concerning should it be that most citizens encounter political life chiefly as audiences? Facing this fact, democratic theorists increasingly respond by reconceptualizing “the spectator” as an empowered agent. Yet this response risks overlooking how evolving forms of media reconstitute audiences in ways that undermine efforts to ascribe agency to any given spectating activity. To illustrate this problem, I consider Jeffrey Green’s idealization of candor, which holds spectators to be empowered when leaders are denied scripted appearances. In contrast, I show that social media occasion a case of irreverent candor wherein spectators claim authenticity by derailing online conversations, thereby valorizing a kind of unscriptedness that perpetuates outgroup marginalization and facilitates demagogy. Paradoxically, such candor disempowers spectators while rendering them more “active” agents. I thus argue that empowerment requires audiences to interrogate their own spectating practices—a possibility I locate in Hannah Arendt’s thought and interactions surrounding Black Lives Matter protests.

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.

How does representation by politicians from specific communities influence these communities’ political participation? Analyzing a natural experiment from Mexico in which a party uses lotteries to select candidates for public office, this paper presents new insights into how representation shapes the political participation of underrepresented segments of society. I find that participation in subsequent elections is significantly higher among constituents who have been represented by randomly selected legislators with a similar social background who are part of local organizational networks (embedded representatives). Furthermore, I show that these represented constituents feel more empowered and that the party that provides this “grassroots” representation is rewarded with more support in the subsequent election. The findings highlight the importance of community embeddedness for political mobilization and have important implications for debates about democratic inclusion and representation.