How do modern individuals form a sense of the vast societies in which they live? Social cognition has evolved to make sense of small, intimate social groups, but in complex mass societies, comparable vivid social cues are scarcer. Extant research on political attitudes and behavior has emphasized media and interpersonal networks as key sources of cues. Extending a classical argument, we provide evidence for the importance of an alternative and internal source: imagination. With a focus on social welfare, we collected survey data from two very different democracies, the United States and Denmark, and conducted several studies using explicit, implicit, and behavioral measures. By analyzing the effects of individual differences in imagination, we demonstrate that political cognition relies on vivid, mental simulations that engage evolved social and emotional decision-making mechanisms. It is in the mind's eye that vividness and engagement are added to people's sense of mass politics.

Why do some armed groups commit massive wartime rape, whereas others never do? Using an original dataset, I describe the substantial variation in rape by armed actors during recent civil wars and test a series of competing causal explanations. I find evidence that the recruitment mechanism is associated with the occurrence of wartime rape. Specifically, the findings support an argument about wartime rape as a method of socialization, in which armed groups that recruit by force—through abduction or pressganging—use rape to create unit cohesion. State weakness and insurgent contraband funding are also associated with increased wartime rape by rebel groups. I examine observable implications of the argument in a brief case study of the Sierra Leone civil war. The results challenge common explanations for wartime rape, with important implications for scholars and policy makers.

To what extent do personal circumstances, as compared to ideological dispositions, drive voters’ preferences on welfare policy? Addressing this question is difficult because a person's ideological position can be an outcome of material interest rather than an independent source of preferences. The article deals with this empirical challenge using an original panel study carried out over four years, tracking the labor market experiences and the political attitudes of a national sample of Americans before and after the eruption of the financial crisis. The analysis shows that the personal experience of economic hardship, particularly the loss of a job, had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending. This effect was appreciably larger among Republicans than among Democrats, a result that was not simply due to a “ceiling effect.” However the large attitudinal shift was short lived, dissipating as individuals’ employment situations improved. The results indicate that the personal experience of an economic shock has a sizable, yet overall transient effect on voters’ social policy preferences.

It is widely believed that rents from windfall revenue undermine accountability. An enduring explanation is that windfalls free leaders from the need to tax, producing a quiescent population. Yet, there is little direct evidence of how windfalls and taxes affect citizen political action. I use novel revenue and information experiments to examine whether and why windfalls (compared to taxes) affect how citizens participate in politics. The experiments were embedded in a public awareness campaign conducted with 1,863 citizens in Indonesia. The results—from an original survey and postcard campaign—indicate that the tax treatment increased monitoring and anti-incumbent political action. Yet, when given spending information, citizens in the windfall treatment cared just as much about misused revenue as those in the tax treatment. The findings have important implications for understanding not only how revenue affects citizen political behavior but also how people acquire and process information on government spending.

There are many different ways of responding to wrongdoing: person-centered or object-centered, victim-centered or perpetrator-centered, and fault-oriented or not. Among these approaches, requiring innocent beneficiaries to disgorge the fruits of historical wrongdoings of others is attractive because it is informationally the least demanding. Although that approach is perhaps not ideal, at least it is feasible where other responses are not, and doing something is better than doing nothing in response to grievous historical wrongdoing. Depending on circumstances, disgorgement can be in whole or in part, in kind or in cash. Even without the full information that disgorgement itself requires, general redistributive taxation might be justified as a tolerably close approximation.

When do ethnic cleavages increase the risk of conflict? Under what conditions is a strong common identity likely to emerge, thereby reducing that risk? How are patterns of social identification shaped by conflict? We draw on empirical results regarding the nature and determinants of group identification to develop a simple model that addresses these questions. The model highlights the possibility of vicious and virtuous cycles where conflict and identification patterns reinforce each other. It also shows how processes of ethnic identification amplify the importance of political institutions and traces the effects of national status and perceived differences across ethnic groups. Finally, we demonstrate how a small but sufficiently potent group of ethnic radicals can derail a peaceful equilibrium, leading to the polarization of the entire population. We reexamine several historical cases as well as empirical correlates of civil wars in light of these results.

A satisfactory model of decision-making in an epistemic democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests, by taking account of relevant knowledge about the world. Analysis of passages in Aristotle and legislative process in classical Athens points to a “middle way” between independent-guess aggregation and deliberation: an epistemic approach to decision-making that offers a satisfactory model of collective judgment that is both time-sensitive and capable of setting agendas endogenously. By aggregating expertise across multiple domains, Relevant Expertise Aggregation (REA) enables a body of minimally competent voters to make superior choices among multiple options, on matters of common interest. REA differs from a standard Condorcet jury in combining deliberation with voting based on judgments about the reputations and arguments of domain-experts.

Revisiting the theory of institutional hybridity and diversity developed by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom to cope with the challenge of the “neither states nor markets” institutional domain, this article reconstructs the Ostromian system along the “value heterogeneity–co-production–polycentricity” axis. It articulates the elements of a theory of value heterogeneity and of the fuzzy boundaries between private and public. It rebuilds the model of co-production, clarifying the ambiguity surrounding a key technical public choice theoretical assumption, and it demonstrates (a) why it should not be confused with the Alchian-Demsetz team production model and (b) how co-production engenders a type of market failure that has been neglected so far. In light of this analysis, the article reconsiders polycentricity, the capstone of the Ostromian system, explaining why polycentricity may be seen as a solution both to this co-production market failure problem and to the problems of social choice in conditions of deep heterogeneity. It also discusses further normative corollaries.

Since 1972, campaign spending by House incumbents has skyrocketed, particularly in those districts with marginal support for the incumbent's party. At the same time, parties in the House have become much more cohesive in the way they vote, producing more precise and informative party brands. We argue that these two phenomena are fundamentally linked. As parties have developed more precise reputations, incumbents in these districts must spend much more to attract voters in “marginal” districts, who would be willing to vote for a candidate with the particular incumbent's legislative record, but not the average member of his party. Increasingly precise party reputations provide voters with stronger priors that incumbents are just like the rest of their party, and incumbents in marginal districts must spend more to overcome these beliefs. We demonstrate this using a simple formal model and test it empirically using campaign-spending data from 1972 to 2008.

Federalist democracies often hold concurrent elections for multiple offices. A potential consequence of simultaneously voting for multiple offices that vary with respect to scope and scale is that the personal appeal of candidates in a high-profile race may affect electoral outcomes in less salient races. In this article I estimate the magnitude of such coattail effects from governors onto other concurrently elected statewide executive officers using a unique dataset of county election returns for all statewide executive office elections in the United States from 1987 to 2010. I exploit the disproportionate support that candidates receive from geographically proximate voters, which is often referred to as the friends-and-neighbors vote, to isolate variation in the personal appeal of candidates. I find that a one-percentage-point increase in the personal vote received by a gubernatorial candidate increases the vote share of their party's secretary of state and attorney general candidates by 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points. In contrast, personal votes for a secretary of state or attorney general candidate have no effect on the performance of their party's gubernatorial candidate or other down-ballot candidates.

This article aims to correct the widespread imbalance in contemporary liberal thought, which makes explicit appeal to the “least advantaged” without parallel attention to the “most advantaged” as a distinct group in need of regulatory attention. Rawls's influential theory of justice is perhaps the paradigmatic instance of this imbalance, but I show how a Rawlsian framework nonetheless provides three justifications for why implementers of liberal justice—above all, legislators—should regulate the economic prospects of a polity's richest citizens: as a heuristic device for ensuring that a system of inequalities not reach a level at which inequalities cease being mutually advantageous, as protection against excessive inequalities threatening civic liberty, and as redress for a liberal society's inability to fully realize fair equality of opportunity with regard to education and politics. Against the objection that such arguments amount to a defense of envy, insofar as they support policies that in certain instances impose economic costs on the most advantaged with negative or neutral economic impact on the rest of society, I attend to Rawls's often overlooked distinction between irrational and reasonable forms of envy, showing that any envy involved in the proposed regulation of the most advantaged falls within this latter category.

We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt to and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 85 topic areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future—and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.

Theories of instrumental ethnic voting in new democracies propose that voters support co-ethnic politicians because they expect politicians to favor their co-ethnics once in office. But many goods that politicians deliver to voters are locally nonexcludable in rural areas, so the local presence of an ethnic group associated with a politician should affect a rural voter's assessment of how likely she is to benefit from that politician's election. Using geocoded polling-station–level election results alongside survey data from Ghana, we show that otherwise similar voters are less likely to vote for the party of their own ethnic group, and more likely to support a party associated with another group, when the local ethnic geography favors the other group. This result helps account for the imperfect correlation between ethnicity and vote choice in African democracies. More generally, this demonstrates how local community and geographic contexts can modify the information conveyed by ethnicity and influence voter behavior.

This paper is concerned with the development of national primary education regimes in Europe, North America, Latin America, Oceania, and Japan between 1870 and 1939. We examine why school systems varied between countries and over time, concentrating on three institutional dimensions: centralization, secularization, and subsidization. There were two paths to centralization: through liberal and social democratic governments in democracies, or through fascist and conservative parties in autocracies. We find that the secularization of public school systems can be explained by path-dependent state-church relationships (countries with established national churches were less likely to have secularized education systems) but also by partisan politics. Finally, we find that the provision of public funding to private providers of education, especially to private religious schools, can be seen as a solution to religious conflict, since such institutions were most common in countries where Catholicism was a significant but not entirely dominant religion.

Cooperation helps states realize mutual gains, but mistrust and disagreements over institutional design inhibit cooperation. This article develops a network explanation for how states achieve cooperation in the face of persistent coordination and collaboration problems. The analysis focuses on bilateral cooperation agreements, a vast body of treaties spanning multiple issue areas. Bilateral agreements constitute an evolving network of cooperative ties. This network defines the strategic environment in which states bargain over new agreements, endogenously influencing subsequent bilateral endeavors by revealing strategically valuable information about states’ trustworthiness and preferences over institutional design, while also generating externalities that incentivize bilateral partnerships. Inferential network analysis shows that states are more likely to create bilateral agreements if they (1) share agreements with common third parties, (2) accede to more agreements in general, and/or (3) share important exogenous characteristics with current bilateral partners. These network dynamics drive bilateral cooperation in everything from commodities to cultural exchange to fisheries.

This article challenges the liberal, contractual theory of the corporation and argues for replacing it with a political theory of the corporation. Corporations are government-like in their powers, and government grants them both their external “personhood” and their internal governing authority. They are thus not simply private. Yet they are privately organized and financed and therefore not simply public. Corporations transgress all the basic dichotomies that structure liberal treatments of law, economics, and politics: public/private, government/market, privilege/equality, and status/contract. They are “franchise governments” that cannot be satisfactorily assimilated to liberalism. The liberal effort to assimilate them, treating them as contractually constituted associations of private property owners, endows them with rights they ought not have, exacerbates their irresponsibility, and compromises their principal public benefit of generating long-term growth. Instead, corporations need to be placed in a distinct category—neither public nor private, but “corporate”—to be regulated by distinct rules and norms.

The American Political Science Review recently published a critique of an article we published in the Journal of Politics in 2008. In that article we showed that variants of the genes 5HTT and MAOA were significantly associated with voter turnout in a sample of 2,300 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Here, we address the critique first by conducting a replication study using an independent sample of 9,300 subjects. This study replicates the gene-environment interaction of the 5HTT gene variant with church attendance, but not the association with MAOA. We then focus on the general argument of the critique, showing that many of its characterizations of the literature in genetics and in political science are misleading or incorrect. We conclude by illustrating the ways in which genopolitics has already made a lasting contribution to the field of political science and by offering guidelines for future studies in genopolitics that are based on state-of-the-art recommendations from the field of behavior genetics.

This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called “religious reasons” ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political communities deliberate. Religious arguments are of many different kinds, are offered to others in a variety of ways, and the spheres of life about which communities deliberate pose distinct moral questions. Turning back to the public reason debate, I argue then that political liberals ought to be concerned primarily about the invocation of a certain subset of religious reasons in a certain subset of areas of human activity, but also that inclusivist arguments on behalf of religious contributions to public deliberation fail to justify the use of religious arguments in all areas of public deliberation.

How do global sources of information such as mass media outlets, state propaganda, NGOs, and national party leadership affect aggregate behavior? Prior work on this question has insufficiently considered the complex interaction between social network and mass media influences on individual behavior. By explicitly modeling this interaction, I show that social network structure conditions media's impact. Empirical studies of media effects that fail to consider this risk bias. Further, social network interactions can amplify media bias, leading to large swings in aggregate behavior made more severe when individuals can select into media matching their preferences. Countervailing media outlets and social elites with unified preferences can mitigate the effect of bias; however, media outlets promulgating antistatus quo bias have an advantage. Theoretical results such as these generate numerous testable hypotheses; I provide guidelines for deriving and testing hypotheses from the model and discuss several such hypotheses.

We study discrimination against immigrants using microlevel data from Switzerland, where, until recently, some municipalities used referendums to decide on the citizenship applications of foreign residents. We show that naturalization decisions vary dramatically with immigrants’ attributes, which we collect from official applicant descriptions that voters received before each referendum. Country of origin determines naturalization success more than any other applicant characteristic, including language skills, integration status, and economic credentials. The average proportion of “no” votes is about 40% higher for applicants from (the former) Yugoslavia and Turkey compared to observably similar applicants from richer northern and western European countries. Statistical and taste-based discrimination contribute to varying naturalization success; the rewards for economic credentials are higher for applicants from disadvantaged origins, and origin-based discrimination is much stronger in more xenophobic municipalities. Moreover, discrimination against specific immigrant groups responds dynamically to changes in the groups’ relative size.