Most research on biased public sector hiring highlights local politicians’ incentives to distribute government positions to partisan supporters. Other studies instead point to the role of bureaucratic managers in allocating government jobs to close contacts. We jointly consider the relative importance of each source of biased hiring as an allocation problem between managers and politicians who have different preferences regarding public sector hiring and different abilities to realize those preferences. We develop a theoretical model of each actor’s relative leverage and relative preferences for different types of public sector positions. We empirically examine our theory using the universe of payroll data in Kenyan local governments from 2004 to 2013. We find evidence of both patronage and bureaucratic favoritism, but with different types of bias concentrated in different types of government jobs, as our theory predicts. Our results highlight the inadequacy of examining political patronage alone without incorporating the preferences and leverage of the bureaucratic managers who are intricately involved in hiring processes.

How do considerations related to backlash affect the desirability of pursuing otherwise justified immigration policies? This paper argues that backlash-related considerations bear on immigration policy decisions in ways that are both more powerful and complicated than typically recognized. The standard possibility, the egalitarian backlash argument, endorses immigration restrictions in order to protect support for egalitarian distributive institutions. The paper shows that this account does not, by itself, provide a convincing rationale for restricting immigration because such diminished support is (a) likely outweighed by the benefits of more permissive immigration policies and (b) caused by the objectionable preferences of citizens. However, the paper develops an alternative account of the relevance of backlash-related considerations, the democratic backlash argument, which holds that increased levels of immigration threaten to contribute to undermining democratic institutions. This argument provides a more powerful rationale for restricting immigration, one that can—under identified conditions—justify immigration restrictions.

Conventional wisdom claims that racial diversity undermines public goods provision. I show that class-based differences, instead, incentivize cooperation for public goods. Class-based segregation reduces spatial externalities of inequality (e.g., sewage pollution and crime) spilling over from impoverished areas (e.g., slums) to the middle class. Conversely, I argue that in integrated (de-segregated) cities, the scale of such externalities undermines the efficacy of private services (e.g., private security), thereby inducing middle-class preferences for externalities-correcting public goods. Thus, while segregation polarizes preferences, integration aligns the middle class with the poor in coalitions that support public goods over private alternatives. I illustrate the theory using focus groups, a proposed quasi-experimental strategy, and an original face-to-face survey of 4,208 households across 420 neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil. The analysis introduces self-interest in reducing intergroup externalities as a mechanism for cooperation for public goods even in diverse societies. Using mechanism vignettes, I distinguish the mechanism from the affective attitudes—racial tolerance, social affinity—of intergroup contact.

Theories of discrimination typically select properties such as race, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity as being of special concern. These properties, which are customarily identified as genuine grounds of discrimination, are also at the forefront of constructionist efforts to understand reality as a product of social interactions. Theories of discrimination have so far neglected the important question of how understanding the nature of these properties impacts our theoretical views of the kind of phenomenon discrimination is. This article outlines some pitfalls of assuming away complexities regarding the ontology of the underlying properties, and systematically develops a constructionist account of discrimination, which I call Discrimination without Traits. I argue pursuing a constructionist view of grounds reveals discrimination to be not a discrete process involving a discriminator and a victim, but an ongoing process of (re)negotiating social reality that is fundamentally political. This uncovers neglected avenues for designing political remedies to discrimination.

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.

Conflictual cabinet terminations are seismic events in democracies, but their consequences are understudied. I argue that the electoral impacts of conflictual cabinet terminations depend on voters’ perceptions of them. Terminations following non-policy conflicts are electorally costly. They signal parties’ deteriorating governing competence, which reduces parties’ vote shares. In contrast, terminations following policy conflicts signal parties’ unwillingness to compromise their policy positions and clarify parties’ policy profiles, thus allowing them to evade voter punishment and junior coalition parties to reap electoral reward, particularly for those terminations preceded by interparty policy conflicts. Statistical analyses using the Party Government in Europe Database dataset support my argument on policy terminations and reveal more nuanced electoral effects of non-policy conflict terminations. These findings are robust to various alternative explanations, as well as multiple cabinet terminations and time passed from termination to election. The findings have large implications on electoral accountability of intra-cabinet conflicts and the quality of governance.

This article proposes a simple but powerful framework to measure political sophistication based on open-ended survey responses. Discursive sophistication uses automated text analysis methods to capture the complexity of individual attitude expression. I validate the approach by comparing it to conventional political knowledge metrics using different batteries of open-ended items across five surveys spanning four languages (total $ N\approx 35,000 $). The new measure casts doubt on the oft-cited gender gap in political knowledge: women might know fewer facts about institutions and elites, but they do not differ substantively in the sophistication of their expressed political attitudes.

We show, against skeptics, that however latent it may be in everyday life, the ability to reason effectively about politics can readily be activated when conditions are right. We justify a definition of deliberative reason, then develop and apply a Deliberative Reason Index (DRI) to analysis of 19 deliberative forums. DRI increases over the course of deliberation in the vast majority of cases, but the extent of this increase depends upon enabling conditions. Group building that activates deliberative norms makes the biggest difference, particularly in enabling participants to cope with complexity. Without group building, complexity becomes more difficult to surmount, and planned direct impact on policy decisions may actually impede reasoning where complexity is high. Our findings have implications beyond forum design for the staging of political discourse in the wider public sphere.

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.

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.

Debates over racial voting, and over policies to combat vote dilution, turn on the extent to which groups’ voting preferences differ and vary across geography. We present the first study of racial voting patterns in every congressional district (CD) in the United States. Using large-sample surveys combined with aggregate demographic and election data, we find that national-level differences across racial groups explain 60% of the variation in district-level voting patterns, whereas geography explains 30%. Black voters consistently choose Democratic candidates across districts, whereas Hispanic and white voters’ preferences vary considerably across geography. Districts with the highest racial polarization are concentrated in the parts of the South and Midwest. Importantly, multiracial coalitions have become the norm: in most CDs, the winning majority requires support from non-white voters. In arriving at these conclusions, we make methodological innovations that improve the precision and accuracy when modeling sparse survey data.

Political candidates use Spanish-language appeals in efforts to increase their support among Hispanic voters. We argue that candidates, Hispanic or not, can use Spanish to signal closeness to Hispanics and posit that the effectiveness of these appeals is conditional on proficiency. To test this, we run two experiments where participants listen to an audio clip of a hypothetical candidate’s stump speech. We vary the ethnicity of the candidate (Anglo or Hispanic) and the language of the speech (English, non-native Spanish, and native-like Spanish). We find that Hispanic support for the Anglo and Hispanic candidates is higher in the native-like Spanish condition compared with the English-only condition. Relative to the English condition, non-native Spanish does not increase support for the Anglo candidate, but it decreases support for the Hispanic candidate. We find mixed effects for Anglo participants. Our results suggest that candidates can effectively appeal to Hispanic voters using Spanish-language messages.

Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they influence politics. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of neighborhoods creates methodological challenges in measuring and modeling them. We develop an open-source survey instrument that allows respondents to draw their neighborhoods on a map. We also propose a statistical model to analyze how the characteristics of respondents and local areas determine subjective neighborhoods. We conduct two surveys: collecting subjective neighborhoods from voters in Miami, New York City, and Phoenix, and asking New York City residents to draw a community of interest for inclusion in their city council district. Our analysis shows that, holding other factors constant, white respondents include census blocks with more white residents in their neighborhoods. Similarly, Democrats and Republicans are more likely to include co-partisan areas. Furthermore, our model provides more accurate out-of-sample predictions than standard neighborhood measures.

How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality? Discussions about diversity usually focus on how individuals’ identities shape their behavior, but diversity is a group-level characteristic. Scholars must, therefore, consider the relationship between group composition and the individual decisions that shape institutional outcomes. Using felony data from a large U.S. court system, I explore the relationship between racial diversity among the judges comprising a court and individual judges’ decisions. I find that as the percent of Black judges in a courthouse increases white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants. Increases in racial diversity decrease the Black–white gap in the probability of incarceration by up to 7 percentage points. However, I find no relationship between judge’s racial identities and disparities in their decisions. This study highlights the importance of conceptualizing diversity as a group characteristic and the relationship between institutional context and outcomes.

Despite substantial research on descriptive representation for Blacks and Latinos, we know little about the electoral conditions under which Asian candidates win office. Leveraging a new dataset on Asian American legislators elected from 2011 to 2020, combined with pre-existing and newly conducted surveys, we develop and test hypotheses related to Asian American candidates’ ingroup support, and their crossover appeal to other racial and ethnic groups. The data show Asian Americans preferring candidates of their own ethnic origin and of other Asian ethnicities to non-Asian candidates, indicating strong ethnic and panethnic motives. Asian candidates have comparatively strong crossover appeal, winning at higher rates than Blacks or Latinos for any given percentage of the reference group. All else equal, Asian American candidates fare best in multiracial districts, so growing diversity should benefit their electoral prospects. This crossover appeal is not closely tied to motives related to relative group status or threat.

Why is support the radical right higher in some geographic locations than others? This article argues that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical-right support in previous research is in part the result of something different: communities that were in the historical “periphery” in the center–periphery conflicts of modern nation-state formation. Inspired by a classic state-building literature that emphasizes the prevalence of a “wealth of tongues”—or nonstandard linguistic dialects in a region—as a definition of the periphery, we use data from more than 725,000 geo-coded responses in a linguistic survey in Germany to show that voters from historically peripheral geographic communities are more likely to vote for the radical right today.

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.

A key finding of recent scholarship on political violence is that environmentalists rarely, if ever, use lethal violence. Many scholars have argued that “ecoterrorism” is a misnomer for what is more accurately termed “ecotage.” Large-n studies of environmental activism have identified only one apparent example of an environmentally motivated terrorist: the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber case is therefore a “crucial case” for evaluating the Peaceful Environmentalist Thesis—the generalization that environmentalists do not use lethal violence. Pioneering a forensic method of ideology analysis, this article uses previously unexamined archival material to assess the Unabomber’s affinities with three environmental ideologies: radical environmentalism, green anarchism, and right-wing ecologism. It shows that the Unabomber’s ideology is not environmentalist in intellectual origins or in conceptual structure, and that his motivations were anti-technological rather than pro-ecological. The Unabomber case demonstrates how ideology analysis can complement and strengthen research on political violence.

In the United States, elections are often administered by directly elected local officials who run as members of a political party. Do these officials use their office to give their party an edge in elections? Using a newly collected dataset of nearly 5,900 clerk elections and a close-election regression discontinuity design, we compare counties that narrowly elect a Democratic election administrator to those that narrowly elect a Republican. We find that Democrats and Republicans serving similar counties oversee similar election results, turnout, and policies. We also find that reelection is not the primary moderating force on clerks. Instead, clerks may be more likely to agree on election policies across parties than the general public and selecting different election policies may only modestly affect outcomes. While we cannot rule out small effects that nevertheless tip close elections, our results imply that clerks are not typically and noticeably advantaging their preferred party.

Since 2010, independent expenditures have grown as a source of spending in American elections. A large and growing portion comes from “dark money” groups—political nonprofits whose terms of incorporation allow them to partially obscure their sources of income. I develop a new dataset of about 2,350,000 tax documents released by the IRS and use it to test a new theory of political spending. I posit that pathways for anonymous giving allowed interest groups to form new networks and create new pathways for money into candidate races apart from established political parties. Akin to networked party organizations discovered by other scholars, these dark money networks channel money from central hubs to peripheral electioneering groups. I further show that accounting for these dark money networks makes previously peripheral nodes more important to the larger network and diminishes the primacy of party affiliated organizations in funneling money into candidate races.