There is a growing recognition that the state is not the sole provider of “local public goods” such as water and education in the developing world. Mainstream approaches to the study of local public goods provision, however, have yet to incorporate these insights. We offer a descriptive typology of hybrid local public goods regimes, or systems in which both state and non-state actors contribute to provision. It emphasizes two dimensions: the type of state involvement (direct versus indirect provision), and the degree of formal state penetration. The politics of producing local public goods, we argue, takes on distinct forms in each cell. The framework allows scholars to develop more accurate and precise explanations of variation in service quality and access, and to choose more appropriate outcome measures. We illustrate the utility of this framework by analyzing distinct hybrid regimes for water and sanitation, and mass transit in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Over the last decade, organized criminal violence has reached unprecedented levels and has caused as much violent death globally as direct armed conflict. Nonetheless, the study of organized crime in political science remains limited because these organizations and their violence are not viewed as political. Building on recent innovations in the study of armed conflict, I argue that organized criminal violence should no longer be segregated from related forms of organized violence and incorporated within the political violence literature. While criminal organizations do not seek to replace or break away from the state, they have increasingly engaged in the politics of the state through the accumulation of the means of violence itself. Like other non-state armed groups, they have developed variously collaborative and competitive relationships with the state that have produced heightened levels of violence in many contexts and allowed these organizations to gather significant political authority. I propose a simple conceptual typology for incorporating the study of these organizations into the political violence literature and suggest several areas of future inquiry that will illuminate the relationship between violence and politics more generally.

Comparative research on Latin American welfare states recently has focused on the extension of non-contributory benefits to those outside the formal labor market. This extension of benefits constitutes a major break from past exclusionary welfare regimes. Yet there also are substantial areas of continuity, especially in the contributory social-insurance system that absorbs most of welfare budgets. We develop here a framework for studying changes in Latin American welfare states that reconciles these trends. We argue that Latin American governments enjoyed an “easy” stage of welfare expansions in the 2000s, characterized by distinct political coalitions. Bottom-targeted benefits could be layered on top of existing programs and provided to wide segments of the population. But many Latin American governments are nearing the exhaustion of this social-policy model. We explore policy and coalitional challenges that hinder moves to “hard” redistribution with case studies of unemployment insurance in Chile and housing in Colombia.

The ISIS videos staging the executions of James Foley and Steven Sotloff are usually understood as devices to deter, recruit, and “sow terror.” Left unanswered are questions about how these videos work; to whom they are addressed; and what about them can so continuously bring new audiences into existence. The evident durability of ISIS despite the imminent defeat of its state, coupled with the political impact of these particular videos, make these questions unusually urgent. Complete answers require analysis of the most understudied aspect of the videos that also happens to be vastly understudied in US political science: the visual mode of the violence. Approaching these videos as visual texts in need of close reading shows that they are, among other things, enactments of “retaliatory humiliation” (defined by Islamists) that perform and produce an inversion of power in two registers. It symbolically converts the public abjection of Foley and Sotloff by the Islamist executioner into an enactment of ISIS’ invincibility and a demonstration of American impotence. It also aims to transpose the roles between the US, symbolically refigured as mass terrorist, failed sovereign, and rogue state, and ISIS, now repositioned as legitimate, invincible sovereign. Such rhetorical practices seek to actually constitute their audiences through the very visual and visceral power of their address. The affective power of this address is then extended and intensified by the temporality that conditions it—what I call digital time. Digital time has rendered increasingly rare ordinary moments of pause between rapid and repetitive cycles of reception and reaction—moments necessary for even a small measure of distance. The result is a sensibility, long in gestation but especially of this time, habituated to thinking less and feeling more, to quick response over deliberative action.

Regions of exception play a critical role in contemporary world politics: they are sites of civil conflict, economic backwardness, secessionist movements, opposition party support, and challenges to contemporary national projects. I argue in this article that the mainstream methodological language for understanding subnational politics renders such important cases illegible precisely because of these regions’ distinct histories and social structures. Using case materials drawn from contemporary Southeast Asia, I illustrate how to conceptualize regions of exception as representing particular tensions between the insights from comparative politics and area studies, with challenges for a purist view of causal inference in political science. Recognizing the challenges presented by regions of exception will help political scientists to better grasp key issues in contemporary world politics.

Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of American politics. Many observers have pinned hopes on institutional reforms to reinvigorate the political center. The Top Two primary is one of the most interesting and closely-watched of these reforms: a radically open primary system that removes much of the formal role for parties in the primary election and even allows for two candidates of the same party to face each other in the fall. Here we leverage the adoption of the Top Two in California and Washington to explore the reform’s effects on legislator behavior. We find an inconsistent effect since the reform was adopted in these two states. The evidence for post-reform moderation is stronger in California than in Washington, but some of this stronger effect appears to stem from a contemporaneous policy change—district lines drawn by an independent redistricting commission—while still more might have emerged from a change in term limits that was also adopted at the same time. The results validate some claims made by reformers, but question others, and their magnitude casts some doubt on the potential for institutions to reverse the polarization trend.

It is widely assumed that the Supreme Court of the United States has established supremacy over contested constitutional questions, with the power to make final determinations of constitutional meaning. Since the 1960s, most scholars have assumed that legislatures and courts are engaged in a power struggle in which countermajoritarian courts can assert their will over majoritarian legislatures. More recently, a new generation of scholarship has demonstrated that judicial power often expands as a result of the willful empowerment of the judiciary by actors in other branches. Most scholars working with the latter framework, however, do not dispute that the United States has a regime of judicial supremacy—they simply see the political empowerment of courts as an explanation for why judicial supremacy has emerged despite the initially weak position of the judiciary. I argue that the insights of the political empowerment literature should be pressed further. It makes little sense to use the general label “judicial supremacy” for a system in which judicial power remains dependent on choices made by other political actors. Examining several cases that are generally seen as canonical examples of assertions of judicial supremacy, I find that courts were unable to settle constitutional debates, and in addition often either were unable to achieve their policy aims or did not actually require other political actors to do anything. The logic of new empirical findings about the sources of judicial power should compel scholars to question whether aggressive assertions of supremacy in judicial opinions are in fact accurate descriptions of how judicial power functions in the United States.