Democracy is weakened when citizens and elites do not criticize actions or actors that undermine its principles. Yet this study documents a widespread pattern of partisan rationalization in how elites and the public evaluate democratic performance in Latin America. Survey data show that those whose party controls the presidency consistently express positive evaluations of the current state of democratic competition and institutions even when democracy in their country is weak. This pattern emerges in both mass survey data and among elected elites. These data have a worrying implication: if only the political opposition is willing to publicly acknowledge and sound the alarm when democracy is under attack, public pressure to protect democracy is likely to be dramatically reduced.

The article proposes the notion of emotional attrition to capture the process through which activists working in high-risk environments may develop a lasting state of emotional exhaustion caused by protracted exposure to adversarial conditions. Combining insights from clinical psychology and the sociology of emotions, it outlines a novel framework to understand the relationship between activism, emotions, and disengagement. We argue that activists can develop an emotional state characterized by dispiriting emotions and disengaging attitudes that affect their well-being and ability to sustain their activism. This argument is grounded on an in-depth analysis of more than 130 interviews with local human rights activists in Colombia, Kenya, and Indonesia. By examining their experiences and pressures in relation to the arena of repression, their immediate social circle, and the broader sociopolitical and cultural context, we shed light on the complex intersections between activists’ emotional challenges and the range of contextual and strategic factors shaping their work and lives.

Political scientists working on clientelism have become interested in the relationships between brokers and the politicians and parties for whom they work. In most of this research, brokers are seen as inherently disloyal and normally act against the interests of their patrons, unless monitoring efforts are enacted. In contrast, we argue that territorial brokers have strong incentives to construct long-term, dependent relationships with their patrons, which diminishes the likelihood of cheating, while their patrons also wish to maintain durable ties with brokers to hold an assured voter base. We argue that politicians prefer brokers who have a good reputation for providing their voters with goods and assuring their votes. Still, sometimes brokers go rogue and cheat on their bosses. This study, which is based on more than fifty in-depth interviews with both local politicians and brokers in Mexico City, examines the conditions under which brokers remain loyal and those that promote cheating. We identify two factors that explain this variation—electoral competitiveness and the level of resource autonomy between brokers and politicians. Non-autonomous brokers working under conditions of low competition tend to have high probabilities of remaining loyal, while independent brokers working under high competitiveness will often resort to cheating.

Institutional reforms often diverge from substantive problems and societal demands that originally prompted reform, raising questions about democratic responsiveness. Such reform gaps are prevalent in policing, wherein some police forces improve capacity and performance, while extrajudicial violence persists. I argue that police evade pressure for reform through strategic policy substitution, pressuring politicians to replace reforms that threaten bureaucratic autonomy with favorable reforms that preserve it. I describe how police act as veto players, thwarting high-threat structural and oversight reforms demanded by advocates to address violence and corruption by enacting low-threat operational and marginal reforms. Drawing on evidence from Colombia and Brazil, I demonstrate that operational reforms, (e.g., body-worn cameras and community policing) preferred by police can produce constrained institutional change. Such reforms may improve performance, but by preserving bureaucratic autonomy, they increase the police’s structural power and ability to resist future structural reforms, complicating efforts to address police violence.

Calculations of the electoral effects of incorporating new voters and beliefs on how inclusion alters gender hierarchies constitute two central motivations of decision makers when facing the prospect of suffrage reform. In contrast to the dominant electoral approach, by focusing on the case of early (before World War II) women’s suffrage in Latin America, I show that both these motivations are necessary and need to align for reform to occur. To explain the (mis)alignment of electoral calculations and social order concerns in Latin America, I consider the region’s historical oligarchic–anti-oligarchic cleavage structure, which is rooted in overlapping class and religious divisions. In most cases, this cleavage produced contradictory motivations and led actors to block women’s enfranchisement. Only cases of weak cleavages or low politicization of the issue had early reform. To illustrate the argument, this article uses process tracing to analyze Uruguay and Ecuador as successful early reformers and Peru as a negative case.

Who should have rights to territory? Dominant political theories hold that either individuals or state-based groups (states, nations, or state-based civic peoples) have foundational territorial rights. However, they cannot accommodate some Indigenous peoples’ claims that the land should be subject neither to private ownership nor to sovereign state control. Given these claims, some scholars have recently revised these theories to mediate between state jurisdiction and private property. But those revisions have thus far neglected the views of Indigenous peoples who did not experience Anglo-American settler colonialism. This article therefore examines contemporary territorial rights theories in light of the experience of colonial Spanish America. Using sixteenth-century documents in which Indigenous communities conceptualized and asserted their rights to territory, historical evidence of political struggles between these communities and the colonial state, and interpretations of colonial legal thinkers from the seventeenth century (particularly Juan de Solórzano Pereira), I argue that, in addition to individuals and state-based groups, we should consider another subject of territorial rights: pueblos, or grounded communities.

This article develops W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism to illustrate the entanglement of popular sovereignty and empire through an excessive form of western self-determination and theorizes how features of this formation remain today. Democratic despotism implies that, in western democracies at the turn of the twentieth century, popular sovereignty was an impulse to partake of the wealth and resources obtained by empire. Western democracies issued a claim to determine themselves (democratically) and others (despotically), in what I call “self-and-other-determination.” I frame the question of imperial democracy within the literature on empire and racial capitalism and the writings of Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman to conceptualize how racial affective attachments allow citizens past and present to restrict democratic concern to a limited community, whose wealth relies on the imperial exploitation of racialized others. I discuss the absence of these questions in the literature on self-determination and reflect on the implications of my framework for the contemporary rise of right-wing populism.

In highly oppressive environments, collective resistance is very costly. Non-collective resistance constitutes a less risky alternative. Focusing on a particular oppressed setting, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I identify everyday forms of non-collective resistance: signaling, persevering, eschewing, and coping. Characterized by low visibility and targeting political goals indirectly, these activities have not yet been recognized as forms of resistance. However, they constitute important resistance efforts that deliberately obstruct oppressive regimes. These efforts show that individuals who are not visibly resisting their rulers cannot be assumed to be loyal or to suffer from a barrier of fear, as often suggested by theories in politics. They also offer an important addition to theories that identify violence as a common response to oppression, suggesting that peaceful non-collective activities constitute an everyday alternative.

Recent scholarship on the role of national party organizations in American politics—specifically, the Democratic and Republican National Committees—has argued that political science research has thus far undervalued the importance of these organizations. These studies have noted the importance that party leaders—including presidents, Congressional leaders, and governors—place on the national committees’ role in shaping a party brand. Notably, these studies are all qualitative historical accounts—perhaps because finding consistent quantitative data from within the DNC and RNC across time is complicated due to limitations in access to archival resources across both parties and time. I present a new quantitative data set measuring DNC and RNC activity on the basis of an external source: New York Times coverage of national committee activity in the period 1953–2012. I use this data to test the claim that, while “party branding” is a core national committee goal, the DNC and RNC do not consistently engage in it. I find that monthly New York Times references of party branding operations decline for parties that hold the White House. Meanwhile, coverage of other service operations does not decline, suggesting committees step back their branding role when their party has control of the executive branch of the federal government.

Torture critics have offered two types of arguments in the hope of swaying public opinion against torture: A pragmatic (consequentialist) argument that “torture doesn’t work” and a moral (deontological) argument about the immorality and cruelty of torture. I present findings from two survey experiments about public support for torture among U.S. adults. The great majority of the respondents in these surveys did not endorse pragmatic arguments. They believed that torture was a quick and effective means of extracting information from detainees who had information about terror attacks. Respondents were unpersuaded by the suggestion that evidence extracted by means of torture might be fragmentary, outdated, or merely corroborative. However, when respondents were informed about the protracted nature of torture, which often requires weeks or months of interrogation before yielding results, their support for torture was lower by 14% in one survey and by 30% in a second survey. Survey participants refused to endorse prolonged torture not because they perceived torture to be ineffective, but because they felt that prolonged torture was cruel. Torture critics would be well advised to steer away from less persuasive arguments about torture inefficacy and instead confront audiences with sobering truths about the cruelty of torture.

Pre-analysis plans (PAPs) have been championed as a solution to the problem of research credibility, but without any evidence that PAPs actually bolster the credibility of research. We analyze a representative sample of 195 PAPs registered on the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and American Economic Association (AEA) registration platforms to assess whether PAPs registered in the early days of pre-registration (2011–2016) were sufficiently clear, precise, and comprehensive to achieve their objective of preventing “fishing” and reducing the scope for post-hoc adjustment of research hypotheses. We also analyze a subset of ninety-three PAPs from projects that resulted in publicly available papers to ascertain how faithfully they adhere to their pre-registered specifications and hypotheses. We find significant variation in the extent to which PAPs registered during this period accomplished the goals they were designed to achieve. We discuss these findings in light of both the costs and benefits of pre-registration, showing how our results speak to the various arguments that have been made in support of and against PAPs. We also highlight the norms and institutions that will need to be strengthened to augment the power of PAPs to improve research credibility and to create incentives for researchers to invest in both producing and policing them.

Congress hears more and more from everyday citizens. How do modern Congressional offices use this information to represent their constituents? Drawing on original interviews and a survey of Congressional staff, we explore how representation works in practice when new data and tools, such as databases and downscaled public opinion polls, are available. In contrast with established theories that focus on responsiveness, we show that representation is a two-way street. Congressional offices both respond to incoming constituent opinion and reach out to elicit opinions from stakeholders. Offices record correspondence into databases, identifying the most salient issues and the balance of opinion among correspondents. They tend not to use polls on policy. To understand the opinions of electorally influential constituencies, staffers also proactively reach out to stakeholders and experts in a practice we call provoked petitioning. If the Washington pressure system is a chorus, Congressional staff often serve as conductors, allowing well-resourced and organized constituents, including interest groups, to sing with the loudest voices. While Congress has some new tools and strategies for representation, its modern practices still reinforce existing biases.

The notion that states pursue a monopoly over the use of force rings increasingly hollow. From vigilantes that patrol the United States’ southern border, to thugs for hire in China, states are characterized by non-state violent actors. These trends are more pronounced in comparatively lower-capacity states. Employing the concept of “security assemblages,” I propose that it is crucial to consider historically embedded relations among violent actors and institutions in order to understand their socio-political role and implications for state authority. This approach offers three insights: first, in low-capacity states, violence is not zero-sum. Rather, it is assembled among diverse actors, which each have historically embedded comparative advantages. Second, therefore, state efforts to monopolize violence should be taken as an empirical question rather than an assumption grounding analysis. Third, relationships between violent actors occur in thick institutional environments, meaning that violent actors, including state actors and institutions, often must act under significant constraints. To illustrate these points, I conduct a mixed-methods nested study of vigilantes in Uganda, finding that vigilantes are more common where other authorities are present, and are more helpful when other authorities are also more helpful. Focusing on dynamics between vigilantes and police, I pinpoint their historically distinct roles: the police were established as a colonial-era institution to suppress political dissent, while vigilantes have long been socially embedded actors tasked with everyday security provision. Thus, in this case, police and vigilantes are not substitutes; instead they play distinct and complementary roles.

The growth of inequality over the past half century is closely connected to the rise of neoliberal policies and institutions, the latter of which shield capital from state actions that might limit wealth accumulation. Economic nationalism since the global financial crisis has slowed or even reversed this, yet this same era has seen the emergence of a new form of instrument in the neoliberal mold, in a stronghold of state sovereignty: taxation. Under mandatory binding tax arbitration, states cede sovereignty over the interpretation of international tax agreements to panels of transnational tax adjudicators. Focusing on the pivotal role of the United States, we use historical documents, including from the congressional archive and interviews with key actors to ask why tax arbitration emerged late in the neoliberal era, and at a counterintuitive time. We demonstrate that this outcome is the result of instrumental business power driving a process of incremental change through layering, to overcome states’ preference to retain sovereignty. This experience sheds light on the historically structured ways that business power constrains sovereignty in an era of high inequality.

The recent surge of global populism has led many intellectuals to call for new forms of democratic elitism. Yet research into the sources of support for political organizations and regimes predicts that suppressing opportunities for public participation will likely exacerbate antisystem political tendencies. We cite the recent protests in Chile, a nation that has employed democratic elitism more effectively than perhaps any other, as illustrative of the eventual consequences of suppressing voice. Our research indicates that empowering citizens through vibrant parties and continuous democracy is the best way to avoid populist impulses and waves of contentious politics.

James Johnson argues that formal models are best conceived as fables which provide lessons about empirical phenomena and the “standard rationale” of testing model predictions fails. Without justifying the “standard rationale” as such, we argue that models produce scientific predictions. These predictions come at different levels or granularity of description and in different forms each bearing some degree of uncertainty, but still give conditions for the existence of political phenomena. Models and their predictions require projection onto the world, and that projection involves interpretation. Tests utilize inference to the best explanation, and it is the conceptual or theoretical aspect of models that make them explanatory. We discuss the extent to which our characterisation of models and their explanatory form versus that of Johnson constitutes a verbal or substantive dispute.

Day to day governance of civilians is not solely the purview of states. Rulemaking, rule-enforcing, and goods and services provision are central components of governance, yet in many instances it is non-state actors who assume these functions. We advance the study of governance by rebel groups engaged in armed confrontation against state governments. We identify five key areas of research where the field of rebel governance is best poised to go: the study of multi-level governance, rebel use of self-constraining or hand-tying behaviors, synergy between institutional form and domestic legitimacy, the nuanced role of territorial control in governance, and short- and longer-term impacts of rebel governance on post-conflict outcomes. In each area, we draw attention to the lessons already learned, interrogate key assumptions in existing work, raise arguments that remain under- or uninvestigated, and focus on the next frontier in the exploration of rebel governance. Learning more about the ways that rebel groups govern informs our understanding of armed conflict and its resolution, as well as provides broader lessons about the study of governance.

In political scientists’ drive to examine causal mechanisms, qualitative expert interviews have an important role to play. This is particularly true for the analysis of complex decision-making processes, where there is a dearth of data, and for linking macro and micro levels of analysis. The paper offers suggestions for making the most effective and reflective use of qualitative expert interviews. It advocates an encompassing, knowledge-based understanding of experts and argues for the incorporation of both “inside” and “outside” experts, meaning those that make and those that analyze political decisions, into an integrated analytical framework. It puts forward concrete advice addressing this technique’s inherent challenges of selecting experts, experts’ personal biases, and the systematic capturing of evidence. Finally, the article suggests that the combination of expert interviews, experimental methods, and online interviewing can meaningfully strengthen the evidentiary value of this important data collection technique.

Linked fate, the concept introduced by Dawson almost three decades ago, reoriented the study of racism and political behavior in the United States. The scholarship traditionally had focused on the racial psychology of whites and how racism seeps into their political views and actions. Dawson proposed the Black utility heuristic theory and linked fate, its associated measure, to investigate the political behavior of Blacks, the minority group most harmed by racism. Since then, linked fate has become a ubiquitous variable of interest in research on minority group politics. Yet the research program around linked fate is due for some extension. Most studies gloss over the fact that the Black utility heuristic theory is historically and socially conditional. We call for bringing elite-level agency and group-level social practices back into the literature to clarify the macro- and meso-level conditions under which a group’s racial status translates into linked fate at the individual level. Greater inquiry into these dynamics is not only warranted but also has broad implications for the research on racial and ethnic politics.