As a result of the 1996 reforms, the number of welfare recipients has declined precipitously, and the reform effort has been heralded a “success.” However, a growing body of research indicates racial disparities in client treatment and outcomes under welfare reform. These findings have inaugurated a debate about interpreting racial disparities under welfare reform and determining what corrective action, if any, is necessary. Some analysts contend that welfare reform, as a post–civil rights era, racially neutral public policy, can legitimately have differential outcomes for different racial groups. I argue that this claim must be countered with a new poverty research that goes beyond the limits of mainstream work by placing welfare reform in its historical and social context, thereby providing a more robust explanation of how and to what effect welfare reform is race-biased. I show how welfare reform contributes to what Loic Wacquant calls “racemaking” by being part of a racial policy regime that has developed from past policy but reinforces current racial inequalities.Sanford F. Schram teaches social theory and policy in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College ([email protected]). He is the author of Praxis for the Poor, After Welfare, and Words of Welfare, which won APSA's Michael Harrington Award in 1996. His Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization is forthcoming. The author thanks Bruce Baum, Wesley Bryant, Tia Burroughs, Anne Dalke, Linda Dennard, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Richard Fording, Burnee Forsythe, Jocelyn Frye, Margaret Henderson, Jennifer Hochschild, Tallese Johnson, Vicki Lens, Amy McLaughlin, Anne Norton, Frances Fox Piven, Melania Popa, Dorit Roer, Corey Shdaimah, Roland Stahl, Roni Strier, Carl Swidorski, Tom Vartanian, Dvora Yanow, Iris Marion Young, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Joe Soss's invaluable suggestions were critical to the completion of this article.

Using individual-level data from the 2008 European Social Survey and country-level health care financing data we analyze the influence of private financing of health care on political trust in twenty-five European countries. Net of known predictors of trust at the individual and country level, we find that trust in government is significantly lower where the health system is financed to a greater degree by private sources. This negative relationship occurs because in countries with more private financing, low-income citizens perceive themselves to be at greater risk for not receiving needed health care. This perception of risk is associated with more negative evaluations of the performance of the health care system, which in turn is associated with less trust in government. When states do less to ensure the basic health care needs of members of society who are at greatest risk, these citizens may come to place less trust in government institutions. Hence, the increasing pressure on European governments to privatize the financing of health care in the wake of the financial crisis that is also characterized by growing income inequality threatens to make citizens trust government less. At the same time, implementation of the Affordable Care Act could signal a renaissance for political trust in the United States, if a growing role in the health care system is accompanied by a redistribution of risk.

In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, many American private-sector employers now have the legal right to recruit their workers into politics and to fire or discipline employees who refuse to participate. How many firms and workers are engaged in this kind of political recruitment and why? And how have the opportunities for the political recruitment of workers by their employers changed over time? Drawing on national surveys of top corporate managers and workers, as well as a review of the legal literature, I provide initial answers to these questions and illustrate the implications of employer political recruitment for a range of substantive and normative issues in American politics. My findings invite further research and discussion about this feature of the American workplace and its effects on politics and policy.

We investigate gender disparities in status construction in American political science, focusing on three questions: 1) Do institutions within the discipline of political science—including departments, APSA, editorial boards, and academic honor societies–reflect or remedy gender disparities that exist in many forms of recognition, including appointments to top leadership and citations? 2) Are institutions with centralized and accountable appointment mechanisms less gender skewed compared to networked and decentralized selection processes where implicit bias may go unchecked? 3) Does leaning in help? Does the effort of women to publish and to claim a seat at leadership tables increase the likelihood that higher-level status positions will follow? We find that the distribution of highest-status positions is still gender skewed, that women are over-represented in positions that involve more service than prestige, that “leaning in” by serving as section chair, on editorial boards, or on academic councils is not necessarily a gateway to higher-status appointments, and that accountability promotes greater gender parity. The study raises questions about the goal of gender parity when it comes to lower-status service, and about the types of contributions our discipline rewards.

Why do petitions flourish when they are often denied if not ignored by the sovereigns who receive them? When activists seek to build political organizations in network-rich but information-poor environments, petitioning as institutional technology facilitates recruitment. A petition’s signatory list identifies and locates individuals sympathetic to its prayer and expresses to other citizens who and how many agree with the prayer. Three historical moments—the explosion of antislavery petitioning in the antebellum United States, the emergence of Protestantism in sixteenth-century France, and England’s suppression of petitioning after the Restoration Settlement of 1660—provide vivid demonstrations of the theory. A recruitment-based theory implies that petition drives mobilize as much as they express, that well-established groups and parties petition less frequently, and that the most important readers of a petition are those asked to sign it. The petition’s recruitment function complements, but also transforms, its function of messaging the sovereign. Contemporary digital petitioning both routinizes and takes its force from the petition’s embedded recruitment technology.

What, if anything, is problematic about the involvement of celebrities in democratic politics? While a number of theorists have criticized celebrity involvement in politics, none so far have examined this issue using the tools of social epistemology, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices, and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. We will draw on these resources to investigate the issue of celebrity involvement in politics, specifically as this involvement relates to democratic theory and its implications for democratic practice. We will argue that an important and underexplored form of power, which we will call epistemic power, can explain one important way in which celebrity involvement in politics is problematic. This is because unchecked uses and unwarranted allocations of epistemic power, which celebrities tend to enjoy, threaten the legitimacy of existing democracies and raise important questions regarding core commitments of deliberative, epistemic, and plebiscitary models of democratic theory. We will finish by suggesting directions that democratic theorists could pursue when attempting to address some of these problems.

Majority leaders of the contemporary Congress preside over parties that are more cohesive than at any point in the modern era, and power has been centralized in party leadership offices. Do today’s majority parties succeed in enacting their legislative agendas to a greater extent than the less-cohesive parties of earlier eras? To address this question, we examine votes on all laws enacted from 1973–2016, as well as on the subset of landmark laws identified by Mayhew. In addition, we analyze the efforts of congressional majority parties to pass their agendas from 1985 to 2016. We find that enacting coalitions in recent congresses are nearly as bipartisan as they were in the 1970s. Most laws, including landmark enactments, continue to garner substantial bipartisan support. Furthermore, majority parties have not gotten better at passing their legislative programs. Contemporary congressional majorities actually fail on their agenda items at somewhat higher rates than the less-cohesive majority parties of the 1980s and 1990s. When majority parties succeed on their agenda priorities, they usually do so with support from a majority of the minority party in at least one chamber and with the endorsement of one or more of the minority party’s top leaders.

Contemporary writing on North African borderlands invokes the idea of a general, unregulated porosity through which small-scale informal traders of food or textiles move alongside drug smugglers and terrorists. I challenge that conception, demonstrating that the vast majority of smuggling activity is in fact highly regulated through a dense network of informal institutions that determine the costs, quantity, and types of goods that can pass through certain nodes, typically segmenting licit from illicit goods.

While informal, the institutions regulating this trade are largely impersonal and contain third-party enforcement, hence providing a direct empirical challenge to common characterisations of informal institutions in political science. I argue that revisiting the characteristics associated with informal institutions, and understanding them as contingent on their political environment, can provide a new starting point for studying institutions, the politics of informality, state capacity, and the regulation of illegal economies.

For about 10 years beginning in the mid 1990s, Northern Ireland had its own women's political party. The Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC) was created by members of the women's movement to achieve “equitable and effective political participation” for women. Despite being small, marginal and short-lived, the party increased access for women in nearly all the other political parties in the system. I connect the scholarship on social movements with that on political parties by examining the impact a social movement can have through the venue of its own political party. I argue three main points. First, the success of the NIWC means political parties may be an under-employed tactic in the repertoires of contention used by social movements. Second, the way the movement had an effect as a party is under-theorized in the literature on social movements because it requires consideration of party-system variables such as competition and issue-space. Third, as an identity-based movement, the women's movement in NI construed its goal of access differently than social-movement literature typically does. This under-utilized and under-theorized tactic of movement qua party delivered gains with the potential for long-term influence over policy and cultural values. In short, the movement-party may be an effective mechanism for changing the patterns of democratic representation of marginalized groups.

The pillars of the Pax Americana are decaying. There are two critical challenges. Our interests with our closest allies have been drifting apart for decades, with increasingly serious consequences. A new populist and economic nationalist coalition has been mobilized in the United States, challenging the internationalist coalition that has prevailed at home since the second World War. These challenges are not the product of President Donald J. Trump. He is the manifestation of these challenges, not their cause. Understanding these challenges requires examining anew the role of international legitimacy and authority in world politics and recognizing that different international orders have different distributional consequences. This essay summarizes my past research on the incentives for international hierarchy, integrates the role of domestic interests into that theory, and explores the nature and role of international legitimacy in the study of world order. Part II examines the Pax Americana, and contrasts this order with those found in the Caribbean basin and Middle East. The final section outlines the changing incentives for cooperation between the United States and Europe, discusses the rise of populism in the United States, and suggests ways of addressing the current challenges to internationalism.

When and why do poor citizens expect the state to respond to their claims, and how do those expectations shape citizenship practice? Drawing on survey and qualitative research in northern India, our study reveals an expectations gap that complicates widely held views of the urban core versus the rural periphery. The urban poor residing in slums are dramatically less likely to believe that they will get a direct response from an official compared to similarly poor rural residents. Slum residents are also significantly more likely than villagers to report the presence of political brokers, who create mediated channels for claim-making. Reflecting on these patterns, we develop a place-based theory to explain sub-national variation in citizen-state engagement. We focus in the northern Indian context on three interrelated factors that shape the local terrain for citizenship practice: the greater visibility of social welfare provision in villages compared to slums; the greater depth of rural decentralization; and the greater strength of urban party organizations. Extending beyond northern India, we propose an analytical framework for the study of citizenship that examines how citizens’ local experiences of state institutions influence sub-national patterns of participation.

A growing body of research shows that women legislators outperform their male counterparts in the legislative arena, but scholars have yet to examine whether this pattern emerges in non-policy aspects of representation. We conducted an audit study of 6,000 U.S. state legislators to analyze whether women outperform or underperform men on constituency service in light of the extra effort they spend on policy. We find that women are more likely to respond to constituent requests than men, even after accounting for their heightened level of policy activity. Female legislators are the most responsive in conservative districts, where women may see the barriers to their election as especially high. We then demonstrate that our findings are not a function of staff responsiveness, legislator ideology, or responsiveness to female constituents or gender issues. The results provide additional evidence that women perform better than their male counterparts across a range of representational activities.

Does political participation make a difference for policy responsiveness, or is affluence what matters most? To examine whether participation beyond voting matters for policy representation, we analyze congruence between citizens’ policy preferences and their representatives’ roll call votes using data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. For the main policy issue for which citizens’ political engagement beyond voting enhances congruence—namely, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010—we then investigate whether this effect holds when taking citizens’ income into account. The findings show that for the ACA, constituents’ participation beyond voting is associated with increased congruence with their representatives at all levels of income, and that those with less income who are politically active beyond voting experience the largest increase in congruence. However, our findings also show that the potential of political participation and income to enhance congruence is restricted to co-partisans, and to highly partisan and salient issues.

Recent events have raised concern about potential threats to democracy within Western countries. If Western citizens who are open to authoritarian governance share a common set of political preferences, then authoritarian elites can attract mass coalitions that are willing to subvert democracy to achieve shared ideological goals. With this in mind, we explored which ideological groups are most open to authoritarian governance within Western general publics using World Values Survey data from fourteen Western democracies and three recent Latin American Public Opinion Project samples from Canada and the United States. Two key findings emerged. First, cultural conservatism was consistently associated with openness to authoritarian governance. Second, within half of the democracies studied, including all of the English-speaking ones, Western citizens holding a protection-based attitude package—combining cultural conservatism with left economic attitudes—were the most open to authoritarian governance. Within other countries, protection-based and consistently right-wing attitude packages were associated with similarly high levels of openness to authoritarian governance. We discuss implications for radical right populism and the possibility of splitting potentially undemocratic mass coalitions along economic lines.

Conceptualizing a political world “beyond black and white” is a familiar scholarly refrain, but theoretical relics of bipolarity remain. The deracialization concept, a much-discussed phenomenon in American elections, is one example. Asian American campaigns provide an interesting case for testing the utility of deracialization in multicultural urban milieus, given the overwhelming tendency for such candidates to be elected from predominantly non-Asian constituencies. Looking in depth at two successful campaigns by Vietnamese Americans in Northern and Southern California, I argue for a broadened approach that can better account for changes in the American political mosaic—namely, increases in immigration occurring in some of the country's fastest growing regions and the availability of alternative media. I call this approach toggling. In this article, I outline the toggling strategy. I conclude by considering the impact of toggling on equality in the American democratic process and suggest some directions for future research.

Conflict within and beyond the United States Senate has refocused scholarly and public attention on “advice and consent,” the constitutional provision that governs the Senate's role in confirming presidential appointments. Despite intense and salient partisan and ideological disputes about the rules of the game that govern the Senate confirmation process for judicial appointees, reformers have had little success in limiting the ability of a minority to block contentious nominees. In this paper, we explore the Senate's brush with the so-called “nuclear option” that would eliminate filibusters of judicial nominees, and evaluate competing accounts of why the Senate appears to be so impervious to significant institutional reform. The past and present politics of the nuclear option, we conclude, have broad implications for how we construct theories of institutional change.Sarah A. Binder is Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution ([email protected]). Anthony Madonna is a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University ([email protected]). Steven S. Smith is the Kate M. Gregg Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Weidenbaum Center, Washington University ([email protected]). The authors thank Stanley Bach, Richard Baker, Greg Koger, Forrest Maltzman, Elizabeth Rybicki, Eric Schickler, and Greg Wawro for helpful comments and advice.

In the spring and summer of 2020, a remarkable number of Americans participated in a remarkable number of protests in support of Black Lives Matter. How did the general public understand these protests, and where does support for the movement stand overall? We answer this question by drawing on several national surveys from 2020 and then examining the results of a framing experiment we conducted in June 2020. We structure the story we find in two parts—the partisans and the persuadables—both of whom are important to understanding public views of Black Lives Matter. Democrats and Republicans differ strongly in their views of the movement but are similar in the firmness of those views, which did not change in response to our framing experiment. Nonpartisans, in contrast, were more persuadable, though their reactions to some of our frames were conditioned by racial resentment. We conclude by setting the movement in historical context and assessing its impact, which we describe as complicated and contradictory but consequential.

Why do some ethnofederal states survive while others collapse? The puzzle is particularly stark in the case of the former Soviet Union: the multiethnic Russian Federation has managed to survive intact the transition from totalitarian rule, whereas the multiethnic USSR disintegrated. The critical distinction between the USSR and Russia lies in the design of ethnofederal institutions. The USSR contained a core ethnic region, the “Russian Republic,” a single region with a far greater population than any other in the union. This core ethnic region facilitated dual sovereignty, exacerbated the security fears of minority-group regions, and promoted the “imagining” of a Russia independent of the larger Soviet state. In place of a single core ethnic region, the Russian Federation contains 57 separate provinces. This feature of institutional design has given Russia's central government important capacities to thwart the kind of centrifugal forces that brought down the USSR. This holds important lessons for policy makers crafting federal institutions in other multiethnic countries.Henry E. Hale is an assistant professor of political science at Indiana University ([email protected]). His book on the development of a national party system in the Russian Federation will be published by Cambridge University Press. The author is indebted to many who provided helpful advice and support, including Andrew Buck, Mikhail Filippov, Edward Gibson, Yoshiko Herrera, Juliet Johnson, Pauline Jones Luong, Daniel Posner, Olga Shvetsova, Jack Snyder, Ashutosh Varshney, the anonymous reviewers of earlier drafts, and participants in the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security workshop and a seminar at the Russian and East European Center, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Pluralism has become a buzzword in International Relations. It has emerged in a number of linked literatures and has drawn the support of an unusual coalition of scholars: advocates of greater methodological diversity; those who feel that IR has degenerated into a clash of paradigmatic “-isms”; those who favor a closer relationship between academics and policy-makers; and those who wish to see greater reflexivity within the field. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no single vision of pluralism unites these scholars; they appear to be using the term in divergent ways. Accordingly, our aim is threefold. First, we wish to highlight this odd state of affairs, by placing it in disciplinary and intellectual context. Second, we distinguish between plurality—the de facto recognition that IR has become a more diverse field—and pluralism—a normative position which values that diversity, given the public vocation of social science. Finally, we lay out a more consistent understanding and defense of pluralism in those latter terms. We argue that, properly understood, pluralism entails a position of epistemological skepticism: the straightforward claim that no single knowledge system, discipline, theory, or method can claim singular access to truth.

We present a new, more transnational, networked perspective on corruption. It is premised on the importance of professional intermediaries who constitute networks facilitating cross-border illicit finance, the blurring of legal and illegal capital flows, and the globalization of the individual via multiple claims of residence and citizenship. This perspective contrasts with notions of corruption as epitomized by direct, unmediated transfers between bribe-givers and bribe-takers, disproportionately a problem of the developing world, and as bounded within national units. We argue that the professionals in major financial centers serve to lower the transaction costs of transnational corruption by senior foreign officials. Wealthy, politically powerful individuals on the margins of the law are increasingly globalized as they secure financial access, physical residence, and citizenship rights in major OECD countries. These trends are evidenced by an analysis of the main components of the relevant transnational networks: banks, shell companies, foreign real estate, and investor citizenship programs, based on extensive interviews with key informants across multiple sites.