Is America in a period of democratic decline? I argue that there is an urgent need to consider the United States in comparative perspective, and that doing so is necessary to contextualize and understand the quality of American democracy. I describe two approaches to comparing the United States: the first shows how the United States stacks up to other countries, while the second uses the theories and tools of comparative politics to examine relationships between institutions, actors, and democratic outcomes. I then draw on research in three literatures—clientelism and corruption, capitalism and redistribution, and race and ethnic politics and American Political Development—to lay out a research agenda for closing the gap between the subfields of American and comparative politics. In doing so, I also argue for richer engagement between academics and the public sphere, as opportunities for scholars to provide commentary and analysis about contemporary politics continue to expand.

The Democrats dodged a bullet on health care in the spring of 2010, but the Senate filibuster is still with us. The 60-vote pivot, the cloture strategies, Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), the member “holds,” and the rest are as basic as anything these days to U.S. national policymaking.

In The Law of Peoples (1999), John Rawls invented a fictional Muslim state that he called Kazanistan. The genealogy of Kazanistan I offer here is the first examination of Islam in Rawls’s papers. It contributes to a critical body of work about the Muslim Question and how Euro-American thinkers construct Islam. In recent years, theorists have turned to Rawls’s papers. The archival turn, however, has neglected the last phase of Rawls’s career and his book-length attempt at thinking internationally. I address this oversight and critically examine Rawls on Islam and global politics. I historicize Rawls’s turn to Islam, Kazanistan’s late introduction, and its transformations across drafts. By examining “the Kazanistan papers,” I highlight the dissonance between Rawls’s philosophical discourse on Islam and the contemporaneous geopolitics recorded in his archives. This disjuncture, I suggest, is characteristic of the logics of liberal deflection from empire and liberal “inflection” into the Muslim Question.

Violent movements in different parts of the world have employed large numbers of women fighters. I address the question of how and why so many women from diverse backgrounds join an ethnic insurgency. Informed by an intersectional approach, I suggest that when gender and ethnic inequalities overlap, an ethnic insurgency promising gender emancipation would have strong appeal among women. At the same time, the intersection of class and gender shapes distinctive patterns of mobilization among women of an ethnic minority. In particular, uneducated women with lower class backgrounds join the movement because it provides them with the most viable way out of patriarchal relations. I employ a multi-method research design to study a paradigmatic case of women in arms, the Kurdish insurgency. I use an original large dataset containing information about more than 9,000 militants, from extensive fieldwork entailing dozens of in-depth interviews, and an archival study of sources in primary languages. My findings reveal the effects of unequal relationships based on ethnicity, gender, and class on violent political mobilization and the ambivalent relationship between women’s political agency and empowerment.

We introduce an original dataset of formal political participation for over 2,000 individuals included in the Forbes Billionaires List. We find that billionaire politicians are a surprisingly common phenomenon: Over 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office. Even compared to other elite groups known for producing politicians from their ranks, this is a high rate of political participation. Moreover, billionaires focus their political ambitions on influential positions, have a strong track record of winning elections, and lean to the right ideologically. We also document substantial cross-national variation: a country’s number of billionaire politicians is not simply a product of its total number of billionaires, but is instead related to regime type. Specifically, billionaires formally enter the political sphere at a much higher rate in autocracies than in democracies. We conclude by discussing the normative implications of our findings and outlining a new research agenda on billionaire politicians.

AIDS first manifested itself in the early 1980s as an apparent “gay disease.” Cases soon appeared outside the industrialized west and among other communities. Given HIV's modes of transmission, sex workers, drug injectors, and those who engaged in unprotected nonmonogamous sex were at higher risk, and the political economy of the virus was such that communities on domestic as well as international margins had the highest prevalence. Governments were slow to respond seriously. In their place, segments of the gay and lesbian community united by the late 1980s to educate, protect, and care for themselves, even in countries in which cases of homosexual transmission comprise a relatively small proportion of infections. At times, governments' abdication of responsibility left those nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) less closely-scrutinized than others—most notable where associational life is generally subject to illiberal controls—leaving them relatively free to advance explicit or implicit community-building among their marginalized constituencies. Though governments and media gained interest as heterosexual transmission rates rose, both still neglected the highest-risk groups. Importantly, the perspectives, perceived constituencies, and approaches of HIV/AIDS-related NGOs may diverge sharply from those of public health authorities, with unambiguous consequences in terms of the relative empowerment, receptivity to messages, and, ultimately, behaviors of target communities.Meredith L. Weiss is a Research Fellow at East-West Center Washington ([email protected]). Preliminary research for this project was supported by a DePaul University faculty research grant.

Parties can be a crucial to democratic function but not all parties or party systems are democratic. Some parties are fully competitive within a pluralist system while others, notably hegemonic parties, are antithetical to democracy. Between competitive, pluralist party systems and hegemonic party systems lie predominant party systems. These are compatible with democracy where democracy is fully consolidated but inhibit democratic consolidation in settings with an authoritarian history or where the rule of law is incomplete. The effect of predominant parties in unconsolidated democracies has not been fully studied in comparative context. I scrutinize this problem in Argentina, which has followed an electoral calendar for two decades, but lacks a fully pluralist system of power-sharing among two nationally-competitive parties. The authoritarian background of Peronism, of Argentina itself and the limited competitive potential of the Radical Party have curtailed democratic development. The article underscores the seriousness of Argentina's dilemma by contrasting its situation with Democratic Party predominance in the United States Deep South in the 1940s. The comparison of democratic development in an older democracy with that of a newer democracy illustrates that some of the processes of consolidation are similar and that the experience of older democracies may indicate possible solutions for newer democracies.

On June 5, 1981, an obscure public health bulletin published by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta first reported that five young men—“all active homosexuals”—had contracted a very rare pneumonia, the cause of which was entirely unknown. The report went on to note that two of the five men had died and that the other three were very ill. These were the first five reported cases in the United States of a deadly disease soon to be known around the world as acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The public health and scientific communities have since learned that cases of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) were also emerging simultaneously in Africa, Europe, and other parts of North America, but the 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the first scientific documentation of HIV, marked the beginning of a global public health crisis. And it did so in ways that would shape the form and content of political discourse and dissent for decades to come.Andrea Densham, Principle of Densham Consulting in Chicago, is a health policy advocate and former health policymaker ([email protected]). She has written on social movements and health policy as they relate to LGBT health, HIV, and breast cancer.

I offer a new perspective on the history of American democratization, tracing the evolution of conflict over black suffrage from the disenfranchisements of the early Republic to efforts to secure equal voting rights in the pre-Civil War era. I draw on case studies and new data on state politics to substantially expand our descriptive understanding of the ideological connotations of African American political rights. In contrast to existing literature, this study identifies a transformation in how positions on black suffrage polarized along party lines. It also offers a new interpretation for this racial realignment, presenting evidence that legislators responded less to the electoral consequences of black voting than to efforts of party leaders and social movements to frame its denial as necessary for national unity, a pragmatic accommodation to racist public opinion, or as complicity in slavery and a violation of republicanism. Integrating earlier periods of disenfranchisement and antislavery activism recasts standard party-driven accounts of Reconstruction-era enfranchisements as the culmination of a long process of biracial social movement organizing, enriching our understanding of how both electoral and programmatic concerns contribute to suffrage reforms and of the process by which conflict over citizenship has at times become a central cleavage in American politics.

During the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. policymakers adopted draconian criminal justice polices including widespread use of extremely long sentences, including life without parole. The country is now coming to face the consequences of these policies: a new class of geriatric prisoners posing little threat to public safety as they age into their seventies and beyond. Using a perspective drawn from bounded rationality, framing, and agenda-setting, we recount how policymakers adopted these policies, with key blind spots relating to obvious consequences of these harsh laws. We show how political leaders can over-respond to a perceived public policy crisis, particularly when powerful frames of race, fear, and dehumanization come to dominate the public discourse. We show how these trends are radically changing the demographics and needs of prison populations through a chronological review, mathematical simulation of the prison population, review of statistics about prison population, and personal stories illustrating these themes drawn from inside prison.

M.K. Gandhi was the undisputed leader of India's struggle for independence. Yet his vision for postcolonial India was completely marginalized at the moment of decolonization. The article takes this seemingly paradoxical juncture as the vantage point from which to offer a critique of Gandhi's political thought and more broadly an analysis of the shift from anticolonial movements to postcolonial rule. Through the voices of Gandhi's two most significant contemporary critics—B.R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru—the article shows how his ideas failed to either inspire the struggle of the ruled (Ambedkar), or address the anxieties of the would-be rulers (Nehru). Gandhi's vision for a postcolonial India persisted within the conceptual constellation of negating colonial modernity, rather than the historical possibilities of postcolonial futures. These predicaments provide an opportunity to analyze the persistence of modern western political imaginaries in the decolonized world. Not through mere assertions of continuity or mimicry, but rather through the concrete struggles, aspirations, and anxieties that constituted the strands of those transitional moments.

The collapses of the interwar and Bretton Woods monetary regimes have been understood as evidence that international monetary regimes fail when sudden economic shocks destabilize the political coalitions or shared ideas underpinning them. But while these histories are important, other monetary regimes, such as the Sterling Area and Latin Union, disintegrated over long periods of time. If exogenous shocks do not account for varied patterns of destabilization, what does? Using the tools of comparative-historical analysis, I argue that these patterns are the result of strategic choices made by hegemonic powers, choices that are in turn governed by the historical-structural foundations of regimes. From these foundations emerge alternative leadership strategies and membership behaviors responsible for endogenous macro-institutional effects that drive the observed regime trajectories. Regime leaders may establish visibly unequal collective arrangements that maintain their positions but leave a system vulnerable to overt internal resistance and sudden breakdown. Or leaders may reject collective arrangements in order to secretly discriminate among members, slowly building dysfunction into a system, driving its gradual abandonment by members and institutional decline. The analysis both suggests that more equal state power may improve long-run regime performance, and also locates structural vulnerabilities in contemporary regimes.

Although James Madison is best known for the views he expressed in the Federalist, as he gained greater experience in the new American political system he rejected some of these early views and increasingly emphasized four propositions: (1) the greatest threat in the American republic comes from a minority, not the majority; (2) to protect their rights from minority factions, members of the majority faction must organize their own political party; (3) the danger that majorities might threaten property rights could be overcome by enabling a majority of citizens to own property, a feasible solution in America; and (4) in a republic, majorities must be allowed to prevail. Even Madison's post-1787 constitutional views, however, were flawed in at least three serious ways: (1) as an empirical proposition, his conjecture that increased size reduces the danger of factionalism is contradicted by subsequent experience; (2) in his conception of basic rights, Madison excluded more than half the adult population: women, African Americans, and American Indians; and (3) he actively supported the provision in the Constitution that gave to slave states an increase in representatives amounting to three-fifths of the slave population.Robert A. Dahl is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]). A past president of the American Political Science Association, his numerous publications include A Preface to Democratic Theory; Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City; Democracy and Its Critics; and How Democratic is the American Constitution? The author expresses his appreciation to the Political Science Departments of the University of Indiana and Stanford University for providing opportunities to offer a lecture on the subject of this essay and to profit from the discussions that followed. Thanks also to Professors Jack Rakove, Richard Mathews, and Lyman T. Sargent for their helpful criticisms and suggestions on a draft of this paper.

This article introduces the concept of “hijacked victimhood” as a form of strategically leveraging victimhood narratives. It is a subset of strategic victimhood, which is a relatively common communicative strategy whereby groups claim victimhood status in contests over power and legitimacy. Political leaders who use the strategy of hijacked victimhood present dominant groups as in danger, as current or future victims, and in need of protection (especially by the crafter of the narrative) from oppressive forces consisting of—or indirectly representing—marginalized and subaltern groups. In the process, leaders hijacking victimhood blunt the rights-based claims of such groups. Analyzing Viktor Orbán’s and Donald Trump’s elite rhetoric in Hungary and the United States, respectively, we inductively document varieties of hijacked victimhood in their political communication, showing how Orbán leverages historical suffering and resistance while Trump constructs economic and value-based harms for dominant groups. Making both conceptual and empirical contributions, we argue that at the heart of hijacked victimhood is a reversal of the victimizer–victim dichotomy, a new portrayal of moral orders, a teleological ordering of past and future harms, and a mobilization of security threats—all used to preserve or expand a dominant group’s power.