This comment addresses the growing controversy over the effects of implicit racial messages in politics. Many scholars find evidence that these implicit messages work and that they have racializing effects. However, the biggest study to date finds that racial messages—implicit or explicit—have no effects. In this paper I conduct a thorough review of several relevant literatures in order to adjudicate between these competing claims. I find that the large study's null findings conflict with 17 public opinion experiments involving over 5,000 subjects, 2 aggregate studies, and a large social psychology literature. Using different methods, samples, and settings, these studies show that racial cues do in fact racialize opinion. I explain the large study's null results by noting that its participants perceived only small differences across messages, that racial predispositions were measured just before exposure to the ad, thereby neutralizing the effect of the ad's racial cue, and that WebTV studies such as this one have failed to provide many subjects with their assigned ad. Thus, the weight of the evidence heavily favors the racial effect of racial cues and messages. I offer several directions for future research on racial communication and politics.Tali Mendelberg is Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University ([email protected]). She is the author of The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton University Press, 2001). She wishes to thank Oleg Bespalov and Dan Cassino for research assistance, Adam Berinsky, Claudine Gay, Martin Gilens, Vince Hutchings, Jon Krosnick, Shawn Rosenberg, and Nick Valentino for helpful feedback, and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for research support.

I'm pleased to report that the health of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and of political science as a discipline, is excellent.

In recent years, Central and Eastern Europe have furnished several examples of illiberalism in power. The most prominent and consequential cases are Fidesz, which has ruled in Hungary since 2010, and Law and Justice (PiS), which has ruled in Poland since 2015. In both cases, illiberal governments have embarked upon an extensive project of political reform aimed at dismantling the liberal-democratic order. We examine the nature, scope, and consequences of these processes of autocratisation. We first argue that illiberal changes are ideologically founded and identify how both populism and nativism figure in the policymaking of illiberals in power. We then show how these practices emerge from a common “illiberal playbook”—a paradigm of policy change comprising forms of forging, bending, and breaking—and elaborate on the notion that illiberal governments are using legalism to kill liberalism. The fine-grained approach that we employ allows us to distinguish between different rationales and gradations of illiberal policymaking, and assess their implications for the rule of law, executive power, and civil rights and freedoms

Howard Dean's presidential bid was notable for many things, including the mixed reaction it drew from political scientists. Many scholars found Dean's ultimate failure predictable. Longstanding political science wisdom suggests several explanations for Dean's defeat: the central issue of electability, which seemed to weigh heavily against his campaign; the fact that primary voters are more moderate than party activists; the well-documented difficulty of regaining lost momentum. Less systematic factors—such as numerous verbal gaffes and one infamous scream—surely contributed as well.Matthew Hindman is an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University ([email protected]). This research was supported by the National Center for Digital Government, with funding from the National Science Foundation under grant no. 0131923. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild, Larry Bartels, Chris Karpowitz, Gabriel Lenz, David Lazer, Alan Abramowitz, James McCann, and the three anonymous reviewers for their contributions.

As levels of criminal punishment have risen in the United States, more and more citizens have been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. This paper provides an overview and analysis of the unique practice of felon disenfranchisement in the United States today. We focus in particular on the political impact of disenfranchising large numbers of nonincarcerated felons—those who have served their entire sentences and those living in their home communities while completing a term of probation or parole. Our discussion is organized around three key issues relating to felon disenfranchisement: (1) the historical and legal origins of this practice; (2) its practical political impact on recent elections; and, (3) the racial dynamics that color both the history and contemporary effects of felon disenfranchisement in the United States. We discuss how felon disenfranchisement laws in many states appear to be out of step with both international practices and public opinion in the United States and consider contemporary policy proposals.Jeff Manza is the coauthor, with Clem Brooks, of Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and U.S. Party Coalitions. With Jeff Manza, Christopher Uggen is coauthor of the forthcoming Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. Research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (No. 9819015) and from the Individual Project Fellowship Program of the Open Society Institute. The authors are indebted to the editors and anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments and suggestions and to Angela Behrens and Sara Wakefield for research assistance.

How does formal education matter for inequalities of political behavior across the citizenry? Most answers to this question focus on the things that schools allocate, such as skills, knowledge, and resources. By contrast, we draw on policy feedback research to resuscitate a more “Deweyian” appreciation for schools as sites where citizens have their earliest formative experiences with public authority and learn what it means to participate in a rule-governed community. Using nationally representative panel data, we conduct an intersectional analysis of how race, class, and gender combine to shape student experiences with school authority relations, and estimate how these experiences are associated with later citizen dispositions in young adulthood. We find strong evidence that negative school authority experiences depress young adult political engagement and trust in government. American schools, we conclude, function as powerful sites of experiential learning that tighten the bond between social hierarchies and civic inequalities.

Standard methodological advice in political science warns against the distortion of measurement decisions by judgmental elements. Judgment is subjective, common wisdom asserts, it produces opaque, biased, and unreliable data. This article, by contrast, argues that judgment is a critical intersubjective ingredient of political measurement that needs to be acknowledged and rationalized, rather than exorcised.

Why do bad policy ideas persist over time? We trace the development of the euro’s governing ideas over fiscal and monetary policy in the face of mounting evidence that continued adherence to those ideas was economically deleterious. We argue that a specific form of social learning, framed by a retrospective recoding in 2010–2012 of Europe’s experience with fiscal rules in 2003–2005, drove European elites to pursue policies that were economically irrational but politically rational. As a result, the Eurozone’s medium-term resilience has been made possible by the European Central Bank’s unconventional and loose monetary policies, which operate in direct opposition to the tight fiscal policies of its member states’ governments. We maintain that this self-defeating macroeconomic policy mix will continue as long as the lessons learned by policymakers are driven by the need to win what we term an authority contest, rather than provide better macroeconomic outcomes.

The theory of justice that John Rawls spent his life developing and refining contains dozens of ideas that each have spurred major scholarly debate. One of these is that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society. In his major works Rawls gives slightly different formulations to the concept of basic structure, but the core idea remains the same. Early in A Theory of Justice Rawls proposes to offer “a conception of justice as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed.” Political Liberalism devotes an entire chapter to explicating what it means to say that the basic structure is the subject of justice. There Rawls defines basic structure “as the way in which major social institutions fit together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties and shape the division of advantages that arise through social cooperation”. More recently, Rawls reiterates the notion of the basic structure in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement:Iris Marion Young is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago ([email protected]). Among books she has published is Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2000. Global Challenges: On War, Self-Determination and Global Justice is forthcoming from Polity Press in 2006.

The Hungarian government’s discriminatory actions against the Central European University constitute one of the most prominent conflicts between an academic institution and a government today. My contribution gives a detailed account of how the conflict has unfolded so far. Various frameworks of interpretation, including democratic backsliding, cultural war, and international politics are discussed. I place the story of the university in the context of the polarized cultural climate of Eastern Europe and draw attention to the power of universities in collaborating across borders in defense of academic freedom—and freedom in general.

In this article, I attempt to integrate the study of citizenship into debates in comparative politics, in two different ways. First, I justify the real-world importance of the topic, and thereby encourage other scholars to grapple with its manifestations and implications. Second, I present some suggestive evidence, based on the 15 “older” countries of the European Union (EU). The findings not only illustrate the extent of cross-national variation in citizenship policies at two different time periods, but they help to demonstrate the applicability of comparative analysis to categorizing and explaining both long-lasting cross-national differences and more recent change in some countries. In explaining the historical variation within the EU, I consider whether or not a country had a prior experience as a colonial power, as well as whether it became a democracy in the nineteenth century. In accounting for continuity or change over the last few decades, I argue that while various international and domestic pressures have led to liberalization in a number of countries, these usually occurred in the absence of public discussion and involvement. In contrast, when public opinion gets mobilized and engaged on issues related to citizenship reform—usually by a well-organized far right party, but also sometimes by a referendum or petition campaign—liberalization is usually blocked, or further restrictions are introduced. This finding raises important, paradoxical, and troubling questions about the connection between democratic processes and liberal outcomes.Marc Morjé Howard is Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University ([email protected]). Research for this article has been supported by a Research Fellowship from the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In addition to three anonymous reviewers, I am grateful to the following people for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article: David Art, Seyla Benhabib, Mark Blythe, Randall Hansen, Martin Heisler, Dick Howard, Wade Jacoby, Christian Joppke, Evan Lieberman, Adam Luedtke, Willem Maas, Kathleen McNamara, Craig Parsons, Martin Schain, Rogers Smith, and Maarten Vink. I also appreciate the research assistance of Hamutal Bernstein, Aspen Brinton, Anamaria Dutceac, Sean Eudaily, Leah Gilbert, and Sara Beth Wallace on various parts of this project.

Choice feminism is motivated by a fear of politics. It arises in response to three common criticisms of feminism: that feminism is too radical, too exclusionary, and too judgmental. In response, choice feminism offers a worldview that does not challenge the status quo, that promises to include all women regardless of their choices, and that abstains from judgment altogether. Moreover, it enables feminists to sidestep the difficulties of making the personal political: making judgments and demanding change of friends, family, and lovers. Yet judgment, exclusion, and calls for change are unavoidable parts of politics. If feminists are not to withdraw from political life altogether, we have to acknowledge the difficulty of engaging in politics. Political claims are partial; we will inevitably exclude, offend, or alienate some of those whom we should wish to have as allies. The political concerns and dilemmas to which choice feminism responds are very real. However, we can take seriously the political motivations behind choice feminism without withdrawing from politics. Instead, we need to complement an acknowledgment of the political dilemmas facing feminists with a celebration of the pleasures of engaging in politics with those who differ from and disagree with us.

In the last decades, the American state has radically enlarged the array of policy instruments utilized in today’s governance of the poor. Most recently, through a process of outright “seizure,” the state now exacts revenue from low-income families, partners, and friends of those individuals who in very large numbers cycle in and out of the nation’s courts, jails, and prisons. In an analysis of legislation, judicial cases, policy regulations, blog, chat-line postings, and survey data, we explore this new form of taxation. In doing so, we endeavor to meet two objectives: The first is to document policies which pressure individuals (mostly men) entangled in the court and prison systems to rely on family members and others (mostly women) who serve as the safety net of last resort. Our second objective is to give voice to an argument not yet well explored in the sizeable incarceration literature: that the government is seizing resources from low-income families to help finance the state’s own coffers, including the institutions of the carceral state itself. Until now, no form of poverty governance has been depicted as so baldly drawing on family financial support under the pressure of punishment to extract cash resources from the poor. This practice of seizure constitutes the very inversion of welfare for the poor. Instead of serving as a source of support and protection for poor families, the state saps resources from indigent families of loved ones in the criminal justice system in order to fund the state’s project of poverty governance.

Non-uniform compliance with public policy by citizens can undermine the effectiveness of government, particularly during crises. Mitigation policies intended to combat the novel coronavirus offer a real-world measure of citizen compliance, allowing us to examine the determinants of asymmetrical responsiveness. Analyzing county-level cellphone data, we leverage staggered roll-out to estimate the causal effect of stay-at-home orders on mobility using a difference-in-differences strategy. We find movement is significantly curtailed, and examination of descriptive heterogeneous effects suggests the key roles that partisanship and trust play in producing irregular compliance. We find that Republican-leaning counties comply less than Democratic-leaning ones, which we argue underlines the importance of trust in science and acceptance of large-scale government policies for compliance. However, this partisan compliance gap shrinks when directives are given by Republican leaders, suggesting citizens are more trusting of co-partisan leaders. Furthermore, we find that higher levels of social trust increase compliance; yet these gains attenuate or intensify depending upon community-level partisan sentiments. Our study provides a real-world, behavioral measure that demonstrates the influence of partisanship, social trust, and their interaction on citizen welfare. Finally, we argue that our results speak to how trust in government may impact successful containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amid the resurgence of party spirit in the U.S., partisanship retains its bad name. Often branded an expression of inherited prejudice, narrow interest, or dogmatic commitment, it seems at odds with good citizenship. In what form, if any, is partisanship something admirable? This question has been neglected by political theorists, whose ideals of democracy, justice, and citizen virtue rarely depict the proper place of partisanship. I offer an account of the ethics of partisanship that shows how party spirit is defensible, even admirable—and how it is troubling, even pathological.Russell Muirhead is Associate Professor in the Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin ([email protected]). I would like to thank Sam Beer, Sharon Krause, Joseph Lambert, Glyn Morgan, Nancy Rosenblum, Mark Somos, Dennis Thompson, Jeremy Waldron, and the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful written comments on drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants of the Yale Political Theory workshop for their comments.

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.

Can stronger state-level public policies help protect workers from “wage theft?” In recent years, workers' rights groups have responded to policy drift and legislative inaction at the national level by launching campaigns to enact stronger penalties for wage and hour violations at the state level. Many of these campaigns have been legislatively successful and formative for the development of “alt-labor.” But are such policies actually effective in deterring wage theft? Previous scholarship has long concluded that although stronger penalties should theoretically make a difference, in practice, they do not. But by confining the analysis to the admittedly weak national-level regulatory regime, the existing literature has eliminated all variation from the costs side of the equation and overlooked the rich variety of employment laws that exist at the state level. Using an original dataset of state laws, new estimates of minimum wage violations, and difference-in-differences analyses of a dozen recently enacted “wage-theft laws,” I find that stronger penalties can, in fact, serve as an effective deterrent against wage theft, but the structure of the policy matters a great deal, as does its enforcement. The implications for workers' rights and the changing shape of the labor movement are discussed in detail.

As the pressure to invite international election monitors rose at the end of the Cold War, states refused to grant the United Nations a dominant role. Thus, today multiple intergovernmental, regional, and international non-governmental organizations often monitor the same elections with equal authority. This article examines the costs and benefits of this complex regime to highlight some possible broader implications of regime complexity. It argues that the availability of many different organizations facilitates action that might otherwise have been blocked for political reasons. Furthermore, when different international election monitoring agencies agree, their consensus can bolster their individual legitimacy as well as the legitimacy of the international norms they stress, and thus magnify their influence on domestic politics. Unfortunately the election monitoring example also suggests that complex regimes can engender damaging inter-organizational politics and that the different biases, capabilities, and standards of organizations sometime can lead organizations to outright contradict each other or work at cross-purposes.

The address situates the rise of “gig” work in the context of a much longer-term trend toward more precarious forms of employment. It explores the forces that are driving these developments and discusses the problems they pose at both the individual level and the national level. By situating the United States in a comparative perspective, it identifies the structural factors that exacerbate the problem of precarity and intensify its effects in the American political economy.

Is the self-esteem of individuals tied to their nation? If so, is that a good reason to strive for a world of safe, secure nations? Many liberal nationalists answer yes to these questions, but they do so without looking at the large social-psychology literature on groups and self-esteem. We examine the claims of liberal nationalists in light of this literature. The good news is that self-respectWe use the terms self-respect and self-esteem interchangeably. and group identity are strongly connected and can lead people to place collective interests above individual interests. The bad news is that the liberal-nationalist assumption that low-status groups have little self-respect and majority groups have it in abundance is mistaken. Perhaps most worrisome is the competitive nature of collective self-esteem: people feel better when their group does better than others. This competitiveness can lead to outright hostility when groups compete for resources and political power. Self-esteem is clearly an unstable foundation for a liberal nation. Although we do not think that problems caused by national identity and self-esteem can be fully solved, we do suggest ways in which they can be contained.