Does political diversity affect the prevalence of selfless behavior across a society? According to a recurrent finding from the study of social capital, ethnic diversity reduces prosocial behavior. We ask whether the same applies to partisan identity, by turning to a frequently used proxy for social capital: blood donations. The question is especially timely: the United States is currently experiencing its worst blood shortage in over a decade. Using survey results covering over 275,000 individuals in the US from 2010 to 2020, and a preregistered survey of an additional 3,500 respondents, we show that not all measures of social diversity have analogous effects on prosocial behavior. We find mixed evidence for a region’s share of immigrants being linked to lower blood donation by US citizens, and no negative effect for racial diversity. By contrast, political diversity appears to be highly significant. Specifically, individuals are less likely to donate blood when their partisan position is farther from the mean political identity in their state or commuting zone, and when they perceive themselves to be political outliers in their community. Affective polarization is known to be a tax on social interaction with out-partisans; as we show, depending on an area’s partisan makeup, it can also be a tax on prosocial behavior writ large.

Scholars have expressed concern over waning support for democracy worldwide. But what do ordinary citizens mean by the term “democracy," and how do their definitions of democracy influence their support for it? Using global cross-national survey data, this study demonstrates that individual variation in the understanding of democracy is substantively linked to democratic support across countries and regime contexts. Individuals who define democracy in terms of elections and the protection of civil liberties and those with greater conceptual complexity express higher support for democracy. This relationship between democratic conceptualization and support holds across diverse political contexts and alternative explanations. These results suggest that it is essential to consider divergent conceptualizations of democracy—and how they may vary systematically—when analyzing popular opinions of democracy.

The last few years have witnessed an increase in democratic “backsliding” in the United States—a decline in the quality of democracy, typically accompanied by an influx of non-normative behavior, such as political violence. Despite the real consequences of support for violence, fairly little is known about such an extremist attitude outside studies of terrorism or aggression. Using a unique survey containing many psychological, political, and social characteristics, we find that perceived victimhood, authoritarianism, populism, and white identity are the most powerful predictors of support for violence, though military service, conspiratorial thinking, anxiety, and feelings of powerlessness are also related. These patterns suggest that subjective feelings about being unjustly victimized—irrespective of the truth of the matter—and the psychological baggage that accompanies such feelings lie at the heart of support for violence. We use these results to build a profile of characteristics that explain support for violence; the predictive validity of this profile is then tested by examining its relationship with support for the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, with which it is strongly associated, even accounting for support for Donald Trump. Our findings have implications for the detection of extremist attitudes and our understanding of the non-partisan/ideological foundations of anti-social political behavior.

Scholars studying the electoral breakthroughs of right-wing illiberalism have arrived at two general conclusions: while they largely rejected the hypothesis that this phenomenon is grounded in voters’ attitudinal shift, they have shown that those voting for the illiberal Right have distinguishing socio-economic and attitudinal characteristics. My analysis reconciles these two sets of findings by documenting the gradual emergence and transformation of the right-wing electorate in Poland in the period 1993–2018 and points to the consolidation of a right-wing partisanship as an organizing factor of the “illiberal moment.” Using the POLPAN panel dataset I find that populist and authoritarian attitudes indeed emerge in Poland in the twenty-first century to distinguish those supporting the Right more and more centered around the PiS party. These attitudes, however, have been incorporated in the context of partisan rivalry—right-wing voters, for example, are more supportive of limiting democratic procedures but only when the Right is in power. In the first decade of the twenty-first century PiS also politicized the lack of partisan consensus on the expansion of the welfare state. PiS incorporated this demand in its stance legitimizing the expansion of the welfare state through what was available in its ideological repertoire: national solidarity, national victimhood, and the idea of a sovereign nation-state joined under the umbrella of Catholic symbolism. This post-consensus polarization and asymmetrical political radicalization resembles the “illiberal moment” in Western Europe that followed the convergence between center-left and center-right parties but they lack a crystallized class-based political identity and social-democratic understanding of political economy to build on.

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.

When do Americans view political violence as legitimate? In this article, I use experimental methods to examine public perceptions of domestic political violence perpetrated to advance right-wing or left-wing agendas. Specifically, I examine the extent to which the alignment of political ideology (conservative/liberal) with a political cause influences perceptions of legitimacy for objectively equivalent acts of violence. Controlling for variables such as perpetrator identity, I demonstrate that political ideology influences both how members of the public perceive the morality of political violence and the extent to which they view an act as constituting terrorism, even when the severity of violence and type of target are identical. The findings have implications for policy makers and practitioners in designating acts as terrorism and developing policies to prevent or counter political violence.

Scholarship on “stealth democracy” finds that many citizens want to avoid the debate and conflict that often come with democratic governance. This scholarship has argued that citizens adopt this posture because they are uncomfortable with disagreement and desire a more expedient political process that enables leaders to make decisions without discussion or compromise. We revisit this argument in light of recent political developments that suggest another reason why citizens may desire a more expedient political process. We examine the possibility that some citizens are not merely uncomfortable with disagreement but also want leaders who will aggressively protect them and champion their interests. Using a nationally representative survey, we ask citizens about their preferences for stealth democracy. We also ask questions that tap into their willingness to support leaders who would “bend the rules for supporters” and take aggressive action against political opponents. We find that a substantial component of the electorate continues to prefer a stealth version of democracy. However, we also find that many “stealth democrats” are willing to support leadership practices that would threaten or even undermine democratic norms. We argue that this evidence indicates that, in recent years, many citizens who appear to desire “stealth democracy” pose a threat to democracy itself.

Existing scholarship establishes that authoritarian regimes make claims about their legitimacy yet does not tell us what makes these claims effective. This article argues that authoritarian legitimation is more effective when coproduced by the government, media, and progovernment supporters, rather than just being centrally disseminated talking points. This article uses the effective handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by the Saudi government to demonstrate how this narration translated trust in state capacity into performance legitimacy of the Saudi regime and system of governance. Saudi media figures and progovernment supporters expanded basic government talking points for audiences and discussed successful policies in relation to countries with higher international status (chiefly in the West) and higher state capacity (such as China). This article evaluates statements by the government, original media sources, and more than 90 interviews with Saudi nationalists, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs, while speaking to the relational character of performance legitimation beyond Saudi Arabia.

Studies conducted between the 1950s and 1970s found that the principles embodied in the First Amendment constituted a “clear norm” endorsed by large majorities of community leaders and virtually all legal practitioners and scholars. This consensus has since weakened under the strain of arguments that racist slurs, epithets, and other forms of expression that demean social identities are an intolerable affront to egalitarian values. Guided by the theory that norms are transmitted through social learning, we show that these developments have spurred a dramatic realignment in public tolerance of offensive expression about race, gender, and religious groups. Tolerance of such speech has declined overall, and its traditional relationships with ideology, education, and age have diminished or reversed. Speech subject to changing norms of tolerance ranges from polemic to scientific inquiry, the fringes to the mainstream of political discourse, and left to right, raising profound questions about the scope of permissible debate in contemporary American politics.

The proliferation of lone-actor terrorist attacks over the past decade has led to a rapidly expanding literature and a subfield of research. However, this research has only to a limited degree been brought into wider discussions on political violence and social movements. In the present article, we take up this synthetic challenge and argue the need to theorize the social and collective dynamics of lone-actor terrorism. The article proposes a novel analytical framework for understanding lone-actor terrorism. We provide a conceptualization that draws attention to the social embeddedness of terrorist lone-actor radicalization and the collective dynamic of lone-actor attacks. Our point of departure is the recurrent finding that lone-actor terrorists are in fact not that alone, and that their attacks tend to cluster in time and space. First, we propose to conceive of lone-actor radicalization as a relational pathway shaped by social ties and interactions with radical milieus/movements. Second, taking inspiration from Charles Tilly’s notion of “scattered attacks” as a pattern of dispersed, loosely coordinated collective violence, we suggest three complementary ways of analyzing these processes and their temporal and interactive dynamic. We argue that theorizing the social and collective dynamics of lone-actor political violence is not only about addressing an empirical puzzle (the abundance of social ties; the clustered pattern of violent attacks), but about analytically capturing an entirely different and potentially increasingly relevant logic of violent processes. Thereby, and paradoxically, the very notion of “lone actors” can help us to understand the social dynamics of collective political violence more generally.

What are the determinants of ethnic violence? Existing research has forwarded a range of often competing explanations, from political opportunism to economic competition to state incapacity. We argue that this diversity of accounts is attributable, in part, to scholars’ tendency to lump together distinct forms of ethnic violence that have different underlying determinants. We propose that scholars instead disaggregate ethnic violence and put forward a typology based on the target of the attack (properties vs. individuals) and whether assailants use arms. We demonstrate the utility of this typology by applying it to an original dataset of ethnic attacks against Christians in Egypt from 2013 to 2018. In addition to a set of shared factors, we find that unarmed attacks against property (“burnings”) are the product of political mobilization, unarmed attacks against individuals (“beatings”) are related to socioeconomic tensions, and armed attacks (“bombings”) follow the strategic logic of terrorist violence.

Immigration and growing diversity have been linked with pathologies such as lower social capital, the rise of authoritarian populists, intergroup conflict, and perhaps the breakdown of democracy itself. At the heart of this complex is a question relating to migration and political culture: whether immigration erodes the attitudes that sustain and legitimize democratic political systems. This paper takes a time-series, cross-sectional approach to this question by analyzing the effects of a comprehensive set of measures of immigration on dynamic estimates of trust in democratic institutions, satisfaction with democracy, and democratic support from 30 European countries. The results show that immigration does not undermine any of these forms of public support for political systems. Indeed, under some circumstances, immigration may increase public trust in democratic institutions.

Censorship is one of the main forms of political coercion deployed by modern states to control and regulate public expression. In this article, we examine the political censorship of China’s intellectual public space, which has long been underexplored. We apply unsupervised machine learning to examine the database of a leading intellectual portal website, which serves as an archive of both published and censored intellectual writings between 2000 and 2020 and includes over 740 million Chinese characters. We identify a strategic censorship mechanism that consists of thematic and persona censorship elements. Thematic censorship involves the state filtering out writing that competes with the official policy narrative, historiography, and values. Persona censorship involves the complete muting of individual intellectuals who have previously made derogatory attacks on the supreme leaders of the Communist Party, which represents a symbolic act of open defiance.

The political implications of population aging for democratic systems are fundamental. Questions of democratic legitimacy are raised as the political equilibrium between the generations is upended. Drawing on evidence from liberal democracies with a focus on Japan, the democracy with the oldest electorate, we identify and analyze three demographic effects on the political system: participation effects deriving from younger voters’ marginalization among the electorate; representation effects demonstrated by the dominance of elderly lawmakers inside the parliament and government; and policy effects manifesting in a preference for policies catering to an aging majority. By breaking down these key effects and contextualizing them in broader debates of political demography, we call attention to the normative repercussions of the interplay between demography and democracy and make a case for enhanced generational pluralism.

For many decades, scholars assumed voluntary compliance and citizens’ commitment to a regime’s principles and values to be critical for regime stability. A growing literature argues that indoctrination is essential to achieve this congruence. However, the absence of a clear definition and comprehensive comparative measures of indoctrination have hindered systematic research on such issues. In this paper, we fill this gap by synthesizing literature across disciplines to clarify the concept of indoctrination, focusing particularly on the politicization of education and the media. We then outline how the abstract concept can be operationalized, and introduce and validate an original expert-coded dataset on indoctrination that covers 160 countries from 1945 to the present. The dataset should facilitate a new generation of empirical inquiry on the causes and consequences of indoctrination.

In any healthy democracy, myriad policy issues compete for the public’s attention. Most remain on the periphery of politics, either because they achieve salience only in narrow communities of interest or because they grab headlines only for brief periods of time. But sometimes issues become what we term “durable attention items”—they capture public attention and sustain it over many years. Why? We focus on one such newly durable issue—gun control in the United States. Using an original dataset of roughly 4,500 letters to the editor over a 40-year period, we demonstrate that this once-episodic issue, long dominated by a narrow constituency of pro-gun advocates, has become a mainstay of mass politics. We show that the gun issue’s growing agenda status is due entirely to pro-regulation people mobilized by a combination of contextual factors, namely regularized mass shootings and efforts to relax gun policy, working in tandem with partisan polarization. Besides offering novel evidence of a fundamental shift in American gun politics, the study contributes to our theoretical understanding of how episodic issues come to command consistent political engagement over the long term.

To what extent do countries protect the rights of transgender people? How does this differ from legal protections countries offer sexual orientation minorities? What conditions are beneficial for advancing trans rights? Limitations in data availability and accessibility make answering these types of trans-specific questions difficult. To address this shortcoming, I introduce a new dataset. The Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP) provides insight into the legal situations transgender people faced in 173 countries from 2000 to 2021. The dataset currently includes 14 indicators that capture the presence or absence of laws related to criminalization, legal gender recognition, and anti-discrimination protections. I then use this data to discuss the global status of transgender rights throughout the period and compare these trends to sexual orientation rights. Finally, I conclude with a preliminary analysis of three institutional and cultural factors that may help explain variation in transgender rights throughout the world.

Democratic erosion—the undermining of republican government by a leader with authoritarian tendencies—depends on the improper use of the state apparatus of the state against opponents (“political targeting”). Because political targeting sometimes falls into a legally gray area, and because officials have some maneuvering room in how to respond to the orders they receive, their preferences matter. In the United States, officials’ behavior seems to be most influenced by a) the professional risks of refusing improper orders, b) normative obligations to uphold the rule of law and to act ethically, and c) attitudes toward the leader. These factors are, in turn, largely a function of 1) how officials are selected and 2) the extent of oversight and procedural checks they face. These findings have potentially broad implications for democratic erosion.

Political efficacy, or a sense of confidence that “people like me” can understand politics and receive responsiveness from government, is central to the study of political behavior. However, the reference group that respondents view as “people like me” is not always immediately clear. This limits our ability to infer how efficacy informs political participation. We propose a specific concept and operationalization of racial group efficacy, and we distinguish this concept from racial identity, group consciousness, and conventional efficacy measures. Analyses of data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey reveal that for white, Black, Asian, and Latina/o Americans, racial efficacy is a more consistent and robust predictor of political participation than standard internal and external efficacy measures. Further, we show that racial efficacy exhibits associations with conventional and unconventional forms of participation that distinguish whites from people of color. We conclude by discussing how people’s racial efficacy informs their engagement in politics, from voting to protests.

Public understandings of race in the United States have evolved, at least among some, to acknowledge that whiteness confers privilege. In contrast to the negative racial stereotypes that animate racial resentment, white privilege inverts the lens by focusing on whites and the notion that whiteness confers unearned advantages. Given the centrality of race in American politics, we investigate white privilege denial and whether it matters politically. Our inquiry shows white privilege denial is a distinct racial construct and that nearly half of whites are at least somewhat in denial with nearly one-third rejecting all the white privilege items. We found that white privilege denial is politically consequential, helping explain white attitudes across a range of political attitudes including support for political leaders, parties, and public policy. To capture the range and complexity of racial attitudes among whites, we recommend that studies of racial attitudes in politics include white privilege denial.