Alfred Cuzán proposed five “laws of politics” that allegedly govern elections in democracies. Drawing from insights in the general philosophy of science and the philosophy of the social sciences, I argue that—although his empirical evidence is impressive—he failed to develop a convincing argument for calling the five theses “laws.” This article discusses other examples that often are claimed to be “laws of politics” and describes the global picture supporting this analysis.

This article builds on work by Devine and Kopko (2021) and Lacy and Burden (1999) who estimated a probit model of candidate choice from nationally representative survey data to determine the second choice of third-party voters. Using this model on 2020 election data, we show that the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgenson probably cost Donald Trump victory in at least two states: Arizona and Georgia. Additionally, the popular-vote margin enjoyed by Joe Biden could have been between 260,000 and 525,000 fewer votes, using conservative estimates. The motivation for this article is to provide contrary evidence for two main misconceptions. First, that third-party candidates are “spoiling” elections for the Democrats. Our evidence clearly shows that third parties have the potential to hurt either of the two main parties; however, in 2020, it was Donald Trump who was hurt the most, although not consequentially. Second, some reformers believe that ranked-choice voting benefits the Democrats; again, we show that—all else being equal—in the 2020 presidential election, it was the Republicans who would have benefited by the change in rules because the majority of third-party votes went to the Libertarian candidate, whose voters prefer Republicans over Democrats 60% to 32%.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide—many that previously prioritized austerity—to approve large relief packages. Political economy tells us that politicians will try to profit from this electorally, but much remains unknown about precisely how pandemic relief might influence voting intentions. Then-President Donald Trump foregrounded this question early in the pandemic by becoming the first US president to physically place his name on Internal Revenue Service relief checks mailed to citizens. By leveraging a nationally representative survey whose timing achieved quasi-experimental variation in the receipt of payments both with and without Trump’s name physically on them, this study asks: Can a president successfully win support through physical personalization of the payments? Yes, the study finds. Receiving a physically personalized check in the mail is associated with a much greater self-reported likelihood of voting for the president, with gains mainly from partisan outgroups. No clear effect is found for unpersonalized electronic transfers. These findings withstand multiple robustness checks.

In the latest round of the apportionment of the US House of Representatives following the 2020 Census, the State of New York lost a seat by an extremely small margin: if a mere 89 people were added to the state’s population of 20 million, the state would have kept the seat. Political observers pointed to the tendency of the US Census to undercount minority and immigrant populations as the primary culprit. However, New York’s seat loss is as much an issue of apportionment as it is of counting. The current apportionment method used by the federal government, Huntington-Hill’s method, is biased against more populous states such as New York. If an alternative apportionment method were used, such as Webster’s method, New York would have kept the seat. This article discusses four historical apportionment methods: Hamilton’s method, Huntington-Hill’s method, Jefferson’s method, and Webster’s method. These methods are evaluated against the three criteria of within-quota, consistency, and unbiasedness. The article shows that Huntington-Hill’s method has produced biased apportionment results in eight of nine apportionments since its official adoption in 1941. The article concludes with a recommendation for replacing the current apportionment method with the only unbiased divisor method: Webster’s method.

Wearing face masks to combat the spread of COVID-19 became a politicized and contested practice in the United States, largely due to misinformation and partisan cues from masking opponents. This article examines whether Public Service Announcements (PSAs) can encourage the use of face masks. We designed two PSAs: one describes the benefits of using face masks; the other uses a novel messenger (i.e., a retired US general) to advocate for them. We conducted two studies. First, we aired our PSAs on television and surveyed residents of the media market to determine if they saw the PSA and how they felt about wearing face masks. Second, we conducted a randomized experiment on a diverse national sample. Both studies suggest that exposure to our PSAs increased support for face masks and induced greater compliance with public health advice. These findings have implications for how governments might fight pandemics.

The 2016 Trump campaign held more than 300 rallies. Our research examines whether these rallies and Trump’s rhetoric served as opportunities for the spread of hate. We measured the number of reported white-supremacist propaganda, anti-Semitic incidents, and extremist behaviors that occurred both leading up to and directly following these campaign events. We contend that Trump’s rhetoric and rallies increased the perceived threat facing white Americans, heightening their white identity, all while justifying violence and extralegal methods to address their grievances and thereby increasing reported bias incidents. We find that counties that hosted a Trump rally experienced an increase in hate-motivated events. We systematically show that Trump political rallies were associated with a limited size but significant rise in the likelihood of reported hate and bias incidents.

Drag has long been part of the LGBTQ rights movement. Drag performers play an important role as community leaders and political activists. Today, drag performers are also popular celebrities in the rest of society. This article explores the role of drag performers as community leaders and celebrities in the context of the 2020 presidential election. To understand this, we interviewed drag performers about their experiences using drag to mobilize voters. Research shows that Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts are more successful if they are led by volunteers and include trusted messengers while still being unexpected in some way. Drag performers are community leaders and volunteers and, when speaking about politics, deliver unexpected—and thus memorable—messages. The drag performers that we interviewed demonstrate the potential for drag artists to be effective GOTV messengers, in both the LGBTQ community and society more broadly.

Despite winning the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump alleged “millions of illegal votes” and other election fraud. He continued using this rhetoric throughout his tenure as president and ultimately suggested that if he did not win reelection in 2020, it would be because it somehow was stolen from him. Through an original survey experiment, this article explores how such allegations of fraud influence the public’s attitudes toward the conduct of elections, election outcomes, representation, and democracy as a whole. In doing so, we found that respondents expressed significantly and substantively more negative attitudes toward elections and democracy after being exposed to claims of fraud (even without evidence). Additionally, Republican identifiers were more likely than Democrats or Independents to doubt that their vote was counted fairly. These results bear important implications for our current understanding of politics in the United States.

The response to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States has shown that even a serious public health crisis cannot escape the lens of partisanship. The literature shows that most Republicans have viewed the coronavirus as less serious than their Democratic counterparts. This study demonstrates that this partisan gap extends to the real behavior of the public during, and after, the coronavirus state lockdowns. Using location data from mobile phones, we find that county-level partisanship predicts compliance with state shutdown orders, even when controlling for local COVID-19 intensity. Further, the magnitude of this effect is stronger than that of other explanatory variables, such as age, education, and population density. These results show that partisan beliefs can affect behavior regarding issues that are not overtly political, even behaviors that could put one or others at risk.

I am not sure if surprise, delight, or gratitude best describes my feelings about receiving this great honor. I experienced all of those emotions in full measure. I must begin by sincerely thanking the American Political Science Association (APSA) Public Administration Section for conferring the 2021 John Gaus Award on me and by saying how much it means to me. Looking at the list of previous John Gaus Award winners, I am indeed awed to be included in their number. There are so many names whose work I have deeply admired and others whom I have known quite well. Just three examples are George Frederickson, Vincent Ostrom, and Aaron Wildavsky, all of whom were extraordinarily kind and generous to me and greatly influenced my work. I only wish they were still here so I could thank them for all they did for me. The same is true for other now-departed mentors, including Mary Douglas, Andrew Dunsire, and Bill Mackenzie, to mention only a few.

Although much of the United States undoubtedly was aware of the impeachment hearings and trial for President Donald Trump in 2019–2020, the extent to which information about those events influenced the public remains unknown. Building on scholarship about public opinion and democratic governance, we attempted to fill this knowledge gap through a unique survey. We asked half of our sample to answer three factual questions pertaining to Trump’s first impeachment trial. We ran a quasi-experiment on the other half, trying to influence their view of the trial by informing them of the same three facts that we asked the first group. The quasi-experiment demonstrates that support for acquittal was largely static and that partisanship strongly influences whether the public accepts the veracity and importance of political information. Consequently, civic knowledge today appears to have a limited—perhaps even nonexistent—effect on public attitudes about American politics.

Using survey data collected less than two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, we investigated why likely Trump voters would support Trump resisting the election results if he lost. We first used an experiment with randomized hypothetical popular-vote margins to test whether support for resistance was contingent on the results of the election. We also directly asked respondents who stated that they would support resistance to explain their reasoning in an open-ended response. In doing so, we gained insight into one of the most turbulent elections in American history and examined how support for resistance existed before the election due to both misinformation about voter fraud and hyperpartisanship that made Trump voters view the electoral process itself as illegitimate.

In January 2019, the House of Representatives voted 418–12 to respond to widespread bipartisan criticism of the inner workings of the legislative branch by creating a Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. This article examines the leadership, participation, and salience of the Select Committee by key reform stakeholders, including individual members, party factions, leaders, interest groups, and the national media that cover Congress. I identify bifurcated participation patterns that overrepresent the interests of junior members, party leaders, and Democratic Party factions. I also find limited salience of Select Committee activities among key stakeholders. The findings raise normative and theoretical questions about procedural reform and reveal a significant challenge to coalition-building efforts in future sessions of Congress.

Matias López and Juan Luna (2021) challenged my comparative analysis of populism’s threat to democracy, its reliance on institutional factors (coupled with conjunctural opportunities), and especially the inference about US democracy’s immunity to populist suffocation. However, their emphasis on structuralist and culturalist factors, which would suggest the vulnerability of the United States, is strikingly selective, theoretically unconvincing, and empirically problematic. López and Luna’s methodological improvement of my analysis does not alter the substantive findings or overturn my sanguine inference about US democracy’s likely resilience. Only their further modifications yield more pessimistic scenarios, but those adjustments stand on shaky theoretical and empirical ground. Indeed, the experiences of 2020–2021 corroborate my theory and its comparative lessons. The US institutional framework held firm and foiled the insistent attempts of President Trump and his most fervent followers to perpetuate the US populist in power. Consequently, US democracy continues to appear quite safe from populist strangulation.

Apparently unnoticed by its advocates, a prominent effort to improve the troubled US presidential-election system—the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)—is on a collision course with another effort at electoral change—“ranked-choice voting” (RCV, known previously by less ambiguous names). The NPVIC is a clever device intended, without constitutional amendment, to elect as president the nationwide popular-vote winner (i.e., the plurality-vote winner) rather than the electoral-vote winner. Election results in 2000, 2016, and 2020 enhanced its support. However, the (constitutional) ability of even one state to replace its plurality voting with another voting system causes the popular-vote total posited for the NPVIC to be undefined, thereby rendering the NPVIC unusable. Maine and Alaska recently switched from plurality voting to RCV for presidential elections. Consequently, tangled results and turmoil could occur with the NPVIC. To improve presidential elections, replacing plurality voting with other systems appears to be more sensible than pursuing the NPVIC.

The phrase “identity politics” has experienced a recent surge in political discourse. However, its meaning varies for highly informed political groups, leaving the term definitionally vague for the general public. Second-level agenda-setting theory can be used to explain how this phrase is communicated to the public by the mass media, a crucial disseminator of political information. We used a quantitative content analysis of major US publications to examine the frequency of this phrase’s use and how it is presented to audiences. We found a surge in mentions beginning in 2016. We also found that it is tied more to the political Left, but there also is a fair amount of linkage to the political Right. The phrase also is portrayed negatively. We advocate for using political communication theories to track emerging political terms in the future.

Former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated vote-fraud claims following the 2020 presidential election divided the Republican Party. Numerous Republicans supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, others did not. These futile attempts reached a flashpoint during the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. Even in the wake of such violence, many House Republicans continued to amplify Trump’s baseless claims by voting to exclude the election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania. This article analyzes these roll-call votes to determine the likely motivations for why some House Republicans were still willing to support Trump’s position following the Capitol riot. We then replicate our analysis with the January 13 impeachment and the May 19 vote to establish a bipartisan National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex (January 6 Commission) to investigate the insurrection. Our findings indicate the relevance of constituent preferences, Trump’s popularity, legislator ideology, and the racial diversity of constituents represented by Republicans.