This paper develops an account of freedom of expression by drawing lessons from the strategic logic of China’s censorship regime. It argues that freedom of expression helps build the common knowledge needed for overcoming coordination problems and is, thus, a source of collective power. However, realizing the full empowering potential of freedom of expression requires supplementing it with (a) public sources of information that are reliable, trusted, and democratically accountable and (b) measures that will provide citizens with equal opportunity to speak and be heard in ways that will enable them to contribute to their society’s stock of common knowledge.

Does shaming human rights violators shape attitudes at home? A growing literature studies the effect of shaming on public attitudes in the target state, but far less is known about its effect in countries initiating the criticism – that is the shamers. In this article, I theorize that when governments shame human rights violators they shape both government approval and human rights attitudes at home. Utilizing two US-based survey experiments, I demonstrate that by shaming foreign countries, governments can improve their image at home and virtue signal their dedication to human rights. At the same time, shaming can modestly shape tolerance towards certain domestic human rights violations. I consider the generalizability of my results through comprehensive supplementary analyses, where experimental insights are corroborated with cross-national observational data. Overall, my findings can provide valuable insight into governments’ incentives to engage in foreign criticism.

Affluent citizens commonly record higher election turnout than less affluent citizens. Yet, the causal effect of affluence on voter turnout remains poorly understood. In this article, we rely on Norwegian administrative data to estimate the impact of random, exogenous shocks in (unearned) income on individual-level voter turnout. Exploiting the random timing and size of lottery wins for identification, our main findings suggest that a lottery windfall in the years just before an election boosts individuals’ turnout probability by 1.6 to 1.9 percentage points. Crucially, these point estimates reflect only a small share of turnout differences observed across the income distribution. Hence, our findings strongly suggest that most of the commonly observed positive income-turnout associations do not reflect a causal relationship.

Liberals experience more distress than conservatives. Why? We offer a novel explanation, the social support hypothesis. Maintaining social support and avoiding exclusion are basic human motivations, but people differ in their sensitivity to the threat of social exclusion. Among people high in the personality trait neuroticism, exclusion easily triggers feelings of vulnerability and neediness. The social support hypothesis translates this to politics. Concerned with their own vulnerability, we find that neurotic people prefer policies of care – social welfare and redistribution – but not other left-wing policies. Specifically, it is anxiety – the facet of neuroticism tapping sensitivity to social threats – that drives this link. And it is only for people experiencing exclusion that anxiety predicts support for social welfare. Our results come from two experiments and four representative surveys across two continents. They help to resolve the puzzle of liberal distress while providing a new template for research on personality and politics.