What is it like to be a partisan? How do individuals experience their relationship to political parties? The most common answer today, both in popular discourse and much political science, is identity, but many individuals do not identify with parties. Rather, they relate to parties in terms of psychological closeness or affinity—they do not say “we” about the party, as do identifiers, but rather “they.” In this article, I argue that both the empirical and normative study of partisanship would be improved by recognizing that these are two fundamentally different ways for individuals to be attached to parties and that these distinct experiences coexist within most democracies today. Acknowledging this basic plurality of partisanships would remedy the current tendency among empirical studies to homogenize partisanship as either identity or closeness and so would avoid falsifying the experience of many citizens who fall into the opposite category. In polarized contexts, moreover, it could help break up dualistic and antagonistic thinking about how to perform partisanship and diversify public understandings of how to be a partisan. Recognizing the plurality of partisanships would also improve the explosion of normative theorizing about partisanship found in the ground-breaking work of scholars like Nancy Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead, and Jonathan White and Lea Ypi. I show how identity and closeness partisanship—and the interaction between them—have transformative consequences for each of these scholars’ theories of partisanship, either furthering or threatening them. The article aims to improve the conceptualization of partisanship and to model a salutary engagement between normative and empirical inquiry within political science.

Do political outcomes respond more strongly to the preferences of the rich? In an age of rising inequality, this question has become increasingly salient. Yet, although an influential literature has emerged, no systematic account exists either of the severity of differentials in political responsiveness, the potential drivers of those differentials, or the variation across democracies. This article fills that gap. We analyze 1,163 estimates of responsiveness from 25 studies and find that, although this research collectively suggests that political outcomes better reflect the preferences of the rich, results vary considerably across models and studies. The divergence in results is partly driven by partisanship and the model specification, while we find no significant variation across either policy domains or general/specific measures of political outcomes. Finally, and against theoretical expectations, published research suggests that differentials in responsiveness are weaker in the United States compared to other developed democracies. The article contributes to our understanding of differential responsiveness by clarifying the main debates and findings in the literature, identifying issues and gaps, and pointing to fruitful avenues for future research.

My presidential address is an attempt to connect two themes: my own work in the field of global governance and the theme of the 2023 APSA Annual Meeting, “Rights and Responsibilities in an Age of Mis- and Disinformation.” Most work on disinformation focuses on domestic-level politics.1 However, I would argue that it also presents a major challenge to global governance, and research on disinformation on the international level deserves greater attention.

Are the preferences of women and men unequally represented in public policies? This simple yet fundamental question has remained largely unexplored in the fast-growing fields of women’s representation and inequality in the opinion-policy link. Our study analyzes gender biases in policy representation using an original dataset covering 43 countries and four decades, with citizens’ preferences regarding more than 4,000 country-year policies linked to information about actual policy change. Our analysis reveals clear and robust evidence that women’s policy preferences are underrepresented compared to those of men. While this skew is fairly modest in terms of congruence, women’s representation is driven mostly by the high correlation of preferences with men. When there is disagreement, policy is more likely to align with men’s preferences. Our analyses further suggest that women’s substantive underrepresentation is mitigated in contexts with high levels of female descriptive representation and labor market participation. In sum, our study shows that gender inequality extends to the important realm of policy representation, but there is also meaningful variation in unequal representation across contexts.

Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats. In this paper, I show detailed evidence for this decades-in-the-making trend and argue that it has important consequences for the U.S. politics of economic inequality and redistribution. Beginning in the 1990s, the Democratic Party started winning increasing shares of rich, upper-middle income, high-income occupation, and stock-owning voters. This appears true across voters of all races and ethnicities, is concentrated among (but not exclusive to) college-educated voters, and is only true among voters living in larger metropolitan areas. In the 2010s, Democratic candidates’ electoral appeal among affluent voters reached above-majority levels. I echo other scholars in maintaining that this trend is partially driven by the increasingly “culturally liberal” views of educated voters and party elite polarization on those issues, but I additionally argue that the evolution and stasis of the parties’ respective economic policy agendas has also been a necessary condition for the changing behavior of affluent voters. This reversal of an American politics truism means that the Democratic Party’s attempts to cohere around an economically redistributive policy agenda in an era of rising inequality face real barriers.

Canonical work argues that macropartisanship—the aggregate distribution of Democrats and Republicans in the country at a given time—is responsive to the economic and political environment. In other words, if times are good when Democrats are in charge (or bad when Republicans are in charge), more Americans will identify with the Democratic Party. We extend the pioneering work of MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson (1989), who analyzed macropartisanship from 1953 through 1987, to 2021, assessing whether consumer sentiment and presidential approval still influence macropartisanship in an era of nationalized elections and affective polarization. We find that change has occurred. The effect of consumer sentiment on macropartisanship is no longer statistically distinguishable from zero, and we find evidence of “structural breaks” in the macropartisanship time series. Macropartisanship appears to have become less responsive to economic swings; approval-induced changes in macropartisanship have become more fleeting over time.

The degree to which female political actors influence policy is hotly debated in political science. However, relatively little research considers how women’s representation in the police influences policing outcomes. We argue that increasing women’s representation should be associated with increases in rape report rates but should not be associated with changes in rape arrest rates. We expect public perceptions of female police to affect victims’ willingness to report and cooperate with the police, but the masculine, hierarchical, and complex nature of police investigations of rape will make it difficult for those increases in reporting to translate into increases in arrests for those crimes. We leverage unique police administrative data from 1987 to 2016 and find that although women’s representation is associated with increased rape report rates, there is no relationship with rape arrest rates, highlighting an important justice gap. Our article has implications not only for the study of female representation and representative bureaucracy but also provides insights into how descriptive representation may be limited by institutional culture, norms, practices, and procedures.

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.

The electoral base of the Democratic Party has been transformed over the past generation. Democrats have lost ground in rural America while adding strength in cities and, more recently, suburbs. A major consequence of this shift has been the creation of a “U-shaped” Democratic voting base, with both poorer metro voters and affluent suburbanites siding with the party. This spatial alliance overlays a multi-racial one, as Democrats rely more heavily on voters of color than any other major party in American history. Many analysts have argued that the Democratic Party has managed this sea change by shifting from economic to cultural and identity appeals. This claim is consistent with leading models of two-dimensional party competition, as well as a fair amount of cross-national research on parties of the left and center-left in contemporary knowledge economies. However, we find little evidence for this claim in national Democrats’ messaging (via party platforms and on Twitter), nor, more important, in their actual policy efforts. Instead, we show that even as Democrats have increasingly relied on affluent, educated voters, the party has embraced a more ambitious economic agenda. The national party has bridged the Blue Divide not by foreswearing redistribution or foregrounding cultural liberalism, but by formulating an increasingly bold economic program—albeit one that elides important inequalities within its metro-based multi-racial coalition. Understanding how and why Democrats have taken this path is central to understanding not just the party’s response to its shifting electorate, but the way parties manage coalitional change more broadly.

As the pandemic accelerated calls to provide relief to millions of student borrowers, President Biden announced executive action to cancel $10,000 of student debt for most federal student loan holders. Both prior to and following his announcement, policymakers have debated the merits and details of student debt relief, focusing particular attention on the perceived deservingness of student loan borrowers. But we have little systematic evidence about how the public evaluates borrower deservingness, or whether elite arguments framing support or opposition to debt relief in terms of deservingness influence public preferences for student debt cancellation. We employ original conjoint and framing experiments conducted just prior to Biden’s announcement to explore each query. We find that, while certain borrower characteristics indicating need (e.g., amount of debt), responsibility for debt (e.g., type of institution attended), and reciprocity (e.g., time in repayment) can influence people’s evaluations of whether borrowers deserve debt relief, those results may not translate to broader deservingness arguments for or against student debt cancellation in a clear manner. Ultimately, our results shed light on a timely policy issue, while extending scholarly understandings of deservingness for a critical and understudied aspect of the American welfare state.

As recently as the early 1990s, Americans living in rural and urban areas voted similarly in presidential elections, yet in the decades since, they have diverged sharply as rural people in all regions of the country have increasingly supported the Republican Party. We seek to explain the sources of this growing cleavage by examining two interrelated processes of change: political-economic transformation that elevated many urban areas and marginalized rural ones, and the nationalization of policy goals. Our analytical approach is developmental, probing the timing and sequencing of trends across more than four decades. It is also comprehensive, testing theories related to economic decline, the educational gap, organizational mobilization, and racism and racial and ethnic threat. Our analysis reveals that while rural and urban counties resembled each other in several respects in the 1970s, they have since moved apart. We examine how key trends relate to political change in presidential voting. We find that in the 1990s and early 2000s, rural dwellers in places experiencing population loss or economic stagnation began to support Republican candidates. Then from 2008 to 2020, those in areas with higher percentages of less-educated residents, a higher presence of evangelical congregations per capita, and higher levels of anti-Black racism, each more prevalent in rural areas than urban areas, shifted their support to Republicans. Through sequential processes of polarization, with political-economic forces leading the way and activating rural resistance to the nationalization of policy goals subsequently, the rural-urban political divide emerged as a major fault line in the nation’s politics.

Partisanship structures mass politics by shaping the votes, policy views, and political perceptions of ordinary people. Even so, substantial shifts in partisanship can occur when elites signal clear differences on a political issue and attentive citizens update their views of party reputations. Mismatched partisans who strongly care about the issue respond by changing parties in a process of “issue evolution” when writ large. Others simply update their views to match their party in a “conflict extension” process. We build on these models by integrating the largely separate research strands of party issue ownership. Using sexual misconduct as a critical case study, we argue that partisan change can occur rapidly when party elites move strategically to take ownership of an issue, thereby clarifying differences between the parties. Using a quasi-experiment, a survey experiment, and data from dozens of national surveys, we find recent, rapid shifts in party reputations on #MeToo, views of the issue, party votes, and broader party support.

Why did congressional Democrats upend the financial regulatory regime they had maintained since the New Deal? I argue that the congressional reforms of the mid-1970s paved the way for the Democratic Party’s turn against financial regulation. Prior to congressional reform, Democrats in Congress were especially parochial, and Southern populists dominated the House and Senate banking committees. These parochial and populist orientations complemented the radically decentralized banking system by New Deal financial regulations. The elimination of the seniority rule and other reforms reduced parochialism and strengthened Democratic leadership, enabling the party to enact deregulatory reforms that provided (short-term, at least) benefits to the diffuse interests of American savers and consumers at the expense of entrenched local industry groups. In the long run, however, these deregulatory reforms significantly accelerated the concentration of economic power held by the nation’s largest firms and wealthiest individuals.

A core tenet of representation is that individuals should expect government to actively protect their human security. In the issue area of domestic violence in the United States, government largely fails to do this for women, who comprise three-quarters of all victims of domestic violence. Nowhere is this more apparent than for Native American women living on tribal lands. In terms of lifetime physical violence, nearly 52% of Native American women will be physically abused compared to 30.5% of white women, 41.2% of African American women, and 29.7% of Hispanic women (Crepelle 2020; Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2023). One of the main obstacles to keeping Native American women safer is that tribal nations have been functionally prohibited from prosecuting non-Native offenders of violence against Native Americans on their lands. Non-Native offenders comprise the bulk of domestic violence abusers in these communities. To address this inequity, the 2013 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) created Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdictions (SDVCJs). Through an application process, federally recognized tribal nations can create these jurisdictions to provide justice for the many women who are victims of domestic violence at the hands of non-Native persons. In this article we explore which tribal nations created these jurisdictions using an original dataset of the 354 tribal nations that were eligible to adopt an SDVCJ following the 2013 VAWA reauthorization. As of 2022, 31 tribal nations have adopted SDVCJs across 13 states, which have led to 74 domestic violence convictions. In this article, we explain adoption of these courts as a function of population, tribal nation fiscal capacity, federal grant support, and having an existing self-governance compact with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Recent years have seen a marked shift in the salience and politicization of any incorporation of race into teaching at the elementary and secondary levels. “Critical race theory” (CRT) has become a prominent feature of the current debate, even as there is a good deal of misunderstanding about what CRT actually is. Drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment, we consider the impact of the phrase “critical race theory” in activating both racial biases and partisan identity. Our expectation was that CRT would tend to activate partisanship independent of symbolic racism. Results suggest otherwise: where support for culturally relevant pedagogy is concerned, CRT appears to engage partisanship particularly amongst those who exhibit high levels of symbolic racism.

Women face more harassment and intimidation as politicians than men, but little is known about how this affects representation. I develop a theoretical framework for studying the gendered costs of political violence for descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Testing the framework using interview and survey data on Swedish women and men politicians, I uncover the costs of violence against politicians in all three dimensions empirically. Violence makes women more frequently than men consider leaving politics and enforces male-coded characteristics for political candidates, affecting prospects for gender-diverse descriptive representation. Substantive representation is harmed by violence silencing feminist debates and obstructing women politicians’ policy debate activities. Women’s symbolic representation is threatened by violence coercing women to decrease their visibility.

Political parties have long been theorized as a key political institution that links society with the formal political system, and thus have often featured prominently in theories of political economy and redistribution. Curiously, however, until recently party systems have received substantially less attention in theories seeking to explain redistribution among both democratic and non-democratic regimes. I build on this nascent literature by conceptualizing the relationship between party systems, inequality, and redistribution, advancing the argument that at least a portion of inequality and income redistribution in any given country is attributable to dynamics within its party system—particularly their structure and institutionalization. Hegemonic party systems can initiate large waves of social reform and redistribution in their formative years but their redistributive prospects significantly wane the longer a hegemonic party remains in power, while two-party systems are unlikely to provide much, if any, alleviation of inequality. Multi-party systems provide the greatest potential to redistribute, but the relationship is conditional on their relative institutionalization. Stable multi-party systems with institutionalized parties are more likely to exhibit both lower levels of inequality and redistribute more income, whereas inchoate counterparts are unlikely to be more redistributive than either hegemonic or two-party systems.