This chapter explores symmetry’s implications for the law of democracy. Symmetry has obvious relevance in this area, given the centrality of election-related disputes to maintaining courts’ political neutrality. At a minimum, symmetric interpretation should encourage the Supreme Court to ensure greater consistency in its emergency orders blocking legal changes before an election. In addition, symmetry may help justify the Court’s controversial decisions leaving both partisan gerrymanders and choices about overall districting procedures to the political process. In combination, if not in isolation, these rulings are symmetric because they avoid constitutionalizing one position or the other on politically charged questions about appropriate criteria for districting. Finally, symmetry should support closer scrutiny of voting rules and procedures with skewed partisan effects, provided that challengers can convincingly establish a meaningful impairment of political competition.

Although the 13 United States courts of appeals are the final word on 99 percent of all federal cases, there is no detailed account of how these courts operate. How do judges decide which decisions are binding precedents and which are not? Who decides whether appeals are argued orally? What administrative structures do these courts have? The answers to these and hundreds of other questions are largely unknown, not only to lawyers and legal academics but also to many within the judiciary itself. Written and Unwritten is the first book to provide an inside look at how these courts operate. An unprecedented contribution to the field of judicial administration, the book collects the differing local rules and internal procedures of each court of appeals. In-depth interviews of the chief judges of all 13 circuits and surveys of all clerks of court reveal previously undisclosed practices and customs.

The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Chapter 7 identifies and tests implications of the argument for contemporary Brazilian politics. Specifically, I test whether black identifiers with high levels of education exhibit distinct patterns of behavior, mainly in the electoral arena. I compile and analyze high-quality election survey data collected by reputable domestic firms between 2002 and 2018 and show that highly educated, black voters have become a loyal leftist constituency, rallying consistently around the leftist Workers’ Party since 2002. These voters are more ideologically leftist than either their lesser-educated black or better-educated white counterparts. This pattern holds even in the face of political instability stemming from major corruption scandals in 2005 and 2015, as well as the rise of far-right populist leader Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. This chapter illustrates the expectations of the policy feedback literature, showing that policy reforms “feed back” into the political process by altering the identities, interests, and behavior of citizens.

Superficially, the period of Conservative rule since 2010 has been one of electoral stability. The Conservatives emerged as the largest party in four general elections in a row. As a result, the party has retained the reins of power for fourteen years. This represents the second longest period of government tenure for any one party in post-war British politics. Yet, in truth, it has been a period of unprecedented electoral instability and political change. Two of the four elections produced a hung parliament, an outcome that had only occurred once before in the post-war period, while a third only produced a small overall majority. After the first of these hung parliaments, in 2010, Britain was governed by a coalition for the first time since 1945, while in the second such parliament, between 2017 and 2019, a minority government entered into a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists. The right of prime ministers to call an election at a time of their own choosing was taken away, only to result in parliamentary tussles that, in the event, failed to stop two prime ministers from eventually holding an election well before the parliamentary term was due to come to an end.

In Chapter 10, contest models are utilized to illuminate crucial elements of traditional economic problems. These include competition for surplus within divisionalized firms, where inefficient divisions often dominate efficient ones; the significant expenses required to attain a monopoly position, including potentially bribing public officials for the allocation of monopoly rights; and the expenses incurred in obtaining property rights that, once secured (sometimes by violent and costly means), will be efficiently exchanged in the marketplace. In the last two cases, these expenses are so substantial that they might leave no social surplus. Additionally, the cost of political campaigns, in which factions compete for the vote to control a portion or entirety of the public sector through convincing voters of the correct choice, is also examined. Overall, it is shown that contests introduce a substantial and previously unnoticed welfare cost to the traditional issues studied, thereby complementing the existing literature on the subject.

This chapter shows how a hierarchical organization and a dominant faction were crucial prerequisites for the strategy of instrumentalism. The union’s hierarchical structure enabled it to mobilize teachers in elections and a dominant faction enabled negotiations with political parties from across the ideological spectrum. The last section analyzes the political backlash against instrumentalism in 2013, which resulted in leadership turnover and policy changes that weakened the union overall. Despite this backlash, however, the union’s internal organization remained largely intact and union leaders continue to be ideologically flexible, in line with the main argument in this book.

This chapter shows how factional divisions in FECODE shaped electoral mobilization and ideological rigidity. It links the repertoire of leftism to competition among rival factions in internal union elections. Contrary to the Argentine tendency toward ongoing and disruptive protests, protests by FECODE were easier for the government to manage owing to the political priorities of union factions. The next section shows how factionalism and ideological rigidity produced rival negotiating strategies that limited the influence of union leaders on the policy process. The final section shows that leftism remained the central tendency of political mobilization for the union throughout the 2010s.

This chapter focuses on Rousseau’s underappreciated treatment of voting and electoral laws. It argues that these are a worthy and essential part of the Social Contract – a matter of political life and death. First, Rousseau sees universal suffrage as necessary for establishing a political community, for selecting its form of government, and for discerning the general will. Second, electoral reforms are the primary mechanism for reducing the speed of political decline and “death.” The chapter brings together Rousseau’s remarks on the design of electoral districts, the manner of voting (i.e. timing, place, secret vs. open, order of casting ballots, thresholds), and the aggregation of votes, drawing primarily on his examples of flawed but enduring republics such as Rome, Sparta, Venice, and Geneva. Instead of reconstructing Rousseau’s blueprint for the perfectly just republic, the chapter shows how frequent and appropriate electoral reforms allowed these republics to outlive even their less corrupt contemporaries.

Building upon the analysis of the previous chapter, this final critical chapter examines theories of state creation focused upon the protection of human rights and the provision of representative government. Both approaches are examined through the lens of governmental legitimacy, and both are finally dismissed as implausible reconstructions of the relevant legal practice. In the course of this argument, significant attention is given to whether the protection of human rights and the provision of representative government are sufficient to render contemporary governments legitimate, to which a negative answer is ultimately given. In particular, neither the egalitarian credentials of representative government nor its facilitation of popular accountability are as normatively conclusive as many 'democratic statehood' theorists suggest.

In this chapter, I offer a thorough review of the scholarship that investigates the impact of partisan identity (i.e., expressive partisanship) on political behavior, including political attitudes, turnout, voting, and other forms of political participation.

Chapter 5 shows that power within the household and autonomy from the household most strongly predict women’s political participation. Using data from a census survey, it estimates the determinants of women’s (and men’s) political participation. Comparing within households, bargaining power is associated with women’s non-electoral political participation, though not their voting. Comparing within villages, autonomy from the household is a clear predictor of women’s political participation. In fact, the behavior of women who enjoy a high degree of autonomy from the household mirrors that of men. It also provides suggestive evidence that intra-household coercion plays a role in women’s political participation by showing a lack of correlation between political interest and participation in the household for women but not men and a negative correlation between regressive gender attitudes of the dominant male household member and women’s political participation.

Chapter 4 brings the household into focus and demonstrates how it denies women political agency and constrains their political participation. Drawing on data from a census survey and interviews, it documents the alignment of the household in political decision-making and the authority of elder men in these decisions. It shows that women lack autonomy in their vote choice and are often coerced into compliance with the wishes of the heads of household. It further documents the inefficiency of household cooperation for women and demonstrate its perpetuation as rooted in coercion and strategic political mobilization.