Exposure to misinformation can affect citizens’ beliefs, political preferences, and compliance with government policies. However, little is known about how to durably reduce susceptibility to misinformation, particularly in the Global South. We evaluate an intervention in South Africa that encouraged individuals to consume biweekly fact-checks—as text messages or podcasts—via WhatsApp for six months. Sustained exposure to these fact-checks induced substantial internalization of fact-checked content, while increasing participants’ ability to discern new political and health misinformation upon exposure—especially when fact-check consumption was financially incentivized. Fact-checks that could be quickly consumed via short text messages or via podcasts with empathetic content were most effective. We find limited effects on news consumption choices or verification behavior, but still observe changes in political attitudes and COVID-19-related behaviors. These results demonstrate that sustained exposure to fact-checks can inoculate citizens against future misinformation, but highlight the difficulty of inducing broader behavioral changes relating to media usage.

More people are mobilized in response to the deaths of Black men than those of Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw understands this asymmetry as being rooted in Black women’s lack of “narrative capital” and has called on women to “share their stories” of violence to occasion greater mobilization. In this essay, I argue that the work of Toni Morrison, and specifically her conception of truant democracy, provides a blueprint for how and with whom Black women should share their stories—that is, for how they should mobilize the narrative capital they have and build more. I make this argument by juxtaposing the democratic visions of Morrison and W. E. B. Du Bois, including the ethical foundations of their envisioned democracies, the forms of violence to which they attend, their visions of justice, and the people—or, in Morrison’s case, the ephemeral collectives—they sought to build via storytelling.

This article draws from Frederick Douglass’s antebellum and wartime writings to reconstruct his approach to natural rights. Douglass admired many elements of the Enlightenment legacy. Yet in the same motion that he echoes European and American thinkers, he subtly qualifies, corrects, and revises their ideas, sometimes in radical ways. In his depictions of slavery, natural rights cease to be metaphysical abstractions and instead become embodied in our social relations. While they persist in outline, their substance is transformed to account for racialized power and structural violence. In this way, Douglass redefines a number of liberalism’s key moral and political concepts, including freedom, reason, dignity, and moral responsibility. He develops a political theory designed to reinforce the Enlightenment’s bare foundations with social insights of the oppressed: a philosophy of natural rights, told from below.

Stauffer (2021) shows that when Americans perceive their legislatures as having more gender diversity, they perceive these institutions to be more responsive. In this letter, we use an independently fielded survey to validate Stauffer’s findings and investigate whether her findings extend to race. We successfully replicate Stauffer’s analyses. We also newly demonstrate that perceptions of Black representation in legislatures are related to increased external efficacy, and perceptions of gender descriptive representation are associated with increased trust. Such findings underscore the importance of studying citizens’ perceptions of descriptive representation to understand their attitudes toward government.

Racial divides in American attitudes toward trade are often explained by labor market discrimination and traits like nationalism. However, recent research shows that perceptions of fairness, particularly “asymmetric fairness” concerns about “falling behind” other countries, significantly shape these attitudes. We theorize that linking these perspectives offers new insights. Drawing on critical race theory and cognitive psychology, we theorize that Black Americans, unlike their white counterparts, do not view trade through the lens of asymmetric fairness. Since Black Americans have not benefited from the same social, economic, and political privileges, they are less concerned with “falling behind” and instead focus on fairness as equality. This leads them to evaluate trade agreements through a “principled fairness” lens, contributing to support for trade policies that benefit both the home and foreign country, as opposed to prioritizing an “America First” trade agenda. We test this theory in a national survey experiment and find strong support.

The troubled state of economic life today has prompted a revival of normative critiques of capitalism. According to a prominent critique, radical republicanism, capitalism is defined by its mode of production and the distinctive wrong of capitalism amounts to a structural form of domination. By arguing that radical republicanism fails to provide a satisfactory account of capitalism’s distinctiveness—and of its core wrong—I propose an alternative account focused on the mode of investment. Capitalism’s mode of investment, I assert, entails a loss of collective control over, and involvement in, the valuation and creation of the future. The wrong inhering in this loss is best understood in terms of alienation—an alienated relation between citizens and their sociopolitical order—rather than domination. In turn, socialism should be understood as a project of reconciliation, the point of which is to overcome this form of alienation through the socialization and democratic planning of investment.

What influences partisan allegiance among Asian Americans and Latinos? These fast-growing demographics are heavily populated by immigrants who were raised outside the United States, which limits parental socialization as the primary mechanism behind their partisan identities. We argue that contemporary Asian and Latino partisanship is better understood in a context characterized by racialization and polarization. Asian and Latino adults regularly navigate the straits between their racial and American identities—two categories, sorted along partisan lines, that shape their sense of belonging in the US. We hypothesize that Asian and Latino adults generally prioritize their racial or national identity, which affects the intensity of their allegiance to Democrats or Republicans. Leveraging major Asian and Latino surveys since 2006 (N = 20,327), we uncover wide heterogeneity in identity prioritization, with 27% of Asian and Latino adults privileging their American identity over their racial one. Greater prioritization of one’s racial (versus national) identity is significantly associated with Democratic (versus Republican) allegiance (meta-analyzed d ~ 0.30). These patterns also emerge at an automatic level via Implicit Association Tests (IATs). Across two experiments (N = 2,920) we then isolate one possible mechanism: Asian and Latino adults who feel their prioritized identity is overlooked signal their preferred attachment through their partisan allegiance.

What determines the legitimacy of aspiring rulers? Questions about support of the governed are central to theories of state-building and political order. Millions worldwide live under the influence of competing armed groups, yet we know little about how people in these contexts make comparative assessments of would-be rulers. We theorize how local norms, social networks, and the provision of goods and services influence these comparative judgments. We report results from a conjoint survey experiment in Colombia among nearly 2,400 respondents across 54 municipalities contested by multiple armed groups. Armed groups that take community norms into account and those that involve local leaders in decision-making are judged less negatively. Additionally, providing services and limiting violence both reduce negative evaluations of armed groups. These findings help us understand dimensions of political legitimacy under limited statehood and the effects of governance on civilian attitudes in areas of competition.

Direct democratic institutions are often introduced by popular vote, but there is little research on what motivates voters to support these new instruments. Using a unique dataset on the ideological positions of voters and members of parliament, this article examines support for the introduction of the initiative right in a popular vote. We find that voters support the initiative right when they are inadequately represented in parliament. Moreover, the analysis shows that the voting behavior is consistent with voters understanding the strategic implications of adopting the popular initiative. We demonstrate that voters support its adoption if they are ideologically more proximate to the median voter than they are to the median legislator. Finally, the article shows that ideological distance matters for voters of the ruling party as well, which helps explain why a majority of voters support a political institution that limits the ruling party’s room for maneuver.

The online dating application has in recent years become a major avenue for meeting potential partners. However, while the digital public sphere has gained the attention of political philosophers, a systematic normative evaluation of issues arising in the “digital sexual sphere” is lacking. I provide a philosophical framework for assessing the conduct of dating app corporations, capturing both the motivations of users, and the reason why they find usage unsatisfying. Identifying dating apps as agents intervening in a social institution necessary for the reproduction of society, with immense power over people’s lives, I ask if they exercise their power in line with individuals’ interests. Acknowledging that people have claims to noninterference, equal standing, and choice improvement relating to intimacy, I find that the traditional, nondigital, sexual sphere poses problems to their realisation, especially for sexual minorities. In this context, apps’ potential for justice in the sexual sphere is immense but unfulfilled.

Oversight, scholars argue, allows Congress to control the executive agents it empowers to implement law. Yet the tools of oversight are rather limited and debate continues as to how much influence oversight provides. How well can members of Congress motivate bureaucratic performance? To measure the efficacy of oversight, we create a new dataset matching oversight efforts to a bureaucratic deficiency Congress has sought to reduce since the early 2000s: improperly made payments to contractors and clients. We estimate the effect of congressional hearings, one of the most important tools of congressional oversight, as well as correspondence, appropriation committee reports, statutes, and executive action. We find that hearings lead to subsequent declines in improper payments. The magnitude of the effect, however, is small relative to the scope of the problem, suggesting strong limits on the efficacy of oversight. Our findings imply that America’s elected officials struggle to effectively manage implementation of policy.

Studies of colonialism often associate indirect colonial rule with continuity of the precolonial institutions. Yet, we know less about how colonialism affected the distribution of power between precolonial domestic elites within nominally continuous institutions. We argue that colonial authorities will redistribute power toward elites that are the most congruent with the colonizer’s objectives. We test our theory on the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Using an original dataset on members of the Egyptian parliament and a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that the colonial authorities shifted parliamentary representation toward the (congruent) landed elite and away from the (oppositional) rural middle class. This shift was greater in cotton-producing provinces which were more exposed to colonial economic interest. Our results demonstrate that the colonial redistribution of power within precolonial institutions can reengineer the social-structural fabric of colonized societies.

Information on social media is characterized by networked curation processes in which users select other users from whom to receive information, and those users in turn share information that promotes their identities and interests. We argue this allows for partisan “curation bubbles” of users who share and consume content with consistent appeal drawn from a variety of sources. Yet, research concerning the extent of filter bubbles, echo chambers, or other forms of politically segregated information consumption typically conceptualizes information’s partisan valence at the source level as opposed to the story level. This can lead domain-level measures of audience partisanship to mischaracterize the partisan appeal of sources’ constituent stories—especially for sources estimated to be more moderate. Accounting for networked curation aligns theory and measurement of political information consumption on social media.

Examining group boundaries is instrumental to understanding intergroup relations, particularly differences in boundary drawing between prototypical and peripheral group members. Whether identity strength and prototypicality have an interactive effect on how group members draw boundaries has been underexplored. We also know less about how different Latinos are viewed, despite the group’s vast diversity. This paper takes up these questions and compares white and Black Americans’ views of Latinos as American. Strikingly, among all respondents, U.S. born Latinos are seen as less American when their parent is undocumented. The results suggest that Black Americans are driven by economic and political concerns and perceive greater commonality with more marginalized Latinos. Whites are driven by cultural concerns and prefer those who will not challenge their prototypicality. This illustrates a divergence in how Latinos are received among each group.

Many Americans express a mix of conservative and liberal views across issues. Prior research indicates these voters are cross-pressured. A recent, influential article “Moderates” (Fowler et al. 2023) argues that these voters instead largely have centrist views on individual issues. To reach this conclusion, “Moderates” develops a method to determine which voters’ views are well-summarized by liberal-conservative ideology. “Moderates” finds that most voters’ views are. It therefore concludes that the large number of such voters with centrist estimated ideologies—“moderates”—must hold centrist views on issues. We show that this method systematically overstates how many voters’ views are well-summarized by liberal-conservative ideology: it assumes voters’ views are unless they either answer questions randomly or form a single cluster with distinctive views. In simulations, we show this problem is large. The article’s core conclusion that many voters who express a mix of conservative and liberal views can be inferred to support centrist policies therefore remains in doubt.

We examine how the effects of initiatives intended to promote programmatic competition are conditioned by candidates’ often mixed incentives to participate in them. In a nationwide debate initiative designed to solicit and widely rebroadcast policy promises from Liberian legislative candidates, we analyze the randomized encouragement of debate participation across districts. The intervention substantially increased the debate participation of leading candidates but had uneven electoral consequences, with incumbents benefiting at the expense of their challengers. These results are driven by incumbents’ more positive selection into participation on the basis of their policy alignment with voters; voters’ heightened attention to them; and how candidates’ campaigns responded in turn. The results underscore wide variation in candidates’ suitability for programmatic politics and highlight important challenges in transitioning away from clientelistic political equilibria.

We present a Fickle Prosocial Violence Response Model to explain how indirect exposure to civilian-perpetrated violence against marginalized minority groups motivates prosocial attitudes toward victimized groups. Although the mass public may not sympathize with marginalized groups, they may adopt prosocial attitudes toward marginalized groups subject to civilian-perpetrated violence if the violence is salient and perceptibly illegitimate. However, the adoption of prosocial attitudes may be fickle. We find evidence consistent with the model. Studies 1–3 show that high-profile violence against LGBTQ+ people increases support for LGBTQ+ rights and reduces negative attitudes toward LGBTQ+ group members. But, the adoption of prosocial attitudes is short-term. Study 4 shows that less salient violence against LGBTQ+ people may not engender prosocial attitudes at the outset. Our findings suggest that violent events must be sufficiently salient to initially motivate prosocial beliefs. Nevertheless, salient civilian-perpetrated violence against marginalized groups may not sustainably motivate prosocial beliefs toward targeted groups.

Theories of international relations (IR) typically make predictions intended to hold across many countries, yet existing experimental evidence testing their micro-foundations relies overwhelmingly on studies fielded in the United States. We argue that the broad nature of many IR theories makes it especially important to evaluate the extent to which their predictions hold across countries. To examine the generalizability of IR experimental findings beyond the US, we implemented a preregistered and harmonized multisite replication study, fielding four prominent IR experiments across a diverse set of seven democracies: Brazil, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, and the US. We find high levels of generalizability across all four experiments, a pattern further analysis suggests is due to limited treatment effect heterogeneity. Our findings and approach offer important empirical and methodological insights for the design and interpretation of future experimental research in IR.