We consider the thesis of Alexis de Tocqueville (1856) that economic development and increased mobility may generate political discontent not present in more stagnant economies. For many citizens, as they become aware of the potential for improved living standards, their aspirations may increase faster than actual living standards. Expanded opportunity may then paradoxically result in dissatisfaction with government rather than greater confidence. We develop a formal model to capture Tocqueville’s (1856) verbal theory and test its predictions using a 2012–2013 face-to-face survey experiment conducted in Pakistan. The experiment utilizes established treatments to subtly manipulate either a participant’s perceptions of her own economic well-being, her perceptions of society-wide mobility, or both. As predicted by the theory, political discontent rises when declining personal well-being coincides with high mobility to create unrealized aspirations. The results thus identify the conditions under which expanded economic opportunity can lead to political unrest.

Although prior scholarship has made considerable progress in measuring politicians’ positions, it has only rarely considered voters’ or activists’ perceptions of those positions. Here, we present a novel measure of U.S. senators’ perceived ideologies derived from 9,030 pairwise comparisons elicited from party activists in three 2016 YouGov surveys. By focusing on activists, we study a most-likely case for perceiving within-party ideological distinctions. We also gain empirical leverage from Donald Trump’s nomination and heterodox positions on some issues. Our measure of perceived ideology is correlated with nominate but differs in informative ways: senators with very conservative voting records were sometimes perceived as less conservative if they did not support Trump. A confirmatory test shows these trends extended into 2021. Even among activists, perceived ideology appears to be anchored by prominent people as well as policy positions.

Autocrats confront a number of threats to their power, some from within the regime and others from foreign actors. To understand how these threats interact and affect autocratic survival, we build a model where an autocratic leader can be ousted by a domestic opposition and a foreign actor. We concentrate on the impact that foreign threats have on the stability of autocratic leadership and show that the presence of foreign threats increases the probability an autocrat retains power. Focusing on two cases, one where a foreign actor and the domestic opposition have aligned interests and one where their interests are misaligned, we elucidate two distinct mechanisms. First, when interests are aligned, autocrats are compelled to increase domestic security to alleviate international pressure. Second, when interests are misaligned, autocrats exploit the downstream threat of foreign intervention to deter domestic threats. We also show that autocrats have incentives to cultivate ideological views hostile to broader interests among politically influential domestic actors.

Interest groups representing the marginalized regularly neglect advocacy on behalf of their most vulnerable constituents—those with intersectional disadvantage. Yet, they claim that such advocacy is central to their missions. I argue that interest groups representing women, people of color, Native nations, and the poor strategically conduct intersectional advocacy through coalitional lobbying. I test this claim using a new dataset of cosignature patterns within public comments on proposed federal agency rules submitted by a set of such groups between 2004 and 2014. I find that these groups are significantly more likely to pursue intersectional advocacy in coalitions but that coalition work, alone, does not relate to influential intersectional advocacy. Rather, it is particular coalition characteristics, including organizational diversity and financial capacity, that predict such influence. I conclude that collaborative lobbying is an effective tactic for mediating representational bias in interest group advocacy and promoting more pluralistic administrative policy making.

The threat of violence, and the occasional outbreak of real violence—which gives the threat credibility—are essential elements in peaceful social change not only in international, but also in national communities. Individuals and groups, no less than nations, exploit the threat as an everyday matter. This induces flexibility and stability in democratic institutions.

I refer not only to the police power of the state and the recognized right of self-defense, but also to private individual or group violence, whether purposive or futile, deliberate or desperate. Violence and the threat of violence, far from being meaningful only in international politics, are underlying, tacit, recognized, and omnipresent facts of domestic life, in the shadow of which democratic politics are carried on. They instil dynamism into the structure and growth of the law, the settlement of disputes, the processes of accomodating interests, and they induce general respect for the verdict of the polls.

Most measures of party competition were designed for the United States or other two-party systems. The measure proposed here is intended for multiparty as well as two-party systems. It is a formalization of the notion of uncertainty: election outcomes are competitive to the degree we are uncertain who will win. By ascertaining through survey research the degree of party loyalty over time, one can calculate the chances of alternative outcomes in hypothetical replications of any given election. Since the chance that a losing party might have won is one measure of the importance of that party, this approach to party competition also provides a precise indicator of the number of parties in the system (i.e., whether it is two-party, three party, etc.). The method is applied here to data on Canadian federal elections in 1965 and 1968.

Starting with nineteenth-century jurisprudence, this essay traces the changing perceptions of the nature and role of groups in politics as affected in turn by scientific reformism, classic pluralism, and descriptive science orientations to the study of politics. The work of Laski and Bentley is highlighted.

The essay contends that political science has not grown by scientific study laid upon scientific study, but rather by a process of gradual encroachment of ideas in which basic premises, questions, and terms shifted without adequate examination. It is argued that this change is not properly portrayed as a trend from abstract legal metaphysics to ever more sophisticated approximations of reality. The forgotten contributions of past orientations are stressed, and the reasons that Bentley was ignored in his day discussed.

More specifically, the study concludes that the process of accretion of ideas was of some benefit to political science as a discipline, but the heritage left by this process was negative in two important respects: the neglect of a dynamic in favor of a static perspective, and the divorce of normative theory from empirical research on American politics.

In conflict-prone societies, the fear of expropriation that accompanies a regime change reduces capital investment. These reductions in investments, in turn, harm the economy, amplifying the likelihood of regime change. This article studies the implications of these feedback channels on the interactions between globalization, capital control, state repression, and regime change. I show that processes that facilitate capital movements (e.g., globalization, economic modernization, and technologies that reduce transportation costs) amplify the likelihood of regime change in conflict-prone societies and strengthen the elite’s demand for a strong coercive state. In particular, to limit their collective action problem and manage the political risk of regime change, capitalists support a state that imposes capital control. We identify two conflicting forces, the Boix Effect and the Marx Effect, which determine when capital control and state repression become complements (Nazi Germany) or substitutes (Latin American military regimes) in right-wing regimes.

In the current debate over the status of moral virtue in ethical and political theory, Aristotle is an imposing and controversial figure. Both champions and critics of the ancient conception of virtue identify Aristotle as its most important proponent, but commentators often obscure the complexity of his treatment of moral virtue. His account of courage reveals this complexity. Aristotle believes that courage, and indeed virtue generally, must be understood as both an end in itself and a means to a more comprehensive good. In this way Aristotle’s political science offers a middle course that corrects and embraces the claims of nobility and necessity in political life. Honor is central to this political science. It acts as a bridge between the desires of the individual and the needs of the political community and reduces the dangers posed by the excessive pursuit of nobility and the complete acquiescence to necessity.

Who drafts the laws in Rousseau's ideal state? According to John T. Scott it is the people alone who execute this function and Rousseau “does not positively argue that commissaires, magistrates, or anyone else has the power to propose laws.” Challenging this view, I argue that the philosopher's varied statements on the subject of lawgiving can be shown to establish merely a right by the people to participate in agenda-setting by others. Rousseau believes that the laws must reflect the will of the people but not necessarily through their physical writing, drafting, or framing of constitutional legislation. More important than popular agenda-setting is the majority's freedom to check those who do draft the laws. Amending my earlier argument that the sovereign is barred from legislating, I reveal how Rousseau's notion of self-legislation as “gatekeeping,” rather than agenda-setting, is central to the political theory and institutions of Du contrat social.

Over the last century and a half, the work of the Constitutional Convention and the motives of the Founding Fathers have been analyzed under a number of different ideological auspices. To one generation of historians, the hand of God was moving in the assembly; under a later dispensation, the dialectic (at various levels of philosophical sophistication) replaced the Deity: “relationships of production” moved into the niche previously reserved for Love of Country. Thus in counterpoint to the Zeitgeist, the Framers have undergone miraculous metamorphoses: at one time acclaimed as liberals and bold social engineers, today they appear in the guise of sound Burkean conservatives, men who in our time would subscribe to Fortune, look to Walter Lippmann for political theory, and chuckle patronizingly at the antics of Barry Goldwater. The implicit assumption is that if James Madison were among us, he would be President of the Ford Foundation, while Alexander Hamilton would chair the Committee for Economic Development.

The “Fathers” have thus been admitted to our best circles; the revolutionary ferocity which confiscated all Tory property in reach and populated New Brunswick with outlaws has been converted by the “Miltown School” of American historians into a benign dedication to “consensus” and “prescriptive rights.” The Daughters of the American Revolution have, through the ministrations of Professors Boorstin, Hartz, and Rossiter, at last found ancestors worthy of their descendants. It is not my purpose here to argue that the “Fathers” were, in fact, radical revolutionaries; that proposition has been brilliantly demonstrated by Robert R. Palmer in his Age of the Democratic Revolution.

In his article, “Union Organization in Advanced Industrial Democracies” in the June 1989 issue of the Review, Michael Wallerstein advocated a model to account for cross-national differences in trade union organization rates. He argued that the size of the labor force provided the most important determinant of variation in union density. In this controversy, John Stephens takes issue with the operationalization of a key variable in Wallerstein's model—industrial infrastructure. Stephens reanalyzes the data using an alternative measure of this variable. His reanalysis supports his claim that in fact, the two variables yield results that are statistically indistinguishable. Wallerstein responds.

Many empirical investigations in the behavioral sciences today aim at tracing the causes of variations in some key dependent variable. The search for satisfying causal explanations is difficult because of the complexity of social phenomena, the crudeness of the measures of many important variables, and the prevalence of simultaneous cause and effect relations among variables. Although these difficulties remain, a number of important methodological contributions have clarified the conditions under which causal inferences can be made from non-experimental data. In particular the Simon-Blalock technique has recently gained considerable attention, and has been profitably used by a number of political scientists in their research. Examination of some of these applications does, however, reveal the need for a better understanding of the purposes and limitations of the technique. This paper reviews two studies: (1) the re-analysis of the Miller-Stokes data by Cnudde and McCrone, and (2) the analysis of the determinants of Negro political participation in the South by Matthews and Prothro. We shall argue that both these applications have two faults: (1) a failure to distinguish conclusions from assumptions, and (2) an inadequate correspondence between the assumptions made in constructing the mathematical models and our prior knowledge about the phenomena being studied. In addition, we shall use the first study to illustrate a principle of general importance in causal analysis: the investigator should check the possibility that different causal mechanisms occur in different subgroups of his data. And we shall use the second study to illustrate the difficulty of separating the effects of two highly correlated independent variables.

Social media giants stand accused of facilitating illegitimate interference with democratic political processes around the world. Part of this problem are malicious bots: automated fake accounts passing as humans. However, we lack a systematic understanding of which politicians benefit most from them. We tackle this question by leveraging a Twitter purge of malicious bots in July 2018 and a new dataset on Twitter activity by all members of national parliaments (MPs) in the EU in 2018. Since users had no influence on how and when Twitter purged millions of bots, it serves as an exogenous intervention to investigate whether some parties or politicians lost more followers. We find drops in follower counts concentrated among radical right politicians, in particular those with strong anti-EU discourse. This is the first set of empirical, causally identified evidence supporting the idea that the radical right benefits more from malicious bots than other party families.

Why do voters in developed democracies support right-wing populist parties? Existing research focuses on economic and cultural vulnerability as driving this phenomenon. We hypothesize that perceptions of personal health vulnerability might have a similar influence on voters. To test this argument, we analyzed all waves of the European Social Survey (2002–2020). Our findings suggest that voters with worse self-reported health were significantly more likely to vote for right-wing populist parties. The relationship persists even after accounting for measures of cultural and economic vulnerability, as well as voters’ satisfaction with both their personal lives and their country’s health system. The influence of health on support for right-wing populist parties appears to be greater than that of income and self-reported economic insecurity, while less than that of gender and attitudes about immigrants. Our findings suggest that policies affecting public health could shape not only health outcomes but also the political landscape.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) fundamentally changed the distribution of electoral power in the US South. We examine the consequences of this mass enfranchisement of Black people for the use of the carceral state—police, the courts, and the prison system. We study the extent to which white communities in the US South responded to the end of Jim Crow by increasing the incarceration of Black people. We test this with new historical data on state and county prison intake data by race (~1940–1985) in a series of difference-in-differences designs. We find that states covered by Section 5 of the VRA experienced a differential increase in Black prison admissions relative to those that were not covered and that incarceration varied systematically in proportion to the electoral threat posed by Black voters. Our findings indicate the potentially perverse consequences of enfranchisement when establishment power seeks—and finds—other outlets of social and political control.

Social scientific evidence suggests that labor migration can increase resilience to climate change. For that reason, some have recently advocated using labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation. This paper engages with the normative question of whether, and under what conditions, states may permissibly use labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation. I argue that states may use labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation and may even have a duty to do so, subject to two moral constraints. First, states must also provide acceptable alternative options for adaptation so that the vulnerable are not forced to sacrifice their morally important interests in being able to remain where they are. Second, states may not impose restrictive terms on labor migrants to make accepting greater numbers less costly for themselves because doing so unfairly shifts the costs of adaptation onto the most vulnerable.

This manuscript helps to resolve the ongoing debate concerning the effect of information communication technology on human rights monitoring. We reconceptualize human rights as a taxonomy of nested rights that are judged in textual reports and argue that the increasing density of available information should manifest in deeper taxonomies of human rights. With a new automated system, using supervised learning algorithms, we are able to extract the implicit taxonomies of rights that were judged in texts by the US State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch over time. Our analysis provides new, clear evidence of change in the structure of these taxonomies as well as in the attention to specific rights and the sharpness of distinctions between rights. Our findings bridge the natural language processing and human rights communities and allow a deeper understanding of how changes in technology have affected the recording of human rights over time.