Politics reflects a seemingly incontrovertible condition—any imaginable human population is diverse across multiple, overlapping dimensions including material interests, moral and ethical commitments, and cultural attachments. Such diversity means, in turn, that disagreement and conflict are unavoidable. Under these circumstances politics largely consists in contests over the contours of shared institutional arrangements. Given that there almost always are a number of ways to institutionalize social interaction, any population occupying the circumstances of politics must determine which institutional form or arrangement to rely on in any particular domain. The “priority” of democracy, on our account, derives from its usefulness in approaching this crucial task. This priority derives from features that are, in our view, unique to democracy, namely a level of reflexivity that distinguishes it from other ways of coordinating ongoing social interaction. As we demonstrate, much of the literature on social institutions tacitly and improperly privileges a quite different component of our institutional arrangements, namely markets. We show that once one clarifies the premises and argumentative strategies common to this literature, it simply is not possible to sustain the privilege it accords to markets. In fact, we argue that the analytical models and explanatory strategies that institutionalists deploy actually sustain our case for the priority of democracy.

In an earlier article we challenged the findings of Fowler and Dawes (FD) that two genes predict voter turnout as part of a more general critique of “genopolitics.” FD now acknowledge that their finding of a “significant” direct association between MAOA and voting was incorrect, but claim to have replicated their finding of an “indirect” association between 5HTT, self-reported church attendance, and self-reported voting. We show that this finding is likely driven by population stratification and omitted variable bias. We then explain why, from the standpoints of genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, genopolitics is a fundamentally misguided undertaking; we also respond to FD's charge that some of our previous statements concerning genetics are “highly misleading,” “extremely disingenuous,” and “even incorrect.” We show that their criticisms demonstrate a lack of awareness of some basic principles in genetics and of discoveries in molecular genetics over the past 50 years.

Why are some people motivated to circulate hostile political information? While prior studies have focused on partisan motivations, we demonstrate that some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to “burn down” the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process. To understand this psychology, we theorize and measure a novel psychological state, the Need for Chaos, emerging in an interplay of social marginalization and status-oriented personalities. Across eight studies of individuals living in the United States, we show that this need is a strong predictor of motivations to share hostile political rumors, even after accounting for partisan motivations, and can help illuminate differences and commonalities in the frustrations of both historically privileged and marginalized groups. To stem the tide of hostility on social media, the present findings suggest that real-world policy solutions are needed to address social frustrations in the United States.

What is the point of ideology critique? Prominent Anglo-American philosophers recently proposed novel arguments for the view that ideology critique is moral critique, and ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice or oppression. We criticize that view and make the case for an alternative and more empirically oriented approach, grounded in epistemic rather than moral commitments. We make two related claims: (a) ideology critique can debunk beliefs and practices by uncovering how, empirically, they are produced by self-justifying power and (b) the self-justification of power should be understood as an epistemic rather than moral flaw. Drawing on the recent realist revival in political theory, we argue that this genealogical approach has more radical potential, despite being more parsimonious than morality-based approaches. We demonstrate the relative advantages of our view by discussing the results of empirical studies on the contemporary phenomenon of neopatriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa.

Early socialization research dating to the 1960s showed that children could have a partisan identity without expressing polarized evaluations of political leaders and institutions. We provide an update to the socialization literature by showing that adolescents today are just as polarized as adults. We compare our findings to a landmark 1980 socialization study and show that distrust in the opposing party has risen sharply among adolescents. We go on to show that the onset of polarization in childhood is predicted by parental influence; adolescents who share their parents’ identity and whose parents are more polarized are apt to voice polarized views.

This article contributes to the study of ethnic diversity and public goods provision by assessing the role of the spatial distribution of ethnic groups. Through a new theory that we call spatial interdependence, we argue that the segregation of ethnic groups can reduce or even neutralize the “diversity penalty” in public goods provision that results from ethnic fractionalization. This is because local segregation allows communities to use disparities in the level of public goods compared with other communities as leverage when advocating for more public goods for themselves, thereby ratcheting up the level of public goods across communities. We test this prediction on highly disaggregated data from Indonesia and find strong support that, controlling for ethnic fractionalization, segregated communities have higher levels of public goods. This has an important and underexplored implication: decentralization disadvantages integrated communities vis-à-vis their more segregated counterparts.

This analysis of open-ended interviews conducted in 1969–70 with small samples of English, French, and white and black American children focuses on orientations toward the heads of state of the three nations and the Prime Ministers of Britain and France. The English children exhibit remarkably positive views of the Queen. Many of them believe her to be the nation's effective leader rather than a figurehead. Any political animus they express is directed toward the Prime Minister. The French children tend to describe the President of the Republic positively when they express feelings toward him at all but expect him to behave harshly and arrogantly in actual situations. Their descriptions of political leaders exude authoritarian imagery and perceptions; they perceive the President of the Republic in an impersonal, undifferentiated manner, and are only barely aware of the Premier. The general descriptions of the President of the United States by white American children interviewed in 1969–70 are remarkably similar to the benevolent-leader perceptions of children in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, but the 1969–70 children exhibit much less idealized views of a president depicted as a law-breaker. A post-Watergate white American comparison group interviewed in June 1973 is generally aware of, but puzzled by, the Watergate events. At this early stage in the Watergate revelations, white children were only slightly less likely than the 1969–70 respondents to idealize the President, but were substantially more likely to perceive the president depicted as a law-breaker in terms implying that the President is “above the law.” The American black comparison group, which is too small and special in its geographical circumstances to offer more than suggestive findings, is the most negative of the four groups in general responses to the head of state, but is more like the white American group than like the English or French children in expectations about the actual behavior of the leader. Even though the black and white American children seem to be similar in their expectations about how certain political encounters would ensue, interpretations of encounters are strikingly different.

Would public meetings incite more civic engagement if they were structured in ways that are simply more engaging? I addressed this question by conducting an original survey with an oversample of racial and ethnic minorities and individuals from low-income households. The survey featured a randomized experiment in which each study participant was shown a short clip of an actual school board meeting that was (1) a standard meeting with no public participation, (2) a meeting with public participation, or (3) a meeting with deliberation (public participation followed by a reasoned response from the school board). The experience of viewing the more participatory and deliberative school board meetings led to increased trust in local officials and a stronger willingness to attend school board meetings in the future. This study has significant implications for civic engagement, local politics, and public school governance.

Larger protests are more likely to lead to policy changes than small ones are, but whether or not attendance estimates provided in news or generated from social media are biased is an open question. This letter closes the question: news and geolocated social media data generate accurate estimates of protest size variation. This claim is substantiated using cellphone location data from more than 10 million individuals during the 2017 United States Women’s March protests. These cellphone estimates correlate strongly with those provided in news media as well as three size estimates generated using geolocated tweets, one text-based and two based on images. Inferences about protest attendance from these estimates match others’ findings about the Women’s March.

Several recent explanations for major-power war focus on purported cycles in global economic activity or in global political order. I shall argue that a better understanding of interrelationships among the economic long wave, the global leadership cycle, and armed conflict can be gained if we (1) expand the study of interstate conflict beyond the limited domain of great power or systemic wars and (2) treat the long wave and the leadership cycle as quasi-independent and interrelated processes, each contributing to the conflict dynamics of the interstate system. Theoretical foundations for these two recommendations are drawn from the core works in this field. A model based on this new approach is developed and tested empirically along with four formal representations of the core frameworks. Poisson regression is employed using data on interstate disputes (1816–1976) to test resulting hypotheses. Analysis shows that broadening the explanatory domains of existing frameworks is valid and that the “coevolving systems” model is measurably superior to all tested competitors. I conclude that these two global processes are best viewed as coevolving systems and that future studies of systemic conflict should take this approach.

One of the major obstacles to the progress of political theory lies in the fact that people speak of rights without paying attention to the feasibility of their exercise. I propose to raise here some elementary problems relating to the right of speech. It is one of the basic tenets of our democratic political philosophy that all people (over a given age) have an equal right of speech. Making this right operational however gives rise to difficulties which have not been faced.

I shall start out with a very simple problem, which moreover has the advantage of evoking familiar pictures: this is the chairman's problem. I find myself chairman of an assembly, and regard all participants as formally equal, which commits me to treating them equally. Feeling bound by this principle, I decide as follows: the duration of the meeting is m, the number of participants n: I shall give the floor to each participant for a time m/n; thus the equal right of speech will receive practical application. Assume that the meeting is to be crowned by a vote (the time of actual voting not figuring in m): before the participants cast their equal votes, they will have had equal opportunities to influence the voting, i.e., they shall have had, insofar as depends upon me, equal voices.

Now if m the duration of the meeting (in speaking time) is three hours, and if n the number of participants is 12, my procedure is susceptible of being applied: it grants the floor to each participant for a quarter of an hour. This is not a long time but still it may be enough.

For all the talk and all the public curiosity about the relations between business and politics, there is a remarkable dearth of studies on the subject. What is written is more likely to come from the pen of a sociologist, an historian, a lawyer, or an economist than from a political scientist. One would suppose that the role of business, particularly big business, in the political system would be a matter of central concern to political scientists. And so it may be. But those who write about it are men like Adolph Berle, a lawyer, C. Wright Mills, a sociologist, and Robert Brady, an economist; nor can political scientists legitimately lay claim to Peter Drucker, whose professional training and interests in business antedated his academic position as a teacher of political science.

Has government protection of human rights improved? The answer to this and many other research questions is strongly affected by the assumptions we make and the modeling strategy we choose as the basis for creating human rights country scores. Fariss (2014) introduced a statistical model that produced latent scores showing an improving trend in human rights. Consistent with his stringent assumptions, his statistical model heavily weighted rare incidents of mass killings such as genocide, while discounting indicators of lesser and more common violations such as torture and political imprisonment. We replicated his analysis, replacing the actual values of all indicators of lesser human rights violations with randomly generated data, and obtained an identical improving trend. However, when we replicated the analysis, relaxing his assumptions by allowing all indicators to potentially have a similar effect on the latent scores, we find no human rights improvement.

In their 1990 Review article, Ian Budge and Richard Hofferbert analyzed the relationship between party platform emphases, control of the White House, and national government spending priorities, reporting strong evidence of a “party mandate” connection between them. Gary King and Michael Laver successfully replicate the original analysis, critique the interpretation of the causal effects, and present a reanalysis showing that platforms have small or nonexistent effects on spending. In response, Budge, Hofferbert, and Michael McDonald agree that their language was somewhat inconsistent on both interactions and causality but defend their conceptualization of “mandates” as involving only an association, not necessarily a causal connection, between party commitments and government policy. Hence, while the causes of government policy are of interest, noncausal associations are sufficient as evidence of party mandates in American politics.

It is just fifty-five years since Walter Bagehot wrote his Physics and Politics, a very suggestive book in its day. He began the first chapter of this book with a reference to “the sudden acquisition of much physical knowledge” which had marked the second half of the nineteenth century, and declared it his purpose to show the bearing of these new ideks upon the political conceptions of mankind. That purpose he, fulfilled with much ingenuity, pointing out the various lines along which the advance in natural science seemed to suggest modifications in the old theories of the state and of government.

This was only a half-century ago; yet the new physics of Bagehot's day has already growh old. Its basic concepts have been turned inside out and upside down. Its laws relating to the indestructibility of mass and the conservation of energy have been radically amended. Even a generation ago the atom was held to be the ultimate and indivisible unit in the composition of the universe. It was the basis upon which the scientists of the nineteenth century built up an inclusive set of laws and principles relating to the structure of all creation. No one had ever seen an atom, but its existence could be postulated and its properties were held to be knowable.

It has been a common teaching among modern historians of the guiding ideas in the foundation of our government that the Constitution of the United States embodied a reaction against the democratic principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence. This view has largely been accepted by political scientists and has therefore had important consequences for the way American political development has been studied. I shall present here a contrary view of the political theory of the Framers and examine some of its consequences.

What is the relevance of the political thought of the Founding Fathers to an understanding of contemporary problems of liberty and justice? Four possible ways of looking at the Founding Fathers immediately suggest themselves. First, it may be that they possessed wisdom, a set of political principles still inherently adequate, and needing only to be supplemented by skill in their proper contemporary application. Second, it may be that, while the Founding Fathers' principles are still sound, they are applicable only to a part of our problems, but not to that part which is peculiarly modern; and thus new principles are needed to be joined together with the old ones. Third, it may be that the Founding Fathers have simply become; they dealt with bygone problems and their principles were relevant only to those old problems. Fourth, they may have been wrong or radically inadequate even for their own time.

Two related issues have developed in the scale analysis of voting in the U. S. Congress. One is methodological; it concerns the appropriate dimensionalizing model. The other is more substantive, entailing interpretation of the extent to which voting dimensions carry an ideological component. Kenneth Koford contributed to consideration of these issues in his research note, “Dimensions in Congressional Voting,” in the September 1989 issue of this Review. In this controversy, his claims are challenged vigorously by Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. In turn, Koford defends his argument that “much roll call voting in Congress does not fit a single dimension.”

The attempted coup in August 1991 provides an acid test of whether a democratic political culture is emerging in the former Soviet Union. This paper considers the hypothesis that active resistance to the coup was partly a function of attachments to democracy. Relying heavily on earlier models of collective action, and based on a 1992 survey of mass opinion in all the republics, this hypothesis is tested within a broader theory of rational choice and expectancy theory. Generally, it seems that reactions to the coup were not based on strictly rational calculations and that basic commitments to the collective good of democracy motivated resistance. My general conclusion is that a mass culture has emerged in Russia that nurtures democracy. The 1991 coup demonstrates that for many people in the former Soviet states there is little alternative to democratic politics.

How do mass publics react to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+) advocacy efforts in socially conservative societies? We consider how the first-ever LGBT+ Pride in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina influences ordinary citizens’ attitudes and behavior regarding LGBT+ support. Using nationwide and local panel surveys, we find that support for LGBT+ activism increased locally after the Pride but did not diffuse nationwide, signaling how proximity mechanisms reinforce Pride effects. In survey experiments, we show that subjects are responsive to both mobilization and counter-mobilization appeals by local activists. We also find evidence from a behavioral experiment that the Pride had a positive effect on shifting the allocation of financial resources toward local pro-LGBT+ activists and away from opposition groups. Finally, in-depth interviews with local LGBT+ activists underscore the challenges facing LGBT+ activism in socially conservative societies but also point to the substantial possibilities of collective action on behalf of minorities at risk.

This paper investigates the proposition that rapid urbanization produces significant changes in the kinds, volume, and intensity of demand making aimed at local and national governments, leading to political system “overload” and pressure for major shifts in resource allocation. Drawing upon data gathered among low-income migrants to Mexico City and other Latin American cities, the paper analyzes the process through which objective needs are converted into demands upon government. The findings indicate that there are often major lags in the process of demand creation among cityward migrants, and that many kinds of felt needs are viewed by migrants as needs to be satisfied primarily through individual rather than governmental action.

Data are presented on the incidence of demand making among the migrant population and the substantive nature of the demands they make upon government. Strategies used in attempting to influence government decisions are described, and the attitudes and perceptions underlying the migrant's preference among alternative strategies are analyzed. The long-term propensity of migrants and their offspring to engage in demand making with regard to broad social and economic issues rather than individual or community-related needs is assessed.