Recruiting a large number of ground workers is crucial for running effective modern election campaigns. It is unclear if party leaders can influence the quality and quantity of the unpaid rank-and-file workforce as they can with prized nominations for candidates. We analyze a field experiment conducted by an Indian party that randomized recruitment messages reaching 1% of a 13-million-person electorate to join its rank and file. Contrary to concerns that parties can only attract a few poor-quality volunteers, we show that elite efforts can shape the rank and file. In fact, specific strategies can increase the size, enhance the gender and ethnic diversity, and broaden the education and political skills of recruits. Strategies that signal gender inclusiveness have a lasting impact on some dimensions up to 3 years later. Taken together, this article provides the first causal evidence that rank-and-file recruitment is an opportunity for elites to influence long-term party development.

Education is perhaps the most generally used independent variable in the fields of public opinion and vote choice. Yet the extent to which a person is educated is just one way in which education may affect political beliefs and behavior. In this article, we suggest that the substantive field of education has an independent and important role to play over and above level. Using cross-national evidence for 15 European countries we find that a person’s field of education is robustly significant and substantively strong in predicting voting for GAL and TAN parties that have transformed European party systems. Analysis of panel data suggests that the effect of educational field results from self-selection, a direct effect during education, and a post-education effect in occupation.

Applications of moral foundations theory in political science have revealed differences in the degree to which liberals and conservatives explicitly endorse five core moral foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and sanctity. We argue that differences between liberals and conservatives in their explicit ratings of abstract and generalized moral principles do not imply that citizens with different political orientations have fundamentally different moral intuitions. We introduce a new approach for measuring the importance of the five moral foundations by asking U.K. and U.S. survey respondents to compare pairs of vignettes describing violations relevant to each foundation. We analyze responses to these comparisons using a hierarchical Bradley–Terry model which allows us to evaluate the relative importance of each foundation to individuals with different political perspectives. Our results suggest that, despite prominent claims to the contrary, voters on the left and the right of politics share broadly similar moral intuitions.

Measurement is the weak link between theory and empirical test. Complex concepts such as ideology, identity, and legitimacy are difficult to measure; yet, without measurement that matches theoretical constructs, careful empirical studies may not be testing that which they had intended. Item response theory (IRT) models offer promise by producing transparent and improvable measures of latent factors thought to underlie behavior. Unfortunately, those factors have no intrinsic substantive interpretations. Prior solutions to the substantive interpretation problem require exogenous information about the units, such as legislators or survey respondents, which make up the data; limit analysis to one latent factor; and/or are difficult to generalize. We propose and validate a solution, IRT-M, that produces multiple, potentially correlated, generalizable, latent dimensions, each with substantive meaning that the analyst specifies before analysis to match theoretical concepts. We offer an R package and step-by-step instructions in its use, via an application to survey data.

Governments across the Global South have decentralized a degree of power to municipal authorities. Are local officials sufficiently knowledgeable about how to execute their expanded portfolio of responsibilities? Past studies have focused on whether citizens lack the requisite information to hold local officials accountable. We instead draw on extensive fieldwork and a novel survey of small-town politicians in India to show that local officials themselves have distressingly low levels of procedural knowledge on how to govern. We further show that procedural knowledge shapes the capabilities of officials to represent their constituents and that asymmetries in knowledge may blunt the representative potential of these bodies. Finally, we show that winning office does not provide an institutionalized pathway to knowledge acquisition, highlighting the need for policy-based solutions. Our findings demonstrate the importance of assessing knowledge deficits among politicians, and not only citizens, to make local governance work.

We provide the first evidence that firms, not just voters, are gerrymandered. We compare allocations of firms in enacted redistricting plans to counterfactual distributions constructed using simulation methods. We find that firms are over-allocated to districts held by the mapmakers’ party when partisans control the redistricting process; maps drawn by courts and independent commissions allocate firms more proportionately. Our results hold when we account for the gerrymandering of seats: fixing the number of seats the mapmakers’ party wins, they obtain more firms than expected in their districts. Our research reveals that partisan mapmakers target more than just voters, shedding new light on the link between corporate and political power in the United States and opening new pathways for studying how mapmakers actually draw district boundaries.

We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. We find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. We also show that corruption adversely affects the provision of public goods and undermines counter-terrorism capacity. Thus, our empirical findings are consistent with predictions from a game-theoretical representation of terrorism, according to which corruption makes terrorism relatively more attractive compared to peaceful contestation, while also decreasing the costs of organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks.

At the turn of the twentieth century, most cities in America featured a patronage-based system of governance, but over the next few decades, patronage was replaced by civil service. Civil service restructured the relationship between elected officials and government employees, with employees benefiting from a variety of new protections. Yet in studying this change, scholars have largely ignored the role local employees themselves might have played in the transformation. We argue that city employees stood to benefit from civil service, and in places where they had agency and clout, they were important drivers of its adoption. We collected a dataset for more than 1,000 municipal governments, determining whether and when they adopted civil service and whether their employees were organized in an occupational organization. Our analysis of these new data shows the influence of city employees was an important contributor to the spread of civil service in American local government.

The profession has been increasing efforts to ensure ethical research in politics and international relations (IR) with robust institutional review procedures. But this ethics turn has not been evaluated systematically to date. Drawing on two original datasets that record reporting on the ethical practices of research in key political science and IR journals (2000–18), we analyze how scholars report on ethics of research involving human participants as well as archival, social media, and textual data from the perspective of feminist ethics of care. We find that women report ethics more than men, women and men report on different dimensions of ethics, and these differences are starker at the intersection of gender and method. We identify a new dimension of gender-based inequality in the profession which, we argue, stems from voluntary practices of ethics reporting that persist globally in academic publications. An agreed international standard of reporting research ethics is needed.

To what extent do peers affect criminal behavior? In this article, I study peer effects among ex-combatants in Colombia. Following a theoretical framework that differentiates the impact of economic conditions from that of social networks, I rely on individual-level data on over 16,000 former paramilitaries in Colombia to study the relationship between illegal gold production and recidivism. I show that when the economic benefits of illegal sectors increase, ex-combatants favor criminal activities. More importantly, I show that an increase in wartime peers’ criminality increases an ex-combatant’s criminal activity. I complement these results with the analysis of an original survey about the social connections of ex-combatants and explore the potential effect of tackling wartime networks as a policy to reduce crime after conflicts.

Why are democratic publics reluctant to use force against fellow democracies? We hypothesize that the democratic peace in public opinion owes, in large part, to racialized assumptions about democracy. Rather than regime type per se doing the causal work, the term “democracy” inadvertently primes the presumption that target countries are predominantly white. This implicit racialization, in turn, explains the reluctance of the American public to support aggression against fellow democracies, most notably among respondents higher in ethnocentrism who disproportionately drive the democratic peace treatment effect. Two original survey experiments, a large-scale word embedding analysis of English texts, and reanalyses of published studies support this expectation. Our results suggest that the democratic peace in public opinion is, largely, an ethnocentric and racialized peace. The findings hold implications for the role of racism and racialization in foreign policy opinion research generally.

What are the psychological, social, and political legacies of sexual violence in armed conflicts? While conventional wisdom expects the exclusion of survivors from their societies due to stigma, we advance a theory of sociopolitical mobilization among wartime sexual violence survivors and their households. Our theory emphasizes the value that people place on their communities in conflict-affected contexts and incorporates the psychosocial harms that survivor-households experience as well as their agency. We use an original survey from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to evaluate the theory. Analyses using list experiment measures of wartime sexual violence show that survivor-households engage in increased levels of social and political activities in their communities. Auxiliary analyses suggest that mobilization is driven by stigmatization and self-blame, a finding that resonates with social psychological research on exclusion and social reconnection.

This article is the first comprehensive treatment of countermajoritarian roll call outcomes in the U.S. Senate, 1789–2022. Divergences from majoritarian principles are rooted in part in malapportionment and equal representation by state. Roll calls where a majority of the chamber votes one way while the other side represents most of the U.S. population are frequent across Senate history, depending on the proportion of the population covered by the majority party and the degree of conflict in the agenda. Other departures from majoritarian principles derive from the presence of supermajority requirements within the chamber. Such decision thresholds likewise are prevalent across Senate history, with significant increases since the 1970s. Although the two sources of countermajoritarian potential tend to be mutually reinforcing, under certain conditions they work against one another. The partisan impact varies over time, but in the modern chamber, Republicans have benefited more from Senate countermajoritarianism than have Democrats.

Congressional observers have long been interested in the distinction between legislative “workhorses” and “showhorses.” However, when scholars operationalize this by measuring legislator productivity, they often neglect many realities of modern lawmaking by focusing on the traditional bill sponsorship and passage process. To better align measurement with practice, we compile widely available data on bill sponsorship, cosponsorship, and amendments; we also use text-as-data methods to credit instances of behind-the-scenes lawmaking via text reuse between bills. We weight achievements from each of these lawmaking methods to create the Lawmaking Productivity Metric for House Members of the 101–113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship provides important insights about who the congressional workhorses are. In particular, we find that traditional measures systematically undercount the legislative successes of women and likely Black Members of Congress because they disproportionately legislate in less visible ways.

Expanding suffrage is critical for democratic inclusion. In the United States, noncitizen residents are the latest focus of such (re)enfranchising efforts. Public opinion plays a significant role in the passage of legislation expanding or restricting noncitizen access to local elections. Although elite support for noncitizen suffrage is well-documented, little is known about public opinion toward such noncitizen voter policies. What accounts for voter support for noncitizen electoral participation? We argue that the partisan alignment between noncitizens and U.S. voters shapes U.S. voters’ support for noncitizen voting rights. Evidence from two survey experiments suggests that U.S. voters are pragmatic in their enfranchising preferences: voters increase their support for co-partisan enfranchisement but oppose this same policy when considering out-partisans. These dynamics are present among both Republicans and Democrats, underscoring the societal implications of heightened partisanship on American democracy.

The apocalypse is frequently deployed by political movements, especially contemporary climate activists, to advance their causes. This article develops a framework for defending such invocations of the end of the world. With many other political theorists, I suggest that the apocalypse is a dangerous concept, not least because of its association with authoritarian accounts of history. However, we should not reject the apocalypse. I argue for a form of anti-anti-apocalypticism, using the criticisms directed against the concept as a launchpad to rethink it in viable terms. While acknowledging the value of different ways of defending the apocalypse, I highlight the importance of the causes of apocalyptic movements. Simply put, apocalypses from below are defensible because they have the capacity to clarify the political position of the oppressed and open new political possibilities for the group. By contrast, apocalypses from above, because they fail to fulfill these functions, are not.

There is a large literature on the use of cases, hardly anything on examples. They are different: cases get analyzed, examples get deployed. Examples can perform clarifying, didactic, persuasive, universalizing, critical, and cogitative functions. These six functions all have their own logic, and a set of guidelines for how to perform each of them well is developed. However, compelling and persuasive examples can also mislead. Following Kahneman’s distinction between system 1 (fast) and system 2 (slow) thinking, good examples both resonate in system 1 terms and invite system 2 scrutiny. The best examples are good in some aspect, flawed in interesting ways in others. A perfect example is a logical impossibility. The author’s interest in convincing the reader and the discipline’s interest in effective inquiry can diverge, a problem overcome if reason in inquiry is seen as essentially dialogical.

Although a master category of contemporary social and political thought, the conceptual import of colonialism has long been contested. Turning to the political thought of Jawaharlal Nehru, this article reconstructs the surprising, and often surreptitious, intellectual transformations that rendered colonialism into a generic name for European rule over Asia and Africa. It demonstrates how the dual claims of colonialism—a historical reference for the global event of European expansion and a threadbare analytical definition for a particular form of rule—generated a powerful framework in the anticolonial age. While the expanded juridical uses of colonialism in the Cold War era undermined its historical claims, the priority would reverse with its postcolonial re-signification as a shorthand for studying the paradoxes of global modernity. Reframing these debates, this article argues that reflexive navigation between the dual claims of colonialism is key to a capacious appreciation of its historical and normative contentions.

The resurgence of industrial policymaking—particularly for emerging low-carbon industries—challenges social science theories that expect such interventions from centralized states or suggest that different kinds of states specialize in various forms of innovation policy. Interventionist forms of industrial policy have made a comeback among liberal economies. Coordinated economies now make use of market-driven strategies. This paper argues that the new generation of industrial strategies is shaped by the industrial development challenges that policymakers face at the sectoral level. It proposes a new theoretical framework that distinguishes between the policy orientation (targeted or open-ended) and the central agents driving financial and technological decision-making (governments or firms). We show that the choice of strategy is shaped by the level of uncertainty and the position of the domestic industry in global supply chains, that is, whether global supply chains are emerging or mature and whether the domestic industry is an entrant or incumbent.

Do corrupt officials govern differently in elected office? This article develops a theoretical framework and analyzes new data from financial disclosures to estimate the governing costs of corruption. First, I uncover substantial hidden wealth held by roughly one quarter of the legislators in the Russian Duma; these “kompromat deputies” are vulnerable to damaging information being used against them by the regime. Analyzing their behavior in office, I find that these deputies are less active and more absent members of parliament. When called to vote, kompromat deputies from the opposition also more eagerly support the regime’s political agenda. Finally, kompromat deputies are less likely to win reelection, suggesting that they have shorter time horizons as well as that parties have incentives to rotate them out. Autocrats permit and then monitor corruption in order to co-opt potential challengers, who in turn trade loyalty to the regime in exchange for opportunities to self-enrich.