Does foreign interference help or harm protest movements? An extensive literature has debated this question but focuses on observational data, obscuring a crucial mechanism for protest success: its effect on public attitudes. We argue that public accusations of foreign meddling damage protest groups by reducing public support. In survey experiments conducted in the United States and Canada, we find that credible accusations of foreign interference erode support by discrediting protester groups among sympathizers and inflaming nationalist fears. Indeed, such accusations delegitimize protest movements even among those sympathetic to the cause. Conditional factors, such as the type of foreign assistance or the identity of the meddling state, have no impact. These findings reveal how referencing foreign backing is a potent discrediting tactic—it influences public opinion, a critical determinant for protest outcomes.

How does the representation of women in international organizations affect the implementation of gender mainstreaming policies? Many international organizations have adopted policies to prevent gender discrimination in their operations, but their implementation is often lackluster. We argue that these shortcomings appear due to a combination of institutional incentives and an underrepresentation of women in their staff. We test the argument in the case of the World Bank, drawing on highly disaggregated staffing data, an instrumental variable strategy, and an elite survey experiment. Our results show that most staff incorporate at least shallow gender mainstreaming in their projects. Deeper implementation of gender mainstreaming is more likely when women staff supervise projects, hold positions of authority, and are more represented as coworkers. These results contribute to understanding the disconnects between talk and action on mainstreaming policies and inform debates on representation in global governance.

Interventions aimed at reducing prejudice toward refugees have shown promise in industrialized countries. However, the vast majority of refugees are in developing countries. Moreover, while these interventions focus on individual attitude change, attitudes often do not shift in isolation; people are embedded in rich social networks. We conducted a field experiment in northwestern Uganda (host to over a million refugees) and find that perspective-taking warmed individual attitudes there in the short term. We also find that the treatment effect spills over from treated households to control ones along social ties, that spillovers can be positive or negative depending on the source, and that peoples’ attitudes change based on informal conversations with others in the network after the treatment. The findings show the importance of understanding the social process that can reinforce or unravel individual-level attitude change toward refugees; it appears essential to designing interventions with a lasting effect on attitudes.

Democracy promises accountability via elections; bureaucracy promises coordination via hierarchy. Many scholars believe these properties conflict. We prove, however, that accountability is precisely what unifies democracy and meritocratic (Weberian) bureaucracy. Central to the concept of meritocracy are performance reviews. We prove that a review system where all individuals and groups are accountable must also be democratic. Thus, meritocratic hierarchy, accountability, and democracy are intertwined. But accountability in modern political systems confronts a significant issue. Such systems include many knowledge-intensive specialties, and since specializations are limited to some but not all members of an institution, the full accountability of democracies entails review of specialists by amateurs. We prove that modern political systems necessarily exhibit this tension. It is a hallmark of modern institutions rather than a problem to be solved.

Under what conditions does the US public support the domestic use of different institutions of coercive state power? We theorize how the type of situation, the type of actor, the mission, and the type of intervention influence public support for such missions. We use a preregistered conjoint survey experiment to test our hypotheses and find that participants (i) are less supportive of interventions in response to protests than to natural disasters or terrorism, (ii) generally prefer the police or the National Guard to the military, (iii) mistrust order maintenance interventions, and (iv) prefer intervening actors be unarmed. Preferences (ii)–(iv) are strongly conditioned on the type of event. We also find that Republicans are more accepting of military actors, order maintenance interventions, armed interventions, and policing responses to protests. We note implications for public trust in the military, the militarization of policing, and the domestic use of federal forces.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Political scientists have long viewed values as a source of constraint in political belief systems. More recently, scholars have argued that values—particularly moral values—contribute to polarization. Yet, there is little direct and systematic research on which values are perceived as moral values. We examine 21 values, including Schwartz’s values, political values, and moral foundations. Drawing on a broad literature on cooperation, we first develop theoretical expectations for the extent of value moralization both between and within value systems. We next argue that this moralization matters because it intensifies the effects of value disagreement on social polarization. Using a probability-based survey of the US and an embedded conjoint experiment, we find substantial variation in moralization across values, and that highly moralized values are more polarizing. Our research brings together competing literatures on values and shows how moral values differentially shape polarization.

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.

In this research letter, we examine whether gender and racial bias affect interruption rates at one of the most visible events in American politics: US Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Using original data from 1939 to 2022, we find that male and white participants are more likely to interrupt women and person of color speakers, respectively, relative to male and white speakers. This finding holds for both senators and nominees as interrupters. Our results provide evidence that biased interruptive behavior occurs in even the most public and salient of political settings and that it can be mitigated (or intensified) by shared (or opposite) partisanship among speaking pairs. We also find interruption inequalities are not isolated to women as the interrupted, revealing that people of color in political and legal settings are subject to heightened rates of interruptions as well.

New evidence suggests that the world recently changed for the U.S. Supreme Court owing to its decision to abrogate the abortion rights first announced in Roe v. Wade. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Court support is little undermined by unpopular rulings, the Dobbs decision generated a substantial knock on the Court’s legitimacy. Two crucial frailties limit these findings, however. First, no one has determined whether the lost legitimacy has persisted, since earlier research relied on a one-shot survey conducted shortly after the decision. Second, no analysis has addressed the “values-based regeneration” hypothesis—that support reemerges not long after a legitimacy hit is inflicted. Based on a nationally representative 2023 survey, my analysis finds that the lost legitimacy has lingered, but institutional support may be being rebuilt owing to its close connection with democratic values. Overall, I conclude that understanding persistence is more complicated than many may have assumed.

Donating to a campaign is inherently costly, and as a result the composition of campaign donors differs from the composition of the electorate. What happens when the financial barriers to campaign finance participation are removed? This paper analyzes Seattle’s recent campaign finance reform, where all registered voters receive four $25 vouchers to donate to candidates abiding by stricter campaign finance restrictions. Utilizing individual- and census block group-level data combined with administrative donation records, I find that those most mobilized by the availability of vouchers belong to groups already overrepresented within the donor pool. This finding is significant across race, income, past political participation, age, and partisanship. In some cases, the availability of vouchers appears to pull the donor pool further from parity with the larger electorate.

In 2020, support for Joe Biden among Latina/o/x voters was 8 percentage points lower than support for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the largest drop of any racial/ethnic group. While much media and academic attention has focused on understanding the impact of misinformation, COVID-19 concerns, and racial animus on Latino voters in 2020, we take a step back and clarify the demographic and core ideological characteristics of Latino voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Using a mix of national survey data, precinct returns, and voter file records, we disaggregate components of electoral change. We find evidence of an increasing alignment between Latinos’ ideology, issue positions, and vote choice. Correspondingly, we observe significant pro-Trump shifts among working-class Latinos and modest evidence of a pro-Trump shift among Latinos closer to the immigration experience. These findings, coupled with an analysis of the 2022 CES, point to a more durable Republican shift than currently assumed.

The world faces a forced displacement crisis. Tens of millions of individuals have been forced across international boundaries worldwide. Therefore, the causes and consequences of refugee flows are the subjects of significant social science inquiry. Unfortunately, the historical lack of reliable data on actual refugee flows, country-specific data reporting timelines, and more general pre-2000 data quality issues have significantly limited empirical inferences on these topics. We replicate 28 articles on these topics using data newly released after a multiyear collaboration with the United Nations on annual dyadic flows. We observe major inconsistencies between the newly released flow numbers and the stock-based flow estimates upon which decades of research are based; we also find widespread inappropriate treatment of missing historical values. When we replicate the existing literature using the newly introduced flow data, correcting the treatment of missing historical values, and temporally extending/restricting the study periods, we produce significantly different results.