This article presents new empirical evidence about the impact of Jihadist terrorist attacks on far-right preferences using the “unexpected event during survey” research design. This strategy allows us to match individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) to data on Jihadist terrorist attacks to compare respondents’ party preferences before and after a terrorist attack during the same survey period in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Germany. We theorise and test three distinct hypotheses about how different combinations of attitudinal changes including out-group prejudice and trust in institutions impact far-right preferences. We find no statistically significant effects. Analyses of the two indirect mechanisms— i.e., prejudice and trust—yield mixed results consistent with the null effect on far-right party preferences. By showing that terrorist attacks are unlikely to decisively change party support despite attracting significant public attention and affecting political attitudes, our results challenge the argument that Jihadist terrorism necessarily benefits the far-right and highlight the importance of null effects for overcoming confirmation bias in the study of voting behaviour.

Why do some conspiracy theories (CTs) remain popular and continue to spread on social media while others quickly fade away? Situating conspiracy theories within the literature on social movements, we propose and test a new theory of how enduring CTs maintain and regain popularity online. We test our theory using an original, hand-coded dataset of 5,794 tweets surrounding a divisive and regularly commemorated set of CTs in Poland. We find that CTs that cue in-group and out-group threats garner more retweets and likes than CT tweets lacking this rhetoric. Surprisingly, given the extant literature on party leaders’ ability to shape political attitudes and behaviors, we find that ruling party tweets endorsing CTs gain less engagement than CT tweets from non-officials. Finally, when a CT’s main threat frames are referenced in current events, CTs re-gain popularity on social media. Given the centrality of CTs to populist rule, these results offer a new explanation for CT popularity—one focused on the conditions under which salient threat frames strongly resonate.

Many theorists argue that justice in international migration requires states to maximize the openness of their borders, even when that can only be done by denying full political membership to some migrants. In contrast, this article contends that democratic ideals recommend inclusion as the guiding principle of migration policy, since full membership for all the state’s residents is the only way to preserve democratic self-rule, whereas the justice- and freedom-related goals associated with openness can be promoted via other means. I define full inclusion as involving not only formal rights, but also solidarity. Against accounts that define solidarity in terms of shared identity (i.e., a specific commonality), I argue that democratic solidarity requires intersubjective “identification” among members of the demos, oriented toward their shared future. This account suggests how migration policy might advance the practical goal of more open borders, along with other moral goals associated with calls for greater openness, without sacrificing important democratic ideals.

Current research suggests that all states share a perpetual appetite for extraction and standardization. However, this research overlooks the fact that subnational regions present different appeals and challenges to ruling coalitions. While states seek to extend bureaucratic rule over peripheries with valuable assets and favorable geography, they might instead seek to preserve local patrimonial bastions when those areas offer substantial electoral support. In turn, these strategies lead to broad subnational heterogeneity in the reach of the state. This paper focuses on regions’ ecological, military, and clientelistic features to explain local trajectories of bureaucratic rule and country-level state capacity. Empirically, I examine Chile, a successful case of capacity-building in Latin America. Prompted by a fiscal crisis in the mid-1850s, Chile’s central government launched state-building projects to offset its budgetary deficit. Using GIS and original data from censuses, budgets, and other primary sources, I show that Chile’s ruling coalition paradoxically modernized the country’s peripheries while deepening its own traditionalism. These results challenge prevailing narratives about the projection of political authority and Chile’s territorial uniformity.

Monetary and financial integration has been shown to increase the pressure on states to liberalize social and labor market policies. If structures do not come with instruction sheets, how do monetary regime pressures translate into policy? Through a case study of the euro area, we show that central banks play an underappreciated role in this process. Using mixed methods to analyze a large amount of data, including the complete corpus of speeches, we trace the evolution of the European Central Bank’s advocacy for structural reforms between 1999 and 2019. To explain the ECB’s activism in a policy area beyond its mandate, we theorize the ECB as navigating a dilemma between governability and legitimacy. Handed a monetary regime under which flexible labor markets were seen as a condition for governability, the ECB saw no alternative but to push governments toward structural reforms, despite the reputational risks. The ECB ended its advocacy when increasing political backlash coincided with a structural regime shift from an inflationary to a deflationary environment.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a natural process where microbes develop the ability to survive the antimicrobial drugs we depend upon to treat and prevent deadly infections, such as antibiotics. This microscopic evolution is further propelled by human activities, where each use of an antimicrobial drug potentially induces AMR. As microbes can spread quickly from animals to humans and travel around the world through humanity’s global circuits of movement, the use of any antimicrobial drug has potentially global consequences. As human-induced AMR occurs, mortality and morbidity increase due to increasingly or sometimes completely ineffective antimicrobial treatments. This article considers AMR as a product of the evolving and complex interplay between human societies and invisible microbial worlds. It argues that as a political challenge, AMR requires robust institutions that can manage human–microbial interactions to minimize the emergence of drug resistance and maximize the likelihood of achieving effective antimicrobial use for all. Yet, current governance systems for AMR are ill-equipped to meet these goals. We propose a conceptual paradigm shift for global AMR governance efforts, arguing that global governance could better address AMR if approached as a socioecological problem in need of sustainable management rather than solely as a medical problem to be solved. In biodiversity governance, institutions are designed to fit the biological features of the ecosystems that they are attempting to manage. We consider how a similar approach can improve global AMR governance. Employing the concept of ecological fit, which is defined as the alignment between human social systems and biological ecosystems, we diagnose 18 discrepancies between the social institutions that currently govern AMR and the ecological nature of this problem. Drawing from lessons learned in biodiversity governance, the article proposes five institutional design principles for improving the fit and effectiveness of global AMR governance.

Administrative agencies have undertaken an increasingly substantial role in policymaking. Yet the influence-seeking that targets these agencies remains poorly understood. Reporting exceptions under the Lobbying Disclosure Act allow many of the most powerful advocates to characterize their activity as lawyering, not lobbying, and thereby fly under the radar. Using agency-generated records on lobbying activity, financial reporting, and personnel databases specific to lawyers, as well as LinkedIn, we describe a vast subterranean world of regulatory influence-seeking that the social-science literature has (mostly) ignored. Regulatory lobbying is systematically different from legislative lobbying. It involves different kinds of people and different lobbying firms that bring specific forms of expertise and distinct networks. Our key findings about how regulatory lobbying differs include the following: (1) the regulatory lobbying sector is highly segregated from the reported lobbying sector, with many regulatory advocates failing to consistently register or report earnings commensurate with their activity level, (2) the number of unregistered regulatory advocates working on the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act plausibly exceeds 150% of the registered lobbyists working on that law, (3) the most effective regulatory lobbyists and law firms involved with regulatory lobbying have incomes that dramatically outpace leading reported lobbying firms (which are also mostly law firms), and (4) back-of-the-envelope calculations and more sophisticated decomposition regressions imply that aggregate expenditure on lawyer-lobbying is several multiples of reported lobbying spending. We introduce the case of a particular lawyer-lobbyist and provide a theoretical discussion to situate and contextualize these findings. Collectively, this work opens a window into neglected domains of politics and reveals an important and understudied form of political inequality.

Do demonstrations tend to deepen or endanger democracy? I examine this theme of major debate between scholars and among political actors, analyzing how the United States and other democracies have dealt with—and been shaped by—popular pressure on representative institutions. Cases that are discussed include Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington and the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, as well as examples drawn from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. I offer clear principles to differentiate between types of protest that deepen democracy, advance the goal of inclusion, and others that endanger democratic principles. Among the issues I take up is whether the location of protest—for example, adjacent to or even inside legislative chambers—is decisive. Rejecting that approach, my argument instead emphasizes the difference between protests intended to influence policy-making or the political agenda and those that use intimidation or violence to replace the primacy of elections in selecting office holders. The discussion argues that conceptualizing demonstrations as complementary to the work of representative institutions can help to promote the difficult to obtain objective of political equality between citizens. The article also asks whether consensus on this matter can be attained and if so how.

The combination of rigid policy rules with shifting political, economic, and social environments can produce drift: policy change without formal modification. We know much about the political origins and consequences of drift but little about the legal battles that accelerate or impede it. I identify two distinct forms of policy rigidity that generate drift: interval freezing and categorical freezing. Drawing from recent and historical cases encompassing voting rights, racial discrimination, religious conscience protections, and other hot-button issues, I argue that drifting policies possess several sources of legal resilience: injuries are difficult to identify; judges can be persuaded of the merits of restraint, textual formalism, and bright-line rules; and policy makers plausibly deny any intentional action in pursuit of controversial outcomes. Drift is not an automatic and unremarkable process of continual policy change but rather the outcome of high-stakes political and legal contestation over how rigid policy thresholds and categories should be adapted to meet shifting conditions.

Revolutionary protest rarely begins as democratic or revolutionary. Instead, it grows in a process of positive feedback, incorporating new constituencies and generating new demands. If protest is not revolutionary at its onset, theory should reflect this and be able to explain the endogenous emergence of democratic demands. In this article, I combine multiple data sources on the 2010–2011 Tunisian Revolution, including survey data, an original event catalogue, and field interviews. I show that the correlates of protest occurrence and participation change significantly during the uprising. Using the Tunisian case as a theory-building exercise, I argue that the formation of protest coalitions is essential, rather than incidental, to democratic revolution.

While scholars have focused extensively on the consequences of partnerships between interest groups, less attention has been paid to the historical dynamics shaping when, how, and why such groups unite. This is especially true of “unexpected” partnerships, which unite groups with seemingly little in common. Such partnerships are important, as they can reshape to an unusual degree which actors, issues, and ideas “fit together” politically. We address the puzzle of how unexpected group partnerships form through case studies of previously non-existent alliances between labor unions and the gay/lesbian rights movement in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. Using these cases, we produce a theory arguing that unexpected partnerships are a product of a favorable political opportunity structure—present when each group experiences shared threats and mutual vulnerabilities—and the actions of entrepreneurial group leaders, who forge cross-group identities, accentuate shared ideological convictions, and build institutional ties.

Gun ownership is a highly consequential political behavior. It often signifies a belief about the inadequacy of state-provided security and leads to membership in a powerful political constituency. As a result, it is important to understand why people buy guns and how shifting purchasing patterns affect the composition of the broader gun-owning community. We address these topics by exploring the dynamics of the gun-buying spike that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was one of the largest in American history. We find that feelings of diffuse threat prompted many individuals to buy guns. Moreover, we show that new gun owners, even more than buyers who already owned guns, exhibit strong conspiracy and anti-system beliefs. These findings have substantial consequences for the subsequent population of gun owners and provide insight into how social disruptions can alter the nature of political groups.