Political scientists conceptualize climate politics as a distributive struggle between emerging green and incumbent fossil coalitions. We argue that, even though this conceptualization is historically accurate, a dichotomous understanding no longer fully explains conflicts over climate policy. Importantly, it misses a group of industries that are central to recent policy progress: the decarbonizable sector. Decarbonizable industries, such as automakers or energy-intensive manufacturers, have long been part of fossil coalitions but can develop new sources of competitiveness through decarbonization. This makes them receptive to a bargain: agreeing to meet climate goals in exchange for policies that support their decarbonization, especially fiscal policies that partially fund or de-risk their business transitions. We establish this argument using an original measurement of the size of the decarbonizable sector and corroborate our findings through case studies of green spending policies in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Why do soldiers engage in unauthorized atrocities? This article explores this question by analyzing the use of postmortem mutilation by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. I show that such acts were remarkably frequent, despite being explicitly prohibited by military policy, and argue that individual-level variation in participation in such violence is explained by social dynamics within military units. Soldiers used mutilation mostly as a means of avenging enemy atrocities or deaths among comrades. Revenge motives were stronger when soldiers shared particularly strong social bonds. Whether these motives resulted in unauthorized atrocity, however, depended on the extent to which discipline was maintained within military units. In units characterized by “deviant cohesion”—strong social ties and weak discipline—informal combatant norms diverged from organizational policies and promoted unauthorized atrocities as a unit-level practice. Evidence for this theory comes from a combination of archival sources and survey data gathered from a representative sample of Vietnam War veterans. A case study of a single Army unit illustrates the mechanism implied by the theory.

It is well established that Donald Trump’s rhetoric and actions during his candidacy and presidency endorsed existing group-based social hierarchies, helping to boost his support among white Americans, especially men and those without a college degree. But how did these endorsements shape support for Trump among non-white Americans? Extant theories suggest that these actions should have pushed racial and ethnic minority voter support for the GOP candidate to its lowest observed levels in contemporary political history. Yet Trump outperformed these expectations in 2016 and in 2020 among Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. We propose the same embrace of social hierarchies that motivated white support for Trump also motivated the political preferences and behaviors of a significant number of non-white Americans. Using several national large-N surveys conducted between 2011 and 2021 with large samples of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans, we explore how support for existing status hierarchies—both gender and racial—engendered support for Trump across racial and ethnic groups and discuss implications for the future of electoral politics in a rapidly diversifying United States.

Despite considerable attention in the literature, existing studies analyzing the effect of left governmental power on inequalities suffer from three main limitations: a privileged focus on economic forms of inequality at the expense of political and social ones, inaccurate measurements of left governmental power, and the analyses’ narrow time spans. This article addresses such concerns through a comparative longitudinal analysis where the impact of left governmental power on different measures of political, social, and economic inequalities is investigated in 20 Western European countries across the last 150 years. Data show that, consistent with previous literature, the Left in government has significantly reduced most forms of inequalities. However, the equalizing effect of the Left in government has decreased over time and has become not significant since the 1980s. The Left is today incapable of accomplishing its historical mission of reducing inequalities. The article discusses the rationale and implications of these findings.

Why do some authoritarian regimes contribute more to climate change than others? I suggest that climate inaction in nondemocracies is shaped by a combination of fossil fuel wealth and executive constraints. Fossil fuel wealth undermines climate action by giving leaders of authoritarian regimes incentives to capture oil and gas rents that help them maintain power. Executive constraints, however, can restrict carbon-intensive rent-seeking and therefore moderate the role of fossil fuel wealth in undermining climate action. This argument provides a novel explanation for variation in efforts to address climate change among nondemocracies: the lack of institutional constraints on autocratic leaders’ use of fossil fuel wealth for political gain. I evaluate this argument using panel data on greenhouse gas emissions, oil and gas income, and executive constraints in 108 countries governed by authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2021, finding that oil and gas income leads to higher emissions, but that these effects decline significantly with executive constraints.

As a wave of backsliding has swept across both new and established democracies, scholars have sought to identify formal and informal institutions that can act as guardrails of democracy. But while informal norms, party structures, and formal institutions such as separation of powers have all been singled out as potential bulwarks against democratic backsliding, the literature has had less to say about what role, if any, federalism might play in stopping democracies from sliding into autocracy. While some constitutional designers and scholars have argued that federalism can help to prevent the emergence of a national tyranny, most contemporary research has emphasized the damaging effects federalism can have on democracy. In this article, we assess the relationship between federalism and threats posed by national rulers, with quantitative analysis of that relationship in countries around the world and with structured, focused comparative case studies in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, and India. Our quantitative analysis finds no systematic relationship between federalism and backsliding, while our comparative case studies support our argument that federalism is only likely to serve as a bulwark against autocratic threats posed by national rulers under a limited set of conditions.

Victimization is often associated with increased political participation, and victims are influential political actors in many countries around the world. Yet for victims, activism is costly: they tell and re-tell painful stories, face searing criticism, and work to exhaustion—all at one of the worst moments of their lives. So why do they do it? Based on ethnographic research with Families for Safe Streets, a group of victims-turned-activists in New York City, this article advances a new explanation for victims’ participation in politics. I propose that for some victims, meaning-making is an in-process benefit of activism. My inductive research suggests three ways victims find meaning in politics. First, through their activism, victims can re-conceptualize the losses and harms they have suffered as policy problems, rather than random, inexplicable events. Victims may also seek to help others by changing laws to prevent similar tragedies from recurring, and some victims see their activism as a way of fulfilling important obligations to their communities, their families, and their deceased relatives.

The “gender gap” in voting is one of the most well-documented findings in survey research across democracies. However, gender gap research has traditionally assumed that everyone is either a man or a woman, which does not account for the growing number of people who identify as nonbinary. How do nonbinary people differ from men and women in their party identification and voting behavior? We answer this question using data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study online panel, which has a large enough subsample of nonbinary respondents to identify gaps in party identification and voting behavior. Nonbinary people are much less likely to identify with and vote for the Liberal Party or Conservative Party and much more likely to identify with and vote for the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) than both men and women. Many of these gaps persist even when restricting the analysis to LGBTQ respondents, adjusting for demographic variables that predict nonbinary identity, and adjusting for issue attitudes. Nonbinary people’s distinctiveness from men and women suggests that researchers need to add nonbinary response options to gender questions and, wherever possible, incorporate nonbinary people into analyses of gender and politics.

While scholars consider the global democratic deficit a key issue, we know little about citizens’ perceptions in this regard. To what extent and why do citizens perceive global democratic deficiencies? I conceptualize deficiencies absolutely and relatively—theorizing countries, knowledge, and framing as explanatory factors. Between 2018 and 2021, I conducted survey experiments on around 42,000 respondents in 17 highly diverse countries. Contrary to many scholarly assessments, I find that most people do not perceive major global democratic deficiencies, in the sense that global governance is generally not perceived as highly undemocratic in absolute terms and more democratic than developing democracies. However, the results vary by the object and aspect of inquiry: World politics (versus international organizations) and input (versus output) are perceived as less democratic. Plus, neither gains in relevant knowledge nor common framings affect public perceptions, which are thus quite robust. These findings add novel evidence to debates about global governance.

I consider the role of exposure to large-scale strikes in shaping preferences about workplace action and labor unions, replicating and extending past work identifying the effect of large-scale teachers’ strikes. I study a large 2019 grocery store strike. Using an original survey fielded in affected states and an instrumental variables design, I find strike exposure increased support for the strikes, including actions taken supporting the striking workers. I do not find consistent evidence that strikes increased interest in online actions to support other workers or in workers taking most forms of labor actions at their own jobs. Firsthand contact with strikes had no effect on individuals’ broader perceptions of the labor movement or support for a union at their job. These results suggest important distinctions between strikes. Suggestive evidence indicates that the grocery strikes may have failed to inspire a greater sense of linked fate between affected members of the public and striking workers, as had occurred with teachers’ strikes. I conclude by laying out a research agenda for understanding the impact of mass strikes.

The importance and impact of feminist mobilization across borders is well documented, but the impact of autonomy as an aspect of such organizing has not been explored in the transnational context. We argue that to understand the impact of transnational feminist mobilization, at least two distinct types of feminist mobilization require further conceptual development and empirical exploration in the transnational context, namely, autonomous as contrasted with multilateral mobilization. We offer a conceptual framework for distinguishing and studying these two forms. Further, using a mixed-methods study design, we empirically distinguish domestic and transnational dimensions of feminist activism and illuminate the impact of both multilateral feminist organizing and autonomous feminist organizing in the transnational space. Our analysis reveals that domestic and transnational organizing are distinct but related phenomena. We also find that in online organizing spaces, autonomous feminist campaigns amplify the messaging of geographically dispersed grassroots and individual activists more than multilateral ones. It further suggests that autonomous movements may offer more potential for representing marginalized groups of women, though this potential may not always be realized. The paper offers new concepts and empirical insights for the study of transnational feminism, thereby enabling a new research agenda. Further, this research contributes to the study of the ways that Transnational Social Movements can enrich global civil society and deepen global democracy.

Refugees drown, are beaten, and are pushed back at the borders of the states of the Global North. Moral outrage is understandable in the face of such treatment. But does it constitute a good political theory? Can morality supply us with good normative arguments for a political world? In this article, I argue that they cannot. Drawing on political realism, I show why moral arguments for admitting refugees fail. What we require is not the extrapolation of moral arguments onto a political world, but a new form of political normativity that is derived from how politics works. I show that refugeehood possesses a specific political function in international politics. States do not admit refugees based on humanitarian reasons. This is what moral arguments get wrong. Rather, they fulfill the political function of condemning and embarrassing other states, of building oppositional and military forces to undermine rival political systems both ideologically and materially. In other words, they play an important political role—a role that allows us to build normative arguments from within a political and not a moral understanding of the world.

While it is commonly understood that the poll tax and literacy tests, among other measures, were used effectively in the South to disenfranchise Black voters from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, what is not well known is how much those disenfranchising laws mattered. Specifically, how much did the enactment of poll taxes or literacy tests affect turnout in federal and state elections? And how much did those disenfranchising provisions dampen vote totals for Republican candidates in the South? Using the staggered implementation and removal of several disenfranchising policies over a 101-year period, we answer these questions and provide some precision to our collective knowledge of the “disenfranchising era” in American electoral politics. Overall, we find that the poll tax was the main driver of disenfranchisement in Southern elections, with literacy tests and the Australian ballot providing some secondary effects. We also find that ex-felon disenfranchisement laws were considerably more important—both in reducing turnout as well as Republican vote share in Southern elections—than has been traditionally understood. Finally, we unpack the “South” and unsurprisingly find that racial politics drove these results: the disenfranchising institutions were more impactful in states with a larger Black population share. Our results show the powerful effects of disenfranchising policies on electorates and electoral outcomes. We discuss these results in both their historical context as well as with a mind to the continuing use of disenfranchising provisions in law today.