Houses of worship hold specific political significance because they shape the political attitudes and behaviors of their congregations. I argue that they also have broader political significance because their impact extends beyond the congregation to the local community. I support this argument by analyzing the locations of more than 300,000 mosques in Indonesia and national panel data of more than 16,000 Muslim respondents. Employing a difference-in-difference approach, I find that the presence of new mosques in a kecamatan (district) correlates with increased exclusionary attitudes toward non-Muslims. To a more limited extent, the presence of more mosques also correlates with a greater emphasis on religious similarity in voting decisions. Further exploratory analysis suggests that mosques serving as channels for information and communication within the community plays a more significant role in producing these effects than their functions in enhancing religiosity or reinforcing religious identity.

More autonomous humanitarian international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have greater capacity to determine who receives aid among conflict- and crisis-affected populations than their donor-following counterparts. The latter are more likely to become instruments of states seeking geostrategic influence in places like Syria and Ukraine. Drawing on more than 120 interviews with INGO and donor agency workers, 10 months of political ethnography among INGOs working with refugees in Lebanon and Jordan after the war in Syria, and content analysis of organizational documents, this article investigates the ways that INGOs secure autonomy from donors. In a theory-building exercise, it introduces the concept of negotiation experience to explain why some INGOs develop skills and strategies that allow them to resist donor demands. It also identifies some of the tactics used by experienced negotiators to do so. The findings have implications for who controls and is accountable for humanitarian policy and practice, as well as the abilities of state donors to influence humanitarian behavior. They call into question expectations that INGOs “scramble” for funds under conditions of funding scarcity.

Housing scarcity is a widespread social and economic problem. Prior studies have attributed this scarcity to local control over land use, which has been seen as making policy makers more responsive to small electorates. Challenging this argument, we suggest that smaller jurisdictions have stronger incentives and greater capacity to raise tax revenue by building housing. Therefore, expanding the electorate that policy makers are responsive to could lead to a more restrictive housing policy. To explore this question empirically, we study a reform that consolidated some Danish municipalities, increasing the size of their jurisdiction. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that consolidated municipalities issue fewer permits and complete less housing than smaller jurisdictions. Our study thus shows that politicians permitted more housing when they were accountable to a smaller electorate. This upends conventional wisdom and suggests that local control need not be at odds with more liberal land use policy.

Do populist governments bend their economic policies to the preferences of bondholders? Populist governments should be a “least likely” case for the market discipline hypothesis. Populist parties typically run on platforms that scapegoat wealthy elites as “enemies of the people” and hence should be more resistant to changing policy positions in the face of market pressure, given their reluctance to alienate their base. Employing most-different case studies of the Five Star Movement/Lega coalition in Italy and Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, we find that populists do bend to market pressure but that this “disciplining effect” does not stem primarily from foreign investors. Rather, it was the inaction of domestic investors in bond auctions that caused these governments to reverse course on headline economic policies. Because domestic investors served as both governments’ “buyers of last resort,” they needed to maintain their favor amidst foreign capital flight.

How do patterns of racial inequality shape policing behavior in the United States? We investigate whether police engage in boundary maintenance at geographic points of racial difference. Critical race scholars suggest that police explicitly serve this function. Yet empirical studies are rare and limited to snapshots of a single city, making it hard to distinguish practices employed across departments from agency- and officer-level idiosyncrasies. We leverage high resolution data on police activity in seven U.S. cities to evaluate how police engage with racial boundaries. We find evidence that police activity is elevated in racial boundary zones relative to non-boundary zones, exceeds observed crime, and that racialized outcomes are as much a product of policing practices as they are of conflict between private citizens. We reorient the study of boundaries around top-down processes that lead to their regulation and identify an agenda for future research.

Labor organizations increasingly rely on political communication campaigns to win broader support from bystanders. How do framings of worker mobilization influence public support for strikers’ demands? This paper explores the effects of different framings of teacher strikes on support for labor unions and strikes in Mexico by employing an original vignette experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey. We find that how strikes are framed alters responses to them. Our treatment effects indicate that mentioning the political interest of union leaders decreases support for unions, while informing voters about teacher grievances increases support for ongoing strikes. Our finding suggests the importance of disaggregating attitudes toward strikes and unions and proposes new avenues for research on how media strategies are used by various actors to gain political leverage during labor conflicts.

Over the last decade, a range of international actors has moved away from direct forms of intervention to protect civilian populations in favor of “bottom-up” approaches that emphasize external support for civilian self-protection (CSP). While this indirect action is often perceived to be less costly, more legitimate, and potentially more effective, we argue that external support for CSP is a “risky business” that presents a significant dilemma for international governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Drawing on literature from sociology, economics, and civil war studies, we conceptualize and categorize the risks of unintended consequences that could accompany external support for CSP and suggest why they are likely to arise in this context. We then empirically explore whether and how these risks manifest with an in-depth study of four purposively selected organizations supporting CSP in their programming. We also assess whether and how organizational type matters for the prevalence of these consequences and how the risk of their occurrence is managed. Our analysis shows that, across a range of conflict settings, all four organizations encountered unintended consequences of three main kinds: increased vulnerability and insecurity for local communities, challenges to organizational mandates and values, and strained relations with key protection stakeholders. International actors supporting CSP thus confront the dilemma of seeking to enhance their effectiveness and legitimacy by “localizing” protection, but potentially create new challenges and perverse effects and/or compromise their organizational identity in the process. While this dilemma is inherent in all external protection assistance, our study highlights the importance of actor embeddedness: organizations that are more proximate to the communities they work with are in a better position to minimize these unintended consequences and manage the risks associated with supporting CSP. These findings contribute to ongoing debates about civilian protection in comparative politics, international relations, and humanitarian studies, but also offer concrete insights for practitioners engaged in support for CSP. More broadly, our study could have implications for other policy areas where the legitimacy of so-called top down approaches is being questioned and where these approaches are giving way to the empowerment of local actors and processes.

Veto rights are a prominent institutional feature in ethnically divided societies, especially power-sharing democracies. Yet while vetoes are intended to protect the vital interests of each ethnic community, they can give rise to serious concerns about political deadlock and instability. In response, we argue that vetoes should be subject to a justificatory test grounded in public reason. On the face of it, one troubling consequence of this approach is that a community’s assessment of its own vital interests cannot be decisive. Yet as we explain, the critical issue is not who should be the arbiter of an interest but the need to be fair to the interests of all concerned. To illustrate how a public reason approach of this sort might be rendered sufficiently specific to be of practical use, we take human rights law as our example. Having considered a number of potential difficulties that this example throws up, we conclude by noting how a justificatory test can help to deliver not just greater political stability but a more democratically progressive form of politics.

Thomas Paine’s and Thomas Jefferson’s writings on the relations between generations continue to attract much attention among political theorists and historians of political thought. They have been described as two of the most important theorists of the intergenerational characteristics of rights and of the significance of ascribing “sovereignty” to every generation. Jefferson’s work has often been portrayed as shaping Paine’s thinking on intergenerational obligations. This article contends that such characterizations of Paine misapprehend the development of his thought. By examining previously overlooked writings in Paine’s corpus, it becomes clear that his account of intergenerational rights and obligations was substantially different from Jefferson’s. The supposed parallels between their work obscure more than they illuminate. Indeed, the most interesting arguments Paine offered for reconceiving the capacities of each generation have thereby been neglected. These conceptual resources are worth returning to, especially given that Paine’s and Jefferson’s work on intergenerational relations is often mobilized to theorize a range of contemporary problems from constitutional interpretation to climate change.

Women legislators face a variety of gendered barriers both outside and inside the legislature. Yet, little previous scholarship has quantitatively examined whether legislative insiders are biased against women and their accomplishments. We explore a new potential explanation for gender inequity in legislatures: that women in office may get less credit than men for similar achievements. If legislative insiders systematically undervalue women’s work, women will have a harder time gaining influence within the chamber; alternatively, those working in and with the legislature may be uniquely aware of the effort that goes into representational activities and can observe the work that women perform firsthand. To examine this question, we combine elite evaluations of legislators from the North Carolina General Assembly with data on committee assignments, legislative effectiveness, electoral performance, and more. We find little systematic evidence that women legislators’ accomplishments are valued less than those of the men with whom they serve.

Research quality assessment is a cornerstone of academic practice, yet the criteria that inform such judgments are often assumed rather than critically examined through empirical research. This article draws on a global survey of international relations (IR) scholars (N = 820) to analyze the cognitive dimensions underlying research quality evaluation and their variation across sociological and epistemological factors. We identify seven distinct quality factors: theoretical significance, logical style and structure, practical significance, methodological rigor, contribution and value for future research, interest and topicality, and challenge to existing knowledge. Our results suggest that, while personal preferences, disciplinary norms, and professional practices—shaped by variables such as gender, nationality, and political orientation—influence evaluations, research quality judgments are ultimately grounded in shared cognitive frameworks. Our study offers robust evidence that quality assessments, though subject to sociological variation, reflect deeper, common cognitive structures across scholarly communities.

Social media platforms have an increasingly central influence on global politics. Media of unprecedented reach, they have the power to sway elections, exacerbate societal polarization, promote or provoke conflict at all levels, and jeopardize relations between states. But what of the people who govern and oversee these platforms? For although algorithms and automation may underpin how social media content influences politics, the policies, approaches, and international relations of social media companies are directed or conducted by corporate executives and their representatives, actors who receive limited critical attention in International Relations (IR) scholarship. Combining multiple data sources, including field interviews with Meta and Twitter staff on three continents, this reflection suggests an approach to studying social media companies and their relationships to global politics that moves beyond abstraction and aggregation. Examining these actors and their internal dynamics through an organizational lens can shed fresh light on the contingent spatial, temporal, and normative drivers and enactments of their influence across the international system.

Under what conditions are user-generated digital content platforms responsive to pressures from users, businesses, and states? I propose that digital platforms show different levels of responsiveness to users, businesses, and states over time. Early in a platform’s life, the platform is highly sensitive to the demands of users, who have an opportunity to directly shape the institutional characteristics of the platform through the threat of user revolt. The unique power of its users stems from the network logic that underpins the value of the platform. As a platform grows and the size and centrality of its network increase, it becomes more sensitive to pressures by businesses (through boycotts) and the state (through regulation). At the same time, the power of users lessens as collective action problems become more severe and exit threats become less credible. The threat of user revolts has a temporal significance: Unless users alter the institutional architecture of the platform and lock in pro-user institutional characteristics early, the threat of user revolts becomes less consequential as the platform grows. Comparative case studies of Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, and Reddit provide support for the theory.

Citizens’ resentment at losing out to the rest of society is commonly regarded as the foundation of the demand for the populist radical right (PRR). Yet whether this motive has an objective economic basis remains disputed. Relying on European Social Survey individual-level data from 23 elections across Western Europe, combined with Eurostat data, I demonstrate that the PRR polls better among social classes facing economic status loss. To do so, I leverage a novel positional measure of income. This approach allows me to gauge economic status loss as a distinct experience from worsening financial circumstances, which has been the initial focus of empirical research. Evidence that economic status loss is the economic engine of PRR support is corroborated by data on cultural stances and redistributive preferences. My study confirms the complementarity of cultural- and economic-based explanations of PRR voting and reveals one electoral consequence of rising economic inequalities.

Which autocratic elites are more likely to return to cabinet in a democracy? Elites’ incentives are at the core of the explanations of why, how, and when democratization happens, yet existing studies on elites’ post-democratization trajectory are mostly anecdotal, case-study–based, region-specific, or based on aggregate, slow-moving structural variables. This article offers a novel theory and systematic empirical evidence of autocratic revolving doors that explain which former autocratic elites are more likely to return to cabinet positions under democracy. Using a demand-and-supply logic of cabinet formation, I propose that the return of former autocratic elites to cabinet is explained both by the need for cabinet leaders with policy-making experience and to appease old autocratic elites and their interests. More specifically, the political experience and the characteristics of the position that political elites held under autocracy explains which of them are more likely to meet these objectives and return to cabinet in a democracy. These theoretical propositions receive support in a quantitative analysis using a novel measure of returning elites for 12,949 former autocratic elites from 68 new democracies between 1966 and 2020.

How does ideology affect relations between armed groups within a state? While existing research has underscored how ideological proximity can foster alliances among armed groups, this article posits that ideological proximity can also breed hostility among them. When organizations share foundational narratives, they gain access to each other’s ideational resources, which can, in turn, pose challenges to these groups’ cohesion and leadership status. These challenges manifest in the form of questioning the sincerity and authenticity of each other’s beliefs, thereby threatening the group’s survival, sometimes overshadowing the risks posed by their shared ideologically distant adversaries. Focusing on Iran’s Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), this article highlights its evolution as one of the first armed groups to transform Islam into a potent ideology before transitioning to Marxism and later reverting to Islamism. It examines how the organization’s ideological proximity with other Islamist and Marxist actors led to conflict and outbidding violence instead of cooperation. Drawing upon a trove of the MKO’s secret documents, this article reveals how a significant portion of the rhetoric and actions of armed groups is directed at outperforming their ideologically similar rivals, rather than confronting ideologically distant adversaries.

Latin America continues to provide a fertile hunting ground for students of comparative politics. There is plentiful variation between, within, and across countries and subsectors. Yet, there are also shared scope conditions, cultural and institutional commonalities, and region-wide interactions and demonstration effects. There are some areas where comparisons can be based on either the “most similar” or the “most different” system design, but most causal variables of real interest are imprecise, unstable, and mutually interactive. They often operate within discontinuous and unstable political systems that evade mechanistic modeling. Temporal discontinuities and compartmentalized sectors can be so prevalent that “kaleidoscopic” patterns may seem more typical than smoothly institutionalized regularities or predictable convergences.

Modern India is a political creation. The citizens of the world’s most populous country speak 100 languages, practice eight major religions, and belong to over 700 tribal groups and thousands of castes. The challenge of democratically representing such a range of interests is compounded by deep material scarcity and striking economic and social inequality.

This article engages with the burgeoning literature on the conceptualization of corruption, a literature animated by the view that failures in anticorruption practice—the limited progress made in tackling global corruption—are in part a consequence of the ways in which corruption is theorized by academics. In response, the article proposes and elaborates a four-dimensional definition of corruption with detailed subdefinitions and seeks to advance thinking in both academic and practitioner circles on how corruption can be most effectively identified in context. The article makes five distinct contributions to live debates in the conceptual literature and clarifies several ambiguities and disagreements that have arisen within it.

First, it presents a set of grounded subdefinitions that make explicit the scope of each dimension of the definition. Second, it recommends applying the four dimensions in a predetermined sequence, enabling uncertainties or gray areas in each dimension to be resolved and clarified by subsequent dimensions. Third, it addresses the much-contested “abuse” dimension, acknowledging not only the flexibility required to identify abuses in different political and social settings but also the need to limit the scope of abuse so that it is not wholly idiosyncratic or relative. Fourth, it incorporates systemic and institutional forms of corruption, which creates an important bridge between individual and institutional approaches to corruption. Finally, it offers a defense for integrating the notion of public interest into the definition, which not only provides additional clarity to the conceptualization but also does justice to the reasons we care about corruption in the first place.