Existing research on public opinion towards Indigenous peoples tends to focus on the extent to which citizens hold racist and anti-Indigenous attitudes. In contrast, few empirical studies have examined the extent to which citizens support reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Drawing on data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study (CES), we construct a novel Indigenous reconciliation scale to measure non-Indigenous support for policies that seek to address the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools. We then compare this scale to existing measures of Indigenous resentment before investigating the effects of several individual-level determinants related to attitudes, elite cues, and policy preferences on support for Indigenous reconciliation policies. Our findings shed light on the ongoing efforts in settler countries in North and South America and Australasia to decolonize their settler institutions and to create new and renewed relationships with Indigenous communities in those countries.

Voters’ issue preferences are key determinants of vote choice, making it essential to reduce measurement error in responses to issue questions in surveys. This study uses a MultiTrait MultiError approach to assess the data quality of issue questions by separating four sources of variation: trait, acquiescence, method, and random error. The questions generally achieved moderate data quality, with 76% on average representing valid variance. Random error made up the largest proportion of error (23%). Error due to method and acquiescence was small. We found that 5-point scales are generally better than 11-point scales, while answers by respondents with lower political sophistication achieved lower data quality. The findings indicate a need to focus on decreasing random error when studying issue positions.

In 1939 and 1940, the renowned political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote and hosted over 40 episodes of a radio show, Human Nature in Action, for the National Broadcasting Corporation. The program was meant to adjust listeners to the experience of psychological insecurities generated by American life—insecurities Lasswell believed would engender political unrest if not properly managed. In uncovering the archives of the show, which have gone almost entirely unexamined to date, this article not only explains why one of the most famous political scientists of the mid-twentieth century believed the American public needed to be subjected to such a program of mass psychotherapy and why the nation’s largest broadcaster agreed to support it. It also invites reconsideration of the ways in which popular political commentary today—even when it represents otherwise diverse ideological perspectives—remains attached to Lasswellian narratives of anxiety as dangerous to a “healthy” democratic polity.

Scholars have found that citizens’ willingness to fight for their country has decreased globally since the 1980s. Some posit this as the underpinning of the ‘long peace’, contending that rising economic prosperity decreases the tolerance for sacrificing one’s life. For governments trying to recruit military personnel, this trend is viewed as detrimental to one’s country’s defence capability. However, we show that this diminishing willingness to fight has not only decelerated in the past decade but has even reversed in some countries. Contrary to the notion of a continuous decline, we maintain that alongside previously identified factors, proximate conflicts affect citizens’ willingness to fight. First, they challenge the view of international relations as cooperative, instead reinforcing a perception of global politics as inherently conflictual. Second, witnessing armed conflicts nearby heightens citizens’ sense of threat, leading them to take the possibility of aggression more seriously and to feel increasingly vulnerable to future conflict. Consequently, they show an increased willingness to fight. In our empirical analysis, we find strong support for the notion that proximate conflict increases citizens’ willingness to fight.

Film offers untapped potential for making critical interventions in world politics, particularly in ways that harness people’s capacity to narrate stories that creatively empower their communities. Combining International Relations scholarship on visual politics with narrative theory and feminist scholarship on care, this paper presents film as a means of exploring and expressing narrative agency; that is, the power to tell stories that represent people’s experiences in ways that disrupt hegemonic narratives. Dialectics of care and narrative agency are explored in the context of military-to-civilian ‘transition’ in Britain. We argue that the landscape of transition for military veterans is dominated by a preoccupation with employment and economic productivity, resulting in a ‘care deficit’ for veterans leaving the military. Through the Stories in Transition project, which used co-created film to explore narrative agency in the context of three veterans’ charities, we argue that the act of making care visible constitutes a necessary intervention in this transitional landscape. Grounding this intervention within feminist care ethics and the related notion of care aesthetics, we highlight the potential for film to reveal in compelling audio-visual narratives an alternative project of transition which might better sustain life and hope in the aftermath of military service.

The extent to which the public takes an interest in politics has long been argued to be foundational to democracy, but the want of appropriate data has prevented cross-national and longitudinal analysis. This letter takes advantage of recent advances in latent-variable modelling of aggregate survey responses and a comprehensive collection of survey data to generate dynamic comparative estimates of macrointerest, that is, aggregate political interest, for over a hundred countries over the past four decades. These macrointerest scores are validated with other aggregate measures of political interest and of other types of political engagement. A cross-national and longitudinal analysis of macrointerest in advanced democracies reveals that along with election campaigns and inclusive institutions, it is good economic conditions, not bad times, that spur publics to greater interest in politics.

Members of the ethnic majority tend to view immigrants and ethnic minorities as less willing to contribute to the collective. Why is this the case? I argue that in Europe, ethnic attributes signal citizens’ socioeconomic resources, cultural values, and norm compliance and that these factors, rather than ethnic identities per se, explain why citizens are expected (not) to contribute. Through a novel conjoint experimental design in Denmark that manipulated respondents’ access to information about these different mechanisms, the argument finds support. First, in information-sparse environments, ethnic majority members expect that minority members contribute substantially less to the provision of public goods than majority members. Second, this ethnic bias is reduced by each of the three mechanisms and explained away once information on all three is available. This demonstrates that negative expectations toward minorities operate through multiple, complementary channels and that stereotype-countering information can reduce the majority-minority expectation gap.

How do race, ethnicity, and gender shape a legislator’s approach to bill sponsorship and cosponsorship? This paper examines how institutional marginalization influences the legislative strategies of racial and gender minority representatives. Constrained by systemic barriers that limit their ability to sponsor legislation, minority legislators prioritize cosponsorship to achieve policy goals, build coalitions, and demonstrate responsiveness to their constituencies. Using the quasi-experimental context of the 2016 and 2018 U.S. congressional elections, I apply the synthetic difference-in-differences estimator and find that minority legislators sponsor fewer bills but cosponsor significantly more than their non-Hispanic White counterparts. Additionally, race-gendered effects reveal that women of color sponsor significantly less legislation than non-minority legislators and men of color. These patterns cannot be explained by factors like freshman status or primary election competitiveness. The findings highlight the strategic adaptations of minority legislators to navigate structural inequities and amplify their legislative influence. This study is the first to use a causal inference approach to explore the intersection of race, gender, and sponsorship and cosponsorship of congressional bills, contributing to a deeper understanding of legislative behavior among marginalized groups.

Powered by Marxist ideology, Revolutionary Socialist (RS) armed groups launched formidable challenges against incumbent regimes during the historical era of the Cold War. As both transformational and transnational actors, they were optimally positioned to execute a revolutionary war doctrine that called for a highly integrated political and military organization that could weave a dense web of interactions with civilian populations. Civil wars featuring RS rebels tended to be robust insurgencies, that is, irregular wars that lasted longer and produced more battlefield fatalities compared to other civil wars. However, this superior capacity failed to translate into a higher rate of victories—hence, a “Marxist Paradox.” By posing a credible threat, RS rebellions engendered equally powerful regime counter-mobilizations. We show how ideology shaped armed conflict in a particular world-historical time and point to implications for the current state of civil conflict.

Gender quotas are used to elect most of the world’s legislatures. Still, critics contend that quotas are undemocratic, eroding institutional legitimacy. We examine whether quotas diminish citizens’ faith in political decisions and decision-making processes. Using survey experiments in 12 democracies with over 17,000 respondents, we compare the legitimacy-conferring effects of both quota-elected and non-quota elected local legislative councils relative to all-male councils. Citizens strongly prefer gender balance, even when it is achieved through quotas. Though we observe a quota penalty, wherein citizens prefer gender balance attained without a quota relative to quota-elected institutions, this penalty is often small and insignificant, especially in countries with higher-threshold quotas. Quota debates are thus better framed around the most relevant counterfactual: the comparison is not between women’s descriptive representation with and without quotas, but between men’s political dominance and women’s inclusion.

Scholar-activism, which we define as scholarship that seeks to contribute knowledge to activism is often underappreciated. From a methodological perspective, the positionality of scholar-activists is too often misunderstood. Yet scholar-activism is a relatively common approach to generating new knowledge about hard-to-access, repressive contexts while also assisting political movements and their strategies. Feminist-informed scholarship necessitates scholar-activism because it is driven by an emancipatory purpose that demands critical reflexivity about the power of epistemology, boundaries, relationships, and the researcher’s situatedness (Ackerly and True 2020, 22). We argue that a deeper understanding of scholar-activism and lived experiences is vital for furthering knowledge and impact in the politics and gender field.

Especially in the context of climate adaptation policy, creating support for hard policy instruments and convincing people that their individual contributions do matter are two significant challenges. In this study, we test the effect of an individually versus collectively framed gain-appeal infographic on the acceptance of hard policy instruments and this in the context of strictly private climate change adaptation behaviour. We used a mixed methods approach focussing on reducing private paving in domestic gardens in Belgium. Evidence from an online survey experiment (n = 3,389) showed that policy makers implementing a collectively framed infographic can increase the acceptance of a more strict permit policy and a yearly financial contribution, while simultaneously enhancing personal and collective self-efficacy and outcome expectancy beliefs. Complementary insights from qualitative data learned that perceived (in)equity is a crucial point of attention when designing climate policies addressing private paving. A collectively framed infographic may convey the message ‘yes, we ánd I can’. With these “findings, we want to trigger new opportunities in climate policies beyond the current policy scopes.

This paper examines the “beautiful countryside,” a newly initiated state rural development programme emphasizing “greening” and beautification elements, in western China. It explores how local bureaucrats, village leaders and planners implement the programme, which stresses the importance of greening and green development, on the ground. It also analyses how local officials and villagers understand the programme. By highlighting the significance of the greening and aesthetic elements of the project, as well as local government officials’ interpretation and understanding of programme implementation, this paper argues that constructing the “beautiful countryside” is a form of aesthetic governmentality. While this initiative constructs tidy and beautiful spaces, it also shapes subjectivities towards building a city-like modern space to promote rural urbanization in the countryside.

Covariance structure analysis or structural equation modeling is critical for political scientists measuring latent structural relationships, allowing for the simultaneous assessment of both latent and observed variables, alongside measurement error. Well-specified models are essential for theoretical support, balancing simplicity with optimal model fit. However, current approaches to improving model specification searches remain limited, making it challenging to capture all meaningful parameters and leaving models vulnerable to chance-based specification risks. To address this, we propose an improved Lagrange multiplier (LM) test incorporating stepwise bootstrapping in LM and Wald tests to detect omitted parameters. Monte Carlo simulations and empirical applications underscore its effectiveness, particularly in small samples and models with high degrees of freedom, thereby enhancing statistical fit.

This paper develops the notion of ‘Platform Security’ to analyse the type of security power that seeks to work through facilitation and decentralised connection. The paper draws an analogy between the metaphor and model of the platform economy and contemporary security practices. It analyses the imaginaries and infrastructures of the platform economy and shows how these are present in the work of transnational security authorities. Like online platforms, contemporary security practitioners seek to connect local players in a manner that is data-driven and decentred. Like digital platforms, security organisations like FATF and Europol seem to understand themselves as utilities or services, whose primary aim is to ‘transmit communication and information data’ that they have not themselves produced or commissioned (Van Dijck 2013: 6). Analysing platform security through this lens, allows the development critical purchase on this mode of security power and raise critical questions about the organisation of responsibility and protections.

Recent changes in the Turkish healthcare system aim to enhance efficiency by implementing various feedback systems, performance-based wages, and new auditing mechanisms to monitor resource and time use and cycle of motions in medical settings. This paper aims to answer the following question: how do nurses respond to changes that place them in a subordinate position, where supervisors and administrators dictate control over time and the nature of labor? In the literature on labor and neoliberalization, resistance by workers to control over work is mostly concluded as part of the reproduction of workers’ subordination. However, this paper challenges such a conclusion by presenting an alternative perspective. In-depth interviews with twenty-one nurses conducted in İstanbul revealed that nurses disrupt control mechanisms by refusing to conform to behaviors dictated by managerial principles, manipulating information about medication and equipment usage, and concealing beds and patients through their authoritative control over them. This study unveils new dimensions of contemporary nursing in Turkey through which covert solidarities between nurses enable efforts to maintain “good care” often shaped by gendered expectations. These efforts mostly resist the “hotelization” of hospitals and aim to remake the moral boundaries of care work.

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.

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, has the potential to transform Pakistan’s economy through economic cooperation, large-scale infrastructure projects and other forms of investment. Many observers fear, however, that the CPEC will become the “New East India Company,” effectively turning Pakistan into a Chinese client state. Through extensive interviews with key stakeholders in Pakistan as well as documentary research, we weigh the arguments on both sides of this debate. While the CPEC has the potential to become what many fashionably term a “game changer” for Pakistan, economic and social problems will likely prevent the country from fully realizing the CPEC’s transformative potential. On the other hand, the CPEC seems likely to expand the China–Pakistan relationship beyond its historical military and security emphasis to bring substantial social and economic benefits to Pakistan, while the complexity of the Pakistan case makes comprehensive “colonization” unlikely.

Most political science studies are, at root, about how people make decisions—how voters choose whether and for whom to vote, how prejudice influences political choices, and the effects of emotions and morals on political choice. However, what people are thinking during these decisions remains obscure; currently utilized methods leave us with a “black box” of decision making. Eye tracking offers a deeper insight into these processes by capturing respondents’ attention, salience, emotion, and understanding. But how applicable is this method to political science questions, and how does one go about using it? Here, we explain what eye tracking allows researchers to measure, how these measures are relevant to political science questions, and how political scientists without expertise in the method can nonetheless use it effectively. In particular, we clarify how researchers can understand the choices made in preset software in order to arrive at correct inferences from their data and discuss new developments in eye tracking methodology, including webcam eye tracking. We additionally provide templates for preregistering eye tracking studies in political science, as well as starter code for processing and analyzing eye tracking data.