Partisanship in American politics is inextricably linked with social identities, and sentiments toward party-aligned groups affect political orientations. However, out-group animosity may operate differently depending on the party or elite. We investigate the extent to which citizens’ animus toward (Democratically aligned) minority groups drove political support for Donald Trump, whose incendiary rhetoric regarding such groups is unique in modern presidential politics. Leveraging panel data beginning before Trump’s candidacy, we find that animus toward Democratic-linked groups in 2011 predicts future support for Trump regardless of party identity. This animus does not predict future support for other Republican or Democratic politicians or either party. Nor do we find that animus toward Republican groups predicts support for Democratic elites. Trump’s support is thus uniquely tied to animus toward minority groups. Our findings provide insights into the social divisions underlying American politics and the role of elite rhetoric in translating animus into political support.

We introduce a fine-grained measure of the extent to which electoral districts combine and split local communities of co-partisans in unnatural ways. Our indicator—which we term Partisan Dislocation—is a measure of the difference between the partisan composition of a voter’s geographic nearest neighbors and that of her assigned district. We show that our measure is a good local and global indicator of district manipulation, easily identifying instances in which districts carve up clusters of co-partisans (cracking) or combine them in unnatural ways (packing). We demonstrate that our measure is related to but distinct from other approaches to the measurement of gerrymandering, and has some clear advantages, above all as a complement to simulation-based approaches, and as a way to identify the specific neighborhoods most affected by gerrymandering. It can also be used prospectively by district-drawers who wish to create maps that reflect voter geography, but according to our analysis, that goal will sometimes be in conflict with the goal of partisan fairness.

A growing body of scholarship connects the participation of women and the inclusion of gender provisions to the sustainability of peace settlements. But how do women's groups navigate gender power structures and gendered forms of violence within complex and fragile political bargaining processes aimed at ending large-scale conflict? The 2016 Colombian peace agreement, internationally applauded for its inclusion of strong gender provisions and women's participation as negotiators and peace advocates, is a significant case for examining these questions. Drawing on original case material, including interviews of key actors on different sides of the conflict – this article analyses the political bargaining dynamics within and among women's movements, the Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC). We argue that the inclusion of women was pivotal in transforming the elite bargaining process and power structures of Colombian society enabling a gender-based approach to the substantive peace agenda addressing transitional gender justice for sexual violence survivors and gender-equal redistribution through land and rural reform programmes. The study suggests that deeply situated political bargaining analysis is essential to navigating gender in elite bargains rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to inclusive peace.

The Arab Spring revived interest into how contentious mobilization diffuses across time and space. We evaluate individual-level attitudinal implications of this literature through laboratory experiments with 681 Egyptian college students. Across two separate experiments, primes based on recent protests in Tunisia, Syria and the Sudan reveal a limited ability to shift respondents’ retrospective views of the Arab Spring, the efficacy of protest to achieve political change, Egypt's perceived domestic situation vis-à-vis its neighbours and a personal willingness to assume risk in a computer game-based behavioural extension. Our findings imply the need to continue to improve theorizing and empirically testing key implications from the diffusion literature.

We investigate how the outbreak of epidemics can affect host governments’ targeting of refugees and violation of their physical integrity rights. We argue that governments target repression against refugees for two reasons. First, refugees are easily scapegoated for the arrival of epidemics at a time when governments are looking to shift the blame for their own poor performance. Second, crises provide circumstances for governments to engage in opportunistic repression to further their goal of coercing existing refugees to depart and deterring new refugees from arriving. Drawing upon a global dataset of countries for the years 1996 to 2015, we demonstrate that epidemic outbreaks do indeed increase the likelihood and scale of government repression targeting refugee populations. These effects are especially pronounced in countries with higher proportions of refugees hosted and in less democratic countries. Identification of this potential for government repression of refugees during epidemics is important in light of the grave scale of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest the international community should be vigilant for signs of governments’ mistreatment of vulnerable refugee populations to shift focus away from their own poor handling of crises such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and opportunistically advance their goal of reducing the numbers of refugees hosted locally.

The literature on International Relations theory has yet to align relational theory with role theory, despite the fact that these two theories share so much epistemological common ground. This article uses role theory to bridge the gap between the Confucian and Western conceptions of relationality, whose practitioners regard each other as strangers. With the support of role theory, the comparative analysis of relationality in this article has mainly focused on two different types of relations: prior rule-based relations and improvised relations. The differences in the cultural preparation for these two relations partially explain the plurality of the relational universe and the perception of stranger. Role theory is one way to reconnect the seemingly irreconcilable relational universes. To illustrate the value of a composite agenda of relational theory and role theory, the article will use Kim Jong-un of North Korea as its case. Confucian relations propose that, for all nations, the necessity of having a certain role relation is a more important agenda than insisting on exactly what role to take.

Drawing on insights from Critical Race Theory and framing theory, as well as previous research, this study ties together and analyzes public opinions about two racialized and politicized sports-related issues: (1) the financial compensation of college athletes, and (2) athlete protests during the national anthem. Consequently, we highlight racial/ethnic identities, racial attitudes, and political identities as predictors of these public opinions. Data for our analyses come from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults who were surveyed just prior to the 2016 presidential election. Descriptive results suggest that well over half of U.S. adults opposed having the NCAA pay college athletes; also, about two-thirds of adults viewed athlete protests during the national anthem as unacceptable. Regression results reveal that Black and Latinx adults were more supportive of paying college athletes and athlete protests during the national anthem than White adults. Other people of color were also more likely than White adults to support paying college athletes. Racial attitudes such as a lack of recognition of racial/ethnic inequalities in education and support for Black Lives Matter also shaped public opinions about these issues in expected ways. Finally, we find that political identities were linked to public opinions about these issues even after accounting for racial/ethnic identities and racial attitudes. Overall, this study documents public opinions about these prominent sports-related issues just prior to the 2016 election of a President who particularly racialized and politicized sports issues. Even then, these sports-related issues had been similarly filtered through both a White racial frame that encourages colorblind racism and a counter frame that promotes antiracist activism. Altogether, the present study offers further evidence of how sports provide cultural terrain for individuals to enact and negotiate racialized and politicized views of sports and society and illustrates how these processes were reflected in public opinions in 2016.

Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters, and political scientists rely on voter-registration lists and consumer files to identify people as targets for registration drives, persuasion, and mobilization and to be included in sampling frames for surveys. We introduce a new category of Americans: the politically invisible—that is, people who are unreachable using these voter and marketing lists. Matching a high-quality, random sample of the US population to multiple lists reveals that at least 11% of the adult citizenry is unlisted. An additional 12% is mislisted (i.e., not living at their recorded address). These groups are invisible to list-based campaigns and research, making them difficult or impossible to contact. Two in five Blacks and (citizen) Hispanics are unreachable, but only 18% of whites. The unreachable are poorer than the reachable population, have markedly lower levels of political engagement, and are much less likely to report contact with candidates and campaigns. They are heavily Democratic in party identification and vote intention, favoring Obama versus Romney 73 to 27, with only 16% identifying as Republicans. That the politically invisible are more liberal and from historically marginalized groups shows that the turn to list-based campaigning and research could worsen existing biases in the political system.

Developing states lacking a monopoly over the use of force are commonly seen as having failed to live up to the ideal Weberian sovereign type. Yet rather than being a calling card of anarchy, the devolution of important state functions to subnational actors is a rational strategy for developing states to effectively provide important public goods. The case study of the Jewish Community of Palestine demonstrates one instance where subnational communities provided public goods. This study highlights the causal effect of property rights within institutions to drive behavior consistent with the provision of public and private goods. Analyzing temporal and institutional variation across two agricultural communities demonstrates a unique strategy of subnational governance and public goods provision in a developing state. Devolution of public goods provision to subnational actors may be an alternative strategy of governance for developing states that are not yet able to effectively provide important public goods.

Although partisan bias – when an authority transfers discretionary public resources to a politically aligned receiver − has been extensively studied, less is known about how this practice is affected by the voting regime − compulsory or voluntary voting. In this article, I study partisan bias in Chile, using administrative data of transfers from the central authority to local governments, highlighting two relevant scope conditions: the electoral cycle, and electoral uncertainty caused by the adoption of voluntary voting. I found strong evidence of partisan bias, especially in election years and in electorally riskier municipalities. This suggests that the uncertainty introduced by this electoral reform induced politicians to allocate a large share of resources to risky municipalities, because such resources would play a more significant role in the electoral outcome. Overall, these results imply that voluntary voting has a large impact on the way that resources are allocated across subnational units.

What are the conditions underlying successful implementation of participatory security mechanisms? Drawing on the case of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and from the notion of social embeddedness, we argue that participatory security reforms that aim to include citizens in defining security priorities allow for better adoption of reforms in practice. Local level reforms are not implemented in a social vacuum but rather in pre-existing social networks that are key to their adoption in practice by citizens. However, not all social networks are equal, nor do they operate in the same manner. In ‘Neza’, it is through existing clientelistic networks and socially embedded local brokers that the redes vecinales were implemented and adopted by citizens, leading to varied reform adoption patterns at the very local level.

We fielded an experiment on a sample of approximately 400 Black state legislators to test whether they would be more responsive to an email that mentioned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) relative to an email that mentioned Black Lives Matter (BLM). The experiment tested Cohen's theory of secondary marginalization (1999), whereby relatively advantaged members of a marginalized group regulate the behavior, attitudes, and access to resources of less advantaged members of the group. We expected that Black legislators would be less responsive to an email that referenced BLM, an organization that is associated with more marginalized members of the Black community. Contrary to our hypothesis, Black legislators were as responsive to emails referencing inspiration from BLM as they were to emails referencing inspiration from the NAACP. Thus, we do not find any evidence of intragroup discrimination by Black state legislators. To our knowledge, this is the first field experiment to test Cohen's theory of secondary marginalization.1

This article develops a theory to account for the variation in electoral systems in electoral authoritarian regimes. We argue that resource-rich dictators are incentivized to employ proportional representation systems to alleviate the threat from the masses and pre-empt the emergence of new opposition, while resource-poor dictators tend to choose majoritarian systems to co-opt ruling elites in the legislature. Using cross-national data on electoral authoritarian regimes, we find strong empirical evidence supporting our theory. We also explicitly illustrate the causal links between natural resources and electoral systems with additional statistical analyses and comparative case studies on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.

By many measures, the public knows little about politics. But just how little people seem to know depends on the questions that are put to them. In particular, knowledge levels seem higher when people are asked closed- rather than open-ended questions. In turn, differences between estimated knowledge levels are sometimes attributed to fundamental differences between these types of questions. Building on this previous research, the present study uses a pre-registered experiment conducted with a representative national sample to shed new light on the relationship between question form and knowledge measurement. The authors find that inferences about political knowledge depend less on fundamental differences between open- and closed-ended questions than on two little-appreciated aspects of survey design: the number and difficulty of the response options that accompany closed-ended questions. These aspects of survey design have large effects. Scholars who use the same questions with different response options may reach substantively different conclusions about the public's levels of knowledge.

Research into the impact of a politician's sociodemographic profile on vote choice in Westminster-style systems has been hindered by the relative sociodemographic homogeneity of party leaders. Past research has focused mainly on the evaluation of local candidates in the American context, but given that elections in plurality systems are far less candidate-oriented , the evaluation of local candidates tells us little about the prevalence of affinity or discrimination in other contexts. This article investigates the effect of political leaders' ethnicity on political behavior by looking at the case of Jagmeet Singh in Canada, the first federal party leader of color in the country's history. While the literature has shown that the gender of leaders in Canada can matter, little is known about the attitudes of Canadians toward party leaders of color specifically. We are interested in the evaluations of Singh and his party, as well as the shifts in voting intentions between elections in 2015 and 2019. We uncover affinity-based behaviors from individuals who identify as Sikh, as well as a negative reception of Singh's candidacy in Quebec.

This article addresses the question of whether populist parties behave differently from other political parties in parliament. Building on the attention-based perspective of the study of policy agendas, we map issue emphasis in parliamentary questions in Italy over more than two decades (1996–2019). The paper is innovative as it compares populist and non-populist parties in government and in opposition. Using data from the Italian Policy Agendas Project and The PopuList, we find mixed evidence. Specifically, we show that populist parties behave differently from other parties only when they are in opposition (signalling that they are different from ‘elite’ ones) but not when in government (signalling that they are ‘competent’ policymakers). While the results are exploratory and drawn from the Italian context, this study contributes to deflate the myth of populists' exceptionalism, at least in terms of their behaviour in parliament. As such, it holds broader implications for the scholarly understanding of party government and the so-called ‘normalization’ of populism in contemporary democracies.