Legislative staff link Members of Congress and their constituents,theoretically facilitating democratic representation. Yet, littleresearch has examined whether Congressional staff actually recognizethe preferences of their Members’ constituents. Using an originalsurvey of senior US Congressional staffers, we show that staffsystematically mis-estimate constituent opinions. We then evaluatethe sources of these misperceptions, using observational analysesand two survey experiments. Staffers who rely more heavily onconservative and business interest groups for policy informationhave more skewed perceptions of constituent opinion. Egocentricbiases also shape staff perceptions. Our findings complicateassumptions that Congress represents constituent opinion, and helpto explain why Congress often appears so unresponsive to ordinarycitizens. We conclude that scholars should focus more closely onlegislative aides as key actors in the policymaking process, both inthe United States and across other advanced democracies.

Previous research has emphasized corporate lobbying as a pathwaythrough which businesses influence government policy. This articleexamines a less-studied mode of influence: private regulation,defined as voluntary efforts by firms to restrain their ownbehavior. We argue that firms can use modest private regulations asa political strategy to preempt more stringent public regulations.To test this hypothesis, we administered experiments to three groupsthat demand environmental regulations: voters, activists, andgovernment officials. Our experiments revealed how each groupresponded to voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) by firms.Relatively modest VEPs dissuaded all three groups from seeking moredraconian government regulations, a finding with importantimplications for social welfare. We observed these effects moststrongly when all companies within an industry joined the voluntaryeffort. Our study documents an understudied source of corporatepower, while also exposing the limits of private regulation as astrategy for influencing government policy.

Are people conservative (liberal) because they are Republicans(Democrats)? Or is it the reverse: people are Republicans(Democrats) because they are conservatives (liberals)? Though muchhas been said about this long-standing question, it is difficult totest because the concepts are nearly impossible to disentangle inmodern America. Ideology and partisanship are highly correlated,only growing more so over time. However, the election of PresidentTrump presents a unique opportunity to disentangle party attachmentfrom ideological commitment. Using a research design that employsactual “conservative” and “liberal” policy statements from PresidentTrump, we find that low-knowledge respondents, strong Republicans,Trump-approving respondents, and self-described conservatives arethe most likely to behave like party loyalists by accepting theTrump cue—in either a liberal or conservative direction. Theseresults suggest that there are a large number of party loyalists inthe United States, that their claims to being a self-definedconservative are suspect, and that group loyalty is the strongermotivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.

We experimentally investigate the informational theory of legislativecommittees (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989). Two committee members provide policy-relevantinformation to a legislature under alternative legislative rules.Under the open rule, the legislature is free to make any decision;under the closed rule, the legislature chooses between a member’sproposal and a status quo. We find that even in thepresence of biases, the committee members improve the legislature’sdecision by providing useful information. We obtain evidence for twoadditional predictions: the outlier principle,according to which more extreme biases reduce the extent ofinformation transmission; and the distributionalprinciple, according to which the open rule is moredistributionally efficient than the closed rule. When biases areless extreme, we find that the distributional principle dominatesthe restrictive-rule principle, according towhich the closed rule is more informationally efficient. Overall,our findings provide experimental support for Gilligan andKrehbiel’s informational theory.

Authoritarian leaders maintain their grip on power primarily throughpreventive repression, routinely exercised by specialized securityagencies with the aim of preventing any opponents from organizingand threatening their power. We develop a formal model to analyzethe moral hazard problems inherent in the principal-agentrelationship between rulers and their security agents in charge ofpreventive repression. The model distinguishes two types of moralhazard: “politics,” through which the security agents can exertpolitical influence to increase their payoff by decreasing theruler’s rents from power, and “corruption,” through which the agentscan increase their payoff by engaging in rent-seeking activitiesthat do not decrease the ruler’s rents from power. The surprisingconclusion is that both the ruler and the security agent are betteroff when the only moral hazard problem available is politics ratherthan when the agent can choose between politics and corruption. Wealso show that the equilibrium probability of ruler’s survival inpower is higher when politics is the only moral hazard available tothe agent. These findings lead to our central conclusion thatopportunities for corruption undermine authoritarian rule bydistorting the incentives of the security agencies tasked withpreventing potential threats to an authoritarian ruler’s grip onpower.

Political competition is widely recognized as a mediator of publicgoods provision through its salutary effect on incumbents’ electoralincentives. We argue that political competitionadditionally mediates public goods provision byreducing the efficiency of legislative bargaining. Thesecountervailing forces may produce a net negative effect in placeswith weak parties and low transparency—typical of many youngdemocracies. We provide evidence of a robust negative relationshipbetween political competition and local public goods using paneldata from Mali. Tests of mechanisms corroborate our interpretationof this relationship as evidence of legislative bargaininginefficiencies. To explore the generalizability of these findings,we analyze cross-country panel data and show that politicalcompetition leads to better (worse) public goods provision underhigh (low) levels of party system institutionalization. The papersheds light on why political competition is only selectivelybeneficial, and underscores the importance of considering both theelectoral and legislative arenas.

It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons whogrow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared withpersons from high-status families. This paper examines whetherreforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establishcausality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform ofSwedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gaverise to exogenous variation in educational attainment betweenindividuals living in different municipalities or born in differentyears. Similar to recent studies employing credible identificationstrategies, we fail to find a statistically significant averageeffect of education on political participation. We move pastprevious studies, however, and show that the reform neverthelesscontributed to narrowing the voting gap between individuals ofdifferent social backgrounds by raising turnout among those from lowsocioeconomic status households. The results thus square well withother recent studies arguing that education is particularlyimportant for uplifting politically marginalized groups.

We leverage innovative spatial modeling techniques and data on the precise geo-locations of more than 32,000 Constituency Development Fund (CDF) projects in Kenya to test whether Members of Parliament (MPs) reward their supporters. We find only weak evidence that MPs channel projects disproportionately to areas inhabited by their political allies, once we control for other factors that affect where projects are placed, such as population density, poverty rates, ethnic demographics, and distance to paved roads. Notwithstanding this result, we find evidence for cross-constituency variation in political targeting, driven in large part by the spatial segregation of the MP’s supporters and opponents. Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom about the centrality of clientelistic transfers in Africa and underscore how local conditions generate particular incentives and opportunities for the strategic allocation of political goods. We also highlight the benefits and challenges of analyzing allocations at the project level rather than aggregated to the administrative unit.

Many authoritarian regimes use frightening acts of repression tosuppress dissent. Theory from psychology suggests that emotionsshould affect how citizens perceive and process information aboutrepression risk and ultimately whether or not they dissent. I testthe effects of emotions on dissent in autocracy by running alab-in-the-field experiment with 671 opposition supporters inZimbabwe that randomly assigns some participants to an exercise thatinduces a mild state of fear, whereas others complete a neutralplacebo. The fear treatment significantly reduces hypothetical andbehavioral measures of dissent by substantively large amounts. Italso increases pessimism about parameters that enter into thedissent decision as well as risk aversion. These results show thatemotions interact in important ways with strategic considerations.Fear may be a powerful component of how unpopular autocrats excludelarge portions of their populations from mobilizing for regimechange.

Crisis bargaining literature has predominantly used formal andqualitative methods to debate the relative efficacy of actions,public words, and private words. These approaches have overlookedthe reality that policymakers are bombarded with information andstruggle to adduce actual signals from endless noise. Materialactions are therefore more effective than any diplomaticcommunication in shaping elites’ perceptions. Moreover, whileostensibly “costless,” private messages provide a more precisecommunication channel than public and “costly” pronouncements. Over18,000 declassified documents from the Berlin Crisis of 1958–63reflecting private statements, public statements, and White Houseevaluations of Soviet resolve are digitized and processed usingstatistical learning techniques to assess these claims. The resultsindicate that material actions have greater influence on the WhiteHouse than either public or private statements; that publicstatements are noisier than private statements; and that privatestatements have a larger effect on evaluations of resolve thanpublic statements.

What explains online radicalization and support for ISIS in the West?Over the past few years, thousands of individuals have radicalizedby consuming extremist content online, many of whom eventuallytraveled overseas to join the Islamic State. This study examineswhether anti-Muslim hostility might drive pro-ISIS radicalization inWestern Europe. Using new geo-referenced data on the online behaviorof thousands of Islamic State sympathizers in France, the UnitedKingdom, Germany, and Belgium, I study whether the intensity ofanti-Muslim hostility at the local level is linked to pro-ISISradicalization on Twitter. The results show that local-levelmeasures of anti-Muslim animosity correlate significantly andsubstantively with indicators of online radicalization, includingposting tweets sympathizing with ISIS, describing life inISIS-controlled territories, and discussing foreign fighters.High-frequency data surrounding events that stir support forISIS—terrorist attacks, propaganda releases, and anti-Muslimprotests—show the same pattern.

This article recovers Martin Buber’s important but neglected critiqueof Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Because Buber is knownprimarily as an ethicist and scholar of Judaism, his attack onSchmitt has been largely overlooked. Yet as I reveal through a closereading of his Biblical commentaries, a concern about the dangers ofpolitical theology threads through decades of his work. Divinesovereignty, Buber argues, is absolute and inimitable; no humanruler can claim the legitimate power reserved to God. Buber’sresponse is to uncover what he sees as Judaism’s earliest politicaltheory: a “theopolitics,” where human beings, mutually subject todivine kingship, practice non-domination. But Buber, I show, did notseek to directly revive this religious vision. Instead, he sought toincorporate the spirit of theopolitics, as embodied by Israel’sprophets, into modern society. The result is a new and significantperspective on liberal democracy and political theology.

We report the results of a laboratory experiment based on acitizen–candidate model with private information about ideal points.Inefficient political polarization is observed in all treatments;that is, citizens with extreme ideal points enter as candidates moreoften than moderate citizens. Second, less entry occurs, with evengreater polarization, when voters have directional information aboutcandidates’ ideal points, using ideological party labels.Nonetheless, this directional information is welfare enhancingbecause the inefficiency from greater polarization is outweighed bylower entry expenses and better voter information. Third, entryrates are decreasing in group size and the entry cost. Thesefindings are all implied by properties of the unique symmetricBayesian equilibrium cutpoint pair of the entry game.Quantitatively, we observe too little (too much) entry when thetheoretical entry rates are high (low). This general pattern ofobserved biases in entry rates is implied by logit quantal responseequilibrium.

How much do the political values of politicians endure throughouttheir careers? And how might the endurance be explained? This paperuses a unique longitudinal data set to examine the persistence ofpolitical values among national politicians: members of the BritishHouse of Commons, who completed Rokeach-type value rankinginstruments during 1971–73 and again 40 years later in 2012–16. Thefindings show remarkable stability and provide strong support forthe persistence hypothesis which predicts that politicians developcrystallized value systems by their early thirties and largelymaintain those values into retirement. This is consistent with theview that rapid changes in aggregate party ideologies have more todo with new views among new waves of recruits than with conversionsamong old members.

Multiparty governance requires compromise and this compromise canlead to electoral losses. I argue that coalition members aremotivated to differentiate themselves from their cabinet partners tomitigate potential electoral losses resulting from voters perceivingthem as not rigorously pursuing their core policy positions or notpossessing strong policy stands. I test this argument with originaldata on the scrutiny of over 2,200 government bills gathered fromthree parliamentary democracies incorporating information on voterperceptions of partisan ideology and parties’ policy preferences asderived from their manifestos. I find that coalition partners thatare perceived as more similar will amend one another’s legislativeproposals more vigorously in an effort to differentiate in the eyesof the electorate—to protect their brand—and therefore provideevidence for “pure” vote-seeking behavior in the legislative reviewprocess. Furthermore, these original data provide answers to severalopen questions regarding the policy motivations of cabinet partiesin legislative review and the role of committee chairs and externalsupport parties on policy outcomes.

It has long been argued that elections amplify partisanpredispositions. We take advantage of the timing of thecross-national post-election surveys included in the ComparativeStudy of Electoral Systems to explore the effects that electionshave on individuals’ attachments to political parties. Within thesesurveys, under the assumption that the dates on which respondentsare interviewed are assigned independent of factors known to affectpartisanship, we are able to identify the causal effects of electionsalience on partisan attachments. We find strong evidence thatelection salience increases the probability of one having a partyattachment, increases the strength of attachments, and heightens therelationship between partisanship and evaluations of politicalactors. Empirical explorations of our identifying assumption bolsterits validity. Our results substantiate the causal role thatelections play in activating partisanship.

Low levels of education are a powerful predictor of anti-immigrationsentiment. However, there is little consensus on the interpretationof this correlation: is it causal or is it an artifact of selectionbias? We address this question by exploiting six major compulsoryschooling reforms in five Western European countries—Denmark,France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden—that haverecently experienced politically influential anti-immigrationmovements. On average, we find that compelling students to remain insecondary school for at least an additional year decreasesanti-immigration attitudes later in life. Instrumental variableestimates demonstrate that, among such compliers, an additional yearof secondary schooling substantially reduces the probability ofopposing immigration, believing that immigration erodes a country’squality of life, and feeling close to far-right anti-immigrationparties. These results suggest that rising post-war educationalattainment has mitigated the rise of anti-immigration movements. Wediscuss the mechanisms and implications for future researchexamining anti-immigration sentiment.

Young men often make up a large share of newly arriving immigrantpopulations. How this impacts attitudes is unclear: young men havethe potential to make substantial economic contributions, meaningattitudes toward them may be more favorable. However, young men maybe seen as security and cultural threats, exacerbatinganti-immigrant attitudes. I conduct a conjoint experiment on asample of 2,100 Germans, asking them to evaluate groups ofimmigrants with randomly varying shares of young men. The resultsshow that groups of immigrants with a large share of young menreceive substantially less support. Further tests reveal thatrespondents also perceive of these groups as likely to pose securityand cultural threats; there is no evidence that young men are viewedas having high economic potential. These results have implicationsfor the importance of economic, cultural, and security concerns inunderpinning attitudes toward immigrants.

How have Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies affected Arab andMuslim American behavior? We provide evidence that the de factoeffects of President Trump’s campaign rhetoric and vague policypositions extended beyond the direct effects of his executiveorders. We present findings from three data sources—television newscoverage, social media activity, and a survey—to evaluate whetherArab and Muslim Americans reduced their online visibility andretreated from public life. Our results provide evidence that theywithdrew from public view: (1) Shared locations on Twitter droppedapproximately 10 to 20% among users with Arabic-sounding names aftermajor campaign and election events and (2) Muslim survey respondentsreported increased public space avoidance.