How do considerations related to backlash affect the desirability of pursuing otherwise justified immigration policies? This paper argues that backlash-related considerations bear on immigration policy decisions in ways that are both more powerful and complicated than typically recognized. The standard possibility, the egalitarian backlash argument, endorses immigration restrictions in order to protect support for egalitarian distributive institutions. The paper shows that this account does not, by itself, provide a convincing rationale for restricting immigration because such diminished support is (a) likely outweighed by the benefits of more permissive immigration policies and (b) caused by the objectionable preferences of citizens. However, the paper develops an alternative account of the relevance of backlash-related considerations, the democratic backlash argument, which holds that increased levels of immigration threaten to contribute to undermining democratic institutions. This argument provides a more powerful rationale for restricting immigration, one that can—under identified conditions—justify immigration restrictions.

Theories of discrimination typically select properties such as race, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity as being of special concern. These properties, which are customarily identified as genuine grounds of discrimination, are also at the forefront of constructionist efforts to understand reality as a product of social interactions. Theories of discrimination have so far neglected the important question of how understanding the nature of these properties impacts our theoretical views of the kind of phenomenon discrimination is. This article outlines some pitfalls of assuming away complexities regarding the ontology of the underlying properties, and systematically develops a constructionist account of discrimination, which I call Discrimination without Traits. I argue pursuing a constructionist view of grounds reveals discrimination to be not a discrete process involving a discriminator and a victim, but an ongoing process of (re)negotiating social reality that is fundamentally political. This uncovers neglected avenues for designing political remedies to discrimination.

This article proposes a simple but powerful framework to measure political sophistication based on open-ended survey responses. Discursive sophistication uses automated text analysis methods to capture the complexity of individual attitude expression. I validate the approach by comparing it to conventional political knowledge metrics using different batteries of open-ended items across five surveys spanning four languages (total $ N\approx 35,000 $). The new measure casts doubt on the oft-cited gender gap in political knowledge: women might know fewer facts about institutions and elites, but they do not differ substantively in the sophistication of their expressed political attitudes.

We show, against skeptics, that however latent it may be in everyday life, the ability to reason effectively about politics can readily be activated when conditions are right. We justify a definition of deliberative reason, then develop and apply a Deliberative Reason Index (DRI) to analysis of 19 deliberative forums. DRI increases over the course of deliberation in the vast majority of cases, but the extent of this increase depends upon enabling conditions. Group building that activates deliberative norms makes the biggest difference, particularly in enabling participants to cope with complexity. Without group building, complexity becomes more difficult to surmount, and planned direct impact on policy decisions may actually impede reasoning where complexity is high. Our findings have implications beyond forum design for the staging of political discourse in the wider public sphere.

Debates over racial voting, and over policies to combat vote dilution, turn on the extent to which groups’ voting preferences differ and vary across geography. We present the first study of racial voting patterns in every congressional district (CD) in the United States. Using large-sample surveys combined with aggregate demographic and election data, we find that national-level differences across racial groups explain 60% of the variation in district-level voting patterns, whereas geography explains 30%. Black voters consistently choose Democratic candidates across districts, whereas Hispanic and white voters’ preferences vary considerably across geography. Districts with the highest racial polarization are concentrated in the parts of the South and Midwest. Importantly, multiracial coalitions have become the norm: in most CDs, the winning majority requires support from non-white voters. In arriving at these conclusions, we make methodological innovations that improve the precision and accuracy when modeling sparse survey data.

Political candidates use Spanish-language appeals in efforts to increase their support among Hispanic voters. We argue that candidates, Hispanic or not, can use Spanish to signal closeness to Hispanics and posit that the effectiveness of these appeals is conditional on proficiency. To test this, we run two experiments where participants listen to an audio clip of a hypothetical candidate’s stump speech. We vary the ethnicity of the candidate (Anglo or Hispanic) and the language of the speech (English, non-native Spanish, and native-like Spanish). We find that Hispanic support for the Anglo and Hispanic candidates is higher in the native-like Spanish condition compared with the English-only condition. Relative to the English condition, non-native Spanish does not increase support for the Anglo candidate, but it decreases support for the Hispanic candidate. We find mixed effects for Anglo participants. Our results suggest that candidates can effectively appeal to Hispanic voters using Spanish-language messages.

How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality? Discussions about diversity usually focus on how individuals’ identities shape their behavior, but diversity is a group-level characteristic. Scholars must, therefore, consider the relationship between group composition and the individual decisions that shape institutional outcomes. Using felony data from a large U.S. court system, I explore the relationship between racial diversity among the judges comprising a court and individual judges’ decisions. I find that as the percent of Black judges in a courthouse increases white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants. Increases in racial diversity decrease the Black–white gap in the probability of incarceration by up to 7 percentage points. However, I find no relationship between judge’s racial identities and disparities in their decisions. This study highlights the importance of conceptualizing diversity as a group characteristic and the relationship between institutional context and outcomes.

Despite substantial research on descriptive representation for Blacks and Latinos, we know little about the electoral conditions under which Asian candidates win office. Leveraging a new dataset on Asian American legislators elected from 2011 to 2020, combined with pre-existing and newly conducted surveys, we develop and test hypotheses related to Asian American candidates’ ingroup support, and their crossover appeal to other racial and ethnic groups. The data show Asian Americans preferring candidates of their own ethnic origin and of other Asian ethnicities to non-Asian candidates, indicating strong ethnic and panethnic motives. Asian candidates have comparatively strong crossover appeal, winning at higher rates than Blacks or Latinos for any given percentage of the reference group. All else equal, Asian American candidates fare best in multiracial districts, so growing diversity should benefit their electoral prospects. This crossover appeal is not closely tied to motives related to relative group status or threat.

In the United States, elections are often administered by directly elected local officials who run as members of a political party. Do these officials use their office to give their party an edge in elections? Using a newly collected dataset of nearly 5,900 clerk elections and a close-election regression discontinuity design, we compare counties that narrowly elect a Democratic election administrator to those that narrowly elect a Republican. We find that Democrats and Republicans serving similar counties oversee similar election results, turnout, and policies. We also find that reelection is not the primary moderating force on clerks. Instead, clerks may be more likely to agree on election policies across parties than the general public and selecting different election policies may only modestly affect outcomes. While we cannot rule out small effects that nevertheless tip close elections, our results imply that clerks are not typically and noticeably advantaging their preferred party.

Since 2010, independent expenditures have grown as a source of spending in American elections. A large and growing portion comes from “dark money” groups—political nonprofits whose terms of incorporation allow them to partially obscure their sources of income. I develop a new dataset of about 2,350,000 tax documents released by the IRS and use it to test a new theory of political spending. I posit that pathways for anonymous giving allowed interest groups to form new networks and create new pathways for money into candidate races apart from established political parties. Akin to networked party organizations discovered by other scholars, these dark money networks channel money from central hubs to peripheral electioneering groups. I further show that accounting for these dark money networks makes previously peripheral nodes more important to the larger network and diminishes the primacy of party affiliated organizations in funneling money into candidate races.

Roughly a thousand people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year, accounting for more than 5% of all homicides. We estimate the causal impact of these events on civic engagement. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close residents live to a killing, we find that exposure to police violence leads to significant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Black and Hispanic citizens and are largest for killings of unarmed individuals. We find corresponding increases in support for criminal justice reforms, suggesting that police violence may cause voters to politically mobilize against perceived injustice.

Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent’s response and reward or punish them for successes and failures. Yet, even when voters perceive events similarly, they tend to attribute responsibility selectively, disproportionately crediting their party for positive developments and blaming opponents for negative developments. We examine selective attribution during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, reporting three key findings. First, selective attribution rapidly emerged during the first weeks of the pandemic, a time in which Democrats and Republicans were otherwise updating their perceptions and behavior in parallel. Second, selective attribution is caused by individual-level changes in perceptions of the pandemic. Third, existing research has been too quick to explain selective attribution in terms of partisan-motivated reasoning. We find stronger evidence for an explanation rooted in beliefs about presidential competence. This recasts selective attribution’s implications for democratic accountability.

Socioeconomic disadvantage is a major correlate of low political participation. This association is among the most robust findings in political science. However, it is based largely on observational data. The causal effects of early-life disadvantage in particular are even less understood, because long-term data on the political consequences of randomized early-life anti-poverty interventions is nearly nonexistent. We leverage the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to test the long-term effect of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods—and thus out of deep poverty—on turnout. MTO is one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments ever implemented in the United States. Although MTO ameliorated children’s poverty long term, we find that, contrary to expectations, the intervention did not increase children’s likelihood of voting later in life. Additional tests show the program did not ameliorate their poverty enough to affect turnout. These findings speak to the complex relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and low political participation.

In this paper, we explain how presidents strategically invest in administrative capacity, noting that presidents have few incentives to invest effort in capacity building in most agencies. We test our account with two analyses. First, we examine the time it took for the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations to nominate individuals to appointed positions. We find that presidents prioritize appointments to policy over management positions and that nominations occur sooner in agencies that implement presidential priorities. Second, we examine the responses of federal executives to the 2020 Survey on the Future of Government Service to see whether perceptions of presidential investment in administrative capacity match our predictions. We find that federal executives perceive higher levels of investment when the agency is a priority of the president and when the agency shares the president’s policy views. We conclude with implications for our understanding of the modern presidency and government performance.

American liberalism has long been divided between early “classic” and modern forms, a transformation associated with the rise of the social welfare state and the New Deal. The long-running critique of Hartzian consensus theory has left intact that division, which is likewise expressed in literature on the Reconstruction Amendments. This article offers a new staged theory of American liberal development in the nineteenth century, accomplished through the prism of public law. Newly elaborating and theorizing the governing frameworks of the antebellum “well-regulated society” and reading judicial disagreement in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873, 83 U.S. 36) in terms of these institutional frameworks, I show how the dual liberty paradigm of the well-regulated society was rearranged in Bradley’s dissent. By elevating a conceptual split between the dissents of Field and Bradley and by tracing in Bradley’s dissent the reorganization of police powers jurisprudence, I illuminate the fashioning and rapid diffusion of modern rights individualism.

Recently, we have witnessed the politicizing effects of police killings in the United States. This project asks how such killings might (de)mobilize voters at the local level. We draw on multiple theoretical approaches to develop a theory of community contact with the police. We argue that when a highly visible event tied to government actions occurs—like a police killing—it can spur turnout. This is especially true where public narratives tie such events to government and structural causes. By comparing neighborhoods near a killing before and after election day, we estimate the causal effect on turnout. We find a mobilizing effect. These effects are larger when they “trend” on Google, occur in Black communities, or if the victim is Black. Proximity to a killing also increases support for abolishing the police. We conclude that police violence increases electoral participation in communities where narratives about racially unjust policing resonate most.

How do government counterinsurgency tactics shape the behavior of the rebels they are combating? This letter builds upon foundational theories of civil war to argue that within-conflict government actions can further increase rebels’ levels of grievances. This increases the likelihood rebels continue fighting as conflicts unfold. I test the argument using newly compiled individual-level data on over 1,700 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army who participated in the 1916 Easter Rising. Rebels varied in whether they were interned after the uprising. I show that rebels who were interned were more likely to fight throughout the entire Irish War of Independence. Qualitative evidence corroborates the contention that internment increased rebels’ levels of grievances. The letter elucidates how within-conflict events shape rebel behavior, by documenting how the tactics governments employ as they fight can shape the subsequent actions of the rebels they are combating.

A majority of Americans spend a substantial amount of time at work where they have little to no say over many issues—a phenomenon that philosophers have likened to a “private government” that resembles a dictatorship. Is this because Americans are indifferent to or even prefer to work for firms that resemble dictatorships? To answer this question, we field a conjoint experiment on a nationally-representative sample of Americans to isolate public preferences over “corporate regime type.” We find that Americans prefer workplace democracy. In a second experiment, we find that most Americans support workplace democracy even after being exposed to framing emphasizing democratization’s costs. The results suggest that social scientists must look beyond public opinion to understand the lack of workplace democracy in the United States. This article forges new ground by applying a political science lens to corporate governance—a field ripe with politics but bereft of political science.

Who gets to “speak up” in politics? Whose voices are silenced? We conducted two field experiments to understand how harassment shapes the everyday experiences of politics for men and women in the United States today. We randomized the names campaign volunteers used to text supporters reminders to participate in a protest and call their representatives. We find that female-named volunteers receive more offensive, silencing, and withdrawal responses than male-named or ambiguously named volunteers. However, supporters were also more likely to respond and agree to their asks. These findings help make sense of prior research that finds women are less likely than men to participate in politics, and raise new questions about whether individual women may be perceived as symbolic representatives of women as a group. We conclude by discussing the implications for gender equality and political activism.

In an influential recent study, Broockman and Skovron (2018) found that American politicians consistently overestimate the conservativeness of their constituents on a host of issues. Whether this conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions of public opinion is a uniquely American phenomenon is an open question with broad implications for the quality and nature of democratic representation. We investigate it in four democracies: Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. Despite these countries having political systems that differ greatly, we document a strong and persistent conservative bias held by a majority of the 866 representatives interviewed. Our findings highlight the conservative bias in elites’ perception of public opinion as a widespread regularity and point toward a pressing need for further research on its sources and impacts.