Platform firms have disrupted markets and challenged regulatory frameworks, but a new phase is emerging in which governments increasingly regulate these firms and firms engage with regulation strategically. This article examines how interactions between governments and firms shape the employment classification of platform workers. Drawing on case studies of California (United States), Spain, and Denmark, I show that welfare regime characteristics structure the regulatory environment that firms confront, whereas their competitive calculations shape their strategic responses. The analysis identifies three distinct configurations: successful firm override of government initiatives to classify workers as employees, resulting in a hybrid worker category (California); mixed firm responses to government initiatives aimed at employee classification, ultimately leading to universal employee status (Spain); and voluntary employee classification in the absence of specific government mandates (Denmark). These findings challenge assumptions that platform firms uniformly resist regulation and demonstrate how welfare state institutions and firms’ competitive strategies jointly shape worker classification outcomes.

Polarization has become the master concept for diagnosing contemporary democratic crises. The notion denotes three features: symmetry between parties, politics as an opinion space where positions diverge, and mutual repulsion between opposing camps. Yet none of these capture current realities. Across democracies, the central dynamic is not two poles drifting apart but the transformation of the political right into authoritarianism, norm breaking, and openness to political violence. Social democratic and center-right parties tend to respond in the opposite way from what “polarization” implies: by accommodating rightward. Attempts to salvage the polarization frame with modifiers (“asymmetric,” “affective,” “sectarian,” “pernicious”) concede these realities but risk hollowing out the concept’s definitional core. These limitations reveal a deeper misdiagnosis: when one party turns antidemocratic and illiberal, incivility and conflict are inevitable—but they are symptoms, not the root problem. Misdiagnosing them as the central issue leads to viewing civility and compromise as remedies, thereby risking the legitimation of authoritarian actors. This article proposes an alternative lens: the radicalization of the political right. Developed in the study of extremism, the radicalization framework better captures asymmetric change, identity-driven politics, and the mainstreaming of illiberalism. It foregrounds identity fusion, threat narratives, elite entrepreneurship, and escalation. Concepts are never politically innocent and persisting with “polarization” risks both misdiagnosing and normalizing authoritarian threats.

Amid global assaults on higher education, this reflection analyzes a video performance created by Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey) students during widespread protests against President Erdoğan’s appointment of a loyalist as rector in 2021. Although it disputes the appointment and the subsequent crackdown on campus protest, the performance more directly responds to the punitive and vilifying reaction of the university administration and the government to a campus exhibition that included a controversial artwork juxtaposing Islamic, mythological, and LGBTQ+ imagery. In the video, a small group of pious Muslim and nonpious students share their divergent views on the artwork while presenting a unified voice against the defamatory campaign targeting their peers. Drawing on democratic theoretical accounts of Aristotelian political friendship, I interpret the performance as an experiment in mutual trust and confidence countering Erdoğan’s tyrannical rule, which thrives on distrust and apathy among citizens, as a form of concerted action that finds its strength in difference and disagreement, and as a model for preserving the university as a site where public issues can be debated openly. Envisioning a democratic life grounded in political friendship, the performance, I argue, reasserts universities’ role as laboratories of democracy, preparing students for collective deliberation, negotiation, and reflective judgment.

This article addresses a central challenge in political science: how to choose between competing conceptions and structures of concepts. Existing approaches to concept validity offer useful criteria—such as resonance, consistency, differentiation, causal utility, and operationalization—but tend to omit criteria for evaluating the normative considerations that often underpin conceptual choices. As a result, conceptualization may face a fundamental indeterminacy when multiple conceptions appear equally well grounded. To address this lacuna, I introduce a “concern” criterion, which evaluates concepts according to the extent to which they capture what is most worrisome in the political world. Building on the semantic–pragmatic approach to conceptualization, I argue that normative considerations can be disciplined, rather than avoided. The argument is illustrated through the case of political polarization, where a shift from issue-based to affect-based conceptions reflects changing concerns about political division. I also examine the implications of the concern criterion for structuring multidimensional concepts and address objections concerning objectivity, stability, and legitimacy. A concern criterion, although not sufficient on its own, provides a valuable complement to existing criteria and helps ground conceptual choices in a normatively informed yet methodologically disciplined manner.

Recent evidence suggests that oligarchs hold disproportionate influence over electoral representative institutions and limit people’s participation in both formal and informal spaces of democratic politics. Drawing on phenomenology, I develop the concept of oligarchic fatigue to describe the political exhaustion that arises when people’s attempts to engage in democratic practices are obstructed by oligarchic domination. Oligarchic fatigue materializes through two analytically distinct mechanisms: people experience fatigue either (1) when they actively participate within formal political spaces, but their options for participation are constrained due to oligarchic control over political institutions; or (2) when their political participation is deemed illegitimate and functionally denied by oligarchy. The corrective to oligarchic fatigue, I contend, is a renewed focus on political freedom as a constitutive element of democratic innovations and anti-oligarchic institutional design.

When religion and politics become entangled with each other, which one has the upper hand? Do politicians simply instrumentalize religion for their own purposes? Or does involvement with religion constrain what politicians can get away with? If it does, is that because of the content of religious doctrine? Or is it simply because religious movements, like any other coordinated movements of citizens, have political weight?

As diffusion scholars increasingly focus on the various mechanisms underlying the spread of policy innovations, it is important to establish clear theoretical foundations for each one. Elite socialization—innovations that diffuse because of the convergence of lawmakers and policy advocates around norms of appropriateness—is the most underdeveloped mechanism in the American diffusion literature. This is a critical oversight given the application of socialization in other contexts and the success of interstate policy networks in seeding policy cascades across the states. This article remedies this problem both by providing a theoretical foundation for elite socialization as an explanation for diffusion via interstate policy networks in the United States and differentiating this mechanism from four other common diffusion mechanisms. It offers testable core and peripheral assumptions and illustrative case studies of strict voter ID and organ donor law diffusion. Finally, it presents a research agenda for systematically testing socialization diffusion, which includes a discussion of methodological opportunities and challenges.

When doing politics online, representatives are increasingly subject to insults, threats, and offensive comments. But in what ways is citizen–elite toxicity a challenge for political equality? Bridging research in communication research and gendered political violence, we theorize that inequality in politicians’ exposure and reaction to online toxicity can arise from their identity, role, or online behavior. Analyzing a full sample of Twitter conversations between citizens and candidates (N = 875,028) during the 2021 German national election, we estimate how candidates’ identity, role, and online behavior correlate with the frequency, form, and consequences of toxicity that they are exposed to. We find most support for our behavioral hypotheses, indicating that citizen–elite communications often function as counter-speech: right-wing parties’ candidates and those who tweet toxically themselves receive more toxic replies, and doing so reduces their tweet activity in the following days. Although the frequency and consequences of toxicity do not vary by candidates’ role and identity, we show that the form of attack does: Frontbencher candidates are more often personally insulted, whereas candidates from marginalized groups and culturally left-wing parties more often receive attacks directed at their party or policy propositions. In sum, this article reveals a complex and nuanced picture of how citizen–elite toxicity affects political equality online.

Deliberative democracy advocates argue that deliberation can strengthen democracy in part by reducing partisan hostility and affective polarization. Yet whether and why this holds remains relatively underexamined. This paper demonstrates that deliberation can reduce partisan animus by promoting engagement with out-partisan policy perspectives. This engagement builds cognitive empathy, increasing positive affect and tolerance toward out-partisans. Evidence is from an experiment in Honduras. Deliberators were randomly assigned to defend policies with which they agreed (own perspective) or disagreed (out-partisan perspective). Deliberation reduced affective polarization and out-partisan animus. These reductions were concentrated and more persistent in the out-partisan perspective group, while polarization increased modestly in the own-perspective group. The findings demonstrate that engagement with out-partisan policy viewpoints is an important causal mechanism driving deliberation’s impact while also highlighting the potential limits of deliberation and discussion in the absence of active engagement with out-group points of view.

Political actors, scholars, and citizens have long worried that the United States Supreme Court poses a “countermajoritarian difficulty”: the concern that policy making by unelected judges undermines democratic governance. In political science, a prominent response has come from a school of thought known as “regime theory,” which contends that this concern is misplaced because the court acts in alignment with a dominant governing coalition in the elected branches. In this article, we revisit regime theory and argue that it relies on unstated scope conditions. Specifically, it best explains periods characterized by low levels of interparty competition and intraparty cohesion. Since the 1970s, however, both these conditions have gradually eroded. We develop a revised theory of court–party relations to account for changing party dynamics. Under contemporary conditions of high interparty competition and high intraparty cohesion, the court is aligned with one of two competitive party coalitions rather than a dominant governing coalition. In this context, the court can support its aligned coalition in distinct ways that are indeed countermajoritarian. To illustrate our theory, we trace the functions of Supreme Court decision making for its aligned coalition over three periods (1930s–60s, 1970s–90s, and 2000s–present) and show why normative concerns about judicial power as a threat to democratic governance are well founded in the contemporary period.

A courageous agitator, Ida B. Wells is known for her principled commitment to racial justice and reluctance to consider concessions in her anti-lynching advocacy. Yet this article argues that Wells negotiates her political principles, specifically her commitment to sacrificial death in political resistance, given the constraints she faces as a Black woman advocating for racial justice in Jim Crow America. Wells links Black leadership with sacrificial death, but she qualifies this view of resistance when confronted with threats against her own life and the Black community in Memphis, Tennessee. Wells is committed to racial justice and willing to make unimaginable sacrifices to try to awaken the conscience of white Americans to the injustice of lynching, but she also engages in political resistance that centers care for the Black community. By examining Wells’s theory of political resistance and Black leadership in her political writings alongside her reflections on her anti-lynching advocacy in her autobiographical writings, this article recovers Wells’s commitment to care and community in her political resistance and reflects on how Black actors negotiate competing principles in practice under oppressive conditions.

Despite strong voter support for higher minimum wages, the US federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25/hour since 2009. This is the longest period of minimum wage stagnation not only in US history but also in the OECD and has resulted in an erosion in its real value over time. Existing scholarship on the politics of the minimum wage in the US has attributed federal inaction to declining union density, the power of wealthy interests, and increasing polarization and partisanship. Although these factors are important, we emphasize the overlooked role of institutions. The US system of minimum-wage setting, in which the legislative branch initiates bills to raise the minimum wage, passes them, and then secures presidential approval, is highly unusual. In most countries, the executive branch has the authority to raise minimum wages without legislative approval. This institutional difference produces both fewer veto points and a distinctive political logic. When executives have the authority to raise the minimum wage, they cannot easily duck responsibility for wage stagnation; they can also manipulate the minimum wage for maximal effect during election season. The result, we argue, is more frequent and generous increases to the minimum wage. Through a comparative analysis with the Hungary and the United Kingdom, we illustrate how institutions shape the politics of the minimum wage, resulting in almost yearly raises there and substantial improvements in the real value of the minimum wage.