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.

Culture has long inhabited a rather peculiar place in International Relations (IR), as witnessed by recent attempts to bring culture “back into” IR (Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit, eds., Culture and Order in World Politics, 2020). Even after the opening up of the discipline at the end of the Cold War, and with strategic culture being the obvious exception to the rule, culture has typically been seen as something that a discipline centered on survival is less concerned with. Yet both culture and the arts have been central to the activity of polities, from the “bread and circus” of Roman antiquity, through the Renaissance papacy’s commission of the Sistine Chapel and the eighteenth and nineteenth century building of numerous national museums, theatres, and opera houses through to the more routine practice of cultural attachés stationed with many embassies of the world today (see Chandra Mukerjee, 1997, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles). As Elif Kalaycioglu notes, this lack of scholarly attention to culture in IR is all the more conspicuous given the “expansive” and “expensive engagement of states” (p. 10). Jelena Subotić points to a similar logic: “acquisition of art has historically been an important practice not just for individuals, but also for states in their pursuit of international status” in the cultural sphere (p. 8). As the two books reviewed here demonstrate, while both culture and art have been crucial to how states project their power in international orders, they have also generated hierarchical orders of their own by distinguishing “civilized” states from “backward” ones, metropoles from their peripheries, and cultural centers from their emulators. Culture and art do more than reflect geopolitical power and hierarchies. As Subotić and Kalaycioglu show, they also actively constitute and legitimate international order based on cultural distinctions. In so doing, they shape the standards of prestige, recognition, and status through which international order is both imagined and maintained.

With the term “decolonization” circulating widely and animating debates inside and outside the academy, how can we ensure that it retains analytic value? In this paper I show that the meanings that the term has acquired in practice complicate empirical analysis. Specifically, I contend that three problems emerge. First, the term’s usage in practical struggles leads a foregrounding of its normative power over analytic precision. Second, this tends to bracket ends, glossing any move away from colonial practices as decolonial, in turn affecting scholarly treatments. Third, the term’s usage often produces an analytic flattening, downplaying nuance, context, and historical specificity. Not inherent to the concept itself, these problems are stubbornly present, despite recent work that seeks to address them. To make the discussion concrete, I focus on political science interventions about a single world region: Central Asia. The relative newness of scholarly engagement with Central Asia’s colonial and decolonial experiences provides an opportunity for critical reflection.

Does democratic public diplomacy work in authoritarian societies and, if so, when? I investigate the impact of the US Embassy in China’s online advocacy of American democracy through two survey experiments conducted during the first Trump administration. The results show that American public diplomacy can improve Chinese audiences’ attitudes toward the United States, not in relatively normal times but when the US international image is under threat. This novel finding suggests that public diplomacy may function more as a “shield” to maintain residual credibility than as a “sword” for proactive influence, expanding our understanding of how public diplomacy works. At the same time, the embassy’s messaging had little effect on Chinese audiences’ attitudes toward democracy, views on China, or behavioral intentions such as protest, regardless of the US image. This general silence greeting the democratic sound underscores the challenges of democracy promotion in a rising authoritarian power, at least in the short term, while also undermining authoritarian governments’ frequent attempts to blame domestic grievances on “foreign forces.” The findings illuminate both the potential and limits of democratic public diplomacy.

Around the world, the growing power of giant technology firms has outpaced regulatory oversight, raising urgent questions about how public opinion can be mobilized in support of meaningful reform. When do broad coalitions emerge in support of stronger regulation? This study investigates corporate scandals as windows of opportunity—focusing events—that can galvanize public support for new regulations and amplify issue salience. To assess this possibility, we conducted a two-wave survey experiment that we fielded simultaneously in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. After collecting pre-treatment data in a separate, dedicated survey wave, our subjects were later assigned to read media coverage describing the 2018 Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. The results confirm our preregistered hypothesis: in all four countries, exposure to scandal coverage significantly increases support for technology regulation and elevates the issue’s salience. Anger mediates this shift, and increased issue salience correlates with a greater willingness to engage in political action around technology policy. At a moment of heightened concern about the concentration of economic and political power in a handful of mammoth technology firms, these findings illuminate the microfoundations of how focusing events can break political inertia and catalyze regulatory reform.