Charge: More than a half-century ago, Richard Hofstadter identified the “paranoid style” as an important feature of American politics. However, in A Lot of People are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum argue that a “new” form of conspiracism has begun to infect contemporary American political life. Whereas “old” conspiracy theorists sought hidden evidence to describe why things are not as they seem, Muirhead and Rosenblum argue that purveyors of the new conspiracism make no attempt to substantiate their theories. In light of this fact-free approach, the authors thus warn that contemporary conspiracy theorists pose an unprecedented danger to foundational elements of American democracy, including political parties and knowledge-producing institutions. Moreover, Muirhead and Rosenblum assert, “The new conspiracism moved into the White House with the inauguration of Donald Trump” (p. 1), “the conspiracist in chief” (p. ix). If there is merit to this argument, then the fate of Trump’s reelection bid carries monumental consequences for the future of American democracy, as well as the way in which the United States responds to the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic. We therefore asked a range of scholars to comment on Muirhead’s and Rosenblum’s bold set of claims.

Love is a key concept in the theory and history of civil disobedience yet it has been purposefully neglected in recent debates in political theory. Through an examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s paradoxical notion of “aggressive love,” I offer a critical interpretation of love as a key concept in a vernacular black political theology, and the consequences of love’s displacement by law in liberal theories of civil disobedience. The first section locates the origins of aggressive love in an earlier generation of black theologians who looked to India’s anticolonial struggle to reimagine the dignity of the oppressed as “creative survival.” The second contextualizes King’s early sermons on moral injury and self-respect within this tradition to reinterpret Stride toward Freedom’s account of the dignity-enhancing effects of nonviolent resistance as the triumph of love over fear. The third considers the implications of these arguments for conceptualizing the moral psychology of the white citizen and its consequences for contemporary debates over the ideological uses of Civil Rights history. The call to respond to oppression with aggressive love illustrates the paradoxical character of civil disobedience obscured by legal accounts as well as by criticisms of the very idea of “civil” disobedience. This is the paradox of affirming civility while enacting disobedience in order to bind political confrontation with political pedagogy.

Survey research can generate knowledge that is central to the study of collective action, public opinion, and political participation. Unfortunately, many populations—from undocumented migrants to right-wing activists and oligarchs—are hidden, lack sampling frames, or are otherwise hard to survey. An approach to hard-to-survey populations commonly taken by researchers in other disciplines is largely missing from the toolbox of political science methods: respondent-driven sampling (RDS). By leveraging relations of trust, RDS accesses hard-to-survey populations; it also promotes representativeness, systematizes data collection, and, notably, supports population inference. In approximating probability sampling, RDS makes strong assumptions. Yet if strengthened by an integrative multimethod research design, it can shed light on otherwise concealed—and critical—political preferences and behaviors among many populations of interest. Through describing one of the first applications of RDS in political science, this article provides empirically grounded guidance via a study of activist refugees from Syria. Refugees are prototypical hard-to-survey populations, and mobilized ones are even more so; yet the study demonstrates that RDS can provide a systematic and representative account of a vulnerable population engaged in major political phenomena.

In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project.

The world is in the midst of a demographic recession. This counters what should be a long-term trend toward greater democracy. Recent research has shown that progress toward stable democracy is strongly associated with progress in the demographic transition. Since most of the world is rapidly dropping in fertility as more countries complete this transition, democracy should be spreading. However, a resurgence of anxiety, nationalism, and support for strong-man governance is associated with sudden waves of immigration from unfamiliar sources. Because certain parts of the world—mainly Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East—still have very young and rapidly growing populations who suffer from poor economic prospects, adverse climate change, and bad governance, those regions are sending waves of migrants seeking asylum to Europe and the United States, raising anxieties that undermine liberal democratic governance. Global democracy is thus being tugged in opposing directions by current demographic trends. Improving governance in poorer countries to cope with the negative impact of climate change and to create better economic prospects, as well as efforts to reduce fertility, are essential to diminish the surges of migrants and restore the impetus toward democracy that should prevail in mature societies.

This article explores the role played by electoral politics in the evolution of postwar growth regimes, understood as the economic and social policies used by governments of the developed democracies to pursue economic growth. It charts changes in growth regimes beginning with an era of modernization stretching from 1950 to 1975, through an era of liberalization running from 1980 to 2000, to a subsequent era of knowledge-based growth. Its overarching claim is that the inclination and capacities of democratic governments to pursue specific growth regimes depend not only on economic circumstances but also on evolving electoral conditions, marked especially by changes in the cleavages that condition partisan electoral strategies. This electoral dynamic affects the balance of influence over policy between actors in the electoral and producer-group arenas and carries implications for the social compromises that democracies can construct. The article concludes by exploring the implications of contemporary electoral politics for the development of growth regimes appropriate to a knowledge economy.

Although many scholars who study the role of racial animus in Americans’ political attitudes and policy preferences do so to help us understand national-level politics, (racialized) policy is largely shaped at the state level. States are laboratories of policy innovation whose experiments can exacerbate or ameliorate racial inequality. In this article, we develop state-level scores of racial resentment. By using linear multilevel regression and poststratification weighting techniques and by linking nationally representative survey data with US Census data, we create time-varying, dynamic state-level estimates of racial resentment from 1988 to 2016. These measures enable us to explore the extent to which subnational levels of racial attitudes fluctuate over time and to provide a comparative analysis of state-level racial resentment scores across space and time. We find that states’ levels of racial animus change slowly, with some exhibiting increases over time while others do just the opposite. Southern states’ reputation for having the highest levels of racial resentment has been challenged by states across various regions of the United States. Many states had their lowest levels of symbolic racism decades ago, contrary to the traditional American narrative of racial progress.

Those for whom the term “Anthropocene” tends to evoke academic faddishness may be surprised to realize that the discourse about it is now two decades old. The term was first proposed in a 2000 paper by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer to describe the geological epoch in which human activity has come to shape the Earth itself. Since then, the concept has generated a vast amount of scholarly conversation and a wide range of interpretations, often concerning the start date of this new era: Did the “age of man” begin with the use of fire? The development of settled agriculture? The rise of capitalism? European settlement of the Americas? And so on. Although these debates have raged across the humanities and sciences for years, political theorists have largely kept their distance. As the climate crisis worsens, however, many may now be looking to play catch-up. If so, each of the three books under review here holds out the promise of helping us understand the theoretical implications of this epochal transformation.

If the election of Donald Trump has proven anything indisputably, it is that the notion of America as a “postracial” society in the aftermath of the Obama presidency is a canard. Yet how should we understand the specific pattern of race’s persistent salience in US politics? In Deep Roots, Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen argue that it is the long legacy of chattel slavery that continues to shape politics in the US South in distinctive fashion. Comparing regions that were once marked by slavery with those that were not, the authors develop the concept of “behavioral path dependence” to describe the production and reproduction of a political culture marked by intergenerational racial prejudice. They argue that this legacy continues to shape US politics today in a fashion that is both understandable and predictable with the tools of empirical political science. We asked several scholars with expertise on politics and race, US political development, and political behavior to address this controversial argument.

If the election of Donald Trump has proven anything indisputably, it is that the notion of America as a “postracial” society in the aftermath of the Obama presidency is a canard. Yet how should we understand the specific pattern of race’s persistent salience in US politics? In Deep Roots, Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen argue that it is the long legacy of chattel slavery that continues to shape politics in the US South in distinctive fashion. Comparing regions that were once marked by slavery with those that were not, the authors develop the concept of “behavioral path dependence” to describe the production and reproduction of a political culture marked by intergenerational racial prejudice. They argue that this legacy continues to shape US politics today in a fashion that is both understandable and predictable with the tools of empirical political science. We asked several scholars with expertise on politics and race, US political development, and political behavior to address this controversial argument.