The party regime concept is central to the study of American political development. Yet many questions about the processes through which party regimes are created, maintained, and dismantled remain unanswered. This article argues that religious bodies have historically played an important role in these processes. Specifically, I demonstrate that “mainline” Protestant groups made three distinct contributions to the entrenchment of the post–New Deal Democratic regime. First, the National Council of Churches (NCC) credibly reframed Democratic policy commitments as embodying universal values (as opposed to the preferences of favored interest groups). Second, the NCC's economic policy arm, which included representatives from business, labor, and the clergy, successfully created the impression of an overwhelming elite consensus in favor of center-left economic policies. Third, the NCC used its moral authority to empower the moderate Republican opposition while simultaneously marginalizing the party's well-funded and potentially influential right wing. The NCC was one of many civil society groups that opposed the GOP right's attempts to roll back the New Deal. But the professional diversity of its membership, its ability to frame its pronouncements in religious terms, and its links to the Protestant grassroots made it arguably the most effective.

This article investigates the role that Italian food companies like Barilla pasta played in creating narratives of East African empire at the apex of the Fascist ventennio. It aims to use the commercial remnants of Fascist empire to provide a more thorough accounting of how colonialism shaped the modern cultural history of Italian pasta. To do so, I analyze the paper ephemera, that is, the pasta advertisements and packaging, that connected occupied East Africa to Italy, demonstrating how regime projects to promote grain evolved into corporate projects in private industry. I argue that these two stories form a single cohesive narrative, one that can unite much of the excellent work that has been done on Fascist agriculture in empire with the transnational history of Italian food companies. East African empire, as depicted by Italian pasta shapes and advertisements, was consumable. At stake in this inquiry lies the shifting question of Italian national identity, framed by food products in global contexts.

The Ithiel de Sola Pool Award is for work throughout my career—work that I have done with many and with the help of so many more. I thank the committee for this honor and, with it, the opportunity to honor another: Merrill Shanks.

Violence leaves significant social groups at a long-term disadvantage, including for generating income and accessing public services. In this article, we conduct a nationwide field experiment with local authorities in Colombia to evaluate how politicians respond to conflict victims in providing access to social services. We find that local officials are more likely to respond to requests for help from victims than from ordinary citizens and return friendlier and more helpful responses. Although politicians invest additional efforts to respond to conflict victims, we show that their responsiveness, affect, and helpfulness vary based on the ideological match between the party in power and the identity of the perpetrator of violence. Using interviews, we present evidence that elected officials respond to victims to signal their commitment to peace and to separate themselves from violent groups on their ideological side. These findings provide new insights into the dynamics of political representation in postconflict societies.

This article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.

Dogs have played a vital and varied role in the social history of early China. Whether used as a source of food, a hunting-aid, or a sacrificial victim, dogs were intimately connected with human life and death. The placement and significance of dismembered and slaughtered dogs in human tombs have been a source of scholarly interest across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, less attention has been paid to sources which present us with a spectrum of concerns surrounding the treatment of dogs after their death. Should they be consumed, discarded, or buried? Which dogs were deserving of burial, and how were such burials viewed by human commentators? By analysing textual, archaeological, and material sources, this article explores the changing conceptualisation of dogs in life and in death through the medium of the tomb, showing how the transition from tomb-keeper to tomb-occupant reflects an increasingly anthropomorphic view of canine potential and moral fibre by the early medieval period.

Unlike other commentaries on the Sāṅkhyakārikā, the Yuktidīpikā (circa sixth to eighth centuries) problematised the Sāṅkhya tradition's equivocal attitudes toward the Veda. While submitting itself to the authority of the Veda, the Yuktidīpikā's commentary on Sāṅkhyakārikā 2 illustrates how Sāṅkhya thinkers of the post-Gupta period safeguarded the identity of Brahmin renouncers. Aligning its doctrine with the Upaniṣad, the end of the Veda, the Yuktidīpikā launched a Sāṅkhya navigation of the central concern of Indian intellectuals, Vedic hermeneutics, and attempted to secure Sāṅkhya's place within Vedic orthodoxy. This article discusses the Yuktidīpikā's strategy for surviving the peer pressure of Vedic ritualists, as represented by the Mīmāṃsakas, while maintaining Sāṅkhya superiority by exploiting the inner division within the Veda.

A growing body of literature on the role of courts in democratic backsliding claims that court-packing weakens liberal democracy. However, this is not necessarily the case. The goals of the actors who produce court-packing help to explain why the co-optation of the judiciary can have a substantial negative effect on liberal democracy in some (although not all) cases. In this respect, we distinguish two types of court-packing. First, policy-driven court-packing occurs when politicians manipulate the composition of courts in order to assure a quick implementation of policies. Although this tends to negatively affect judicial independence, it is not per se a first step towards regime change. Second, regime-driven court-packing happens when politicians alter the composition of the courts with the goal of eroding democracy. In this case, court-packing’s negative effect on judicial independence has a systemic negative effect on different dimensions of liberal democracy. Relying on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, we conceptualize these two types of court-packing by comparing two cases: Carlos Menem (1989–99) in Argentina, seeking judicial support to carry out pro-market economic reforms, and Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and Nicolás Maduro (2013–present) in Venezuela, seeking to control the judiciary in the context of democratic backsliding.

In this article, the confidence that has been placed in hard and, in particular, soft paternalistic measures in the field of behavioural public policy is questioned. The four purported limitations of human reasoning – i.e. limited imagination, willpower, objectivity and technical ability – are considered, but ultimately it is concluded that these are insufficient justifications for paternalistic intervention, for two principal-related reasons. First, it is impossible for a policy maker to discern what people desire for their own lives, and second, so long as they are not harming others, people ought to be free to pursue their own desires. The vision for the future of behavioural public policy proposed here is thus consistent with classical liberal, and in particular, Millian thought: i.e. aim to educate people on the pros and cons of their actions and inactions so that they are better equipped to live the lives they wish to lead but do not interfere directly in guiding them towards any particular end.

Prison labour was an integral part of the penal order in colonial India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially in Bengal, such coerced labour, overwhelmingly male, was increasingly deployed in handicrafts production rather than in extramural construction projects, a regimen that led to the development of a prison-handicraft complex. Colonial efforts to refine this system focused largely on increasing the severity of the conditions of incarceration and indoor work, but also on the conflicting goal of maximizing the profits of its handiwork. Prisons thus emerged as effective sites of handicrafts production, with the products of their forced labour facilitating the revival of the crafts industry whose growth is generally attributed to the rise of an international arts and crafts movement in Britain and India.

The Sustainable Development Goal’s (SDG) blueprint to global sustainability exemplifies the global governance trend towards the displacement of law by indicators. Indicators purport to produce objective measurement and comparison, a desirable trait for international public authorities that struggle to bolster the legitimacy of environmental and sustainability norms. This paper adopts a pragmatic approach to indicators by taking seriously their limitations, weaknesses, and dangers, but also their potential contributions to international sustainability objectives. We explore a reframing of the relationship between law and indicators in complementary, not adversarial, terms. Several examples of this complementarity are explored, including the potential use of the SDGs for evaluating the instrumental effectiveness of legal regimes, as well as the ways that international sustainability law supplements the SGDs by providing legal ramifications for violations of state-specific obligations. Finally, we argue that law and legal normativity make invaluable contributions to international environmental and sustainability governance, contributions that metrics and other managerial and technocratic forms of governance cannot make.

While burgeoning research on China's state–society relations has paid attention to the Party, little is known about how the Party interacts with diverse actors and involves itself at the grassroots level in a specific region. This article delineates Party-advancement strategies at the community level in Shenzhen since 2013. To reclaim its leading role at the grassroots level, the Party opted for “Party–government disaggregation” by framing community governance as a Party-building affair, separating the government's affairs from those of the Party and “kicking” the government out of the community. Under the rubric of “reshaping Party–mass relations,” the Party penetrated deep into the community by innovating a “centre-periphery” organizational system, absorbing community elites in a top-down way and using a “service delivery taking the lead” method in a reciprocal exchange. In the end, the Party-governance structure, in which Party–mass relations are at the core, was reframed in the communities.

Unlike its European counterparts, Canada appears to remain firmly entrenched in a soft approach to ensuring that Canadian extractive companies respect human rights abroad. Canada’s powerful extractive industry has been very successful in resisting attempts to introduce hard law measures to regulate their transnational conduct. This article considers business and state motivations for supporting or pursuing the shift to hard law measures in the business and human rights context. It assesses Canada’s 2022 policy on responsible business conduct and the implications of the government’s failure to endow the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise with the necessary powers to engage in credible independent investigations of transnational business conduct. It also considers the potential impact of three leading cases brought in Canadian courts against Canadian extractive companies in relation to their overseas operations. The article argues that these developments may not yet be sufficient on their own to shift extractive sector views on the introduction of domestic human rights due diligence legislation. It concludes with some thoughts on the impact that the legislative developments in Europe and treaty negotiations at the United Nations may have in Canada.

This article examines the gacaca trials of women accused of perpetrating the Rwandan genocide, asking whether and how ideas about their gender impacted their defences, testimonies and experiences as defendants. It uses court reports of the trials of 91 accused women; a set of sources that provides novel insights into the role of gender in an African transitional justice system. These sources reveal that ideas about gender – particularly female peacefulness and passivity – were commonly invoked by both accused women and wider trial participants. These gendered ideas not only helped women to achieve acquittals, but they also contributed to the Rwandan state's construction of a ‘truth’ narrative that ordinary Rwandan women are not capable of genocide violence. Additionally, women's trials reveal a further function of the gacaca process: as a political tool that made moral judgements about contemporary Rwandan women's domestic roles and place within the household.

In post-independence India, as in many developing post-colonial nations, the capitalist class was dependent on the state to discipline the laborforce, and the rapid uptake of capitalist production methods prompted the new government to intervene aggressively in industrial labor relations. The main goal of postcolonial labor policy was to maintain peaceful labor relations at any cost in order to foster economic development. The newly elected government failed to help capitalists increase their profits through productivity growth, so the way forward was to impose restrictions on labor. Pro-capital labor legislation initially enabled capitalists to curb the mobility and resistance of workers. In due course, however, irrespective of how consistently or effectively labor regulations and repressive measures were enforced, the reaction of the working class heightened its political consciousness, and thus aggravated frictions between capital and labor. When the state resorted to labor welfare laws as a new strategy to reduce these conflicts, employers often fragmented production among smaller units (such as workshops and households) in order to dodge labor regulations. As a reaction to this production decentralization, the working-class movement created impediments to the process of continual capital accumulation.

A common approach when studying the quality of representation involves comparing the latent preferences of voters and legislators, commonly obtained by fitting an item response theory (IRT) model to a common set of stimuli. Despite being exposed to the same stimuli, voters and legislators may not share a common understanding of how these stimuli map onto their latent preferences, leading to differential item functioning (DIF) and incomparability of estimates. We explore the presence of DIF and incomparability of latent preferences obtained through IRT models by reanalyzing an influential survey dataset, where survey respondents expressed their preferences on roll call votes that U.S. legislators had previously voted on. To do so, we propose defining a Dirichlet process prior over item response functions in standard IRT models. In contrast to typical multistep approaches to detecting DIF, our strategy allows researchers to fit a single model, automatically identifying incomparable subgroups with different mappings from latent traits onto observed responses. We find that although there is a group of voters whose estimated positions can be safely compared to those of legislators, a sizeable share of surveyed voters understand stimuli in fundamentally different ways. Ignoring these issues can lead to incorrect conclusions about the quality of representation.

We propose and explore the possibility that language models can be studied as effective proxies for specific human subpopulations in social science research. Practical and research applications of artificial intelligence tools have sometimes been limited by problematic biases (such as racism or sexism), which are often treated as uniform properties of the models. We show that the “algorithmic bias” within one such tool—the GPT-3 language model—is instead both fine-grained and demographically correlated, meaning that proper conditioning will cause it to accurately emulate response distributions from a wide variety of human subgroups. We term this property algorithmic fidelity and explore its extent in GPT-3. We create “silicon samples” by conditioning the model on thousands of sociodemographic backstories from real human participants in multiple large surveys conducted in the United States. We then compare the silicon and human samples to demonstrate that the information contained in GPT-3 goes far beyond surface similarity. It is nuanced, multifaceted, and reflects the complex interplay between ideas, attitudes, and sociocultural context that characterize human attitudes. We suggest that language models with sufficient algorithmic fidelity thus constitute a novel and powerful tool to advance understanding of humans and society across a variety of disciplines.