That someone like me could serve as president of the American Political Science Association is a testament to one story about America. It is a story of success that we celebrate, even as such stories erase and conceal other stories about the United States.

After the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU) issued new domestic rules across a variety of financial services. Different politics and policy-making processes generated regulatory incompatibilities, and conflicts emerged as each side insisted the other adapt to its approach. Yet our original data covering eleven sub-sectors show that in a predominant cluster of cases, the two jurisdictions had by 2020 made adjustments and adopted integrationist regulation, which fosters cross-jurisdictional interoperability for financial companies through harmonization (increasing similarity and compatibility) or deference (accepting the regulation of other jurisdictions). The pattern has broad and surprising implications for the future of global finance in an era of rising economic nationalism and populist politics. Why, then, did Washington and Brussels move beyond the standoffs? What accounts for the integrationist turn? Our novel explanation features a “mutual accommodation” causal mechanism driven by the development in both jurisdictions of “border-policing” capacities, builds on a new generation of IPE research that is attentive to complexity and temporal process in accounting for global governance outcomes, and provides a pathway for qualitative researchers seeking to balance many new methodological and transparency demands.

Do populist governments bend their economic policies to the preferences of bondholders? Populist governments should be a “least likely” case for the market discipline hypothesis. Populist parties typically run on platforms that scapegoat wealthy elites as “enemies of the people” and hence should be more resistant to changing policy positions in the face of market pressure, given their reluctance to alienate their base. Employing most-different case studies of the Five Star Movement/Lega coalition in Italy and Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, we find that populists do bend to market pressure but that this “disciplining effect” does not stem primarily from foreign investors. Rather, it was the inaction of domestic investors in bond auctions that caused these governments to reverse course on headline economic policies. Because domestic investors served as both governments’ “buyers of last resort,” they needed to maintain their favor amidst foreign capital flight.

Monetary and financial integration has been shown to increase the pressure on states to liberalize social and labor market policies. If structures do not come with instruction sheets, how do monetary regime pressures translate into policy? Through a case study of the euro area, we show that central banks play an underappreciated role in this process. Using mixed methods to analyze a large amount of data, including the complete corpus of speeches, we trace the evolution of the European Central Bank’s advocacy for structural reforms between 1999 and 2019. To explain the ECB’s activism in a policy area beyond its mandate, we theorize the ECB as navigating a dilemma between governability and legitimacy. Handed a monetary regime under which flexible labor markets were seen as a condition for governability, the ECB saw no alternative but to push governments toward structural reforms, despite the reputational risks. The ECB ended its advocacy when increasing political backlash coincided with a structural regime shift from an inflationary to a deflationary environment.

Russia’s 2014 seizure of parts of Ukraine, notably the Crimean Peninsula, set in motion a flurry of legal activity. Ukraine’s “lawfare” strategy, which aims to fight Russia via international legal means, included explicit encouragement of Ukrainian investors to file disputes under the Ukraine-Russia Bilateral Investment Treaty. We consider the resulting Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) arbitrations, the first instances of ISDS in which state parties to the treaty are actively engaged in armed conflict. Although Ukrainian actors have consistently won at ISDS arbitrations, Ukraine moved to formally withdraw from the treaty a year after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022. Developments before and since the invasion point to the diverging interests between commercial actors and their home states, the weakness of ISDS as a tool during wartime, and a reconsideration of treaty-based commitments to international investor protections. We highlight the implications of these events for several literatures in international relations.

In the age of post-neoliberal globalization, complex interdependence has resulted in the integration of many economies and the industries within them and led to varied national and subnational political and economic responses. These forces have enabled the rise of a new political economy that requires the contextualized comparative sector approach (CCSA). This article advances a research agenda that contends theoretical and empirical leverage for explaining heterogeneity and assessing generalizability is gained by taking contextualized comparisons to the sector level of analysis. The CCSA identifies the multidimensional effects of sectors, uncovering new sites of inquiry connected to sectoral structural attributes, context-specific sectoral organization of institutions, and social and political constructions of sectors. Sectors are thus contexts that are embedded in multilevel contexts involving state and nonstate actors alike. Scholarship on industrial policy, technology and innovation, environmental transition, and regulation and governance demonstrates the analytical power and theoretical value of combining contextualized comparisons and sectoral analysis, which have been overlooked by the overly macro- or micro-level studies dominant in international and comparative political economy. The various strategies of the approach and a stepwise discussion of a research design underscore the possibilities for theory development and testing, adjudication of competing explanations, and case-specific discoveries.

In communities throughout Latin America, criminal organizations provide basic order and security. While multidisciplinary research on criminal governance (CG) has illuminated its dynamics in hundreds of site-specific studies, its extent remains understudied. We exploit novel, nationally representative survey data, validated against a compendium of qualitative sources, to estimate CG prevalence in 18 countries, and explore its correlates at multiple levels. Overall, 14% of respondents reported that local criminal groups provide order and/or reduce crime, corresponding to some 77–101 million Latin Americans experiencing CG. Counterintuitively, CG is positively correlated with both respondents’ perceptions of state governance quality and objective measures of local state presence. These descriptive results are consistent with multiple causal pathways, including case-specific findings that state presence—rather than absence—drives criminal governance. We offer suggestions for both more precise data collection on CG itself and, given its pervasiveness, its inclusion in broader research on economic development, demography, and politics.

This article examines how drug gangs establish commitments of silence (CS) with communities in Montevideo, Uruguay. CS involve tacit agreements through which communities exchange silence—that is, not reporting illicit gang activities to the authorities—for gang-provided tranquility, thus ensuring relative stability. Unlike previous research that has focused on contexts of low state presence, this study explores a context, Montevideo, with higher state presence, emphasizing the increased importance of CS when states can receive reports of criminal activity and respond; that is, in low-corruption and high-capacity settings. Gangs use various methods from forced violence to negotiated loyalty to secure community silence. I argue that the structure of local reciprocity networks, characterized by long-term exchange ties, influences the type of CS established and determines prevalent strategies for maintaining community silence. Homegrown gang members embed the CS within the community’s existing reciprocity network. The argument is developed through case studies in Montevideo’s Casavalle neighborhood, using a process-tracing design based on interviews, press articles, and historical records to uncover the logics behind drug gang operations and their relationship with the local community.

Criminal actors are widely assumed to maintain a low profile, exerting power through coercion and clandestine networks. Scholarship addressing public action by criminal actors focuses largely on visible violence. However, an ample empirical record demonstrates that criminal actors also communicate publicly to broad audiences. To better understand this practice, my study focuses on campaigns of narco-messaging in Mexico. I ask: how do criminal actors represent themselves when they speak publicly? How does such self-portrayal interact with other practices of criminal governance and control? I identify three patterns of self-representation: Ruler of territory, Scourge of enemies, and Guardian of people. Overall, public communication expands the repertoires of criminal actors, offering ways to modify public perceptions of better-known practices such as costly signaling through violence. Different representations are deployed strategically in the contexts of establishing regimes of governance, maintaining regimes, and fighting criminal wars.

This article examines the effects of the militarization of public security and the conflicts it triggers on a central democratic institution: press freedom. We focus on Mexico, which experienced multiple waves of assassinations of local journalists after the federal government declared a War on Drugs against the country’s main cartels and deployed the military to the country’s most conflictive regions. We argue that violence against journalists is tied to the outbreak of criminal wars—the multiple localized turf wars and power struggles unleashed by the federal military intervention. Subnational politicians and their security forces and drug lords are at the center of these conflicts because they jointly enable local operations of the transnational drug-trafficking industry. To defend their interests, they have individual and shared incentives to prevent city- and town-level journalists from (or punish them for) publishing fine-grained information that may compromise their criminal and political survival and their quest for local control. We compiled the most comprehensive dataset available on lethal attacks on journalists from 1994 to 2019 to test our claims. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that violence against local journalists substantially increased in militarized regions, where the military decapitated the cartels and fragmented the criminal underworld, triggering violent competition for criminal governance—de facto rule over territories, people, and illicit economies. Evidence from original focus groups and interviews with at-risk reporters suggests that governors, mayors, and their police forces possibly joined cartels in murdering journalists to mitigate the risks of unwanted information and to minimize the costs of criminal governance by silencing the press and society. Our study offers a sobering lesson of how the militarization of anti-crime policy and the onset of criminal wars can undermine local journalism, press freedom, and democracy.

How and why do armed groups that become known as “rebels” initially use violence? New datasets show that such violence is often small in scale. Numerous empirical examples indicate that it is also often ambiguous—not easily identified as a precursor to anti-state rebellion. This paper seeks to explain these patterns. We argue that a variety of fledgling nonstate armed groups find small-scale, anonymous anti-state violence useful, despite the risks. Therefore, armed groups that later become distinguishable as “rebels” or “bandits” often initially use this similar repertoire of violence. The resulting ambiguity of this violence—for outsiders from states to scholars—presents an opportunity for aspiring rebels, since states struggle to discern the threat they pose. Ambiguity lessens when aspiring rebels opt to use offensive, larger-scale violence. We illustrate our claims with three historical case studies that enable close examination of early armed group violence, as well as 12 brief case vignettes. Our analyses show the promise of integrating research on rebel origins, criminality, and state formation.

The contemporary field of American political behavior lacks a methodological tradition of in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we illustrate the causes and consequences of this gap and argue for a renewal of methodological pluralism. First, we situate the current dearth of qualitative approaches within two key methodological debates during the behavioral turn in political science, showing that scholars initially embraced open-ended interviews and fieldwork but that these methods were ultimately sidelined. Although qualitative approaches persisted in historical and institutional research on American politics, their marginalization within the field of American political behavior has come at significant conceptual cost. Second, to redress this loss, we draw on existing discussions of the comparative advantages of qualitative methods to propose a framework for reintegrating interviews and ethnography into the study of American political behavior. We identify four “modes of inquiry” that should inform qualitative and mixed-methods research design in the subfield: innovating theoretically through the discovery of surprising findings, innovating theoretically through research design and case selection, identifying how contexts shape meaning-making, and tracking dynamic processes of change.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Make America Great Again (MAGA) activists during the 2020 presidential campaign, we explore the status dynamics behind the appeal of Donald Trump’s right-wing populism. While existing explanations emphasize partisanship, economic anxiety, racial resentment, rural identity, and media polarization, we underscore a less-explored explanation for Trump’s core support: it is a status-based social movement. We find that Trump’s activists are not simply voters responding to policy preferences or culture-war appeals but are also participants in a grassroots social movement organized around a shared perception of lost honor, declining esteem, and institutional disrespect. To make this argument we use the concept of the symbolic politics of status to explain how political conflict extends beyond contests over material distribution or moral values to include battles over whose values and lifestyles are considered worthy. For MAGA activists, reclaiming lost status means seeking public affirmation for identities they feel have been unfairly denigrated. The MAGA movement blends grievance with joy, cultivating pride, belonging, and celebration alongside anger at elites. By centering status in our analysis, we offer an integrative framework that connects material, cultural, and emotional motivations into a broader account of MAGA as a right-wing social movement grounded in grassroots populism.

We identify a rise in educational polarization among members of the US Congress mirroring the educational polarization in the American mass public. Over the past half-century, the percentage of Republican representatives who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15%, and the percentage of similarly educated Republican senators declined from 55% to 35%, while the ranks of elite-educated Democrats rose in both chambers. These changes across the parties have mapped into observable differences in behavior and approaches toward lawmaking. We find that elite-educated legislators are much more liberal in their voting patterns, suggesting a link between the decline in elite-educated Republicans and ideological polarization in Congress. We also demonstrate that, in the House, elite-educated Democrats are especially effective lawmakers, but not so for elite-educated Republicans. In the Senate, we establish a link between the decline of elite-educated Republicans and the rise of partisan warrior “Gingrich Senators.” Overall, these patterns offer initial glimpses into how political elites are being drawn from different educational cohorts, representing an important transition in American governance.

The aspiration of representative democracy is that the legislature will make decisions that reflect what the majority of people want. The US Constitution, however, created a Congress with both majoritarian and counter-majoritarian forces. We study public opinion on 103 important issues on the congressional agenda from 2006 to 2022 using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Congress made decisions that aligned with what the majority of people wanted on 55% of these issues. Analysis of each issue further reveals the circumstances under which Congress represents the majority and the many ways that representation fails. The likelihood that the House passes a bill is usually a reflection of public support for that policy, but Senate passage depends on how divided the public is on the issue and whether party control of the two chambers of Congress is divided. Legislative institutions make it difficult to pass popular bills but even more difficult to pass unpopular ones. As a result, most representational failures occur because Congress failed to pass a popular bill, rather than because it passed a bill that the public did not want.

How do societies navigate the symbolic and artistic heritage of troubled pasts? I build on Bernhard and Kubik’s (2014) theorization of official memory regimes to demonstrate how memory regimes govern the public mnemonic space beyond the official level. I trace such governance within what Bernhard and Kubik call a unified memory regime, in which official actors prefer not to fight battles in and around memory. I argue that unified memory regimes order, discipline, and govern not only the official but also the everyday spaces of judgment and affection. Posited on unity at the official level, these hegemonic frames of meaning-making relegate mnemonic tension to the societal level where discursive battles continue to take place. I further argue that unified memory regimes can open pitfalls for pluralists during moments of mnemonic contestation. Because pluralists acknowledge and agonistically deliberate on multiple interpretations of the past, they may attempt to discursively reconcile the emerging societal-level mnemonic fracture with the official unified memory regime. But this strategy can backfire, reinforcing the unified regime and disciplining the societal-level challenger through three discursive practices that I call the traps of consensus: semantic alignment, a syntax of disavowal, and the juxtaposition of “universal” and “particular” narratives about the past. Pluralists may be especially vulnerable to these traps when they face unified memory regimes in which the consensus narrative appears superficially pluralist (or “underspecified”) because it eschews normative judgments that distinguish between perpetrators and victims. I illustrate these dynamics through tracing the case of a contested soundscape in postcommunist Albania.

In this paper, I explore how two recent politically charged deaths—those of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt—illuminate the broader dynamics inherent in the concept of political martyrdom and its relationship to American democracy. Political martyrdom (as distinct from that associated with religious communities) offers martyrs a life beyond the grave, not by promising eternal life or paradise, but by ensuring them a role in a community’s collective memory. It involves three components: death, in what we might call “unnatural” circumstances, generally connected to an individual’s identity (or identities) or political commitments; consecration of that death, embedding it in a community’s collective memory and ascribing to it transcendent meaning; and transmission, the passing down of martyrdom narratives over time through media, ritual, and commemorative practices. The paper uses the examples of Floyd and Babbitt to illustrate the value of this conceptual category, one that focuses less on the personal qualities of individuals and more on communities’ narrations of their lives and deaths; highlights such narratives’ capacity to build collective identities over time, often in contexts far removed from the martyrs’ own lives and deaths; and offers new interpretive lenses for considering twenty-first-century issues of systemic violence and structural injustice.

At times of political catastrophe, what spaces remain for disenfranchised voices? This essay explores an early seventeenth-century compendium of urban folksongs, compiled by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), to explore a new kind of political action outside the institutions of the state—the act of transmission, that is, the recording of materials from the past or present for the moral cultivation of posterity. When Feng inserts non-elite voices into this process by recording and transmitting their poetry in a textual record that takes account of their regional and oral features, inflected by differences of class and gender, his act is both inclusive and meaningfully political. Feng’s act of transmission sustains voices—including those of the marginalized—whose circumstances otherwise render them precarious. Transmission thus draws attention to the forward-looking acts that can shape future practice and theory, on the basis of the very voices being obstructed by the mainstream realities of their time.

The Biden-Harris administration launched two important initiatives to expand public participation in the administrative state. These initiatives aimed to increase public engagement in developing federal regulations and reducing burdens in accessing public benefits. These two initiatives built on social science, especially political science. In this piece, I draw from my experience helping to lead the work to describe how political science research informed the design and implementation of both initiatives. I aim to open the “black box” of how federal policy makers use political science research. I also describe future research that could advance these initiatives. I conclude with a case study of such research, examining the barriers faced by food assistance applicants to sharing their experiences with government with a survey of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applicants. The survey points to barriers government must overcome to expand participation among SNAP applicants and strategies policy makers might use to do so.