Why do some authoritarian regimes contribute more to climate change than others? I suggest that climate inaction in nondemocracies is shaped by a combination of fossil fuel wealth and executive constraints. Fossil fuel wealth undermines climate action by giving leaders of authoritarian regimes incentives to capture oil and gas rents that help them maintain power. Executive constraints, however, can restrict carbon-intensive rent-seeking and therefore moderate the role of fossil fuel wealth in undermining climate action. This argument provides a novel explanation for variation in efforts to address climate change among nondemocracies: the lack of institutional constraints on autocratic leaders’ use of fossil fuel wealth for political gain. I evaluate this argument using panel data on greenhouse gas emissions, oil and gas income, and executive constraints in 108 countries governed by authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2021, finding that oil and gas income leads to higher emissions, but that these effects decline significantly with executive constraints.

We live in a period of hopes and fears for democracy. The fears, however, are now foremost in our minds. Democratic erosion is now taking the perverse form in which institutions long associated with democracy, especially competitive elections, have become vehicles for authoritarian populists to undermine other institutions necessary to democracy, including rights and the rule of law. Yet although the democratic project seems to be backsliding, the democratic values of citizens remain relatively strong. Hopes for democracy will involve continuing to defend, reform, and reinforce electoral democracy, while supplementing these institutions with “democratic innovations”—processes that tap these democratic values with smarter and better citizen participation, more equal and responsive representation, and better deliberation. If we can target the democratic deficits in representative democracies with these kinds of innovations, the democratic project will continue to march forward, and our hopes will have places to land.

Neoliberalism provides a compelling explanation for how city governments satisfy private capital interests by slashing social welfare spending and criminalizing the racialized poverty it unleashes. However, neoliberalism cannot account for why the politics of law and order also often find support from within overpoliced communities. This article claims that underlying broken windows policing is a neoconservative theory of democracy aimed not so much at directly reducing crime or enforcing disorder but at empowering organic community authorities. Specifically, I show how neoconservatives developed this theory of democracy in response to the urban crisis, which they argued was a crisis of authority and not of material deprivation, as welfare liberals believed. This article thus suggests that we understand the project of neoconservatism as aimed at making modern conservatism appealing within an increasingly diverse democracy by cultivating (authoritarian) political attachments between traditional authorities in the community and the police.

This article explores Leo Strauss’s thoughts on Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1954 “Natural Right” course transcript. One of the significant features of this transcript is that it contains an original interpretation and tentative critique of Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Although Strauss considered Tocqueville to be an indispensable observer of modern liberal democracy, he saw significant limits to Tocqueville’s thought. By comparing him with Aristotle and Nietzsche, among others, Strauss criticizes Tocqueville’s understanding of justice, history, and democracy. Strauss concludes that Nietzsche offers a more profound critique of liberal democracy, but one that leads to right-wing extremism. Strauss urges his students to be satisfied with Tocqueville’s more moderate and humane criticisms. Although Strauss’s tentative critique is illuminating and worth careful consideration, I challenge his interpretation and offer a Tocquevillian response to his overly intellectualized conception of social and political change.

Entrenched ethnoracial hierarchies that persist alongside formal democratic rules threaten commitments to democracy. Previous research has shown how marginalization and oppression harm minoritized group members, but has rarely considered the potential harm entrenched group-based hierarchies pose for democratic society overall. This paper offers two innovations. First, we argue that ethnoracial hierarchies have society-wide implications. Entrenched systems of ethnoracial marginalization undermine support for democracy and respect for democratic rights, even among members of privileged groups. Second, group consciousness conditions the effects of ethnoracial hierarchy among minoritized group members. Specifically, when minoritized individuals hold a structural dimension of group consciousness, they tend to sustain commitments to democracy. Insights from interviews with Indigenous and Afrodescendant activists and policy makers conducted during field research in Peru facilitate development of these theoretical expectations. Subsequent analysis of survey data cross-nationally throughout Latin America and over time in Bolivia demonstrates that ethnoracial hierarchies are associated with weaker democratic commitments across society, while reducing these hierarchies strengthens support for democracy. Among minoritized group members, however, structural group consciousness helps to mitigate these negative effects. This paper contributes a theoretical framework and empirical evidence concerning the challenges ethnoracial hierarchies pose for democratic commitments not only among those who belong to minoritized groups, but for people across society.

The theory and practice of what has come to be called “deliberative democracy” have been revived for the modern era with a focus on deliberative microcosms selected through random sampling or “sortition.” But might it be possible to spread some of the benefits of deliberation beyond mini-publics to the broader society? Can technology assist with scaling an organized deliberative process? In particular, would those who experience such a process become more deliberative voters? Would their considered judgments from deliberation influence their voting? We draw on a larger than usual experiment with public deliberation and a one-year follow-up in the mid-term U.S. elections to suggest answers to these questions. It has implications for whether spreading an organized deliberative process could, in theory, be used to create more deliberative elections.

As a wave of backsliding has swept across both new and established democracies, scholars have sought to identify formal and informal institutions that can act as guardrails of democracy. But while informal norms, party structures, and formal institutions such as separation of powers have all been singled out as potential bulwarks against democratic backsliding, the literature has had less to say about what role, if any, federalism might play in stopping democracies from sliding into autocracy. While some constitutional designers and scholars have argued that federalism can help to prevent the emergence of a national tyranny, most contemporary research has emphasized the damaging effects federalism can have on democracy. In this article, we assess the relationship between federalism and threats posed by national rulers, with quantitative analysis of that relationship in countries around the world and with structured, focused comparative case studies in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, and India. Our quantitative analysis finds no systematic relationship between federalism and backsliding, while our comparative case studies support our argument that federalism is only likely to serve as a bulwark against autocratic threats posed by national rulers under a limited set of conditions.

The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests in many cities throughout the United States. Protesters’ demands ranged from constraints on police use of force to defunding and disbanding the police altogether. These have led some to worry about the possibility of a “Ferguson Effect,” where police withdraw from policing, and in particular discretionary stops and searches, with deleterious consequences for crime. Drawing on data from four cities, we evaluate whether the 2020 BLM protests impacted police behavior, and whether changes in policing negatively impacted public safety. Regression discontinuity-in-time estimates suggest that although depolicing followed the BLM protests, in some respects the quality of policing improved, and public safety was not clearly impacted. Our findings have important implications for research on policing, social movements, and structural inequality in cities.

Democratic electoral systems characteristically take a Count-and-Report Approach to enfranchised citizens’ failure to turn out in political elections: The number of non-votes is counted and publicly reported, but non-votes are given no effect in the allocation of political offices. We morally assess this model in the context of legislative elections, and argue that it is pro tanto less desirable than another, counterfactual model which we label Proportional Non-Voter Sortition. This model provides that citizens’ non-votes shall be legislatively represented by legislators who are selected by lot from the non-voting part of the demos, and whose share of seats is proportional to the aggregate rate of non-voting in the legislative election. Our assessment of the two models specifically turns on the claim that a democracy’s legislature should reflect the full diversity of political views that exists within its demos (legislative inclusivity), and it offers two reasons to expect that Proportional Non-Voter Sortition serves legislative inclusivity better than the Count-and-Report Approach: 1) Proportional Non-Voter Sortition uniquely incentivizes political parties to integrate non-voter views into their political agendas and mobilisation activities; and 2) Proportional Non-Voter Sortition additionally enables the legislative articulation and advocacy of non-voter views by placing people in the legislature who are descriptively representative of non-voters. Through our discussion of different models for the post-electoral management of non-votes, we contribute to a body of normative democratic theorizing about citizens’ non-voting, but raise a distinct question that so far has remained unexplored.

Sweden’s adoption of proportional representation (PR) is interesting because it involved static structural and institutional factors, well captured by variance-based left-threat thesis, and four temporal factors—sequencing, timing, historical change, and duration—that historical case studies highlight. We integrate these two sets of factors. We fuse the more static, temporally homogeneous world created by the left-threat thesis, that is well suited to explain cross-sectional variations, with the more dynamic, temporally heterogenous world presumed by the case studies that is attuned to temporal processes. It illustrates how comparative historical analysis (CHA) can translate temporal anomalies into generalizable temporal mechanisms and how nested analysis, together with causal graphs, provide helpful tools for updating theories. We ultimately employ an abductive approach that evaluates evidence not just for its inferential leverage of confirming theories but also for its inductive potential to generate new, more test-worthy hypotheses.

Anti-reclamation movements are common in Indonesia, but their effectiveness varies. Such movements, which oppose the infilling of coastal waters and wetlands, consistently draw support from environmentalists, fisherfolk, and coastal residents. To succeed, however, they must transcend these constituencies and mobilize broad coalitions. In this paper, I apply the concept of political opportunity to explain variation in the ability of anti-reclamation movements to achieve this goal. Specifically, I argue that the opportunity to build broad coalitions depends on the positioning of political, economic, and communal elites. Disagreement among these groups creates opportunities for activists to recruit some of them as allies in the construction of economically diverse, cross-class coalitions. Consensus, by contrast, excludes elites as potential allies, forcing activists to build geographically expansive but class-based coalitions. To develop my argument, I draw on local news archives and primary source documents to compare similarly situated anti-reclamation movements in Bali and Makassar. In Bali, the movement flourished by cultivating an alliance with communal elites and local businesses. In Makassar, the movement withered because public officials, local businesses, and communal elites all welcomed reclamation. My findings imply that anti-reclamation movements are most likely to succeed when they emphasize communal identities with cross-class appeal. Yet such tactics alienate parallel movements from one another and undermine national activism. As a result, anti-reclamation movements fight the same battles over and over without achieving national reforms that would empower coastal communities to participate in coastal planning. Under such conditions, reclamation deepens the vulnerability of coastal communities to climate change.

As Black Lives Matter protests swept across the United States in recent years, protesters encountered a mix of police reactions: Some news reports described police in military gear and widespread arrests, whereas others reported minimal police involvement. We developed an original dataset of BLM protests that shows that police reactions varied widely, even when comparing protests with similar messages and tactics. We then investigated this variation with a survey experiment and found that observers are more likely to describe protesters as violent when a protest is met with a heavy police presence. These findings highlight the role of the police in shaping public perceptions of violence and social movements and extend a growing body of empirical research on BLM by shifting the focus from protest activity to the impact of protest policing.

How do patterns of racial inequality shape policing behavior in the United States? We investigate whether police engage in boundary maintenance at geographic points of racial difference. Critical race scholars suggest that police explicitly serve this function. Yet empirical studies are rare and limited to snapshots of a single city, making it hard to distinguish practices employed across departments from agency- and officer-level idiosyncrasies. We leverage high resolution data on police activity in seven U.S. cities to evaluate how police engage with racial boundaries. We find evidence that police activity is elevated in racial boundary zones relative to non-boundary zones, exceeds observed crime, and that racialized outcomes are as much a product of policing practices as they are of conflict between private citizens. We reorient the study of boundaries around top-down processes that lead to their regulation and identify an agenda for future research.

While it is commonly understood that the poll tax and literacy tests, among other measures, were used effectively in the South to disenfranchise Black voters from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, what is not well known is how much those disenfranchising laws mattered. Specifically, how much did the enactment of poll taxes or literacy tests affect turnout in federal and state elections? And how much did those disenfranchising provisions dampen vote totals for Republican candidates in the South? Using the staggered implementation and removal of several disenfranchising policies over a 101-year period, we answer these questions and provide some precision to our collective knowledge of the “disenfranchising era” in American electoral politics. Overall, we find that the poll tax was the main driver of disenfranchisement in Southern elections, with literacy tests and the Australian ballot providing some secondary effects. We also find that ex-felon disenfranchisement laws were considerably more important—both in reducing turnout as well as Republican vote share in Southern elections—than has been traditionally understood. Finally, we unpack the “South” and unsurprisingly find that racial politics drove these results: the disenfranchising institutions were more impactful in states with a larger Black population share. Our results show the powerful effects of disenfranchising policies on electorates and electoral outcomes. We discuss these results in both their historical context as well as with a mind to the continuing use of disenfranchising provisions in law today.

A number of important studies have documented gender gaps in the effectiveness or performance of individual representatives. Yet whether these differences are observable when it comes to responsiveness to public opinion is unclear. In this article, I examine the degree to which representatives use social media to dynamically respond to shifts in issue salience among the electorate. After combining nearly 400 bi-weekly repeated public opinion surveys from YouGov asking voters about their issue priorities, I trained a large language model to classify the universe of elected U.S. and UK representatives’ social media messages on Twitter to the same issues. Findings reveal that women representatives demonstrate greater responsiveness than their male counterparts to shifts in issue salience according to both women and men constituents. Despite an overall bias toward male constituents, female representatives play a crucial role in narrowing the gender gap by consistently aligning their attention with the issues prioritized by female constituents. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of elite-voter responsiveness but also underscore the substantive benefits that women representatives provide for all constituents.

Opponents of authoritarian regimes are often assumed to desire democracy in place of the current regime. In this paper, we show that authoritarian dissidents hold divergent attitudes towards democracy and identify a key bloc within the regime opposition: “non-democratic critics” (NDCs) or those who are dissatisfied with the current regime but resist adopting democracy. We develop the concept of NDCs, theorize why they exist and how they differ from supporters of democracy and the status quo, and test implications of this framework using interviews and an original survey across China. We find that nearly half of respondents who oppose the current Chinese regime are non-democratic critics who also do not support democracy. Compared to democracy and status quo supporters, NDCs have a distinct set of political and socio-economic demands and higher uncertainty about the performance of democracy in meeting these demands. We also find that NDCs are economically better off than democracy supporters, suggesting that unequal access to the benefits of state-led economic development may motivate differing attitudes toward democracy among regime opponents. These findings put forth an important explanation for why the world’s largest authoritarian regime endures—those who oppose the regime have divergent and unclear visions of what political system should be adopted in its place.