Electoral reform efforts in the United States are widespread, yet little is known about how Americans evaluate alternative electoral systems or their consequences. We address this gap using conjoint and vignette experiments to study how Americans assess electoral reforms based on their implications for the number of parties and the degree of ideological polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives. Focusing on democratic voice, governability, and responsiveness, our designs emphasize party-system outcomes rather than technical institutional features that may be difficult for citizens to understand. We find that Americans are strongly averse to reforms that generate pronounced legislative polarization, even when it might be expected to enhance democratic voice. Findings pertaining to multipartism are more mixed, with some evidence that respondents respond positively to moderate departures from the two-party system. Perceived gains in voice and responsiveness do not generally compensate for losses in governability, except under arrangements that avoid polarization.

This article analyzes three kinds of privilege—roughly, the monopoly or near-monopoly of a prized social good by a group—in terms of the political barriers facing attempts to reform them. Extending previous work, it distinguishes among discrimination privileges, which are zero-sum and relative, benefiting some groups at others’ expense; monopolized social right privileges, involving goods enjoyed only by some that can and should be extended to all; and differential treatment privileges, involving disagreement over whether a good currently monopolized by some should be extended to all or to none. The political barriers to reforming discrimination privilege involve group interest; those to reforming monopolized social rights include privilege, ignorance, cost, priorities, policy uncertainty, and the psychological wage. Differential treatment privilege is complicated. An exercise in applied political realism, this article treats normative categories as political inputs rather than philosophical conclusions and seeks to demonstrate the insights enabled by doing so.

Prior research demonstrates voters’ confidence in elections depends on whether their preferred candidate wins, but does agreement with the electoral rules being used also matter? Leveraging growing procedural polarization in election laws, public opinion data from 2008 to 2024, and a large-scale survey experiment conducted before the 2024 election, I show that agreement with election procedures matters for voter confidence beyond well-established effects related to partisan control and electoral outcomes. Observational and experimental analyses consistently reveal that voters are less likely to express confidence in election results conducted using procedures they oppose. The effects are particularly large for voter identification laws and among Republicans and independents. The findings underscore a tension in American federalism: as states increasingly adopt divergent electoral rules aligned with co-partisan preferences, partisan divides in electoral confidence may deepen. If so, procedural responsiveness to partisan preferences may undermine electoral confidence and, in turn, perceptions of electoral legitimacy.

Are effective state lawmakers more likely than ineffective ones to be elected to Congress? We draw on a new dataset of state legislative effectiveness scores from 1993 to 2018 to examine the relationship between lawmaker effectiveness and the decision to run for, and ultimately be elected to, the U.S. House of Representatives. We find that more effective state lawmakers are more likely to enter Congress than ineffective lawmakers. This pattern is due more to the progressive ambition of candidates than to voter decisions. Specifically, within citizen state legislatures, more effective lawmakers are much more likely to run for U.S. House seats than are their less effective counterparts. In highly professional state legislatures, however, more effective lawmakers are more likely to run for Congress only when presented with the opportunity of an open seat. Our analysis finds no relationship between a state legislator’s lawmaking effectiveness and their likelihood of winning primary or general House elections.

We re-examine recent influential claims that repeated measure experimental designs offer large precision gains without biasing treatment effect estimates in survey research. We test these claims by experimentally varying the design of six classic political science experiments across three distinct large samples of U.S. adults (total $ N=\mathrm{13,163} $). In contrast to prior evidence, we observe consistent attenuation of treatment effects in repeated measure designs. However, we show in simulations that this average design effect is small enough, and the precision gains large enough, that we recommend repeated measure designs for broad application—though (large-N) post-only designs may be preferable when research priorities include estimating the precise magnitude of a treatment effect. We additionally explore how several design considerations affect the bias-precision trade-off, such as within-subject versus between-groups designs, the relative separation of repeated measures within single surveys, and differences in respondent characteristics across sample types.

How effective are democratic systems in preventing individuals with criminal backgrounds from holding political office? We investigate this question for the case of Norway, which has no legal restrictions against felons running for office. We analyze local election candidates from 2003 to 2019, paired with administrative records of criminal offenses. We demonstrate that individuals with criminal records are systematically penalized at every stage of their political careers. Candidates are less likely to have criminal records than the general population, with elected officials less likely to have criminal backgrounds than their unelected peers, and mayors being the most lawful. In Norway’s flexible-list PR system—where parties rank candidates and voters can cast personal votes for preferred candidates—our evidence shows that party gatekeeping accounts for most filtering, while personal votes contribute little at the margin.

In a recent article published in this journal, Holman, Merolla, and Zechmeister (2022; 2024) report a decrease in support for U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May following the 2017 Manchester bombing, using data from the British Election Studies. Our analysis, however, reveals that once a linear time trend is considered, the bombing does not significantly affect public reactions. We replicate their study with Gallup World Poll data and likewise find no decline in May’s approval rating. Extending the analysis, we examine major terrorist attacks in African countries led by men and similarly find no rally effect. Together, these results cast doubt on terrorism’s capacity to trigger rally ’round the flag dynamics and challenge claims of a gendered pattern whereby women leaders face unique penalties in crises. We argue that broader comparative evidence is necessary before concluding whether citizens rally around, or retreat from, leaders in the wake of terrorism.

Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for incumbent politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of electoral politics in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent’s reform based on post-reform government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats can undermine. Bureaucratic resistance for political leverage is most likely to occur when voters are torn between the reform and the status quo. Resistance lowers the informational value of government service for voters and can lead to policy distortions and accountability loss. When reform is moderately popular, resistance leads to policy inefficiency by preventing beneficial reforms due to electoral risks and inducing ineffective reforms by offering bureaucrats as scapegoats. Our model identifies a distinct mechanism of bureaucratic power and its implications for policy and accountability.

Ethnicity is an important cleavage in Africa, yet its influence on voting is contested. Selection biases from restricted choice sets complicate micro-level analyses, while ecological inferences and unobserved confounders hamper meso and macro-level approaches. Our new Covoting Regression (CVR) tackles several of these challenges. It estimates the effect of coethnicity on the probability that pairs of voters covote for the same party while conditioning on other shared characteristics. Thereby, CVR mirrors the micro-foundations of aggregate indicators such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index. We analyze Afrobarometer surveys from 28 countries and estimate that coethnicity increases covoting intentions between respondents by 17 percentage points. Politically relevant groups and covoting for ethnic parties drive this estimate, which is consistent across institutionally diverse countries and at least four times larger than that of other cleavages. The CVR addresses key issues in studying electoral consequences of socio-economic cleavages and bridges gaps between levels of analysis.

The credibility revolution advances the use of research designs that permit the identification and estimation of causal effects. However, understanding which mechanisms produce measured causal effects remains a challenge. The dominant current approach to the quantitative evaluation of mechanisms relies on the detection of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) with respect to pretreatment covariates. This article develops a framework to understand when the existence of such HTEs can support inferences about the activation of a mechanism. We show first that this design cannot provide evidence of mechanism activation without additional, generally implicit, exclusion assumptions. Further, even when these assumptions are satisfied, the presence of HTEs supports the inference that the mechanism is active but the absence of HTEs is generally uninformative about mechanism activation. We provide novel guidance for interpretation and research design in light of these findings.

We helped design and evaluate a statebuilding intervention in Medellín, Colombia. The municipal government dramatically intensified nonpolice state presence in 40 neighborhoods over 20 months. On average, perceptions of security and legitimacy changed negligibly, suggesting that returns to statebuilding investments are generally low, at least within electoral cycles. Prespecified heterogeneity analysis, however, reveals significant increases in security and legitimacy where state governance began relatively higher, while impacts were null or possibly negative where it began lower. This suggests increasing rather than diminishing returns to statebuilding. The divergence apparently resulted from city officials under-delivering in initially lower-governance sectors. One reason might be “start-up costs” in statebuilding. Alternatively, both initial state penetration and incentives to implement new programs might depend on neighborhoods’ ability to hold agencies accountable. Whatever their source, increasing returns could drive persistent “neglect traps”—channeling political attention and investment to areas where state penetration is already robust, reinforcing existing disparities.

Does partisan disagreement impact expectations of victory in war? We conjectured it could by degrading military cohesion. We registered two main predictions: (a) soldiers fight less effectively if they observe political parties disagree during a crisis about whether to initiate war and (b) the effects of (a) are amplified when soldiers are affiliated with a dissenting opposition party. With some nuance, we found broad support for these predictions through two preregistered survey experiments that recruited South Korean military cadets and soldiers of appropriate ranks for warfighting. Our novel design estimated effects on the will to perform six essential battlefield tasks given land-battle doctrine, unit structures, and force employment of modern democratic armies. Thirteen exploratory tests yield findings consistent with arguments that military institutions provide nonpartisan socialization, but surprising for research on nationalism, soldier-to-soldier trust, and the psychological and dispositional determinants of military effectiveness. We also introduce and calibrate rifle shooting outcomes for experiments.

How do candidate selection processes shape policy outcomes? Studying Tanzania’s initial single-party legislative elections, I assess how electing candidates preferred by party elites affected policy implementation, which emphasized rural development during this period. Leveraging the deterministic assignment of ballot symbols—which was orthogonal to candidate characteristics but had large electoral effects—finds that their election substantially increased the supply of salient local public goods. Assembling novel candidate-level data, I document that elites prioritized candidates’ national prominence while voters prioritized their local ties. Rather than representing misaligned incentives, the results are consistent with elites, in an incipient regime, more quickly understanding which characteristics would matter for candidates’ performance in office. Beyond highlighting novel conditions under which elite-led candidate selection facilitates responsiveness, the results underscore the distributive consequences of candidate selection even in nondemocratic settings.

How do electoral rules influence voters? We build on existing research that has examined voter, rather than elite, reactions to electoral rules and implement a field experiment around a switch from single-member plurality rules to multi-member closed-list proportional rules (PR) in Sierra Leone, expanding the study of electoral rules’ influence on voters further into the Global South. We find that exposure to multimember district/PR increased women’s commitment to voting and decreased both men’s and women’s support for particularistic campaign appeals in this context. These results likely flow from voters’ perceptions of whether politicians are accountable to parties or to voters under different systems, rather than from increased party competition, new party entry, a clear switch to programmatic party competition, or increased trust in elections. We discuss the implications for studying electoral rules in clientelistic democracies.

Chiara Cordelli has recently criticized radical republicans for failing to ground a domination-based anti-capitalism. Cordelli argues that radical republicans “cannot prove either that domination under capitalism is less contingent than other wrongs, that capitalism’s distinctive wrong amounts to domination, or that such domination is unjust.” This article responds to Cordelli’s objections. I argue that Cordelli’s emphasis on capitalization does not threaten the non-contingency of capitalist domination; that capitalism’s distinctive wrong is domination and not alienation, and that this wrong is structural all the way down. Cordelli is right that capitalism involves alienation of our future to the vagaries of profit-maximization. But alienation is only a moment in capitalism’s fundamental wrong and ill—the domination of labor by capital.

As of February 24, 2022, over forty thousand foreign-invested firms operated in Russia, a host state that initiated an interstate war—an exceptional shock in the modern era of economic globalization. Using company registration data, we document that after 18 months of war, 33.3% of foreign-invested firms had changed ownership or become inactive. We conceptualize exit as a politicized transaction in which sellers and buyers face external pressures and bargain over terms. Concerning pressures to sell, those in consumer-oriented industries were more likely to exit. On bargaining, we find Russian state interests consequential: foreign-invested firms already under Russian managerial control were more likely to exit, whereas those in Russian strategic industries were not. Despite extraordinary economic sanctions to isolate Russia, and surging social backlash against doing business in Russia, results imply that multinationals are at best unstable tools of economic statecraft, even in the midst of war.

This article examines the racial discourse of Zou Rong, a 20th-century Chinese radical intellectual, and the puzzling rendering of transnational racial politics at work in his pamphlet The Revolutionary Army. In this text, Zou employs the imported concept of race to refashion Han Chinese identity within a politically motivated global racial taxonomy. He then problematizes the “double enslavement” of the Han race at the trans-imperial nexus of domestic Manchu domination and global white supremacy. Finally, he urges a multifront revolution in China by discursively vindicating Han Chinese racial uplift within a newly reconfigured system of racial hierarchy. In reconstructing the formation and broader political stakes of Zou’s racial discourse, this article centers the deeply contingent and paradoxical alignment of racism and imperialism and the nuanced power relations between peoples of color. It also exemplifies a transnational approach to comparative political theory that focuses on the circulation and negotiation of ideas.

The study of political agenda setting is a cornerstone in political science. Within this literature, political parties are implicitly portrayed as being capable of proactively initiating discussions. However, this fundamental notion of party agency deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. In response, this article crafts a new model (the Issue Initiation Model) that opens the window into parties’ efforts to set an agenda and traces how they initiate and elevate their agenda. The model is tested on an original dataset covering more than 5.5-million tweets by political parties and MPs, coupled with over 750,000 news articles and 419,000 parliamentary questions in the United Kingdom and Denmark from 2015 to 2022. Results show how parties and their MPs can proactively redirect the attention of other actors through strategic planning and orchestrated actions. By theorizing and empirically testing the implicit notion that parties can proactively initiate discussions, this article has important implications for political agenda setting.

Research on partisan expressive responding suggests that the beliefs people express in surveys are more partisan than their underlying perceptions. This article examines the scope and importance of expressive responding through a meta-reanalysis of 44 studies from 25 articles. On average, treatments designed to reduce expressive responding shrink measured partisan bias by about 25%. Across the 242 survey questions in the data, treatments increase the correlation between the average Democrat’s and Republican’s beliefs from 0.81 to 0.86. Contrary to expectations derived from the two leading theories of expressive responding, misreporting (“cheerleading”) and congenial inference, there is no evidence that expressive responding increases in partisan identity strength or educational attainment. As research on expressive responding enters its third decade, greater emphasis on design-based tests of mechanisms may help build a firmer understanding of the nature and substantive importance of expressive responding—namely, whether the forces that produce expressive responding in surveys also shape real-world political judgments.

In recent decades, political theorists have drawn on historical thinkers to explore how political elites can be held accountable. Rousseau, however, is often dismissed as reducing accountability to elections and participation to occasional ratification referenda. This article challenges that view. While Rousseau expected an elective aristocracy to execute laws ratified by the people, he also identified two mechanisms—scrutiny and recall—through which citizens could control these representatives. After reconstructing Rousseau’s account, I consider how these mechanisms could be adapted to contemporary democracies. Focused on executive accountability, the model is particularly suited to presidential systems with directly elected presidents. It combines a national jury—a citizens’ assembly chosen by lot and tasked with examining presidential actions—with the possibility of a recall referendum. By uniting deliberative scrutiny with the power to remove the head of state, this approach offers an underexplored complement to recent anti-oligarchic institutional innovations based on sortition.