In the 1930s and 1940s, the conservative newspaper industry argued that the First Amendment should shield them from New Deal economic regulations. This article uses these forgotten clashes about freedom of the press to provide a new history of the origins and trajectory of the anti-regulatory First Amendment. It shows that conservative newspaper attorneys were at the forefront of efforts to use civil liberties to protect their economic interests in the New Deal. But it argues that these efforts were only partially successful. The courts rejected these maximalist First Amendment claims, distinguishing between economic liberties and civil liberties. But maximalist claims were more successful in the political culture, where conservative newspapers helped legitimize a belief that a laissez-faire “marketplace of ideas“ was a liberal principle with deep roots in the past. The origins of First Amendment Lochnerism thus lie not in judicial precedent, but in contestation in the political culture. A clearer understanding of the dynamics of this long-running effort to deploy civil liberties claims for conservative purposes, the article concludes, will help us better navigate the contemporary crises of the First Amendment.

This paper examines how class conflict affected US imperial expansion between 1898 and 1906. It focuses on West-Coast-based white merchant sailors and relies on union publications, legislative records, and congressional testimony to reveal how domestic class conflict shaped the boundaries, both internally and externally, of the emerging US empire. The struggle of the sailors’ unions over these imperial boundaries illustrates the real-life consequences they held for working people. These were not just abstractions. These lines often determined the type of labor systems under which workers would toil. Specifically, this article centers on the American Federation of Labor's successful effort to apply the Chinese Exclusion Act to the United States’ empire on the Pacific in 1902 as well as the Sailor's Union of the Pacific's unsuccessful attempt to apply exclusion to US-flagged merchant vessels. With that in mind, I argue that the line between domestic and foreign or nation and empire was a contested space of racially inflected class conflict. For white working people, the most pertinent question in the aftermath of the Spanish American War was not, does the constitution follow the flag? But rather, does exclusion follow the flag?

In the interwar years, authors Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham wrote popular detective fiction that explored possible roles for the aristocracy in an age of universal suffrage. Critics have seen these novels as nostalgic encomia for hierarchy and tradition. This article argues that they should be seen instead as part of a larger trend in interwar fiction that sought to make connections between aristocracy, national identity, and social cohesion. Far from celebrating an imagined idyllic past, these novels suggested possibilities for the continuing relevance of the nobility to the upholding of justice, and indeed, to the success of British democracy.

Interculturalism in theatre, although much critiqued, is an inevitable category for understanding theatre practices and histories. Critical approaches have highlighted the complicity of “hegemonic” Euro-American-led theatre with imperialist structures. Newer critiques tend to focus on encounters in European languages in multicultural cities, and to posit multilateral non-Western collaborations as liberated from colonial power structures. This paper argues that it is necessary to fundamentally rethink interculturalism in theatre by taking seriously the long-standing major theatrical exchanges which do not reference, and are not principally influenced by, Western theatre's sphere. Considering a major example of Sino–Japanese collaboration from 1989, Ryū-Ō (Dragon King), we place it within the genealogy of the two countries’ long-standing theatrical practices of interculturalism. Ryu-O, a kabuki-jingju collaboration, shows that intra-Asian interculturalism has its own genealogy and is neither new nor beholden to Euro-American models, nor necessarily characterized by the idealism easily invested in overtly counter-hegemonic projects. By examining the show's production process, performance and reception, we re-evaluate how interculturalism in theatre is conceived, urging serious engagement with areas of practice historically grounded and fully independent of both “hegemonic” and “new” intercultural theatre tendencies.

Widespread belief in economic liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, combined with the development of safer, faster, and cheaper transportation, paved the way for huge migration to occur. Between 1850 and 1914, 55 million people departed Europe, with the vast majority heading to the Americas during what Hatton and Williamson term “the age of mass migration”. According to McKeown, something similar in scale and duration took place at approximately the same time – albeit enduring for slightly longer – involving Indians and southern Chinese moving to Southeast Asia and people from north-eastern Asia and Russia to North Asia. However, “the booming of the guns of August 1914 brought to a sudden close the era during which foreigners were relatively free to traverse borders”, according to John Torpey. States in Europe and North America, in particular, reintroduced passport controls with vigour during World War I and instead of lifting these bellicose measures at the end of the conflict, they generally reinforced them. The United States led the way in introducing such restrictions. Following on from the imposition of the 1917 Literacy Act came the 1921 and 1924 US Immigration Acts, which limited arrivals by introducing quotas for countries. The development in much of Europe of the modern welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century simultaneously gave rise to more restrictive immigration policies in Europe, thereby leading to an even greater distinction between citizens and non-citizens.

Scholarship on urban China and urban India has been prolific. Studies have separately addressed urban processes of migration, spatial transformation, governance, infrastructure, land conflicts, policing, and more. However, research on these areas has rarely intersected. This article discusses the challenges of comparison in China–India urban studies, and examines recent works through an analysis of “styles and scales of comparison.” Some seek to explain national-level variations by studying selected cities in each country. Others identify convergence and divergence in the context of broader global processes, and some incorporate historical trajectories to structure a temporal comparison. Because the most rapid periods of urbanization in the first half of the twenty-first century will take place in India and China and will soon account almost half of the planet's urban population, studies of urbanization in India and China are of great importance. Careful reflection on the study of urbanization in China–India studies can also re-center urban studies away from the historically dominant American/Eurocentric perspectives.

High levels of crime are a key driver of emigration from Latin America and the Caribbean. But can emigration change public opinion about how best to respond to crime? Focusing on the political economy of remittances—the money migrants send to their families and communities—this study argues that emigration can increase support for violent responses to crime. Migrants’ families often spend remittances on investment goods, which makes them more vulnerable to crime and more supportive of violence to protect themselves. An analysis of AmericasBarometer data finds that remittance recipients are more likely both to fear crime and to be victims of crime than nonrecipients. They are also more approving of vigilantism, more tolerant of police bending the law to apprehend criminals, and more supportive of deploying the military in crime fighting. These findings contribute to our knowledge of the consequences of international migration for political development in migrant-sending countries.

According to conventional wisdom, closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) electoral systems create incentives for legislators to favor the party line over their voters’ positions. However, electoral incentives may induce party leaders to tolerate “shirking” by some legislators, even under CLPR. This study argues that in considering whose deviations from the party line should be tolerated, party leaders exploit differences in voters’ relative electoral influence resulting from malapportionment. We expect defections in roll call votes to be more likely among legislators elected from overrepresented districts than among those from other districts. We empirically test this claim using data on Argentine legislators’ voting records and a unique dataset of estimates of voters’ and legislators’ placements in a common ideological space. Our findings suggest that even under electoral rules known for promoting unified parties, we should expect strategic defections to please voters, which can be advantageous for the party’s electoral fortunes.

How do individuals’ fairness judgments affect their political evaluations? This article argues that when citizens perceive high levels of distributive unfairness in society, they will be less satisfied with the way democracy functions. Yet good governance—that is, impartiality in the exercise of political authority—should mitigate the negative influence of perceived distributive unfairness on satisfaction. Using a cross-national analysis of 18 Latin American countries from 2011 to 2015, this study demonstrates that individuals are significantly less satisfied with democracy when they perceive their country’s income distribution as unfair. Yet good governance significantly offsets this negative relationship, even in a region with the highest level of inequality in the world. These findings imply that policymakers can bolster democratic satisfaction, even in places where citizens perceive the income distribution as fundamentally unfair, by committing to good governance and fair democratic procedures.