Whorfian socioeconomics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of study that holds that linguistic structures explain differences in beliefs, values, and opinions across communities. This field, which draws on linguistic relativity but extends it radically, holds that linguistic features are a fundamental explanation for variation in human behavior. This essay provides a conceptual overview and methodological critique of Whorfian socioeconomics, with a particular emphasis on empirical studies that document a correlation between the presence or absence of a linguistic feature in a survey respondent's language and their responses to survey questions. Using the universe of linguistic features from the World atlas of language structures online and a wide array of responses from the World Values Survey, I show that such an approach produces highly statistically significant correlations in a majority of analyses, irrespective of the theoretical plausibility linking linguistic features to respondent beliefs and behavior. I show how two simple and well-understood statistical fixes can more accurately reflect uncertainty in these analyses, and use them to replicate two prominent findings in Whorfian socioeconomics. The essay concludes by reflecting on the common methodological challenges facing linguists and other social scientists interested in nonlinguistic effects of linguistic structures.

Whorfian socioeconomics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of study that holds that linguistic structures explain differences in beliefs, values, and opinions across communities. This field, which draws on linguistic relativity but extends it radically, holds that linguistic features are a fundamental explanation for variation in human behavior. This essay provides a conceptual overview and methodological critique of Whorfian socioeconomics, with a particular emphasis on empirical studies that document a correlation between the presence or absence of a linguistic feature in a survey respondent's language and their responses to survey questions. Using the universe of linguistic features from the World atlas of language structures online and a wide array of responses from the World Values Survey, I show that such an approach produces highly statistically significant correlations in a majority of analyses, irrespective of the theoretical plausibility linking linguistic features to respondent beliefs and behavior. I show how two simple and well-understood statistical fixes can more accurately reflect uncertainty in these analyses, and use them to replicate two prominent findings in Whorfian socioeconomics. The essay concludes by reflecting on the common methodological challenges facing linguists and other social scientists interested in nonlinguistic effects of linguistic structures.

Democratic theorists hold that voting contributes to some political good: individual and collective autonomy, equality, justice, pluralism, stability, better policies, and many others. But elections are common under authoritarianism, and empirical research finds that holding elections can stabilize authoritarian regimes. This creates what we term the democrat’s dilemma, where citizens who vote in authoritarian elections may bolster the regimes they wish to unseat, even when they cast a vote for the opposition. We identify three major ways of thinking about the democratic value of electoral participation—justice-based, epistemic, and proceduralist approaches—and use them to examine the complex moral considerations that confront voters in authoritarian regimes. We contend that authoritarian elections’ residual democratic value can justify voting, even when doing so could further entrench the autocrat. Our argument also implies that the democratic principles that justify voting in authoritarian elections oblige citizens to choose the most democratic alternative.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was a watershed moment in European politics. The invasion prompted a massive influx of refugees into Central Europe, a region in which immigration has proven highly contentious and politically salient in recent decades. We study public opinion toward refugees in Hungary, a highly exclusionary political environment in which anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiments are commonly invoked by the ruling government. Combining historical public opinion data from the past decade with two rounds of original survey data from 2022, we demonstrate that the Ukrainian refugee crisis was accompanied by a large increase in tolerance for refugees, reversing what had previously been one of the most anti-refugee public opinion environments in Europe. To explain this reversal, we use a series of survey experiments coupled with detailed settlement-level demographic data to investigate how conflict proximity and racial, religious, and national identity shape openness to refugees. We find that the distinguishing feature of the 2022 refugee crisis was that refugees were mostly white European Christians driven from their home country by conflict. We discuss the implications of our argument for Hungary, for European politics in times of crisis, and for the politics of public opinion in competitive authoritarian regimes.

A wealth of recent research in comparative politics examines how spatial variation in historical conditions shapes modern political outcomes. In an article in the American Political Science Review, Homola, Pereira, and Tavits argue that Germans who live nearer to former Nazi concentration camps are more likely to display out-group intolerance. Clarifying the conceptual foundations of posttreatment bias and reviewing the historical record on postwar state creation in Germany, we argue that state-level differences confound the relationship between distance to camps and out-group intolerance. Using publicly available European Values Survey data and electoral results from 2017, we find no consistent evidence that distance to camps is related to contemporary values. Our findings have implications for literatures on historical persistence, causal inference with spatial data, Holocaust studies, and outgroup tolerance.

Three recent books introduce political scientists to important debates and conceptual challenges for contemporary social science research. Rather than proposing new methods, these books propose new frameworks that their authors believe should guide current practice. The authors and editors seek to guide researchers through the research process, from asking questions and proposing theories to operationalizing concepts and executing comparative research designs. Reading the three books together will give researchers a comprehensive overview of the state of the discipline on important questions like how and what to compare, what social science concepts should refer to, and how to proceed when theory and empirics disagree.

Analyses of embedded liberalism have focused overwhelmingly on trade in goods and capital, to the exclusion of migration. We argue that much as capital controls were essential components of the embedded liberal compromise, so too were restrictions on the democratic and social rights of labor migrants. Generous welfare programs in labor-receiving countries thrived alongside inclusionary immigration policies, but this balanced arrangement was only tenable if migrants were politically excluded in their destination countries. That is, embedded liberalism abroad rested on exclusionary political foundations at home. In bringing together the IPE literature on the “globalization trilemma” with the comparative politics of citizenship, we provide a novel account of how embedded liberalism worked politically, with implications for current debates about the fate of the liberal order in a time of populist resurgence.