The Voting Rights Act (1965) protects minority voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice, namely co-ethnic candidates. Historically, these protections were enforced through preclearance, which required federal approval of voting changes to prevent retrogression. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby v. Holder (2013) eliminated preclearance, raising concerns about its impact. Existing research largely focuses on minority voter registration and turnout, often concluding that the ruling’s effects are less severe than expected. But is this too narrow a lens to view the implications of this Supreme Court ruling? This study shifts attention to minority descriptive representation, analyzing how Shelby v. Holder affected the number of Latinos elected to local offices. Using a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences approach and data from the National Association of Latino Elected Officials directory, I find that the ruling is associated with a decline in Latino descriptive representation. These findings highlight the need to consider representation beyond turnout and registration when evaluating policy impacts on minority voting rights.

Drawing on Agamben’s notion of “bare life” and Fassin’s critique of “humanitarian reason,” this article asks when refugees become recognizable as fully human in Turkish news discourse. It analyzes a simple random sample of 2,285 migration-related news items published in eight national newspapers between 2011 and 2020 through qualitative content analysis, and complements this with a close reading of sixty items that cluster around positive/humanitarian storytelling. Overall coverage is largely massifying and predominantly negative in tone; framing is dominated by threat–security–control (40 percent) alongside a substantial humanitarian–moral frame (32 percent). The paper’s main contribution is to identify and theorize three recurring “good refugee” figures: (1) the vulnerable woman/child; (2) the heroic young man; and (3) the talented/entrepreneurial refugee whose exceptional skills and achievements are foregrounded. The paper argues that these figures do not merely individualize refugees; they also function as privileged sites where Turkish nationhood is narrated as compassionate, modern, and sovereign – while “ordinary” refugees remain outside the horizon of unconditional humanity and rights. The article argues that humanization strategies may backfire, ultimately eliminating individual subjectivity and agency. The article critiques the news items’ compassionate, patronizing, and moralizing tone, highlighting the urgent need to politicize and historicize the issue.

Using a regression discontinuity design, we examine the causal impact of far-right parties’ first-time entry into Swedish municipal politics on the inclusion of candidates from groups frequently targeted by their rhetoric, namely immigrants and sexual minorities. Leveraging validated candidate data, we find that far-right entry has a negative effect on the share of immigrant candidates within mainstream parties. However, this average effect masks important differences across parties. Left-wing parties respond by increasing immigrant recruitment, resulting in a net increase in immigrant representation on ballots. In contrast, right-wing parties reduce their share of immigrant candidates, largely due to limited recruitment of new candidates. These findings highlight how far-right legislative presence shapes the recruitment and retention of minority candidates in democratic politics.

Rural Americans constitute a politically consequential yet theoretically understudied identity group. This study reconceptualizes descriptive representation to include place-based identities and demonstrates its influence on policy support and political trust. Using a preregistered, original survey experiment of rural respondents, we assess whether rural Americans exhibit greater support for laws and perceive it as more beneficial to rural communities when proposed by state representatives who share their rural identity. Our findings strongly support this hypothesis: rural Americans express higher levels of support for laws that were introduced by descriptively representative lawmakers and are more likely to believe such policies benefit rural areas. Moreover, respondents demonstrate higher levels of trust in rural lawmakers even in the absence of additional information about them. These results illustrate that, for rural Americans, place-based identity is deeply influential in shaping their political perceptions.

This forum continues the Journal of Public Policy’s series for debate and discussion of important ideas in the scholarly study of public policy. This exchange is anchored with an essay by Christopher Wlezien entitled, “On Policy Responsiveness: Conditions for Effective Demand and Supply.” Understanding the connection between the public and the officials meant to represent them is fundamental to democratic governance. While there is a voluminous literature from across the political science and policy studies spectrum, Wlezien offers a new framework for examining the “theoretical conditions for effective policy representation.” He develops the concepts of “input” as a function of public demand, and “output” as the result of policy supplied. Wlezien concludes that we observe a surprising amount of congruence between what the public wants and the policy it receives. This conclusion is in stark contrast to more pessimistic views prominent in the recent literature.

When activists act as unelected representatives by voicing political demands on behalf of various constituencies, does this affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy? We theorize that this may be the case if and when such individuals constitute an effective channel of representation, meaning that (1) activists substantively represent individuals and (2) they are included in politics. Furthermore, we theorize that marginalized individuals become more satisfied with the way democracy works when they witness activists with whom they agree. We test this through a preregistered vignette experiment in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Romania (N = 8196). Our findings are mixed. Unelected representatives can sway citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in some instances. Specifically, the electoral winner–loser gap can be narrowed through substantive representation from unelected representatives. This presents an invitation for further research on the role activists play in shaping the legitimacy of liberal representative democracies.

Given that parliamentary democracies channel the preferences of their citizens through elected representatives, parliamentarians need to estimate the policy preferences of their electorate. We investigate how the gender of representatives influences this assessment for policies characterized as women’s issues. Building on theories of shared group experiences, gendered role expectations, and strategic behavior, we expect that, in comparison to their men colleagues, women representatives are better at estimating their party voters’ policy position when they are electorally vulnerable. Combining original survey data from political elites and voters in Germany and Switzerland, our estimation indicates that women representatives’ estimation of public opinion on women’s issues is not more accurate than that of their men colleagues. Yet, the perceptual accuracy of women representatives increases markedly if they are electorally vulnerable. Corroborating our theoretical expectations, a placebo test implies that our findings are specific to women’s issues.

The rise of nationalist and populist candidates worldwide provides compelling evidence that parties win elections, not by appealing to voters’ policy preferences alone, but rather by connecting those preferences to group identities. This state-of-the-field article argues that party scholars need to integrate constructivist insights from neighboring fields to better understand the role of group identities in party competition. We review recent demand- and supply-side studies on the role of group identities in elections and bring them into conversation with the literature on ethnic politics and nationalism and political economic models of identity politics. On this basis, we suggest a research agenda that models voters as having both policy preferences and desires for self-esteem and self-consistency, which are mediated by their identification with social groups. Voters want to benefit others they see as being similar to themselves, to raise the status of the groups they identify with, and to maintain self-consistency by narrowing the gap between themselves and members of groups with which they identify. Political parties strategically combine policy offers with group appeals to address – and shape – all these motivations. Shifting from a ‘policy-only’ towards a ‘policy-cum-identity’ paradigm will enable the field of party politics to better understand the dynamics of real-world electoral competition and to reconcile its models with the latest developments in the political theory of representation.

Human languages are powerful representational tools, but can they represent every possible kind of entity? This seems unlikely. We can easily imagine languages—God’s language, or that of advanced extraterrestrials—that represent features of reality that our actual languages fail to capture. Eklund (2024) calls these alien languages. Yet despite the intuitive pull of this picture, it is unclear what alien languages, so understood, would amount to. I argue that there are no alien languages in this sense; human languages can represent any entity that can be linguistically represented at all. Still, I propose an alternative sense in which a language can be alien. On my cognitive account of alien language, a language is alien when linguistic understanding of it requires cognitive resources not used in understanding human languages. This account better explains the sense in which we can and cannot speak an alien language. We can represent whatever alien languages represent, but understanding alien languages may require cognitive resources that we lack.

This article examines what motivates elected representatives to engage with citizens in organised settings, specifically investigating the role of anticipatory representation – aligning policies with future voter preferences. Using representation theory, the study involves in-depth interviews with representatives in three Norwegian municipalities, focusing on their perception of public meetings as avenues for listening, convincing, and deliberating. The findings suggest that anticipatory representation minimally influences politicians’ attendance at these meetings. Instead, they view public meetings primarily as opportunities to listen to citizens rather than as platforms for persuasion or policy deliberation. Despite often disliking the confrontational aspects of these meetings, politicians attend to demonstrate presence and show interest in their constituents. Thus, the main motivation for their participation is the chance to exhibit responsiveness, rather than engaging in argumentative or deliberative exchanges. This research sheds light on the dynamics of politician–citizen interactions in democratic settings.