Collective action can be motivated in many different ways. Here I point to a new and perhaps surprising one: by, in effect, telling people that the group is powerful and likely to achieve its goal, precisely because each of them is an inessential, interchangeable part in it. Given people’s desire to be part (even if a superfluous part) of a winning group, that can be a powerful motivator for people to join in a collective action.

The recent surge of global populism has led many intellectuals to call for new forms of democratic elitism. Yet research into the sources of support for political organizations and regimes predicts that suppressing opportunities for public participation will likely exacerbate antisystem political tendencies. We cite the recent protests in Chile, a nation that has employed democratic elitism more effectively than perhaps any other, as illustrative of the eventual consequences of suppressing voice. Our research indicates that empowering citizens through vibrant parties and continuous democracy is the best way to avoid populist impulses and waves of contentious politics.

Debates around the effectiveness of high-profile Twitter account suspensions and similar bans on abusive users across social media platforms abound. Yet we know little about the effectiveness of warning a user about the possibility of suspending their account as opposed to outright suspensions in reducing hate speech. With a pre-registered experiment, we provide causal evidence that a warning message can reduce the use of hateful language on Twitter, at least in the short term. We design our messages based on the literature on deterrence, and test versions that emphasize the legitimacy of the sender, the credibility of the message, and the costliness of being suspended. We find that the act of warning a user of the potential consequences of their behavior can significantly reduce their hateful language for one week. We also find that warning messages that aim to appear legitimate in the eyes of the target user seem to be the most effective. In light of these findings, we consider the policy implications of platforms adopting a more aggressive approach to warning users that their accounts may be suspended as a tool for reducing hateful speech online.

James Johnson argues that formal models are best conceived as fables which provide lessons about empirical phenomena and the “standard rationale” of testing model predictions fails. Without justifying the “standard rationale” as such, we argue that models produce scientific predictions. These predictions come at different levels or granularity of description and in different forms each bearing some degree of uncertainty, but still give conditions for the existence of political phenomena. Models and their predictions require projection onto the world, and that projection involves interpretation. Tests utilize inference to the best explanation, and it is the conceptual or theoretical aspect of models that make them explanatory. We discuss the extent to which our characterisation of models and their explanatory form versus that of Johnson constitutes a verbal or substantive dispute.

Fifty years after the publication of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert Hirschman’s work is receiving renewed attention in leading journals, including efforts to develop formal models and new strands of democratic theory that capture his insights. These efforts have led some to conclude that power flows exclusively from an ability to exit at low cost, and that we can only empower the weaker elements in society by giving them more choices—more ability to switch from one public goods supplier to another. I examine work by leading proponents of these views and argue that their approaches ignore the role that constrained exit opportunities play in fomenting collective action and voice, not merely to signal dissatisfaction, but to provide information on where leaders have gone too far and what needs to be done. We should expect to see leaders respond to member dissatisfaction both when members can cheaply leave and when they have no way out, with the problematic zone lying in between—exactly where “voucher” systems for public goods propose to take us.

Many of the conversations about international cybersecurity have remained siloed in specific disciplines and professional cultures. As such, there is disagreement among academics and practitioners about how to define basic terms, such as “cybersecurity,” and arguments about what should “count” as part of cybersecurity. Because people’s perspectives on cybersecurity are often defined by where they “sit” professionally, practitioners and scholars are sometimes unaware that they do not share a conceptual universe. For instance, many separate international internet governance debates from conversations around global cybersecurity norms, although many of the same cleavages and barriers to agreements occur in both domains. Others consider censorship to be unrelated to cybersecurity, although espionage via hacking uses many of the same tools as the domestic surveillance that goes hand in hand with censorship. Still others do or do not incorporate considerations of internet infrastructure into conversations about conflict in spite of concerns about the security of undersea cables to most global powers. The three books under review—James Shires’s The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East, Florian Egloff’s Semi-State Actors in Cybersecurity, and Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall’s Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace—all help us understand how to think about this landscape. Each untangles some of these disconnects by making assumptions transparent, articulating places of overlap, unpacking terminology and categories, and offering paths forward for scholars.

Despite their long-held reputation as controlled affairs, autocratic elections continue to surprise. Recent years have seen turnovers in power or unexpected opposition gains in such far-flung places as Guinea-Bissau, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Bhutan. Of course, in many other dictatorships, ruling parties resoundingly win their elections and only increase their aura of dominance. Yet even when turnover is unlikely, elections can loom over autocratic politics like a squall line on the horizon. For instance, many observers claim that Putin’s planned reelection in 2024 makes him less willing to accept defeat in Ukraine. How do we make sense of the inner workings and surprising outcomes of these elections?

Recent decades have seen a precipitous decline in union membership, with deleterious consequences for the working class. Yet political theorists have devoted little attention to unions. In this article, I argue that unions help solve collective action problems that otherwise stymie workers’ attempts to take industrial action and compel employers to take better account of their interests. Unions thereby afford workers a form of partial protection from domination. This has three important implications. First, insofar as workers have claims against subjection to domination, they must be afforded opportunities to unionize. Second, insofar as the ability of unions to afford workers such protection depends on their being able to credibly threaten industrial action, it is essential that unions and their members have the right to take such action. Finally, workers have duties to join the union that represents them and contribute to its legitimate activities. This lends support to various forms of compulsory unionization.

Day to day governance of civilians is not solely the purview of states. Rulemaking, rule-enforcing, and goods and services provision are central components of governance, yet in many instances it is non-state actors who assume these functions. We advance the study of governance by rebel groups engaged in armed confrontation against state governments. We identify five key areas of research where the field of rebel governance is best poised to go: the study of multi-level governance, rebel use of self-constraining or hand-tying behaviors, synergy between institutional form and domestic legitimacy, the nuanced role of territorial control in governance, and short- and longer-term impacts of rebel governance on post-conflict outcomes. In each area, we draw attention to the lessons already learned, interrogate key assumptions in existing work, raise arguments that remain under- or uninvestigated, and focus on the next frontier in the exploration of rebel governance. Learning more about the ways that rebel groups govern informs our understanding of armed conflict and its resolution, as well as provides broader lessons about the study of governance.

In political scientists’ drive to examine causal mechanisms, qualitative expert interviews have an important role to play. This is particularly true for the analysis of complex decision-making processes, where there is a dearth of data, and for linking macro and micro levels of analysis. The paper offers suggestions for making the most effective and reflective use of qualitative expert interviews. It advocates an encompassing, knowledge-based understanding of experts and argues for the incorporation of both “inside” and “outside” experts, meaning those that make and those that analyze political decisions, into an integrated analytical framework. It puts forward concrete advice addressing this technique’s inherent challenges of selecting experts, experts’ personal biases, and the systematic capturing of evidence. Finally, the article suggests that the combination of expert interviews, experimental methods, and online interviewing can meaningfully strengthen the evidentiary value of this important data collection technique.

Democracy is premised on the ability of individuals, often working with others, to influence policies affecting them. However, existing theory cannot always explain why some organized efforts are more influential than others. We introduce the concept of civic feedbacks, arguing that the ways organizations engage individuals in collective action have feedback effects that shape the strategic position of organizations, the options available to leaders, and the likelihood of policy influence. The mechanisms through which civic feedbacks operate include the depth of accountability to the constituency, the network of elite relationships to which leaders subsequently have access, and their ongoing ability to recruit a committed and flexible constituency willing to engage new issues. Analyzing how these feedbacks redound to organizations over time enhances our ability to explain civic organizations’ differential rates of political influence. The concept of civic feedbacks returns organizations and organizational strategy to the center of the study of political influence.

Governments in developed nations today collect high tax revenues and spend vast amounts on security, regulation, infrastructure, and social programs. Yet developed nations were in no way born with effective state institutions. What explains the emergence of the modern state? And, why did capable states first form historically in Western Europe? Proper answers to these questions are key to our understanding of modern forms of governance, including parliamentary democracy.

Linked fate, the concept introduced by Dawson almost three decades ago, reoriented the study of racism and political behavior in the United States. The scholarship traditionally had focused on the racial psychology of whites and how racism seeps into their political views and actions. Dawson proposed the Black utility heuristic theory and linked fate, its associated measure, to investigate the political behavior of Blacks, the minority group most harmed by racism. Since then, linked fate has become a ubiquitous variable of interest in research on minority group politics. Yet the research program around linked fate is due for some extension. Most studies gloss over the fact that the Black utility heuristic theory is historically and socially conditional. We call for bringing elite-level agency and group-level social practices back into the literature to clarify the macro- and meso-level conditions under which a group’s racial status translates into linked fate at the individual level. Greater inquiry into these dynamics is not only warranted but also has broad implications for the research on racial and ethnic politics.