Green transition policies set long-term targets to reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants, posing a threat to workers in polluting occupations and communities reliant on them. Can far-right parties attract voters who anticipate losing from the green transition? We explore this in Germany, which has ambitious green policies and a large workforce in polluting occupations. The far-right AfD started campaigning as the only party opposing green transition policies in 2016. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show AfD support increased more in counties with larger shares of employment in polluting occupations once the AfD adopted an anti-green platform in 2016. A panel survey demonstrates that individuals in these occupations also shifted toward the AfD. Probing mechanisms, we find that far-right support may stem from shifting perceptions of social stigma and lower status. Our results highlight the need for a new research agenda on backlash against the normative dimension of the green transition.

What explains the demand and supply of criminal governance? Contrary to traditional explanations of criminal governance as top-down control, this study integrates bottom-up demands for assistance and top-down supply of aid and coercion. We argue that the demand for criminal governance stems from civilians’ drive to satisfy their primary necessities, while security concerns motivate criminals to supply governance to prevent civilian resistance. The theory focuses on three main factors: economic difficulties, articulation/resistance capacity, and government response. The empirical strategy uses multiple list experiments conducted in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. On the demand side, results indicate that economic difficulties and civilian articulation capacity shape the demand for criminal aid. On the supply side, criminals largely neglect people’s economic needs. When criminals help, they do it for cheap and to neutralize potential civilian resistance or to compete against the state. However, when economic conditions worsen, criminals revert to imposing lockdowns.

Some scholars argue that democratic stability requires political elites to practice forbearance: roughly speaking, “restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018). The article proposes a novel conception of forbearance as a mechanism of democratic stability. According to this view, public officials exercise forbearance when they refrain from actions of uncertain legitimacy, actions that, while in fact compatible with democracy’s constitutive rules, are not commonly known to be. The argument is that such actions, by provoking divergent reactions among citizens, create uncertainty about the extent to which others are willing to resist breaches of democracy’s rules. This uncertainty undermines their ability to coordinate responses to genuine abuses of power in the future. The article concludes with observations about the normative implications of the theory, introducing the concept of the “Democrat’s Dilemma” to illustrate the difficulties of knowing when democrats ought to practice forbearance.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reshaped international politics and the field of International Relations. But one question—“How should the atomic bomb be used?”—has been largely overlooked in political science. This article recovers American deliberations on alternative nuclear use options before August 1945, including the “noncombat demonstration,” targeting military installations, giving advance warning, and striking more symbolically valuable cities. We develop theoretical insights on the value of staging violent spectacles and the emotive power of visible destruction. We then use a wide range of sources to show that U.S. leaders selected an ostentatiously lethal means of atomic debut due to concerns about conventional military inferiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the desire to instill a widespread view of the bomb’s revolutionary character, and the imperative of shaping the postwar international order. This study advances our understanding of the post-1945 international order and the performative dimensions of political violence.

Against the status quo, this article argues for the right to renounce state citizenship while remaining a resident. To motivate this argument, it presents a dilemma: if long-term residents can choose not to naturalize, why cannot citizens renounce their status without leaving? This article rejects one way out of this dilemma—making citizenship mandatory for long-term residents—and proceeds to make the positive case for the right to renounce citizenship. It argues for the value of citizenship renunciation as an expressive political act, distinct from territorial exit, which allows individuals to sever political ties while maintaining social membership. This form of political exit enables citizens to express their detachment from the state without the costs of emigration. This article explores the implications of this proposal for democratic consent, legitimate authority, and collective citizen responsibility for state action, arguing that a right to renounce without emigration enhances autonomy and democratic legitimacy.

Misinformation poses serious risks for democratic governance, conflict, and health. This study evaluates whether sustained, classroom-based education against misinformation can equip schoolchildren to become more discerning consumers of information. Partnering with a state government agency in Bihar, India, we conducted a field experiment in 583 villages with 13,500 students, using a 4-month curriculum designed to build skills, shift norms, and enhance knowledge about health misinformation. Intent-to-treat estimates demonstrate that treated respondents were significantly better at discerning true from false information, altered their health preferences, relied more on science, and reduced their dependence on unreliable news sources. We resurveyed participants 4 months post-intervention and found that effects persisted, as well as extended to political misinformation. Finally, we observe within-household treatment diffusion, with parents of treated students becoming more adept at discerning information. As many countries seek long-term solutions to combat misinformation, these findings highlight the promise of sustained classroom-based education.

Studies have found that voters in democratic countries are far more reluctant to use military force against democracies than against nondemocracies. This pattern may help explain why democracies almost never wage war against other democracies. In an important contribution, Rathbun, Parker, and Pomeroy (2025) propose that the apparent democratic peace in public opinion is an artifact of failing to account for race. Rather than democracy itself influencing support for war, they argue, the term “democracy” cues assumptions about the adversary’s racial composition, and those racialized assumptions are the true drivers of support for war. We reevaluate RPP’s evidence, concluding that their data do not support their predictions. In fact, their novel experiments provide powerful evidence that democracy affects support for war, independent of race. Our findings contribute to major debates about both regime type and race in international relations, as well as the design and interpretation of survey experiments.

Violent conflicts are often accompanied by symbols commemorating past violence. I argue that political symbols exert a causal effect on future violence. Such symbols generate shared understandings of the prevailing social order. Symbols that affirm this order may act as substitutes for performative violence motivated by status concerns, while their removal may signal contestation, increasing violence. I test this theory by examining the effect of Confederate monument construction on lynchings and public executions in the postbellum U.S. South. Using a difference-in-differences design and original archival work, I find that Confederate monuments reduced violence, acting as a substitute for performative violence in constructing a white supremacist social order. Effects are concentrated in counties where racial threat is higher. I then test the effects of Confederate monument removals in the present-day US and find that removals increased the likelihood of anti-Black hate crimes.

How does racial inequality shape who dies in war? Focusing on the era of United States military segregation, we argue that discriminatory societal institutions and prejudicial attitudes combined to reduce commanders’ beliefs about Black soldiers’ combat effectiveness. These biased assessments decreased the likelihood that Black soldiers were assigned combat occupational specialties, and that Black combat units received key frontline assignments. However, commanders’ biases also created a desire to preserve white lives. Accordingly, we expect Black soldiers received worse support. These choices shaped soldiers’ risk of death. Analyzing the case of World War I (WWI), we leverage data on over 44,000 infantry fatalities and show that white units incurred four times as many combat fatalities as comparable Black units. However, holding fixed exposure to combat, Black units suffered higher levels of noncombat deaths. Commanders thus deemed Black soldiers insufficiently qualified to fight as equals, but sufficiently expendable to die in war’s least consequential conditions.

As elected officials and citizens struggle to understand the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States, some have pointed to the introduction of “gavel-to-gavel” camera coverage in legislative bodies as driving the downward trajectory of these institutions. Advocates of increased transparency suggest cameras empower voters, producing more moderate behavior among legislators, whereas opponents suggest cameras encourage partisanship and dysfunction. Previous research offers mixed conclusions, in part, because of a focus on national legislatures where the introduction of cameras occurs only once. Using an original dataset of the adoption of gavel-to-gavel coverage in state legislative chambers, we examine whether cameras are associated with a range of chamber- and individual-level outcomes. The findings suggest that there are no systematic impacts from the introduction of gavel-to-gavel coverage. Normative concerns about cameras in legislatures may be overstated, an important finding given their proliferation in public proceedings since the COVID-19 pandemic.

When deciding new issues, judges face uncertainty about how cases map into their existing understanding of the law. This uncertainty can lead to conflicting decisions on the same legal question, generating inconsistent law. I develop a formal theory of judicial decision making, where courts learn about and rule on new legal issues. I find that courts learn most from their ideological allies; however, increasing the ideological distance between courts can either increase or decrease legal uniformity. Using an original dataset of cases of first impression in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, I find that increasing the ideological distance between two courts increases the probability of disagreement if the previous court’s decision is in-line with their relative bias, and decreases disagreement when the decision runs counter to their relative bias. My findings highlight the ways that courts can use decisions from even ideologically distant peers to learn about new legal issues.

A paradox has emerged in the growing literature on the legacies of the precolonial past: areas home to precolonial centralized polities are associated with beneficial long-run outcomes in some studies, but harmful ones elsewhere. This article introduces an original dataset of precolonial African states in the nineteenth century to explain this seeming contradiction. By developing a typology of precolonial statehood, I show that there is no single legacy of the precolonial past. Rather, statehood only increases civil conflict where political power was highly concentrated in a polity. Where political authority was more diverse, conflict prevalence is lower. A largely inverse pattern holds for development outcomes. These findings, and the associated dataset, suggest promising new pathways for understanding not only the legacies of Africa’s precolonial past, but the study of comparative state-building, which has largely relegated the African experience to a single story.

Only 15% of African households possess a formal title for their agricultural land, despite the widespread availability of titles and their documented benefits. Local politics combine with national land regimes to explain this empirical anomaly. I combine 170,216 household-level observations of titling across 22 African countries with a novel geospatial measure of land values and the returns to agricultural investment. Households in areas with high returns to potential agricultural investment title more. However, in countries with centralized land tenure regimes, strong customary institutions attenuate this relationship; in countries with decentralized land regimes, strong customary institutions reinforce it. I use a case study in Côte d’Ivoire, including an original survey of 801 households and 194 customary elites, to trace these mechanisms at work. This research documents granular variation in the uptake of land titles, illustrates how local politics explain this variation, and outlines conditions under which customary elites impede development.

This article reconciles conflicting views about the political landscape of corporate America with new data on the revealed political preferences of 97,469 corporate directors and executives at 9,005 different U.S. companies. Driven largely by turnover, I find that average observed ideology for directors and executives has shifted meaningfully to the left over time, changing from modestly conservative in 2001 to roughly centrist by 2022. This finding supports a middle-ground position between conventional wisdom casting “big business” as a conservative stronghold and revisionist views holding the opposite. Counterfactual simulations and a difference-in-differences design suggest multifaceted reasons for these changes, and hand-collected data on corporate stances on LGBTQ-related legislation suggest a strong connection between corporate political activity and individual views. Overall, this transformation has profound implications for American politics, as the individuals comprising one of the most powerful interest groups—corporate elites—appear to be fracturing ideologically and to some degree even switching sides.

Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans are politically visible yet institutionally invisible, long categorized as “white” by the U.S. government despite neither self-categorizing nor racially assigned as such. Most forms—across public and private sectors—still lack a “MENA” category option. What are the political consequences of institutional invisibility? Across two survey experiments and in-depth interviews, I find that exclusion from official identity categories triggers the experience of categorization threat, a psychological response rarely linked to political behavior. When MENA Americans experience categorization threat, they respond by expressing opinions on politics in ways that attempt to signal and assert their MENA identity and, to a lesser extent, Person of Color (POC) identity. Such identity assertion demonstrates that bureaucratic categorization influences expressions of public opinion on politics, not simply how people self-categorize. Researching the effects of category exclusion on public opinions creates opportunities for more accurate and democratic scholarship.

A prominent literature on pre-modern warfare and institution-building holds that intense military competition in pre-modern Europe encouraged institutional innovations—for example, centralized bureaucracies and monopolies on coercion—that empowered rulers and enhanced state capacity, with salutary effects on long-run political development. States that adopted these innovations were more likely to survive, whereas those that did not succumbed to invading armies. Yet links between geopolitical competitiveness and capacity building are largely theorized and tested based on the European historical experience. A broader view of that period reveals a more complicated picture. The dominant mode of warfare throughout much of medieval and early modern Eurasia, Inner Asian cavalry warfare (IACW), favored succession institutions that selected for competent military leaders at the expense of long, secure reigns and cumulative capacity-building potential. I explore these links between IACW, succession practices, and rule duration with a novel dataset of over 300 Eurasian dynasties.

The share of women in politics is higher, on average, under closed-list proportional representation (PR) electoral systems compared to majoritarian systems. Yet, even in PR systems, progress toward gender parity has been slow and uneven. We argue that women’s representation and career progression under PR might be impeded when single-occupant positions, such as local mayor and list leader, serve as important stepping stones in political career paths. Using a century of detailed candidate-level data from Norway, we investigate (1) whether gaps in women’s representation emerge at these “majoritarian stepping stones” and (2) how access to these positions affects women’s progression into higher offices. Our empirical analysis reveals that gender gaps indeed emerge at majoritarian stepping stones. However, we also document how Norwegian parties have employed workarounds—promoting women occupants of these positions at higher rates than men—to mitigate the adverse effects of this hidden majoritarianism on women’s representation in higher offices.

In East Jerusalem, the vast majority of Palestinians contest the legitimacy of the Israeli state’s claim to sovereignty. This necessarily affects how Palestinians engage with the state in pursuit of goods and services. But how? Using data from 55 interviews and original observational and experimental survey data from a representative sample of East Jerusalemites, I show that civilians’ engagement with each good, service, and institution of the state is a function of their perceptions of the state’s legitimacy, or right to rule, in that sector. Civilians will avoid engagement with goods, services, and institutions that explicitly affirm the state’s claims to monopolized sovereign rule, without forsaking essential goods and services. This article empirically illustrates that the same individual will make different choices with respect to each state sector, and in doing so builds on the burgeoning recognition of sector-level choices in the citizen claim-making literature.

Contributing to a growing interest in disability in political science, this article makes the case for the central role of disability in upholding the belief in work as requisite for full citizenship. Turning to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it shows how disability and the figure of the disabled worker were used to fortify emergent understandings of work against the changes wrought by industrial capitalism. Focusing on three sites of disabled labor—the school-based workshop, custodial institution, and industrial factory—it reveals the crucial ideological work performed by disability in sustaining the myth of the independent worker-citizen. Where existing scholarship has focused on disability either as an identity category or as a target of rights and policy, this article models an alternative approach, arguing for the relevance of disability as a concept that is integral to, and productive of, the ways we understand citizenship and political belonging.

This article examines the problem of racialized vulnerability to systemic violence by engaging with the works of Judith Butler and discussing police brutality. Butler has been criticized for presupposing vulnerability as an ontological condition inherent in embodied life and obscuring the distinctive characteristics of racialized vulnerability. Wrestling with these criticisms, the article reads this presupposition as a “contingent foundation,” and it turns to Butler’s longstanding engagements with phenomenology to foreground the norms and frames that inform the ways in which vulnerability is always perceived, interpreted, and adjudicated. Expanding on Butler’s analysis of the 1992 Rodney King trial with the help of Frantz Fanon’s concept of “sociogeny” and working with the trial archives, jurors’ statements, media coverage, and King’s memoir, it outlines a critical phenomenology inquiring into the sociohistorical constitution of racial schemas that turn Black bodies into phobic objects and disproportionately expose them to violence carried out with impunity.