In this article, I show that Richard Rorty’s unduly neglected normative political theory advances a far more distinct and demanding form of liberalism than is usually attributed to him. Attention to how Rorty understands solidarity—and its corresponding conception of public obligations—encourages analysis of his nonjuridical vision of liberal community. Through examination of his oft-ignored, revealing interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov and instructive comparison with the thought of Judith Shklar, I argue that, for Rorty, the sustainability of a liberal community requires an ethos of curiosity, whereby citizens feel moved to uncover and understand the personal experiences of cruelty and humiliation endured by others. We can make sense of this ethos and its demands of us through rethinking the idea of political conversation. This understanding of Rorty’s intellectual project not only enriches our appreciation of his complex political theory but also contests the meaning and implications of liberalism itself.

Radical right populist (RRP) parties are often described as Männerparteien, predominantly led by, represented by, and supported by men. Yet recently, these parties have elected more women. Under what conditions do we see this increase in women MPs? This paper presents a novel argument of strategic descriptive representation: electorally struggling RRP parties with large gender gaps in voter support increase their proportion of women MPs to attract previously untapped women voters. To test this argument, we develop the most comprehensive dataset to date on women MPs and gender differences in voter support across Europe and over time, covering 187 parties in 30 countries from 1985 to 2018. Our analyses confirm that RRP parties engage in strategic descriptive representation when they are both struggling electorally and suffering from a gender gap in support. Additional models reveal that this tactic is largely unique to RRP parties.

Postindustrial occupational change has ended an era of unprecedented upward mobility. We examine the political implications of this immense structural shift by introducing the concept of status discordance, which we operationalize as the difference between status expectations formed during childhood and outcomes realized in adulthood. We leverage German household panel data and predictive modeling to provide empirical estimates of status expectations based on childhood circumstances and parental background. The analysis reveals that political dissatisfaction is widespread among voters who fall short of intergenerational status expectations. We show that such dissatisfaction is associated with higher abstention rates, less mainstream party support, and more radical voting. Moreover, we explore variation in status discordance by gender, education, and occupation, which influence the choice between radical left and right parties. Our findings highlight how expectations about opportunities underlie generational voting patterns and shed light on the ongoing breakdown of the postwar political consensus.

Political borders profoundly influence outcomes central to international politics. Accordingly, a growing literature shows that historical boundaries affect important macro-outcomes such as patterns of interstate disputes and trade. To explain these findings, existing theories posit that borders have persistent effects on individual-level behavior, but the literature lacks empirical evidence of such effects. Combining spatial data on centuries of border changes in Europe with a wide range of contemporary survey evidence, we show that historical border changes have persistent effects on two of the most politically significant aspects of behavior: individuals’ political and social trust. We demonstrate that in areas where borders frequently changed, individuals are, on average, less trusting of others as well as their governments. We argue that this occurs because border changes disrupt historical state-building processes and limit the formation of interpersonal social networks, which leads to lower levels of trust.

In environments of seemingly intractable conflict, how should we understand the role of state capacity building and security-sector reform in transitions to peace? Prevailing wisdom suggests that a strong state security apparatus mitigates cyclical violence and aids in transitions to predictable, rule-governed behavior. Yet growing attention to police brutality in institutionalized democracies calls this assumption into question. Drawing on a multiyear study of war making and state making in eastern DR Congo, this article interrogates logics of police capacity building, analyzing how and why reform efforts intended to bolster the state’s monopoly on violence frequently fail to curb the unrest they seek to disrupt. I argue that enhancing the coercive capacity of the police can entrench a wartime political order that makes peace more elusive; when police deploy the image of the state toward destabilizing ends they reinforce the institutions of everyday war, undermining the stability a monopoly on violence is intended to build.

There is abundant anecdotal evidence that nondemocratic regimes are harnessing new digital technologies known as social media bots to facilitate policy goals. However, few previous attempts have been made to systematically analyze the use of bots that are aimed at a domestic audience in autocratic regimes. We develop two alternative theoretical frameworks for predicting the use of pro-regime bots: one which focuses on bot deployment in response to offline protest and the other in response to online protest. We then test the empirical implications of these frameworks with an original collection of Twitter data generated by Russian pro-government bots. We find that the online opposition activities produce stronger reactions from bots than offline protests. Our results provide a lower bound on the effects of bots on the Russian Twittersphere and highlight the importance of bot detection for the study of political communication on social media in nondemocratic regimes.

Many nondemocracies hold multiparty elections while also adopting institutions of de jure judicial independence; yet there is debate over how nondemocratic courts can affect election integrity. This paper argues that increased de jure independence creates incentives for opposition recourse to the courts, which reduces election fraud due to greater legal exposure for election-manipulating agents and the ruling party. However, this effect occurs only when competition is low and the ruling party has limited incentive to intervene. These predictions are distinct from those of prior work, and they are supported by an analysis of cross-national election-year data from 1945 to 2014. Preprocessing techniques are used to reduce concerns about endogeneity and confounding. The results show that principal-agent dynamics can occur in manipulated elections even when incumbents remain in office, challenge the centrality of protest risk as a deterrent to manipulation, and offer a framework for predicting when de jure reforms translate to behavioral independence.

India, the world’s largest democracy, has been experiencing a democratic decline. Since coming to power in 2014 and winning reelection in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have become increasingly illiberal and authoritarian. The rule of law has deteriorated, rights and liberties have been curtailed, and scholars and the media have been silenced. If electoral constraint, constitutional design, judicial independence, and a free press haven’t slowed India’s march toward illiberalism, what can? In November 2020, India’s farmers began a highly organized protest against the government. In this research note, I ask, how has this protest protected Indian democracy from further degradation, and has it radically altered India’s political future? I argue that the farmers’ protest provides an alternative vision of democracy, one rooted in radical egalitarianism. Protesting farmers have actualized the spirit of dissent enshrined in the Indian constitution by holding the current government accountable to it.

Understanding sources of judicial bias is essential for establishing due process. To date, theories of judicial decision making are rooted in ranked societies with majority–minority group cleavages, leaving unanswered which groups are more prone to express bias and whether it is motivated by in-group favoritism or out-group hostility. We examine judicial bias in Kenya, a diverse society that features a more complex ethnic landscape. While research in comparative and African politics emphasizes instrumental motivations underpinning ethnic identity, we examine the psychological, implicit biases driving judicial outcomes. Using data from Kenyan criminal appeals and the conditional random assignment of judges to cases, we show that judges are 3 to 5 percentage points more likely to grant coethnic appeals than non-coethnic appeals. To understand mechanisms, we use word embeddings to analyze the sentiment of written judgments. Judges use more trust-related terms writing for coethnics, suggesting that in-group favoritism motivates coethnic bias in this context.

States cannot legitimately enforce their borders against migrants if dominant conceptions of sovereignty inform enforcement because these conceptions undermine sufficient respect for migrants’ basic human rights. Instead, such conceptions lead states to assert total control over outsiders’ potential cross-border movements to support their in-group’s self-rule. Thus, although legitimacy requires states to prioritize universal respect for basic human rights, sovereign states today generally fail to do so when it comes to border enforcement. I contend that this enforcement could only be rendered legitimate if it was predicated on more desirable conceptions of sovereignty that supported the universal prioritization of basic human rights. Specifically, desirable conceptions would not establish and require absolute state sovereignty over borders as a necessary precondition for true popular self-governance.

Social scientists have documented rapid polarization in public opinion about COVID-19 policies. Such polarization is somewhat unsurprising given experimental studies that show opinions on novel issues can diverge quickly in the presence of partisan frames. In this paper I describe a different process that operates alongside polarization: not centrism but a lack of opinion formation. Drawing on four rounds of in-depth interviews with 86 Midwesterners, conducted between June 2019 and November 2020, I take an inductive approach to understanding variation in the processes by which people gathered and interpreted information about COVID-19. I find that those with universal distrust in all media struggled to adjudicate between conflicting interpretations of reality, particularly if they also had low political knowledge. The result was that they felt little confidence in any opinions they formed. These findings suggest that deteriorating trust in media is an important and understudied factor shaping trajectories of opinion formation.

Using the formation of a lesbian and gay electoral constituency as a case, this article demonstrates how activists and party elites contest and construct collective identities and groups. Activist–party interactions produce identity-building feedback that recognizes some groups and identities and rejects others, creating conditions for people to see themselves as partisans. I call this process “constitutive group mobilization.” I find that, when party actors affirmed civil rights and libertarian constructions of lesbian and gay people and politics, mobilization was relatively bipartisan. Republicans’ emerging alliance with the Christian Right, however, brought activists to form the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Democratic Clubs, crystallizing civil rights as the dominant linkage to partisanship. These developments reveal how groups and identities form endogenously to parties rather than entering the party system as preformed entities with fixed interests and partisanship. Thus, the lesbian and gay case provides insights about group and identity formation previously overlooked in party and LGBT politics scholarship.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) fundamentally changed the distribution of electoral power in the US South. We examine the consequences of this mass enfranchisement of Black people for the use of the carceral state—police, the courts, and the prison system. We study the extent to which white communities in the US South responded to the end of Jim Crow by increasing the incarceration of Black people. We test this with new historical data on state and county prison intake data by race (~1940–1985) in a series of difference-in-differences designs. We find that states covered by Section 5 of the VRA experienced a differential increase in Black prison admissions relative to those that were not covered and that incarceration varied systematically in proportion to the electoral threat posed by Black voters. Our findings indicate the potentially perverse consequences of enfranchisement when establishment power seeks—and finds—other outlets of social and political control.

Awareness-raising messages feature prominently in most anticorruption strategies. Yet, there has been limited systematic research into their efficacy. There is growing concern that anticorruption awareness-raising efforts may be backfiring; instead of encouraging citizens to resist corruption, they may be nudging them to “go with the corrupt grain.” This study offers a first test of the effect of anticorruption messaging on ordinary people’s behavior. A household-level field experiment, conducted with a representative sample in Lagos, Nigeria, is used to test whether exposure to five different messages about (anti)corruption influence the outcome of a “bribery game.” We find that exposure to anticorruption messages largely fails to discourage the decision to bribe, and in some cases it makes individuals more willing to pay a bribe. Importantly, we also find that the effect of anticorruption messaging is conditioned by an individual’s preexisting perceptions regarding the prevalence of corruption.

Many social movements face fierce resistance in the form of a countermovement. Therefore, when deciding to become politically active, a movement supporter has to consider both her own movement’s activity and that of the opponent. This paper studies the decision of a movement supporter to attend a protest when faced with a counterprotest. We implement two field experiments among supporters of a right- and left-leaning movement ahead of two protest–counterprotest interactions in Germany. Supporters were exposed to low or high official estimates about their own and the opposing group’s turnout. We find that the size of the opposing group has no effect on supporters’ protest intentions. However, as the own protest gets larger, supporters of the right-leaning movement become less while supporters of the left-leaning movement become more willing to protest. We argue that the difference is best explained by stronger social motives on the political left.

Most scholars agree the rise of states led to modern territoriality. Yet globally the transition to precise boundaries occurred most often in colonies, and there are virtually no systematic explanations of its occurrence outside Europe. This article explains how precise boundaries emerged in the earliest context where they were regularly and generally implemented: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial North America. Unlike explanations of modern territoriality in Europe, it argues property boundary surveys became an entrenched practice on the part of settlers and were a readily available response to intercolonial boundary disputes. After independence, settlers who were accustomed to surveys pursued linear boundaries with Britain, Spain, and Russia. Moreover, the article argues that linear borders (delimited linearly and typically physically demarcated), not sovereignty, are constitutive of modern territoriality. By disentangling the literature’s Eurocentric confusion between modern territoriality and sovereign statehood, the article makes possible a global comparative study of the emergence of modern territoriality.

A large literature establishes the benefits of central bank independence, yet very few have shown directly negative economic consequences. Furthermore, while prevailing monetary theory suggests CBI should enhance management of economic distress, I argue that independent central banks exhibit tepid responsiveness to banking instability due to a myopic focus on inflation. I show that banking crises produce larger unemployment shocks and credit and stock market contractions when the level of central bank independence is high. Further, I show that these significant economic costs are mitigated when central banks do not have the inflation-centric policy mandates predominantly considered necessary. When the bank has high operational and political independence, banks’ whose policy mandate does not rigidly prioritize inflation produce significantly better outcomes during banking crises. At the same time, I show that this configuration does not produce higher inflation, suggesting it achieves a more flexible design without incurring significant costs.

Focusing on John Stuart Mill, a particularly illuminating contributor to modern democratic theory, this article examines the connections between modern democracy and the European colonial experience. It argues that Mill drew on the exclusionary logic and discourse available through the colonial experience to present significant portions of the English working classes as domestic barbarians, whose potential rise to power posed a danger to civilization itself: a line of argument that helped him legitimate representative government as a democratic, rather than an antidemocratic form of government, as it had been traditionally perceived. The article contributes to our understanding of the development of modern democratic theory and practice by drawing attention to the ways the colonial experience shaped core Western institutions and ways of thinking, and it makes the case that this experience remains an essential, if often unacknowledged, part of our collective “self.”

Is the public backlash against human rights rulings from European courts driven by substantive concerns over case outcomes, procedural concerns over sovereignty, or combinations thereof? We conducted preregistered survey experiments in Denmark, France, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom using three vignettes: a foreigner who faces extradition, a person fighting a fine for burning Qurans, and a home owner contesting eviction. Each vignette varies with respect to whether a European court disagrees with a national court (deference treatment) and whether an applicant wins a case (outcome treatment). We find little evidence that deference moves willingness to implement judgments or acceptance of court authority but ample evidence that case outcomes matter. Even nationalists and authoritarians are unmoved by European court decisions as long as they agree with the case outcome. These findings imply that nationalist opposition to European courts is more about content than the location of authority and that backlash to domestic and international courts may be driven by similar forces.

In the Internet era, people can encounter a vast array of political news outlets, many with which they are unfamiliar. These unknown media outlets are notable because they represent potential sources of misinformation and coverage with a distinctive slant. We use two large survey experiments to consider how source familiarity influences political communication. Although this demonstrates the public is averse to consuming news from unfamiliar media, we show that—conditional on exposure to them—unknown local and foreign media sources can influence public opinion to an extent similar to established mainstream news outlets on the same issues. This comparable effectiveness stems from the public’s charitable evaluations of the credibility of unfamiliar news sources and their relatively low trust in familiar mainstream media. We find avoidance of unknown news outlets, not resistance to their coverage, is the primary factor limiting their political influence.