Where, when, and why do civilians organize during war? We propose a research agenda that expands the scope of variation in civil organizing and identify mechanisms to explain its emergence and evolution. Drawing on a large-scale original dataset of public Facebook posts produced by Syrian organizations from 2011 to 2020 and qualitative case studies based on 10 months of field research among Syrian activists in Turkey and Jordan, we systematically examine geographic, temporal, and substantive variation in civil organizing. We find that civil organizing can persist in the face of ongoing violence and displacement, focusing not only on concerns of protection and survival, but also on governance and even contentious politics. This organizing increasingly shifts from within Syria to border states, with translocal organizations—operating both inside and outside Syria—playing a particularly active role. This work contributes to literature on conflict processes and contentious politics by emphasizing the importance of organizations, centering refugees and civilians as agential and strategic actors, and using novel evidence to describe variation in wartime organizing over time and space.

The concept of political knowledge is foundational to American politics, but we know little about the extent to which its two dimensions—objective knowledge and knowledge confidence—covary over time as citizens learn about the American political system. We employ a two-wave survey to study whether individuals gain both objective knowledge and knowledge confidence such that they calibrate over time when exposed to civic education coursework. We find students gain both objective knowledge and knowledge confidence over the semester and that, on average, the gap between them shrinks after taking Introduction to American Government. However, we also see evidence that a student’s initial levels of knowledge shape growth in these two concepts and whether they become more closely aligned over the semester. The results shed light on the relationship between what individuals know about politics and what they think they know, and the role of civic education in shaping an active and informed electorate.

How do societies navigate the symbolic and artistic heritage of troubled pasts? I build on Bernhard and Kubik’s (2014) theorization of official memory regimes to demonstrate how memory regimes govern the public mnemonic space beyond the official level. I trace such governance within what Bernhard and Kubik call a unified memory regime, in which official actors prefer not to fight battles in and around memory. I argue that unified memory regimes order, discipline, and govern not only the official but also the everyday spaces of judgment and affection. Posited on unity at the official level, these hegemonic frames of meaning-making relegate mnemonic tension to the societal level where discursive battles continue to take place. I further argue that unified memory regimes can open pitfalls for pluralists during moments of mnemonic contestation. Because pluralists acknowledge and agonistically deliberate on multiple interpretations of the past, they may attempt to discursively reconcile the emerging societal-level mnemonic fracture with the official unified memory regime. But this strategy can backfire, reinforcing the unified regime and disciplining the societal-level challenger through three discursive practices that I call the traps of consensus: semantic alignment, a syntax of disavowal, and the juxtaposition of “universal” and “particular” narratives about the past. Pluralists may be especially vulnerable to these traps when they face unified memory regimes in which the consensus narrative appears superficially pluralist (or “underspecified”) because it eschews normative judgments that distinguish between perpetrators and victims. I illustrate these dynamics through tracing the case of a contested soundscape in postcommunist Albania.

Anti-reclamation movements are common in Indonesia, but their effectiveness varies. Such movements, which oppose the infilling of coastal waters and wetlands, consistently draw support from environmentalists, fisherfolk, and coastal residents. To succeed, however, they must transcend these constituencies and mobilize broad coalitions. In this paper, I apply the concept of political opportunity to explain variation in the ability of anti-reclamation movements to achieve this goal. Specifically, I argue that the opportunity to build broad coalitions depends on the positioning of political, economic, and communal elites. Disagreement among these groups creates opportunities for activists to recruit some of them as allies in the construction of economically diverse, cross-class coalitions. Consensus, by contrast, excludes elites as potential allies, forcing activists to build geographically expansive but class-based coalitions. To develop my argument, I draw on local news archives and primary source documents to compare similarly situated anti-reclamation movements in Bali and Makassar. In Bali, the movement flourished by cultivating an alliance with communal elites and local businesses. In Makassar, the movement withered because public officials, local businesses, and communal elites all welcomed reclamation. My findings imply that anti-reclamation movements are most likely to succeed when they emphasize communal identities with cross-class appeal. Yet such tactics alienate parallel movements from one another and undermine national activism. As a result, anti-reclamation movements fight the same battles over and over without achieving national reforms that would empower coastal communities to participate in coastal planning. Under such conditions, reclamation deepens the vulnerability of coastal communities to climate change.

This article examines the effects of the militarization of public security and the conflicts it triggers on a central democratic institution: press freedom. We focus on Mexico, which experienced multiple waves of assassinations of local journalists after the federal government declared a War on Drugs against the country’s main cartels and deployed the military to the country’s most conflictive regions. We argue that violence against journalists is tied to the outbreak of criminal wars—the multiple localized turf wars and power struggles unleashed by the federal military intervention. Subnational politicians and their security forces and drug lords are at the center of these conflicts because they jointly enable local operations of the transnational drug-trafficking industry. To defend their interests, they have individual and shared incentives to prevent city- and town-level journalists from (or punish them for) publishing fine-grained information that may compromise their criminal and political survival and their quest for local control. We compiled the most comprehensive dataset available on lethal attacks on journalists from 1994 to 2019 to test our claims. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that violence against local journalists substantially increased in militarized regions, where the military decapitated the cartels and fragmented the criminal underworld, triggering violent competition for criminal governance—de facto rule over territories, people, and illicit economies. Evidence from original focus groups and interviews with at-risk reporters suggests that governors, mayors, and their police forces possibly joined cartels in murdering journalists to mitigate the risks of unwanted information and to minimize the costs of criminal governance by silencing the press and society. Our study offers a sobering lesson of how the militarization of anti-crime policy and the onset of criminal wars can undermine local journalism, press freedom, and democracy.

Democratic electoral systems characteristically take a Count-and-Report Approach to enfranchised citizens’ failure to turn out in political elections: The number of non-votes is counted and publicly reported, but non-votes are given no effect in the allocation of political offices. We morally assess this model in the context of legislative elections, and argue that it is pro tanto less desirable than another, counterfactual model which we label Proportional Non-Voter Sortition. This model provides that citizens’ non-votes shall be legislatively represented by legislators who are selected by lot from the non-voting part of the demos, and whose share of seats is proportional to the aggregate rate of non-voting in the legislative election. Our assessment of the two models specifically turns on the claim that a democracy’s legislature should reflect the full diversity of political views that exists within its demos (legislative inclusivity), and it offers two reasons to expect that Proportional Non-Voter Sortition serves legislative inclusivity better than the Count-and-Report Approach: 1) Proportional Non-Voter Sortition uniquely incentivizes political parties to integrate non-voter views into their political agendas and mobilisation activities; and 2) Proportional Non-Voter Sortition additionally enables the legislative articulation and advocacy of non-voter views by placing people in the legislature who are descriptively representative of non-voters. Through our discussion of different models for the post-electoral management of non-votes, we contribute to a body of normative democratic theorizing about citizens’ non-voting, but raise a distinct question that so far has remained unexplored.

Despite 30 years of research on economic inequality, the question of whether government ideology affects inequality remains unresolved. As rising inequality poses a major challenge to contemporary democracies, we ask: (when) do parties matter regarding inequality? Our systematic analysis finds that research is divided, with a tendency toward a pessimistic “no.” We decipher the factors that account for this split in theoretically predictable ways. We assess the roles played by the type of inequality, the time horizon, and the impact of policy channels. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of 393 TSCS-regression findings show how the type of inequality and a neglect of top incomes, a focus on short- rather than long-term effects, and the inclusion of policy channels that absorb the effects of parties strongly codetermine the results. Effects septuple depending on how these factors are combined. We draw three lessons that, when combined, foster a shift toward a more optimistic perspective on the latitude of politics.

From speech to privacy, broad public interests are increasingly governed online by policy decisions taken by private companies. We examine when and how firms make such decisions. In contrast to the shadow of hierarchy and functionalist explanations of private authority, we build an analytical framework based on business power and the economics literature concerned with two-sided markets. We argue that companies operating as digital platforms may use private actor governance to consolidate their influence. More precisely, public-interest regulation on one side of the market (e.g., protecting the privacy of end-users) may increase the dependence of firms on the other side of the market (e.g., increasing the price paid for information by advertisers). We probe our argument by looking at the privacy policy implemented by Apple in 2021. Our findings demonstrate the growing role played by digital companies in global regulatory debates and call attention to how market structures can simultaneously incentivize public-interest regulation and become a source of business power.

In recent years, an old contentious tactic in which protesters besiege and harass public officials in their private homes has resurged. Discontented sectors of all stripes have employed what is most commonly called charivari or “rough music.” To elucidate this surprising reappearance, this reflection highlights the rise of conflict over cultural and moral values, affective polarization, and the personalization of politics. Moreover, the proliferation of social media has eroded the boundary between the public and private sphere and thus propelled the resurgence of privacy-breaching direct action. This interpretive essay compares the special features of revived charivari with its earlier incarnations in premodern times and in the revolutions of the long nineteenth century, and with the internet harassment of the twenty-first century. By analyzing the reappearance of a contentious tactic with premodern roots, this essay seeks to shed light on broader trends of sociopolitical development in the postmodern age.

We examine the changing patterns of knowledge production and diffusion in political science over the past five decades using a dataset of over 200,000 SSCI-indexed research articles from 1970 to 2020. We analyze how author identity and team diversity influence research outputs and outcomes. The results show that historically excluded groups of scholars have gradually improved their representation and expanded their collaboration networks over time. Although the publication gaps are narrowing, obscured gaps in evaluation and citation practices persist. Research specialties with higher proportions of minority researchers tend to have lower average citation impacts. The least cited research specialties are largely studied by women and racial/ethnic minority scholars. Papers written by racial/ethnic minorities and Global South scholars are significantly less cited. However, collaborating with outgroup scholars can effectively overcome this citation gap. We also find that papers written by women receive more citations than those written by men, after controlling for journal prestige and research topics. Furthermore, when we limit our investigation to leading universities, citation gaps diminish. However, scholars of African descent continue to experience entrenched citation disadvantages even if they are affiliated with highly prestigious universities. This study provides multidimensional measurements to advance diversity debates and adds nuances to our understanding of opportunity structures in political science.

Presidents possess vast authority to change policy unilaterally. But their power depends on the compliance of unelected officials, who typically have more information. We examine the conditions under which presidents invest in costly oversight of the bureaucracy. We identify an underlying political process—the polarization of an agent’s potential principals—and argue that because this increases the potential for future policy losses for presidents, they create new means of overseeing agency behavior. To test this argument, we examine abortion restrictions in foreign aid, leveraging archival records and interviews with former officials. Most importantly, this allows us to study prohibitions that were proposed but not adopted. We find that as abortion became an essential part of party competition for the presidency, Republican presidents increased their investment in oversight, which eroded bureaucrats ability to moderate presidential power over abortion abroad.

Inspired by developments in artificial intelligence, space engineering, and genetics, discussion of post-human visions of the future is now widespread, especially in the tech world. This reflective essay analyses various ideological configurations of “transhumanism,” a body of thought centred on the pursuit of radical human improvement through technoscientific intervention. It focuses on the political values and world-making projects transhumanists have advocated since the early twentieth century. We argue that transhumanism constitutes a significant strand of international political thought: transhumanists have articulated extraordinarily ambitious visions of global order. Through analysing the work of key transhumanists from the interwar era to the present, we show that assorted socialist and liberal iterations have aimed to overcome the irrationality of a state-centric international order, with projects ranging from Marxist accounts of a world state to anarcho-capitalist visions of market order through to dreams of space colonization. Analysing transhumanist world-making visions helps to clarify the political ideas underlying current techno-utopian projects and debates about existential risks to humanity.