We identify a rise in educational polarization among members of the US Congress mirroring the educational polarization in the American mass public. Over the past half-century, the percentage of Republican representatives who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15%, and the percentage of similarly educated Republican senators declined from 55% to 35%, while the ranks of elite-educated Democrats rose in both chambers. These changes across the parties have mapped into observable differences in behavior and approaches toward lawmaking. We find that elite-educated legislators are much more liberal in their voting patterns, suggesting a link between the decline in elite-educated Republicans and ideological polarization in Congress. We also demonstrate that, in the House, elite-educated Democrats are especially effective lawmakers, but not so for elite-educated Republicans. In the Senate, we establish a link between the decline of elite-educated Republicans and the rise of partisan warrior “Gingrich Senators.” Overall, these patterns offer initial glimpses into how political elites are being drawn from different educational cohorts, representing an important transition in American governance.

The aspiration of representative democracy is that the legislature will make decisions that reflect what the majority of people want. The US Constitution, however, created a Congress with both majoritarian and counter-majoritarian forces. We study public opinion on 103 important issues on the congressional agenda from 2006 to 2022 using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Congress made decisions that aligned with what the majority of people wanted on 55% of these issues. Analysis of each issue further reveals the circumstances under which Congress represents the majority and the many ways that representation fails. The likelihood that the House passes a bill is usually a reflection of public support for that policy, but Senate passage depends on how divided the public is on the issue and whether party control of the two chambers of Congress is divided. Legislative institutions make it difficult to pass popular bills but even more difficult to pass unpopular ones. As a result, most representational failures occur because Congress failed to pass a popular bill, rather than because it passed a bill that the public did not want.

How and why do armed groups that become known as “rebels” initially use violence? New datasets show that such violence is often small in scale. Numerous empirical examples indicate that it is also often ambiguous—not easily identified as a precursor to anti-state rebellion. This paper seeks to explain these patterns. We argue that a variety of fledgling nonstate armed groups find small-scale, anonymous anti-state violence useful, despite the risks. Therefore, armed groups that later become distinguishable as “rebels” or “bandits” often initially use this similar repertoire of violence. The resulting ambiguity of this violence—for outsiders from states to scholars—presents an opportunity for aspiring rebels, since states struggle to discern the threat they pose. Ambiguity lessens when aspiring rebels opt to use offensive, larger-scale violence. We illustrate our claims with three historical case studies that enable close examination of early armed group violence, as well as 12 brief case vignettes. Our analyses show the promise of integrating research on rebel origins, criminality, and state formation.

What are the consequences of selective emigration from a closed regime? To answer this question, I focus on socialist East Germany and leverage an emigration reform in 1983 that led to the departure of about 65,200 citizens. Analyzing panel data on criminal activity in a difference-in-differences framework, I demonstrate that emigration can be a double-edged sword in contexts where it is restricted. Emigration after the reform had benefits in the short run and came with an initial decline in crime. However, it created new challenges for the regime as time passed. Although the number of ordinary crimes remained lower, border-related political crimes rose sharply in later years. Analysis of emigration-related petitioning links this result to a rise in demand for emigration after the initial emigration wave. These findings highlight the complexities of managing migration flows in autocracies and reveal a key repercussion of using emigration as a safety valve.

Autocrats frequently appeal to socially conservative values, but little is known about how or even whether such strategies are actually paying political dividends. To address important issues of causality, this study exploits Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 2020 bid to gain a popular mandate for contravening presidential term limits in part by bundling this constitutional change with a raft of amendments that would enshrine traditional morality (including heteronormativity and anti-secularism) in Russia’s basic law. Drawing on an original experiment-bearing survey of the Russian population, it finds that Putin’s appeal to these values generated substantial new support for Putin’s reform package, primarily from social conservatives who did not support him politically. These findings expand our understanding of authoritarian practices and policy making by revealing one way in which core political values are leveraged to facilitate autocracy-enabling institutional changes and potentially other ends that autocrats might pursue.

While deplatforming has become an increasingly common strategy to combat online harm and far-right extremism, its effects on the followers of extremist groups—who are key supporters and play a crucial role in spreading and sustaining these ideologies—remain underexplored. On August 10, 2018, Twitter (now X) deplatformed one such far-right extremist group, the Proud Boys, along with their affiliated accounts. Leveraging this intervention, our research addresses a key knowledge gap by examining the impact of deplatforming on the cohesion of extremist group followers. Specifically, we investigate whether deplatforming leads to fragmentation or reinforces unity among the group’s followers. We assess cohesion through three theoretical lenses: task commitment, social commitment, and sense of belonging. By analyzing over 12 million tweets from approximately nine thousand Proud Boys supporters between August 1, 2017, and September 1, 2019, we find that deplatforming had a limited effect on reducing group cohesion. Instead, it may have prompted followers to seek broader networks and external interactions, leaving overall cohesion largely intact. This study offers important insights into the resilience of online extremist communities and the limitations of deplatforming as a strategy to disrupt them. Understanding these dynamics is essential for developing more effective approaches to counter online extremism and promote safer digital spaces.

The Biden-Harris administration launched two important initiatives to expand public participation in the administrative state. These initiatives aimed to increase public engagement in developing federal regulations and reducing burdens in accessing public benefits. These two initiatives built on social science, especially political science. In this piece, I draw from my experience helping to lead the work to describe how political science research informed the design and implementation of both initiatives. I aim to open the “black box” of how federal policy makers use political science research. I also describe future research that could advance these initiatives. I conclude with a case study of such research, examining the barriers faced by food assistance applicants to sharing their experiences with government with a survey of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applicants. The survey points to barriers government must overcome to expand participation among SNAP applicants and strategies policy makers might use to do so.

Over the past two decades, political science has produced varied examples of ethnographic approaches. These approaches have not only tackled epistemological dilemmas but also exposed a second methodological dimension of ethnographic practice that is not so systematically explored: the relationship of researchers to their research participants. In this article, we focus on this second dimension, using emblematic texts in political science, especially in comparative politics, to develop a fourfold typology of political ethnographies that takes into account the emotional dynamics between researchers and participants. We use this typology to analyze various gradations through which these emotional dynamics develop in fieldwork. Focusing on the navigation between distance and proximity that these dynamics entail, we propose the concept of “emotional proximity” to capture relations between the researcher and the participant. We investigate the validity of this novel typology by applying it to ethnographic studies of far-right actors. The political distance separating researchers and participants in these studies allows us to investigate the methodologies of disconnecting political from emotional dynamics across this fourfold schema of ethnographic varieties. We argue that the “infidelity” of emotional distance (instead of proximity) is not an objectivist epistemological necessity but a methodological tool that is indispensable to the practice of participant observation.

Care theorists have had enough. Decades of neoliberalism, followed by financial crisis, austerity, gender backlash, and, in 2020, a worldwide infectious disease pandemic, have clearly tested their patience. The titles alone of three recent books on the ethics and politics of care suggest a change in tone; indeed, “radical,” “revolutionary,” and “manifesto” are generally not words we associate with the scholarship of those interested in the everyday practices of responding to the needs of others. And yet for Maurice Hamington, Lynne Segal, and co-authors Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson, these quotidian practices, and the ethos that underlies them, are more radical than they seem. Indeed, these volumes suggest that a commitment to care—a commitment that is both ideational/ethical and material—is necessary to usher in the kind of politics we so desperately need today. It could be, then, that with their latest books, these authors are edifying and formalizing what we might call the “radical turn” in research on care—a turn that can be roughly said to have begun in 2020 with the Care Collective’s The Care Manifesto (Verso) and the parallel Care Manifesto (Femnet) written by and for women of Africa, Asia, and Latin America a year later.

These three books are strong contributions to contemporary democratic theory. They are, however, very different in tone, intent, and argument and represent a wide range of methodological and philosophical traditions with little overlap. Mary Scudder and Stephen White both draw on a deliberative democracy background with deep roots in Jürgen Habermas’ communicative ethics. They build their arguments in the language of ontology, affective imagery, and aesthetic resonance to paint a picture of the sort of ethos needed to bridge the divide between two competing visions of democracy. Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartzberg offer a more eclectic mix, but rational-choice institutionalism and a type of Madisonian realism certainly feature — as does the postwar no-nonsense pluralism of Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom, and David Truman. In their view, politics is about power and competing interests, and democratic politics is about the regulation of power and competition in the interest of citizens understood as equals. Bargaining is the key to this regulation. Finally, using the precise tools of analytic philosophy, Adam Lovett argues that empirical social science offers clear evidence that American democracy is so compromised that the state loses its moral authority to command obedience. Under these conditions, he contends, philosophic anarchism is the only defensible position.

After the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU) issued new domestic rules across a variety of financial services. Different politics and policy-making processes generated regulatory incompatibilities, and conflicts emerged as each side insisted the other adapt to its approach. Yet our original data covering eleven sub-sectors show that in a predominant cluster of cases, the two jurisdictions had by 2020 made adjustments and adopted integrationist regulation, which fosters cross-jurisdictional interoperability for financial companies through harmonization (increasing similarity and compatibility) or deference (accepting the regulation of other jurisdictions). The pattern has broad and surprising implications for the future of global finance in an era of rising economic nationalism and populist politics. Why, then, did Washington and Brussels move beyond the standoffs? What accounts for the integrationist turn? Our novel explanation features a “mutual accommodation” causal mechanism driven by the development in both jurisdictions of “border-policing” capacities, builds on a new generation of IPE research that is attentive to complexity and temporal process in accounting for global governance outcomes, and provides a pathway for qualitative researchers seeking to balance many new methodological and transparency demands.

In communities throughout Latin America, criminal organizations provide basic order and security. While multidisciplinary research on criminal governance (CG) has illuminated its dynamics in hundreds of site-specific studies, its extent remains understudied. We exploit novel, nationally representative survey data, validated against a compendium of qualitative sources, to estimate CG prevalence in 18 countries, and explore its correlates at multiple levels. Overall, 14% of respondents reported that local criminal groups provide order and/or reduce crime, corresponding to some 77–101 million Latin Americans experiencing CG. Counterintuitively, CG is positively correlated with both respondents’ perceptions of state governance quality and objective measures of local state presence. These descriptive results are consistent with multiple causal pathways, including case-specific findings that state presence—rather than absence—drives criminal governance. We offer suggestions for both more precise data collection on CG itself and, given its pervasiveness, its inclusion in broader research on economic development, demography, and politics.

What is the nature of America’s liberal inheritance? These days, prominent political thinkers—pro-liberals, anti-liberals, and postliberals alike—seem to agree, following Louis Hartz, that American liberalism is individualist, Enlightenment liberalism grounded in Lockean teachings. This is a mistake. We would do better to understand American political thought as defined not just by Enlightenment liberalism but also by Exodus liberalism, the latter of which has been expressed primarily (though not exclusively) in African American political thought. It is in the complex interplay between these two liberal traditions that we can better understand the nature of, and the possibilities for, American liberalism and American politics. This essay tells part of the story of how political scientists came to neglect Exodus liberalism, then envisions a more comprehensive approach to American political thought—a desegregated American political thought.

Following the independence of African countries in the 1960s and 1970s, many newly minted politicians and political scientists who studied them directed their attention to the effects of ethnic identities, heterogeneity, rivalries, and alliances on African politics. In the aftermath of colonial violence and social engineering, ethnic competition contributed to violent secessionist movements, and ethnic hatred sometimes fueled genocide. Many African governments expelled minorities and banned ethnic parties, established federal institutions, and at times adopted nationalist rhetoric to punish rivals or mitigate the deleterious outcomes of ethnic conflict. As Christof Hartmann summarizes, “political regulation of ethnicity has been a core dimension of state-building in Africa” (“Managing Ethnicity in African Politics,” in Nic Cheeseman, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics, 2019: 1).

In the age of post-neoliberal globalization, complex interdependence has resulted in the integration of many economies and the industries within them and led to varied national and subnational political and economic responses. These forces have enabled the rise of a new political economy that requires the contextualized comparative sector approach (CCSA). This article advances a research agenda that contends theoretical and empirical leverage for explaining heterogeneity and assessing generalizability is gained by taking contextualized comparisons to the sector level of analysis. The CCSA identifies the multidimensional effects of sectors, uncovering new sites of inquiry connected to sectoral structural attributes, context-specific sectoral organization of institutions, and social and political constructions of sectors. Sectors are thus contexts that are embedded in multilevel contexts involving state and nonstate actors alike. Scholarship on industrial policy, technology and innovation, environmental transition, and regulation and governance demonstrates the analytical power and theoretical value of combining contextualized comparisons and sectoral analysis, which have been overlooked by the overly macro- or micro-level studies dominant in international and comparative political economy. The various strategies of the approach and a stepwise discussion of a research design underscore the possibilities for theory development and testing, adjudication of competing explanations, and case-specific discoveries.

Since the inception of the United States, religion has long permeated its politics, so much so that racial construction cannot be fully understood without first dissecting America’s cosmological underpinnings. This article maps the founding of ethnic democracy within European modernity and its centrality to the development of the American nation-state. I contend that American ethnic democracy emerges when ethno-racial tyranny expresses itself as white supremacy that is built and sustained through a cosmological justification for its political existence. The political ramifications reveal an unfolding of transhistorical racial terror against the Black as a precondition for ethno-democratic continuity. Nevertheless, contestations against the US ethno-democratic state emerge via the heretical praxis of Black rebels who, through a commitment to subversive belief systems, struggle for Black freedom as a recovery of abolition–democracy.

Despite constituting around 16% of the world’s population, we know little about the extent to which political parties encourage people with disabilities to participate in political parties. This article aims to fill that gap by providing a comparative analysis of political parties in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The research develops a framework for assessing the accessibility of political parties. The research finds evidence of activity in a small number of parties but finds relatively little evidence to suggest that parties are prioritizing this issue, especially when compared with the participation of other social groups. The article argues that we need greater research into the relationship between disability and political parties, concluding with a future research agenda.

This article proposes the creation of constituency juries to enhance accountability and check oligarchy in representative governments. Constituency juries would be made up of randomly selected citizens from an electoral constituency who exercise oversight over that constituency’s elected representative. Elected representatives would be required to give a regular account of their actions to the constituency jury, and the jury would have the power to sanction the representative. In addition to this general model of constituency juries, I offer a more specific institutional design that shows how the general model can be operationalized and realistically incorporated into existing representative governments. In contrast to lottocratic proposals that replace elections with sortition, constituency juries are a promising way to combine the two to address the oligarchic tendencies of elections in representative government.

Calls to defund the police gained prominence with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and take various forms. Depending on what will be defunded, the idea has attracted support from different parts of the political spectrum. The politicized nature of the debate often cuts short reflection on how best to assess proposals to defund the police. This article takes up that task. It begins by developing a typology of defund measures: abolitionist cuts, abolitionist reallocation, disaggregative cuts, and disaggregative reallocation. It then outlines a framework to evaluate policing and defund measures, drawing on criteria from the ethics of defensive force. Since policing relies on force, it faces a high justificatory bar and must satisfy the principles of just aim, proportionality, and necessity. The state should not fund unjustified forms of policing that violate those principles. Different violations, though, demand different policy responses.