Climate Politics

One of the most important challenges facing the world today is climate change. Why does state decision-making lag behind the demands of this global challenge, and how does this differ across polities? Under what conditions can citizens, social movements, and business leaders effectively push for green policies? The three articles in this section take on these and other pressing questions with a range of methods and cases, yielding both theoretical contributions and policy implications.

“The Fossil-Fueled Roots of Climate Inaction in Authoritarian Regimes” opens the section by investigating why some autocracies contribute more to climate change than others. William Kakenmaster argues that fossil fuel wealth can hinder climate action because authoritarian executives often attempt to capture rents to aid their maintenance of power. However, institutions that provide oversight on executive action may restrict rent-seeking and thereby limit the extent to which authoritarianism leads to climate inaction. Kakenmaster evaluates this argument using quantitative analysis of panel data from 108 countries governed by authoritarian regimes from 1990 to 2021. He finds that oil and gas income was associated with higher levels of emissions among authoritarian regimes, suggesting that fossil fuel wealth leads to diminished climate action efforts. Nevertheless, the effect of fossil fuel wealth on emissions was significantly lower in autocracies with constrained executives. These findings encourage future work integrating literatures on the political economy of climate change, natural resource governance, and political institutions to explore how emissions do or do not vary both within and between regime types.

Institutional constraints shape climate policy at the state level, but public opinion also plays a critical role in determining the political feasibility of climate action. “Scaling Dialogue for Democracy: Can Automated Deliberation Create More Deliberative Voters,” tests whether AI-facilitated deliberation can influence participants’ views and voting behavior using climate change as a case study. James Fishkin, Valentin Bolotnyy, Joshua Lerner, Alice Siu, and Norman Bradburn analyze the results of an experiment with nearly 1,000 participants in the United States, comparing the attitudes of those who engaged in AI-moderated deliberations on climate change with those who did not. They find that those who participated in deliberation changed their views on 66 out of 72 substantive climate-related questions, often showing increased concern and support for mitigation policies. Despite the polarized nature of climate change, participants became more inclined to support Democratic candidates in congressional elections, attributing greater importance to climate change in their voting decisions. These findings challenge recent skepticism in democratic theory by demonstrating that AI-assisted online deliberation can potentially scale participatory processes and positively impact democratic engagement. The authors suggest that such technologies hold promise for enhancing voter deliberation and informing future democratic practices, thereby advancing both the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. At the same time, the study offers insights into climate politics by showing that structured deliberation can meaningfully shift public attitudes on climate policy.

While public opinion and voting behavior shape climate policy, collective action is also crucial for contesting and influencing policy implementation. The next study shifts focus to how social movements mobilize against environmental threats at the local level. In “Social Movements and Climate Adaptation: The Provincial Politics of Coastal Reclamation in Indonesia,” Ryan Tans examines movements that oppose the infilling of coastal waters and wetlands, a practice that deepens coastal communities’ vulnerability to climate change. Tans argues that a key factor conditioning these movements’ political effectiveness is their ability to mobilize broader coalitions, which in turn is constrained by the stances of political, economic, and communal elites. A controlled comparison of movements in Bali and Makassa, Indonesia illustrates that fragmentation among elites in their support of reclamation projects creates potential for movements to build economically diverse, cross-class coalitions; by contrast, where elites share support for creating new land from oceans and seas, activists opposed to that practice must build movements that are geographically expansive, but ultimately class-based. The study elucidates the processes through which local political conditions can undermine national-level movement building, suggesting how a multi-level conceptualization of political opportunity can enhance understanding of social movement outcomes in cases of climate activism and beyond.

Women and Politics

The politics of gender in general, and the study of women in particular, is important for all subfields of political science. This special section features articles from comparative politics, international relations, and political theory to demonstrate how bringing gender into our analyses can shed light on the pursuit of women’s rights and equality and also how examining women’s rights and equality can increase understanding of a range of other important political phenomena.

Beginning the section, Zachary P. Dickson expands our understanding of voter responsiveness and legislative behavior by documenting how they vary by gender. In “The Gender Gap in Elite-Voter Responsiveness Online,” the author asks whether men and women representatives respond differently on social media to changes in issue salience among men and women in the electorate. Analyzing nearly 400 bi-weekly public opinion surveys in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as over three million Twitter posts from representatives in both countries, Dickson shows that both men and women legislators give overall less attention to issues that are salient for women voters than they do for issues salient for men voters. However, women legislators help to diminish the gender gap by providing greater responsiveness to changes in the salience of issues among all their constituents, regardless of gender. In clarifying the disparities faced by women voters and the importance of women legislators in addressing these inequalities, this paper indicates paths forward for women in politics in the digital age. It also contributes to understandings of elite-voter responsiveness by bringing in the new perspective from social media and providing insight into individual responsiveness as a dynamic process in real time.

Shifting to the international domain, Kyosuke Kikuta and Manaho Hanayama use the case of women’s rights activism to balance the international relations literature on naming and shaming with what they call “prize and praise.” In “The Nobel Peace Prize Increased the Global Support for Women’s Organizations: Prize and Praise in International Relations,” they hypothesize that selecting women’s rights activists for international awards can serve to reassure, persuade, and pressure people to trust women’s rights activists, in general. They make use of an as-if random coincidence between the timing of Nobel Peace Prize announcements and waves of the World Value Survey across fourteen countries and find that when this prize was awarded to women’s rights activists, respondents’ trust in women’s organizations increased, though the effect was not long-lasting. Awarding of the prize to women’s rights activists also correlated with a decrease in reported incidents of violence against women, whether by effecting an actual reduction of violence or in pressuring media not to relay that negative news. This research encourages further investigations into the mechanisms through which positive symbolic actions can have real-world effects, as well as how the international community can prolong and deepen these changes to boost popular support for women’s rights.

Finally, “The Antidemocratic Harms of Mansplaining,” moves us from empirical studies to political theory. Laura Montanaro delves into “mansplaining”: the insidious dynamic in which a man explains things to a woman that she already understands, assuming that she lacks the man’s knowledge because she is a woman. Upon clarifying the meaning of the concept, Montanaro draws from women’s experiences to identify two categories of mansplaining and examine how each harms democracy. Expertise-based mansplaining does not recognize women’s expertise and thus poses a collective epistemic harm to the collective decision-making process. Experience-based mansplaining does not include women’s experiences and thereby causes the relational harm of political exclusion. This intervention, highlighting mansplaining’s collective and relational harms, demonstrates the limits of existing literature on mansplaining that predominantly uses the framework of epistemic injustice and emphasizes harms that are only individual and epistemic. By setting the problem of mansplaining against democracy’s norms of inclusion, equality, and status recognition, Montanaro highlights how mansplaining results in inequality and misrecognition, and thereby undermines the political voice, efficacy, trust, and reciprocity required for democratic deliberation. This paper offers a model for further theoretical work on acts by which men refute and restate women’s claims and also offers a guide for empirical work analyzing both these behaviors and their consequences.

Democracy

This section explores how democracies emerge and evolve, focusing on transitions between democratic and autocratic regimes, as well as how democracies function and how they can be improved. Considering issues such as mode of democratization, territorial reach, social capital, deliberative processes, and citizens’ preferences, these studies shed light onto the processes that drive democratic change and the mechanisms that sustain and enhance democratic practices.

In “Multilevel Regime Decoupling: The Territorial Dimension of Autocratization and Contemporary Regime Change,” Javier Pérez Sandoval asks how scholars can conceptualize and observe multilevel regime change. The author introduces the novel concept of multilevel regime decoupling (MRD), where democracy can advance at one territorial level while eroding at another. Using quantitative data from the V-Dem Dataset covering 1990–2022, Pérez Sandoval demonstrates that MRD is increasingly common across world regions and may become the dominant type of regime change if trends continue. The paper also examines MRD through case studies of South Africa and the United States (examples of territorial decoupling) and Italy and India (examples of coupled democratization or autocratization), showing how MRD can occur in diverse political, institutional, and socioeconomic contexts. These findings challenge the assumption that regime change is territorially uniform and contribute to the literature on democratic backsliding and subnational politics. They also highlight directions for future research, including the effects of MRD on democratic or autocratic resilience and the political conditions likely to produce (de)coupled changes. It also calls for improvements in the data and methods needed to compare democracy across territorial levels, emphasizing the importance of incorporating territorial dimensions into the study of regime change.

“How Civil Resistance Improves Inclusive Democracy” explores why some transitions to democracy advance inclusion for historically excluded groups while others do not. Subindra Bogati, Titik Firawati, Jonathan Pinckney, and Ches Thurber argue that the mode of transition matters: democratization initiated through unarmed civil resistance campaigns leads to greater political inclusiveness than other types of transitions. The authors propose three mechanisms to explain this advantage: civil resistance elevates leaders from marginalized groups, fosters social capital and mobilization, and transforms political norms to embrace pluralism. Using statistical analysis of 315 political transitions between 1945 and 2014, the authors find that transitions driven by mass civil resistance campaigns consistently result in greater post-transition inclusion for groups excluded on the basis of gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as higher scores on an aggregate index of inclusion. Their findings highlight the long-term effects of civil resistance, particularly in broadening participation and empowering marginalized groups through leadership opportunities and mobilization. While data limitations prevent them from testing the third mechanism—civil resistance’s transformation of political norms—their analysis underscores the importance of grassroots mobilization in not only advancing democracy but also addressing structural inequalities that perpetuate exclusion.

Shifting from the generation of democratic systems to their functioning, Adelin-Costin Dumitru examines how social capital, a crucial yet often overlooked foundation of republicanism, can be generated and sustained to support institutional stability and foster civic virtue. In “Forging the Resistive Republic: Social Capital, Institutional Stability, and Civic Virtue in Pluralist Democracies,” Dumitru draws on Elinor Ostrom’s concept of polycentric governance, a decentralized system of overlapping authorities and decision-making arenas that facilitates the creation and regeneration of social capital by fostering trust, cooperation, and mutual accountability among diverse groups. The author argues that polycentric governance strengthens social capital and, in turn, enables the development of civic virtue—a core concept in republican theory—by creating environments where individuals engage collectively in the pursuit of the public good. The paper contends that republican ideals need not rely solely on the state; instead, polycentric governance can enhance social capital, thereby strengthening a “resistive republic” capable of resisting domination. Dumitru further argues that republican institutions and policies can actively bolster social capital by fostering arenas for interaction, amplifying civic voice, and offering participants opportunities to opt out. Drawing on insights from Institutional Analysis and Development studies inspired by Ostrom, the paper demonstrates how polycentric governance can help realize the contestatory republic envisioned by republican theorists. In addition to advancing republican political theory by emphasizing the role of social capital in sustaining republican institutions, the study enriches political science by illustrating the importance of bridging political theory with empirical research.

In “Citizens’ Preferences for Multidimensional Representation,” Jack Blumenau, Fabio Wolkenstein, and Christopher Wratil take us from social capital to representation. The authors examine the types of representation citizens value, the socio-demographic factors that shape these preferences, and their impact on perceptions of representation. They propose a framework distinguishing six dimensions of representation, including two novel ones: surrogation (representation beyond constituencies) and justification (accountability through reasoning). Using original measurement instruments and a conjoint survey experiment conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, they find that citizens’ representation preferences vary significantly depending on factors such as age, ethnicity, race, political interest, and satisfaction with democracy. On average, citizens value substantive representation—advancing constituents’ policy preferences—more highly than responsiveness to electoral sanctions. Citizens also prioritize independence from party over descriptive representation, though the latter is more valued by historically marginalized groups. These findings challenge traditional assumptions about representation and open new avenues for research, including understanding group-specific preferences, examining non-electoral relationships between voters and representatives, and reevaluating the importance of electoral sanctioning, which appears less significant to citizens.

Bureaucracy

How have different polities understood bureaucracies? What drives the state’s decision to expand its administrative reach to specific regions? Why and when do presidents invest resources in limiting bureaucratic authority? The papers in this section explore these distinct aspects of bureaucracies, illuminating the historical significance of bureaucrats, the central role bureaucracies play in the expansion of state authority, and their vital importance in public goods provision and policy implementation—while also revealing the tensions that can arise between bureaucrats and other powerful actors.

In “The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory: Administrative Labor in the ‘Other Half’ of the History of Political Thought,” Douglas I. Thompson critiques the traditional neglect of bureaucracy in political theory, which he attributes to the discipline’s focus on Athenian democracy as the origin of political thought. Thompson argues that bureaucratic practices in ancient Mesopotamia were foundational to early political theory, providing a long-overlooked genealogy of public administration. By analyzing some of the earliest recorded reflections on governance, he demonstrates how administrative labor was viewed not merely as a practical necessity but also as a creative and even divine force capable of building cities, organizing trade, and shaping social and political systems. This perspective challenges modern negative stereotypes of bureaucracy and highlights its historical role in fostering collaborative governance. In addition, the article advocates for a new research agenda in political theory, one that traces the importance of public administration across the history of political ideas. Recognizing administrative labor as central to the five-thousand-year history of political societies, Thompson argues, can counter contemporary populist rhetoric that undermines trust in bureaucratic systems, while offering new insights into the relationship between administration and democracy.

While Thompson explores the historical roots of bureaucracy, Maximiliano Véjares examines the contemporary dynamics of state-building, investigating how states selectively expand their bureaucratic reach across subnational regions. In “Varieties of State-Building: Ecology, Clientelism, and Bureaucratic Rule in Chile,” the author argues that rulers strategically decide whether and how to expand the state’s presence based on a region’s ecology, clientelistic ties, and the military strength of local elites. Though rulers prioritize state expansion in regions with abundant resources and favorable geography, the type of bureaucratic rule established depends on whether local elites can mount credible military resistance. Where local elites lack such threats, imposed bureaucratic rule emerges, replacing regional administration through state force. Conversely, where local elites possess credible military power, rulers adopt bureaucratic cooperation, devolving authority and rights to these elites. In less resource-rich regions, the state often refrains from expansion, resulting in patrimonial cooperation and enabling local allies to maintain high autonomy and preferential access to public goods. Alternatively, rulers can also implement patrimonial reinforcement in regions where clientelistic ties enable the creation of state enclaves. Drawing on spatial, census, and budgetary data, Véjares illustrates this theoretical framework by analyzing Chile’s nineteenth-century state-building process. Results reveal a selective and uneven expansion of state authority, challenging Chile’s reputation as a model of even state power in Latin America. This theoretical account and findings point to new avenues for research at the intersection of the study of state-building, democratization, and public goods provision.

Shifting focus from state-building to the dynamics between executives and bureaucracies, Kenneth Lowande and Ignangeli Salinas-Muñiz close this section by investigating the conditions under which presidents invest in oversight of the bureaucracy. In “When Presidents Limit Bureaucratic Power: Evidence from Abortion Bans in Foreign Aid,” the authors analyze U.S. foreign policy on reproductive rights since the 1960s and argue that presidents are more likely to exert oversight when their preferences conflict with those of bureaucrats and when heightened polarization among other political actors increases the risk of policy losses. Drawing on archival evidence and elite interviews with former USAID officials, Lowande and Muñiz illustrate how presidents can unilaterally constrain the authority of federal agencies to align policy implementation with their preferences. This research deepens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the executive branch and the bureaucracy in the United States, showing how executive power is used to influence policy outcomes. These findings contribute to the literatures on presidential power, bureaucratic oversight, and the separation of powers, as well as scholarship on abortion policy and U.S. foreign relations within the research program on American political development.

The Politics of Political Science Knowledge Production

Many articles in Perspectives, including the lead section of our editorial team’s inaugural December 2024 issue, think deeply about the science of political science. In this special section, we instead cast a spotlight on the politics of political science. Three articles examine how political contexts shape research, as well as how scholars’ own identities and positionality within structures of power affect how they produce research and how that research is recognized by others.

Opening the section, “Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline” places the discipline in a larger political setting to examine how American state-building shaped the development of political science through the funding priorities of the National Science Foundation (NSF). To that end, Tamir Moustafa builds the original Political Science Awards Dataset, which contains a systematic award-level record of 2,962 NSF-funded projects throughout political science from 1965 to 2020. This data reveals that nearly 95 percent of the NSF Political Science Program’s funds were allocated to research employing quantitative, experimental, or formal methods, while the remainder went to qualitative research projects. Seeking to explain this striking skew, Moustafa turns to analyze archival records, which indicate that the NSF Political Science Program funding was shaped by both the political context of congressional appropriations and the expectations of the natural sciences-dominated NSF leadership. This multi-method study helps political scientists better understand the political forces underlying the production of disciplinary knowledge, urging both more research in this domain and more awareness of these dynamics — and their implications — among members of the profession.

Turning from contexts to identities, “Multidimensional Diversity and Research Impact in Political Science: What 50 Years of Bibliometric Data Tell Us” assesses disparities in the production, reproduction, and evaluation of disciplinary knowledge, as well as how they vary by authors’ intersectional identities. Carrying out multivariate regression models on a dataset of more than 200,000 research articles from 1970 to 2020, Yuner Zhu and Edmund W. Cheng examine publication gaps (the degree to which articles authored by historically excluded scholars are disproportionately sorted into lower-tier journals); within-journal citation gaps (the disparity in citation counts between historically excluded authors and their majority counterparts when their works are published in the same journals); and evaluation gaps (the degree to which minority-concentrated topics receive fewer citations than majority-concentrated topics). Results point positively to political science’s increasing diversification but also highlight continued inequalities that are more subtle because they entail covert forms of devaluation. This reflection essay illustrates the value of a disaggregated approach to assessing gender, racial/ethnic, and geographic inequalities across the discipline, encouraging ongoing nuance on these questions.

Finally, “‘Like Us, but Not Quite Us’: Researching Gender Politics in Autocratic Contexts” delves into the specific ways in which researchers’ identities interact with their subject matter to influence the very process of doing research. Nermin Allam argues that, in hypermasculinized, patriarchal, and oppressive regimes, feminist researchers carrying out fieldwork face ethical dilemmas, logistical challenges, and difficult epistemological questions. Seven semi-structured interviews with feminist political scientists who were born and raised in the Middle East or North Africa but are now based at Western academic institutions examine the impact of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and researchers’ own insider/outsider positionality upon the research process and the knowledge to which it gives rise. Allam’s analysis finds that researching gender politics is a contentious topic that puts researchers on the radar of the state; for scholars from the region, the issue is compounded by the fact that regimes in their country of origin sometimes view them as traitors tarnishing the image of the government. Within the broader society, furthermore, the politics of representation and gendered restrictions on researchers’ mobility within the field can impose other limitations and expectations on female scholars. The article expands our understanding of the interplay between identity politics, fieldwork practices, and knowledge production, providing direction for the exploration of these dynamics in other complex political and social settings.