At the turn of the twentieth century, most cities in America featured a patronage-based system of governance, but over the next few decades, patronage was replaced by civil service. Civil service restructured the relationship between elected officials and government employees, with employees benefiting from a variety of new protections. Yet in studying this change, scholars have largely ignored the role local employees themselves might have played in the transformation. We argue that city employees stood to benefit from civil service, and in places where they had agency and clout, they were important drivers of its adoption. We collected a dataset for more than 1,000 municipal governments, determining whether and when they adopted civil service and whether their employees were organized in an occupational organization. Our analysis of these new data shows the influence of city employees was an important contributor to the spread of civil service in American local government.

We revise the conventional wisdom that Africa’s international borders were drawn arbitrarily. Europeans knew very little about most of Africa in the mid-1880s, but their self-interested goals of amassing territory prompted intensive examination of on-the-ground conditions as they formed borders. Europeans negotiated with African rulers to secure treaties and to learn about historical state frontiers, which enabled Africans to influence the border-formation process. Major water bodies, which shaped precolonial civilizations and trade, also served as focal points. We find support for these new theoretical implications using two original datasets. Quantitatively, we analyze border-location correlates using grid cells and an original spatial dataset on precolonial states. Qualitatively, we compiled information from treaties and diplomatic histories to code causal process observations for every bilateral border. Historical political frontiers directly affected 62% of all bilateral borders. Water bodies, often major ones, comprised the primary border feature much more frequently than straight lines.

Congressional observers have long been interested in the distinction between legislative “workhorses” and “showhorses.” However, when scholars operationalize this by measuring legislator productivity, they often neglect many realities of modern lawmaking by focusing on the traditional bill sponsorship and passage process. To better align measurement with practice, we compile widely available data on bill sponsorship, cosponsorship, and amendments; we also use text-as-data methods to credit instances of behind-the-scenes lawmaking via text reuse between bills. We weight achievements from each of these lawmaking methods to create the Lawmaking Productivity Metric for House Members of the 101–113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship provides important insights about who the congressional workhorses are. In particular, we find that traditional measures systematically undercount the legislative successes of women and likely Black Members of Congress because they disproportionately legislate in less visible ways.

We develop State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for state legislators across 97 legislative chambers over recent decades, based on the number of bills that they sponsor, how far those bills move through the lawmaking process, and their substantive importance. We assess the scores through criterion and construct validation and reveal new insights into effective lawmaking across legislators. We then offer two illustrations of the immense opportunities that these scores provide for new scholarship on legislative behavior. First, we demonstrate greater majority-party influence over lawmaking in states featuring ideological polarization and majority-party cohesion, and where there is greater electoral competition for chamber control. Second, we show how institutional design choices—from legislative rules to the scope of professionalization—affect the distributions of policymaking power from state to state.

In recent decades, the term “politics” has become almost synonymous with conflict. Results from eight studies show that individuals averse to conflict tend to select out of surveys and discussions explicitly labeled as “political.” This suggests that the inferences researchers draw from “political” surveys, as well as the impressions average Americans draw from explicitly “political” discussions, will be systematically biased toward conflict. We find little evidence that these effects can be attenuated by emphasizing deliberative norms. However, conflict averse individuals are more willing to discuss ostensibly political topics such as the economy, climate change, and racial inequality, despite reluctance to discuss “politics” explicitly. Moreover, they express greater interest in politics when it is defined in terms of laws and policies and debate is deemphasized. Overall, these findings suggest the expectation of conflict may have a self-fulfilling effect, as contexts deemed explicitly “political” will be composed primarily of conflict seekers.

This article is the first comprehensive treatment of countermajoritarian roll call outcomes in the U.S. Senate, 1789–2022. Divergences from majoritarian principles are rooted in part in malapportionment and equal representation by state. Roll calls where a majority of the chamber votes one way while the other side represents most of the U.S. population are frequent across Senate history, depending on the proportion of the population covered by the majority party and the degree of conflict in the agenda. Other departures from majoritarian principles derive from the presence of supermajority requirements within the chamber. Such decision thresholds likewise are prevalent across Senate history, with significant increases since the 1970s. Although the two sources of countermajoritarian potential tend to be mutually reinforcing, under certain conditions they work against one another. The partisan impact varies over time, but in the modern chamber, Republicans have benefited more from Senate countermajoritarianism than have Democrats.

The profession has been increasing efforts to ensure ethical research in politics and international relations (IR) with robust institutional review procedures. But this ethics turn has not been evaluated systematically to date. Drawing on two original datasets that record reporting on the ethical practices of research in key political science and IR journals (2000–18), we analyze how scholars report on ethics of research involving human participants as well as archival, social media, and textual data from the perspective of feminist ethics of care. We find that women report ethics more than men, women and men report on different dimensions of ethics, and these differences are starker at the intersection of gender and method. We identify a new dimension of gender-based inequality in the profession which, we argue, stems from voluntary practices of ethics reporting that persist globally in academic publications. An agreed international standard of reporting research ethics is needed.

U.S. homesteading has been linked to establishing federal sovereignty over western lands threatened by the Confederacy, foreign powers, and the Indian Wars in the last half of the nineteenth century. However, the bulk of homesteading actually took place in the early twentieth century, long after these threats to federal ownership ceased. We argue that this “late homesteading” was also an effort to enforce federal rights, but in response to a different threat—a legal one. Questionable federal land policies in the late nineteenth century dispossessed massive amounts of Indigenous lands, and exposed the federal government to legal, rather than violent, conflict. Late homesteading was used to make the dispossession permanent, even in cases where a legal defeat eventually occurred. Examining the qualitative evidence, and using data on the universe of individual homesteads and federal land cessions across the 16 western states, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis.

This study addresses the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians “crying wolf” over fake news. Strategic and false claims that stories are fake news or deepfakes may benefit politicians by helping them maintain support after a scandal. We posit that this benefit, known as the “liar’s dividend,” may be achieved through two politician strategies: by invoking informational uncertainty or by encouraging oppositional rallying of core supporters. We administer five survey experiments to over 15,000 American adults detailing hypothetical politician responses to stories describing real politician scandals. We find that claims of misinformation representing both strategies raise politician support across partisan subgroups. These strategies are effective against text-based reports of scandals, but are largely ineffective against video evidence and do not reduce general trust in media. Finally, these false claims produce greater dividends for politicians than alternative responses to scandal, such as remaining silent or apologizing.

Why are democratic publics reluctant to use force against fellow democracies? We hypothesize that the democratic peace in public opinion owes, in large part, to racialized assumptions about democracy. Rather than regime type per se doing the causal work, the term “democracy” inadvertently primes the presumption that target countries are predominantly white. This implicit racialization, in turn, explains the reluctance of the American public to support aggression against fellow democracies, most notably among respondents higher in ethnocentrism who disproportionately drive the democratic peace treatment effect. Two original survey experiments, a large-scale word embedding analysis of English texts, and reanalyses of published studies support this expectation. Our results suggest that the democratic peace in public opinion is, largely, an ethnocentric and racialized peace. The findings hold implications for the role of racism and racialization in foreign policy opinion research generally.

To what extent do peers affect criminal behavior? In this article, I study peer effects among ex-combatants in Colombia. Following a theoretical framework that differentiates the impact of economic conditions from that of social networks, I rely on individual-level data on over 16,000 former paramilitaries in Colombia to study the relationship between illegal gold production and recidivism. I show that when the economic benefits of illegal sectors increase, ex-combatants favor criminal activities. More importantly, I show that an increase in wartime peers’ criminality increases an ex-combatant’s criminal activity. I complement these results with the analysis of an original survey about the social connections of ex-combatants and explore the potential effect of tackling wartime networks as a policy to reduce crime after conflicts.

To safeguard peace in multi-ethnic countries, scholars and practitioners recommend territorial autonomy. However, there is limited cross-national research on how autonomy affects subnational ethnic conflict, and increasing concern that it redirects ethnic violence from the national to the subnational level. Addressing this gap, I argue that autonomy generates tensions over subnational government control and the distribution of local economic goods. However, whether these turn violent depends on ethnic representation in the central government. If groups are unequally represented, violent escalation is more likely due to information and commitment problems and subnational majoritarianism. To test these arguments, I provide new time-variant data on subnational boundaries, territorial autonomy, and ethnically attributed violence. I conduct a systematic analysis of all multi-ethnic countries between 1989 and 2019, instrumental variable analyses, and tests of my argument’s intermediate implications. My findings underline the importance of complementing autonomy with inclusive central governments to attenuate the risks of subnational violence.

Scholars have long questioned whether and how courts influence society. We contribute to this debate by investigating the ability of judicial decisions to shape issue attention and affect toward courts in media serving the LGBTQ+ community. To do so, we compiled an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases over an extended period covering major decisions, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003), and Lofton v. Secretary of Department of Children & Family Services (2004). We argue these cases influence the volume and tone of LGBTQ+ media coverage. Combining computational social science techniques with qualitative analysis, we find increased attention to same-sex marriage after the decisions in Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton, and the coalescence of discussions of courts around same-sex marriage after Lawrence. We also show how LGBTQ+ media informed readers about the political and legal implications of struggles over marriage equality.

What are the psychological, social, and political legacies of sexual violence in armed conflicts? While conventional wisdom expects the exclusion of survivors from their societies due to stigma, we advance a theory of sociopolitical mobilization among wartime sexual violence survivors and their households. Our theory emphasizes the value that people place on their communities in conflict-affected contexts and incorporates the psychosocial harms that survivor-households experience as well as their agency. We use an original survey from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to evaluate the theory. Analyses using list experiment measures of wartime sexual violence show that survivor-households engage in increased levels of social and political activities in their communities. Auxiliary analyses suggest that mobilization is driven by stigmatization and self-blame, a finding that resonates with social psychological research on exclusion and social reconnection.

Social movements often appeal to the politics of sight, meaning that if people knew about a given injustice, political transformation would follow. Jasmine English and Bernardo Zacka articulate two central premises of the politics of sight: “(1) exposing morally repugnant practices will make us see them, (2) seeing such practices will stop us from acquiescing to them.” Considering the case of slaughterhouse workers, Timothy Pachirat and English and Zacka challenge the previous premises. This article complements their contributions by theorizing what I call Western conceptuality/language and the role this plays in forming our subjectivities not to recognize violence on the one hand, and to be sovereign masters over animals on the other. I conclude by discussing the political implications of these arguments for the politics of sight, including the role of concealment and exposure, and the conditions needed for humans to see animals in their full ethical weight.

We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. We find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. We also show that corruption adversely affects the provision of public goods and undermines counter-terrorism capacity. Thus, our empirical findings are consistent with predictions from a game-theoretical representation of terrorism, according to which corruption makes terrorism relatively more attractive compared to peaceful contestation, while also decreasing the costs of organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks.

We provide the first evidence that firms, not just voters, are gerrymandered. We compare allocations of firms in enacted redistricting plans to counterfactual distributions constructed using simulation methods. We find that firms are over-allocated to districts held by the mapmakers’ party when partisans control the redistricting process; maps drawn by courts and independent commissions allocate firms more proportionately. Our results hold when we account for the gerrymandering of seats: fixing the number of seats the mapmakers’ party wins, they obtain more firms than expected in their districts. Our research reveals that partisan mapmakers target more than just voters, shedding new light on the link between corporate and political power in the United States and opening new pathways for studying how mapmakers actually draw district boundaries.

This study examines how protesters’ gender shapes public reactions to protests and protest repression. Using an original survey experiment, I demonstrate that protests involving extensive participation by women are perceived as less violent and meriting of repression than male-dominated protests. But perceptions of female protesters vary. Patriarchy-defiant female protesters like feminists are deemed more deserving of repression despite being perceived as equally likely to be peaceful as female protesters who emphasize patriarchy-compliant femininities, such as women who highlight their roles as mothers and wives. This, I show, is because patriarchy-defiant women are viewed as more immoral, which renders their protest accounts less trustworthy when they clash with government propaganda seeking to legitimize repression. These findings underscore the value of disaggregating the binary category of man or woman when examining sentiments toward political agents and of considering stereotypes when studying perceptions, and ultimately the risks and effectiveness, of protest movements.