What are the determinants of ethnic violence? Existing research has forwarded a range of often competing explanations, from political opportunism to economic competition to state incapacity. We argue that this diversity of accounts is attributable, in part, to scholars’ tendency to lump together distinct forms of ethnic violence that have different underlying determinants. We propose that scholars instead disaggregate ethnic violence and put forward a typology based on the target of the attack (properties vs. individuals) and whether assailants use arms. We demonstrate the utility of this typology by applying it to an original dataset of ethnic attacks against Christians in Egypt from 2013 to 2018. In addition to a set of shared factors, we find that unarmed attacks against property (“burnings”) are the product of political mobilization, unarmed attacks against individuals (“beatings”) are related to socioeconomic tensions, and armed attacks (“bombings”) follow the strategic logic of terrorist violence.

Censorship is one of the main forms of political coercion deployed by modern states to control and regulate public expression. In this article, we examine the political censorship of China’s intellectual public space, which has long been underexplored. We apply unsupervised machine learning to examine the database of a leading intellectual portal website, which serves as an archive of both published and censored intellectual writings between 2000 and 2020 and includes over 740 million Chinese characters. We identify a strategic censorship mechanism that consists of thematic and persona censorship elements. Thematic censorship involves the state filtering out writing that competes with the official policy narrative, historiography, and values. Persona censorship involves the complete muting of individual intellectuals who have previously made derogatory attacks on the supreme leaders of the Communist Party, which represents a symbolic act of open defiance.

Immigration and growing diversity have been linked with pathologies such as lower social capital, the rise of authoritarian populists, intergroup conflict, and perhaps the breakdown of democracy itself. At the heart of this complex is a question relating to migration and political culture: whether immigration erodes the attitudes that sustain and legitimize democratic political systems. This paper takes a time-series, cross-sectional approach to this question by analyzing the effects of a comprehensive set of measures of immigration on dynamic estimates of trust in democratic institutions, satisfaction with democracy, and democratic support from 30 European countries. The results show that immigration does not undermine any of these forms of public support for political systems. Indeed, under some circumstances, immigration may increase public trust in democratic institutions.

Why do some conspiracy theories (CTs) remain popular and continue to spread on social media while others quickly fade away? Situating conspiracy theories within the literature on social movements, we propose and test a new theory of how enduring CTs maintain and regain popularity online. We test our theory using an original, hand-coded dataset of 5,794 tweets surrounding a divisive and regularly commemorated set of CTs in Poland. We find that CTs that cue in-group and out-group threats garner more retweets and likes than CT tweets lacking this rhetoric. Surprisingly, given the extant literature on party leaders’ ability to shape political attitudes and behaviors, we find that ruling party tweets endorsing CTs gain less engagement than CT tweets from non-officials. Finally, when a CT’s main threat frames are referenced in current events, CTs re-gain popularity on social media. Given the centrality of CTs to populist rule, these results offer a new explanation for CT popularity—one focused on the conditions under which salient threat frames strongly resonate.

The political implications of population aging for democratic systems are fundamental. Questions of democratic legitimacy are raised as the political equilibrium between the generations is upended. Drawing on evidence from liberal democracies with a focus on Japan, the democracy with the oldest electorate, we identify and analyze three demographic effects on the political system: participation effects deriving from younger voters’ marginalization among the electorate; representation effects demonstrated by the dominance of elderly lawmakers inside the parliament and government; and policy effects manifesting in a preference for policies catering to an aging majority. By breaking down these key effects and contextualizing them in broader debates of political demography, we call attention to the normative repercussions of the interplay between demography and democracy and make a case for enhanced generational pluralism.

For many decades, scholars assumed voluntary compliance and citizens’ commitment to a regime’s principles and values to be critical for regime stability. A growing literature argues that indoctrination is essential to achieve this congruence. However, the absence of a clear definition and comprehensive comparative measures of indoctrination have hindered systematic research on such issues. In this paper, we fill this gap by synthesizing literature across disciplines to clarify the concept of indoctrination, focusing particularly on the politicization of education and the media. We then outline how the abstract concept can be operationalized, and introduce and validate an original expert-coded dataset on indoctrination that covers 160 countries from 1945 to the present. The dataset should facilitate a new generation of empirical inquiry on the causes and consequences of indoctrination.

In any healthy democracy, myriad policy issues compete for the public’s attention. Most remain on the periphery of politics, either because they achieve salience only in narrow communities of interest or because they grab headlines only for brief periods of time. But sometimes issues become what we term “durable attention items”—they capture public attention and sustain it over many years. Why? We focus on one such newly durable issue—gun control in the United States. Using an original dataset of roughly 4,500 letters to the editor over a 40-year period, we demonstrate that this once-episodic issue, long dominated by a narrow constituency of pro-gun advocates, has become a mainstay of mass politics. We show that the gun issue’s growing agenda status is due entirely to pro-regulation people mobilized by a combination of contextual factors, namely regularized mass shootings and efforts to relax gun policy, working in tandem with partisan polarization. Besides offering novel evidence of a fundamental shift in American gun politics, the study contributes to our theoretical understanding of how episodic issues come to command consistent political engagement over the long term.

While the origins and consequences of populist attitudes in adults are being studied extensively, it is still unknown when populist attitudes might emerge in a person’s life. Drawing on the existing literature on political socialization, we focus on populist attitudes during adolescence and explore the contributing role of negative relationships with parents, peers, and teachers. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of populist attitudes among a representative sample of children aged 12 to 18 (mean: 14.66 years) using a unique dataset gathered through interviews conducted in schools in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland (n=3,123). Our findings reveal a strong association between perceived unjust teacher behavior and the level of populist attitudes in adolescents, while the connection of peers and parents with populist attitudes appears to be limited. Further analyses using panel data from the UK support these findings.

To what extent do countries protect the rights of transgender people? How does this differ from legal protections countries offer sexual orientation minorities? What conditions are beneficial for advancing trans rights? Limitations in data availability and accessibility make answering these types of trans-specific questions difficult. To address this shortcoming, I introduce a new dataset. The Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP) provides insight into the legal situations transgender people faced in 173 countries from 2000 to 2021. The dataset currently includes 14 indicators that capture the presence or absence of laws related to criminalization, legal gender recognition, and anti-discrimination protections. I then use this data to discuss the global status of transgender rights throughout the period and compare these trends to sexual orientation rights. Finally, I conclude with a preliminary analysis of three institutional and cultural factors that may help explain variation in transgender rights throughout the world.

Democratic erosion—the undermining of republican government by a leader with authoritarian tendencies—depends on the improper use of the state apparatus of the state against opponents (“political targeting”). Because political targeting sometimes falls into a legally gray area, and because officials have some maneuvering room in how to respond to the orders they receive, their preferences matter. In the United States, officials’ behavior seems to be most influenced by a) the professional risks of refusing improper orders, b) normative obligations to uphold the rule of law and to act ethically, and c) attitudes toward the leader. These factors are, in turn, largely a function of 1) how officials are selected and 2) the extent of oversight and procedural checks they face. These findings have potentially broad implications for democratic erosion.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a natural process where microbes develop the ability to survive the antimicrobial drugs we depend upon to treat and prevent deadly infections, such as antibiotics. This microscopic evolution is further propelled by human activities, where each use of an antimicrobial drug potentially induces AMR. As microbes can spread quickly from animals to humans and travel around the world through humanity’s global circuits of movement, the use of any antimicrobial drug has potentially global consequences. As human-induced AMR occurs, mortality and morbidity increase due to increasingly or sometimes completely ineffective antimicrobial treatments. This article considers AMR as a product of the evolving and complex interplay between human societies and invisible microbial worlds. It argues that as a political challenge, AMR requires robust institutions that can manage human–microbial interactions to minimize the emergence of drug resistance and maximize the likelihood of achieving effective antimicrobial use for all. Yet, current governance systems for AMR are ill-equipped to meet these goals. We propose a conceptual paradigm shift for global AMR governance efforts, arguing that global governance could better address AMR if approached as a socioecological problem in need of sustainable management rather than solely as a medical problem to be solved. In biodiversity governance, institutions are designed to fit the biological features of the ecosystems that they are attempting to manage. We consider how a similar approach can improve global AMR governance. Employing the concept of ecological fit, which is defined as the alignment between human social systems and biological ecosystems, we diagnose 18 discrepancies between the social institutions that currently govern AMR and the ecological nature of this problem. Drawing from lessons learned in biodiversity governance, the article proposes five institutional design principles for improving the fit and effectiveness of global AMR governance.

Political efficacy, or a sense of confidence that “people like me” can understand politics and receive responsiveness from government, is central to the study of political behavior. However, the reference group that respondents view as “people like me” is not always immediately clear. This limits our ability to infer how efficacy informs political participation. We propose a specific concept and operationalization of racial group efficacy, and we distinguish this concept from racial identity, group consciousness, and conventional efficacy measures. Analyses of data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey reveal that for white, Black, Asian, and Latina/o Americans, racial efficacy is a more consistent and robust predictor of political participation than standard internal and external efficacy measures. Further, we show that racial efficacy exhibits associations with conventional and unconventional forms of participation that distinguish whites from people of color. We conclude by discussing how people’s racial efficacy informs their engagement in politics, from voting to protests.

The importance and impact of feminist mobilization across borders is well documented, but the impact of autonomy as an aspect of such organizing has not been explored in the transnational context. We argue that to understand the impact of transnational feminist mobilization, at least two distinct types of feminist mobilization require further conceptual development and empirical exploration in the transnational context, namely, autonomous as contrasted with multilateral mobilization. We offer a conceptual framework for distinguishing and studying these two forms. Further, using a mixed-methods study design, we empirically distinguish domestic and transnational dimensions of feminist activism and illuminate the impact of both multilateral feminist organizing and autonomous feminist organizing in the transnational space. Our analysis reveals that domestic and transnational organizing are distinct but related phenomena. We also find that in online organizing spaces, autonomous feminist campaigns amplify the messaging of geographically dispersed grassroots and individual activists more than multilateral ones. It further suggests that autonomous movements may offer more potential for representing marginalized groups of women, though this potential may not always be realized. The paper offers new concepts and empirical insights for the study of transnational feminism, thereby enabling a new research agenda. Further, this research contributes to the study of the ways that Transnational Social Movements can enrich global civil society and deepen global democracy.

Parties and party systems are treated as separate phenomena in theory, but not in research practice. This is most clearly so in the literature on the institutionalization of party politics, where the party level and the systemic levels are often analyzed through combined fuzzy indices. We 1) propose separate indicators for measuring institutionalization at the party and at the party system level, 2) demonstrate their different dynamics in twentieth and twenty-first century European countries, and 3) investigate the direction of causality. Using a dataset that covers more than 700 elections, 800 parties, and 1,400 instances of government formation in 60 different historical party systems across 45 European countries, we find that party-level institutionalization tends to precede systemic institutionalization. The opposite pattern occurs only in a few countries.

Public understandings of race in the United States have evolved, at least among some, to acknowledge that whiteness confers privilege. In contrast to the negative racial stereotypes that animate racial resentment, white privilege inverts the lens by focusing on whites and the notion that whiteness confers unearned advantages. Given the centrality of race in American politics, we investigate white privilege denial and whether it matters politically. Our inquiry shows white privilege denial is a distinct racial construct and that nearly half of whites are at least somewhat in denial with nearly one-third rejecting all the white privilege items. We found that white privilege denial is politically consequential, helping explain white attitudes across a range of political attitudes including support for political leaders, parties, and public policy. To capture the range and complexity of racial attitudes among whites, we recommend that studies of racial attitudes in politics include white privilege denial.

This article examines the role of digital technology in enabling and enhancing democratic practices and forms of governance. It contributes to emerging debates on democratic innovations by proposing a novel theoretical account of decentralized participatory democracy. To develop our account, we draw on the experience of two EU-funded projects, D-CENT and DECODE, which produced innovative citizen participation platforms and digital public infrastructure. Bringing democratic theory into conversation with critical data studies and the new municipalism movement, we theorize how these projects advanced three political aims: organizing political communities to build collective power, empowering citizens through direct participation in decision making, and transforming political institutions. The article then analyzes the strengths and limitations of these projects to draw lessons for policy makers and practitioners for future digital democratic experiments.

Political scientists conceptualize climate politics as a distributive struggle between emerging green and incumbent fossil coalitions. We argue that, even though this conceptualization is historically accurate, a dichotomous understanding no longer fully explains conflicts over climate policy. Importantly, it misses a group of industries that are central to recent policy progress: the decarbonizable sector. Decarbonizable industries, such as automakers or energy-intensive manufacturers, have long been part of fossil coalitions but can develop new sources of competitiveness through decarbonization. This makes them receptive to a bargain: agreeing to meet climate goals in exchange for policies that support their decarbonization, especially fiscal policies that partially fund or de-risk their business transitions. We establish this argument using an original measurement of the size of the decarbonizable sector and corroborate our findings through case studies of green spending policies in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Political science has seen a welcome increase in guidance on conducting field research, which recognizes the need for adaptability. But while disciplinary conversations on “iterating” in the field have advanced, strategies for adapting to the breakdown of one’s case selection—an all-too-frequent problem faced by field researchers—remain underspecified. I synthesize the sources of case selection collapse and puts forward four strategies to help scholars iterate when things fall apart: 1) rethinking what constitutes a “case” when fieldwork upends one’s understanding of the population to which the original case(s) belong; 2) reorienting the object of analysis from outcomes to processes when new insights question the values of the outcome variable within one’s original case(s); 3) returning to dominant theoretical models as a source of comparison when unanticipated changes cut off data or field site access; and 4) dropping case(s) that become extraneous amid fieldwork-induced changes in the project’s comparative logic. By embracing these moments of seeming crisis, we can more productively train field researchers to make the most of the inductive discoveries and new theoretical insights that often emerge when one’s original plans fall apart.

Democracies in general and political parties in particular have undergone political personalization in recent decades. The power balance between politicians (one or many) and the team (the party as a collegial entity) has changed, and existing party typologies are no longer suited to the analysis of today’s democratic politics. Although some new personalized party types have been added, what is missing is a systematic attempt to contrast them with the collegial option. This article proposes a new classification of political parties to fill the lacuna. It includes five ideal types of parties: two personalized-decentralized types, referring to collections of separated autonomous activists or to separated autonomous individual politicians (plural); a collegial type, which is about the centrality of the team and is based mainly on collective authorities and collective decision making; and two personalized-centralized types, referring to the centrality of an individual politician in her capacity as the party leader or that of a specific individual who “owns” the party.

How do White Americans operationalize Whiteness? This article argues that religion, in conjunction with country of origin, alters how self-identified White Americans assign ethnoracial labels to other groups. To test the role of religion in White assignment, this article uses the case of Muslims and of Americans from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Although MENA individuals are legally classified as White in the United States, they are subjected to racialization and often conflated with Muslims. Using an historical analysis of racial prerequisite court cases and a survey experiment, I find that country of origin and religion play separate, additive roles in racial assignment decisions, both historically and today. These findings also extend to perceived skin tone. This is important because many of the benefits that come from being White depend on whether others perceive an individual as White. Understanding the constitutive parts of Whiteness compels research to be specific when discussing White people and why some “White” people are excluded.