A vast body of work investigates the consequences of legislative term limits for public policy. However, considerably less research has delved into their effects in noneconomic policy domains. In this article, we develop the argument that implemented term limits increase the effect that a state government’s ideology has on the state’s incarceration rate. When analyzing incarceration rates among all states between 1979 and 2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectation. Specifically, for states with term limits, we find that an increase in state government conservatism is associated with a higher incarceration rate. Conversely, for non-term-limited states, we find that the policy preferences of the state government have little influence on the incarceration rate. These findings deepen our insight into how institutional design can affect public policy.

Are people's priorities associated with their income and education levels? There is a long history in political science of claims that priorities are driven by economic interests, but also that low-income and low-education people fail to prioritize their economic interests. In this paper we use measures of revealed importance from [Sides J, Tausanovitch C and Vavreck L (2023) The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the hallenge to American Democracy. Princeton University Press.] to evaluate the priorities of high- and low-income/education voters with respect to 44 different policies. It is well known that there are substantial differences in the preferences of people with lower incomes or education levels and people with higher incomes or education levels, but conditional on preferences we find very small differences among education and income groups in terms of priorities. Like high-income and high-education voters, lower-income and education voters care most about the major issues of the day. They do not care systematically more or less than other voters about policies that expand social welfare, redistribution, or labor rights.

Since the end of World War II, the US government has spent nearly $4 trillion on humanitarian, economic, and military assistance to other countries. Despite the myriad benefits of such programs, mass support has long been lacking. Here, I argue that low citizen trust in government can help us to understand why. Using cross-sectional and panel survey data from the United States, I find a positive and substantively significant relationship between political trust and support for government spending on foreign aid. Overall, these findings underscore the relevance of political trust and further illustrate the drivers of U.S. public opinion toward foreign aid, something that has implications for whether America should turn inward or continue its long-standing role of global leadership.

In this paper, I examine the factors associated with public attitudes toward foreign policy among white Americans and argue that racial attitudes play an important role. To test this hypothesis, I perform quantitative studies across four iterations of the American National Election Survey (ANES)—(1) 2012, (2) 2016, (3) 2020, and (4) the Cumulative Survey (1986–2020). While the results include white public opinion across several different areas of foreign policy across several decades of data, the findings are consistent: American foreign policy opinion among white Americans is highly racialized—meaning that their views on foreign policy are strongly associated with their views on race and racism. This study contributes to our knowledge of a relatively poorly understood phenomenon in American politics: how the American public forms their attitudes on foreign policy. Overall, I find strong evidence that racial attitudes play an important yet understudied role in the foreign policy attitudes of white Americans. This study also extends our knowledge of the role of racialization in public opinion and reminds us that while racism is one of the most central problems for U.S. domestic politics, we should also be wary of how these hierarchies of domination extend beyond our borders through its foreign relations.

Networks among legislators shape politics and policymaking within legislative institutions. In past work on legislative networks, the ties between legislators have been defined on those who serve in the same legislature or chamber. Online information networks, which have been found to play important roles in legislative communication at the national level, are not bounded by individual legislative bodies. We collect original data for over four thousand US state legislators and study patterns of connection among them on Twitter. We look at three types of Twitter networks—follower, retweets, and mentions. We describe these networks and estimate the relationships between ties and salient attributes of legislators. We find that networks are organized largely along geographic and partisan lines and that identity attributes—namely gender and race—exhibit strong associations with the formation of ties.

Many believe that weaker legal constraints make unilateral action easier to reverse than legislation. Yet in some cases, unilateralism survives a successor's determined opposition. I argue that legislative persistence and unilateral transience may arise not only from differences in legal status but also from a selection effect: unilateralism and subsequent rescission can both stem from weak underlying policy-demanding groups. But if unilateralism itself alters the landscape of group power through policy feedback effects, it can survive a purportedly opposed new president. An example is the Trump Administration's failure to depart from the Obama Justice Department's lax stance on cannabis. Weak constituents’ policy demands may thus need to rely on a sympathetic president's unilateral action to begin a feedback loop, subsequently softening opposition. This paper therefore identifies unilateral action as a key tool for shifting policy in an enduring way, explaining its success or failure in terms of interest group power.

Increasing partisan polarization has characterized American politics for decades. On January 6, 2021, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress expressed their horror at the violent invasion of the US Capitol, leading to the popular perception—emphasized by media accounts—that the attack generated a rare moment of bipartisan unity. We argue that while members of both parties condemned the attack, a marked partisan divide characterized their messaging even as events unfolded. We analyze all 1861 tweets by members of Congress on January 6th and find that Republicans were significantly more likely to characterize the invasion as a protest grown out of hand, while Democrats described it as an attack on democracy. The results strongly indicate that partisan polarization was alive and well on January 6th and may help to account for Republicans’ shift toward normatively positive portrayals of the day in subsequent months.

Presidents possess vast authority over policies and outcomes. Recent studies suggest the public checks this unilateralism through expressive opinions and political participation. We reevaluate this accountability link with a preregistered panel survey that incorporates a number of design and conceptual improvements over existing experimental studies. Our findings reveal a more complex relationship between presidential actions and public opinion. We find no evidence that the public reacts negatively to unilateralism – and some evidence they react positively. Respondents, however, may punish an incumbent for failing to implement the proposed policy change. While such a result suggests that the public can hold presidents accountable, we close by discussing how a lack of information likely renders this check moot.

Is the COVID-19 pandemic a critical juncture? An emerging social scientific scholarship on the COVID-19 pandemic has set out to study its effects on a range of social, political, and economic phenomena. Some of this scholarship theorizes that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of those rarest and most impactful moments in time, what historical institutionalists would call a “critical juncture”. This article tests a COVID-19 critical juncture hypothesis by conducting a theory-infirming case study of recent multilingual developments in the United States. Process tracing of federal and state multilingual trajectories reveal that two of the hypothesis’ observable implications are absent: there is no evidence of radical institutional change and ostensibly “new” multilingual pathways were in fact established prior to the pandemic. In light of this evidence, the article concludes by discussing alternative understandings of COVID-19’s effects and this might mean for the study of the pandemic moving forward.

Why do executive agencies form coalitions? Legislative coalitions are widely theorized and studied, but less attention has been paid to executive coalitions. Executive agencies’ dependence on the political branches calls for a distinctive theory of coalition building. This article presents such a theory, arguing that agencies form coalitions to optimize their autonomy given their subordinate position in a separation of powers system by signaling to overseers that their policies are efficient and should be maintained. Bureaucrats form coalitions actively to advance their policy goals in the face of political opposition. Using data on dozens of agencies over seventeen years, I find that agencies are most likely to form coalitions when their preferences are misaligned with the president but aligned with each other. I also find evidence that coalitions send credible signals that bureaucratic policies are efficient since Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is less likely to request regulatory revisions of policies produced by coalitions.

Partisans in the American electorate are affectively polarized, which coincides with the tendency for partisan geographic sorting. Could mate selection pressures contribute to this geographic tendency, and how might they interact with out-party affect? I propose a model in which an individual’s perception of their mate success in a niche is key. I argue that perceived mate success is a function of a niche’s partisanship and one’s out-party affect, which in turn, incentivizes sorting. The model is partially tested with conjoint experiments on multiple U.S. samples. Results show that partisans perceive a lower probability of mate success in niches with greater shares of out-partisans and that mate success interacts with negative out-party affect. I also replicate findings on political mate choice preferences with a more appropriate method. Lastly, this project links instrumentality and affect, which is a departure from past work. In doing so, it contributes to research on the consequences of mate pressures for political behavior.

The revolving door is a potential mechanism of private influence over policy. Recent work primarily examines the revolving of legislators and their staff, with little focus on the federal bureaucracy. To analyze decisions to turnover into lobbying, we develop an argument emphasizing the (1) policy expertise acquired from federal employment; (2) the proximity of employees to political decision-making; and (3) the agency policymaking environment. Leveraging federal personnel and lobbying data, we find the first two factors predict revolving whereas the policymaking environment has an inconsistent impact. We highlight the importance of studying selection into lobbying for estimating casual effects of lobbyist characteristics on revenue and contribute to the literature on bureaucratic careers and the nature of private influence in policymaking.

Are cues from party leaders so important that they can cause individuals to change their own issue positions to align with the party's position? Recent work on the importance of party cues suggests they do, especially given the literature on partisanship as a strong and persistent group identity. However, in this paper we test the limits of those partisan cues. Using a unique two-wave panel survey design we find that the effect of party cues is moderated by the prior level of importance individuals place on an issue. We find that when a person believes an issue area to be more important, party cues are less likely to move that citizen's position, particularly when the cue goes against partisan ideological norms. Our results show evidence that an individual's own issue positions—at least the important ones—can be resilient in the face of party cues.

A growing body of evidence indicates the public is less committed to democracy than conventional wisdom long held. One possibility is that many in the public have internalized the norm that democracy is “good” but that such support is not firmly held. An implication of this reasoning is that because there is an expectation to express support for democracy, responses will be influenced by the presence of an interviewer due to social desirability effects. In this note, we examine the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies—in each year, a portion of respondents were interviewed via the internet while others were interviewed face-to-face. We identify a politically relevant difference between the two survey modes: those interviewed face-to-face express greater satisfaction with democracy. Indeed, the difference we identify is similar in magnitude to the difference typically observed between electoral winners and electoral losers. Our result is robust to different measurement and estimation strategies. While levels of satisfaction are influenced by the presence of an interviewer, a followup analysis indicates that the relationship between satisfaction and winner–loser status is similar across modes.

Across a series of experiments, I show that racial threat from a stereotypically nonthreatening racial minority group, Asian Americans, has a direct impact on white Americans' views of discrimination toward the group. When white Americans learn the group is growing, they feel a distinct racial threat which decreases support for the idea that Asian Americans experience discrimination while simultaneously increasing support for policy which actively discriminates against Asian Americans. I show this concept to be portable over context, examining support for discriminatory policy toward Asians in education policy and COVID-19 policy. I conclude by discussing the implications for how racial threat can drive more racial conflict while simultaneously decreasing the perception that this discrimination is occurring.

Travel bans were a globally prevalent policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, travel bans against China and European countries proved a broadly popular mitigation tool among Americans. Why did Americans support COVID-19 travel bans? We fielded two novel survey experiments, surveying 3000 American citizens across five waves (between March 2020 and March 2021). In randomizing the country of origin of those potentially subject to travel ban measures, we find consistent evidence that racial attitudes drive support for travel bans. The strength of this relationship varies across political parties and across hypothetical target countries but is not explained by objective caseloads that change across countries and over the course of the pandemic.