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.

Existing scholarship establishes that authoritarian regimes make claims about their legitimacy yet does not tell us what makes these claims effective. This article argues that authoritarian legitimation is more effective when coproduced by the government, media, and progovernment supporters, rather than just being centrally disseminated talking points. This article uses the effective handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by the Saudi government to demonstrate how this narration translated trust in state capacity into performance legitimacy of the Saudi regime and system of governance. Saudi media figures and progovernment supporters expanded basic government talking points for audiences and discussed successful policies in relation to countries with higher international status (chiefly in the West) and higher state capacity (such as China). This article evaluates statements by the government, original media sources, and more than 90 interviews with Saudi nationalists, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs, while speaking to the relational character of performance legitimation beyond Saudi Arabia.

A growing literature focuses on the role of political partisanship in shaping attitudes and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We provide a different perspective, by developing a theory of how partisanship interacts with another important factor that shapes how people think and behave in the context of the pandemic—local norms. Using a combination of survey data and a survey experiment, we demonstrate the importance of norms in shaping both support for social distancing and reported social-distancing behavior, particularly amongst independents and Republicans. We then confirm that perceptions of norms are indeed tied to what is actually happening around people—that their partisanship does not blind them to reality. Our analysis is the first to examine how partisanship and norms interact with each other and helps to explain why partisan differences matter more in some places than in others.

Scholars studying the electoral breakthroughs of right-wing illiberalism have arrived at two general conclusions: while they largely rejected the hypothesis that this phenomenon is grounded in voters’ attitudinal shift, they have shown that those voting for the illiberal Right have distinguishing socio-economic and attitudinal characteristics. My analysis reconciles these two sets of findings by documenting the gradual emergence and transformation of the right-wing electorate in Poland in the period 1993–2018 and points to the consolidation of a right-wing partisanship as an organizing factor of the “illiberal moment.” Using the POLPAN panel dataset I find that populist and authoritarian attitudes indeed emerge in Poland in the twenty-first century to distinguish those supporting the Right more and more centered around the PiS party. These attitudes, however, have been incorporated in the context of partisan rivalry—right-wing voters, for example, are more supportive of limiting democratic procedures but only when the Right is in power. In the first decade of the twenty-first century PiS also politicized the lack of partisan consensus on the expansion of the welfare state. PiS incorporated this demand in its stance legitimizing the expansion of the welfare state through what was available in its ideological repertoire: national solidarity, national victimhood, and the idea of a sovereign nation-state joined under the umbrella of Catholic symbolism. This post-consensus polarization and asymmetrical political radicalization resembles the “illiberal moment” in Western Europe that followed the convergence between center-left and center-right parties but they lack a crystallized class-based political identity and social-democratic understanding of political economy to build on.

Are the preferences of women and men unequally represented in public policies? This simple yet fundamental question has remained largely unexplored in the fast-growing fields of women’s representation and inequality in the opinion-policy link. Our study analyzes gender biases in policy representation using an original dataset covering 43 countries and four decades, with citizens’ preferences regarding more than 4,000 country-year policies linked to information about actual policy change. Our analysis reveals clear and robust evidence that women’s policy preferences are underrepresented compared to those of men. While this skew is fairly modest in terms of congruence, women’s representation is driven mostly by the high correlation of preferences with men. When there is disagreement, policy is more likely to align with men’s preferences. Our analyses further suggest that women’s substantive underrepresentation is mitigated in contexts with high levels of female descriptive representation and labor market participation. In sum, our study shows that gender inequality extends to the important realm of policy representation, but there is also meaningful variation in unequal representation across contexts.

We introduce an original dataset of formal political participation for over 2,000 individuals included in the Forbes Billionaires List. We find that billionaire politicians are a surprisingly common phenomenon: Over 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office. Even compared to other elite groups known for producing politicians from their ranks, this is a high rate of political participation. Moreover, billionaires focus their political ambitions on influential positions, have a strong track record of winning elections, and lean to the right ideologically. We also document substantial cross-national variation: a country’s number of billionaire politicians is not simply a product of its total number of billionaires, but is instead related to regime type. Specifically, billionaires formally enter the political sphere at a much higher rate in autocracies than in democracies. We conclude by discussing the normative implications of our findings and outlining a new research agenda on billionaire politicians.

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.

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.

Revolutionary protest rarely begins as democratic or revolutionary. Instead, it grows in a process of positive feedback, incorporating new constituencies and generating new demands. If protest is not revolutionary at its onset, theory should reflect this and be able to explain the endogenous emergence of democratic demands. In this article, I combine multiple data sources on the 2010–2011 Tunisian Revolution, including survey data, an original event catalogue, and field interviews. I show that the correlates of protest occurrence and participation change significantly during the uprising. Using the Tunisian case as a theory-building exercise, I argue that the formation of protest coalitions is essential, rather than incidental, to democratic revolution.

We describe an emerging research practice that we call Large-N Qualitative Analysis (LNQA), outline its core components and codify best practice. LNQA starts with hypothesized regularities and causal mechanisms. Regularities take two basic forms: Y generalizations (if Y then X) or X generalizations (if X then Y), albeit with more complex variants. To establish a causal generalization requires defining its scope. The strength of the regularity is simply the percentage of cases conforming with the causal claim. The causal force of LNQA, however, comes from within-case causal inference, which demonstrates the presence and operation of the postulated mechanisms in all cases in the scope. The method thus partly obviates problems arising from case selection in qualitative and multimethod work. We also identify a multimethod variant (M-LNQA), which combines LNQA with experimental, quasi-experimental, or observational statistical analysis. An appendix introduces over fifty examples of the method.

Since the third wave of democratization, specialized constitutional courts have spread widely across developed and developing countries and become key to government accountability, rights protection, and cross-institutional conflict resolution. Simultaneously, nearly half of all constitutional court adoptions have occurred in Europe. What explains the global, yet Eurocentric, spread of constitutional courts? Countries’ institutional endowments, particularly domestic and international legal institutions, are key to this crucial choice of constitutional design. Common law countries are less likely to establish specialized constitutional courts than their civil law counterparts due to their domestic legal system’s relatively weaker affinity with the constitutional court model. Furthermore, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission—the main international organization specifically promoting constitutional courts—has catalyzed their wide and rapid spread especially, but not exclusively, in Europe. Our theory gains robust support from event history analyses of 172 developed and developing countries from 1947 to 2019.

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.

Women face more harassment and intimidation as politicians than men, but little is known about how this affects representation. I develop a theoretical framework for studying the gendered costs of political violence for descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Testing the framework using interview and survey data on Swedish women and men politicians, I uncover the costs of violence against politicians in all three dimensions empirically. Violence makes women more frequently than men consider leaving politics and enforces male-coded characteristics for political candidates, affecting prospects for gender-diverse descriptive representation. Substantive representation is harmed by violence silencing feminist debates and obstructing women politicians’ policy debate activities. Women’s symbolic representation is threatened by violence coercing women to decrease their visibility.

As the pandemic accelerated calls to provide relief to millions of student borrowers, President Biden announced executive action to cancel $10,000 of student debt for most federal student loan holders. Both prior to and following his announcement, policymakers have debated the merits and details of student debt relief, focusing particular attention on the perceived deservingness of student loan borrowers. But we have little systematic evidence about how the public evaluates borrower deservingness, or whether elite arguments framing support or opposition to debt relief in terms of deservingness influence public preferences for student debt cancellation. We employ original conjoint and framing experiments conducted just prior to Biden’s announcement to explore each query. We find that, while certain borrower characteristics indicating need (e.g., amount of debt), responsibility for debt (e.g., type of institution attended), and reciprocity (e.g., time in repayment) can influence people’s evaluations of whether borrowers deserve debt relief, those results may not translate to broader deservingness arguments for or against student debt cancellation in a clear manner. Ultimately, our results shed light on a timely policy issue, while extending scholarly understandings of deservingness for a critical and understudied aspect of the American welfare state.

A core tenet of representation is that individuals should expect government to actively protect their human security. In the issue area of domestic violence in the United States, government largely fails to do this for women, who comprise three-quarters of all victims of domestic violence. Nowhere is this more apparent than for Native American women living on tribal lands. In terms of lifetime physical violence, nearly 52% of Native American women will be physically abused compared to 30.5% of white women, 41.2% of African American women, and 29.7% of Hispanic women (Crepelle 2020; Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2023). One of the main obstacles to keeping Native American women safer is that tribal nations have been functionally prohibited from prosecuting non-Native offenders of violence against Native Americans on their lands. Non-Native offenders comprise the bulk of domestic violence abusers in these communities. To address this inequity, the 2013 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) created Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdictions (SDVCJs). Through an application process, federally recognized tribal nations can create these jurisdictions to provide justice for the many women who are victims of domestic violence at the hands of non-Native persons. In this article we explore which tribal nations created these jurisdictions using an original dataset of the 354 tribal nations that were eligible to adopt an SDVCJ following the 2013 VAWA reauthorization. As of 2022, 31 tribal nations have adopted SDVCJs across 13 states, which have led to 74 domestic violence convictions. In this article, we explain adoption of these courts as a function of population, tribal nation fiscal capacity, federal grant support, and having an existing self-governance compact with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

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.

Over the past fifteen years, a narrative has developed that IR scholars have become a “cult of the irrelevant,” with declining influence on and engagement with policy debates. Despite these assertions, the evidence for limited policy engagement has been anecdotal. We investigate the extent of policy engagement—the ways in which IR scholars participate in policy-making processes and/or attempt to shape those processes—by surveying IR scholars directly about their engagement activities. We find policy engagement is pervasive among IR scholars. We draw on theories of credit-claiming to motivate expectations about how and when scholars are likely to engage with practitioners. Consistent with our expectations, much of this engagement comes in forms that involve small time commitments and provide opportunities for credit-claiming, such as media appearances and short-form, bylined op-eds and blog posts. However, sizable minorities report engaging in consulting activities not for attribution/publication and writing policy briefs, and a majority of respondents indicate they engaged in these activities several times a year or more. We find only small differences in engagement across gender and rank. Our results demonstrate that, for IR scholars, some form of policy engagement is the norm.

We reexamine the concept of individualism and its political implications. While both political scientists and social psychologists agree that individualism is a core value for many Americans, political science has primarily associated the concept with views about economic mobility. Building upon insights from political theory, we argue that a narrow focus on economics overlooks key elements of individualism and its relation to political life. With the help of five distinct datasets collected between 2018 and 2022 (combined N = 12,169), we develop a new index that emphasizes autonomy from authority, which we label moral individualism. We show how it and other dimensions of individualism explain interactions with the political world, including responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across multiple indicators, moral individualists were far less likely to engage in collective action or pursue other behaviors meant to assist the community. For example, even after controlling for the effects of ideology and partisanship, moral individualism reduced the probability of wearing a mask during the first year of the pandemic by approximately 30 percentage points.

While scholars have focused extensively on the consequences of partnerships between interest groups, less attention has been paid to the historical dynamics shaping when, how, and why such groups unite. This is especially true of “unexpected” partnerships, which unite groups with seemingly little in common. Such partnerships are important, as they can reshape to an unusual degree which actors, issues, and ideas “fit together” politically. We address the puzzle of how unexpected group partnerships form through case studies of previously non-existent alliances between labor unions and the gay/lesbian rights movement in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. Using these cases, we produce a theory arguing that unexpected partnerships are a product of a favorable political opportunity structure—present when each group experiences shared threats and mutual vulnerabilities—and the actions of entrepreneurial group leaders, who forge cross-group identities, accentuate shared ideological convictions, and build institutional ties.

Political attempts to control how the past may be represented have flourished in the twenty-first century. Russia participates in this trend, having taken steps to legislatively and juridically safeguard the legacy of the USSR’s involvement in World War II. This has institutionalized an interpretation of the fight against Nazism that was already widely held in society, making the Russian case a “hard test” for evaluating when the violation of a historical norm is deemed appropriate and what the impact of a memory law might be relative to other factors. Drawing on two vignette experiments conducted in 2021, our article demonstrates both that the discursive context in which a controversial statement about the past is made matters when respondents assess whether the person making it should be punished and that criticism of a historical norm is more likely to be accepted when it emanates from an in-group member. We also find that the state has limited ability to influence societal attitudes regarding history. Moreover, a willingness to defend state-led interventions into how the past is depicted aligns with support for the political system but the latter does not necessarily overlap with individuals’ historical views, underscoring the multidimensional nature of collective memory.