What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call social frontiers. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that these committees were more likely to form in contexts where levels of ethno-nationalist heterogeneity were high and where political institutions had recently changed. Contrary to common wisdom, vigilance committees were much more than functionalist alternatives to an absent state, or local orders established by bargaining, or responses to social or economic conflict. They constituted flexible instruments to counteract environments characterized by social and political uncertainty.

In accounting for the endurance of dysfunctional institutions, scholars often highlight the importance of path dependence or incremental change. Yet this fails to capture the creativity that actors deploy to reproduce order, particularly in times of crisis. We propose the concept of dynamic order, rooted in pragmatist theory, as an alternative way to think about institutional durability. Powerful actors reproduce order through creative adjustments to rules and routines that channel action into predictable and controllable behavior. We illustrate this dynamic with examples from the European Union and the United States. In response to the crisis of the Eurozone, EU and state officials invented new procedures that strengthened European governance at the very moment many questioned whether the euro could survive. Likewise, in the United States, public officials responded to social movements and street protests against racism and police brutality by creatively channeling these grievances into judicial proceedings and procedures controlled by the state. By focusing on how elite actors regenerate order in times of crises, our analysis enhances the conceptual toolkit currently available to the scholars of institutions.

The pillars of the Pax Americana are decaying. There are two critical challenges. Our interests with our closest allies have been drifting apart for decades, with increasingly serious consequences. A new populist and economic nationalist coalition has been mobilized in the United States, challenging the internationalist coalition that has prevailed at home since the second World War. These challenges are not the product of President Donald J. Trump. He is the manifestation of these challenges, not their cause. Understanding these challenges requires examining anew the role of international legitimacy and authority in world politics and recognizing that different international orders have different distributional consequences. This essay summarizes my past research on the incentives for international hierarchy, integrates the role of domestic interests into that theory, and explores the nature and role of international legitimacy in the study of world order. Part II examines the Pax Americana, and contrasts this order with those found in the Caribbean basin and Middle East. The final section outlines the changing incentives for cooperation between the United States and Europe, discusses the rise of populism in the United States, and suggests ways of addressing the current challenges to internationalism.

Platform companies disrupt not only the economic sectors they enter, but also the regulatory regimes that govern those sectors. We examine Uber in the United States as a case of regulating this disruption in different arenas: cities, state legislatures, and judicial venues. We find that the politics of Uber regulation does not conform to existing models of regulation. We describe instead a pattern of “disruptive regulation”, characterized by a challenger-incumbent cleavage, in two steps. First, an existing regulatory regime is not deregulated but successfully disregarded by a new entrant. Second, the politics of subsequently regulating the challenger leads to a dual regulatory regime. In the case of Uber, disruptive regulation takes the form of challenger capture, an elite-driven pattern, in which the challenger has largely prevailed. It is further characterized by the surrogate representation of dispersed actors—customers and drivers—who do not have autonomous power and who rely instead on shifting alignments with the challenger and incumbent. In its surrogate capacity in city and state regulation, Uber has frequently mobilized large numbers of customers and drivers to lobby for policy outcomes that allow it to continue to provide service on terms it finds acceptable. Because drivers have reaped less advantage from these alignments, labor issues have been taken up in judicial venues, again primarily by surrogates (usually plaintiffs’ attorneys) but to date have not been successful.

There have been many retrospective analyses written about the marriage-equality movement since the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that made marriages between people of the same sex legal in all 50 states. Most attribute that triumph to a stunningly swift turnaround in public comfort with and approval of same-sex relationships. However, public opinion data indicates that this narrative is inaccurate. In 2015, 51% of General Social Survey respondents declared that they found sexual relationships between people of the same sex to be “wrong” at least “some of the time.” Nevertheless, at the same time, 56% of respondents affirmed that people of the same sex ought to have the legal right to marry. This dissonance suggests that the most common narrative about the success of the movement misses something crucial about how political persuasion happened in this case, as well as the way that political persuasion happens in general. In this article, I show that the massive shift in support for same-sex marriage was likely not the result of large majorities changing their underlying attitudes regarding gay sexual relationships, but was instead the result of activists inserting new criteria for evaluating same-sex marriage into popular political discourse by consistently using resonant arguments. These arguments reframed the political stakes, changed the public meaning of the marriage debate, and altered the decisional context in which people determine their policy preferences.

Does political participation make a difference for policy responsiveness, or is affluence what matters most? To examine whether participation beyond voting matters for policy representation, we analyze congruence between citizens’ policy preferences and their representatives’ roll call votes using data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. For the main policy issue for which citizens’ political engagement beyond voting enhances congruence—namely, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010—we then investigate whether this effect holds when taking citizens’ income into account. The findings show that for the ACA, constituents’ participation beyond voting is associated with increased congruence with their representatives at all levels of income, and that those with less income who are politically active beyond voting experience the largest increase in congruence. However, our findings also show that the potential of political participation and income to enhance congruence is restricted to co-partisans, and to highly partisan and salient issues.

I use the case of the transportation network company Uber as a lens to explore the comparative politics of the platform economy in Europe and the United States. Within the advanced capitalist world, different countries have responded in very different ways to this new service, from welcome embrace and accommodating regulatory adjustments to complete rejection and legal bans. I analyze Uber’s arrival and reception in the United States, Germany, and Sweden, documenting three very different responses to this disruptive new actor. I show that conflicts over Uber centered on different issues in the three countries. These differences were consequential because the specific regulatory “flashpoints”that Uber provoked mobilized different actors, inspired the formation of different coalitions, and shaped the terms on which conflicts over Uber were framed and fought.

Refugees are often considered to be among the world’s most powerless groups; they face significant structural barriers to political mobilization, often including extreme poverty and exposure to repression. Yet despite these odds refugee groups do occasionally mobilize to demand better services and greater rights. In this paper I examine varying levels of mobilization among Syrian refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan in order to explain how marginalized and dispossessed groups manage to develop autonomous political strength. I explain the surprisingly high levels of mobilization in Jordan’s Za’atari Camp compared to the relative quiescence of refugees in Turkish camps and Lebanese informal settlements as the product of a set of strong informal leadership networks. These networks emerged due to two unique facets of the refugee management regime in Jordan: the concentration of refugees in the camp, and a fragmented governance system. In Turkey and Lebanon, where these two conditions were absent, refugees did not develop the strong leadership networks necessary to support mobilization. I develop this argument through structured comparison of three cases and within-case process tracing, using primary source documents from humanitarian agencies, contentious event data, and 87 original interviews conducted in the summer of 2015.

For over two centuries, the evolution of democracy has been marked by repeated democratic waves. Yet these cross-border bursts of revolution and reform have varied widely in their origins, intensity, and success rates. How do we compare cascades of regime change, and what lessons do they offer about the spread of democracy? I lay out a historical framework of democratic waves that focuses on recurring causal mechanisms across time. Thirteen democratic waves are categorized according to two dimensions: 1) the origins of external influence, located in either vertical hegemonic transformations or in horizontal cross-border linkages; 2) the strength of external influence, taking the form of contagion when outside forces dominate and emulation when domestic focal points shape the timing of contention. This approach allows for more meaningful comparisons between these important, recurring, yet seemingly incomparable democratic waves. More generally, it suggests that the global history of democracy cannot be reduced to the sum of its national trajectories.

Following E. E. Schattschneider’s observation that “a new policy creates a new politics,” scholars of “policy feedback” have theorized that policies influence subsequent political behavior and public opinion. Recent studies observe, however, that policy feedback does not always occur and the form it takes varies considerably. To explain such variation, we call for policy feedback studies to draw more thoroughly on public opinion research. We theorize that: (1) feedback effects are not ubiquitous and may in some instances be offset by political factors, such as partisanship and trust in government; (2) policy design may generate self-interested or sociotropic motivations, and (3) feedback effects result not only from policy benefits but also from burdens. We test these expectations by drawing on a unique panel study of Americans’ responses to the Affordable Care Act. We find competing policy and political pathways, which produce variations in policy feedback.

How does formal education matter for inequalities of political behavior across the citizenry? Most answers to this question focus on the things that schools allocate, such as skills, knowledge, and resources. By contrast, we draw on policy feedback research to resuscitate a more “Deweyian” appreciation for schools as sites where citizens have their earliest formative experiences with public authority and learn what it means to participate in a rule-governed community. Using nationally representative panel data, we conduct an intersectional analysis of how race, class, and gender combine to shape student experiences with school authority relations, and estimate how these experiences are associated with later citizen dispositions in young adulthood. We find strong evidence that negative school authority experiences depress young adult political engagement and trust in government. American schools, we conclude, function as powerful sites of experiential learning that tighten the bond between social hierarchies and civic inequalities.

Attribution is one of the most serious challenges associated with cyberattacks. It is often difficult to determine who launched an attack and why, which hinders efforts to formulate appropriate responses. Although the attribution problem has been discussed extensively in research on cybersecurity, it is generally approached as a technical challenge for security professionals and politicians. I contend that it is vital to take the attribution problem beyond this elite focus by considering how attributional challenges can interfere with the public’s efforts to understand security challenges and evaluate government actions. Faced with uncertainty and the confusion of attempting to understand novel cyber threats, citizens frequently lack the information they need to reliably identify the culprits behind attacks—or sometimes even to know whether an attack has taken place. I show that attributional uncertainty immediately following cyberattacks encourages dependence on a narrow range of elite frames and the assignment of blame to familiar enemies. Over time this promotes conspiratorial thinking and poses a risk to democratic accountability. When seen in light of these broader costs, the attribution problem becomes a vital political concern with implications that reach beyond the scope of elite-focused cybersecurity research.

Scholars have shown that once in place policies can foster greater political participation. Indeed, politicians often deliberately design policies to shore up political support among their allies. But can political actors engineer the reverse effect, crafting policies that demobilize their rivals? Drawing on the example of conservative cross-state advocacy against public sector unions, I describe the strategy of policy feedback as political weapon, or when actors design policies to politically weaken their opponents. I then document that the passage of conservative network-backed legislation led to large and enduring declines in public sector union density and revenue. I further show that by curbing the power of public unions, the passage of conservative network-backed bills dampened the political participation of public sector employees. My findings emphasize the importance of considering how actors use policy to demobilize political opponents and explain why public unions are now on the defensive in state politics.

Legitimacy is a key concept in political science. It has deep normative roots in democratic theory and refers usually to righteous, just, fair, and therefore acceptable rule. However, non-democracies also try to create a following among their citizens. They also engage in justifying their rule through politicization, be it of religion, ethnicity, or ideologies ranging from left-wing communism to right-wing nationalism. Against this backdrop, I pose the question: does it make sense to use the concept of legitimacy for both types of regimes, democracies and autocracies alike? Or, do we overstretch the concept when transplanting it to the non-democratic realm? And, empirically, how can we assess to what degree a non-democracy is viewed as legitimate by its citizens? I aim therefore at defining what legitimacy and legitimation is in autocratic settings; drawing a semantic map of rival concepts like support, trust, and loyalty; and tackling concrete challenges in measuring this elusive concept.

Against the legal recognition of same-sex marriage, many advocates of religious liberty argue that those who adhere to “traditional” understandings of marriage should not be forced to “recognize” same-sex marriages. This includes exempting individual business owners engaged in commercial activity from anti-discrimination laws. I argue that such exemptions overreach. Equal access to the commercial arena is an essential feature of life in America’s commercial republic, which means that public accommodations should not be given exemptions on religious grounds. Yet this does not require business owners to morally approve of same-sex marriage; nor does it require them to grant same-sex marriages “equal concern and respect.” Rather, it requires simple toleration, which is compatible with moral disapproval. Indeed, I argue that this is the very sort of toleration at the foundation of religious liberty in America. Efforts to grant religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws invite the return of religious conflict and discrimination. Prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public accommodations is necessary not only for equal citizenship, but to maintain the regime of toleration that undergirds religious liberty in a pluralistic democracy.

Given that the fictional narratives found in novels, movies, and television shows enjoy wide public consumption, memorably convey information, minimize counter-arguing, and often emphasize politically-relevant themes, we argue that greater scholarly attention must be paid to theorizing and measuring how fiction affects political attitudes. We argue for a genre-based approach for studying fiction effects, and apply it to the popular dystopian genre. Results across three experiments are striking: we find consistent evidence that dystopian narratives enhance the willingness to justify radical—especially violent—forms of political action. Yet we find no evidence for the conventional wisdom that they reduce political trust and efficacy, illustrating that fiction’s effects may not be what they seem and underscoring the need for political scientists to take fiction seriously.