This article advances and tests an original theory of a “feminine homestyle” to explain how female legislators develop relationships with constituents that both mitigate the potential for gendered biases and fulfill the communal goals that motivate women to run for political office. We use an original audit study that tests legislator responsiveness to direct email communication. We show that female lawmakers are more responsive to constituent communication and more likely to display compassion and empathy in responses compared with male legislators; but we also find important differences in women’s responsiveness across the race and ethnicity. Further, we find that responsive female lawmakers can change the behaviors of their male counterparts by creating stronger norms of responsiveness within legislative institutions. Our findings have important downstream implications for democratic accountability among voters and illustrate how female lawmakers substantively represent through direct communication with constituents.

Despite long-standing academic interest in Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, there has been little study of Indigenous elected officials as representational actors. We ask: What are the distinctively Indigenous forms of representation practised by Indigenous elected officials in Canada? And how does clarifying the role of Indigenous elected officials as representatives both contribute to and enhance our overall understanding of Indigenous politics, governance and sovereignty? We draw on the existing literatures on substantive representation as well as original interviews conducted with current and former Indigenous elected officials to develop an original conceptualization of Indigenous representation. These actors differ in their perceptions of themselves and their roles as representatives, the representational behaviours they engage in and the outcomes they seek. Our conceptualization of Indigenous representation engages with four themes: Indigenous perspective, Indigenous advocacy, balance with other imperatives including constituency representation and party discipline, and Indigenous nationhood.

Two important puzzles characterize the development of pre-modern Eurasian polities. First, most rulers convened councils of nobles, but only European monarchs expanded them to create parliaments. Second, war was common throughout Eurasia, but only in Europe did it correlate with the formation of parliaments. We advance a new argument about the emergence of parliaments that accounts for both stylized facts while integrating the literature highlighting the rulers' need to finance wars with that emphasizing the importance of the medieval communal revolution. Using novel data, we document a ‘no communes, no parliaments’ rule: monarchs established parliaments only after they had fostered the creation of self-governing towns (aka communes). We also show that war was a significant predictor of parliamentary births across medieval Europe – but only during a window of opportunity that opened after a polity had experienced the communal revolution.

People in political decision-making across the globe tend to be much older than the average voter. As such, parliaments and cabinets are unrepresentative of the larger population. This has consequences: it risks favouring policies geared towards the interests of older cohorts, it might alienate youth from voting and could push parties to appeal (even more) to older voters. In this review, we synthesize the growing literature on youth representation. We do so by: (1) delineating the group of young politicians, (2) discussing why youth ought to be present in politics, (3) empirically depicting the state of youth representation, and (4) illustrating the factors that help or harm youth to enter politics. This synthesis shows the degree to which young people are absent from decision-making bodies across the national, subnational and supra-national levels and attempts to make sense of the reasons why there is such a dearth of youth as candidates and representatives. We conclude by discussing gaps in research and suggesting several avenues for future work.

Theories of electoral accountability emphasize voters' ability to evaluate individual officeholders, which incentivises officials to demonstrate their quality. Before the Australian ballot was introduced in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, however, most ballot designs constrained voters' ability to distinguish individual candidates. Previous scholarship argues that ballot reform led to the rise of candidate-centred politics and the decline in party influence in the twentieth century. We reassess the evidence for this claim and implement the most comprehensive analysis to date on the secret ballot's effects on outcomes related to distributive politics, legislator effort, and party influence. Using an improved research design, we find scant evidence that ballot reform directly affected legislator behaviour, much less that it transformed political representation. While the Australian ballot may have been a necessary condition for the eventual rise of candidate-centred politics, ballot reform did not by itself reshape American politics.

Kant’s criticism of democracy has been traditionally defused with the consideration that Kant’s aversion is not to democracy per se, but to direct democracy. However, what Kant says – ‘to prevent the republican constitution from being confused with the democratic one, as commonly happens’ (ZeF, 8: 351) – appears to count not only against direct democracy, but also against conceptions of democracy closer to the ones we are accustomed to. By offering a new account of what Kant sees as the real problem of democracy (direct or not), the article unpacks a lesson about the limits of democracy that has gone largely unnoticed among political theorists and Kant specialists.

Exorcismos de esti(l)o is one of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s least studied books. It is nevertheless of essential importance for understanding the entirety of his poetics. It is a book that condenses the pain of the ostracism and the betrayal inflicted by the revolutionary regime that Cabrera had so strongly supported. The purpose of this article is to highlight the implicit elements of the text that support this hypothesis. It considers the strategies used by the author throughout Exorcismos de esti(l)o to practice the language with which he obsessively tries to draw, in his novelas del yo, a portrait of a lost and unrecoverable Havana, the hopeful Havana preceding the Cuban Revolution. It is an impossible yet obstinate mission. This is why the texts that articulate the impossibility of representation and the anguish that this mission generates deserve special attention.

The article deals with archives of memoryscapes as remembered landscapes of a past society by Hungarian women authors from Yugoslavia. Divided into two separate cycles, it explores how an inhabited geography transgressed from the present into a past, and how it evolved via belletristic practices from the 1990s onward. The archive is therefore assessed as a cumulative development of text-worlds in prose, poetry, and drama by Hungarian women, who either remained in disintegrating Yugoslavia or emigrated to Hungary, both of which led mostly to uprootedness and a misinterpretation of their work. Accordingly, displaced as authors, who remember landscapes that are beyond official memory politics, their archive remained largely unnoticed and marginalised throughout the decades. Emerging in autobiographic writing and literary fiction equally, these memoryscapes are not idiosyncratic but are regulated and systemic representations of a time, a space, and a society. To display such a mnemonic agency, the article integrates the foucauldian notions of the archive with the thirdspace perspective of geocriticism within literary representation, as used in post-colonial thought. Eventually, this enables the exposition of the archive of these female memoryscapes of an ethnic minority not in relation to other “national” archives, or as auxiliary archives of a male perspective, but as a system of thirdspaces and representation in itself.

This article examines the extent to which overseas Chinese educators at Confucius Institutes (CIs) in Thailand act as representatives and practitioners of Chinese national identity. Though working for the state, CI teachers promote Chinese language and culture according to their own perceptions. In this paper, participatory observation and in-depth interviews were employed to assess how CI teachers in Thailand articulate their Chineseness and national identity. The findings show that (1) banal national sentiment was an important expression of the CI teachers' national identity, in terms of psychological attachment and ingrained behaviors; (2) pragmatic identity politics are used to distinguish various contributors to the CI; (3) the materialization of Chinese national identity recontextualizes the country via national symbols and cultural activities. The intricacy of the everyday activities of CI teachers illuminates the trans-nationalization and localization of Chinese national identity, which constitute the “doing” of the nation that the imaginary Chinese community in Thailand represents not just a government-endorsed national identity but also the CI teachers' creation of tradition.

A growing literature has revealed a notable electoral advantage for congressional and gubernatorial candidates with deep local roots in their home districts or states. However, there is a dearth of research on the presence and impact of local roots in state legislative races. In this paper, we close that gap by demonstrating the consistent and significant electoral impacts that state legislators’ local roots have on their reelection efforts. We use data capturing a representative cross-section of state legislative incumbents (N = ~5,000) and calculate a novel index measuring the depth of their local roots modeled after Hunt’s (2022, Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress) measure for the US House. We present evidence that state legislators with deep local roots in the districts they represent run unopposed in their general elections nearly twice as often as incumbents with no such roots. Of those who do attract challengers in their reelection efforts, deeply rooted incumbents enjoy an average of three extra percentage points of vote share. Our results have important implications for candidate emergence in state legislative elections during a time when so many are uncontested. They also demonstrate the limits of electoral nationalization for understanding state politics.

This article examines the way in which Iran's eighteenth-century ruler Nader Shah was portrayed in contemporary Europe as well as in Iran, and how the resulting image—half national hero, half ruthless warlord—has resonated until today. In an age short on ‘great’ leaders, Nader spoke to the imagination like no other contemporary ruler, Western or Asian. Nader's subsequent record can be read as a palimpsest, a layered series of images of multiple world conquerors, from Alexander to Napoleon. The latter, who shared Nader's humble background and evoked a similar ambivalence, represented the closest analogue, turning him into the European Nader Shah. In the modern West, Nader no longer speaks to the imagination. Modern Iranians, by contrast, have come to see him as the Iranian Napoleon. While still ambivalent about him, they admire him as the ruler who regenerated the nation and ended foreign occupation, yet his undeniable cruelty and imperialism make him an awkward national hero.