The Bosniak and Albanian minorities in postcommunist Montenegro have supported and been represented by mainstream Montenegrin parties more than by their ethnic parties. This stands in striking contrast to the situation in neighboring Serbia and North Macedonia where the Bosniak and Albanian minorities vote almost exclusively for their ethnic parties. The Montenegrin case stands out as deviant also when one considers a number of extant explanations, all of which would predict a different outcome. Montenegrin Bosniaks and Albanians constitute two native, sizeable and geographically concentrated minority groups inhabiting a country with an institutional framework and several special electoral arrangements favoring minority parties. Drawing on original data on Bosniak and Albanian legislators elected across 12 parliamentary elections in Montenegro (1990–2023), municipality and country-level parliamentary election results and 12 semi-structured elite interviews, I argue that what explains the deviance in the Montenegrin case is the peculiar nature of Montenegrin identity, specifically the fact that it does not pit the majority against minority, but rather it pits the Montenegrin and Serbian components of the Orthodox majority against each other and in such a context the non-Orthodox minorities become critical political allies of the Montenegrin bloc against the Serbian one.

Group-based identities are an important basis of political competition. Politicians consciously appeal to specific social groups, and these group-based appeals often improve the evaluation of parties and candidates. Studying place-based appeals, we advance the understanding of this strategy by distinguishing between dominant and subordinate social groups. Using two survey experiments in Germany and England, we show that group appeals improve candidate evaluation among subordinate (rural) voters. By contrast, appeals to the dominant (urban) group trigger a negative reaction. While urban citizens’ weaker local identities and lower place-based resentment partly explain this asymmetry, they mainly dislike group-based appeals because of their antagonistic nature. If the same policies are framed as benefiting urban and rural dwellers alike, candidate evaluation improves. Thus, people on the dominant side of a group divide reject a framing of politics as antagonistically structured by this divide, even if they identify with the dominant group.

Calls for more family-friendly assemblies, specifically those able to accommodate representatives who are pregnant, postpartum or have young children, have become urgent in the last decade, as a mini-baby boom in the federal parliament and the provinces has called the inclusivity of legislatures into question. Drawing on interviews with legislative clerks, this article asks two questions: 1) Are Canadian legislatures family-friendly? And 2) what approaches to family-friendly legislatures emerge from policies and discussions within these legislatures? It identifies patterns both in the types of changes that are proposed and those which are actioned, finding that changes have leaned heavily on the least consequential improvements. Many calls for change continue to run up against structural challenges that have been, thus far, ignored. Although legislatures are more family-friendly than in previous decades, this article argues that the future of inclusive parliaments hinges on a broad rethinking of the parliamentary role.

Academics across Canada, an officially bilingual and multicultural country, devote a lot of attention to diversity and representation. This is particularly true for political scientists. In this research note, we focus on the linguistic composition of panels and overall linguistic fragmentation of the most important in-person event for Canadian political science: the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). To do so, we generated a dataset based on the official program of the 2023 annual conference. Our main results are twofold. First, we find an important under-representation of French-speaking events and academic communications (i.e., panels and papers). Second, we computed Herfindahl-Hirschman indexes demonstrating that francophone-dominated panels and co-authored papers with francophone first authors are significantly more linguistically diverse than anglophone panels and papers. Our results highlight important blind spots in Canadian political science and help make sense of the lack of representation of French-language work in Canadian academia.

What are the consequences of including a “don't know” (DK) response option to attitudinal survey questions? Existing research, based on traditional survey modes, argues that it reduces the effective sample size without improving the quality of responses. We contend that it can have important effects not only on estimates of aggregate public opinion, but also on estimates of opinion differences between subgroups of the population who have different levels of political information. Through a pre-registered online survey experiment conducted in the United States, we find that the DK response option has consequences for opinion estimates in the present day, where most organizations rely on online panels, but mainly for respondents with low levels of political information and on low salience issues. These findings imply that the exclusion of a DK option can matter, with implications for assessments of preference differences and our understanding of their impacts on politics and policy.

I argue that Charles Travis’s interpretation of Frege, in Frege: The Pure Business of Being True, as consistent with Travis’s conception of occasion-sensitivity does not in fact require any modal notions, and so is consistent with the amodalist interpretation of Frege I elaborate in Necessity Lost.

In Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, the text describes its main character as witty, brave, and resourceful. The drawings of the story’s main character which accompany this text, however, present a unique kind of harm that only becomes clear when the work is read as a collection of single-panel comics rather than an illustrated book. In this chapter, I show what happens when we read drawings in books as textless comics, and, based on how things turn out from this reading, motivate why we have some substantive reason to read both Little Black Sambo and other books with drawings-as-comics.

En este artículo se estudia la representación discursiva de las identidades no normativas en un producto paradigmático de la industria mediática colombiana, la revista SoHo. Las preguntas que guiaron esta investigación fueron: ¿Cómo la revista SoHo (1999–2014) representa a las mujeres trans y a las masculinidades no normativas, en particular al metrosexual?; ¿qué estrategias discursivas son usadas para construir dicha representación?; y, ¿cómo la revista SoHo contribuye a cuestionar o fortalecer la cisheteronormatividad? Se sostiene que en SoHo se construye discursivamente a dichos individuos desde una mirada espectacularizante, reivindicando la cisheterosexualidad como natural y normal, y la masculinidad como propia del cuerpo del hombre cisgénero. Para demostrar lo anterior, se examinaron las estrategias discursivas utilizadas para construir dichas identidades a través de un enfoque interdisciplinar que combina los estudios culturales (latinoamericanos) y de género/queer con la lingüística queer. Este trabajo es un aporte para nuevas investigaciones en torno a la representación de las identidades sexo-genéricamente marginalizadas en la industria mediática colombiana.

Are workers effective lawmakers? Throughout American history, some politicians and elites have argued that white-collar Americans are more qualified than working-class Americans to govern. To date, however, we know relatively little about the legislative effectiveness of working-class lawmakers. I develop a theory of class-based electoral selection that links class-based discrimination in elections to legislators’ performance in office. I argue that working-class candidates face class-based biases in elections that make it more difficult to emerge and successfully win elective office. As a result, I expect the working-class candidates who do become lawmakers to be equally or more effective than their white-collar colleagues. To test these expectations, I create a data set merging the occupational background of more than 14,000 individual state legislators with their state legislative effectiveness score (SLES). The resulting data set includes more than 50,000 state legislator-term specific observations. Consistent with my expectations, I find that working-class lawmakers do not underperform white-collar lawmakers. Further, I provide evidence that, across various models and specifications, the gap between working-class and white-collar legislators’ effectiveness is negligible.

Transitivity has come to be recognized as a promising heuristic tool for uncovering implicit ideologies in a wide range of areas. Though it has been used to explore worldviews in several kinds of discourse, nearly all have relied solely on qualitative analyses. Statistical analysis can offer a fuller understanding of past societies. This study applies a gradient, discourse-based understanding of transitivity, which lends itself nicely to corpus-based analysis, to data from 16th-century New Spain. In colonial Mexico, female behaviors were often strictly circumscribed. This paper uses a quantitative, corpus-based framework to examine how gender inequality is reflected in patterns of transitivity. It is found that female subjects are significantly associated with imperfective contexts, nonfinite constructions, akinesis, and low affectedness of the object—all markers of lower transitivity. Thus, for the most part, in these data, women are represented as inactive, inert, and powerless.

This research note reports on a new dataset about legislators in four Canadian provinces since the establishment of their colonial assemblies in the eighteenth century. Over 7,000 legislators from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia are included, with consolidated information drawn from multiple sources about parliamentarians’ years of birth and death, religion, electoral performance, kinship, and several other biographical indicators. We also illustrate the utility of such data with the help of a few descriptive examples drawn from the four provinces. We believe this consolidated dataset offers several opportunities for future research on representation, legislative activities and party politics.