Political theorists and philosophers have converged mainly on the following claim: workers face the threat of domination in the workplace. While many propose reforms to capitalism to address this domination, a growing chorus of radical Republicans argue that domination at work results from the capitalist distribution of ownership. In this paper, I argue that this focus on ownership is a mistake. Instead, I contend we ought to direct our attention to the role that managerial discretion plays in the firm's structure. My intention in advancing these two claims is to carve out space for a position that acknowledges the domination of workers, but does so in a way that is compatible with private ownership in the means of production.

Political elites often employ propaganda to affect the behavior of a particular social group by altering its members' social identities. The empirical literature has demonstrated that this kind of ‘identity propaganda’ is generally effective at mobilizing citizens. However, while the consequences of being exposed to propaganda depend on its content, we know little about which factors shape propaganda content. To gain insight into the determinants of propaganda content, I analyze a game-theoretic model where a political elite proposes a new identity norm, and citizens affirm or reject it. I demonstrate that, in equilibrium, the propagandist exploits his agenda-setting power to design effective identity norms. I also show that more demanding identity norms can emerge when citizens’ mobilization costs are higher, or the propagandist can cheaply allocate material incentives. By contrast, the nature of strategic interaction among citizens has an ambiguous effect on identity norms.

Recent studies take increasingly refined views of how socioeconomic conditions influence political behaviour. We add to this literature by exploring how voters' prospective evaluations of long-term economic and social opportunities relate to electoral contestation versus the stabilization of the political-economic system underpinning the knowledge society. Using survey data from eight West European countries, we show that positive prospects are associated with higher support for mainstream parties (incumbents and opposition) and lower support for radical parties on all levels of material well-being. Our results support the idea that ‘aspirational voters’ with positive evaluations of opportunities (for themselves or their children) represent an important stabilizing force in advanced democratic capitalism. However, we also highlight the importance of radical party support among ‘apprehensive voters’, who are economically secure but perceive a lack of long-term opportunities. To assess the implications of these findings, we discuss the relative importance of these groups across different countries.

How do immigration attitudes form? Drawing on the political socialization literature, I argue that growing up in a recession causes a lasting increase in anti-immigration attitudes. I delineate two mechanisms that emphasize the negative consequences of recessions for young workers and the anti-immigration narrative that often emerges during economic turmoil. Young adults are particularly vulnerable to these external shocks because they have minimal political experience and are developing their core political attitudes. Support is provided for this argument with evidence from the European Social Survey. An economic shock during young adulthood causes a significant increase in anti-immigration attitudes, a relationship not found for other ages. I find tentative evidence that growing up in a recession has a larger effect on the racial and cultural dimensions of immigration and causes a broader sociotropic response. Results highlight how economic crises affect the socialization of young adults and underscore their lasting political consequences.

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.

An influential perspective argues that voters use interest group ratings and endorsements to infer their representatives' actions and to hold them accountable. This paper interrogates a key assumption in this literature: that voters correctly interpret these cues, especially cues from groups with whom they disagree. For example, a pro-redistribution voter should support her representative less when she learns that Americans for Prosperity, an economically conservative group, gave her representative a 100 per cent rating. Across three studies using real interest groups and participants' actual representatives, we find limited support for this assumption. When an interest group is misaligned with voters' views and positively rates or endorses their representative, voters often: (1) mistakenly infer that the group shares their views, (2) mistakenly infer that their representative shares their views, and (3) mistakenly approve of their representative more. We call this tendency heuristic projection.

How free should the movement of people be compared to the movement of capital? Unlike those who defend a presumption in favour of symmetrical treatment, I suggest that the presumption in favour of free human movement is much stronger than the same presumption in favour of the free movement of capital. Against those who claim that capital ought to be freer to move than people, I argue that states have much stronger reasons, both of distributive justice and cultural integrity, to constrain capital movement than they have to restrict human movement. Further, the case for restricting skilled workers' right to exit their country in the case of brain drain is much weaker than the parallel case for restricting investors' right to exit from a country that faces a threat of capital flight. Overall, my argument supports the ‘reversed asymmetry thesis’: People should be much freer to move than capital.

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.

How do politicians use moral appeals in their rhetoric? Previous research suggests that morality plays an important role in elite communication and that the endorsement of specific values varies systematically across the ideological spectrum. We argue that this view is incomplete since it only focuses on whether certain values are endorsed and not how they are contextualized by politicians. Using a novel sentence embedding approach, we show that although liberal and conservative politicians use the same moral terms, they attach diverging meanings to these values. Accordingly, the politics of morality is not about the promotion of specific moral values per se but, rather, a competition over their respective meaning. Our results highlight that simple dictionary-based methods to measure moral rhetoric may be insufficient since they fail to account for the semantic contexts in which words are used and, therefore, risk overlooking important features of political communication and party competition.

We live in a world of text. Yet the sheer magnitude of social media data, coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs, has made this important source of data difficult to use. Researchers often engage in costly hand coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or rely on unsupervised techniques where the measurement of predefined constructs is difficult. We propose a novel approach that we call ‘super-unsupervised’ learning and demonstrate its usefulness by measuring the psychologically complex construct of online political hostility based on a large corpus of tweets. This approach accomplishes the feat by combining the best features of supervised and unsupervised learning techniques: measurements of complex psychological constructs without a single labelled data source. We first outline the approach before conducting a diverse series of tests that include: (i) face validity, (ii) convergent and discriminant validity, (iii) criterion validity, (iv) external validity, and (v) ecological validity.

We investigated both the direct and indirect political dividends of public policies by examining Minha Casa, Minha Vida, a housing programme in Brazil that selects its beneficiaries by lottery. We surveyed the lottery participants and found that the winners were not more likely to support the incumbent politicians. Non-beneficiaries, a much larger group, were aware of the programme and thought well of it while the beneficiaries' responses to the programme were sometimes underwhelming. However, politicians considered the programme to be an electoral asset, and a difference-in-differences analysis of electoral results leveraging the roll-out of the programme across municipalities found that presidential and mayoral incumbent candidates performed better in localities that had implemented MCMV. Overall, when the beneficiaries formed a relatively small group, the benefits were conspicuous and the programme's objectives were widely supported. Government programmes can create electoral payoffs independently of how programmes are perceived or experienced by beneficiaries.

Political parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s.

In recent decades, governments in many Western democracies have shown a remarkable consensus in pursuing fiscal austerity measures during periods of strained public finances. In this article, we show that these decisions have consequences for political polarization. Our macro-level analysis of 166 elections since 1980 finds that austerity measures increase both electoral abstention and votes for non-mainstream parties, thereby boosting party system polarization. A detailed analysis of selected austerity episodes also shows that new, small and radical parties benefit most from austerity policies. Finally, survey experiments with a total of 8,800 respondents in Germany, Portugal, Spain and the UK indicate that the effects of austerity on polarization are particularly pronounced when the mainstream right and left parties both stand for fiscal restraint. Austerity is a substantial cause of political polarization and hence political instability in industrialized democracies.

Several recent studies have found unequal policy responsiveness, meaning that the policy preferences of high-income citizens are better reflected in implemented policies than the policy preferences of low-income citizens. This has been found mainly in a few studies from the US and a small number of single-country studies from Western Europe. However, there is a lack of comparative studies that stake out the terrain across a broader group of countries. We analyze survey data on the policy preferences of about 3,000 policy proposals from thirty European countries over nearly forty years, combined with information on whether each policy proposal was implemented or not. The results from the cross-country data confirm the general pattern from previous studies that policies supported by the rich are more likely to be implemented than those supported by the poor. We also test four explanations commonly found in the literature: whether unequal responsiveness is exacerbated by (a) high economic inequality, (b) the absence of campaign finance regulations, (c) low union density, and (d) low voter turnout.

Political conservatives' opposition to COVID-19 restrictions is puzzling given the well-documented links between conservatism and conformity, threat sensitivity, and pathogen aversion. We propose a resolution based on the Dual Foundations Theory of ideology, which holds that ideology comprises two dimensions, one reflecting trade-offs between threat-driven conformity and individualism, and another reflecting trade-offs between empathy-driven cooperation and competition. We test predictions derived from this theory in a UK sample using individuals' responses to COVID-19 and widely-used measures of the two dimensions – ‘right-wing authoritarianism’ (RWA) and ‘social dominance orientation’ (SDO), respectively. Consistent with our predictions, we show that RWA, but not SDO, increased following the pandemic and that high-RWA conservatives do display more concerned, conformist, pro-lockdown attitudes, while high-SDO conservatives display less empathic, cooperative attitudes and are anti-lockdown. This helps explain paradoxical prior results and highlights how a focus on unidimensional ideology can mask divergent motives across the ideological landscape.

Extant literature argues that ethnic minority representation in plurality systems will benefit from the presence of sizable co-ethnic populations. I argue that the threshold for election depends not only on a minority population's group size but a district's level of segregation. I show that residential segregation can facilitate the increased representation of ethnic minority populations. Contrary to the prevailing literature, however, I find that increased segregation levels in cities with sizable minority populations decrease the percentage of co-ethnics elected to office. I support this argument with evidence from an original dataset on the local representation outcomes of Muslims in England between 2011 and 2021, which covers 434 district council elections. Using threshold modelling, I introduce the concept of the population threshold, above which increases in segregation level decrease Muslim representation. This article contributes to the electoral geography literature on ethnic minority representation.

Families are not only the first institution ever created, they are also, for most people, the first institution ever encountered. The preindustrial family structure, which was a function of local ecology and cooperation needs, instilled family members with different values, such as trust in strangers and respect for elders. These values passed through generations and, as we show in three studies, impact today's political attitudes and policies. First, using surveys of second-generation immigrants representing roughly 180 ethnicities living in 32 European countries, we show that the tighter kinship structure of a person's ancestors predicts right-wing cultural attitudes. Among those who are less engaged in politics, tighter ancestral kinship structure also predicts left-wing economic attitudes. In a second study, we control for country-level differences by comparing ethnic groups within countries and find that ancestral kinship strength predicts right-wing cultural attitudes but not left-wing economic attitudes. Finally, in a third study, we examine the policy implications of ancestral kinship. We show that stronger country-level ancestral kinship strength also increases anti-LGBT policies and welfare spending. Finally, we examine whether value systems link preindustrial kinship with modern political attitudes. In total, this work indicates that our political beliefs are rooted in the value systems and familial institutions created by our forebears.

How do external threats affect leaders' incentives to repress? We argue that external threats both increase and decrease state repression, but through different causal pathways. Directly, external threats provide leaders with political cover to use repression against political opponents. Indirectly, threats incentivize leaders to augment state capacity, which decreases the likelihood of state repression. To test this argument, we develop a new latent measure of external threat using a Bayesian measurement model. We use mediation analysis to examine the direct and indirect effects of external threats on repression in developing countries from 1980 to 2016. We find that external threats increase government repression directly, but indirectly decrease repression through stronger state capacity. Our findings have implications for how international factors connect to domestic politics to help explain state repression. In addition, our new measure of external threat will help scholars study the consequences of the international threat environment.

How do failed coups influence power personalization in dictatorships? While scholars have studied the mechanisms of personalism in dictatorships in detail, little attention has been paid to the timing and determinants of surges in personalism levels. In this article, we propose that personalism can evolve non-linearly, and show that large, quite rapid increases in personalization by dictators occur after a failed coup attempt. The logic is that failed coups are information-revealing events that provide the dictator with strong motives and ample opportunities to accumulate power. The leader uses this window of opportunity to rapidly consolidate his power at the expense of the ruling coalition. We test the theory using time-series, cross-sectional data on dictatorships in 114 countries in the period between 1946 and 2010. Two placebo tests indicate that disruptive events by regime outsiders – failed assassination attempts and civil war onsets – do not promote the rush to personalize.

We study the drivers of refugees' decision making about returning home using observational and experimental data from a survey of 3,003 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that the conditions in refugee-hosting countries play a minor role. In contrast, conditions in a refugee's home country are the main drivers of return intentions. Even in the face of hostility and poor living conditions in host countries, refugees are unlikely to return unless the situation at home improves significantly. These results challenge traditional models of decision making about migration, where refugees weigh living conditions in the host and home countries (“push” and “pull” factors). We offer an alternative theoretical framework: a model of threshold-based decision making whereby only once a basic threshold of safety at home is met do refugees compare other factors in the host and home country. We explore some empirical implications of this new perspective using qualitative interviews and quantitative survey data.