Abstract In Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism, Tamar Mitts describes harmful content online—identified by federal governments and tech companies—as an “urgent challenge for societies in the digital age.” While Mitts notes we had limited knowledge to answer this question at the time of her writing, the cumulative research findings in Safe Havens for Hate suggest moderation efforts are largely ineffective in a decentralized online information ecosystem where platforms’ content-moderation policies diverge. The crux of her argument is that divergence in social media platforms’ content-moderation policies creates “virtual safe havens” and allows these groups to become “resistant to online regulation” via an exploitative innovation she terms “digital resilience.” Such resilience, she argues, is possible due to the “strategic interaction between national governments, technology companies, and dangerous organizations.” To put it plainly, content moderation may reduce harmful content in some spaces but not in the overall ecosystem. To this end, Mitts analyzes many social media platforms and an ideological range of extremist groups, ultimately providing a useful theoretical contribution to better understand such actors’ digital resilience across platforms. Her framework connects two key dimensions (moderation and impact) of platform characteristics and three mechanisms (migration, mobilization, and messaging) that “facilitate dangerous organizations’ resilience” online and help explain, despite regulation and moderation efforts, how such groups remain prolific online.
Abstract Thermostatic public responsiveness to policy is mediated by news coverage of government actions. The literature on partisan polarization and associated echo chambers in media consumption suggests the possibility of variation across partisan groups, however. Do partisans have different information about policy change? Do they react differently to the same information? We analyze relationships among policy, television (and newspaper) news, and public preferences in the United States, focusing on three salient spending domains over four decades since 1980. In line with some published observational studies and recent experimental work, our results reveal strikingly similar thermostatic responsiveness to policy change across partisans. Although there are hints of heterogeneity in responses to media, these effects are slight and of little consequence for spending support—parallel partisan publics (still) are a thing. Moreover, to the extent partisans do respond differently to the news, it is not driven by any particular more-partisan network(s) and appears to reflect the more general media signal evident across those outlets.
Abstract Using the thoughtful examination of decades of antitax rhetoric and policy that John L. Campbell offers in Pay Up! Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich as a jumping-off point, this review article recounts Campbell's argument while pointing to other evidence and examples, and offers a warning drawn from other recent scholarship about the harm such antitax orthodoxy visits not merely upon the economy but also on civic and social health, and ultimately democratic governance itself.
Abstract In Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability, Rachel Myrick provides a groundbreaking and compelling understanding of how political divisions hamper the foreign policy performance of democracies. While a large literature has found that democracy enables a country's foreign policy to be more stable, credible, and reliable, Myrick explains that these democratic advantages disappear when a country becomes extremely polarized. Myrick supports her argument effectively with original cross-national data and in-depth analysis of U.S. foreign policy. The book generates many avenues for further research, including on whether the harmful foreign policy effects of polarization are reversible; whether related phenomena such as politicization, populism, and democratic erosion involve similar pathologies; and whether polarized fault lines within countries are being replicated in polarized political alignments among countries. This review article also discusses possible institutional, electoral, and interpersonal remedies to polarization, concluding that each of those has limitations and that a broad political movement may be necessary to reverse the polarization tide.
Abstract Susan Stokes′ The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies offers an important account of the structural and strategic drivers of democratic backsliding. In this review essay, I describe the contributions that the book makes, especially the payoff of focusing on economic inequality as a critical background factor generating societal conditions favorable to backsliding. I then discuss how future work on democratic resilience and backsliding should focus not only on economic inequality′s impacts on the bottom of the income distribution but also on the top of the distribution and the role of increasingly wealthy economic elites in enabling backsliding. The essay concludes with a research agenda on these elites, especially to inform the work of democratic defenders and rebuilders in the United States.
Abstract The coexistence of public tolerance for high inequality alongside the perception of meritocracy, unreflected in the reality of the contemporary American economy, has puzzled scholars in a number of disciplines. Eunji Kim offers an explanation for this phenomenon in The American Mirage: How Reality Television Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy. Her contribution extends beyond just the impact of entertainment television on attitudes about inequality. The American Mirage represents an important signpost in the scholarship about the impact of implicitly political influences on Americans' political attitudes more broadly.
Abstract In My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America, Ruth Braunstein explores the political culture of taxation in contemporary America. Calling our attention to the origins of contemporary tax debates, she shows how morality and American civil religion influence how citizens understand taxation, citizenship, and the proper scope of government. In this article, we review Braunstein's main arguments and the evidence she presents in support of them. We take stock of the book's theoretical frame work and the applicability of the concepts it borrows from the sociology of religion. For all there is to like about Braunstein's book, we discuss what we regard as oversights and things which we think could be improved. We suggest some other factors that have influenced the public reaction to taxation and suggest how going forward morality might help understand the American taxpayer.
Abstract Most scholars who study the history of American politics are so taken with the rich nature of Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835) that they tend to overlook another keen analyst: James Bryce. He is best known to us for his The American Commonwealth (1888). Thankfully, we now have an exceptional biography of Bryce by H.S. Jones. This new book is a fine guide to the extraordinary life and work of Bryce.
