Labor-managed firms, whether in the form of worker cooperatives, codetermination, or broad-based employee ownership, have recently prompted substantial public debate, to which political theorists have contributed with normative analyses that are seriously deficient insofar as they have neglected considerations of productive efficiency. I offer a normative view of labor-managed firms that leans squarely on efficiency considerations. I first argue that the value of productive efficiency is grounded not only on the interests of capital suppliers and society at large, but also on workers’ interest in avoiding domination by their bosses, and examine how efficiency may serve and set back this interest. I next argue that some variants of labor-managed firms can secure efficient production while protecting workers’ interest in nondomination more robustly than capital-controlled firms. Finally, I compare labor-managed firms to alternatives to achieve these aims, including self-employment, workplace regulation, unionization, and labor market policies to enhance workers’ exit options.
The experimental study of the effects of religious messages and endorsements by religious leaders on political attitudes has a relatively short history yet has coalesced around three main claims: religious treatments are especially effective because of their religious character, effects are larger for religious affiliates than nonaffiliates, and effects are larger for high religiosity types than low religiosity types. Here, we meta-reanalyze the experimental record (58 treatment-outcome pairs drawn from 43 studies reported in 26 papers) to probe the generalizability of these claims. Our findings indicate that these three headline claims do not generalize straightforwardly across contexts: effects are large in some cases and close to zero in others, and we find no evidence in favor of the claimed heterogeneities by religious affiliation or religiosity. Based on a census of the estimands in this literature, we offer suggestions for future research that would enhance commensurability and synthesis.
The proof of Proposition 2 in Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1998, American Political Science Review 92(1): 23–35) is flawed. This note presents an elementary direct proof of the result.
Standard arguments for the moral duty to vote in nationwide elections or referendums appeal to citizens’ general duty of reciprocity not to free ride on the provision of the public goods of democratic governance and its benefits, to a nonreciprocal duty to maintain and strengthen democratic institutions, or to a general duty to bring about just outcomes. In this article, I argue that citizens are under an expressive duty to vote, as grounded in a more general duty to manifest support for just and democratic laws, and for democratic institutions as the instantiation of the requirement to treat one another with equal concern and respect. Even if (in circumstances I elucidate) citizens are morally permitted not to vote for either of the options on offer, it does not follow that they are morally permitted to abstain: sometimes, participating in the poll and voiding one’s ballot is, on expressive grounds, the right thing to do.
How do states overcome mistrust? Scholars argue that costly foreign policy signals build trust. But when trust is low, such as during rivalries, states are unwilling to use these signals for fear of being cheated. We argue that domestic policies can also build trust by revealing information about a state's likelihood of cooperating internationally when there is a correlation between domestic and international preferences. We further argue that domestic policies have a distinct advantage: the value states accrue from them depends less on international reciprocation. As a result, domestic choices can reassure counterparts at moments when trust is so low that costly international signals appear prohibitively risky. We test the implications of our theory in case studies of the Cold War's end and United States-South Korea trust-building post-coup, illuminating several phenomena the current literature struggles to explain: initial trust-building between enduring rivals, asymmetric trust-building, and trust-building through illiberal domestic policies.
A persistent puzzle in the study of public opinion is why political information often produces minimal attitude change despite reliably influencing beliefs. We argue that this duality reflects belief relevance—the extent to which specific beliefs bear on attitudes. Using conversations with large language models (LLMs), we elicit deeply held issue attitudes and the “focal beliefs” people use to justify those attitudes. We then randomly assign participants to receive an LLM-generated counterargument targeting either their focal belief, an issue-relevant but unmentioned belief (“distal belief”), or a placebo. In experiments with two large online convenience samples, counterarguments targeting the aforementioned beliefs successfully decrease belief strength, with effects persisting after 10 days. More importantly, focal belief counterarguments produce larger and more durable attitude change than distal counterarguments. These findings suggest that political information can successfully shift political attitudes and provide new evidence for the role of belief relevance in persuasion.
Are effective state lawmakers more likely than ineffective ones to be elected to Congress? We draw on a new dataset of state legislative effectiveness scores from 1993 to 2018 to examine the relationship between lawmaker effectiveness and the decision to run for, and ultimately be elected to, the U.S. House of Representatives. We find that more effective state lawmakers are more likely to enter Congress than ineffective lawmakers. This pattern is due more to the progressive ambition of candidates than to voter decisions. Specifically, within citizen state legislatures, more effective lawmakers are much more likely to run for U.S. House seats than are their less effective counterparts. In highly professional state legislatures, however, more effective lawmakers are more likely to run for Congress only when presented with the opportunity of an open seat. Our analysis finds no relationship between a state legislator's lawmaking effectiveness and their likelihood of winning primary or general House elections.
Prior research demonstrates voters' confidence in elections depends on whether their preferred candidate wins, but does agreement with the electoral rules being used also matter? Leveraging growing procedural polarization in election laws, public opinion data from 2008 to 2024, and a large-scale survey experiment conducted before the 2024 election, I show that agreement with election procedures matters for voter confidence beyond well-established effects related to partisan control and electoral outcomes. Observational and experimental analyses consistently reveal that voters are less likely to express confidence in election results conducted using procedures they oppose. The effects are particularly large for voter identification laws and among Republicans and independents. The findings underscore a tension in American federalism: as states increasingly adopt divergent electoral rules aligned with co-partisan preferences, partisan divides in electoral confidence may deepen. If so, procedural responsiveness to partisan preferences may undermine electoral confidence and, in turn, perceptions of electoral legitimacy.
Electoral reform efforts in the United States are widespread, yet little is known about how Americans evaluate alternative electoral systems or their consequences. We address this gap using conjoint and vignette experiments to study how Americans assess electoral reforms based on their implications for the number of parties and the degree of ideological polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives. Focusing on democratic voice, governability, and responsiveness, our designs emphasize party-system outcomes rather than technical institutional features that may be difficult for citizens to understand. We find that Americans are strongly averse to reforms that generate pronounced legislative polarization, even when it might be expected to enhance democratic voice. Findings pertaining to multipartism are more mixed, with some evidence that respondents respond positively to moderate departures from the two-party system. Perceived gains in voice and responsiveness do not generally compensate for losses in governability, except under arrangements that avoid polarization.
This article analyzes three kinds of privilege—roughly, the monopoly or near-monopoly of a prized social good by a group—in terms of the political barriers facing attempts to reform them. Extending previous work, it distinguishes among discrimination privileges, which are zero-sum and relative, benefiting some groups at others’ expense; monopolized social right privileges, involving goods enjoyed only by some that can and should be extended to all; and differential treatment privileges, involving disagreement over whether a good currently monopolized by some should be extended to all or to none. The political barriers to reforming discrimination privilege involve group interest; those to reforming monopolized social rights include privilege, ignorance, cost, priorities, policy uncertainty, and the psychological wage. Differential treatment privilege is complicated. An exercise in applied political realism, this article treats normative categories as political inputs rather than philosophical conclusions and seeks to demonstrate the insights enabled by doing so.
How do electoral rules influence voters? We build on existing research that has examined voter, rather than elite, reactions to electoral rules and implement a field experiment around a switch from single-member plurality rules to multi-member closed-list proportional rules (PR) in Sierra Leone, expanding the study of electoral rules' influence on voters further into the Global South. We find that exposure to multimember district/PR increased women's commitment to voting and decreased both men's and women's support for particularistic campaign appeals in this context. These results likely flow from voters' perceptions of whether politicians are accountable to parties or to voters under different systems, rather than from increased party competition, new party entry, a clear switch to programmatic party competition, or increased trust in elections. We discuss the implications for studying electoral rules in clientelistic democracies.
Does partisan disagreement impact expectations of victory in war? We conjectured it could by degrading military cohesion. We registered two main predictions: (a) soldiers fight less effectively if they observe political parties disagree during a crisis about whether to initiate war and (b) the effects of (a) are amplified when soldiers are affiliated with a dissenting opposition party. With some nuance, we found broad support for these predictions through two preregistered survey experiments that recruited South Korean military cadets and soldiers of appropriate ranks for warfighting. Our novel design estimated effects on the will to perform six essential battlefield tasks given land-battle doctrine, unit structures, and force employment of modern democratic armies. Thirteen exploratory tests yield findings consistent with arguments that military institutions provide nonpartisan socialization, but surprising for research on nationalism, soldier-to-soldier trust, and the psychological and dispositional determinants of military effectiveness. We also introduce and calibrate rifle shooting outcomes for experiments.
We helped design and evaluate a statebuilding intervention in Medell & iacute;n, Colombia. The municipal government dramatically intensified nonpolice state presence in 40 neighborhoods over 20 months. On average, perceptions of security and legitimacy changed negligibly, suggesting that returns to statebuilding investments are generally low, at least within electoral cycles. Prespecified heterogeneity analysis, however, reveals significant increases in security and legitimacy where state governance began relatively higher, while impacts were null or possibly negative where it began lower. This suggests increasing rather than diminishing returns to statebuilding. The divergence apparently resulted from city officials under-delivering in initially lower-governance sectors. One reason might be "start-up costs" in statebuilding. Alternatively, both initial state penetration and incentives to implement new programs might depend on neighborhoods' ability to hold agencies accountable. Whatever their source, increasing returns could drive persistent "neglect traps"-channeling political attention and investment to areas where state penetration is already robust, reinforcing existing disparities.
In a recent article published in this journal, Holman, Merolla, and Zechmeister (2022; 2024) report a decrease in support for U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May following the 2017 Manchester bombing, using data from the British Election Studies. Our analysis, however, reveals that once a linear time trend is considered, the bombing does not significantly affect public reactions. We replicate their study with Gallup World Poll data and likewise find no decline in May's approval rating. Extending the analysis, we examine major terrorist attacks in African countries led by men and similarly find no rally effect. Together, these results cast doubt on terrorism's capacity to trigger rally 'round the flag dynamics and challenge claims of a gendered pattern whereby women leaders face unique penalties in crises. We argue that broader comparative evidence is necessary before concluding whether citizens rally around, or retreat from, leaders in the wake of terrorism.
Ethnicity is an important cleavage in Africa, yet its influence on voting is contested. Selection biases from restricted choice sets complicate micro-level analyses, while ecological inferences and unobserved confounders hamper meso and macro-level approaches. Our new Covoting Regression (CVR) tackles several of these challenges. It estimates the effect of coethnicity on the probability that pairs of voters covote for the same party while conditioning on other shared characteristics. Thereby, CVR mirrors the micro-foundations of aggregate indicators such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index. We analyze Afrobarometer surveys from 28 countries and estimate that coethnicity increases covoting intentions between respondents by 17 percentage points. Politically relevant groups and covoting for ethnic parties drive this estimate, which is consistent across institutionally diverse countries and at least four times larger than that of other cleavages. The CVR addresses key issues in studying electoral consequences of socio-economic cleavages and bridges gaps between levels of analysis.
We investigate the developmental consequences of slave-raiding in Eastern Europe, the largest source of slaves in the early modern world after West Africa. Drawing on a wide-ranging new dataset, we estimate that at least five million people were captured from hundreds of locations across Eastern Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. We hypothesize that, over time, raids encouraged an economically advantageous process of defensive state-building linked to raided societies' resistance to and lack of integration into the slave trade. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables strategies, we find that exposure to raids is positively associated with long-run urban growth and related indicators of demographic and commercial development. Consistent with our posited mechanism, raided areas constructed more robust defensive infrastructures and attained higher levels of military, administrative, and fiscal capacity. Our findings suggest that the structure of slave production conditions its developmental legacies, cautioning against drawing generalizations from the African context.
Research on partisan expressive responding suggests that the beliefs people express in surveys are more partisan than their underlying perceptions. This article examines the scope and importance of expressive responding through a meta-reanalysis of 44 studies from 25 articles. On average, treatments designed to reduce expressive responding shrink measured partisan bias by about 25%. Across the 242 survey questions in the data, treatments increase the correlation between the average Democrat's and Republican's beliefs from 0.81 to 0.86. Contrary to expectations derived from the two leading theories of expressive responding, misreporting ("cheerleading") and congenial inference, there is no evidence that expressive responding increases in partisan identity strength or educational attainment. As research on expressive responding enters its third decade, greater emphasis on design-based tests of mechanisms may help build a firmer understanding of the nature and substantive importance of expressive responding-namely, whether the forces that produce expressive responding in surveys also shape real-world political judgments.
In recent decades, political theorists have drawn on historical thinkers to explore how political elites can be held accountable. Rousseau, however, is often dismissed as reducing accountability to elections and participation to occasional ratification referenda. This article challenges that view. While Rousseau expected an elective aristocracy to execute laws ratified by the people, he also identified two mechanisms-scrutiny and recall-through which citizens could control these representatives. After reconstructing Rousseau's account, I consider how these mechanisms could be adapted to contemporary democracies. Focused on executive accountability, the model is particularly suited to presidential systems with directly elected presidents. It combines a national jury-a citizens' assembly chosen by lot and tasked with examining presidential actions-with the possibility of a recall referendum. By uniting deliberative scrutiny with the power to remove the head of state, this approach offers an underexplored complement to recent anti-oligarchic institutional innovations based on sortition.
The study of political agenda setting is a cornerstone in political science. Within this literature, political parties are implicitly portrayed as being capable of proactively initiating discussions. However, this fundamental notion of party agency deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. In response, this article crafts a new model (the Issue Initiation Model) that opens the window into parties' efforts to set an agenda and traces how they initiate and elevate their agenda. The model is tested on an original dataset covering more than 5.5-million tweets by political parties and MPs, coupled with over 750,000 news articles and 419,000 parliamentary questions in the United Kingdom and Denmark from 2015 to 2022. Results show how parties and their MPs can proactively redirect the attention of other actors through strategic planning and orchestrated actions. By theorizing and empirically testing the implicit notion that parties can proactively initiate discussions, this article has important implications for political agenda setting.
This study examines how economic elites respond to the erosion of democratic checks and balances, focusing on the Japanese legislature from 1936 to 1942. Using an original dataset of Diet members' biographies and board memberships, it analyzes the Imperial Japanese Army's consolidation of power and shifts in parliamentary voting patterns amid the suppression of dissent. Employing difference-in-differences and event-study designs, this study evaluates the effects of two key shocks: economic sanctions and wartime procurement. Legislators tied to sanction-hit sectors-such as textiles and petrochemicals, the weakest performers in the stock market-shifted toward authoritarian alignment. Biographical and legislative records suggest this shift was facilitated by regime-backed campaign finance. In contrast, legislators from procurement-dependent sectors, such as automobiles, maintained stable voting behavior. The findings complicate the conventional view that sanctions prompt elites to advocate international policy change. Instead, they show that sanctions can drive vulnerable actors to submit domestically, thereby accelerating authoritarian consolidation.
