This review examines the persistence and strengthening of Indigenous communities, identities, and nations in Latin America over the past two decades. Indigenous peoples in the region have transitioned from social movements to wielding actual political power, reshaping national politics, governance structures, and development paradigms. We analyze the evolution of scholarly literature beyond earlier biases in country selection and insufficient attention to racial and gender dimensions, highlighting communitarian feminist perspectives that link body, territory, and collective governance. The review addresses fundamental questions of Indigenous identity formation, linguistic revitalization, and the endogeneity of census categorizations. We examine territorial defense against extractivism, digital colonialism, and threats to data sovereignty, while also exploring traditional governance institutions, legal pluralism, and autonomy claims. Indigenous perspectives challenge conventional political science approaches through holistic worldviews that integrate spiritual, social, and environmental dimensions. Critical emerging issues include historical trauma's impact on political behavior, Indigenous health inequalities (particularly in mental health), and urban Indigenous youth participation. We argue that political science can gain much from recognizing Indigenous epistemologies, learning from Indigenous peoples’ experiences in their transformative processes for reimagining governance, collective action, and political engagement.
Climate change politics in the developing world remains understudied, despite the region's acute vulnerability and centrality to climate futures. This article synthesizes emerging research across three domains: public opinion and climate salience, the political effects of climate exposure, and the institutional production of climate risk. We highlight a central paradox: Widespread public concern often exists alongside low climate literacy, suggesting that political salience stems from lived experience with environmental degradation rather than scientific attribution. Yet the literatures on climate and environmental politics have developed along separate tracks, limiting conceptual integration and obscuring how local environmental decline manifests as climate risk. Turning upstream, we examine how institutions shape climate exposure itself. Climate vulnerability, we argue, is not merely inherited but also politically produced and unequally distributed through the institutions that govern carbon sinks, build adaptive capacity, and allocate political voice. We identify critical gaps around the distributive politics of adaptation, representation, and institutional sources of climate exposure.
At its core, democracy carries a promise of political equality that rests on rules, norms, and procedures that govern the polity to afford equal consideration and freedom from domination to every member. However, despite being widely cherished, political equality is rarely defined precisely. This article offers a framework for studying political equality that can be used to organize thinking. We begin with an idealized notion of direct democracy, then move to its application in representative democracies. We use the framework to argue that political equality requires three conditions: inclusiveness, anonymity, and representativeness. The framework is also useful in characterizing problems of structural power inequalities that can impede political equality.
This article reviews some of the most influential accounts of our democratic duties. It organizes the debate into three normative reasons that ground said duties: reasons of justice, reasons of citizen equality, and reasons of civic virtue. Although this division is somewhat forced—since duties can be justified on several considerations at the same time—it helps us organize the extremely scattered debates in the literature. Finally, the article concentrates more specifically on a number of duties as emblematic of the conversation, including the duty to vote, jury duty, and others.
This review surveys the limits of participatory democracy and reconsiders its merits, with particular emphasis on the limited attention of citizens. I trace the development of participatory democracy within political science and democratic theory and suggest that participation has fallen out of its previously central role as a criterion of democratic quality. What remains is a set of functions and pitfalls, which I explore in a series of inquiries into participation: ( a ) in lottocracy and electoral democracy, ( b ) in its relationship to representation, and ( c ) in local land use planning. I conclude with thoughts for future research informed by the discussion.
The study of nonelite women's political participation has received renewed focus, especially in the Global South. A focus on nonelite women reveals distinct models and understandings of the gendered constraints to political participation and power. Yet a lack of clarity in the conceptualization of nonelite women and their distinctions from elite women inhibits our understanding of the causes and consequences of women's political inclusion and its subsequent implications for democratic accountability and resilience. This article provides a conceptual framework for understanding nonelite women, their distinct political preferences from elite women, and their available political strategies. We review the literature on the constraints to nonelite women's political participation, highlighting the roles of resources, political institutions, and patriarchal social norms. We conclude by theorizing how patriarchal norms and their global variants shape the political behavior and strategies of nonelite women and their implications for the sustenance of political gender gaps.
Democracy offers subaltern groups tools to reduce inequalities by asserting political equality, but these groups must sustain political mobilization to achieve real gains. In the Global South, subaltern groups confront three key obstacles: ( a ) threats of violence and intimidation, ( b ) the challenge of recovering suppressed histories and forging collective identity, and ( c ) severe organizational deficits. Contrary to expectations, democracy and modernity have not eradicated hierarchy, and new forms of domination persist. As backlash against the expansion of subaltern rights develops, we urgently need to study subaltern politics. Contemporary resubordination revives the same obstacles that historically impeded mobilization.
Inflation returned to the foreground of political economies worldwide after 2019, after 30 years of relative quiescence. Inflation remains unpopular—including among those who are hurt by the policies currently used to reduce it—and damaging for established regimes and incumbent governments. But whether the explanations and tools developed to contain price increases after the 1970s are appropriate for twenty-first century inflation is less clear. Credibly independent conservative monetary policy, export-oriented production, and wage coordination helped limit demand-driven and wage-push inflation in the past, but global supply shocks and structures and sellers’ inflation may be more important drivers of contemporary inflation. These are yet to be systematically examined in political science, and their political consequences and policy solutions look quite different.
Over the past decade, a new wave of research has restored interest in the central and complex role of bureaucracy in international politics. We introduce the concept of bureaucratic influence to unify theories modeling how bureaucrats—ranging from foreign policy advisers to international organization staff—shape behaviors ranging from international conflict to global governance. We identify two dimensions that structure the pathways through which bureaucrats exert such influence: the degree of centralization in the decision-making process and the selection criteria political leaders apply. We synthesize the resurgent literature along these dimensions, illustrating how emerging findings challenge several conventional wisdoms about the scope and nature of bureaucratic influence. Finally, we take stock of the empirical accomplishments of recent scholarship, highlighting the rich micro-level data it has introduced while noting the bureaucratic populations that remain understudied. Our review illuminates how bureaucratic actors embedded in states and international organizations shape consequential events in international politics.
LGBTQI politics has become a vibrant field of inquiry, illuminating how struggles over sexual and gender diversity shape core debates in comparative politics and international relations. This review synthesizes scholarship on the causes, consequences, and contestation of LGBTQI rights, tracing the path from grassroots mobilization to institutional uptake. We thus reflect on the question of why LGBTQI rights expand and contract, while highlighting the unprecedented speed of rights expansion alongside persistent and growing coordinated opposition. The review underscores that queer agency has been central to these transformations in ways that inform our core theories in political science. It argues for integrating LGBTQI politics into mainstream theory building as a key site for understanding democratic resilience and the contested evolution of human rights.
Education institutions are fundamentally political. They mold political values, shape inequality, create opportunities for patronage through teaching jobs, and can even be used for political surveillance. Yet most political science research treats education as just another welfare-enhancing public service, leaving key puzzles unresolved, such as why some countries have universal schooling but low skills, and why both autocracies and democracies invest heavily in indoctrination. In this article, I reconceptualize education systems as inherently political institutions with four distinctive features. Then, based on a review of research since the early 2000s, I demonstrate how the study of education—reconceptualized as I propose—yields unique insights into core political phenomena such as state building, nationalism, conflict, and regime politics. Finally, I identify and discuss two central questions for future research: Why do governments choose different combinations of education access and quality? How do education policies shape political outcomes beyond participation, including social order, preferences for redistribution, and democratic stability? The field is ripe for inquiry.
Statues of Confederate figures represent only a small portion of the memorial sites under reconsideration in the United States, but much of the political debate about American monuments in recent years has focused on arguments about the motives behind their potential removal, renaming, or modification. Although the contested removal of Confederate statues across the United States has spurred significant public discourse, much work remains to assess the ways in which a changing monumental landscape shapes American political development. This article reviews the evolution of monument controversies, monument protection laws, and relevant scholarship, focusing on the importance of the politics of memory to situate current debates in a long history of political battles over how the American past should be remembered. We discuss the ways in which monument conflicts reflect tensions over American identity and point out some of the most important recurring problems in American monument protection laws.
Relational egalitarianism refers to an approach to interpreting the meaning and value of equality. This approach emphasizes the egalitarian quality of social relations and deemphasizes the equal distribution of goods. This article provides a short history of relational egalitarianism. I then survey relational egalitarian criticisms of distributively focused egalitarian principles, arguing that theorists are converging on the view that both relational and distributive concerns have independent significance. I discuss attempts to identify what relational equality involves and why it matters. I argue that defenses of relational egalitarianism are more robust than often suggested. I review relational egalitarian approaches to specific political and policy problems, with a special focus on scholarship in democratic theory, given relational egalitarians’ long-standing concerns with inequalities of power and authority. I conclude with reflections on the relevance of relational egalitarianism for political science and political theory.
A large literature explains the rise of populist parties with the economic insecurities stemming from globalization and technological change. But despite the long-standing focus of the comparative and international political economy literature on fiscal policy, these studies largely ignore governments and their economic policies. This article brings policy back into the picture by reviewing the research agenda on the political effects of fiscal policy, and fiscal austerity in particular. This research finds that governments, especially those with a large electoral margin, can implement austerity and still survive in office. Support for austerity varies with the composition of the austerity package, the public discourse, and the narratives to which voters are exposed. Nonetheless, austerity has important political effects even if governments do not collapse: They increase votes for nonmainstream, often populist, parties among economically vulnerable voters because austerity magnifies rather than alleviates the social risks of these voters.
No systematic framework exists to analyze the different forms of fictions in politics. We develop the concept of fictive politics to illuminate how actors simulate selective, alternative, or entirely fictional representations of reality while dissimulating incompatible facts. We distinguish three ideal types: deceptions, where audiences are unaware that they are facing a fiction; veiled facts, where audiences suspect a fiction but choose not to probe it; and open fictions, where audiences are fully aware that they are witnessing a fiction. We show that fictions answer critical political needs, including maintaining systems of domination, managing conflicts between competing interests and values, and facilitating cooperation between state and society.
The United States continues to evade scrutiny as a place that actively represses, expels, and rules over subsets of its population. This oversight has foreclosed investigation into the empirical relationship between digital technologies, civic engagement, and political control in the United States. For example, how are digital technologies used as a resource for the individual and collective power of marginalized people? How are digital technologies deployed to suppress or disorganize the individual and collective power of marginalized people? To integrate existing work and generate new lines of inquiry, we offer an analytical framework that centers the experiences of marginalized groups, interrogates the United States as a racial authoritarian democratic regime, and examines how institutions and actors leverage digital technologies in a complex political landscape. We argue that digital technologies can have both enhancing and destructive effects on the civic engagement and collective power of marginalized groups in the United States.
In an era when artificial intelligence and chatbots make it enticing to interface with an entirely digital field site, immersive ethnographic practices and an ethnographic sensibility remain indispensable. Honing an ethnographic sensibility increases the fidelity of our theories to the real world; improves researchers’ sensitivity to the ethical, emotional, and moral stakes of research; and sparks creativity. As more researchers in political science adopt an ethnographic sensibility, they are increasingly engaging in ethnography-plus research, which may include other qualitative or quantitative methods. To assess the promise of these approaches, we consider new directions in digital research methods, especially for difficult-to-access settings in authoritarian regimes that involve navigating the thorny ethics of state surveillance. Digital research with an ethnographic sensibility could benefit from an ontological and epistemological examination of what ethnography can and cannot deliver. The emerging generation of researchers looking to embrace an ethnographic sensibility should practice participant observation, embrace reflexivity, and attune to the body and sensations.
Why are some countries more successful at advancing the clean energy transition than others? Existing research, centered on industrialized democracies, often frames international collective action against domestic distributive explanations. This review synthesizes many previous comparative and international explanations in a credibility framework that clarifies when governments can reduce opposition and create climate coalitions. Applying it to both developed and developing countries reveals how institutions, state capacity, and global constraints jointly shape decarbonization trajectories and suggests a new research agenda for the political economy of climate change.
Participatory institutions often aim to yield information useful to policymakers, whether about public preferences, problems, or solutions. But how can large numbers of public contributions be processed into interpretable and actionable information outputs? As theorists and practitioners increasingly call for participatory institutions to operate at larger scales, often enabled by new technologies, this challenge only becomes more important. This article reviews recent work on participatory institutions in order to develop several insights: ( a ) that there are different types of information that policymakers may aim to learn and that are relevant to different policy stages; ( b ) that information must be effectively processed in order to be interpretable and actionable for policymakers; ( c ) that there are different types of information processing, depending on the specificity and novelty of the information outputs that policymakers aim to learn; and ( d ) that there are different ways in which this processing can be delegated, whether to experts, ordinary people, or automated algorithms. Better recognizing these differences will help both researchers and practitioners better understand the potential and the limitations of participatory institutions in different settings and with different goals.
We survey research on the relationship between democracy and the environment. The first part of our review examines how democratic systems influence environmental outcomes. Scholars have found, at best, a weakly positive correlation between democracy and environment, with little support for the proposed democratic environmental Kuznets curve, a finding we confirm with new data. We argue that democracy is too coarse a category to capture variation in environmental outcomes. Therefore, the second part of the review surveys how specific institutional features structure principal–agent relationships between citizens, leaders, and organized groups. We show that effective environmental governance depends on institutions that align incentives, reduce informational asymmetries, and match temporal horizons. These can arise in democracies but can also, under certain conditions, appear in autocratic contexts such as China, where state capacity and political incentives have aligned to produce targeted improvements. We conclude by identifying key open questions and promising directions for future research.
