Abstract The AppleTV series Pluribus presents a world in which an alien virus joins the vast majority of humanity into a collective group mind. The few unjoined find themselves facing classic political dilemmas in a world without political institutions. Ultimately the series suggests that the virus has returned its characters to something like a Hobessian state of nature.
Abstract Symbols and messages from Star Wars have been a constant presence at US protests against rising authoritarianism. In Minneapolis, the Rebel Loon symbol merged the state’s bird with the Rebel Alliance emblem, leading the rise of a Rebel Flock composed of state, and national birds, merged with the Alliance Emblem. Shared on social media, and in real life, the Rebel Flock was just one way that people shared their concerns about authoritarianism and their intention to rebel. Beyond the US, pro-democracy protestors in Iran, Thailand, and Brazil shared excerpts from a key rebellion manifesto, recognizing their own struggles in the words from the Andor television show. This article examines the rise and diffusion of symbols and narratives from Andor as a way to understand the initial moments of building and sustaining a rebellion. It argues that Andor and Star Wars present a coherent set of goals and purposes, and that the fictional universe gives political cover to those trying to resist who also need to avoid government censorship. This article shows that the politics of rebellion and authoritarianism in Andor and Star Wars have insights for scholarship and for political science pedagogy.
Abstract Democracy depends on people having the capacity to act collectively and navigate difference, yet political science often overlooks the transformative work that enables this. This essay foregrounds democratic organizing : sustained, relational, and strategic work that transforms people – reshaping their identities, relationships, and sense of what is possible – while building the collective capacity needed to act together across difference and inequality. Distinct from mobilizing, it does so through sustained relational investment rather than episodic activation. Drawing on U.S. and global examples, we present a conceptual framework built around three analytically distinct principles: interdependence as the proper ontological unit of analysis, power with as the mode of collective capacity-building organizing produces, and the politics of possibility as an orientation toward democratic futurity that keeps people engaged when outcomes are uncertain. We situate these principles within existing scholarship on collective action and civic engagement, extending that literature to address what it has systematically overlooked. We then outline a concrete research agenda for studying organizing as a central engine of democratic development.
Abstract This contribution to the special issue of the Forum argues that mainstream science fiction can be an important site for narrating a nascent change in the moral economy of armed politics in the United States. While firearm politics remain durably partisan, I show that a narrower but significant norm change is emerging: the boundary between ordinary gun ownership and politically charged preparedness has become more permeable, even as overt political violence remains broadly stigmatized. I develop this argument through an interpretive comparative reading of Disney’s Andor and Amazon’s Fallout as widely circulating cultural texts that register changing understandings of legitimacy, protection, and force. The article proceeds in three steps. First, it examines firearm politics and armed politics as related but analytically distinct concepts and situates both within the historical development of America’s partisan armed order. Second, it argues that contemporary distrust in institutions has begun to recode arming less as partisan identity and more as contingency and precaution. Third, it shows how Andor and Fallout narrate this shift through distinct but complementary normative scripts: predatory rule and reluctant resistance in Andor ; fragmented sovereignty, self-help, and reluctant adaptation in Fallout . Importantly, neither series normalizes political violence in the abstract; rather, both dramatize the weakening of the threshold of exceptionality around armed politics by depicting the conditions under which force becomes thinkable to ordinary people. What contemporary science fiction reveals, in this sense, is a growing American anxiety that institutions may no longer reliably provide justice, order, and protection.
Over the last several decades, the onset of political nationalization, party polarization, and negative partisanship have shifted the motivations, strategies, and tactics of those who financially participate in congressional elections. These shifts have taken place amidst landmark campaign finance policy changes. In this paper, we use transaction-level datasets of individual campaign donations, independent expenditures, and political action committee donations from 1990 to 2024 to track these changes in congressional elections. Specifically, we argue that individual donors; party organizations; and non-party groups have reacted in divergent ways that match their electoral motivations and goals, and reveal important trends in American politics. For example, an analysis of the top House fundraisers and most competitive districts demonstrates how nationalization and negative partisanship are driving many individuals' donations. Meanwhile, parties and ideological groups appear laser-focused on the most competitive races; while business and labor organizations continue to target safer incumbents with access-oriented giving and spending. A multivariate case study of the 2024 congressional elections confirms these suspicions, and highlights in particular the largely "wasted" millions of dollars donated by individuals to nationally-known partisan heroes and villains in non-competitive seats.
While the party elites selected the Democratic nominees in 1968 and 2024, conventional wisdom suggests that conventions have become meaningless as the nominee is regularly chosen by voters well ahead of time. We contend that while presidential nominations are undoubtedly more democratic than they were pre-1972, various reforms have affected the opportunities for meaningful participation by voters while still ensuring a central role for elites. This give-and-take between elite control and participatory democracy is dynamic, but in the current system, elites can still overrule voters. The central role the convention can assume in the post-modern era and the influential role for elites is evident in 2024, where delegates to the national convention, not voters, ultimately selected Vice-President Kamala Harris as the party's nominee. Even though 2028 will likely go back to the status quo - a nomination where voters have meaningful participation, as their preferences expressed in primaries and caucuses will likely affect the outcome - the ability for elites to overrule that and sway the choice of a nominee persists and can always be utilized. Through a series of reforms that have unfolded over the course of more than 50 years, the Democratic Party has preserved their ability to put their thumb on the scale as needed.
Not all midterm election gains are created equal. When Republicans swept 63 seats in 2010, they were mostly taking back districts that already leaned in their favor. When Democrats flipped 41 seats in 2018, they were doing something harder - winning in Republican territory. I call these two types of flips reclamation and incursion, and show that the distinction matters for understanding what electoral waves mean and predicting what might happen in 2026. Drawing on Cook PVI data for every midterm House seat that changed party hands from 1998 to 2022, I document a shift from reclamation-dominated waves to incursion-dominated ones - a shift driven by partisan geographic sorting and gerrymandering. I also find that incursion flips revert at higher rates than reclamation flips, which holds implications for understanding the likely durability of party mandates. With the reclamation inventory nearly exhausted, 2026 shapes up as the most incursion-dependent Democratic wave in the post-sorting era.
This paper extends presidential succession effects theory to Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign. There was hope that Joe Biden's weak popularity would not undermine her campaign, but presidential election succession theory suggests strong Biden effects on her candidacy because she was a vice president running in an immediate election. Drawing on daily approval and favorability data from 538, seven partisan subgroup surveys from AP-NORC, and individual-level voting data from AP VoteCast, results show a strong impact of voter assessments of Biden on support and voting for Harris. These findings reinforce the theoretical prediction that immediate vice-presidential succession elections are highly sensitive to outgoing presidential approval. The paper contributes to scholarship on succession effects by extending analysis beyond post-election data and highlights the strategic limitations faced by vice-presidential successors in polarized political environments.
From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, the politics of criminal justice took a sudden turn from highly politicized punitiveness, to lower-salience problem solving that led to a range of breakthroughs that reduced the growth in incarceration. This shift was driven by decreasing party competition at the state level, the increasing space for reform produced by lower public salience of crime, and the creative advocacy and political entrepreneurship of advocates. This period of problem solving appears to be over, driven by increasing public concern about crime and repolarization in response to social movement activism. Lessons are offered that advocates and funders can draw from this case, especially concerning the linkage between salience and problem-solving reform.
This special issue brings together essays by leading political scientists to provide insights on the politics of problem solving in the contemporary American state. This brief introduction summarizes the essays in the special issue and highlights common themes.
At a time when there are calls to radically reform - or even eliminate - the civil service, understanding its relative strengths and opportunities for improvement becomes more important. This article considers the capacity of the civil service to engage in learning and problem-solving. While public employees are (sometimes justly) critiqued for their inability to learn and adapt, I review two examples of problem-solving that have been institutionalized into the United States federal government: performance management and reducing administrative burdens. Those examples and broader research offer a number of observations about problem-solving. Governments can build models of iterative adaptation and improvement that are tied to specific routines. While unflashy and incremental, a model of problem-solving that focuses on embedding an ethos of change into organizational routines is more likely to have lasting effect than top-down reforms that feel distant from the day-to-day work of civil servants. But for those routines to succeed requires other changes. Government needs to do a better job of hiring problem-solvers, and then shielding them from the twin threats of proceduralism - becoming bogged down in rules rather than goals - and politicization.
This discussion surveys changes in the world that might impact the ability to solve policy problems as outlined initially in Glazer and Rothenberg (2001. Why Government Succeeds and Why It Fails. Harvard University Press). While the basic premises of the original analysis hold, interrelated political and economic changes have occurred in ways that would produce a far different monograph than was authored roughly a quarter-century ago. Politically, four changes are highlighted: (1) growth in polarization; (2) rise of private politics; (3) heightened globalization; and (4) media diversification. Economically, three notable changes are discussed involving: (1) the changing nature of industrial organization; (2) the redesign of supply and value chains; and (3) the dramatic rise of artificial intelligence. While no universal statement can be offered, changes in these features, both individually and interactively, provide additional opportunities and new obstacles for policy successes to be realized and suggest areas for further scholarly investigation.
Good governance and effective problem solving are important goals for American government, and one branch of political science that focuses on them is research on the politics of public policy. This essay summarizes important insights from that literature and illustrates their relevance to two problems: housing unaffordability and public pension underfunding. With housing unaffordability, problem-solving politics is currently activated, whereas with pension underfunding, it is not. To understand why, it is important to consider the features of the policy, the organization of interests, and the politics of problem creation. In the problem-creation stage, the two cases share much in common: they feature lopsided interest structures buttressed by longstanding institutions. But for the activation of problem-solving politics and what problem solving looks like, there are meaningful differences between the two. One difference relates to how the problems are experienced by the broader public. The other is that in one of the cases, the side with vested interest in the status quo is a well-organized interest group. In both cases, problem-solvers tend to emerge from political offices with broader constituencies: state-level offices for housing, and executives (governors and mayors) for pensions.
A major development in the modern Congress is the increased centrality of fundraising. Although raising money has long been a component of members' responsibilities, until recently it was a more moderate one. As this essay describes, numerous factors have contributed to the development, including the reduced role of seniority in determining committee positions, the rise of the internet as a medium through which challengers can raise funds from out-of-district donors, and reforms to campaign finance law that have handicapped parties' ability to serve as the dominant fundraising organizations. These changes, individually and in combination, have been quite detrimental to congressional problem-solving. The increased amount of time needed for fundraising means that members have less time for problem-solving; donor opinion has an outsized impact on members' policy behavior; and the types of members and candidates who are interested in problem-solving are now less willing to run for office. The essay concludes by offering potential reforms to the campaign finance system and congressional rules that would better incentivize problem-solving in the contemporary Congress, as well as suggestions for future research that would help us better understand the current dynamics.
Agenda-setting shapes the problems that occupy the sustained attention of those who craft laws and policy, and the heuristics and solutions used to address those problems. An extensive political science literature has elucidated agenda formation, concluding that (1) policy change happens under the conjuncture of solution streams and policy streams (given a structure or moment of political opportunity), and (2) "there is an impressive congruence between the priorities of the public and the priorities of Congress across time" (Jones and Baumgartner 2004. "Representation and Agenda Setting." Policy Studies Journal 32 (1): 1-24), conditioned upon wider legislative agendas than those for the public. I contend here that the rise of administrative government qualifies these conclusions. That delegation trades off expertise for agency preferences is well known, but it also embeds a second trade-off: between a forum with more open agendas (the legislature) and one that restricts them (administration). Indeed, delegation to administrative agencies presumes, if it does not favor, agenda closure - a tightly constrained focus on a limited set of issues to which the legislature has entrusted the agency's authority and resources, and a narrow set of methods and consiliaria (experts, lawyers, adversaries, commenters) from which the agency seeks and gets its information. Agenda limitation may be desirable but may also worsen the quality of public problem solving, and agenda democracy itself may be normatively desirable. This tension is ineluctable. Hypothetically, it might be ameliorated by (a) the development and embedment of greater expertise in law-making assemblies and/or (b) the restriction or deliberative aperture (or both) of administrative policymaking.
We examine the contributions Congress makes to problem solving in contemporary American government. We offer a more positive assessment of the institution than is the norm for political science. In terms of representation, institutional processes, and policy outcomes, the polarized Congress has underappreciated virtues. Congress's membership and party composition do a credible job reflecting the political diversity that exists in the country, and its institutional processes show respect for that diversity. Congress's policy outcomes typically command broad support across party lines. Amid the intense polarization of contemporary American politics, the contemporary Congress enacts as much or more legislation by sheer volume than it did in the 1980s and the 1990s, and it normally does so in ways that large majorities and both parties support.
Justice Anthony Kennedy is widely regarded as the author of the gay rights legal movement-establishing the Court's attempt to codify gay and lesbian dignity into a constitutional rights-based logic. From Romer v. Evans to Obergefell v. Hodges, Kennedy's was often the only federal voice that mattered in the fight for gay and lesbian rights. When he retired, gay rights advocates worried about the stability of his distinctive gay rights doctrinal legacy. Trans rights advocates wondered whether the Kennedy precedent would apply to transgender legal claims. And anti-LGBTQ advocates hoped that Kennedy's retirement could usher in an era of LGBTQ-rights retraction. It's been 10 years since Obergefell and 8 since Kennedy's retirement and conservatives have not only stemmed the flow of Kennedy's doctrinal legacy but have encouraged the Court to entertain some significant setbacks. In this article we revisit Kennedy's legacy, identifying the contours of his contributions, the opportunity costs of his retirement and the Court's emerging LGBTQ rights retractions.
Are democracies better at solving problems than non-democratic regimes? If so, what elements of democracies make them better? How do different political systems monitor and manage problems that are long-term? In this paper I sketch the issues in making such comparisons, and report some of the major findings at present. Then I point to possible directions for making those comparisons by linking components of the problem-solving paradigm to specific elements of democratic institutions and governance.
In recent years, conservative actors have decried what they call "gender ideology," defined as efforts to recognize the complexity of sexuality and gender beyond the simple binary. We first review the recent politics of the anti-gender ideology movement both globally and in the U.S., with a particular focus on the rights of transgender people, a central target of these efforts. We emphasize that many of the attacks on gender ideology are associated with rising anti-democratic forces around the world. Employing a unique national survey with extensive questions regarding both democracy and trans attitudes fielded after Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, we find that fewer than half of Americans support policies that expand or defend the rights of trans people. However, support varies considerably across specific trans policy issues and between different groups in society. Without making any claims to causal direction, we find support for democracy and attitudes toward right-wing authoritarianism are strongly associated with support for transgender rights. We conclude that the observed link between anti-democratic forces and opposition to trans rights at the elite level is replicated at the mass level.
In three presidential election cycles from 2016 to 2024, the Democratic Party nominated two women, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, and one man, Joe Biden. Each ran against the Republican Party's repeat nominee, Donald Trump, with Clinton and Harris losing and Biden winning. This paper examines the role that sexism plays when women lose elections, focusing on the narratives used to explain Democrats' (and Harris's) loss in 2024. Using original survey data, we find that men and women attribute blame across the candidates differently from one another. Regardless of party identification, women voters are significantly less likely than men to blame Harris most for Democrats' loss. Indeed, women who identify as Democrats and Independents blame Harris the least for Democrats' loss. We also find evidence that the blame gap between men and women in their views of Kamala Harris is significantly mediated by hostile, though not benevolent sexism. The dual finding of a gender gap in blame attribution and the persistence of hostile sexist attitudes among some voters has important implications for the Democratic Party as it processes their loss in 2024 and looks ahead in nominating candidates to run in future elections.
