Democracies often struggle to contain police violence, which undermines the rule of law and reproduces inequality by targeting marginalized citizens. Yet, scholars have shown that repressive policing enjoys considerable public support. Focusing on Brazil, we demonstrate that attitudes toward police violence mirror polarization between left- and right-wing voters, and investigate how competing narratives change attitudes toward police violence through multiple mechanisms. We argue that marginalized victims' counternarratives can counteract police discourses justifying violence through perspective-getting, enabling citizens to hear about the experiences of stigmatized groups. Using a nationwide survey experiment, we find that although police narratives increase endorsement of lethal violence, statements from victims' mothers emphasizing innocence and disadvantage reduce support for police killings-even among right-wing voters-by increasing empathy and reducing victim-blaming. We demonstrate that, even in deeply unequal and polarized democracies where exclusionary attitudes align with entrenched ideological divides, counternarratives from marginalized groups can shape public attitudes toward injustices.
Voter perceptions of candidates are the substrate on which campaigns act. It is costly, however, for voters to devote enough attention to politics to change their own perceptions of candidates. This paper views campaigns-and the time, effort, and money they expend-as subsidizing rationally inattentive voters' adoption of new beliefs about candidate platforms. We employ an all-pay contest to model costly competition over voter perceptions. In our baseline model, campaigns seek to improve perceptions of their own candidates. In a variant, candidates engage in negative campaigning. Among other results, we observe platform divergence under more reasonable informational assumptions than previous spatial models, replacing candidate uncertainty about voters with voter uncertainty about candidates. This model serves as a bridge between behavioral research on campaigns and theoretical literature on elections, offering a richer set of empirical predictions while preserving the insights of the canonical Downsian framework as a limiting case.
Territorial rights (TR) have become foundational in normative political theory, addressing pressing questions about boundary drawing, governance, and resource use. Influential TR theorists Cara Nine and Margaret Moore justify humans' TR based on the functional, social, and identity-anchored normative significance of non-substitutable places. However, these arguments treat animals as resources, excluding them from normative consideration and political standing. This article analyzes Nine and Moore's arguments to assess whether their justificatory logic applies to wild animals. Using mule deers as a case study, I test whether they have sufficiently weighty interests in occupancy, residency, resource use, and control to ground duties on humans and whether TR theories should continue to treat animals as mere natural resources.
Abstract Power‐sharing deals can potentially solve the autocrat's commitment problem, yet often fail to prevent conflict. This article develops a dynamic model to examine a largely overlooked friction: Sharing power within an authoritarian regime bolsters the opposition's coercive capabilities. The resultant threat‐enhancing effect creates two distinct commitment problems for the opposition, which determine if and when power sharing occurs. First, the opposition cannot commit to refrain from leveraging its enhanced threat. The ruler prefers to incur a revolt than peacefully share power if the threat‐enhancing effect is large. Second, the threat‐enhancing effect tempts the opposition to wait for a future power‐sharing deal, which undercuts the opposition's commitment to revolt today. New dynamic implications arise: delayed power sharing, conflict, or an increased willingness for the ruler to share power are all possible. Scrutinizing the opposition's limited commitment ability contrasts with the predominant existing focus on the autocrat's commitment problem.
Abstract When constituents are uncertain about whether leaders' policy preferences align with their interests, policy choices generate a trade‐off between payoffs and information. Leaders can experiment with their preferred policy, but if the outcome is bad, constituents learn this and threaten office removal. I use a repeated model of political agency to analyze how this trade‐off shapes long‐lived, term‐unlimited leaders' policy choices. When there is uncertainty about the optimal policy for constituents, leaders implement “learning traps”: spatially intermediate policies that halt learning about what the best policy is. They experiment only when their preferences are very likely to be aligned with constituents, a contrast to the “gambling for resurrection” logic ubiquitous in the literature. I provide a case study that examines how the 1861 reforms ending Serfdom in Imperial Russia represented the logic of a “learning trap” and illustrate additional applications of the model to political contagion and economic policymaking.
