Timing of valence outcomes plays an important role in key theories of electoral choice, and different models place different emphases on past and future outcomes. Whereas sanctioning models consider only retrospective evaluations as an accountability mechanism, selection models hold that voters use past and proposed future conditions to infer the incumbent's ability to deliver benefits. Drawing on four surveys run on six different samples, we demonstrate that voters prefer improving conditions in both retrospection and prospection. In retrospection, this pattern is difficult to distinguish from overweighting of temporally proximate conditions, which gave rise to the notion of "the myopic voter." Distinguishing the two processes, we find that people do not ignore early datapoints and reward improving conditions (in both retrospection and prospection). This preference for improvement does not simply reflect an uncritical heuristic for upward trends. People are not universally myopic and many genuinely value improving aggregate conditions retrospectively and prospectively.
Abstract Far-right political shifts have been linked to increased racism, raising concerns about their impact on minority access to public services. This study investigates whether far-right electoral victories encourage discrimination by street-level bureaucrats, who are expected to act impartially. We conducted a nested research design in Italy, combining a field-experimental audit with a regression discontinuity design focused on municipalities near the electoral threshold for far-right mayors. Research assistants with native-Italian and West-African accents contacted municipal healthcare offices to request registration with a general medical practitioner. Compared to native-Italian callers, those with West-African accents faced significantly higher rates of scrutiny and dismissive responses. Leveraging close elections, we find that this disparity was exacerbated in municipalities where far-right candidates narrowly won. These findings demonstrate that far-right electoral success can undermine impartiality and equal access to essential services.
The article replies to Nicholas Vrousalis’s attempt to rescue radical republicanism from my critique that it fails on three counts: its non-contingency, domination, and structural injustice theses. Central to my response are the claims that (i) capitalist power cannot be reduced to legal ownership of the means of production, as the process of capitalization is constitutive of capital; (ii) neither neo-republican nor Kantian notions of domination adequately capture what is inherently wrong with capitalism, and (iii) the concept of “class domination” remains theoretically puzzling. I then defend an alienation-centered critique: capitalism’s mode of investment subjects citizens to an impersonal and anarchical form of governance, which, by being necessarily alienating, contradicts democratic self-determination. Overall, this critique forms the core of a “political, political theory of capitalism” and grounds the case for a specific kind of democratic socialism—socialism as reconciliation—which is more demanding than both republican and liberal socialisms.
This article reconsiders the relationship between the globalization of political liberalism and the globalization of political equality. Departing from interpretations of liberal theories of rights and representation as egalitarian or democratic, the article reconstructs an elitist paradigm of liberal representative government from the colonial world. It does so by offering a new reading of the thought of Indian political leader Dadabhai Naoroji. It recovers Naoroji’s overlooked commentary on political representation and imperial reform. I show that Naoroji drew upon analyses made by the first generation of Indian liberal thinkers about imperial political economy and mass-elite relations and used these arguments to formulate a distinctive model of electoral politics as a form of hierarchical tutelage. The recovery of Naoroji’s theory illustrates the deep tensions between representation and mass politics that marked liberalism’s global circulation.
