With the US Congress increasingly gridlocked, fewer bills are becoming law. Nevertheless, members continue to engage in what we call “symbolic legislating”—that is, introducing legislation that has effectively no chance of securing enough votes to become law. Despite its prevalence, little is known about the electoral implications of sponsoring symbolic legislation. It is possible that voters reward their legislator’s efforts to move the status quo closer to their position even if it has no chance of becoming law. On the other hand, because symbolic legislation is doomed to fail, it may decrease a legislator’s perceived effectiveness and, thus, their political support. Alternatively, it is possible that sponsoring symbolic legislation has no impact beyond a cue of the politician’s position. In this Research Article, we test these competing hypotheses using a survey experiment. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that, assuming shared party and issue position, sponsoring symbolic legislation is strongly rewarded. Moreover, the effect is even stronger among voters who are most likely to attend to this information in the real world and operates similarly across parties.
US troops are required to disobey unlawful orders but obey lawful ones – yet social scientists know very little about how they draw that line or what drives the decision to actually disobey when it counts. We asked 818 active-duty American troops to define “manifestly unlawful orders” in their own words, as well as whether they would obey or disobey specific scenarios in which they might be asked to directly and intentionally target unarmed civilians. A majority of troops could provide clear examples of situations in which they would feel compelled to disobey orders. Of specific scenarios, over a third of US troops were prepared to disobey orders to target civilians, either with nuclear weapons or if asked to shoot civilian protesters. Controlling for gender, age, branch of service, party affiliation, voting behavior, rank, income, and education, we find simply thinking ahead about the concept of “manifestly unlawful orders” is the single biggest predictor of soldiers’ willingness to refuse to harm civilians.
This paper examines public attitudes toward Big Tech and their relationship to policy preferences in six OECD countries. Drawing on original survey data collected in 2022 from 19,800 respondents in Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, we analyze how education and political ideology shape evaluations of large technology firms such as Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. Using six survey items on the perceived economic, social, and democratic effects of Big Tech, we identify two weakly correlated attitudinal dimensions: positive and negative evaluations. A cluster analysis reveals five groups of respondents—supporters, skeptics, ambivalent, dismissive, and neutral—highlighting that public opinion on Big Tech is not organized along a single continuum. Bayesian multinomial regression models show that higher education is associated less with outright support than with greater ambivalence, while ideology structures attitudes in distinct ways: skepticism is more pronounced on the left, whereas ambivalence rises especially among highly educated respondents on the right. These attitudinal clusters are closely linked to preferences for regulation and government support. The findings suggest that public opinion toward Big Tech is complex, politically structured, and consequential for policy debates.
During civil wars, some rebel groups hire lobbying and public relations (PR) firms to cultivate favorable perceptions abroad. Almost 15% of rebel groups, for example, lobbied through PR firms at least once in the United States between 1945 and 2012. Yet, data limitations have made it difficult for scholars of rebel diplomacy to study rebel lobbying systematically. To help mitigate these limitations and facilitate future research, we introduce the first version of the Rebel Lobbying Dataset (RLD), which captures whether and when rebel groups hired professional lobbying firms in the United States. The RLD covers 230 rebel groups engaged in 103 civil conflicts worldwide from 1945 to 2012. After presenting several descriptive patterns, we demonstrate the dataset’s utility by examining whether rebel lobbying in Washington is associated with subsequent U.S. support for rebel groups. By making rebel groups’ use of professional lobbying firms visible at scale for the first time, the RLD opens new avenues for studying the determinants, timing, and consequences of how rebel groups pursue foreign influence.
Why do conciliatory political appeals sometimes polarise rather than moderate electoral competition in divided societies? Existing accounts of consociational power-sharing explain how hardline parties can become credible negotiators, but they say less about how voters respond when the leaders of displaced moderate parties attempt to broaden support beyond their traditional community. I argue that leaders’ cross-ethnic appeals function as reassurance signalling: they reduce perceived threat to the outgroup while simultaneously weakening perceptions of defensive credibility among co-ethnics. Voters therefore update leader evaluations in opposite directions relative to a party’s inherited reputation. Using survey data from the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election, I compare leader evaluations to party baselines across identity groups. A leader who emphasised cross-community accommodation was evaluated more favourably by the opposing community and less favourably by co-ethnics, while leaders emphasising intra-group defence did not exhibit this pattern. The findings suggest moderation in divided societies redistributes support across groups rather than uniformly increasing approval, providing a behavioural mechanism within post-tribune party competition.
