Researchers often lack the necessary data to credibly estimate racial discrimination in policing. In particular, police administrative records lack information on civilians police observe but do not investigate. In this article, we show that if police racially discriminate when choosing whom to investigate, analyses using administrative records to estimate racial discrimination in police behavior are statistically biased, and many quantities of interest are unidentified—even among investigated individuals—absent strong and untestable assumptions. Using principal stratification in a causal mediation framework, we derive the exact form of the statistical bias that results from traditional estimation. We develop a bias-correction procedure and nonparametric sharp bounds for race effects, replicate published findings, and show the traditional estimator can severely underestimate levels of racially biased policing or mask discrimination entirely. We conclude by outlining a general and feasible design for future studies that is robust to this inferential snare.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has organized hundreds of disruptive protests in American cities since 2013 (Garza 2014; Harris 2015; Taylor 2016). The movement has garnered considerable attention from the U.S. media and is well recognized by the U.S. public (Horowitz and Livingston 2016; Neal 2017). Social movement scholars suggest that such robust mobilizations are typically predicated on clear social movement frames (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow et al. 1986). Tillery (2019b) has identified several distinct message frames within the social media communications of BLM activists. In this paper, we use a survey experiment to test the effect of three of these frames—Black Nationalist, Feminist, and LGBTQ+ Rights—on the mobilization of African Americans. We find that exposure to these frames generates differential effects on respondents’ willingness to support, trust, canvass, and write representatives about the Black Lives Matter movement. These findings raise new questions about the deployment of intersectional messaging strategies within movements for racial justice.

Checkpoints in the West Bank’s Hebron Governorate represent Israel’s ever-present power over Palestinian civilians. Drawing on 71 interviews conducted during the Intifada of Individuals (2015), this article inductively builds theory about the relationship between social isolation and different modalities of resistance. Rather than forcing civilians to comply with the state, checkpoint apparatus instead change the nature and texture of resistance. I suggest that checkpoints structure social connections for civilians on the ground. Checkpoint apparatus which inhibit social connection engender a feeling of hopelessness and foster support for individual, often violent, resistance. Where checkpoints isolate a community as a whole but did not disrupt within-community social connections, citizens maintain hope for the possibility of change, which facilitates a preference for collective resistance. This article identifies troubling consequences checkpoints have on civilians and highlights how oppressive state power can limit some modalities of resistance only to engender support for others.

Epistocratic arrangements are widely rejected because there will be reasonable disagreement about which citizens count as epistemically superior and an epistemically superior subset of citizens may be biased in ways that undermine their ability to generate superior political outcomes. The upshot is supposed to be that systems of democratic government are preferable because they refuse to allow some citizens to rule over others. We show that this approach is doubly unsatisfactory: although representative democracy cannot be defended as a form of government that prevents some citizens from ruling over others, it can be defended as a special form of epistocracy. We demonstrate that well-designed representative democracies can, through treatment and selection mechanisms, bring forth an especially competent set of individuals to make public policy, even while circumventing the standard objections to epistocratic rule. This has implications for the justification of representative democracy and questions of institutional design.

Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo.

How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward “social control.” In 1968, using rainfall as an instrument, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election. Elites may dominate political communication but hold no monopoly.

“Dissident minorities” are members of marginalized groups who dissent from the consensus group position on matters seen as critical to their group’s collective liberation. This paper articulates the distinctive political status—powers, vulnerabilities, and obligations—of dissident minorities. Dissident minorities may be especially vulnerable to slurs or ostracism as “self-hating.” But they also can wield significant public influence by positioning themselves as exceptional and exemplary members of their group. Both the powers and vulnerabilities of dissident minorities, in turn, converge around the prospect of “tokenization”—the use of the dissident minority’s dissident opinion by majority group actors as a means of discharging a stipulated obligation to engage with the minority group writ large. While dissident minorities should be free to hold and advocate for their divergent positions in public spaces, they retain a distinctive obligation to not offer themselves out as adequate replacements for engagement with the broader group.

How do citizens within countries hosting U.S. military personnel view that presence? Using new cross-national survey data from 14 countries, we examine how different forms of exposure to a U.S. military presence in a country affect attitudes toward the U.S. military, government, and people. We find that contact with U.S. military personnel or the receipt of economic benefits from the U.S. presence correlates with stronger support for the U.S. presence, people, and government. This study has profound implications for the role that U.S. installations play in affecting the social fabric of host nations and policy implications for the conduct of U.S. military activities outside the United States.

Arming is puzzling for the same reason war is: it produces outcomes that could instead be realized through negotiation, without the costly diversion of resources arming entails. Despite this, arms control is exceedingly rare historically, so that arming is ubiquitous and its costs to humanity are large. We develop and test a theory that explains why arming is so common and its control so rare. The main impediment to arms control is the need for monitoring that renders a state’s arming transparent enough to assure its compliance but not so much as to threaten its security. We present evidence that this trade-off has undermined arms control in three diverse contexts: Iraq’s weapons programs after the Gulf War, great power competition in arms in the interwar period, and superpower military rivalry during the Cold War. These arms races account for almost 40% of all global arming in the past two centuries.

Democratic representation focuses on voice: it conceives voice as that which is represented and as the prime mode of representing. This article argues that this focus is problematic and turns instead to silence to ask a fundamental question: Can representation empower citizens from their silent positions? I approach the question in three parts. First, I offer a new conceptualization of silence, arguing that silence is best understood as the site of a potential or actual presence. Second, I use criteria of domination and displaced involvement to assess attempts to enfranchise silence within the transmission-belt model of representation. Third, I critically engage and strengthen constructivist views of representation by developing these criteria to assess the legitimacy of claims to represent—speak about and for—silent constituencies—namely, the claim to represent an (alleged) silent majority.

Public support has long been thought crucial for the vitality and survival of democracy. Existing research has argued that democracy also creates its own demand: through early-years socialization and later-life learning, the presence of a democratic system coupled with the passage of time produces widespread public support for democracy. Using new panel measures of democratic mood varying over 135 countries and up to 30 years, this article finds little evidence for such a positive feedback effect of democracy on support. Instead, it demonstrates a negative thermostatic effect: increases in democracy depress democratic mood, while decreases cheer it. Moreover, it is increases in the liberal, counter-majoritarian aspects of democracy, not the majoritarian, electoral aspects that provoke this backlash from citizens. These novel results challenge existing research on support for democracy, but also reconcile this research with the literature on macro-opinion.

Retrospective voting is a crucial component of democratic accountability. A large literature on retrospective voting in the United States finds that the president’s party is rewarded in presidential elections for strong economic performance and punished for weak performance. By contrast, there is no clear consensus about whether politicians are held accountable for the local economy at other levels of government, nor how voters react to the economy in a complex system of multilevel responsibility. In this study, we use administrative data on county-level economic conditions from 1969 to 2018 and election results across multiple levels of government to examine the effect of the local economy on elections for local, state, and federal offices in the United States. We find that the president’s party is held accountable for economic performance across nearly all levels of government. We also find that incumbents are held accountable for the economy in U.S. House and gubernatorial elections. Our findings have broad implications for literatures on representation, accountability, and elections.

Multidimensional concepts are non-compensatory when higher values on one component cannot offset lower values on another. Thinking of the components of a multidimensional phenomenon as non-compensatory rather than substitutable can have wide-ranging implications, both conceptually and empirically. To demonstrate this point, we focus on populist attitudes that feature prominently in contemporary debates about liberal democracy. Given similar established public opinion constructs, the conceptual value of populist attitudes hinges on its unique specification as an attitudinal syndrome, which is characterized by the concurrent presence of its non-compensatory concept subdimensions. Yet this concept attribute is rarely considered in existing empirical research. We propose operationalization strategies that seek to take the distinct properties of non-compensatory multidimensional concepts seriously. Evidence on five populism scales in 12 countries reveals the presence and consequences of measurement-concept inconsistencies. Importantly, in some cases, using conceptually sound operationalization strategies upsets previous findings on the substantive role of populist attitudes.

The leading explanation for the underrepresentation of women in American politics is that women are less likely to run for office than men, but scholars have given less attention in recent years to the gender makeup of the pipeline to elected office. We examine the gendered pipeline to power across three potential candidate pools: lower-level officeholders, those named in newspapers as likely candidates, and lawyers who made political contributions. We find some evidence that women are less likely to seek elected office; however, the dearth of women in the pipeline plays a much greater role in the lack of women candidates. For the gender disparity in candidates to close, women have to be far more likely to run for office than men, particularly on the Republican side. Our results highlight the need to consider the gendered pipeline to power alongside rates of entry in studies of women’s underrepresentation.

Why do local governments sometimes hire lobbyists to represent them in other levels of government? I argue that such mobilization efforts depend in part on the policy congruence between localities and their elected delegates in the legislature. I provide evidence consistent with this theory by examining how municipal governments in the United States respond to partisan and ideological mismatches with their state legislators—a common representational challenge. Using almost a decade of original panel data on municipal lobbying in all 50 states, I employ difference-in-differences and a regression discontinuity design to demonstrate that cities are significantly more likely to hire lobbyists when their districts elect non-co-partisan state representatives. The results are broadly consistent with a model of intergovernmental mobilization in which local officials purchase advocacy to compensate for the preference gaps that sometimes emerge in multilevel government.

Why did Plato conclude the Republic, arguably his most celebrated work of political theory, with the Myth of Er, an obscure story of indeterminate political-theoretical significance? This paper advances a novel reading of the Myth of Er that attends to the common plot that it shares with two earlier narrative interludes in the Republic. It suggests that Plato constructed the myth as an account of a search, akin to the sorting of potential philosopher-kings that underwrites the kallipolis’ educational curriculum, for natures that have successfully absorbed the cumulative effects of their philosophical upbringing. The model of nature presented in the myth, in turn, helps us approach the category of nature as a working concept: we can recognize contexts in which it is useful to assume in otherwise complex and fluid individuals a fixed, indelible nature, while granting that our sense of what that consists in is subject to revision.