American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Recently, the authors identified an error that occurred during the collection and compilation of our dependent variables measuring long-term effects, specifically the election outcomes. This impacted the results reported in Table 2 and Table 3, as well as the illustration in Figure 4.

The issue arose from a coding error in our STATA script, which, instead of aggregating election data from all polling stations within each township as intended, inadvertently selected election outcomes from a single random polling station within each township. As a result, our analysis was based on election outcome data from a single random polling station rather than the aggregated township-level data.

Upon detecting the error, we immediately corrected the coding script and data and then reanalyzed the results. We confirm that the main findings of the paper remain robust. In fact, the corrected data indicate stronger effects in terms of statistical significance, further supporting our core findings and conclusions. Below, we report the tables and figures from the corrected data. All replication files on the AJPS Dataverse and the Supplementary Materials are updated accordingly.

While recent scholarship has demonstrated multiple political effects of international trade, less attention has been paid to unbundling the mechanisms through which import competition affects democratic politics. One mechanism, in theory, works through labor unions as domestic countervailing powers shaping legislative responses on compensation and trade votes. We assess the relevance of unions as a mediating variable in the US Congress. For identification, we leverage two distinct sources of exogenous variation, one instrument for import exposure and another for unionization, and combine them in a semiparametric estimator. We find that (i) import competition lowers district-level unionization, (ii) weaker unions lead to less legislative support for compensating economic losers and less opposition to trade deregulation, and (iii) the union mechanism represents a large fraction of the overall effect of import exposure on legislative votes. The results help explain weak compensation and further trade liberalization in the face of rising global competition.

This paper studies the contours of Supreme Court legitimacy. First, we construct a data set of surveys from 2012 to 2024 to show that diffuse support now diverges among partisans; we then analyze an original, six-wave panel survey that reveals the stability of this partisan sorting. Second, we unpack the direct and indirect effects of partisanship on legitimacy: Democrats are more cynical about the Court, disapprove of its outputs, and view obedience to the law differently than Republicans, which contributes to the profound partisan gap in legitimacy. Finally, we reevaluate the relationship between specific and diffuse support by introducing a new measure of specific support, which shows that “fatalistic” views of the Supreme Court contribute to low levels of legitimacy. Today, Democrats’ pessimism toward the Court has eliminated decades of positivity and goodwill. This fatalistic sorting among large swaths of the public implies that the Court's authority now rests on weak and polarized foundations.

Mob vigilantism—the punishment of criminal suspects by groups of citizens—is widespread throughout the developing world. This paper sheds light on the relationship between state capacity and citizens’ choice between reliance on the state and vigilantism. I implemented a field experiment in South Africa that randomly varies the capacity of police to locate households. Findings from surveys conducted several months later suggest households that have become legible to police are more willing to rely on police and less willing to participate in vigilantism. An additional information experiment points toward increased fear of state punishment for vigilantism rather than improved police service quality as the likely mechanism. The broader implication is that citizens’ willingness to cooperate with capable state institutions need not reflect satisfaction with state services. Such cooperation can also be due to the state's ability to limit citizens’ choices by ruling out informal alternatives like vigilantism.

Despite eroding consensus about credible political news sources, much of the public still trusts local media. We assess the emergence, sources, and implications of the trust advantage local news holds over national media. We argue the public now uses a news outlet's local orientation as a shortcut to assess its credibility. In survey experiments, we find unfamiliar news outlets are trusted more when they have a local cue in their name. In surveys where people evaluate digital sources covering their community, this heuristic leads the public to trust unreliable information providers that signal a local focus more than high-quality sources that do not. Our findings position local media as unique, broadly trusted communicators while also illustrating a logic behind recent efforts to disseminate biased political information by packaging it as local news. More broadly, we show the challenges that arise when the public applies once-reliable heuristics in changing political circumstances.

Recently, empirical political scientists have challenged presuppositions about voter behavior that they take to be widespread in normative democratic theory, charging that democratic theory is unmoored from empirical reality. For their part, many normative democratic theorists have rejected empiricists’ characterizations of their subfield and denied that normative theories are threatened by empirical findings about voter behavior. This article argues that both camps are partly right and partly wrong. Normative democratic theories are more varied than empirical critics recognize, and some avoid grounding their defenses of democracy on an unrealistic “folk theory” of popular control. However, even these more promising normative theories may import “folk theory” assumptions in subtler ways and neglect empirical evidence to their own cost. I focus on social or relational egalitarian theories of democracy as an illustration of this problem, which should be addressed by more productive and dynamic engagement between normative and empirical democratic theory.

In many settings, scholars wish to estimate the similarity of political texts. However, the most commonly used methods in political science struggle to identify when two texts convey the same meaning as they rely too heavily on identifying words that appear in both documents. This limitation is especially salient when the underlying documents are short, an increasingly prevalent form of textual data in modern political research. Building on recent advances in computer science, I introduce to political science cross-encoders for precise estimates of semantic similarity in short texts. Scholars can use either off-the-shelf versions or build a customized model. I illustrate this approach in three examples applied to social messages generated in a telephone game, news headlines about US Supreme Court decisions, and Facebook posts from members of Congress. I show that cross-encoders, which utilize pair-level embeddings, offer superior performance across tasks relative to word-based and sentence-level embedding approaches.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping labor markets and sparking political debates. Like economic globalization, AI developments promise benefits, including job creation and lower prices, but also costs such as job displacement, raising crucial questions about public perceptions. Will AI, like globalization, challenge existing paradigms and trigger a backlash? Leveraging a conjoint experiment with 6,000 respondents from the United States and Canada, we examine public opinion toward offshoring and generative AI, focusing on the multidimensional trade-offs between job and price changes. Across all scenarios, respondents are equally or more sensitive to price changes than employment shifts. AI is favored over offshoring, especially among Democrats, highlighting an emerging partisan divide in the United States. Republicans and Canadians show more varied support, indicating AI is not immune to opposition. By focusing on the microfoundations of opinion formation, we identify scenarios that may trigger or temper protectionist stances.

How do legislators' occupational backgrounds shape their ability to advance policy? We argue that politicians with professional experience are perceived as more credible in their areas of expertise and can more effectively persuade voters and peers. We examine this argument in a series of experiments in three Western democracies. We find that German legislators with occupational experience in education are more effective at persuading voters in that policy area. The same pattern holds for United States' legislators with experience in healthcare. The quality of the arguments does not substitute for having actual occupational experience. These effects extend to elected officials: Swedish politicians are more likely to co-sign motions proposed by peers with relevant expertise. Overall, parties that foster occupational diversity are better equipped to build support for their policy agendas. The study uncovers a new mechanism through which descriptive representation can influence policy outcomes, independent of legislators' preferences.

Partisans are divided on policing policy, which may affect officer behavior. We merge rosters from 99 of the 100 largest local U.S. agencies—over one third of local law enforcement agents nationwide—with voter files to study police partisanship. Police skew more Republican than their jurisdictions, with notable exceptions. Using fine-grained data in Chicago and Houston, we compare behavior of Democratic and Republican officers facing common circumstances. We find minimal partisan differences after correcting for multiple comparisons. But consistent with prior work, we find Black and Hispanic officers make fewer stops and arrests in Chicago, and Black officers use force less often in both cities. Comparing same-race partisans, we find White Democrats make more violent crime arrests than White Republicans in Chicago. Our results suggest that despite Republicans' preference for more punitive law enforcement policy and their overrepresentation in policing, partisan divisions often do not translate into detectable differences in on-the-ground enforcement.