American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Formal models commonly characterize interstate bargaining as dichotomous, ending in either war or peace. But there are many forms of coercion—including supporting rebel groups, sanctions, and cyberattacks. How does the availability of intermediate policy options affect the incidence of war and peace? We present an analysis of crisis bargaining models with intermediate policy options that challenges conventional results about the relationship between private information and negotiation outcomes. In our “flexible-response” modeling framework, unlike in traditional crisis bargaining models, we find that greater private war payoffs may be associated with a lower probability of war or worse settlement values. When intermediate options are available, the relationship between the private efficacy of war and the private efficacy of these other options largely determines equilibrium outcomes. By utilizing the tools of mechanism design, we derive game-form–free results on how private information shapes international conflict, regardless of the precise negotiating protocol.

John Maynard Keynes is often seen as the quintessential thinker of the short run, calling on us to focus our intellectual and material resources on the present. This poses an intriguing puzzle in light of Keynes's own influential speculations about the future. I use this seeming tension as an opening into Keynes's politics of time, both as a crucial dimension of his political thought and a contribution to debates about political temporality and intertemporal choice. Keynes's insistence on radical uncertainty translated into a skepticism toward intertemporal calculus as not only morally objectionable but also at risk of undermining actual future possibilities. Instead of either myopic presentism or calculated futurity, Keynes advocated bold experimentation in the present to open up new possibilities for an uncertain future. This points to the need to grapple with how to align multiple overlapping time horizons while appreciating the performativity of competing conceptions of the future.

In this article, I claim that Simón Rodríguez, a 19th-century Venezuelan thinker, used and reconfigured Jean-Jacques Rousseau's understanding of amour-propre to construct a new political foundation for Latin America. He sought to channel it and other sentiments toward productive ends with a social education. In doing so, Rodríguez departs from Rousseau while still addressing the latter's political concerns regarding the benefits of egalitarian republicanism and the pitfalls of civilizational progress. Instead of accepting political models from antiquity, Rodríguez conceives of an egalitarian social republic uniting the rich and poor, White and people of color. While skeptical of European civilization built on commerce, he sees the possibility of a social civilization reconciling the interests of all in society. This comparative study of Rodríguez provides a necessary addition to the history of political philosophy while offering insights into a mode of thinking still informing contemporary politics in Latin America.

Extant research has established that displeasure with a Supreme Court ruling typically has negligible consequences for institutional support, largely because, as legitimacy theory's positivity bias explains, judicial decisions are invariably delivered with the accoutrements of legitimizing symbols. The Court's ruling in Dobbs, abrogating a federal constitutional right to abortion services, may challenge legitimacy theory because displeasure with the ruling seems so widespread and intense. This research aims to determine whether the ruling lessened the Court's legitimacy. The general conclusion is that Dobbs produced a sizeable dent in institutional support, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, in part because abortion attitudes for many are infused with moral content and in part owing to the Court's substantial tilt to the right since 2020. Indeed, the Court's legitimacy may be at greater risk today than at any time since Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930s attack on the institution.

Political elites must know and rely faithfully on the public will to be democratically responsive. Recent work on elite perceptions of public opinion shows that reelection-motivated politicians systematically misperceive the opinions of their constituents to be more conservative than they are. We extend this work to a larger and broader set of unelected political elites such as lobbyists, civil servants, journalists, and the like, and report alternative empirical findings. These unelected elites hold similarly inaccurate perceptions about public opinion, though not in a single ideological direction. We find this elite population exhibits egocentrism bias, rather than partisan confirmation bias, as their perceptions about others' opinions systematically correspond to their own policy preferences. Thus, we document a remarkably consistent false consensus effect among unelected political elites, which holds across subsamples by party, occupation, professional relevance of party affiliation, and trust in party-aligned information sources.

Tragic events such as terrorist attacks have been shown to influence voters’ policy preferences, but less is known about whether such events also affect actual immigration policy. In this study, I bring new evidence to this question by examining whether migrant shipwrecks and terrorist attacks affected asylum decisions in France during the refugee crisis of 2015–16. I find that asylum officers were more likely to approve an individual's refugee application if a shipwreck has recently been in the news than they are otherwise. Yet they were less likely to grant refugee status to asylum seekers from Syria and Iraq after a terrorist attack. Together, these findings suggest that tragic events can affect immigration policy through their influence on asylum officers.

How do populations facing external aggression view the costs and benefits of self-defense? In Western countries, war support has been shown to follow cost–benefit calculations, resembling the moral principle of proportionality. A categorical position, in contrast, means supporting self-defense regardless of the costs. To evaluate which moral principle populations facing external aggression follow, we conducted a conjoint experiment with 1,160 Ukrainians in July 2022. We examine support for different strategies Ukraine could pursue against Russia, which vary regarding the political autonomy and territorial integrity they afford and three costs: civilian and military fatalities, and nuclear risk. We find that Ukrainians do not trade off autonomy or territory against these costs. A new method to rank conjoint-attributes, computing “nested” marginal means, shows that respondents categorically reject political or territorial concessions, regardless of costs. This provides first experimental evidence that populations resisting external aggression do not subject war outcomes to cost–benefit calculations.

Consensus from the debate over lagged dependent variables in dynamic linear regression models advises that including enough lags of the dependent and independent variables will fully model autocorrelation in the error term. But this approach fails to account for a long-neglected source of autocorrelation in the error term—moving averages—which cannot be represented with a finite number of lags. Approximating moving averages results in either inconsistent or inefficient estimates of relevant quantities of interest, a claim demonstrated here via Monte Carlo simulations and three empirical demonstrations. Ultimately, we argue that moving averages should be a standard part of dynamic analysis and offer guidance for incorporating them into various modeling strategies.

Aristotle's analysis in the Rhetoric of the intelligibility of passionately angry political speech is an urgently needed addition to the ongoing scholarly reassessment of his relevance to democratic practices. Aristotle shows his readers—both orators and their auditors, citizens who might both rule and be ruled—that anger is prone to exaggeration and distortion and is therefore liable to be amplified into hatred. He shows further though that if instead of simply being exaggerated, anger is taken “seriously,” then a more sober and measured politics can ensue, one less destructive of a good legal order.