American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Unions sponsor electoral candidates around the world, yet little is known about the consequences of these arrangements. I study how union sponsorship affected the electoral prospect of British parliamentary candidates throughout the 20th century. I collect new data on the universe of union-sponsored candidates. Employing a difference-in-differences design based on within-candidate variation induced by the sponsorship institution and its abolishment, I document that sponsorship caused a six percentage point increase in candidate vote shares. I outline theoretical mechanisms and examine whether sponsees improved their electoral fortune because of changes in constituencies, opponents, resources, mobilization, or information. The evidence supports the constituency and resource mechanisms: Sponsorship helped candidates get nominated in attractive constituencies, accounting for two-thirds of the effect, and caused an inflow of resources into constituency–party organizations. Overall, sponsorship promoted the representation of union-friendly candidates in parliament, but it only led to moderate shifts in the balance of power between parties.

Can human rights organizations (HROs) shame governments without fueling racism against diasporas or appearing racist? To what extent can shamed governments recover public support lost to shaming by accusing their critics of racism? Employing two U.S.-based survey experiments involving 6,739 respondents and 11 prominent HRO interviews, we offer three novel findings. First, shaming decreased support for shamed countries (Israel and China) but did not fuel racism (antisemitism and anti-Asianism). If shamers face a racial dilemma, it is less about how to shame without fueling racism and more about how to shame without appearing racist. Our second finding points toward a solution: when shaming included an anti-racist cue denouncing racism, respondents perceived it as less racist. Finally, shamed governments can employ racial countershaming to recover some, but not all, of the public support lost to shaming. We contribute to the international relations shaming literature and offer recommendations about racially responsible shaming.

Electoral support for far-right parties is often linked to geographies of discontent. We argue that public service deprivation, defined as reduced access to public services, plays an important role in explaining these patterns. By exploiting an Italian reform that reduced access to public services in municipalities with fewer than 5,000 residents, we show that far-right support in national elections increased in municipalities affected by the reform compared to unaffected ones. We use geo-coded individual-level survey data and party rhetoric data to explore the mechanisms underlying this result. Our findings suggest that concerns about immigration are exacerbated by the reform, and that far-right parties increasingly linked public services to immigration in their rhetoric after the reform. These demand and supply dynamics help us understand how public service deprivation shapes geographic patterns in far-right support.

Existing work sees populist governments undermining the rule of law because they seek to dismantle institutional constraints on their personalistic plebiscitarian rule. We argue that populist rulers pose a greater threat to legal impartiality, equality, and compliance when they face a legacy of weak rule of law. We find empirical support for this assertion after applying synthetic control methods to a cross-country sample that includes up to 51 populist events spanning the period from 1920 to 2019. Our results remain consistent across a range of robustness checks including, the consideration of a set of contextual variables that can potentially determine the capacity of populist governments to sweep away institutional constraints, different populist event classifications, and different ways of measuring the rule of law. In countries, like the United States, with a robust rule of law tradition, the deleterious impact of populists on institutions will be limited but not negligible.

The disadvantages experienced by minorities and lack of societal remedies are partly attributable to native-majority citizens’ limited awareness of minority hardships. We investigate whether informing citizens about field-experimental audits on ethno-racial discrimination increases their recognition of the issue and support for equal-treatment policies. Extending a largely US-centric research frontier, we focus on beliefs about discrimination faced by Muslims in Denmark. To further comprehension, we test three types of framing: a scientist stressing credibility, a lawyer emphasizing the legal breach, or a minority expressing grief. Our survey experiment (n = 4,800) shows that citizens are generally aware of discrimination and tend to overperceive its extent. Communicating audit evidence corrects misperceptions but does not change recognition or policy support, regardless of framing or initial misperception. Only combining priming, correction, and framing temporarily increases recognition and donations to support groups. These findings suggest that audit-based awareness campaigns have limited immediate success beyond donations acknowledging minority hardships.

Institutional investors in residential real estate have become targets of political backlash against unaffordable housing. We argue that this backlash is not only about economic issues such as rising rents; it reflects a fundamental rejection of “financialized capitalism” that turns housing from a basic need into a speculative asset. Using novel geo-coded real estate transaction data, we document the extent of housing financialization cross-nationally and over time, and demonstrate that neighborhood-level exposure to financialization alone is insufficient to explain the widespread support to expropriate corporate landlords in a historic 2021 Berlin referendum. We then develop nationally representative surveys to show that German citizens conceptualize housing as a social right and hold the state responsible for its under-provision. We demonstrate experimentally that arguments about housing financialization significantly raise support for expropriation beyond rent effects. Our findings suggest that financialized capitalism can unite diverse groups of voters in favor of housing socialism.

Formal presidential authority does not always translate into real influence over policy outcomes: The bureaucratic actors that are responsible for policy implementation have considerable discretion. Presidents, however, have tools to influence their behavior. In this paper, we focus on presidential control of intra-executive information flows. We show how the President's power to persuade depends on inter-branch relations and intra-branch institutions. We develop a theory in which the President can shape information available to bureaucratic subordinates via both overt, legitimate channels as well as covert, illegitimate interventions. We find that the President's ability to persuade bureaucrats to pursue her preferred goals can be reinforced by higher bureaucratic independence or more aggressive external oversight. We also show how bureaucratic independence mediates how overseer motivations translate into oversight intensity. Our theory predicts that Congress' investigative resources should target more independent agencies under divided government and less independent agencies under unified government.

Although most local elections are officially nonpartisan, a debate exists regarding how much ideology matters in local politics. I test the effects of national polarization toward policing at the local level using a conjoint survey experiment and novel observational data. I find that police union endorsements send clear ideological signals about mayoral candidates to voters and voters respond accordingly: liberal (conservative) respondents are significantly less (more) likely to vote for police union-endorsed candidates. I create a new dataset of police union endorsements in every mayoral election in American cities with populations above 180,000 between 2011 and 2022. I find police union endorsements have significant negative effects on incumbent vote share in liberal cities at the same time as polarization occurs nationally. This evidence suggests that when national politics polarize on a local issue, ideology becomes an important component in local politics and that police union endorsements now inform about local candidate ideology.

Governments use a variety of tools to discourage, impede, or limit the ability of foreign adversaries to purse their ambitions. Some of these measures seek to constrain an opponent's capacity, while others seek to deter an opponent to take (or not) a particular action. We develop a theory to study how constraining and coercive threats interact strategically. Building on canonical models of deterrence, we first identify how coercive measures, in isolation, curb an aggressor's transgressions. We then identify when constraining measures and the threat of coercion (deterrence) are substitutes and when they are complements. In some cases, constraining measures make deterrence effective when it would otherwise fail (constraining to deter). Our results offer insights about measuring the effectiveness of various diplomatic tools. We highlight a series of novel empirical challenges stemming from the interaction of selection effects and ecological features of a sample of country dyads, and discuss potential solutions.

Why are some threats more credible than others? I argue that leaders’ anger expressions are a previously underappreciated source of coercive credibility. Specifically, leaders who express anger appear more credible because targets believe they are less sensitive to the costs of conflict. I test this argument through quantitative analysis of a novel dataset of world leaders’ public statements in crises from 1946 to 1996 and a U.S.-based survey experiment designed to test the mechanism. The observational evidence reveals that anger expressions increase the likelihood a threat will succeed. The experiment shows that anger expressions cause targets to infer greater resolve and that non-angry threats carry little credibility—and might even backfire. These findings not only shed light on a unique source of threat credibility but also highlight the crucial role of emotions in international relations with new data measuring political leaders’ emotional expressions over time and space.