American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Governments routinely wage civil conflicts in ways that disrupt civilians' lives and livelihoods, creating harmful externalities like internal displacement. Both fighting and displacement hinder economic activity, jeopardizing popular support for governments and reducing the future gains of governance. How do states fight when using force induces migration and thus risks popular discontent? I model a conflict where government efforts to control territory spur displacement, creating economic disruption that can spark tension between displaced civilians and government supporters. The risk of losing popular support leads the government to modify its tactics. While the government could mitigate the disruptive consequences of displacement by fighting less, I find another, more troubling, strategy. Governments may engage in preemptive violence to prevent migration. Moreover, economic downturns exacerbate migration incentives and, I find, can also increase violence against civilians. Governments anticipating displacement fight more intense conflicts today to see relatively less migration in the future.

What does it take to abolish structural domination? If domination is structural, then it can only be eliminated by the transformation or abolition of structures. For this to happen, agents advantaged by existing structures will often have to be brought under a form of power that lays beyond their control. Defeating domination therefore seems to require the embrace of dominating power. I call this dilemma the double bind of emancipation. To illustrate, I turn to debates regarding land confiscation during the Reconstruction era in the United States (1865–1877). Confiscation was intended to destroy the material bases of planter power and guarantee formerly enslaved people economic independence. But it would also entail subjecting planters to uncontrolled power. To address the double bind, I argue emancipation must be guided by a social theory of domination. Emancipation from structural domination requires identifying and eliminating the conditions that reproduce domination over time.

Survey researchers have long protected respondent privacy via de-identification (removing names and other directly identifying information) before sharing data. Unfortunately, recent research demonstrates that these procedures fail to protect respondents from intentional re-identification attacks, a problem that threatens to undermine vast survey enterprises in academia, government, and industry. This is especially a problem in political science because political beliefs are not merely the subject of our scholarship; they represent some of the most important information respondents want to keep private. We confirm the problem in practice by re-identifying individuals from a survey about a controversial referendum declaring life beginning at conception. We build on the concept of “differential privacy” to offer new data-sharing procedures with mathematical guarantees for protecting respondent privacy and statistical validity guarantees for social scientists analyzing differentially private data. The cost of these procedures is larger standard errors, which can be overcome with larger sample sizes.

How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important question in international relations. This paper studies the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we leverage the timing of survey collection across respondents from nine members of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that battlefield casualties increase the news coverage of Afghanistan and the public demand for withdrawal. Evidence from a survey experiment replicates the main results. To shed light on the media mechanism, we leverage a news pressure design and find that major sporting matches occurring around the time of battlefield casualties drive down subsequent coverage, and significantly weaken the effect of casualties on support for war termination. These results highlight the role that media play in shaping public support for foreign military interventions.

In many democracies, unemployed and low-income citizens are less willing to vote. Can social policies weaken the link between income and turnout? We study policy feedback leveraging a unique experiment in Finland, which randomly assigned a sizable group of unemployed to receiving an unconditional basic income (BI) for 2 years (2017–19). Combining individual-level registry and survey data, we show that the intervention has large positive effects on voter turnout. Unconditional BI increases turnout in municipal elections by about 3 percentage points (p.p.), on average, an effect that is concentrated among marginal voters (+ 6–8 p.p.) and persists in national elections after the end of the experiment. Exploring possible mechanisms, our analysis highlights the role of the interpretive effects that follow from unconditionality in the bureaucratic process, including higher levels of political trust and efficacy. We discuss implications for theories of voter turnout and policy feedback, and the design of BI policies.

State repression in autocracies has long been assumed to elicit explicit or implicit disapproval from citizens. Recent studies suggest that authoritarian governments can garner support for repressive policies through active information manipulation or exploiting social cleavages. However, is it possible for citizens to support repression even without government manipulation? We propose the “authoritarian cue effect,” arguing that citizens’ attitudes toward state repression can be endogenously shaped by instances of state repression, which may be interpreted as cueing messages signaling the regime's disapproval of the punished behaviors. Using a novel belief correction survey experiment, we empirically demonstrate that state repression can induce the public to pick up on cues and automatically adopt the state's stance, perceiving repressed behavior as having more negative externalities and supporting state repression more. This cue effect suggests that authoritarian state repression can self-legitimize and evade public opinion backlash in a less costly manner than previously presumed.

We consider the classic veto bargaining model but allow the agenda setter to engage in persuasion to convince the veto player to approve her proposal. We show that the proposer-optimal can be achieved either by providing no information or with a simple binary experiment. Proposer chooses to reveal partial information when there is sufficient expected misalignment with Vetoer. In this case, the opportunity to engage in persuasion strictly benefits Proposer and increases the scope to exercise agenda power. We discuss applications and how the optimal experiment can be implemented in practice.

Amid rapid urbanization in the developing world, there is growing interest in the effects of urban context on political behavior. An underexplored element of urban context is the built environment itself—the physical architecture and design of urban space—which can structure how residents interact both with each other and with the state. Drawing on street network data and an original survey from urban Ghana, I suggest that more gridded, orderly neighborhoods reduce the social interactions residents have with neighbors, lower embeddedness in political problem-solving networks, and depress electoral turnout. Rather than making residents more legible to state officials, gridded streets make the local state and political realm less legible to residents by reducing opportunities to forge politically valuable social ties in a context of clientelist politics. The paper demonstrates that greater focus is needed on built environments to understand the social structures undergirding grassroots urban politics.

We argue that economic and political integration leads voters' political preferences toward cross-national convergence. Analyzing data on voter preferences across 30 European democracies from 1976 to 2022, we measure the similarity of preference distributions across state dyads over time, documenting an average increase in similarity over this period. We then model these associations statistically and find that greater similarity and complementarity in economic production and co-participation in the European Union and the Eurozone are associated with increasingly similar voter preferences. The argument and analyses broaden our understanding of the political implications of globalization and also provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for two growing literatures: one on the cross-national diffusion of parties' strategies and one on the political implications of macroeconomic stimuli such as trade shocks or banking crises.

Does the implementation of a ranked choice voting (RCV) system increase the number, diversity, and quality of candidates competing in local elections? Using original data from 273 cities across three decades and employing a preregistered difference-in-differences design with matching, I find that the size of the candidate pool increases following implementation. However, this effect dissipates in later election cycles, indicating that RCV has no long-term effect on candidate entry. Indeed, the short-term increase in the candidate pool mostly reflects increased entry by low-quality candidates with little chance of winning. Additionally, I find that RCV has no effect on the proportion of female and non-white candidates running for office. These results call into question several purported benefits of RCV and suggest that RCV, by itself, might not be sufficient to influence candidate entry at the local level.