American Journal of Political Science最新文献

What determines the content of bilateral diplomacy? I argue that the foreign policy issues prioritized by specific embassies are influenced by their diplomats' sources of information. For evidence, I study the proliferation of American Chambers of Commerce (AmChams)—private interest groups composed of US firms that are operating in specific host states—over the 20th and early 21st centuries. AmChams became key sources of information for US embassies, particularly on issues of relevance to the private sector (such as tax, trade, and investment regulations). Using novel text data from approximately 1500 oral history interviews with former diplomats, and leveraging the institutional structure of diplomatic rotation, I show that diplomats who were exposed to active AmCham branches paid significantly greater attention to commercial issues. These results identify a new avenue through which interest groups can influence foreign policy, help explain the proliferation of probusiness international agreements over the past several decades, and contribute to the growing literature on diplomacy in the international political economy.

We know little about the extent to which racial minorities are symbolically represented by members of Congress. This stands in contrast to a wealth of research analyzing the extent to which minorities are substantively and descriptively represented. This article provides the most comprehensive analysis of symbolic representation to date. Using data on legislators’ speech from 105,875 newsletters and 620,838 floor speeches, I find that White legislators of both parties are more likely to symbolically represent Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians if those groups are more populous in their constituency. However, these effects only hold cross-sectionally; using a difference-in-differences setup from redistricting shocks, I find that there is little within-legislator variation in speech patterns as their constituencies change. Lastly, I show that, unlike on the symbolic dimension, legislators’ substantive representation is not influenced by group size. I conclude that White legislators are symbolically responsive to their constituents’ identities in their speech patterns.

Health and safety standards offer a convenient means by which governments can claim to be protecting the population, even while pursuing more parochial goals. In the realm of international trade, such standards have most often been studied as a means of veiled protectionism. Yet precisely because health and safety standards create ambiguity about their intent, nations may seek to use them for goals that extend well beyond protecting domestic industry. We theorize that governments will, at times, enforce regulations in ways intended to exact political retribution. To show this, we collect original data on import refusals by Chinese border inspectors between 2011 and 2019. Though ostensibly intended to keep dangerous products out of the hands of Chinese consumers, we demonstrate that import refusals have systematically been used by the Chinese government as a way to punish states that act against China's interest.

I study the impact of party campaigns on tactical voting, focusing on voters with tactical incentives. Focusing on three UK Elections, I exploit panel data within each election to address endogeneity in party behavior, which would otherwise bias the estimates of campaign effects. My findings show that party contacts during campaigns have an influence in encouraging loyalty to preferred nonviable parties and defection to alternative viable ones. These findings are important as relatively little is known about what influences voters’ decision to cast tactical votes, beyond their demographic characteristics and the electoral circumstances they may find themselves in.

While causal inference has become front and center in empirical political science, we know little about how to analyze causality with latent outcomes, such as political values, beliefs, and attitudes. In this article, we develop a framework for defining, identifying, and estimating the causal effect of an observed treatment on a latent outcome, which we call the latent treatment effect (LTE). We describe a set of assumptions that allow us to identify the LTE and propose a hierarchical item response model to estimate it. We highlight an often overlooked exclusion restriction assumption, which states that treatment status should not affect the observed indicators other than through the latent outcome. A simulation study shows that the hierarchical approach offers unbiased estimates of the LTE under the identification and modeling assumptions, whereas conventional two-step approaches are biased. We illustrate our proposed methodology using data from two published experimental studies.

Individuals with heightened labor market insecurity express more protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist sentiment. We construct a novel measure of labor market insecurity that combines an individual's industry-based exposure to import competition with an occupation-based measure of job immobility. Immobility captures the similarity of an individual's job to others in the economy, weighted by their prevalence. The holder of a job that is dissimilar to others in the industry or in the state experiences more anxiety regarding their labor market prospects in the face of a globalization shock, and is more likely to express antiglobalization sentiment.

Women in male-dominated organizations often must adopt more stereotypical masculine traits to advance within those hierarchies. While politics, historically male-dominated, should induce women to blend in, increasing numbers of women in parliaments may give women the opportunity to stand out by not adopting a masculine style. This paper investigates how these contradictory incentives influence female Members of Parliament (MPs) in 24 democracies between 1987 and 2022, applying machine learning to 6.8 million parliamentary speeches to measure how feminine is their speaking style. Findings indicate a socialization effect, whereby women adopt a more masculine style the longer they stay in office, even after controlling for their speeches’ topics. The effect is strongest for women in socially progressive parties. This research highlights the role of parliaments as gendered workplaces, which still lead women to adapt to the male norm, and helps us understand the incentives that shape how women represent women in parliament.

We study the effect of expanding trade on societal coalitions through its impact on development. We combine a majoritarian political model with a spatial model of trade to argue that trade-induced economic change—by bringing new workers to locations closer to world markets—can lead to losses rather than gains in political power for the factors of production advantaged by increased trade. We study how this phenomenon explains rising protectionism in the United States from 1880 to 1900. Using county-level changes in transportation costs induced by railroad expansion, our estimates indicate that falling costs increased population and farm values but reduced the proportion of farmers. Reduced transportation costs caused a reduction in vote shares for the Democratic Party, which favored liberal trade policies, and an increase in an original newspaper-based measure of protectionist sentiment. Expanding trade alters not only political interests but also the geographic distribution of those interests.

The elimination of Black voting in the U.S. South after Reconstruction is the most significant instance of democratic backsliding in American history. I use newly collected state legislative roll call data from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, consisting of more than 19,400 unique roll calls, to explore Black disfranchisement's consequences for legislative representation. Using ideal point estimates in a panel design, I demonstrate that disfranchisement is associated with substantial changes in roll call voting. In states where competition between Democrats and Republicans structured roll call voting, disfranchisement precipitated shifts away from more-Republican roll call records. In states already dominated by Democrats before disfranchisement, disfranchisement often led to relative shifts toward the agrarian, reform wing of the Democratic Party. These results demonstrate the centrality of Black disfranchisement for the creation of the Solid South and the significant impact of Black suffrage on southern politics in the years following Reconstruction.

The role of ideals and idealizations is among the most vigorously debated methodological questions in political theory. Yet, the debate seems at an impasse. This paper argues that this reflects a fundamental ambiguity over idealization's intended inferential logic: the precise way in which idealizations might yield normative knowledge. I identify two tacit understandings of idealization—a dominant “telic” understanding and a less overt “heuristic” understanding—which, though importantly different, are rarely distinguished. I argue that delineating these understandings, and shifting from telic to heuristic idealization, recasts various unresolved methodological problems for political theorists, while productively connecting their discussions to work on idealization in political science and the practice and philosophy of science more broadly. I then provide a systematic account of how idealization might be used heuristically in normative reasoning and explicate the advantages of such an approach for promoting rigorous, relevant, and inclusive methodologies in political theory.