American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Do Americans have a right to believe that the country is making racial progress? Conservatives sometimes answer yes and argue that the country is achieving Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a color-blind society. Afropessimists answer no and point to the continuing problems of police terror, mass incarceration, and poverty among Black Americans. This article unearths King's 1952 term paper on the pragmatists to reveal an early engagement with William James’ notion of the will to believe. The article interprets King as articulating a right to dream of a just and loving world to maximize the chance of the community actualizing it. The conclusion argues that the idea of a right to dream helps people become energized rather than despondent in the aftermath of the Supreme Court case prohibiting race-conscious college admissions.

Pardos-Prado, S. and C. Xena. 2019. Skill specificity and attitudes toward immigration. American Journal of Political Science, 63(2): 286–304. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12406

The number of countries reported in Table 1 in the original publication of Pardos-Prado and Xena (2019) has been found to be incorrect. We are very grateful to Professor Michelle Dion for bringing this issue to our attention.

The error was due to logging GDP and unemployment spending after centering all variables. This inadvertently dropped from the analysis a significant number of observations coded as 0. The loss of country sample size after introducing logged variables was difficult to spot since the software we use to run cross-classified hierarchical models does not report the number of countries.

Reassuringly, the substantive results remain unchanged if GDP and unemployment spending are not logged, and therefore if the full sample is retrieved (13 countries across five waves). A corrected version of Table 1 can be found below. The coefficients of interest (skill specificity and occupational unemployment) remain highly significant across the four model specifications: p = 0.009 in the second model, and p = 0.000 in all other models. In fact, the coefficient of skill specificity is now more precisely estimated (narrower CIs). The sign remains consistently positive, meaning that higher values of skill specificity or occupational unemployment increase anti-immigrant attitudes. Our theory does not involve any country-specific feature, so it probably makes sense that the results are not overly sensitive to changes in the country sample.

In theory, the administration of criminal justice is state business: Defendants are arrested, tried, and punished by state agents. In reality, citizens often attempt to intervene in this process—for example, by imposing their own punishments in lieu of, or in addition to, state penalties. We build a game-theoretic model to investigate how such behavior affects state justice provision. Illustrating our results with examples from, inter alia, the Jim Crow South, we show that community intervention warps both court procedures and the mapping between court attitudes and court decisions: Relative to a baseline without interference, it can lead courts to under- or over-convict, and can disrupt court incentives to use or acquire information at trial. More broadly, the threat of community interference can distort the behavior of all actors in the criminal justice system—and neither courts themselves nor other state actors may be able to mitigate these distortions.

Many citizens find politics too uncivil, and incivility is often considered a source of political disaffection. However, research studying these effects almost exclusively relies on survey experiments, which yield contrasting results depending on design choices and do not study downstream consequences for satisfaction with democracy and compliance with public policy. We present a theoretical argument on these downstream consequences and study how citizens respond to political incivility in their real-life information environment using a multi-wave survey panel of 6055 Danish citizens with 18,805 interviews spanning 18 months. Using generalized difference-in-differences models and a natural experiment, we demonstrate nontrivial adverse effects of political incivility on political trust, satisfaction with democracy, and intentions to comply with policies, while intentions to vote are unaffected. Our results highlight how elite rhetoric shapes support for the political system and policy compliance and pinpoint the potential and pitfalls of survey experiments and our own panel approach.

It is often assumed that, in highly religious environments, religious messages that promote political participation will more effectively influence behavior than nonreligious messages with the same goal. To our knowledge, however, this assumption remains untested. We present results from a community-collaborative study implemented prior to elections in Zambia, an overwhelmingly Christian country with a youth-skewed population. We randomized young adults into different versions of a WhatsApp-based civics course and compared outcomes after exposure to civic information only versus after civic information accompanied by either religious or nonreligious messages that promote self-efficacy and grit. Because Zambia is a highly religious country, we expected the religious course to have the largest effect. Instead, the nonreligious efficacy-boosting course did. The religious course performed no better than the information-only condition. This study cautions against assuming the efficacy of religious messages, even in highly religious contexts, and identifies new questions for future research.

Instrumental variable (IV) analysis relies on the exclusion restriction—that the instrument only affects the dependent variable via its relationship with the independent variable and not via other causal routes. However, scholars generally justify the exclusion restriction based on its plausibility. I propose a method for searching for additional violations implied by existing social science studies. I show that the use of weather to instrument different independent variables represents strong prima facie evidence of exclusion-restriction violations for all weather-IV studies. A review of 289 studies reveals 194 variables previously linked to weather: all representing potential exclusion-restriction violations. Using sensitivity analysis, I show that the magnitude of many of these violations is sufficient to overturn numerous existing IV results. I conclude with practical steps to systematically review existing literature to identify and quantify possible exclusion-restriction violations when using IV designs.

Assessing resolve and interpreting costly signals are crucial tasks for leaders engaging in international diplomacy. However, leaders rarely make these decisions in isolation, relying on advisers to help assess adversary intentions. How do group dynamics change the way costly signals are interpreted? We field a large-scale group experiment to examine how assessments of resolve vary across group settings. We find groups make significantly higher initial assessments of adversary resolve than individuals do, but also update their beliefs less after receiving new information. In small group contexts, first impressions may play a stronger role in shaping beliefs than any signals—costly or otherwise—that come afterwards. This has important implications for our understanding of signaling, providing further evidence that costly signals are less straightforward than often assumed.

Immigration has been shown to drive ethnocentrism and anti-globalization attitudes in native-born populations. Yet understanding how global integration shapes intercultural relations also necessitates clear evidence on how migration affects the attitudes of migrants. We argue that migration can foster tolerance, cosmopolitan identities, and support for international cooperation among migrants who experience sustained contact with other cultural groups. We evaluate this theory with the first randomized controlled trial resulting in overseas migration, which connected individuals in India with job opportunities in the Persian Gulf region's hospitality sector. Two years after the program began, individuals in the treatment group were significantly more accepting of ethnic, cultural, and national out-groups. Migration also bolstered support for international cooperation and cultivated cosmopolitan identities. Qualitative and quantitative evidence links these changes to intercultural contact overseas. By focusing on migrants rather than native-born individuals, our study illustrates how cross-border mobility can facilitate rather than undermine global integration.

With some recent exceptions, demands for global reparations have largely been ignored by former colonial countries. While the past two decades has seen renewed interest in colonial reparations in normative political theory and philosophy, this work has focused on determining responsibility for redress. By contrast, relatively little has been said on the further question of how redress might be sought in face of persistent colonial amnesia and apologia. This paper defends expropriation—unilateral public takeovers of ownership and/or control of foreign assets—as a justified response to overdue colonial reparations. In making this case, the paper (1) moves our focus beyond questions of responsibility for reparative justice to consider what victims of past injustice (and/or their descendants) are justified in doing to obtain their due and (2) explores distinctive issues that arise for political resistance at the global level.

How do rulers soften resistance by local powerholders to state-building efforts? This paper highlights a strategy of compensation, where elites receive government offices in exchange for relinquishing their localist interests, and become uprooted and integrated into the national political system as stakeholders. We explore this strategy in the context of the Northern Wei Dynasty of China (386–534 CE) that terminated an era of state weakness during which aristocrats exercised local autonomy through strongholds. Exploiting a comprehensive state-building reform in the late fifth century, we find that aristocrats from previously autonomous localities were disproportionately recruited into the bureaucracy as compensation for accepting stronger state presence. Three mechanisms of bureaucratic compensation facilitated state-building. Offices received by those aristocrats: (1) carried direct benefits, (2) realigned their interests toward the ruler, and (3) mitigated credible commitment problems. Our findings shed light on the “First Great Divergence” between Late Antiquity Europe and Medieval China.