American Journal of Political Science最新文献

How can democratic values and behavior be induced in new democracies? We designed and tested three original civic education interventions to answer this question, using Tunisia as a case study. Participants were recruited through Facebook and Instagram, where they were randomly assigned to either one of three treatment groups or a placebo. Two treatments were derived from prospect theory, emphasizing the gains of a democratic system or the losses of an autocratic system. A third treatment, derived from self-efficacy theory, provided practical information regarding participation in the upcoming 2019 elections. Our findings suggest that online civic education has a considerable effect on democratic citizenship, including a significant reduction in authoritarian nostalgia and increasing intended political behavior. We further find differences between the three treatments, with the loss and gain treatments having overall more consistent impact than self-efficacy, though the latter frame has notable effects on political efficacy and registration.

Unilateral power is an important source of policy change for contemporary presidents. In contrast with scholarship that examines the institutional constraints on presidents’ exercise of unilateral authority, I consider presidents’ unilateral behavior in a framework of political accountability. I argue that presidents have incentives to incorporate the public's policy priorities in their unilateral agendas. I examine this account using panel data on executive orders and public opinion across issue areas from 1954 to 2018. Across a variety of model specifications and estimation strategies, I find evidence that patterns of executive action reflect the public's policy priorities. Presidents issue greater numbers of unilateral directives on issues that gain public salience, particularly on issues that are more familiar to the public and when issuing more policy-significant directives. These findings suggest that accountability mechanisms structure how presidents exercise unilateral power and have normative implications for considering presidential unilateralism in a separation-of-powers system.

Could perceived relative economic standing affect citizens’ support for political leaders and institutions? We explore this question by examining Pakistan's national unconditional cash transfer program, the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP). Leveraging a regression discontinuity approach using BISP's administrative data and an original survey experiment, we find that perceptions of relative deprivation color citizen reactions to social protection. When citizens do not feel relatively deprived, receiving cash transfers has little sustained effect on individuals’ reported level of support for their political system and its leaders. However, when citizens feel relatively worse off, those receiving cash transfers become more politically satisfied while those denied transfers become more politically disgruntled. Moreover, the magnitude of the reduction in political support among non-beneficiaries is larger than the magnitude of the increase in political support among beneficiaries. This has important implications for our understanding of the political ramifications of rising perceived inequality.

Nativist political movements are globally ascendant. In advanced democracies, rising anti-immigrant politics is in part a backlash against economic globalization. In emerging economies, where nativists primarily target internal migrants, there is little investigation of whether trade liberalization fuels antimigrant sentiment, perhaps because trade benefits workers in these contexts. I argue that global economic integration causes nativist backlash in emerging economies even though it does not dislocate workers. I highlight an alternative mechanism: geographic labor mobility. Workers strategically migrate to access geographically uneven global economic opportunity. This liberalization-induced mobility interacts with native–migrant cleavages to generate nativist backlash. I explore these dynamics in the Indian textile sector, which experienced a positive shock following global trade liberalization in 2005. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, I find that exposed localities experienced increased internal migration and nativism, manifesting in antimigrant rioting and nativist party support. Liberalization can fuel nativism even when its economic impacts are positive.

Many care-ethics scholars argue that care and justice should harmonize. While agreeing in general, we argue for a hard limit on justice in some instances. For example, we find evidence to support limiting justice in favor of care in the US military's restricted reporting policy in cases of sexual assault. This policy allows victims to receive medical treatment without initiating a criminal investigation. Moreover, the article finds additional evidence to normatively prioritize care in the policy's attentiveness and responsiveness, two values emphasized by care-ethics scholars. This article gives insight into how care and justice can devolve into an antagonistic relationship, something many care-ethics scholars seek to avoid. Finally, this article suggests how a more harmonious relationship between care and justice might be restored.

We study the effects of terrorism on political trust and national versus ethnic identification. Making use of unexpected attacks by the extremist group Boko Haram in Nigeria, which occurred during the fieldwork of a public opinion survey in 2014, we show that even in a context of weak state institutions and frequent terrorist activities, terror attacks significantly increase political trust. We also find that the attacks significantly reduced the salience of respondents' national identity, instead increasing ethnic identification. These findings run counter to arguments that “rally around the flag” effects following terror attacks result from increased patriotism. The results have important implications for understanding the effects of terrorism in contexts of weak state institutions, frequent political violence, and politically salient ethnic divisions.

Renewed calls for Indigenous sovereignty in North America have led some scholars to search Western philosophy for thinking that affirms these claims. Many suggest that the common law tradition offers resources to do so. In this article, I argue that common law is limited in its capacity to endorse Indigenous political legitimacy. Instead, I suggest that supportive elements in common law are trace remnants of natural law thinking. Further, natural law as a concept resonates with contemporary Indigenous philosophy that maintains that nonhuman nature is suffused with morality and normativity, making the natural law tradition worth considering for defenses of Indigenous sovereignty. I propose beginning with the work of Bartolomé de las Casas. While my aim is not to defend either Lascasian nor Indigenous natural law, I conclude that they should be part of efforts to understand the ongoing conflicts between Indigenous nations and colonial states.

Financial regulation is often adopted in the wake of scandals and crises. Yet political science has little to say about the political effects of corporate scandals. We break that silence, asking whether exposure to news coverage of bank scandals changes the preferences of voters for financial regulation. Drawing from the literatures on media influence and public opinion, we argue that news coverage of bank scandals should increase voters’ appetite for regulation. We test our hypothesis with data from six countries, using original nationally representative panel surveys with embedded experiments (total N = 27,673). Our pooled and country-specific analyses largely support our expectation that exposure to news coverage of scandals increases regulatory preferences. We reproduce this finding in a separate survey wave, using different scandals than in our original analysis. These results contribute to studies on media influence on public opinion, the political significance of scandals, and the political economy of regulation.

The welfare magnet hypothesis holds that immigrants are likely to relocate to regions with generous welfare benefits. Although this assumption has motivated extensive reforms to immigration policy and social programs, the empirical evidence remains contested. In this study, we assess detailed administrative records from Switzerland covering the full population of social assistance recipients between 2005 and 2015. By leveraging local variations in cash transfers and exogenous shocks to benefit levels, we identify how benefits shape intracountry residential decisions. We find limited evidence that immigrants systematically move to localities with higher benefits. The lack of significant welfare migration within a context characterized by high variance in benefits and low barriers to movement suggests that the prevalence of this phenomenon may be overstated. These findings have important implications in the European setting where subnational governments often possess discretion over welfare and parties frequently mobilize voters around the issue of “benefit tourism.”

We propose a model of political competition not over policy programs, but over ideologies: models of the world that organize voters' experiences and guide the inferences they draw from observed outcomes. Policy-motivated political parties develop ideologies, and voters choose the ideology that best explains their observations. Preferences over policies are then induced by the adopted ideology. Parties thus care about winning the ideological battle as it confers an advantage in the electoral arena. We show that in equilibrium political parties always propose different models of the world. This divergence extends to all features of the environment, not just policy dimensions. A lower degree of policy extremism in the past increases the divergence on the policy dimension, thus leading to higher ideological polarization.