American Journal of Political Science最新文献

How do political parties share power internally? We study the internal organization of political parties as the solution of a moral hazard problem between a party conference and its factions. Factions' mobilization efforts benefit the party electorally, but can only be imperfectly monitored. In contrast with the logic of Michel's Iron Law, we provide a functionalist rationale for intraparty power sharing: We show that internal power sharing can enhance a party's electoral performance. This effect is stronger in settings that award more resources to election winners: Low interparty power sharing produces high intraparty power sharing. We also show that intraparty power sharing should be more frequent within smaller parties, when monitoring of factional effort is more precise (e.g., preferential voting systems), and when factions' ideological disagreements span multiple dimensions.

Many are skeptical of the appeal of authoritarian political systems. We argue that global audiences will embrace authoritarian models when they believe that autocracies can meet governance challenges better than democracies. We collect comprehensive data on the external messaging of the Chinese and American governments. We then conduct a randomized experiment in 19 countries across six continents exposing global citizens to real messages from the Chinese and American governments’ external media arms. We find that exposure to a representative set of Chinese messages strengthens perceptions that the Chinese Communist Party delivers growth, stability, and competent leadership. It also moves the average respondent from slightly preferring the American model to slightly preferring the Chinese model. In head-to-head matchups, messages from the US government are less persuasive. Our findings show how autocracies build global support by selling growth and competence, with important implications for democratic resilience.

Influential theories doubt that partisan television's audience is sufficiently large, moderate, or isolated from cross-cutting sources for it to meaningfully influence public opinion. However, limitations of survey-based television consumption measures leave these questions unresolved. We argue that nonpolitical attributes of partisan channels can attract voters to form habits for watching channels with slants they do not fully share. We report findings from three novel datasets which each link behavioral measures of television consumption to political administrative or survey data. We find that approximately 15% of Americans consume over 8 hours/month of partisan television. Additionally, weak partisans, independents, and outpartisans comprise over half of partisan channels’ audiences. Finally, partisan television consumers largely consume only one partisan channel and remain loyal to it over time, consistent with “echo chambers.” These findings support our argument and suggest partisan television's potential to influence public opinion cannot be dismissed.

Are corruption trials that involve the highest ranks in the public sphere and large private companies biased against some groups? Existing research predominantly focuses on corruption prosecutions of politicians, leaving unresolved the extent to which judges apply differential treatment when convicting and sentencing the political class compared to other defendants, including those in the private sector. To address this gap, we investigate judicial bias within Brazil's famous “Operação Lava Jato,” the largest corruption investigation carried out in history. Leveraging an original database that traces the trajectory of the universe of the 3154 cases of Lava Jato, we show that judges' sentencing decisions were not governed by a partisan logic. Instead, judges were more inclined to impose longer prison times and higher fines to elected politicians when compared to all other defendants, particularly those from the private sector. We interpret these findings as evidence of antipolitical class bias.

While some assert that social identities have become more salient in American media coverage, existing evidence is largely anecdotal. An increased emphasis on social identities has important political implications, including for polarization and representation. We first document the rising salience of different social identities using natural language processing tools to analyze all tweets from 19 media outlets (2008–2021) alongside 553,078 URLs shared on Facebook. We then examine one potential mechanism: Outlets may highlight meaningful social identities—race/ethnicity, gender, religion, or partisanship—to attract readers through various social and psychological pathways. We find that identity cues are associated with increases in some forms of engagement on social media. To probe causality, we analyze 3,828 randomized headline experiments conducted via Upworthy. Headlines mentioning racial/ethnic identities generated more engagement than headlines that did not, with suggestive evidence for other identities. Identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.

We use doubly robust difference-in-differences models to estimate the causal effect of successful coups on national incomes. We find that real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) decreases by 10%–12% 5 years after a coup and the effect has not begun to diminish at that point. When we investigate the economic and political mechanisms behind this outcome, we find that our result is mostly driven by a fall in investment and in the rule of law, along with an increase in repression. Given the size of the effect, preventing coups can be seen as a significant development issue, and though the international community has taken steps to discourage coups, further consideration of anticoup policies seems well-warranted.

How do dominant-group natives react to immigrants' political integration? We argue that ethnic minority immigrants winning political office makes natives feel threatened, triggering animosity. We test this dynamic across the 2010–2019 UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 regional and local newspaper articles. While past work has not established a causal relationship between minorities' political power gains and dominant-group animosity, we identify natives' hostile reactions with a regression discontinuity design that leverages close election results between immigrant-origin ethnic minority and dominant-group candidates. We find that minority victories increase hate crimes by 67%, exclusionary attitudes by 66%, and negative media coverage of immigrant groups by 110%. Consistent with power threat and social identity theories, these findings demonstrate a strong and widespread negative reaction—encompassing a violence-prone fringe and the mass public—against ethnic minority immigrants' integration into majority settings.

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.