American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Democratic theory tells us that citizens should be engaged, informed, passionate, reasonable, willing to speak up, ready to listen, and militant but also restrained. Yet we are rarely told how they might achieve this. The challenge is particularly relevant for theories that distinguish between the liberal and democratic principles of our regime with their contradictory ideals of citizenship. This article draws on Plato's reflections on drinking wine with friends in the Laws to argue that the political psychology suggested therein fits the complex ideal of citizenship in a liberal democracy. Furthermore, it shows how extrapolitical and even disreputable social practices can not only help prepare citizens for political life but also enable them to deal with the inequalities that inevitably contaminate it. Weaving together law, contestation, reason, and passion, the Platonic account articulates the psychological burdens of citizenship in a liberal democracy and suggests ways to cope with them.

I describe and analyze a model of strategic communication and deliberation in decentralized decision-making settings. I show that, in a cheap-talk environment, inclusion and exclusion of agents can affect the credibility of messaging between agents and, accordingly, the quality of policy decisions and overall social welfare. Somewhat surprisingly, the inclusion of agents can aid information aggregation and social welfare even when the added agents do not themselves communicate truthfully. Analogously, the results suggest an informational, social welfare–based rationale for excluding agents not only from observing policy-relevant deliberation but also from observing the product of the communication precisely because the excluded agents possess decision-making authority.

We analyze the effects of veto institutions in a dynamic model where control of the legislative and executive branches fluctuates between two parties. In our setting, there are universal projects (benefiting both parties) and partisan projects (benefiting one party at the expense of the other). When government is divided, the legislature can leverage the universal project to achieve a lopsided and dynamically inefficient distribution of partisan projects under the absolute veto. While the line-item veto eliminates this type of hostage-taking, it also prevents beneficial logrolls. A novel institution, the alternating line-item veto, can both eliminate hostage-taking and preserve beneficial interparty logrolls. No veto institution prevents dynamically inefficient, lopsided outcomes under unified government; this can only be done through norms, and we show that a no-veto regime, or a regime with a line-item veto, best facilitates such a cooperative norm.

This article contends that sexism plays a fundamental role in the electoral rise of the far right, both as a predisposition and as a changing attitude. Using panel data from Spain, we show that modern sexism is indeed among the most important attitudinal predictors of voting for the far-right party Vox. The results also show that internal individual changes in levels of modern sexism impact far-right voting. Backlash attitudinal change, defined as increases in sexism occurring in a context of feminist momentum, contributed significantly to the recent emergence of the radical right. Our findings indicate that sexism is not a crystalized attitude but rather susceptible to showing short-term changes with important political consequences. This highlights the importance of understudied context-dependent individual dynamics of gender backlash in far-right voting.

Can those dominated and oppressed by racialized power structures be held responsible for their actions? On some plausible accounts of moral responsibility, the answer is “no”: domination exempts the oppressed from moral obligations because they are structurally deprived of the freedom to make choices for which one might be blameworthy. In this article, I use the work of Frederick Douglass to offer a different understanding of moral responsibility. Attending to specific arguments that Douglass makes regarding the moral responsibility of slaves, and the tensions it raises with other parts of his corpus, I argue that one's ability to act as a moral agent is deeply tied to the environmental resources at their disposal. Drawing on distributed theories of cognition, I offer a Douglassonian conception of “distributed moral agency,” contending that Douglass's writings draw our attention to various environmental factors that can scaffold moral responsibility, even among the enslaved.

Lobbyists often target legislators who are aligned with them rather than opponents. The choice of whom to lobby affects both what information becomes available to legislators and how much influence special interest groups exert on policies. However, the conditions under which aligned legislators are targeted are not well understood. We investigate how the pressure to conclude policies quickly affects the strategic decision of whom to lobby. We derive conditions on the cost of delaying policies and on the distribution of legislators' preferences for lobbyists to prefer targeting allies. We show that the use of allied intermediaries has important implications for the duration of policymaking and the quality of policies. Counterintuitively, an increase in time pressure can increase the duration of policymaking and a longer duration does not always lead to better informed policies.

Quantifying the value that legislators give to reelection relative to policy is crucial to understanding electoral accountability. We estimate the preferences for office and policy of members of the U.S. Senate, using a structural approach that exploits variation in polls, position-taking, and advertising throughout the electoral cycle. We then combine these preference estimates with estimates of the electoral effectiveness of policy moderation and political advertising to quantify electoral accountability in competitive and uncompetitive elections. We find that senators differ markedly in the value they give to securing office relative to policy gains: While over a fourth of senators are highly ideological, a sizable number of senators are willing to make relatively large policy concessions to attain electoral gains. Nevertheless, electoral accountability is only moderate on average, due to the relatively low impact of changes in senators' policy stance on voter support.

The majority of economic actors in the developing world participate in the informal sector, and yet little is known about the political implications of this constituency. I argue that, particularly in weak-state democracies, economic informality constrains the rise of programmatic politics. An uncertain, undocumented, and irregular economic relationship with the state conveys signals about the state that affect citizens’ demand for and ability to coordinate on programmatic policy. Novel survey evidence from urban Senegal illustrates that greater irregularity is associated with weaker perceptions of tax compliance, lower expectations of government, and weaker coordination capacity and that informality is associated with weaker programmatic demands. Experimentally providing information about a salutary fiscal policy causes some informal sector members to positively update expectations about government performance and electoral coordination capacity. Field experiments in two other African democracies increase confidence in the proposition that informality inhibits the formation of a constituency for programmatic politics.

How do international regimes change over time? Regimes facilitate cooperation by linking together otherwise ad hoc negotiations. These linkages endogenize the status quo from which subsequent negotiations depart. I develop a theory of endogenous status quo within international regimes: prior outcomes implicitly define the status quo of new negotiations by acting as focal points and by creating inconsistency costs. I test observable implications of the theory in the context of the multilateral trade regime, focusing on new member accession negotiations. These negotiations attract interest from a surprising subset of World Trade Organization members, many with few observable trade ties or other economic incentives to participate. Nonetheless participation enables states to shape the emergent status quo strategically, with potentially far-reaching implications for future bargaining. I employ a text-as-data approach—together with a novel corpus of negotiating documents—finding consistent support for the theory and mechanisms.

Meta-analysis is a method that combines estimates from studies conducted on different samples, in different contexts, or at different times. Social scientists increasingly use meta-analyses to aggregate evidence and learn about general substantive phenomena. We develop a framework to examine the theoretical foundations of meta-analysis, with emphasis on clarifying the role of external validity. We identify the conditions under which multiple studies are target-equivalent, meaning they identify the same empirical target. Our main result shows that external validity and harmonization, in comparisons made and how outcomes are measured, are necessary and sufficient for target-equivalence. We examine common formulations of meta-analysis—fixed- and random-effects models—developing the theoretical assumptions that underpin them and providing design-based identification results for these models. We then provide practical guidance based on our framework and results. Our results reveal limits to agnostic approaches to the combination of causal evidence from multiple studies.