How does the central state affect public goods provision by local actors? I study the effect of state capacity on local governance in sub-Saharan Africa, which I argue depends on whether traditional authorities are integrated in the country’s [...]
I surveyed the universe of recent applicants to the Indonesian civil service to study the effects of high-stakes examinations on political attitudes. Leveraging applicants’ scores on the civil service examination, I employ a regression discont [...]
Realism can mean many things in political theory. This article focuses on “common-sense realism,” an approach to decision making under uncertainty characterized by its posture toward risk. Common-sense realist arguments have become popular in [...]
The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the US has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic [...]
The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this [...]
The role of domestic public opinion is an important topic in research on international negotiations, yet we know little about how exactly it manifests itself. We focus on government rhetoric during negotiations and develop a conceptual distinc [...]
What is the point of ideology critique? Prominent Anglo-American philosophers recently proposed novel arguments for the view that ideology critique is moral critique, and ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice or oppress [...]
What type of revolutions are most vulnerable to counterrevolutions? I argue that violent revolutions are less likely than nonviolent ones to be reversed because they produce regimes with strong and loyal armies that are able to defeat counterr [...]
How does exile affect online dissent? By internationalizing activists’ networks and removing them from day-to-day life under the regime, we argue that exile fundamentally alters activists’ political opportunities and strategic behavior. We tes [...]
During violent conflict, governments may acknowledge their use of illegitimate violence (e.g., noncombatant casualties) even though such violence can depress civilian support. Why would they do so? We model the strategic incentives affecting g [...]
With population aging, interest groups demand that governments act to prevent a perceived financial crisis. Senior citizens remain frustrated in their efforts to influence the response of policy-makers. In an effort to strengthen their voice, [...]
What does it take for a female aspirant to win a party nomination in a candidate-centered electoral system in an emerging democracy? Three decades after the third wave of democratization hit Africa, we still know little about women’s entry int [...]
Women and young constitute two underrepresented groups in most legislatures worldwide. The aim of this paper is to theorize and empirically analyze how the hitherto overlooked intersection between gender and young age condition legislators’ op [...]
A recent wave of research has engaged with gender-focused bodies within parliament studying their status, organization, and function. One type of body scarcely studied is issue-based parliamentary groups such as the Speaker’s Gender Equality G [...]
Surveys constitute the main method of studying elite behavior. A concern with survey data is that they reflect what elites report they do – not what elites actually do. Alternative, process-oriented approaches such as direct observation can he [...]
Current comparative analyses of gender attitudes among adolescents largely focus on individual-level characteristics. Understudied is the role of women’s protest on adolescents’ gender attitudes. This paper investigates how women’s protests re [...]
Scholars have correlated the racial attitudes of White partisans with a number of explanatory variables, including ingroup favoritism and outgroup prejudice. Notwithstanding the importance of these variables, scholars have neglected other cons [...]
This article engages with Steven Lubet’s arguments in Interrogating Ethnography on reliability of evidence and replication of findings in ethnographic research. It draws on eight months of immersive fieldwork on Abkhaz mobilization in the Geor [...]
By the early 2000s, immersed in fieldwork methods literatures (participant-observer ethnography, interviewing, and document-based research), I increasingly saw that “evidence” meant something different in different research and professional pr [...]
While [ethnographers] do seek to uncover the rules of action, such rules are not as clearly discoverable as law is to lawyers – through examination of definitive statements. Most rules of social behavior are tacit and unstated. Frequently they [...]
Although women and minorities hold an increasing share of judgships in the United States, they remain underrepresented. We explore Americans’ perceptions of the bias of women and minority judges – one of the possible challenges to creating a d [...]
Denialism accompanies many global threats, such as climate change, HIV/AIDS, and now also SARS CoV-2 and COVID-19. We analyzed a corpus of 624 English-language news items to examine emerging social representations of people who question the ex [...]
How do people explain persistent inequality between whites and blacks? Research has focused on two dimensions of explanation, or attribution: internal (regarding shortcomings in black motivation and capability); and external (regarding the soc [...]
Far right parties often attack efforts to promote equality for historically marginalized groups like women, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQIA+ people, suggesting that “identity politics” takes away valuable resources from native working class pop [...]