This paper investigates how politicians use the assignment of officials to geographical posts—a personnel system found in many countries—as a system of incentives to control, and possibly corrupt, bureaucratic behavior. The argument is developed with a matching model and tested with a nationwide survey of Indian officials who administer land, a lucrative asset and source of rents in fast‐growing countries. With an unobtrusive design, we provide evidence that officials prefer geographical posts with urban amenities, good staffing, and hometown proximity. These preferences are intense in salary‐equivalent terms. Ruling parties use this as leverage to exert pressure on officials to bend regulations by assigning them to their preferred posts but threatening transfers should they fail to comply, especially in jurisdictions with high regulatory corruption potential (measured with remote‐sensing data on flow of rural‐to‐urban land transactions). The findings highlight personnel policy as a potent instrument of political control/corruption of bureaucracy.

In complex multiparty democracies, citizens face the challenge of interpreting elite behavior to locate parties on the policy spectrum. This paper investigates when and why voters use party cooperation as a heuristic for judging the distance between their own preferences and those of an out-party. Drawing on the theory of ecological rationality, I argue that cooperation becomes an efficient heuristic when it is cheap to access, simple to apply, and accurate enough to guide inferences about policy alignment. Using original surveys from Canada, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom across fifteen policy domains, I show that perceived cooperation is consistently associated with reduced policy distance. The effect is strongest among knowledgeable partisans, on polarized issues, and when the out-party is perceived to be ideologically extreme. These findings reveal how ecological rationality conditions voter reasoning, highlighting cooperation as a dynamic elite cue that shapes mass perceptions and democratic representation.

Illicit migration is big business, involving millions of migrants each year, many of whom hire human smugglers to facilitate perilous journeys. Yet little is known about this illicit market or how potential migrants choose whom to hire. Facing high costs and uncertain prospects of success, future migrants must make complex, high-stakes decisions when selecting a smuggler. In this paper, we provide descriptive evidence on the market for coyotes (human smugglers in Latin America) and experimental evidence on the factors shaping hiring preferences. Using a forced-choice conjoint experiment, we isolate the effects of referrals, reputation, reliability, safety, and price. Our evidence draws on three original sources: a panel survey of deportees from the U.S. to Guatemala, a household survey, and in-depth interviews. We find that referrals and reputations for safe, successful journeys are central, while price has little influence—helping explain why policies that raise migration costs often fail to deter irregular migration.

Scholarship on populism has long identified a negative association between populism in power and the decline of democracy-sustaining institutions. However, researchers’ understanding of the theoretical links between these two phenomena differ and scholars have been hesitant to test competing approaches to populism against each other on equal footing. In this study, we address this lacuna, contrasting the theoretical predictions from the ideational and political-strategic approaches to populism side by side. To do so, we discuss the theoretical arguments undergirding the cross-case relationship between populism and democratic decline, then derive measures for each approach and compare them empirically. We use both conventional frequentist as well as Bayesian statistical methods to compare these approaches. Within both statistical paradigms, we find that measures derived from the ideational approach outperform measures derived from the political-strategic approach.

The defining characteristic of the modern state is its monopoly on violence. Yet, despite broad scholarly agreement on the definition, there are no empirical measures of the monopolization of violence. We introduce the first such measure: the share of castles controlled by the Crown. Taking the canonical definition as its point of departure, the measure allows us to trace the origins of the modern state in the power struggle between monarchs and societal actors when, where, and as it actually happened. The Castles Data are based on random samples from 17 modern European countries and record the ownership of more than 5,400 unique castles across most of Europe from 1000 to 1700. To validate the measure, we show that it tracks historiographical accounts of state formation and correlates strongly with independent coding by historians. We illustrate its use in applications at both the polity and micro levels.

Amid global assaults on higher education, this reflection analyzes a video performance created by Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey) students during widespread protests against President Erdoğan’s appointment of a loyalist as rector in 2021. Although it disputes the appointment and the subsequent crackdown on campus protest, the performance more directly responds to the punitive and vilifying reaction of the university administration and the government to a campus exhibition that included a controversial artwork juxtaposing Islamic, mythological, and LGBTQ+ imagery. In the video, a small group of pious Muslim and nonpious students share their divergent views on the artwork while presenting a unified voice against the defamatory campaign targeting their peers. Drawing on democratic theoretical accounts of Aristotelian political friendship, I interpret the performance as an experiment in mutual trust and confidence countering Erdoğan’s tyrannical rule, which thrives on distrust and apathy among citizens, as a form of concerted action that finds its strength in difference and disagreement, and as a model for preserving the university as a site where public issues can be debated openly. Envisioning a democratic life grounded in political friendship, the performance, I argue, reasserts universities’ role as laboratories of democracy, preparing students for collective deliberation, negotiation, and reflective judgment.

Platform firms have disrupted markets and challenged regulatory frameworks, but a new phase is emerging in which governments increasingly regulate these firms and firms engage with regulation strategically. This article examines how interactions between governments and firms shape the employment classification of platform workers. Drawing on case studies of California (United States), Spain, and Denmark, I show that welfare regime characteristics structure the regulatory environment that firms confront, whereas their competitive calculations shape their strategic responses. The analysis identifies three distinct configurations: successful firm override of government initiatives to classify workers as employees, resulting in a hybrid worker category (California); mixed firm responses to government initiatives aimed at employee classification, ultimately leading to universal employee status (Spain); and voluntary employee classification in the absence of specific government mandates (Denmark). These findings challenge assumptions that platform firms uniformly resist regulation and demonstrate how welfare state institutions and firms’ competitive strategies jointly shape worker classification outcomes.

Polarization has become the master concept for diagnosing contemporary democratic crises. The notion denotes three features: symmetry between parties, politics as an opinion space where positions diverge, and mutual repulsion between opposing camps. Yet none of these capture current realities. Across democracies, the central dynamic is not two poles drifting apart but the transformation of the political right into authoritarianism, norm breaking, and openness to political violence. Social democratic and center-right parties tend to respond in the opposite way from what “polarization” implies: by accommodating rightward. Attempts to salvage the polarization frame with modifiers (“asymmetric,” “affective,” “sectarian,” “pernicious”) concede these realities but risk hollowing out the concept’s definitional core. These limitations reveal a deeper misdiagnosis: when one party turns antidemocratic and illiberal, incivility and conflict are inevitable—but they are symptoms, not the root problem. Misdiagnosing them as the central issue leads to viewing civility and compromise as remedies, thereby risking the legitimation of authoritarian actors. This article proposes an alternative lens: the radicalization of the political right. Developed in the study of extremism, the radicalization framework better captures asymmetric change, identity-driven politics, and the mainstreaming of illiberalism. It foregrounds identity fusion, threat narratives, elite entrepreneurship, and escalation. Concepts are never politically innocent and persisting with “polarization” risks both misdiagnosing and normalizing authoritarian threats.

The transnational cleavage captures a divide between those with cosmopolitan orientations who are more positive about international migration, trade, and governance and those with more nationalist outlooks. Recent research has demonstrated that polarisation along this cleavage in Europe is increasingly linked to urban-rural differences: people living in urban areas tend to be more cosmopolitan than people in rural areas, but existing studies have not yet elaborately analysed differences in voting behaviour. Moreover, education is the most consistent predictor of attitudes related to the transnational cleavage, and higher-educated individuals more often live in cities. Urban-rural political differences may therefore reflect differences in educational attainment between urban and rural inhabitants. We take a longitudinal perspective to assess the degree of overlap between urban-rural and educational differences in voting for parties at the opposite ends of the transnational cleavage (‘GAL’ and ‘TAN’ parties), using data from all 11 rounds of the European Social Survey (2002–2024). We find that urban voters are overrepresented in the electorates of GAL parties and underrepresented in the electorates of TAN parties. These urban-rural differences are growing over time and, only for a small portion, overlap with educational divides in GAL/TAN voting. Although, overall, educational attainment remains more strongly related to GAL/TAN voting, both educational attainment and urban-rural residence have their own explanatory value. These findings underscore that ‘place’ increasingly matters in structuring political conflict across Europe and highlight the importance of further incorporating geography into future research on the transnational cleavage.

Voters of government parties are systematically more satisfied with democracy than supporters of opposition parties. The dynamics of this winner-loser gap are typically studied in the context of elections. However, it is not clear how changes in government composition that occur without elections midway through an electoral cycle, and that change voters’ winner/loser status, influence satisfaction with democracy. We address this question by examining an unexpected government change in Estonia in 2016, which interrupted the European Social Survey data collection (Round 8). The largest party in a three-party coalition government was replaced by the largest opposition party midway through the 2015–2019 electoral cycle while all other parties retained their government or opposition status. These circumstances enabled us to examine the effect of winning and losing without elections using fixed effects models, including a difference-in-differences design. The results provide suggestive but fragile evidence that losing government status might reduce satisfaction with democracy, whereas the effect of winning is modest at best and statistically inconclusive. Where effects emerge, they do so with a lag of approximately six weeks, coinciding with the implementation of a major tax reform – consistent with policy-based considerations rather than by immediate affective responses.

Scholars have suggested that polarization among political elites may undermine the functioning of democratic institutions. While extensively studied at the mass level, affective polarization at the elite level and its potential consequences for cooperation and governance remain understudied. This study examines how elite affective polarization influences government coalition formation in parliamentary democracies. We argue that when political elites are highly polarized along affective lines, the barriers to cooperation and compromise are higher, as elites may view other parties not only in terms of policy differences but also in terms of the capacity to act as credible coalition partners. We hypothesize that, holding constant ideological differences, potential coalitions characterized by higher affective distance are less likely to form. We evaluate our hypothesis using elite survey data collected among local politicians in Swedish municipalities. We find that affective distance between potential coalition partners reduces the probability of coalition formation, separate from the effect of left-right ideological disagreement and positions on multiculturalism. The findings suggest that as affective polarization intensifies among political elites, it may hinder parties’ ability to form stable governing coalitions, with potential consequences for democratic functioning.

Citizens’ perceptions of political divides shape democratic processes, yet we know little about how these divides are mentally represented. This article develops a conceptual framework that integrates cleavage theory with the study of meta-perceptions—individuals’ beliefs about the attitudes of social groups—to examine how people cognitively map political cleavages. We argue that these perceptions are systematically distorted by cognitive biases, which operate in three distinct ways: egocentrism (projecting one’s own views onto others), conservatism (assuming others hold more conservative attitudes than they actually do), and false polarization (overestimating attitudinal differences between groups). Using original survey data from Germany and focusing on immigration as a prominent contemporary cleavage issue, we measure cleavage perceptions and introduce a novel method to decompose perceptual errors into three distinct biases. The results provide robust evidence for the presence of all three biases and show that they interact asymmetrically across the cleavage spectrum, producing structured misperceptions that mirror underlying political divides. These findings illuminate the cognitive foundations of political cleavages and suggest that psychological mechanisms embedded in social structures can systematically distort citizens’ understanding of societal divisions, with implications for democratic deliberation and political behavior.

The educational composition of labor markets has changed dramatically in recent decades. In many advanced democracies, the majority of workers now possess a university education. We currently know very little about how this transformation has influenced perceptions of welfare state deservingness, which are closely linked to support for the welfare state. This article addresses that gap in the literature by carrying out an original survey with a sample of 3,916 respondents from the United States. The survey combines a conjoint experiment with an information provision experiment. We find causal evidence that people are less inclined to provide welfare state assistance to the university educated than the non-university educated. This is primarily driven by need-based considerations: The university educated are seen as less in need of support, due to their strong labor market position in contemporary knowledge economies.

Over the past decade, research on Christian nationalism in the United States has grown substantially. Some of the associated public opinion literature has described Christian nationalism as an identity, and some of it as a worldview, but scholars have not grappled with this ambiguity or its consequences. Accordingly, we make two moves to bring conceptual order to this rapidly expanding literature. First, we use well-established social identity measures to assess whether respondents think of Christian nationalism as an identity, and we compare the responses to popular measures of the Christian nationalist worldview. Second, we use multiple survey experiments to evaluate the extent to which identification with Christian nationalism is dependent on the definition of Christian nationalism. We conclude that Christian nationalist identities exist, they are strongly linked with a Christian nationalist worldview, and to some extent they depend on the definition of the identity group. In this unique case of elite contestation of an emerging identity, we find that the typical worldview measure also serves effectively as a strength-of-identity measure.

The Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) effectively predicts collective action and social change, but has been less examined in emerging movements and non‐WEIRD contexts. This research had two aims: to test SIMCA during the Gen Z mobilization in Madagascar, a largely online movement that culminated in the overthrow of the government in October 2025; and to examine how SIMCA variables relate to post‐action activism and reconciliation. Study 1 ( N = 959), conducted during the governmental transition, tested SIMCA—including national identification, Gen Z identification, perceived injustice, collective efficacy, and morality—on online collective action support, intention, and participation. Study 2 ( N = 258), conducted post‐transition, examined associations with activism intention, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Gen Z identification and morality were consistently associated with collective action and activism intention, whereas perceived injustice was primarily linked to ongoing collective action. Collective efficacy showed mixed associations. In contrast, national identification emerged as a key factor of post‐action forgiveness. These findings suggest that SIMCA variables are involved not only in social change but also in post‐action social harmony. They highlight the distinct roles of politicized and non‐politicized identities, underscoring the importance of conceptualizing collective action as a temporally and contextually embedded process.

This study reports interview data gathered with Dalits in India on the topic of humiliation ( N = 19). We demonstrate the prevalence of humiliation in their everyday experience and provide novel insights concerning the experience, the conditions, and the consequences of humiliation. First, we show that the experience of humiliation is rooted in the tension between being devalued by others and being powerless to respond. Second, we show that this experience is contingent upon developing a valued sense of self. Third, we show that the responses to humiliating experiences are enacted in a strategic manner and center on the possibility of collective resistance. We conclude by underlining the importance of humiliation in Dalit lives and its collective nature. We therefore argue that a decolonized psychology should pay more attention to humiliation and should also reconceptualize it by paying more attention to identity, power, and resistance.

The paper puts forward a novel solution to the so‐called All or Nothing Problem. Contrary to what many believe, I argue that it is permissible to go some way towards benefiting others without going all the way. Something Is Okay! If this is true, it is not the case (which would be absurd) that we should rather Do Nothing than Something if we are not going to do the Best. If my main claim is correct, this is a blow to a key tenet of Effective Altruism, namely, that if we do good (e.g., contribute to charities), we should do what is best. A side benefit of my solution is the introduction of a neglected sort of supererogation, namely, Self‐Regarding Suboptimal Supererogation (i.e., the self‐regarding equivalent of the more familiar other‐regarding notion of going halfway towards supererogation). Regarding this, my view implies that we are not obliged to do what is best for ourselves (e.g., maximize our health or looks) once we go some way towards benefiting ourselves (incurring considerable costs in doing so).

How do citizens form perceptions of victory in war under power asymmetry? Although scholars have extensively studied the objective determinants of war outcomes, we know far less about how citizens subjectively weigh these factors. We examine this question in Taiwan, a demanding test: extreme power asymmetry with China, an available American patron, and a politically engaged citizenry should maximize the pull of external considerations. A prevailing view holds that Taiwanese victory perceptions depend almost exclusively on American military intervention. We challenge this view using two conjoint experiments with over 2400 respondents, extending the conjoint approach to a domain it is well-suited to address but rarely studied. International military support exerts the strongest effect, yet domestic factors collectively carry comparable weight. Military readiness and public morale emerge as the second and third most influential determinants, and together with political unity, these domestic attributes account for over 40% of citizens’ decision calculus. Even where conditions should maximize the pull of external considerations, Taiwanese citizens do more than look outward. They evaluate their own society’s capacity to resist. These findings suggest that weaker states facing powerful adversaries possess meaningful levers for enhancing perceived resilience beyond securing external guarantees.

Do field experimental interventions produce durable changes in gender representation? We examine the persistence of experimental treatment effects in Karpowitz, Monson, and Preece (2017), where a single letter from Republican Party leaders significantly increased women’s election to state delegate positions. Two years later, differences between treatment and control conditions evaporated. Treated precincts largely retained earlier experimental gains, but the treatment effect size was smaller because of increases in the control condition. We examine four possible explanations for this pattern. First, we find considerable evidence of an incumbency effect among women in one treatment condition. Second, increases in women’s representation in the control condition appear to be related in part to larger turnout during the 2016 election cycle. Finally, we find little evidence of lasting attitude changes about women’s representation and few traces of post-experimental spillover.

To gain support, political actors must be visible on issues where they are seen as credible and advance these issues on the agenda. Direct online communication and negative messaging can amplify this by gaining traction on social media. While prior research assumes parties attack competitors on issues they ‘own’, we test that assumption in a highly fragmented multi-party system where ownership is fiercely contested. Here, attacks may aim to compete for ownership rather than defend it. Analysing 27,266 posts on X by Belgian party actors over two-and-a-half years, we find that sender issue ownership alone does not predict issue-based attacks. Instead, competition over ownership, especially at the target level, shapes attack patterns. During campaigns, issue-based attacks are significantly more likely to target issue owners than during routine periods. By linking issue competition and negative campaigning, we offer new insights into communication dynamics in fragmented party systems across the electoral cycle.

In a globalised world, authoritarian politics does not stay within state borders. Autocrats and their allies reach abroad to influence their international environment to, at a minimum, protect authoritarianism at home or, more ambitiously, to promote pro-authoritarian norms and practices abroad. A rich stream of political science literature – comparative, international and area studies – has mapped the contours of this ‘transnational authoritarianism’ in an increasingly permissive international environment. This review article argues that transnational authoritarianism is facilitated by the rise of authoritarian powers and deepening globalisation. It first examines the drivers of contemporary transnational authoritarianism before identifying and categorising its central actors. The review then organises the literature on this topic into two strands, each enabled by autocracies’ ascendance in a globalised era. First, official channels of transnational authoritarianism see mostly state actors advance regime goals with familiar instruments such as security cooperation agreements, but with renewed vigour and support. Second, unofficial channels feature a mix of state and non-state actors exerting leverage and influence within the networks and channels of global interconnectedness. By necessity, these categories traverse the fields of comparative politics and international relations, revealing how these transnational dimensions are critical to the success of contemporary authoritarian regimes. The review concludes by revisiting earlier literature on autocracy promotion considering these emergent realities, and reflecting on how recent political developments in the United States relate to these processes.

On May 20, 2025, the Swedish parliament passed a new law that criminalizes the purchase of sexual acts taking place “at a distance,” that is, via digital platforms and without physical contact. It prohibits the act of promoting or financially exploiting an individual to perform a sexual act remotely for compensation and specifically bans clients from impacting the content of online sexual acts (Government Bill 2025; SVT Nyheter 2025). By targeting platforms such as OnlyFans , it aims to capture the sex industry’s digitalization and thereby decrease the vulnerability of specific groups and prevent new entries into prostitution.

How does the provision of political appointments influence coalition support in multiparty presidential systems? While the importance of cabinet portfolios for coalition governments is well-established, lower-tier positions have received less attention being limited to compensations for weak policy-making capabilities. In multiparty presidential systems, however, these appointments also function as bargaining chips during coalition formation. I argue that bureaucratic appointments help sustain coalition support, especially during votes on bills issued by the executive power. Analyzing roll-call data from Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies (2003–2018) across 161 bills, I find that besides ministerial portfolios, lower-tier appointments strongly increase legislative support, highlighting the strategic use of patronage under high political stakes. These findings contribute to understanding coalition management strategies in fragmented presidential systems.

Public security remains a central issue across the globe. Approaches to studying this issue area have largely followed two orientations: one conceptualizes security along an ideologically dictated unidimensional spectrum, ranging from tough-on-crime strategies (right-wing) to social policy-oriented alternatives (left-wing). The other examines specific security strategies without assuming a singular ideological continuum. This paper bridges these orientations by offering a conceptual framework that more holistically defines the structure of this issue area. Using computational text analysis of Brazilian gubernatorial campaign proposals (2010–2022) and over 100 expert interviews, I assess the validity of the unidimensional heuristic and propose an alternative mapping of public security policies across four categories: crime prevention, repression, human rights and accountability, and pro-police reform. Findings demonstrate that (1) these policy categories are not fundamentally mutually exclusive, and (2) while ideology does help us understand who proposes certain public security portfolios, there is substantial ideological intra-group heterogeneity.

Under what conditions do the unemployed protest? Traditionally, scholars have found that joblessness creates feelings of depression and self-blame, reducing mobilization among the unemployed. Experiences of the past 30 years, including the Great Recession, have led scholars to reconsider the influence of material deprivation on mobilization. Specifically, a growing body of literature has highlighted numerous historical instances of mobilization among the unemployed. However, much of this literature has focused on particular cases, with little attention given to cross-national comparison. This study contributes a cross-national comparative analysis of when and where the unemployed mobilize using eleven rounds of data provided by the European Social Survey (ESS). We identify a convex, curvilinear relationship in which the unemployed are most likely to mobilize under conditions of high unemployment, particularly in countries with more generous welfare provision.

Although members of the mass public express support for judicial philosophies--such as originalism--and evaluate nominees and decisions accordingly, it remains unclear whether they apply these philosophies in a coherent and consistent manner. In general, the public rarely employs overarching belief systems when making political judgments. Thus, are individuals philosophically constrained in their thinking about the judiciary? To answer this, we assess philosophical constraint among the mass public and compare it to a relevant baseline: legal professionals. Using two surveys—the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES) and a 2025 Prolific sample of legal professionals—we evaluate constraint through multiple metrics, including attitude consistency. Our findings suggest that judicial philosophy functions as an organizing framework for only a small subset of individuals, primarily those with higher levels of political sophistication or legal training. There is a disconnect between philosophy-based support and coherence in one’s understanding of that philosophy.

During Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential bid, there was a substantial wave of social media messaging aimed at mobilizing voters. Previous research indicates that many American voters obtain political news through social media; therefore, political candidates often use social media as a critical campaign strategy to garner widespread attention. We examine the influence of different Harris TikTok videos during the shortened 2024 presidential election to assess which affect favorability towards Harris. We demonstrate that during presidential elections with polarizing political candidates, social media messaging matters. We find that traditional campaign videos posted on the platform have greater influence than trendy TikTok “edits.” In particular, long form campaign ads posted to TikTok increased favorability for Harris. On the other hand, videos in which Harris explicitly discussed race or called out JD Vance or President Trump had limited influence on support, with some exceptions. In an increasingly digitized political environment, our findings are the first to document the effects of short-form videos on candidate favorability, the effectiveness of social media, the effectiveness of sharing social media with networks, and the use of different messages for voters.

How is between-group inequality related to collective action in broker-mediated patronage systems? Research typically examines between-group inequality at coarse scales, like countries, but I argue that hyper-local neighborhood context conditions politically relevant outcomes. Using original household survey data from over 200 Indian informal settlements, with social network data from a subset, I show local inequality between caste (jati) groups is associated with lower neighborhood collective action potential. Probing mechanisms, I show neighborhoods with higher between-group inequality exhibit more inter-caste conflict and weaker reciprocity; problem-solving networks are also more fragmented, and brokers struggle to build large, cross-caste followings, with adverse consequences for mobilization. These findings contribute to debates on how diversity and inequality structure political behavior and underscore the importance of micro-contexts where citizens interact and mobilize.

This article follows the arc of congressional competence through the development and decline of the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) Surveys & Investigations (S&I) staff, an enduring oversight unit whose investigations were unobserved by design. S&I was quietly reorganized out of existence in December 2024. Why? What, if anything, is lost? Drawing on committee reports, archival materials, and interviews, this study shows how Chairman Clarence Cannon's design for S&I shaped its distinctive nonpartisan, under‐the‐radar oversight, filling a once‐powerful niche made untenable in recent decades by partisan conflict. Time‐series analysis of S&I study activity (1975–2024) indicates divided government and partisan disagreement constrained bipartisan S&I oversight. The conclusion situates S&I's history in research on congressional oversight, grounding abstract models, tracing institutional change, and revealing unexpected consequences.

Do constituents hold elected officials accountable for their ideological positions? Using over 1 million Senatorial evaluations from the 2006–2024 Cooperative Election Study, we employ a within‐respondent design that exploits the fact that each constituent evaluates two Senators, absorbing unmeasured respondent characteristics. We find “uniform punishment, conditional reward”: outpartisan constituents penalize extremism by roughly 14 percentage points of Senatorial approval, while only ideologically aligned copartisans (liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) reward extremism by 22 percentage points in approval. These results are robust to the inclusion of Senator fixed effects, which identify extremism effects from within‐Senator variation over time. Ideological accountability is evident and operates through offsetting channels, which can explain null findings in election‐level research.

European family migration policies increasingly impose economic, linguistic, and legal requirements on residents seeking reunification with family members abroad. Based on a conjoint experiment in three European Union member states, this article examines public attitudes towards this policy trend. Contrary to expectations, the respondents do not support conditioning reunification on residents’ status or attributes. Resident family members’ economic resources, work experience, language skills, and legal status exert minimal influence on respondents’ preferences for allowing family reunification. These findings indicate that, while conditionality is a central feature of contemporary migration policy, it does not reflect public sentiment regarding residents’ opportunity to reunite with family members living abroad. The study uncovers a new and significant opinion–policy gap, which has not been noted in migration studies so far.

Most studies on modern state formation assume that enhanced state capacity and institutionalization increase clarity and predictability. We argue that this view fails to consider ambiguity politics—a form of governance in which formal and informal institutions are inconsistent, unclear, or ill-defined, thereby creating space for multiple interpretations, practices, and procedures. Combining inductive insights from research in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and deductive engagement with different strands of literature, we developed a typology that distinguishes mechanisms of ambiguity politics according to the level at which the ambiguation takes place (elite/administrative) and the intentionality of it (strategic/accidental). Although ambiguity politics is particularly visible in conflict and postconflict settings, we show that it is not inevitably a temporary stage toward greater order and predictability but rather a persistent feature of governance in various contexts.

The republican conception of property developed during the American founding continues to shape contemporary legal and constitutional orders, yet its foundations and legacy remain underappreciated. This article reconstructs that tradition by showing that American republicanism understood property as a politically constituted, fiduciary entitlement oriented to public purposes. On this view, property emerges as a civil right grounded in the social compact rather than as an inherent natural right conferring absolute dominion. The article traces the nineteenth-century consolidation of an absolutist, Blackstonian conception of property and contract that, under the influence of legal formalism, increasingly depoliticized both. It further shows how legal realism and North American institutional economics disrupted this framework by recasting property as a socially constructed bundle of rights. Recovering the earlier fiduciary-republican conception, the article demonstrates its enduring normative and doctrinal significance in contemporary constitutionalism worldwide, including in eminent domain, as embedded in the social function of the property clause, and in the decommodification of labor.

In Spring 2024, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in Latino-majority communities in Arizona and Texas to test the impact and effects of voter registration campaigns run by local Registrars in high schools. We theorized that bringing election officials into schools dispels informational uncertainty, cultivates positive political attitudes and emotions, and ultimately boosts voter registration rates. Two partner schools were identified in each state and then randomized into treatment and control conditions. Before treatment, seniors at all four high schools were asked to complete a survey about their interest in and attitudes toward politics and voting. Registrars then conducted in-person visits at the two treatment schools. After treatment, the seniors again were asked to complete a survey. We find that the Registrars’ visits increased enthusiasm, encouragement, and interest around voting and decreased anxiety.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has provoked polarized reactions in higher education, ranging from fears of plagiarism and the “death of the college essay” to claims of pedagogical transformation. Political science, in which writing remains central to learning, is at the center of this debate. This study advances a critical middle ground, arguing that generative AI should be treated as neither an existential threat nor a pedagogical shortcut but instead as a tool whose use must be structured around accountability, critical literacy, and equity. By synthesizing scholarship on AI in higher education, writing-as-process pedagogy, and educational inequality, this article challenges the “replacement” logic that equates writing with text production and examines the limits of framing AI as a neutral assistant. It introduces Disclose and Defend Pedagogy, a design framework that organizes pedagogical responses to AI along two dimensions—openness and accountability—and incorporates equity-aware practices related to access and language. A practice-grounded, instructor-led case study from a political science course taught in Lebanon during Spring 2025 illustrates how disclosure requirements, process-oriented assessment, and classroom dialogue made AI use visible and accountable in a resource-constrained, crisis-affected setting while also highlighting the practical limits and implementation lessons of this approach. The study concludes that Global South contexts clarify what is at stake in AI integration: safeguarding responsibility, judgment, and voice in political science writing while equipping students to use and interrogate generative tools critically under unequal conditions of access.

Scholars, journalists, and educational professionals have called for renewed efforts to make American civics coursework more relatable to students. Relatable coursework should spur students’ sense that the material is relevant to them and yield greater gains in key learning outcomes—namely, increased internal political efficacy. We developed a series of “regular people” profiles that were used to introduce weekly topics in an introductory college-level American Government course. Each profile highlighted the role of an outsider or a behind-the-scenes actor, drawn from disproportionately young and historically marginalized backgrounds, who has made or is making an impact on American politics. We find that students who received the regular people lessons were significantly more likely to rate the course material as personally relevant. Moreover, they exhibited significantly greater growth in internal political efficacy—that is, the feeling that they have the knowledge and skills to make a difference in the political process—during the semester.