The forthcoming article “Competing Principals? Legislative Representation in List Proportional Representation Systems” by Peter Buisseret and Carlo Prato is summarized by the author(s) below.

Over two-thirds of the world’s legislators are elected under list proportional representation (PR). Under closed lists, party leaders control the order in which seats are filled. Under open lists, this order is determined by each candidate’s share of preference votes. The prevailing scholarly wisdom holds that closed list systems encourage cohesive parties, while open list systems promote better representation of local interests.

Many real-world systems, however, combine elements of both: under flexible lists, both a party’s rank assignment and preference votes determine the order in which seats are filled. Our paper conceptualizes list flexibility as a continuum, ranging from the two extremes of closed lists and open lists. Increasing list flexibility—i.e., increasing the relative importance of preference votes for an incumbent’s reelection—transfers electoral control away from party leaders and towards constituency voters.

We develop a new theoretical framework that asks: how does flexibility shape legislators’ incentives to balance the competing interests of their party leaders and their local voters?

We find that higher flexibility may weaken local representation. Higher list flexibility intensifies competition for preference votes, encouraging representatives to demonstrate to their voters that they prioritize local interests over party interests. In an effort to build a reputation, representatives pander by opposing their party’s agenda even when it benefits their local voters. These concerns are more likely to arise in political systems where voters have weak partisan attachments—for example, in contexts where competition is largely personalistic or clientelistic, or in countries with a relatively short experience of democracy.

Our theory identifies a “sweet spot” degree of list flexibility that maximizes the representation of local interests and depends on district magnitude and voters’ ideological heterogeneity and partisanship.

Our analysis also considers how changes in district-level ideological heterogeneity affect party cohesion. The answer depends critically on list flexibility. In high-flexibility contexts, more heterogeneous districts make parties less cohesive. In low-flexibility contexts, they make parties more cohesive.

Finally—and once again contradicting conventional scholarly wisdom—we show that under closed, open and flexible lists, higher district magnitude can reduce the value of cultivating a personal reputation through obstruction. Even when a party’s ranking has no direct consequence for the order in which seats are awarded, district magnitude nonetheless shifts the balance of power from voters towards party leaders.

About the Author(s): Peter Buisseret is assistant professor at Department of Government, Harvard University and Carlo Prato is assistant professor at Department of Political Science, Columbia University. Their research “Competing Principals? Legislative Representation in List Proportional Representation Systems” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Good Times and Bad Apples: Rebel Recruitment in Crackdown and Truce” by Kolby Hanson is summarized by the author below. 

Rebellion is a dangerous business, but some times are more dangerous than others. During periods of government crackdown, life for rebel soldiers is dangerous and difficult, deterring would-be rebels from taking up arms. In many separatist conflicts, however, governments have allowed rebels to operate and recruit freely for years as part of a long-term truce like those in Senegal, Georgia, and Myanmar. Counterinsurgents often worry that these periods of toleration encourage would-be rebels to take up arms, attracted by newfound safety and comfort. Even when rebel groups have few material resources, periods of toleration enable a modicum of comfort: a soft bed, a warm meal, and a few dollars at the end of the week. 

In this paper, I argue that government toleration actually weakens rebel groups in the long run by unraveling an important screening process in rebel recruitment. When life for rebels is dangerous and difficult, only the most community-oriented, committed recruits take up arms. Safety and comfort, by contrast, attract many self-oriented low-commitment recruits who later prone to desert on the battlefield, defect to the enemy, or abuse civilian supporters. Limited by weak disciplinary institutions and active recruitment competition, rebel leaders often struggle to maintain discipline and cohesion with these self-oriented recruits. 

I explore rebel recruitment with experimental and qualitative evidence inside five rebel movements in Northeast India. First, I explored how potential rebel recruits evaluate rebel organizations using a conjoint survey experiment. By speaking to young men in local hotspots of rebel recruitment – such as ethnic volunteer organizations, tea shops, and moonshiners – my team surveyed nearly 400 likely rebel recruits, testing what factors make them more likely to join a rebel group. This survey shows that community-oriented recruits from ethnic volunteer organizations care about very different factors than do self-oriented recruits from other gathering places. While the community-oriented recruits will join rebel groups even during the danger and difficulty of open conflict, self-oriented recruits will join only when doing so requires few sacrifices, as in times of toleration. 

Second, the paper explores how government crackdown and toleration have shaped the trajectories of Northeast India’s two longest-running and largest rebel movements. Through dozens of in-depth interviews with current and former rebels (and civilians in the area), I explore how the government’s long-running truce in Nagaland has actually weakened Naga rebel groups. Even as rebels in Nagaland have gained resources and recruits, they have simultaneously have eroded into indiscipline and fragmentation. 

Cases like those in Northeast India illustrate that leniency against rebels may ultimately play into the hands of the state. Counterinsurgency, by contrast, can be counterproductive for governments even when it is implemented “correctly,” screening out low-quality recruits and strengthening rebel organizations. 

About the Author: Kolby Hanson is a Strategy and Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the U.S. Naval War College. Their research “Good Times and Bad Apples: Rebel Recruitment in Crackdown and Truce” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “People Haven’t Had Enough of Experts: Technocratic Attitudes among Citizens in Nine European Democracies” by Eri Bertsou and Daniele Caramani is summarized by the author(s) below. 

In the run up to the UK’s referendum on EU membership in 2016, Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a leading figure in the “Leave Campaign” claimed that “people in this country have had enough of experts” in an effort to rebuke economic expert opinions regarding the repercussions of Brexit. The validity of his claim remains doubtful, especially in the light of experts’ role during the Coronavirus crisis. 

In this article, we assess the extent to which technocratic attitudes, that is, the public’s beliefs that an independent knowledge elite can provide effective and responsible governance based on expertise, exist among citizens and can be measured. We also investigate how technocratic attitudes oppose populist ones.  

First, we conceptualize and confirm empirically technocratic attitudes at the mass level across nine European countries using a novel survey battery to measure dimensions of Elitism, Expertise and Anti-politics. 

Second, we investigate in what numbers there are citizens harbouring technocratic attitudes in established democracies. Using latent class analysis, we identify groups of citizens that follow a Technocratic, Populist or Party-democratic profile and show how they overlap and contrast. Across the nine European countries, approximately 12% of citizens fall into the Technocratic profile. This group can be found across Europe but is larger in Southern and Eastern European countries (13-20%). This finding adds force to the claim that the model of responsible party government, which has dominated in Western democracies in the second half of the 20th century, is challenged not only by populism but also by technocracy.  

We also find that technocratic and populist attitudes share a common Anti-politics stance, while they contrast on Elitism, in line with our theoretic expectations. A surprising finding from our research concerns the Expertise dimension. We find that beliefs around the superiority of skillful, knowledgeable and scientific experts over politicians abound across countries. Citizens with technocratic attitudes register strong preferences for expertise and science in politics. At the same time, however, citizens with populist attitudes also showcase strong preferences for more expertise. In other words, there is no Populism without Expertise.  

Finally, we explore the differences among citizens who fall in the Technocratic, Populist and Party-democratic profiles in terms of demographic characteristics and attitudes. While citizens with technocratic attitudes are dissatisfied with current representative systems, they are distinct from citizens with populist attitudes; they are more educated and interested in politics, they have higher political trust, and they are not attracted to the extremes of the left−right ideological spectrum. 

Being able to distinguish between populist and technocratic attitudes vastly increases our ability to understand the current challenges faced by mainstream parties and governments in established democracies on the demand side. Given that, so far, no political force has tried to mobilize this segment of the electorate, the potential implications for political behaviour and party competition are considerable. 

About the Author(s): Eri Bertsou is Senior Researcher, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich and Daniele Caramani is Ernst B. Haas Chair of European Governance and Politics at the European University Institute. Their research “People Haven’t Had Enough of Experts: Technocratic Attitudes among Citizens in Nine European Democracies” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “The Divide Over Independence: Explaining Preferences for Secession in an Advanced Open Economy” by Maria Jose Hierro and Didac Queralt is summarized by the author(s) below. 

The number of states facing self-determination claims has increased steadily since 1960. Self-determination, common in the postcolonial world, regained momentum after the breakup of the USSR. In recent decades, referenda on independence have also reached advanced economies. Far from exceptional, demands for self-determination are expected to proliferate because international economic integration reduces the relevance of country size.  

To date, the study of individual-level preferences for secession has largely focused on nonmaterial traits, including identity and language. This contrasts with aggregate analyses of secession demands that emphasize the importance of economic factors. Inspired by the latter approach, we examine here the leverage of material considerations in forging pro-secession preferences. We claim that exposure to anticipated trade, insurance, and fiscal shocks structure support for (and opposition to) independence. We test our argument in Catalonia, an advanced economy deeply integrated in international markets. We draw on an original online survey conducted before the December 2017 regional election, which followed the declaration of independence by the Catalan Parliament and the suspension of autonomy by the Spanish government. The election was read by many as a covert referendum on independence.  

Using different instruments of support for independence, we provide robust evidence showing that anticipated trade shocks following secession exert differential effects depending on market specialization. Respondents working in sectors and at firms exporting to the host country disproportionally oppose secession. By contrast, respondents specializing in foreign markets show no aversion to independence. We offer three nonmutually exclusive explanations for the different effect of domestic and foreign trade relationships: the relative size of the host country and foreign markets, anticipated boycott by domestic consumers, and relatively low competitiveness of producers specializing in the domestic economy.  

Exploring material considerations further, we find no systematic relationship between income levels and preference for secession; however, we show that exclusion from welfare strengthens support for independence among the long-term unemployed, a result that sheds light on the upsurge of secession support during the harshest years of the economic crisis, 2008‒2014.  We offer suggestive evidence that the long-term unemployed favored secession not because of reemployability considerations but in expectation of generous social insurance in the new state. 

Our analysis also reveals that support for independence increases with skill levels. We investigate further this result that seemingly challenges the expectations derived from the Heckscher-Ohlin trade model; that is, if secession is followed by (short-term) international economic disintegration, high-skilled individuals in a capital-intensive economy should oppose secession. We dismiss an explanation based on anticipated economic returns from independence. Instead, we find that education masks differences in “fiscal knowledge,” namely understanding of the institutional design of interterritorial transfers. In a context of autonomy retractions, highly educated individuals show disproportional skepticism about the accommodation of regional demands and the fulfillment of central government promises.  

Our findings contribute to the literature of secession politics by uncovering individual-level economic drivers of support for and opposition to independence, holding nonmaterial considerations constant. The results speak to ongoing secessionist movements in open economies, including Quebec, Scotland, Flanders, New Caledonia, and arguably, Hong Kong. Likewise, our findings shed light on the connection between grievances derived from autonomy retractions and preference for secession. Provided that high-skill, high-knowledge individuals have disproportional access to and influence over regional political elites, sustained autonomy retraction by the central government might leave little room for a negotiated solution.  

About the Author(s): Maria Jose Hierro is Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Yale University and Didac Queralt is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Yale University. Their research “The Divide Over Independence: Explaining Preferences for Secession in an Advanced Open Economy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming article of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “The Organizational Voter: Support for New Parties in Young Democracies” by Mathias Poertner is summarized by the author(s) below. 

Across much of the democratic world, political parties are experiencing a critical moment: trust in established parties has decreased in recent decades and new parties are emerging. While new parties arise even in many well-established, historic democracies, this happens even more frequently in young democracies. Whereas most of these new parties remain short-lived and disappear quickly, some manage to secure substantial electoral support surprisingly quickly and to maintain support over repeated elections.  

In order to understand the success and failure of new parties, this article explores how voters come to support them. This question is critical for understanding the quality and stability of democratic representation and accountability especially in young democracies, yet little studied in the literature, which tends to focus on well-established parties.  

While researchers have predominantly explained variation in success by focusing on direct ethnic or personalistic appeals that parties make to voters, I show that organizationally mediated appeals—those that engage voters through civil society organizations—can secure electoral support more effectively and durably. Locally organized, participant-based civil society organizations—such as neighborhood associations, informal sector unions, and indigenous movements—formed around a broad range of political identities and interests are particularly widespread in the developing world: in most Latin American countries, for example, about one third to one half of citizens regularly attend meetings of such organizations. 

Using a randomized experiment in Bolivia—one of the most unstable party systems in the region—presenting voters with campaign posters, I demonstrate that endorsements by such organizations hold considerable sway over the vote preferences of organization members and other people in their wider social networks. Endorsements can even counteract policy and ethnic differences between candidates and voters. Finally, I find suggestive evidence that repeated endorsements for the same party have lasting effects and lead voters to become attached to a party itself. 

The findings suggest an important, understudied route to partisan support in new democracies and have important implications for research on political accountability. The findings dovetail with other recent research that has highlighted that “voters, even the most informed voters, typically make choices not on the basis of policy preferences or ideology” (Aachen and Bartels 2016, 4). At the same time, it expands on this work, by illustrating how group identities influence electoral politics outside the context of established democracies with stable party systems and by demonstrating how organized civil society groups can overcome diffuse group identities (e.g., ethnic identities). Finally, the article sheds light on how marginalized populations, such as indigenous people or informal sector workers, who in many developing countries have historically been largely excluded from representation through traditional parties, can achieve representation in electoral politics.  

About the Author: Mathias Poertner is Assistant Professor, Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University. Their research “The Organizational Voter: Support for New Parties in Young Democracies” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming article of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Gender Quotas and International Reputation” by Sarah Sunn Bush and Pär Zetterberg is summarized by the author(s) below.

“The RPF’s [Rwandan Patriotic Front] pro-women policies…give members of the diplomatic corps in Kigali liberty to overlook the regime’s authoritarianism and human rights abuses” (Burnet 2008, p. 371). 

Do authoritarian leaders successfully exploit gender equality policies to gain international recognition and enhance their chances for regime survival? We address this question by analyzing one of the most significant institutional developments of the last thirty years: the global spread of electoral gender quotas, which has transformed the composition of legislatures in more than 100 countries, including many non-democracies. A prominent explanation for autocracies’ embrace of quotas is that quotas and women’s political representation, by being intimately connected to democracy, enhance countries’ international reputations for democracy and therefore deflect external pressure to democratize.  

Case studies from a range of non-democracies — including Bangladesh, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Jordan, Morocco, Rwanda, and Uganda — emphasize how political elites have sought to improve their countries’ international reputations for democracy, and leverage improved reputations into increased foreign aid, through quotas and women’s representation. Yet a key question has remained unanswered: Do electoral autocracies really improve their reputations through the adoption of gender quotas?  

We answered that question by conducting original surveys in Sweden and the United States. In both countries, we asked respondents to evaluate a hypothetical developing country that was an electoral autocracy. We varied two traits about the country: the presence or absence of a gender quota, and the proportion of women in the parliament. This design enabled us to identify the separate and combined effects of the existence of quotas and the level of women’s descriptive representation. We then asked people how democratic the country was and whether they supported giving it aid.  

Our findings support the idea that non-democracies secure benefits through reforms designed to increase women’s representation. Women’s descriptive representation increased support for aid in both Sweden and the United States, and the mere existence of a quota increased support for aid in the United States, though not in Sweden. This pattern suggests that for Swedes, it is an improvement in women’s representation, one desired effect of quotas, rather than the existence of quotas, that mattered. Women’s representation also enhanced perceptions of democracy in Sweden. This relationship did not hold, however, in the United States, perhaps reflecting the fact that less than 20% of representatives in the U.S. Congress are women but the country is widely considered (including by its citizens) to be democratic.  

Since an improved performance in terms of women’s political inclusion spills over to countries’ reputations for democracy, it may strengthen non-democracies and help them survive. Though the survival benefits may come in many forms, one clear example comes from the effects we identify in terms of support for foreign aid. As a consequence, international organizations and donor countries should be cautious when evaluating and engaging with these regimes.  

About the Author(s): Sarah Sunn Bush is Associate Professor on term at the Department of Political Science, Yale University and Pär Zetterberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Government, Uppsala University. Their research “Gender Quotas and International Reputation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Do Politicians Discriminate Against Internal Migrants? Evidence from Nationwide Field Experiments in India” by Nikhar Gaikwad and Gareth Nellis is summarized by the author(s) below. 

The world is urbanizing at a lightening pace. This is especially true in developing countries, as migrants relocate from rural areas to towns and cities in search of jobs, education, and cosmopolitan lifestyles. Yet shifting to new destinations is challenging. Poorer migrants often find themselves consigned to urban peripheries, and rank among the most marginalized classes of citizens in developing countries globally.  

In our new paper, “Do Politicians Discriminate Against Internal Migrants?” we theorize and investigate the kind of treatment internal migrants receive when they move to new destinations. In particular, we test whether elected urban politicians treat migrants’ requests for basic constituency services similarly or differently to requests from long-term city residents (city “natives,” so to speak).  

We suspect there to be at least three reasons why urban politicians would be less solicitous of migrant versus local requests. First, politicians may harbor prejudice against migrant “outsiders.” Second, they might channel the nativist preferences of the bulk of their voting constituents: locals who fear that the arrival of waves of newcomers will depress job opportunities in the area, create competition for scarce state resources, and lead to ethno-cultural “dilution.” Third, politicians may think that migrants will be unlikely to take part in local elections, curtailing incentives to respond to this group’s interests. 

Our test case for these claims is India, the world’s largest democracy and home to a large and growing stock of internal migrants (325 million, by some estimates). We gathered contact details for sitting municipal councilors in 28 major Indian cities. We then ran an unobtrusive audit, sending each politician a brief postal letter from a fictitious citizen asking for help with a basic yet potentially consequential task—one over which local politicians are known to have sway (e.g. getting an income certificate or setting up a local government dispensary). Various features of the letters were randomized, including whether the petitioner said they had just moved to the city from another state, or were local to the area and had lived there all their lives. Each letter asked the councilor to give the requester a callback at a local number provided. For each letter, we record whether a callback was received. By comparing average callback rates across the citizen types, we can assess how much discrimination is induced by those citizen-attributes.  

We find that urban politicians are indeed less responsive to migrants: a migrant letter is three percentage points less likely to get a reply than a near-identical letter from a city native. Note that the average response rate for all letters was just 14 percent, underscoring how difficult it can be to get hold of urban councilors in these settings and how significant the anti-migrant penalty really is proportionally (24 percent).  

But what explains such maltreatment? A pattern of auxiliary results in the letters experiment didn’t reveal any telltale signs that politicians were personally prejudiced toward migrants or that they were fixated on standard nativist concerns (jobs or ethnic identity) in deciding whom to help. Meanwhile, two additional studies we conducted suggest that politicians’ re-election considerations may be the driving factor. In a second audit experiment, conducted via SMS text messages to elected councilors, we found that migrants mentioning that they were registered to vote locally were just as likely to get a reply as locals mentioning that they were registered; that is, the migrant penalty disappeared once registration status was clarified. Migrants mentioning that they were not registered were disadvantaged vis-à-vis registered migrants. Further, in an endline survey, councilors reported that they believed recent migrants were unlikely to be enrolled on the city voter registers whereas city natives were highly likely to be so. In short, the stack of evidence suggests that politicians mete out unequal treatment to migrants because they don’t view them to active members of their electorates.  

As it turns out, political elites have good reasons for thinking this to be the case. Surveys repeatedly show a shortfall in migrant voter registration and turnout rates. India, along with a swath of other developing democracies, operates an onerous voter-initiated registration system that is especially hard to navigate for those who move across electoral boundaries. In a new set of studies, we theorize reasons why internal migrants struggle to integrate politically into cities and test feasible solutions.  

About the Author(s): Nikhar Gaikwad is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University and Gareth Nellis is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego. Their research “Do Politicians Discriminate Against Internal Migrants? Evidence from Nationwide Field Experiments in India” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Winning Hearts and Minds in Civil Wars: Governance, Leadership Change, and Support for Violent Groups in Iraq” by Christoph Mikulaschek, Saurabh Pant and Beza Tesfaye is summarized by the author(s) below. 

The “hearts and minds” model of combating rebellions indicates that civilians in civil war theaters are less likely to support armed opposition groups if they are satisfied with the provision of public services and security by the government. If the government effectively signals that it will address the grievances of a certain displeased group, then this group will reward the government with support in return; and simultaneously, this group will reduce support for the rebels. Building on this model, we argue that a political event that increases a group’s expectation of future security and public service delivery by the government will increase support for the government and will decrease sympathy for violent opposition groups. Attitudes toward the government and its opponents will change as soon as the displeased group’s expectations of future public service and security provision rise. Therefore, a leadership transition that affects these expectations can shift public support away from insurgents and toward the government even before the new government implements policy changes. 

To test our argument, we leverage original data from a large national survey in Iraq and a unique research design opportunity that stems from the unforeseen announcement of the resignation of divisive Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in the summer of 2014 while the survey was in the field. This leadership transition to a successor viewed as relatively less sectarian, Haider al-Abadi, occurred at the height of the ISIS insurgency. We demonstrate that the characteristics of respondents who were interviewed before the leadership transition was announced were not systematically different from those of respondents who took our survey afterwards, and that the timing of each interview was unrelated to the leadership transition. Thus, we can estimate the effect of this event on the attitudes of Iraqi citizens by comparing survey responses provided immediately before the announcement of the leadership transition to those given shortly thereafter.  

We find that the announcement of the leadership transition had a large effect on the attitudes of Iraq’s displeased Sunni Arab minority. We show that this minority group shifted support from the violent opposition to the government. In fact, Sunni Arab support for violent opposition groups dropped by almost 20 percentage points over just a few weeks after the announcement of the leadership transition. In line with our argument, we provide evidence that this realignment was due to rising optimism among Sunni Arabs that the new government would provide services and public goods—specifically security, electricity, and jobs. 

We can rule out three plausible alternative explanations of our findings. First, the results do not merely reflect a transitory “honeymoon effect” that is often observed when a new leader is elected. Second, it is highly unlikely that the realignment of Sunni Arab attitudes was due to changing expectations of which side was going to win the civil war. Third, and finally, the findings do not support an explanation grounded in zero-sum sectarianism where one group’s gain comes at the expense of another group’s welfare. 

These results have several major implications. First, support for militancy is not simply a reflection of primordial sectarian animosity. Iraqi Sunni Arabs are willing to support a Shia Arab-led government if they expect the government to improve their plight. Second, leadership change in civil war countries with a history of personalized dictatorship can drastically shift mass political attitudes even when the new head of government is a member of the same sect, political party, and ruling coalition as his predecessor, as long as the transition improves public perceptions of future service delivery to aggrieved communities. Third, while the recent literature shows that leadership transitions in weakly institutionalized regimes alter public goods and service provision, this study indicates that the public’s expectation of such changes triggers a realignment of popular support from violent opposition groups to the government. Thus, effective signals about future public service delivery start to at least temporarily win over hearts and minds even before any concrete policy change.  

About the Author(s): Christoph Mikulaschek is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, Saurabh Pant is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and Beza Tesfaye is a Senior Researcher at Mercy Corps. Their research “Winning Hearts and Minds in Civil Wars: Governance, Leadership Change, and Support for Violent Groups in Iraq” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Observed without Sympathy: Adam Smith on Inequality and Spectatorship” by Kristen R. Collins is summarized by the author below. 

Inequality is increasingly becoming central to studies of American politics. As socioeconomic inequality has grown, democratic participation has declined, particularly among people making the least amount of money. Using the concept of “spectatorship,” democratic theorists have highlighted how most people observe politics unfolding, even if they do not vote. But, at the same time, people are observed themselves, affecting how they experience American democracy. Due to intrusive surveillance practices, some government programs intended to alleviate poverty and inequality can end up discouraging political participation.  

To examine how inequality shapes how we observe and are observed by each other, I turn to the moral philosophy of Adam Smith. Social spectatorship is central to his account of how we develop moral judgments; inequality is a major factor that warps these judgments. According to Smith, people disproportionately attend to, trust, and admire people who are wealthy and socially distinguished. Conversely, not only do spectators tend to ignore people living in poverty, but when spectators do deign to look at them, they assume them to have inferior moral qualities, such as being craven and dishonest.  

Although Smith focuses his criticisms on how these tendencies cause moral decay in the community at large, he also acknowledges the problems posed by mistaken public judgments in general. By analyzing his account of unearned social censure, I show how harsh public judgments can harm a person’s self-image. Even people who have a strong sense of moral judgment, who know they are good people, can nevertheless be severely demoralized by the mistaken judgments of others. 

In order to build a bridge between Smith’s time and ours, I extend his insights about the harmful effects of obligatory public exposure to an example he suggests but does not discuss in detail: the experience of a survivor of rape. Smith’s criticisms of casuists, who too harshly rebuke a man who breaks a promise made under coercion, which he compares to the socially induced shame experienced by a survivor of rape, shows how the problems posed by mistaken judgments can arise within intimate settings. 

By connecting Smith’s insights to contemporary studies of the experiences of people using public assistance, I highlight the moral dimension of social and state surveillance. Disparaging rhetoric perpetuated by politicians and other members of the community regarding people living in poverty evoke the English discourse that Smith challenges. Participants in public assistance programs cite obligatory questions about sexuality and experiences of violence as particularly demeaning. In contemporary democracy, many people may be subject to gazes more scrutinizing than those experienced by politicians, transforming socioeconomic inequality into political inequality.  

Smith’s approach to spectatorship illuminates how people’s experiences of watching and being watched interact. Engaging with his work brings to mind the perennial nature of the consequences of inequality, through which society is stratified and individuals are disempowered.  

About the Author: Kristen R. Collins is a senior fellow in the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Mercatus Center, George Mason University. Their research “Observed without Sympathy: Adam Smith on Inequality and Spectatorship” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.