The forthcoming article “Strategic state violence and migration in conflict” by Jessica S. Sun is summarized by the author below.

Among the consequences of civil conflict, two whose effects can be particularly long-lasting are economic disruption and mass displacement of civilians. These problems often go hand-in-hand, as fighting makes it difficult for civilians to sustain their livelihoods, and lack of economic opportunity increases their willingness to flee their homes for safer, more prosperous areas. When civilians become internally displaced (IDPs), this can strain receiving communities, creating competition in labor and housing markets and contributing to increases in crime and conflict.

Governments already fighting in contested areas must manage these new challenges in otherwise peaceful areas. They are also often the perpetrators of violence that causes civilian flight, making civilians in contested areas insecure and driving displacement. How do governments both take control of contested areas and maintain popular support in peaceful areas when these two aims are in conflict? Do they change their strategy when fighting produces negative externalities like migration?

I answer these questions with a formal model where the government chooses how hard to fight in a contested area, and civilians can flee violence by moving to an uncontested area as IDPs. Their choice to migrate is motivated both by insecurity in the contested area and economic opportunity in the uncontested area. Government supporters in the uncontested area, who become hosts to the displaced, may protest because conflict and conflict-induced migration reduce their standard of living. This chain reaction is what the government aims to prevent.

Sometimes, I find, when displacement’s effects on government supporters are too great, the government may reduce its effort to retake control of contested areas, accepting a less decisive outcome to the conflict. In my model, to stave off protests by its supporters, the government can engage in patronage—providing selective benefits like preferential housing to mitigate the costs for its constituents of hosting displaced civilians. Fighting less hard in the contested area reduces the destructiveness of conflict, and therefore also reduces how many civilians are pushed to flee. When patronage costs are high, the government may prefer less control and less migration to more control and more patronage.

In other circumstances, a fighting-less-hard approach would cede more of the contested area than the government can tolerate. Rather than deescalating to reduce displacement, I show the government might preemptively increase violence against civilians, leading to more intense conflict today and relatively less migration in the future. The government uses repression as a crude tool for arresting migration, which decreases patronage costs and helps it maintain popular support. I find that reliance on repression to affect migration increases when economic circumstances in the contested area worsen and decreases when civilians flee conflict as refugees.

Overall, strategic considerations in conflict lead to violence that both drives and hampers migration, highlighting how governments may repress when they expect violence will affect civilians’ choice to flee, and providing an explanation for preemptive violence against civilians in past instances where governments were concerned about conflict-induced displacement.

About the Author: Jessica S. Sun is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Emory University. Their research “Strategic state violence and migration in conflict” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “When you come at the king: Opposition coalitions and nearly stunning elections” by Oren Samet is summarized by the author below.

For opposition parties competing in authoritarian elections, there can be significant benefits to working together and forming pre-election coalitions to challenge autocratic incumbents. Such coalitions have been widely understood as a boon not only to opposition prospects for victory, but also to the potential for democratization of authoritarian regimes.

But, as I show in my article, forming coalitions can also be risky. Coalitions have the potential to significantly improve opposition performance, boosting vote shares and helping parties overcome the difficulties of an unlevel playing field. Doing so, however, can also make oppositions more vulnerable to subsequent repression. In particular, where oppositions come very close to victory but fail to take power—an outcome I refer to as a nearly stunning election—regimes are left with both the incentive and capacity to crack down and bolster their autocratic control.

Using original cross-national data on opposition performance in authoritarian elections since the end of the Cold War, I show that opposition coalitions are associated with higher opposition vote shares. But I also demonstrate that the nearly stunning election scenario—which is, in many cases, facilitated by coalitions—is associated with greater democratic regression in elections’ aftermath, including increased repression and poorer electoral quality in future contests. These downsides persist into at least the medium term and become even more pronounced over time, undermining the potential for opposition parties to build on their gains and promote the kind of gradual moves toward democracy that other scholars have heralded.

Using the case of Cambodia, I show qualitatively how the very features that make opposition coalitions a useful tool in strengthening performance also invite new threats from regimes. Cambodia’s opposition united and came very close to a shocking upset victory in 2013 only to see their fortunes reverse by the next election, as the regime cracked down and ultimately banned the unified party outright. Other cases, from Venezuela to Zimbabwe, exhibit similar patterns.

The findings do not mean that oppositions should forgo forming pre-election coalitions altogether. But they do implore us to take more seriously the risks that coalitions and strong challenges entail. The conclusions echo the classic line from the television drama, The Wire: when “you come at the king, you best not miss.”

About the Author: Oren Samet is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research “When you come at the king: Opposition coalitions and nearly stunning elections” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Abolishing structural domination: US Reconstruction and the double bind of emancipation” by Michael Gorup is summarized by the author below.

What does it take to abolish structurally entrenched domination? In recent years, political theorists have developed increasingly sophisticated accounts of the structural bases and dimensions of dominating power. However, little has yet been written about what a structural conception of domination might mean for emancipatory politics. This article argues that if domination is rooted in social structures (e.g., laws, property relations, institutions), then it can only be eliminated by the transformation or abolition of such structures. For this to happen, agents advantaged by prevailing structures—i.e., dominators—will often have to be brought under a form of power that lays beyond their control and is indifferent to their interests. Defeating domination therefore seems to require the embrace of dominating power. I call this dilemma the double bind of emancipation.

To develop the notion of the double bind of emancipation, and to begin to think constructively about how it might be addressed, I turn to debates regarding land confiscation during the Reconstruction era in the United States (1865-1877). The social dominance of the antebellum planter class had an important structural basis, rooted above all in land ownership. Even after slavery’s end, control of land enabled planters to continue to wield dominating power over persons they formerly enslaved. In response, Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens proposed land confiscation and redistribution as an emancipatory form of counter-domination. Confiscation would simultaneously destroy the material bases of planter power and grant formerly enslaved people economic independence. However, it would also entail subjecting planters to a form of state imperium that could be—and, at the time, was—plausibly described as dominating.

Drawing on Stevens’s thought, I argue that the double bind can be addressed if emancipatory politics is guided by a social theoretic account of domination’s structural predicates. Emancipation from structural domination requires identifying and eliminating the conditions that reproduce domination over time. This may entail temporarily abridging the status quo freedoms of dominators. Such is the cost of counter-domination. But there may yet be good reason to judge this cost bearable—above all, because the status quo itself is not cost-free. The choice faced during Reconstruction was not between a non-dominating status quo of constitutional responsibility and a highly risky, if potentially rewarding, strategy of revolutionary rupture. It was between a deeply dominating status quo and an emancipated future that could only be achieved through the episodic embrace of uncontrolled—i.e., dominating—state power. In such a situation, there is no royal road to freedom.

About the Author: Michael Gorup is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New College of Florida. Their research “Abolishing structural domination: US Reconstruction and the double bind of emancipation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Authoritarian cue effect of state repression” by Jiangnan Zhu, Steve Bai, Siqin Kang, Juan Wang, and Kaixiao Liu is summarized by the author(s) below.

In both democracies and autocracies, stringent state-sponsored social control has long been expected to provoke backlash from the public. However, recent empirical evidence challenges this assumption and reveals a counterintuitive pattern: citizens in authoritarian states could welcome, rather than resist, various forms of social control such as censorship or state repression. Why is this the case? Existing explanations primarily focus on the strategies employed by autocratic governments to manipulate the informational environment or exploit salient social cleavages. The government either convinces citizens that social control is beneficial or garners support by targeting specific subgroups within the domestic population. 

However, can citizens support state repression even in the absence of government maneuvering? In this paper, we theorize an “authoritarian cue effect” and argue that instances of state repression might be interpreted as cueing messages that implicitly signal the regime’s disapproval of the punished behaviors. When the government punishes a behavior, citizens tend to perceive the repressed behavior as harmful to society, thus subsequently considering repression necessary. In other words, public opinion about repression, instead of static, can be murky, unstable and malleable. People employ instances of state repression as a baseline to infer whether the behavior has negative externalities for society. 

Employing a novel belief correction survey experiment, we empirically record the cue effect of state repression. In our experiment, we presented around with six online speech scenarios and prompted them to speculate whether the individuals involved would be punished by the police. We only revealed the actual outcomes of these cases to the treatment group, who were informed that individuals in all six cases were detained by local police authorities, while the control group was not presented with the actual outcomes of these cases. Our results suggest that the treatment group perceived the behavior with more negative externalities; additionally, they also tended to support heavier regulation of online speech. The results have been tested for robustness across three waves of the experiment, involving approximately 3,000 respondents recruited from mainland China with diverse demographic backgrounds.

As such, this paper reveals a normatively dark picture about authoritarian politics by showing that authoritarian state repression might evade public opinion backlash in a less costly manner than previously presumed. The attitudinal effect of state repression creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: repression is “automatically” legitimized because it shifts citizens’ underlying perceptions of what unacceptable behavior is.

It should be noted that this cue effect might travel beyond the context of state repression and could potentially be extended to general policy-making in autocracies. If citizens, once informed of policies carried out by the government, might automatically adopt the regime’s position, the state is then unlikely to face public opinion backlash even when carrying out potentially unpopular policies. As such, the implications of our theory fundamentally challenge our understanding of contentious politics and public opinion in authoritarian states, which might largely underestimate authoritarian resilience.  

About the Author(s): Jiangnan Zhu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong, Steve Bai is a Ph.D student in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, Siqin Kang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen, Juan Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, and Kaixiao Liu is a Ph.D student in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Their research “Authoritarian cue effect of state repression” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Persuasion in veto bargaining” by Jenny S. Kim, Kyungmin Kim, and Richard Van Weelden is summarized by the author(s) below.

An underappreciated aspect of agenda-setting is the opportunity for the proposer to engage in persuasion to convince the veto player.  While the importance of agenda-setting authority has long been recognized (Romer and Rosenthal 1978), agenda-setting is almost always associated with an opportunity to advocate in favor of the proposal.  In this article we demonstrate control of the information process broadens the scope for the agenda setter to secure favorable policy outcomes. 

Take as a leading example an interest group that both develops legislation and lobbies for its passage.   We interpret policy development as the interest group using its resources and expertise to draft legislation and informative lobbying as information design to persuade a critical policymaker.  In our analysis the interest group wants to move the policy in a particular direction, but the policymaker’s preferred policy depends on the unknown state of the world.  For example, an industry lobbyist always wants to reduce regulation whereas the policymaker’s ideal policy depends on the regulation’s environmental effectiveness.  We study how the ability to engage in informative lobbying shapes the legislation the interest group will develop and put forward. 

We show that the interest group can achieve its maximal payoff by either providing no information or by revealing the outcome of a simple binary experiment.  If the legislature always supports reducing regulation, the interest group would not reveal any information.  This is because the proposed policy would make the critical legislator indifferent between the new policy and the status quo, meaning the policy is proportional to the expected environmental consequences.   Informative lobbying cannot change the expectation on average, it only succeeds in creating uncertainty about the policy, which never benefits a (risk averse) interest group.  

When the legislature is less aligned, and so in some cases may prefer to increase regulation, informative lobbying can be strictly beneficial.  The key is that the interest group’s agenda-setting authority ensures that regulation won’t be increased.  Consequently, by revealing whether the legislature’s ideal is on the opposite side of the status quo, the interest group can secure greater policy concessions in expectation.   

Optimally, the interest group would commission a study that reveals only whether the environmental damages of deregulation would be very harmful.  In a favorable legislative environment, the interest group would solicit the endorsement of a free-market think tank which supports deregulation except when the consequences would be catastrophic, but if the legislature is more skeptical it would solicit the endorsement of a more ideologically centrist one (e.g. American Enterprise Institute vs Brookings).  So, even if it had unlimited control over the information available, the optimal experiment is to reveal a simple endorsement decision by an appropriately chosen expert. 

Our analysis provides a first step in understanding how agenda setting and persuasion interact and shows that studies which do not incorporate persuasion fail to fully capture the scope of proposal power.  Persuasion is particularly important when the proposer and veto player are misaligned and so, absent persuasion, the value of agenda-setting authority is muted. 

About the Author(s): Jenny S. Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Emory University, Kyungmin Kim is a Professor of Economics at Emory University, and Richard Van Weelden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Their research “Persuasion in veto bargaining” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Fiscal legibility and state development: Theory and evidence from colonial Mexico” by Francisco Garfias and Emily A. Sellars is summarized by the author(s) below.

What enables political centralization and state development? In this article, we focus on the role of fiscal legibility: the ability of central authorities to independently observe, measure, and assess local populations, wealth, and activities for taxation and control.

Our theory highlights an interdependence between fiscal legibility and the consolidation of authority under a central ruler. In areas with low fiscal legibility, central rulers often resort to indirect rule, ceding autonomy to local elites to govern on behalf of the center. Though sometimes advantageous for central authorities, indirect rule requires giving up revenue and control to powerful elites. As fiscal legibility improves, central authorities can better monitor local intermediaries, making political centralization—the replacement of autonomous intermediaries with direct agents of the state—more attractive.

Under more centralized arrangements, rulers have an incentive to invest in improving legibility through efforts like conducting censuses or establishing tax offices to better monitor agents in the periphery, efforts that have little immediate benefit under indirect forms of rule. Because of this interdependence between centralization and fiscal legibility, a sudden increase in state informational capacity can lead to longer-term divergence in state development.

To assess these ideas empirically, we examine the consequences of a sudden improvement in fiscal legibility in colonial Mexico: the discovery of the patio process to refine silver in the 1550s. This new technology relied on mercury to extract silver in a known ratio. The Spanish Crown was able to exploit its monopoly over the distribution of this key input to track fluctuations in local silver production, drastically improving the center’s ability to monitor economic conditions in silver-producing areas.

Using a differences-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that this sudden increase in fiscal legibility led to an acceleration in political centralization. Mining areas affected by the legibility shock experienced a faster transition from the administration of territory via encomiendas, a form of indirect rule, to corregimientos, a more direct form of rule through which intermediaries directly collected taxes and were hired and fired by the center. We then examine the longer-term implications of this legibility shock. We show that affected areas received greater state investment in informational capacity through the placement of post offices, further altering the trajectory of state development.

Our theory highlights the important connection between endogenous and exogenous sources of fiscal legibility, with important implications for longer-term divergence in state development. Where states lack information about the periphery, central authorities have little incentive to either centralize power or to invest to improve fiscal legibility. A single shock that raises fiscal legibility encourages both centralization and additional investment in informational capacity with far-reaching consequences for state development. The features of our empirical context allow us to provide quasi-experimental evidence on the connection between fiscal legibility and political centralization, a relationship that is typically endogenous and self-reinforcing.

About the Author(s): Francisco Garfias is an Associate Professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego and Emily A. Sellars is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Their research “Fiscal legibility and state development: Theory and evidence from colonial Mexico” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “When politicians behave badly: Political, democratic, and social consequences of political incivility” by Troels Bøggild and Carsten Jensen is summarized by the author(s) below.

Many citizens today believe that politics has an “incivility problem.” In the United States, 69% consider the government uncivil, and two-thirds think the problem is worsening. This perception is, at least in part, grounded in reality: uncivil exchanges between politicians, such as personal insults and interruptions, have become increasingly common and are widely broadcasted through traditional and social media.

Scholars, pundits, and politicians have expressed concerns that this rise in political incivility could harm the fundamental health of democracies. Incivility might not only diminish public trust in politicians but also have broader consequences for citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and their compliance with policies. As such, incivility can decrease both specific support for political actors and diffuse support for the political system and its capacity for problem solving.

The scientific literature has not provided clear insights into the consequences of increasing political incivility. Previous research has suggested a link between politicians’ incivility and public trust, but empirical results have been mixed. Our recent study addresses this lacuna on three levels. Theoretically, we argue that political incivility adversely affects not just citizens’ trust in politicians but also broader satisfaction with the democratic system and policy compliance. We integrate insights from social and political psychology into the literature on political incivility to develop our expectations.

Methodologically, we test our framework with a three-stage setup that overcomes the limitations of traditional survey experiments while maintaining strong causal identification. In the first stage, we develop and validate a scale to measure citizens’ perceptions of political incivility, showing that these perceptions reliably track real-world changes in elite rhetoric. In the second stage, we embed this scale in a multi-wave panel survey with over 6,000 Danish respondents, using generalized difference-in-differences models to estimate how citizens respond to changes in political incivility. In the third stage, we exploit a natural experiment during the COVID-19 crisis, which led to a “rally ’round the flag” effect and a sudden decrease in political incivility. This provided a unique opportunity to test whether this rally effect could be attributed to the drop in incivility.

Empirically, our study reports three consistent findings. First, we find that political incivility negatively affects trust in politicians. Second, we find that political incivility depresses citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and willingness to comply with COVID-19 restrictions. Third, we consistently find that these negative effects are driven by incivility rather than conflict on substantial issues.

Our study offers both methodological and substantive lessons. Methodologically, it provides an integrated approach to studying the effects of elite rhetoric on broader systemic attitudes and policy compliance. We discuss how criticism of survey experimental approaches can be addressed through complementary research designs. Substantively, our findings highlight discernible, negative democratic and social consequences of uncivil behavior between politicians. Importantly, our results show that citizens can distinguish between issue-related conflict and uncivil personal interactions, implying that it is possible to maintain high public trust, satisfaction in a democracy, and policy compliance with fierce political competition, as long as it remains issue-based and civil.

About the Author(s): Troels Bøggild is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University and Carsten Jensen is the director of Platform for Inequality Research at Aarhus University (PIREAU) and editor of Socio-Economic Review. Their research “When politicians behave badly: Political, democratic, and social consequences of political incivility“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Banking bad? A global field experiment on risk, reward, and regulation” by Michael G. Findley, Daniel L. Nielson, and J. C. Sharman is summarized by the author(s) below.

Do banks follow rules mandating that they police the global financial system to screen out dirty money? In seeking to find out, we formed a variety of shell companies, and through them made solicitations to all the world’s internationally connected banks for corporate bank accounts. 

Some of our shell companies posed a high corruption risk, some a high risk of terrorist financing, others suggested tax evasion, while still others were innocuous. Global and national rules state that banks are meant to apply a “risk-based approach” in differentiating between their corporate customers, applying more scrutiny to high- than low-risk approaches. After making thousands of email solicitations, however, we found that these rules don’t work: in practice, banks only marginally differentiated—if they differentiated at all—between high- and low-risk corporate customers in the rate at which they engaged, offered their services, or properly identified shell companies owners. We test three models against these results. 

A standard rational utility model suggests that banks weigh risk and reward in responding to customers. This perspective doesn’t explain why banks were insensitive to risk, however, nor why banks were just as insensitive to variations in the amount of money offered across different solicitations. A behavioral economics perspective is consistent with some of the results, but in some cases would predict larger substantive effect sizes than we observed. Banks’ lack of responsiveness to both risk and reward may be consistent with an institutionalist view that banks as organizations fall into habits and routines, standard operating procedures or “organizational scripts.” 

Finally, we argue that in judging the ethics of field experiments, researchers should focus on enhancing the public good and the merits of “studying up” in holding rich and powerful actors to account.

About the Author(s): Michael G. Findley is the Erwin Centennial Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, Daniel L. Nielson is a Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and J. C. Sharman is the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. Their research “Banking bad? A global field experiment on risk, reward, and regulation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “From powerholders to stakeholders: State-building with elite compensation in early medieval China” by Joy Chen, Erik H. Wang, and Xiaoming Zhang is summarized by the author(s) below.

Our article investigates a central question in the political economy of development: how do rulers resolve resistance to state-building from local powerholders who stand to lose from such efforts? This question is particularly important in settings where a central government maintains fragile political order and local powerholders retain considerable economic prowess, social prestige, and some coercive means to undermine the building of the state in their turfs. 

We theorize an important yet often overlooked strategy: compensating the local powerholders via a nascent bureaucracy. Besides offsetting the loss of economic rents, offices in the bureaucracy also serve the purposes of 1) mitigating the credible commitment problem for the ruler and 2) aligning the interests of the local powerholders and the ruler. 

Empirically, we exploit a major state-building Reform in the Northern Wei Dynasty of China (386 – 534 CE), which challenged the interests of aristocrats who exercised local autonomy. We built a unique dataset from textual and archaeological sources, such as dynastic archival records and excavated epitaphs and monuments. At its core are geocoded career histories of around 2,600 elites alongside the geographic distribution of fortified castles across northern China. Aristocrats in regions with (without) fortified castles serve as the treatment (control) group in our research.  

The state-building Reform of 485-486 CE sought to increase state penetration in the society and control local population directly. Both historical evidence and our own analyses suggest that the Reform succeeded in expanding central authority at the expense of the aristocrats in regions with fortified castles, who we operationalize as local powerholders with vested interest in the status quo.  

The puzzle becomes: why didn’t these powerful reform “losers” resist or undermine the Reform? Our difference-in-differences (DiD) estimates reveal that following the Reform, there is a sustained spike in the number of aristocrats from regions with such castles recruited into the bureaucracy as compensation in exchange for their acceptance of state penetration. Various auxiliary analyses all point to the strategic nature of this deal. 

We further unpack the mechanisms of bureaucratic compensation: credible commitment and interest realignment. Individual-level analyses of career histories indicate that those local powerholders, compensated with higher-ranked and more prestigious offices post-Reform, were also more likely to take the kind of positions in the bureaucracy that could help them expand networks of allies. This arrangement effectively made them too powerful for the ruler to renege on the deal. The bureaucracy, therefore, enabled the ruler to deliberately tie her own hands when compensating these powerholders.  

Equally important, the data suggests that the ruler compensated the aristocrats from castle areas with senior offices in the national government rather than in regional governments. When these aristocrats did serve in regional governments, they were positioned away from their hometowns. These arrangements, among others, reflect a conscious effort to transform the erstwhile local powerholders into national stakeholders of the political regime.  

Our findings contribute to the literature on state capacity, by demonstrating a non-violent pathway to state-building, and to the literature on political economy of reform, by highlighting bureaucracy as a compensation device. The strategy documented here also differs from typical “cooptation,” where local elites would remain localized after receiving nominal titles from the government. Bureaucratic compensation fully uproots and integrates the erstwhile powerholders into the upper echelon of political power, turning them into national stakeholders who support broader policies or reform that increase the regime’s rents. Our article also sheds light on a major puzzle of historical political economy, the so-called “First Great Divergence,” where similar “barbarian” invasions at similar times led to fragmentation in Europe but further state consolidation in China.

About the Author(s): Joy Chen is an assistant professor at the School of Economics, Renmin University of China, Erik H. Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University (NYU), and Xiaoming Zhang is an assistant professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University. Their research “From powerholders to stakeholders: State-building with elite compensation in early medieval China” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Race, legislative speech, and symbolic representation in Congress” by Arjun Vishwanath is summarized by the author below.

Most blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in America are represented by white members of Congress; in light of this, it is important to understand whether these groups are well represented by white MCs. A variety of studies have tested whether white legislators are more likely to vote in line with minority groups’ interests as they become more populous, but these studies do not point to a firm conclusion in any direction. By contrast, little work has examined whether white legislators are more likely to symbolically represent racial minority groups if they have more minority constituents.

This article addresses the question of whether white legislators are symbolically responsive—that is, if a minority group is more prevalent in the district, does its representative speak more about that racial group or evoke symbols particular to that group on the floor of Congress or in her electronic newsletters? I use supervised machine learning algorithms to detect the symbolic content of over thirteen million sentences with respect to blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The content identified by the model typically takes the form of group mentions (e.g., “Asian”, “Colombian”, “Hmong”, “AAPI”) or symbolic references to terms relevant to the group (e.g., “Rosa Parks”, “Selma”, “Cinco de Mayo”).

I find that white legislators are more likely to engage in symbolic speech of blacks, Hispanics, or Asians if the member hails from a district with more citizens of the respective group. This is true of both Democratic and Republican legislators, although Democratic legislators are more responsive to black group size in their symbolic speech about blacks than Republican legislators are.

While we observe differences across legislators—that is, a white MC from a 25% Hispanic district symbolically invokes Hispanics to a larger degree than another white MC from a 5% Hispanic district (controlling for legislator party and the ideology of the district)—I find that legislators do not actually adapt to constituency changes over time. I test this by looking at sudden changes to the district composition following redistricting. That is, if an MC’s district changed from 10% Hispanic to 15% Hispanic after redistricting, that MC does not increase her symbolic speech of Hispanics.

At first glance, it may seem obvious that white legislators will be symbolically responsive to minority group size. However, I replicate past work showing that legislators are no more likely to vote in line with minorities’ preferences in Congress if they have more minority constituents. Thus, we see white legislators with strongly conservative voting records in places like Texas who nonetheless speak about and engage regularly with their Hispanic constituencies.

This naturally raises the question of whether symbolic representation is meaningful, or whether legislators merely speak hollow words while betraying their constituents’ interests in policymaking. Although symbolic representation should not be taken as a substitute for substantive representation, the article concludes in discussing the ways in which symbolic representation might matter to citizens.

About the Author: Arjun Vishwanath is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Vanderbilt University in the Center for Effective Lawmaking and the Department of Political Science. Their research “Race, legislative speech, and symbolic representation in Congress” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.