The forthcoming article “Unpacking the role of in-group bias in US public opinion on human rights violations” by Rebecca Cordell is summarized by the author below.

Americans are more likely to oppose human rights abuses perpetrated by a political out-group. Simply changing the perpetrator’s political party—from an in-group to an out-group—can determine whether individuals oppose their government’s human rights violations.

To understand what shapes public responses to domestic human rights violations, I conducted a national conjoint survey experiment with 3,200 US respondents. Participants evaluated different physical integrity rights abuse scenarios (including arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearances) according to their disapproval and willingness to mobilize against the abuse.

For each violation, I varied the perpetrator and elite cue giver’s party affiliation and the target’s race, religion, and citizenship, as well as other contextual factors. To identify the effect of in-group bias, I compared how respondents reacted to abuses when they shared identities with these actors versus when they did not. Examining the relative influence of different identity characteristics is important, as an individual (bystander observing the violation) may have multiple connections to the actors in abuses at the same time.

Results show the perpetrator’s identity plays a key role in shaping respondents’ choices. Individuals are more likely to oppose abuses when the perpetrator is from the opposing political party. These patterns held across different political leaders, from US governors to presidents, and applied to both Democrat and Republican supporters. However, there are limits to partisan loyalty. In-group perpetrators are less likely to get away with targeting their supporters’ racial in-group or when bystanders share many identities with targets and elite cue givers.

Why does the perpetrator’s party identity matter so much? In U.S. politics, party loyalty dominates public attitudes on a range of topics, and people tend to see political leaders as the ones responsible for protecting rights. This hierarchy of blame can trigger strong in-group defenses to protect the group’s moral reputation, and punitive out-group demands for accountability. This powerful focus on the perpetrator can overshadow concern for the victim and make it harder for political elites to shift public opinion on abuses.

These findings have serious implications for policymakers and human rights groups. In democracies, human rights depend on public accountability, and public opinion can play a crucial role in shaping government behavior. While Americans are more likely to oppose abuses by political opponents, they may be inclined to excuse or overlook violations committed by their own side. This can reduce the political costs of repression and make it easier for governments to evade accountability.

About the Author: Rebecca Cordell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Their research “Unpacking the role of in-group bias in US public opinion on human rights violations” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “The logic of secret alliances” by Peter Bils and Bradley C. Smith is summarized by the author(s) below.

A primary goal of military alliances is to deter aggression from enemies. Traditionally, alliances are understood to achieve this goal by serving as a costly signal of members’ commitment to fight alongside one another against a shared enemy. By observing allies engage in costly action such as policy coordination or the provision of military equipment, enemies infer that only states seriously committed to each other’s defense would bear these costs. Through this logic, alliances alter the calculus of deterrence and reduce an enemy’s incentive to attack.

In light of this signaling logic, secret alliances stand out as odd. For the signaling mechanism to operate, it is self-evident that an alliance, and the costs imposed by it, must be visible to adversaries. This presents a puzzle: if a primary goal of alliances is to deter enemies through signaling, then why would allies keep their commitments to one another secret?

In this paper, we argue that secret alliances are an attractive option when the alliance may act as a signal of members’ alignment. In our theory, alliances play two roles. First, they aggregate capabilities, allowing members to better resist aggression from a shared enemy. Second, and importantly for our argument, the presence of an alliance may endogenously reveal information about the constellation of interests in the international system. Consequently, a new alliance can indicate that a state previously thought to be friendly is, in reality, an adversary. We argue that if there is significant uncertainty about the alignment of states’ interests then the second effect dominates and secret alliances emerge.

To develop this argument, we analyze a formal model in which states may enter into secret or public alliance agreements. We find that if there is uncertainty about the alignment of interests then secret alliances occur in equilibrium. We also find that secret alliances have general effects on deterrence, undermining the deterrent value of concurrent public alliances.

Our theory explains variation in the prevalence of secret alliances over time. Prior to World War I secret alliances were the norm. However, by the Cold War era they are virtually non-existent.  Our model points to the emergence of two phenomena after World War II to explain this pattern. First, the movement of the international system from a multipolar to bipolar environment reduced uncertainty about states’ alignments. Second, the advent of nuclear weapons significantly increased the deterrent value of alliances, further mitigating the need for states to maintain secrecy about their alignments.

About the Author(s): Peter Bils is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Economics at Vanderbilt University and Bradley C. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Their research “The logic of secret alliances” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Complementarity in alliances: How strategic compatibility and hierarchy promote efficient cooperation in international security” by J. Andrés Gannon is summarized by the author below.

How can defense alliances effectively harness the benefits of collective action when faced with significant coordination challenges and the risks of opportunism? This study investigates the conditions under which states can overcome these inherent difficulties to achieve efficient cooperation in international security. I argue that alliances characterized by high strategic compatibility and a hierarchical structure are better equipped to minimize opportunism and coordination costs. This, in turn, facilitates an efficient distribution of defense capabilities among member states, fostering complementarity and a functional division of labor rather than promoting redundant military investments.

To assess this theoretical framework, I develop a novel network-level measure of the division of labor within alliances. This measure is applied to an extensive dataset of national military capabilities spanning from 1970 to 2014. The empirical analysis also incorporates improved measures of strategic compatibility—defined as the extent to which states concur on the nature of the international threat environment—and hierarchy, understood as an asymmetric distribution of influence over security decisions within the alliance.

The findings indicate a robust positive association: alliances with high strategic compatibility and greater hierarchy exhibit a significantly higher division of labor. This suggests that shared security interests and centralized decision-making structures within an alliance are crucial factors that mitigate the inherent costs of collective action, enabling a more rational and efficient allocation of defense responsibilities.

This research offers several contributions to the understanding of international security. It clarifies the interaction between alliance structures and armament policies, demonstrating that the distribution of military capabilities within an alliance is shaped by the alignment of security interests and the nature of its decision-making framework. Furthermore, it introduces complementarity as a distinct mechanism through which alliances can enhance the efficiency of defense spending and collective security outcomes. Finally, the study challenges the conventional view of states as undifferentiated “like-units” in the international system by providing evidence of functional differentiation emerging from cooperative security arrangements. These insights underscore the importance of alliance design in promoting efficient and effective international security cooperation.

About the Author: J. Andrés Gannon is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and a Faculty Affiliate at the Data Science Institute. Their research “Complementarity in alliances: How strategic compatibility and hierarchy promote efficient cooperation in international security” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Brook no compromise: How to negotiate a united front” by Elaine Yao is summarized by the author below.

Coordination is a central challenge in politics. To pass legislative agendas, maintain authoritarian control, or respond to financial crises, political parties, ruling elites, and international organizations must first overcome internal disagreements over the correct path to take. However, the process by which organizations settle these disagreements – and the reasons they sometimes fail – is often hard to observe and poorly understood, particularly in settings where institutional rules and procedures do not impose clear structure on the coordination process.

This paper uses a dynamic game-theoretic model to explore how coordination occurs in such environments. The game centers on each side’s uncertainty over their counterpart’s willingness to compromise: would they accept a second-best outcome, or prefer to stick with the status quo if their favorite outcome is unavailable? The model captures a stylized setting in which players must choose when to “play hardball” – to make an irreversible commitment that removes an option from consideration. Such actions are both costly and risky: if miscalibrated, they can lock players into a mutually unfavorable status quo.

What the paper shows, however, is that hardball tactics also serve an informational function. Uncompromising actors reveal themselves by acting early, allowing more flexible actors to learn about their opponent’s type over time. The quality of this screening process – how fast and beneficial it is – is a crucial factor shaping coordination outcomes. Broadly speaking, faster screening reduces both uncertainty in coordination outcomes and avoidable miscoordination; noisier or less beneficial screening has the opposite effect.

One particularly interesting result is that when players are extremely different – in their capacity to play hardball, their prior beliefs about one another’s obstinacy, or their valuations of the status quo and potential reforms – both players have an incentive to stall longer. Preemptive incentives are strongest when players are on relatively equal footing, creating the highest incidence of avoidable miscoordination.

The model contributes to a growing literature on coordination under uncertainty, offering a tractable framework for analyzing how endogenous information acquisition and exogenous shocks (e.g., leaks of players’ willingness to compromise) affect timing, credibility, and welfare. It also helps explain real-world puzzles—such as failed legislative coalitions or fractured insurgencies—where actors appear to act too soon or too cautiously despite having shared interests. In doing so, the model shifts attention away from preference divergence or institutional design and toward the strategic logic of learning and commitment under informational frictions.

About the Author: Elaine Yao is a Ph.D candidate in Politics at Princeton University and an incoming assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Their research “Brook no compromise: How to negotiate a united front” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Strategic litigation as a challenge for deliberative democracy” by Svenja Ahlhaus is summarized by the author below.

Strategic litigation is a growing public concern, but remains understudied in democratic theory. In strategic litigation, collectives go to court with a political agenda that goes beyond their specific case. Especially climate litigation and religious-conservative litigation are at the center of public attention in recent years. How should we assess the legitimacy of strategic litigation? From the perspective of democratic theory, it seems insufficient to argue that the legitimacy of the use of legal contestation either depends on a prior normative judgment about the substantive goal (e.g. strategic litigation is legitimate if it is “progressive”) or the social status of the plaintiffs (e.g. strategic litigation is legitimate if it is used by minorities/marginalized groups).

In “Strategic Litigation as a Challenge for Deliberative Democracy”, forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, I propose a new two-step framework for evaluating strategic litigation from the perspective of deliberative democracy.  

First, I argue that we should understand strategic litigation as a collaborative and mobilizing use of the institution of legal contestation, meaning that we should analyze which social groups, in what way, are mobilized by strategic litigation. I describe a pattern of differentiated mobilization that characterizes the social effects of strategic litigation. Second, an assessment of the legitimacy of strategic litigation should ask whether strategic litigation empowers or disempowers citizens in the long run. Here, I build on Cristina Lafont’s idea of “blind deference” to define as disempowering those political practices in which citizens lack control over decision-makers and a sense of alignment with policy-decisions. Ultimately, the legitimacy of strategic litigation depends on whether it requires or avoids blind deference over time.

The advantage of my deliberative framework is that it includes the social effects of strategic litigation in its normative analysis. I show how strategic litigation is a form of political participation whose details are accessible for the legal community but remain opaque to the majority of citizens. Lacking legal knowledge to follow these cases, ordinary citizens are mainly activated by compelling narratives crafted around strategic litigation by professional legal organizations. This pattern of mobilization, which characterizes politically “progressive” and “regressive” cases, has ambivalent potential. It can contribute to empowering citizens in three ways: by providing an opportunity to shift public attention (agenda-setting); for forming and strengthening social groups (group-strengthening); and for highlighting institutional dysfunctions which make strategic litigation necessary (context-disclosing).

However, this pattern of mobilization can also be used to disempower citizens. As citizens are often only aware of the public narrative created around strategic lawsuits, there can be mismatches between a litigation collective’s public narrative and their actual agenda (agenda-masking), litigation collectives can simulate broad public support for their case (group-simulating), and they can make misleading claims about the institutional context and about potential effects of their case (context-distorting). For deliberative democrats, the main challenge of strategic litigation is that it mobilizes citizens in a way that makes it difficult for them to distinguish empowering from disempowering uses, meaning that they cannot easily fulfill their role of holding litigation collectives to account.

About the Author: Svenja Ahlhaus is an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at University of Münster. Their research “Strategic litigation as a challenge for deliberative democracy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Global competition, local unions, and political representation: Disentangling mechanisms” by Michael Becher and Daniel Stegmueller is summarized by the author(s) below.

How does democracy function in the face of increased globalization? Our article examines the response of elected policymakers in the United States to the steep rise in import competition from China after 1990. It provides evidence that this economic shock altered how legislators in Congress voted on key economic issues. On average, legislators in districts hit by the shock were less likely to vote for bills targeted towards the less fortunate. We find that this change is to a significant degree due to the shock weakening labor unions. Altogether, the evidence suggests that unions constitute an important mechanism that links global competition to democratic representation.

While prior research has examined the effects of import competition on elections and legislative votes, it paid relatively little attention to disentangling mechanisms in general and the role of labor unions in particular. Building on the theory that unions can serve as a countervailing power that enhances the representation of non-elite workers in the political process but whose strength is susceptible to economic shocks, we draw on recent advances in the statistical analysis of mechanisms and roll-call data from the House of Representatives matched to district characteristics to assess the relevance of the union mechanism. It is well known that analyzing mechanisms is difficult. Intuitively, scholars face a double threat of confounding. One threat is about the treatment variable (here: import exposure). Another is about the mediator variable (here: union density). As we cannot randomize import competition and union density, we turn to a novel instrumental variable approach for causal mediation. Following research on international trade and labor unions, we employ separate instrumental variables for the treatment on trade shocks and the moderator variable on unions. We combine them in a semiparametric instrumental variable approach, which enables us to relax identification assumptions required in the standard regression approach for unpacking causal mechanisms.

We find that import competition in the 1990s did substantively reduce district-level unionization in the 2000s. In turn, by weakening unions, import competition reduced legislators’ support for compensation policies helping trade losers (e.g., extending unemployment benefits, job training, trade adjustment assistance). Through weaker unions, import competition also increased legislative support for additional trade liberalization. A central quantity of interest for our investigation is the relative magnitude of the union mechanism. How much of the effect of the economic shock on legislative votes is due to changes in union strength? Our decomposition suggests that about half of the effect of import exposure on declining legislative support for compensation works though the mechanism of weaker unions. On trade policy, unions account for approximately one third of the total effect in the direction of less opposition to further trade liberalization.

Our results underscore that, by undermining unions, import competition reduced democracy’s willingness to compensate and support workers and regions adversely affected by trade (at least in the US). It thus eroded a central component of the post-war  “embedded liberalism” growth model, which combined free trade with domestic compensation underwritten by domestic institutions.

About the Author(s): Michael Becher is a Professor in political science at IE University and Daniel Stegmueller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. Their research “Global competition, local unions, and political representation: Disentangling mechanisms” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Shifting power, interstate war, and domestic politics” by Scott Wolford and Yuji Masumura is summarized by the author(s) below.

National leaders are rarely punished for winning wars, yet that seems to be precisely what happened after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese war. Public dissastisfaction with the Treaty of Portsmouth boiled over into violence and the fall of the government, leaders’ remonstrations that they’d won a significant preventive victory not withstanding. Why?

We answer this question with a game-theoretic model in which shifting power undermines foreign states’ commitments to the status quo, yet domestic leaders can’t credibly communicate the true scale of averted shifts after preventive war. Publics prefer war only for large prospective power shifts, but preventive war renders the true size of averted shifts unobservable, incentivizing leaders to lie ex post to avoid political punishment. When publics are ex ante skeptical over shift size and war outcomes are middling, the probabilities of war and political punishment, as well as public skepticism over averted shifts and the chances of erroneous punishment, all increase in war outcomes. Public strategies of punishing military failures are particularly unsuccessful at discouraging undesirable preventive wars, yet the same conditions that encourage preventive war undermine its political benefits.

We use intra-elite debates in prominent Japanese newspapers before and after the war to show that (a) there was prewar skepticism over the true scale of the looming power shfit in Russia’s favor and (b) the government’s claims that matters would’ve been worse without war were honest yet couldn’t convince a skeptical domestic audience.

About the Author(s): Scott Wolford is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and Co-Director of the Correlates of War Project and Yuji Masumura is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research “Shifting power, interstate war, and domestic politics” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Partisan sorting, fatalism, and Supreme Court legitimacy” by Nicholas T. Davis and Matthew P. Hitt is summarized by the author(s) below.

Shortly after taking office in January, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order freezing trillions of dollars of federal funding appropriated by Congress. While the order was rescinded after intense public criticism, other provocations like shuttering USAID or closing the Department of Education are almost certain to end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In such cases, the Court, lacking the power of either purse or sword, relies on its store of perceived legitimacy in the mass public to exercise its authority over life, liberty, and property. It is this very store of legitimacy – sometimes called “diffuse support” – that the Court relies upon when it defies the wishes of the president or Congressional leaders. Historically, the Court maintained a strong reservoir of this support. But, today, the conditions that sustained such support have rapidly evolved.

In recent years, new appointees to the Court were involved in nomination controversies featuring bruising partisan conflicts and party-line confirmation votes in the Senate. In turn, not only have several justices become embroiled in public ethics scandals, but the conservative majority began issuing salient and deeply polarizing rulings, overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson and giving the President of the United States immunity for official actions taken while in office (Trump v. USA).

Have these developments affected the Court’s perceived legitimacy?

We assembled a historical dataset of public opinion surveys regarding the Court dating back to 2012. To this dataset, we added an original, nationally-representative, six-wave panel study, spanning May of 2022, a month prior to Dobbs, through April of 2024. We show first that the Court’s diffuse support was indeed quite robust among all citizens prior to 2016, replicating findings showing few differences among Democrats and Republicans.

However, we then show that diffuse support among Democrats began falling precipitously after 2016, bottoming out after the Court’s ruling in Dobbs, and remained substantially lower than that of Republicans’ for the entirety of our panel study. Further, we find that partisanship structures an ongoing sorting out of other key attitudes about the Court: Democrats disapprove of the Court, hold weaker support for the “rule of law,” and are more cynical about justices’ motivations than Republicans.

We then demonstrate that one key factor associated with this durable decline in diffuse support is fatalistic attitudes about Court. Drawing on literature in clinical and social psychology, we derive a new closed-ended measure, Supreme Court Fatalism, that functions as a summary property of “specific” or contemporaneous support for the Court’s outputs. This battery includes items measuring respondents’ pessimism about the trajectory of the Court, as well as their feelings of helplessness to control its rulings. This combination of pessimism and a sense of an external locus of control is strongly associated with low perceived legitimacy of the Court.

Our findings show that the Supreme Court’s perceived legitimacy now rests on weak and polarized foundations. These fatalistic Democratic attitudes will remain so, especially should the Court affirm constitutionally questionable and polarizing actions by the Trump administration.

About the Author(s): Nicholas T. Davis is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama, where he runs the Democracy and Open Science (DEMOS) lab and Matthew P. Hitt is the Interim Director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University. Their research “Partisan sorting, fatalism, and Supreme Court legitimacy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Speaking their language?: Multilingualism in party communication across democracies” by Taishi Muraoka, Dahjin Kim, Christopher Lucas, Jacob Montgomery, and Margit Tavits is summarized by the author(s) below.

Our study examines how political parties navigate linguistic diversity in modern democracies. Naturally, multilingual political communication only emerges in settings where multiple languages are spoken. However, we find that even in multilingual societies, parties don’t always communicate in the languages of all their constituents. This selective approach to language use has important implications for democratic discourse and outcomes, as language barriers can limit political participation and representation. Our research seeks to understand this variation in linguistic representation at the party level.

Through an analysis of millions of Facebook posts from over 800 political parties across 87 democracies, we provide the first comprehensive look at multilingual political communication on a global scale. Using computational methods to detect and classify languages, we identified that approximately 12% of parties regularly communicate in multiple languages. However, this pattern varies significantly across countries, and we found that it was influenced by two key factors: electoral systems and party ideology.

The electoral system plays a crucial role. In countries with majoritarian systems, where parties need to win a majority of votes in their district, parties are more likely to communicate in multiple languages compared to proportional systems. This reflects the strategic necessity of building broader coalitions in majoritarian systems.

Party ideology emerges as another significant factor. Left-leaning parties, particularly those emphasizing social and cultural issues, are more likely to employ multilingual communication than right-leaning parties.

Our research also examined individual political candidates, analyzing their social media communication during election periods in twelve multilingual democracies. The data shows that candidates from multilingual parties are more likely to communicate in multiple languages themselves, suggesting that party-level language policies are correlated with candidate behavior.

These findings have important implications for understanding political representation in linguistically diverse societies. They demonstrate how institutional structures and party characteristics shape communication strategies, ultimately affecting how different language communities access political discourse.

This research opens new avenues for investigating the relationship between language and political representation, including how parties’ language choices evolve over time and their impact on voter behavior and political participation.

About the Author(s): Taishi Muraoka is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Dahjin Kim is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, Christopher Lucas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a faculty affiliate with the Division of Computational & Data Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Jacob Montgomery is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at WashU and chair of the political science concentration for the newly formed Division of Computational and Data Sciences, and Margit Tavits is a Professor of Political Science and the Dr. William Taussig Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Their research “Speaking their language?: Multilingualism in party communication across democracies” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “How the State Discourages Vigilantism—Evidence From a Field Experiment in South Africa” by Anna M. Wilke is summarized by the author below.

Throughout the developing world citizens often hesitate to bring crimes to the attention of the state. In many contexts, victims of crime instead turn to their community – family, friends, and neighbors – who brutally punish criminal suspects. Mob vigilantism of this kind results in gruesome assaults or even murder. Moreover, citizens’ tendency to bypass the state has the potential to weaken institutions like the police and courts, which rely on citizen-provided information to function effectively.

This study is set in South Africa, where mob vigilantism causes an average of two deaths every day. Many accounts attribute citizens’ reluctance to cooperate with state institutions to the ineffectiveness of these institutions themselves. Crime rates are high and police presence low in South Africa’s low-income townships. How would citizens’ behavior change if police became more effective?

To answer this question, I collaborated with a South African non-profit organization that works closely with the South African Police Service. We randomly assigned 100 out of 250 homes in one police precinct to receive an alarm system that increases the ability of police to locate households. The alarm consists of an electronic device that gets installed in the home. When triggered through the press of a button, the alarm sends text messages to the officers on duty at the local police station. Names, contact information and location details of alarm-protected households are on file at the police station.  I measure outcomes using two waves of household surveys that were conducted, respectively, one and eight months after the installation of the alarms.

I found that respondents from households assigned to receive a police alarm became more inclined to cooperate with the police and less willing to resort to vigilantism. I conducted an additional information experiment to understand the mechanisms that drive these changes. The results speak against the interpretation that alarm owners refrained from vigilantism because they perceived the police as more attractive. Instead, the reluctance to resort to vigilantism seems to arise because alarm owners are more convinced that participation in vigilantism could result in a prison sentence.

The broader take-away is that citizens’ willingness to cooperate with capable state institutions does not necessarily reflect that citizens are satisfied with state services. Instead, citizens may draw on state institutions because states limit citizens’ choices by sanctioning those who participate in informal practices such as vigilantism that the state deems illegal.

About the Author: Anna M. Wilke is an Assistant Professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. Their research “How the State Discourages Vigilantism—Evidence From a Field Experiment in South Africa” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.