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.

The forthcoming article “Tracing the “true liberalism”: F. A. Hayek as a reader of Tocqueville” by Gianna Englert is summarized by the author below.

Today’s headlines warn of a global “crisis of liberalism”: the realization that free governments are under threat, and that their foundational liberal philosophies – including appeals to individual freedom, civil rights, and constitutional protections – cannot protect them. So impoverished is liberalism, we now hear, that we ought to envision a “post-liberal” politics of the future, free from the commitments to individualism and limited government that have unraveled liberalism from within. But not everyone aspires to move beyond liberalism. Scholars are also actively investigating the tradition’s past, aiming to illuminate current dilemmas with insights from liberals’ history and the figures who helped to shape it.

This article explores an earlier description of liberalism by the Nobel economist F.A. Hayek (1899–1992), who likewise used history to fortify liberal theory. It investigates Hayek’s renderings of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) as an exemplar of “true liberalism” against its “false” variant. This article reveals how Hayek deployed Tocqueville to navigate a parallel moment of liberal crisis in response to the collectivist philosophies of the mid-twentieth century.

But why did Hayek turn to Tocqueville, the famed observer of nineteenth-century America, to resolve the political crises of twentieth-century Europe? Hayek interpreted his French predecessor as the heir to a tradition of liberal individualism that originated in seventeenth-century Britain. This original liberal philosophy was epistemic and social. It began with the assumption that human reason is limited and imperfect – so much so that any attempts at “top-down” social planning are destined to fail. For Hayek, Tocqueville was remarkable for upholding this philosophy after the French Revolution, when true liberalism was eclipsed by the “false” Continental rationalism of Henri de Saint-Simon. Through his interpretations of Tocqueville, Hayek narrated a story of liberal decline but also of optimism. Developed by Locke and Mandeville, adapted by Smith and Hume, and later “perfected” – to use Hayek’s term – by Tocqueville, true liberalism offered a compelling counterweight to the rationalist ideas that supported totalitarianism in Hayek’s own time.

This study of Hayek’s Tocqueville resonates for us today as we look to the past for guidance or clarification in the present. Through his composite history of liberal ideas and their exemplars, Hayek recovered a forgotten definition of liberalism as an attitude of epistemic humility; he explored why moments of political uncertainty like our own often inspire a return to history; and he offered lessons (persuasive and cautionary) for writing a coherent account of the liberal tradition in illiberal times.

About the Author: Gianna Englert is an Associate Professor of Humanities in The Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. Their research “Tracing the “true liberalism”: F. A. Hayek as a reader of Tocqueville” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “The ethics of responding to democratic backsliding abroad” by James Pattison is summarized by the author below.

The past decade has seen many previously liberal democratic states weaken or abandon key aspects of their liberal democracies and take authoritarian turns. This poses a major dilemma for remaining liberal democratic actors. What should they do? It might seem that it is vital for liberal actors to adopt a strong line. They should, the thought goes, react firmly to protect the civil and political rights of those affected to avoid being complicit, as well as to maintain their own integrity. Yet reacting robustly might push backsliding states further towards aligning with authoritarian global powers and weaken the prospects of collective action to tackle key global challenges.

In “The ethics of responding to democratic backsliding abroad”, forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, I consider how states should respond to democratic backsliding in other states. To do this, I consider three potential approaches.

The first (the ‘complicity-based approach’) holds that states and other liberal democratic actors should avoid being causally involved in backsliders’ violations of democratic freedoms. On the face of it, this seems attractive. It seems wrong to be likely to contribute causally to others’ wrongdoing when this has major effects for backsliding. Yet, I argue, this approach is limited because engaging with democratic backsliders may not make much of a difference causally because they will engage with other states instead and because the effects can be very small. In addition, taking a strong line on avoiding complicity can sometimes make things worse overall.

The second approach (the ‘integrity-based approach’) holds that engaging with democratic backsliders undermines a liberal actor’s integrity. Against this approach, I argue that maintaining liberal integrity is not a weighty consideration and that liberal integrity is not always jeopardised by engaging with democratic backsliders.

Instead of these two approaches, which focus on the ‘internal’ elements of backsliding, I defend a third approach – the ‘responsibility-based approach’. This emphasises the need to take seriously ‘external’ backsliding, that is, the external impacts of a state’s democratic backsliding. Backsliding states not only violate their own citizens’ rights; they also have poorer records in dealing with key global challenges, from climate change to refugee protection. In addition, they risk leading to a form of the global order where these challenges are more likely to go unmet. The responsibility-based approach holds that these external effects of backsliding need to figure majorly in the response to backsliding, alongside the internal effects of backsliding on democracies. In practice, this requires rejecting from approaches that require clean hands and ensuring integrity, to one that is focused on reducing the global array of harms that backsliding can cause.

About the Author: James Pattison is a Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester. Their research “The ethics of responding to democratic backsliding abroad” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Can Americans’ trust in local news be trusted? The emergence, sources, and implications of the local news trust advantage” by Erik Peterson, Joshua P. Darr, Maxwell B. Allamong, and Michael Henderson is summarized by the author(s) below.

In recent decades media trust has substantially declined and there are large partisan divides in how the American public views most news sources. Our article shows trust in local media is an important exception to these developments.

We analyze a collection of surveys from across the past 40 years to show local news has been more trusted than the national media since the late 1990s. The local news trust advantage still exists today and is present even among those who are skeptical of the media as a whole.

We go on to demonstrate some complications from these favorable views of local news. The public now uses the apparent “localness” of a media outlet as a shortcut when deciding whether to trust it. In survey experiments where they evaluate unfamiliar news sources, adding a local cue to a news organization’s name leads people to view it more favorably, even though they have no experience with its coverage. When evaluating real digital news sources covering their community, people trust unreliable information providers that signal a local focus more than high-quality local news sources that do not.

As views of the national media have become negative, our study reveals that an underappreciated pool of local media trust still exists. Signaling a local focus allows unfamiliar news providers to tap into these positive views, explaining why many groups trying to influence public opinion now package their messages like local news reports. This development, and the observation that some of the reliable local news sources now starting to operate on the Internet do not clearly convey their local focus, means distinguishing between these different types of local information providers is an important and ongoing challenge for the public in a changing media environment.

About the Author(s): Erik Peterson is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Rice University, Joshua P. Darr is an associate professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, Maxwell B. Allamong is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology and The Polarization Lab at Duke University, and Michael Henderson is an associate professor in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Their research “Can Americans’ trust in local news be trusted? The emergence, sources, and implications of the local news trust advantage” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “National identity after conquest” by Christopher Carter and Daniel W. Gingerich is summarized by the author(s) below.

Throughout history, occupying powers have often tried to reshape the identity of the people in the territories they control by encouraging them to adopt the occupier’s national identity. They typically use policies that reward those who align with this new identity while discriminating against those who resist. However, these strategies don’t always work as intended. A key factor in determining whether such policies succeed or fail is how long people believe the occupation will last. If the occupation is viewed as short-term, discrimination may backfire. Parents may become more determined to pass on the marginalized (non-occupier) identity to their children, believing that maintaining it won’t harm their children’s future economic prospects. This makes it harder for the occupying power to achieve its goal of erasing the local identity, even if the policies it espouses are economically harmful. On the other hand, when the occupation is perceived as long-lasting, parents are more willing to have their children adopt the occupier’s identity because it becomes essential for survival and success in the new social system. In these cases, discrimination can be more effective, as the occupier’s identity becomes ingrained over time. We further demonstrate that institutions, such as credible plebiscites and treaties, play a critical role in shaping public perceptions around how long occupation will last. Historical examples like the Chilean occupation of Tacna, Peru, and the Prussian occupation of Northern Schleswig show how the perceived duration of occupation plays a crucial role in whether these identity-shaping policies succeed or fail. 

About the Author(s): Christopher Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and John L. Nau III Assistant Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia and Daniel W. Gingerich is a Professor of Politics specializing in comparative politics and the Director of the Quantitative Collaborative at the University of Virginia. Their research “National identity after conquest” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Enchanted democracy: Religion and democratic thought in nineteenth-century Latin America” by Michael S. Thomas is summarized by the author below.

The persistence of religion has forced political theorists and political scientists to grapple with how religious reasons, practices, and beliefs relate to democratic politics. Often, theorists ask how and where religion or religious reasons should “fit” within already-existing democratic societies of equality, reciprocity, and civility. In contrast to this approach, this article examines an overlooked strand of nineteenth-century Latin American democratic thought that I call enchanted democracy, epitomized in the work of the Chilean radical thinker, Francisco Bilbao (1823-1865). Rather than banishing metaphysics to clear the ground for democratic politics, Bilbao deployed theology to construct and justify equality, reciprocity, and civility where it did not yet exist: at the dawn of the democratic age in Latin America. One of the most radical democrats of his century, Bilbao saw in theology an important theoretical tool to instantiate a deeply controversial politics: mass democracy. Unlike more well-known, state-centric theories of civil religion meant to stabilize the political (Rousseau) or the theorization of religion as a corrective for what democracy might deform in citizens’ hearts (Tocqueville), Bilbao saw in democracy itself a sacred politics, the eschatological destination of humanity. This vision is what I call enchanted democracy, melting divine presence directly into the realm of politics. Even as he fiercely critcized the Catholic Church, Bilbao deployed the lives of saints, sacraments, and scripture to justify mass expansion of suffrage, direct democracy, and social equality.

But why would an anti-clerical, radical democrat rely upon theology to make his case for democracy? Religious practice and theological resources contained elements that allowed citizens to grasp a democratic politics of equality yet to be instantiated. This article traces three ways that Bilbao’s enchantment of democracy served to justify democratic politics. The first task was to justify mass political inclusion. Against liberals of the day who used “reason” and “capacity” as a means of political exclusion, Bilbao theorized the human person as a sharer in God’s essence, who is sovereign reason. Secondly, Bilbao aimed to harmonize class conflict and overcome the tension between the good of the whole and individual rights. To this end, Bilbao produced a theory of solidarismo (solidarity). This account of solidarity was explicitly cosmopolitan, invoking the Trinity as a model of unity, aspiring for humanity to “be one as God is one.” Finally, Bilbao’s enchanted democracy constructed an ideal of sacrificial love embodied in the life of the seventeenth-century Peruvian Saint, Rose of Lima. This theory of love, grounded in the saint’s example and in cultic devotion to the saint, sacralized the revolutionary value of fraternité but without sentimentality, theorizing democratic love as a tether that binds and a costly duty of sacrifice.

Recovering enchanted democracy signals the importance of religious thought in the construction of modern democratic politics. It also signals the importance of Latin America as a site of democratic theory and theorization of the relationship between religion and politics. Religion has not disappeared from the public realm and remains salient in the world’s democracies. Theorists have begun to explore conceptualizations of democratic politics and religion that are alternatives to US-style separation of Church and state. This article suggests that both Bilbao and modern Latin American thought more broadly have something to offer to this discussion. Features of Latin American political modernity – constitutionalism, popular sovereignty, democracy, human rights, even Marxism – were theorized by many Latin American actors who were sensitive to the place of religion, and many who argued that religious ideas and spirituality were essential to their political projects.

About the Author: Michael S. Thomas is a Ph.D candidate at Stanford University. Their research “Enchanted democracy: Religion and democratic thought in nineteenth-century Latin America” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.