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.

The forthcoming article “An anatomy of worldmaking: Sukarno and anticolonialism from post-Bandung Indonesia” by Say Jye Quah is summarized by the author below.

This article, titled “An anatomy of worldmaking: Sukarno and anticolonialism from post-Bandung Indonesia”, analyzes the anticolonial worldmaking of postcolonial Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, during Guided Democracy (1959-1965). Using worldmaking as a conceptual interface, it offers three interconnected interventions.

First, it attempts a conceptual advance in the uses and understandings of worldmaking, which has conceptually anchored recent scholarship across a range of cognate fields. The influence of the concept may be attributed to how it manages to encompass a wide range of activities within its scope while also forcefully channeling our attention towards ambitious (and urgent) present day imperatives. However, this concept has been appropriated loosely, where worldmaking is increasingly annexed to a diffuse set of referents. There is a danger of conceptual overextension.

This article stages a conceptual advance by pursuing an anatomy of worldmaking. This entails disaggregating worldmaking into its different dimensions, explicating a rich spectrum of activity that operates with distinct accompanying logics. This spectrum is intended to loosely reflect the state of the literature on worldmaking and show how worldmaking connects to a myriad of issues and lines of inquiry. This article offers a typology where the disaggregated dimensions of worldmaking are interconnected, but, nevertheless, each dimension can be taken in abstraction and analytically isolated, and from there approached through distinct modes of study.

This leads to the second intervention, which is to contribute to the scholarly discussion within the history of anticolonial political thought. This article analyzes the anticolonial worldmaking projects of postcolonial Indonesia’s first president Sukarno at the peak of his political influence from 1959 to 1965. This moves towards rectifying regional imbalances within this literature: while scholars have sought to recover anticolonial political leaders as global political thinkers, Southeast Asia’s absence is conspicuous. Sukarno and Indonesia provide a prime example: despite acting as one of the prime architects of the Third World—especially by hosting the Bandung Conference in 1955—Indonesia remains the world’s “biggest invisible thing”, with a vast mismatch between the country’s size and the muted mainstream academic attention.

This rectification of regional imbalances, in turn, provokes reflection on the different pathways of anticolonial praxis: by surfacing a contextually specific relationship between international organizations and decolonization, this article underscores the importance of sensitivity to situated understandings of anticolonialism. Contrary to other anticolonial figures, Sukarno’s worldmaking revolved around a postcolonial vision of global order outside the United Nations, requiring attempts to simultaneously tear down their foundations and establish alternative institutions outside their purview.

These two interventions are grounded upon a third: shifting the lines of inquiry that have preoccupied the English-language scholarship of Sukarno or mid-twentieth century Indonesia more broadly. By inter alia resituating him within the Third World, this works towards bringing Sukarno out of a primarily Area Studies frame and towards wider disciplinary audiences.

The article closes by laying out some contradictions of Sukarno’s anticolonial worldmaking project. Sukarno remains a valuable figure to think with, given that so many of his questions are now ours.

About the Author: Say Jye Quah is a PhD student at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Cambridge. Their research “An anatomy of worldmaking: Sukarno and anticolonialism from post-Bandung Indonesia” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Using cross-encoders to measure the similarity of short texts in political science” by Gechun Lin is summarized by the author below.

The most commonly used methods in political science struggle to identify when two texts convey the same meaning as they rely too heavily on identifying words that appear in both documents. This issue is especially salient when the underlying documents are short, an increasingly prevalent form of textual data in modern political research. To address the limitation of current methods, I introduce a state-of-the-art transformer model, cross-encoder, which utilizes pair embedding technique that considers the context of both snippets to achieve better estimates of semantic similarity for short texts, such as news headlines and Facebook posts.

I illustrate this model in three examples in American politics. First, I apply an off-the-shelf pretrained cross-encoder to measure the similarity between social messages written by experimental subjects and the original Reuters article about the US economic performance that they read in a “telephone-game” conducted by Carlson (2019), showing that the cross-encoder estimates of information distortion are better at capturing the amount of partisan bias contained in social messages. In the second application which studies the competing media framing of US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), I train a customized cross-encoder model with manually labeled pairs of news headlines to predict the heterogeneity of media coverage of case decisions. The cross-encoder not only outperforms a wide range of word-based and sentence embedding approaches, but also uncover empirical patterns that otherwise would be missed—cases with published dissents receive more diverse coverage than unanimous decisions. The last example presents a more challenging task in which I apply cross-encoder and other models to measure the similarities of social media posts from inter- and intra-party US senators that a topic model has already identified to be on the same policy issue. Only the cross-encoder yields conclusions that are predicted by established theories, which state that elite polarization is more intensive in domestic policies compared to international affairs.

About the Author: Gechun Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Their research “Using cross-encoders to measure the similarity of short texts in political science” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Compulsory voting increases men’s turnout most” by Shane P. Singh is summarized by the author below.

Policymakers are more responsive to voters than non-voters. As such, unequal turnout rates can exacerbate representational disparities. This has led many scholars and activists to advocate for compulsory voting on the grounds that it could equalize participation by boosting turnout among less participatory groups.

Like other socioeconomic factors, gender gaps in turnout contribute to unequal representation. Compulsory voting, by the usual logic, should help ensure gender equality in representation by bolstering relative turnout among whichever gender is least participatory. Counter to this, I argue that compulsory voting’s impact is consistently more pronounced for men because men’s voting behavior is especially sensitive to external incentives, while women’s participation depends more on intrinsic motivation.

To test my expectations, I focus on Brazil, where voting is constitutionally mandatory. Brazil also offers a unique quasi-experimental setting, as certain age groups are exempt from compulsory voting. Using official turnout data and leveraging an exogenous age cutoff, I show that compulsory voting increases men’s turnout compared to women’s. I then show that this pattern holds cross-nationally.

I subsequently demonstrate a methodological concern: compulsory voting increases the social desirability of voting for women, leading to higher rates of overreporting in self-reported surveys. This misreporting obscures the true gendered effects of compulsory voting, as survey-based analyses suggest compulsory voting increases women’s turnout more than men’s—a conclusion contradicted by official data.

These findings have significant implications. If compulsory voting disproportionately boosts men’s turnout, it could widen representational disparities. While a powerful tool for increasing turnout, compulsory voting may have unintended consequences for gender equity. At the same time, reliance on self-reported turnout data risks misinforming policymakers and scholars.

About the Author: Shane P. Singh is a Professor of Public and International Affairs and the director of graduate studies in the Department of International Affairs within the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at the University of Georgia. Their research “Compulsory voting increases men’s turnout most” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Why parties can benefit from promoting occupational diversity in legislatures: Experimental evidence from three countries” by Mia Costa and Miguel M. Pereira is summarized by the author(s) below.

Can legislators’ occupational experience outside politics make them more persuasive and effective in shaping policy? Parties frequently face the challenge of defending unpopular policies, which are often necessary to address complex problems but risk alienating voters and colleagues. Our forthcoming article examines how legislators’ occupational backgrounds shape their ability to persuade voters and peers. We conducted survey experiments in Germany, the United States, and Sweden to explore this question and found that politicians with relevant professional experience are seen as more credible and effective in advancing policies within their areas of expertise. The article highlights an important but underappreciated mechanism of descriptive representation, showing how occupational diversity can influence policy outcomes.

Across three political contexts, we examined two policy proposals that, while supported by expert reasoning, lack broad public approval. First, in Germany, we tested how voters responded to a policy to eliminate grade retention in schools. Legislators with experience in education were perceived as significantly more knowledgeable about the issue, and this credibility converted into higher public support for the otherwise unpopular proposal. These effects hold regardless of whether the legislator was a professor or a teacher, emphasizing the importance of relevant occupational experience over the prestige of the profession.

Similarly, in the United States, legislators with a medical degree were seen as better informed and were more effective at building support for restricting telehealth services. Importantly, we found that occupational background effects were not diminished when other legislators provided the same, detailed arguments.

We extended the third study to elected officials. In Sweden, we found that local politicians were more likely to co-sign the same telehealth reform when proposed by peers with relevant professional experience. This result suggests that elected officials can leverage their occupational background not only to persuade voters but also to build policy coalitions in the legislature.

About the Author(s): Mia Costa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College and Miguel M. Pereira is an Assistant Professor in European Politics at the London School of Economics. Their research “Why parties can benefit from promoting occupational diversity in legislatures: Experimental evidence from three countries” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Making the other side mad: How out-group distaste benefits less competent candidates” by Joshua A. Strayhorn is summarized by the author below.

This article explores a formal theory of candidate evaluation and selection in a polarized polity, where voters take cues from how an out-group or opposing political party reacts to political events.  If a voter learns that one of their own in-group politicians is particularly disliked by the other side, when does this make the in-group more supportive of that politician?  To make this setting a bit more interesting, I assume that this (as I term it) ‘out-group distaste’ toward politicians can be caused by two factors: either ideological or spatial distance, or that politician’s low valence or competence.  I am interested in characterizing what information along those dimensions voters extract from out-group distaste, and how that varies depending on features of the voter or the political environment.

Using some standard Bayesian updating machinery, I first show that under some conditions, namely when the two groups collectively care enough about spatial preferences relative to competence, the in-group prefers politicians more the more they are disliked by the out-group.  More to the point, when this happens it implies that the in-group will be systematically biased toward low-competence candidates, and is more likely to, e.g., choose them in a primary.  I derive the voter’s beliefs on each dimension to illustrate the exact mechanism, and show that essentially the voter gets their wires crossed: low out-group evaluations arising from any source are interpreted as evidence about ideological preferences, leading the in-group to incorrectly believe the candidate is closer to them on policy.  This provides a mechanism by which voters can become particularly loyal to ‘buffoon’ politicians who especially anger the out-group.

I also explore how the strength of this effect varies.  For example, I show that for voters who lack good direct information about politicians, such as those who do not watch (or mistrust) hard news, this mechanism exerts stronger effects.  I also show that when groups are asymmetric, i.e. when one group places extremely high weight on ideology, while the other has more balanced preferences for both ideology and competence, the first type of group is especially prone to be biased toward low-competence candidates through this mechanism, while the second is not.

I also look at a number of extensions that add more detail to this story, of which I’ll highlight one in particular.  I consider a signaling game between politicians and voters in which politicians can misreport their true ideology and competence parameters (at some cost).  I show that politicians sometimes have incentives to feign incompetence, i.e. to report lower competence than they truly hold.  Playing up the appearance of incompetence can benefit the politician even when doing so partially misleads in-group voters; the benefits of generating higher out-group distaste can outweigh any direct costs.  This provides a way to think about why politicians might lean into and exaggerate the more provocative aspects of their own self-presentation.

About the Author: Joshua A. Strayhorn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Their research “Making the other side mad: How out-group distaste benefits less competent candidates” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Alienation, equality, and multifaith establishment” by Andrew Shorten is summarized by the author below.

Can state support for religious practices or identities ever be compatible with secularism? Cautiously positive answers to this question have recently been given by liberal egalitarian political thinkers defending ‘minimal’ or ‘open’ varieties of secularism, including Cécile Laborde, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor. In ‘Alienation, Equality and Multifaith Establishment’, I build on their work by exploring the potential for a concept of social alienation to help assess and guide multifaith forms of religious establishment.

Religious establishment practices and institutional arrangements, in which a state supports or recognises one or more religions, are commonplace. For instance, some broadly secular states subsidise religious schooling and even pay the salaries of clergy, whilst many states lend symbolic support to particular religions, for instance by inviting religious leaders to participate in state ceremonies or by displaying religious symbols in public places. Reflecting on examples like these has prompted multiculturalist political thinkers like Tariq Modood, Simon Thompson and Bhikhu Parekh to reject the goal of disestablishment and to instead recommend moving towards evenhanded regimes of multifaith establishment, in which multiple religions are supported or recognised, perhaps in different ways and to different degrees.

I believe that liberal egalitarians should be open to such proposals, so long as establishment does not involve coercion or fail to respect pluralism and religious freedom. Nevertheless, establishment is often controversial, as in the recent Kreuzpflicht controversy in Bavaria, when public buildings were required to display crosses at their entrances. Cases like these raise the question of determining when specific establishment practices are unacceptable. Other liberal thinkers like Christopher Eisgruber, Lawrence Sager, Martha Nussbaum, Cécile Laborde and Aurelia Bardon have answered this by arguing that establishment is wrongful when it conveys a harmful message. By contrast, I argue that if an establishment practice is wrong, it is for contributing to social alienation. This involves a person being excluded from the justificatory community, undermining their status as an equal normative authority.​

Drawing on the critical theory of Rainer Forst as well as Iris Marion Young’s theory of structural injustice, I develop an original account of social alienation and the conditions that produce it. Because social alienation is not merely about subjective feelings but is intersubjectively produced and maintained, I argue that it can only be understood through social scientific analyses of the various mechanisms that contribute to it. These include institutional practices that deprive minorities of equal political status, social arrangements that fail to respect people’s status as equal normative authorities, exclusionary processes of social identity construction, and structures that internally ostracise.

As well as being used as a negative normative criterion for evaluating specific establishment practices, I also show how social alienation can be invoked in support of adjusting establishment regimes to better support and recognise minority religions. This is because it is often unequal establishment practices that alienate, rather than establishment itself. Thus, I conclude the article by showing how multifaith establishment can counter social alienation by promoting a politics of belonging and egalitarian social relations.

About the Author: Andrew Shorten is an Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Limerick. Their research “Alienation, equality, and multifaith establishment” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.