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.

The forthcoming article “Populism and the rule of law: The importance of institutional legacies” by Andreas Kyriacou and Pedro Trivin is summarized by the author(s) below.

Existing work sees populist governments undermining the rule of law because they seek to dismantle institutional constraints on their personalistic, plebiscitarian rule. We argue that the capacity of populists to undermine the rule of law depends on the degree to which the law is respected, and equally and impartially enforced before populists take office. A strong tradition or legacy of the rule of law — in the guise for example, of independent courts and impartial public administrations — is likely to limit the damage populists will inflict. Conversely, in countries with a weak tradition, the deleterious impact of populist governments on the rule of law is likely to be stronger.

We propose that the strength of a country’s rule-of-law tradition ultimately depends on the prevalence across society of social norms that define respect for the law as expected or appropriate behavior. In countries where respect for the rule of law is expected behavior, the negative impact of populist governments on the law will tend to be weaker because courts, public administrators and voters are more likely to oppose populists who try to remove legal constraints on the exercise of their power, and because populist governments themselves are more likely to comply with legal or administrative decisions checking their plebiscitarian rule.

We empirically examine the impact of rule-of-law legacies by applying synthetic control methods to a cross-country sample that includes up to 51 populist events characterized by the ascent of a populist leader to power and spanning the period from 1920 to 2019. Our empirical results reveal that while, on aggregate, the rise of populist governments leads to an 11.4 percentage point decline in the rule of law after 15 years, this reduction is larger in countries with a weak rule-of-law legacy (17.5 percentage points) and smaller in those with a strong rule-of-law tradition (5.8 percentage points). In the former group of countries, the sharp reduction in the rule of law soon after populists take office suggests that populist leaders, propelled by their electoral mandates, immediately proceed to attack institutions and quickly manage to do a great deal of damage.

The differential impact of populism in high versus low rule-of-law legacy settings is robust to a barrage of robustness checks, including the consideration of alternative factors that can potentially determine the capacity of populist governments to sweep away institutional constraints, as well as different populist event classifications and rule-of-law measures. Our findings suggest that in countries like the USA, with a robust rule-of-law tradition, the deleterious impact of populists on institutions will be limited but not negligible.

About the Author(s): Andreas Kyriacou is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the Universitat de Girona and Pedro Trivin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at the Università degli Studi di Milano. Their research “Populism and the rule of law: The importance of institutional legacies” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Can norm-based information campaigns reduce corruption?” by Aaron Erlich and Jordan Gans-Morse is summarized by the author(s) below.

Across the world, governments and activists deploy anti-corruption information campaigns. But do they work? Our research provides grounds for cautious optimism.

Through three experimental studies conducted in Ukraine between 2017 and 2021, we examined how different types of anti-corruption messages affect people’s willingness to engage in bribery. We tested two main types of messages: those conveying “descriptive norms” (information about how common corruption is) and those conveying “injunctive norms” (information emphasizing that corruption is wrong and should be resisted). We also examined combinations of these two types of norm-based messaging.

Our findings challenge some conventional wisdom. First, we found that simple slogans like “Keep fighting! Stop corruption!” consistently reduced willingness to pay bribes. These effects, however, were modest and temporary. Second, contrary to recent research warning that information campaigns might backfire by normalizing corruption, none of our tested messages increased bribe intentions.

We also discovered that blending moral appeals (i.e., injunctive norms) with information showing that corruption is on the decline (i.e., descriptive norms) proved highly effective—but only when people believed the messages. In countries where corruption is endemic, this is a key caveat: Only about a quarter of our Ukrainian respondents perceived factually accurate claims about decreasing corruption to be credible.

Our most practical finding may be about age. Across all message types, effects were substantially larger among younger citizens. For participants under 30, several messages reduced willingness to bribe by about 1.5 times more than in the overall sample. Meanwhile, messages had virtually no effect on those over 50.

What does this mean for anti-corruption efforts? We believe messaging can work, but designers of information campaigns must be strategic about content, timing, and audience. Simple moral appeals might be most effective when strategically placed (for example, outside of government offices) to influence immediate decisions about bribery. By contrast, more ambitious campaigns to shift social norms might focus on younger citizens through social media using combinations of injunctive and descriptive-norm messaging.

While we’re clear that information campaigns alone won’t solve systemic corruption, even small reductions in bribery can add up. We estimate that a 20% decline in Ukraine’s bribe rate—the approximate impact of our more effective messages—would result in nearly a million fewer bribes annually, a substantive change for a country with around 30 million adults at the time of our studies.

Overall, our research challenges both excessive optimism and excessive pessimism about anti-corruption messaging. The reality lies somewhere in between: These campaigns aren’t silver bullets, but they can be effective tools when deployed thoughtfully. More broadly, our research sheds light on longstanding debates about how messages that focus on what’s right (injunctive norms) or what others are doing (descriptive norms)—or a mix of both—can help tackle harmful behaviors, whether the goal is fighting corruption, improving public health, or protecting the environment.

About the Author(s): Aaron Erlich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University and Jordan Gans-Morse is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Their research “Can norm-based information campaigns reduce corruption?” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Designing Confucian democracy: A semi-parliamentarian framework” by Zhichao Tong is summarized by the author below.

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of theoretical studies on Confucian democracy, which is increasingly taken by a group of scholars known as “Confucian democrats” to be a mode of democracy best suitable for East Asian societies with a Confucian heritage. Still, despite the establishment of Confucian democracy as a normatively plausible ideal, little has been said regarding its institutional design. Yet, to the extent that Confucian democracy inevitably involves some synthesis between a formally democratic regime and substantively Confucian ends, it has to ask for a more specific choice among various possible democratic institutional frameworks, so as to make sure that the exact form of the former is conducive to the realization of the latter. This article addresses such a question by presenting semi-parliamentarianism as an appropriate institutional framework for designing Confucian democracy. My central claim is that compared with other types of constitutional structure such as presidentialism, parliamentarianism, and semi-presidentialism, semi-parliamentarianism is more likely to simultaneously advance Confucian democrats’ dual normative commitments, which I summarize as benevolent government and deep harmony.

Within the broader field of democratic theory and comparative politics, semi-parliamentarian is a distinct model of democratic design that has been most comprehensively articulated by Steffen Ganghof in his 2021 monograph Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism. The basic idea is that there should be two democratically composed chambers which together share the legislative power, but with only of them, the so-called confidence chamber, having the power to choose the cabinet and to dismiss it via a no-confidence vote. A good case of comparison would be with semi-presidentialism which divides the executive into two parts, the presidency and the cabinet led by a prime minister, and makes one of them, the cabinet, accountable to the legislature.  Semi-parliamentarianism could be viewed as the exact opposite, that is, dividing the legislature into two parts via bicameralism and having one of them, the confidence chamber, to hold the executive into account.

Drawing on but also somewhat departing from Ganghof’s arguments, I consider how the two chambers of a bicameral semi-parliamentarian Confucian democracy should be constituted and arranged in a way that would simultaneously promote benevolent government and deep harmony in a modern pluralistic society. To make my normative claim more empirically grounded, I also examine major political challenges currently faced by East Asian democracies including South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, in what exact sense those challenges are problematic from a democratic perspective and a Confucian perspective, and how semi-parliamentarianism may help to address them. In this regard, the article aims to speak to both normative political theorists and empirical political scientists.

About the Author: Zhichao Tong is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the School of Government at Sun Yat-Sen University. Their research “Designing Confucian democracy: A semi-parliamentarian framework” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Rethinking the imperative mandate: Toward a better balance between independence and accountability” by Pierre-Étienne Vandamme is summarized by the author below.

The imperative mandate is an old practice meant to increase citizens’ control over their political representatives. It does so by allowing citizens to give binding instructions to their representatives (or “delegates”) and to recall them in case of betrayal of these instructions. This practice has been defended historically by figures such as Rousseau and Marx. However, one salient characteristic of the representative governments that have emerged since the end of the 18th Century is that they do not authorize (and sometimes explicitly forbid) this practice, elevating the independence of elected representatives as one of their foundational principles.

In this article, I review the reasons why a strictly imperative mandate, entirely binding representatives, is unappealing in a mass democracy. In short, a degree of independence from voters is valuable to allow representatives to make decisions on unanticipated events, to change their minds based on new information, to deliberate, negotiate and co-construct laws, integrating legitimate minority claims. However, representatives should also be strongly accountable to voters. If they are too independent, it becomes too easy for them to betray their promises, make self-serving decisions or be captured by private interest lobbies.

To achieve a better balance between independence and accountability than prevailing forms of representation, I defend an alternative proposal called the Semi-Directed Mandate. It consists in 1) asking candidates or parties to put forward key priorities (in addition to their broader program) before the election; 2) allowing voters to give a more specific mandate to their representatives by approving or rejecting these key priorities on the ballot, and 3) allowing citizens to revoke the mandate and call anticipated elections in case of betrayal of key promises, unless the targeted representatives can offer convincing justifications for departing from their mandate.

This would empower citizens vis-à-vis their representatives without entirely suppressing the latter’s independence. It also allows for constant dialogue between representatives and citizens incentivizing politicians to spend more time publicly justifying their actions and decisions. Additionally, as a by-product, it may improve voters’ average degree of information by attracting voters’ attention to parties’ key proposals, thereby making the vote more program-based and easing retrospective judgments.

All of this makes the Semi-Directed Mandate potentially more appealing than the traditional imperative mandate. It is also an improvement on existing forms of recall, as practiced in several US states and many other countries, which usually lack specificity regarding the valid reasons for recalling an elected representative.

Nevertheless, these theoretical expectations must be taken with caution since this proposal has not so far been tested empirically. One important point of attention is the risk of instrumentalization by opposition parties, as often happens with existing recall mechanisms. There are reasons to believe that the limitation of the possibility of recall to cases of betrayal of key promises makes the use of recall less attractive to opposition parties, as it may push the party in power to deliver on this key promise, which the opposition is unlikely to endorse. This, however, will need to be observed in practice.

About the Author: Pierre-Étienne Vandamme is an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in political philosophy at KU Leuven (Belgium). Their research “Rethinking the imperative mandate: Toward a better balance between independence and accountability” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.