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.

The forthcoming article “Race, shaming, and international human rights” by Zoltán I. Búzás and Lotem Bassan-Nygate is summarized by the author(s) below.

Human rights organizations (HROs) play a crucial role in holding governments accountable for their actions. However, debates persist regarding the unintended consequences of their methods. Specifically, there are concerns that publicly criticizing (shaming) governments might inadvertently fuel racism against diasporas or undermine HROs’ own anti-racist reputation.

In our article, titled “Race, Shaming, and International Human Rights,” published in the American Journal of Political Science, we explored the dynamics of racially charged interactions between HROs and the governments they critique. Through two U.S.-based survey experiments involving over 6,700 respondents and interviews with eleven prominent HROs, we uncovered several key insights.

First, our findings indicate that shaming can effectively influence U.S. public opinion towards foreign governments. Individuals exposed to HRO reports criticizing Israel and China held less favorable views of these nations. Importantly, this criticism did not increase racism against the respective diasporas, such as antisemitism or anti-Asian sentiments.

Second, we identify a central challenge to shaming which relates to concerns about anti-racist reputations. Our interviews highlighted a genuine concern among organizations about being perceived as biased or racist when criticizing specific countries. Our survey-data validated some of this concern — almost 60% of controlled respondents agreed that Amnesty International’s report labeling Israel as an Apartheid state is antisemitic. However, our study also suggests a remedy: incorporating explicit anti-racist messaging in their critiques can mitigate perceptions of bias.

Lastly, our research examined how governments targeted by HRO criticism employ rhetorical strategies, which we term “racial countershaming,” to rebut accusations and regain public support. We found that such countershaming tactics can partially offset the negative effects of shaming.

In conclusion, while HROs play a pivotal role in advancing human rights globally, they must navigate complex terrain to avoid unintended consequences. Incorporating clear anti-racist messaging in their communications can enhance their anti-racist reputation. Additionally, governments targeted by HROs may employ racial countershaming to recover some, but not all, of the public support lost to shaming.

About the Author(s): Zoltán I. Búzás is an associate professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and Lotem Bassan-Nygate is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Their research “Race, shaming, and international human rights” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Geographies of discontent: Public service deprivation and the rise of the far right in Italy” by Simone Cremaschi, Paula Rettl, Marco Cappelluti, and Catherine E. De Vries is summarized by the author(s) below.

What happens if in a country where public service provision has traditionally been high, communities’ access to public services is substantially reduced? This study examines this question by studying the effect of a 2010 administrative reform in Italy which forced municipalities to jointly manage public services, such as garbage collection or policing for example. The results show that exposure to the reform not only increased public service deprivation, that is to say it reduced access to services, but also that it boosted the vote share of far-right parties. With a more in-depth examination of how exposure to the reform fueled support for the far right in Italy, the study shows that it is a combination of both changing voter preferences and the rhetoric of political parties. Residents living in municipalities affected by the reform expressed greater concern about immigration compared to those living in other places. And far-right parties increasingly linked the state of public services to immigration in their rhetoric after the reform. Overall, these findings suggest that people’s concerns about public services and the composition of their community are intertwined. Public service deprivation leads native-born residents to feel they are competing for access to public resources with immigrants. Far-right rhetoric linking public services to immigration finds fertile ground in these contexts. What is more, these findings help us to better understand why electoral support for far right parties is geographically concentrated in communities that feel that they do not receive their fair share of public resources and feel left behind by the state.

About the Author(s): Simone Cremaschi is a a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bocconi University’s Department of Social and Political Sciences and Dondena Centre, Paula Rettl is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School, Marco Cappelluti is a PhD candidate in Political Science at University College London, and Catherine E. De Vries is the Dean of International Affairs and a Professor of Politics at Bocconi University in Milan. Their research “Geographies of discontent: Public service deprivation and the rise of the far right in Italy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “The institutional foundations of the power to persuade” by Carlo Prato and Ian R. Turner is summarized by the author(s) below.

How do the design of bureaucratic agencies and congressional oversight shape the ability of the President to influence policy? In this paper, Carlo Prato and Ian Turner address this question using a game-theoretical model.

The premise of the theory is that in many agencies, career bureaucrats enjoy civil service protections that limit the ability of the President to directly compel bureaucrats to take certain actions. The president and his/her administration, however, can shape the production of information that career bureaucrats use for policy implementation (e.g., via guidelines, political appointments, and expert panels). As a result, the ability of the President to align bureaucrats’ actions to her goals depends on the credibility of this information.

A key obstacle to credibility is the temptation of the Executive to interfere ex-post with information provision—for instance, by trying to censor or amend the content of internal reports. Whether these attempts are going to be successful depends on the agency’s structural independence (a function of agency design), but also on Congressional oversight.

The uncovering of interference will damage the President, and different Congressional actors might then vary in how aggressively they exercise their oversight powers. We show that the president’s ability to systematically influence bureaucrats’ actions requires (i) some degree of structural independence and (ii) sufficiently aggressive legislative oversight.

Without independence or aggressive oversight (e.g., when the same party controls Congress and the Presidency), the president might actually lack the necessary credibility to influence bureaucrats’ actions. Why? The reason is that the high likelihood of undetected interference makes the Bureaucracy skeptical of internally produced information. As a result, the best course of action for the Executive might be to provide unbiased information.

Crucially, we show that Congress’ incentive to engage in aggressive oversight requires sufficiently low bureaucratic independence, and will systematically vary with its alignment with the president: under unified government, Congress will devote comparatively more resources to investigating low-independence agencies (e.g., a Cabinet-level agency) in order to increase the President’s credibility. Under divided government, instead, Congress will shift these resources to investigating high-independence agencies (e.g., independent commissions).

More generally, the paper clarifies how the strength of the president’s formal powers does not necessarily translate into policy influence: less formally constrained presidents might actually be less able to influence policy implementation.

About the Author(s): Carlo Prato is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and Ian R. Turner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Their research “The institutional foundations of the power to persuade” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Polarization in police union politics” by Jennifer Gaudette is summarized by the author below.

Police unions are a vital yet understudied interest group. They are one of the most politically active local interest groups, and endorsements are the political activity in which police unions engage most frequently. In my forthcoming AJPS article, “Polarization in Police Union Politics,” I use an original data set of police union endorsements and a conjoint survey experiment to show that police union endorsements generate ideologically polarized responses from voters.

Local politics scholars debate how important ideology is at the local level. I theorize that the effects of police union endorsements have changed in recent years due to growing national discussion of police violence against racial minorities and subsequent polarization in response. Using two studies, I find significant ideological polarization at the local level surrounding police union endorsements.

Conjoint survey experiment results show liberal respondents are significantly less likely to vote for a police union-endorsed candidate, while conservative respondents are significantly more likely to vote for them. Surprisingly, though national polling typically shows racial gaps in confidence in the police, racial and ethnic identity are not predictive of response to police union endorsements, suggesting that respondents’ ideological alignment has greater effects on how individuals react to police politics.

Observational results also show significant polarization. Using real police union endorsements in cities of at least 180,000 across 269 mayoral elections between 2011-2022, I show that the effects of police union endorsements have changed over time in tandem with national polarization over policing. Police union-endorsed incumbents received roughly six percentage points higher vote share in the 2011-2015 period, and there are no differences between liberal and conservative cities. However, police-endorsed incumbents receive significantly lower vote share in liberal cities in the 2016-2022 period. The 2016 shift is notable because it was during that presidential election that the two national parties took clear, opposing stances, and national surveys found increasing polarization between liberals and conservatives beginning in that year.

Using the experimental results, I am also able to show that other local interest groups that represent polarized issues can generate polarized responses. In my experiment, liberal respondents are significantly more likely to vote for a teachers’ union-endorsed candidate, while conservative respondents are significantly less likely to do so. However, candidates endorsed by chambers of commerce or firefighters’ unions – neither of which represent polarized issues at the national level – do not generate polarized responses from respondents. These results show that ideology and national polarization can have significant effects on vote choice in municipal elections, providing evidence that both are relevant at the local level.

About the Author: Jennifer Gaudette is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego and an incoming Assistant Professor at UC Riverside’s School of Public Policy (Fall 2025). Their research “Polarization in police union politics” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Economic risk perceptions and willingness to learn about globalization: A field experiment with migrants and other underprivileged groups in Vietnam” by Niccolò W. Bonifai, Edmund J. Malesky, and Nita Rudra is summarized by the author(s) below.

Seeking greater information about the economy can empower people to both avoid potential hazards and seize emerging opportunities. Such efforts are especially crucial for the disadvantaged because lower socioeconomic status affects their susceptibility to, vulnerability during, and ability to recover from significant economic changes. Previous work has emphasized the role of education in information-seeking behavior, particularly with respect to globalization, but has frequently overlooked when and how less educated and disadvantaged groups pursue information to change their circumstances. In this article, we designed a field experiment to test whether disadvantaged groups respond to economic risks —defined as events that may lead to significant income loss or gain (Knight 1921) – by searching for information on the pending global integration.  Although most groups did not respond to the treatment, internal migrants, particularly those engaged in manufacturing industries, were highly motivated to learn and prepare themselves for the future.

Our theoretical framework draws on the Risk, Information, and Processing (RISP) model developed by Griffin et al. (1999) to explain the conditions under which disadvantaged individuals are motivated to educate themselves about the implications of trade liberalization. We consider a pending trade agreement as a proxy for individual economic risk because trade reforms can deliver substantial economic shocks to developing economies, impacting the daily lives and incomes of large segments of the workforce.

We hypothesize that internal migrants will be more inclined to seek information in response to risks associated with trade integration for two primary reasons. First, they possess a comparative advantage over other vulnerable groups in their originating locations, enabling them to exploit new opportunities and relocate as needed. Second, they face heightened vulnerability post-economic shocks due to discrimination in their destination areas.  This is because globalization intensifies labor market competition, leading natives to resent competing for jobs with migrants (real or perceived). This unique combination of relative strength and vulnerability makes migrants particularly responsive to perceptions of economic risk, thus driving their proactive pursuit of information regarding the effects of globalization.

To test our hypothesis, we conducted a randomized experiment with a nationally representative sample of Vietnamese citizens, assessing their knowledge of the macroeconomic and microeconomic distributional effects of the European Union-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), the largest trade agreement in the country’s history. Given the complexity of the EVFTA’s impacts on local jobs, we anticipate that exposure to economic risk will heighten respondents’ willingness to learn about the actual effects of the agreement.

Our findings indicate that while economic risk does not motivate all respondents to seek information about the EVFTA, internal migrants demonstrate a pronounced willingness to do so. Specifically, when primed with economic risk, migrants are 187% more likely to visit the trade website compared to untreated migrants. This effect is particularly pronounced among manufacturing migrants, who typically work in more comparative advantaged sectors, often for foreign-invested enterprises in industrial zones. This analysis suggests a shift in focus from merely assessing trade or economic literacy to evaluating a “willingness to learn” about global economic shocks.

Our research contributes to the literature on information seeking, political economy, development, and public policy in emerging markets. First, we demonstrate that individuals with low socioeconomic status actively seek information in response to significant economic risk, empowering these disadvantaged groups to become pivotal players in the politics of globalization.

Second, our work offers new insights into development dynamics and “poverty traps.” Respondents facing scarcity tend to be task constrained, making them less responsive to risk and less likely to seek information about job opportunities – and losses- created by globalization. At the same time, individuals not burdened by extreme poverty—such as migrants—exhibit a strong desire to acquire knowledge about globalization. This knowledge equips them to improve their living standards and can contribute to broader economic development.

About the Author(s): Niccolò W. Bonifai is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, Edmund J. Malesky is a professor of political economy at Duke University, and Nita Rudra is is a Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Their research “Economic risk perceptions and willingness to learn about globalization: A field experiment with migrants and other underprivileged groups in Vietnam” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.