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.

The forthcoming article “Strategic state violence and migration in conflict” by Jessica S. Sun is summarized by the author below.

Among the consequences of civil conflict, two whose effects can be particularly long-lasting are economic disruption and mass displacement of civilians. These problems often go hand-in-hand, as fighting makes it difficult for civilians to sustain their livelihoods, and lack of economic opportunity increases their willingness to flee their homes for safer, more prosperous areas. When civilians become internally displaced (IDPs), this can strain receiving communities, creating competition in labor and housing markets and contributing to increases in crime and conflict.

Governments already fighting in contested areas must manage these new challenges in otherwise peaceful areas. They are also often the perpetrators of violence that causes civilian flight, making civilians in contested areas insecure and driving displacement. How do governments both take control of contested areas and maintain popular support in peaceful areas when these two aims are in conflict? Do they change their strategy when fighting produces negative externalities like migration?

I answer these questions with a formal model where the government chooses how hard to fight in a contested area, and civilians can flee violence by moving to an uncontested area as IDPs. Their choice to migrate is motivated both by insecurity in the contested area and economic opportunity in the uncontested area. Government supporters in the uncontested area, who become hosts to the displaced, may protest because conflict and conflict-induced migration reduce their standard of living. This chain reaction is what the government aims to prevent.

Sometimes, I find, when displacement’s effects on government supporters are too great, the government may reduce its effort to retake control of contested areas, accepting a less decisive outcome to the conflict. In my model, to stave off protests by its supporters, the government can engage in patronage—providing selective benefits like preferential housing to mitigate the costs for its constituents of hosting displaced civilians. Fighting less hard in the contested area reduces the destructiveness of conflict, and therefore also reduces how many civilians are pushed to flee. When patronage costs are high, the government may prefer less control and less migration to more control and more patronage.

In other circumstances, a fighting-less-hard approach would cede more of the contested area than the government can tolerate. Rather than deescalating to reduce displacement, I show the government might preemptively increase violence against civilians, leading to more intense conflict today and relatively less migration in the future. The government uses repression as a crude tool for arresting migration, which decreases patronage costs and helps it maintain popular support. I find that reliance on repression to affect migration increases when economic circumstances in the contested area worsen and decreases when civilians flee conflict as refugees.

Overall, strategic considerations in conflict lead to violence that both drives and hampers migration, highlighting how governments may repress when they expect violence will affect civilians’ choice to flee, and providing an explanation for preemptive violence against civilians in past instances where governments were concerned about conflict-induced displacement.

About the Author: Jessica S. Sun is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Emory University. Their research “Strategic state violence and migration in conflict” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “When you come at the king: Opposition coalitions and nearly stunning elections” by Oren Samet is summarized by the author below.

For opposition parties competing in authoritarian elections, there can be significant benefits to working together and forming pre-election coalitions to challenge autocratic incumbents. Such coalitions have been widely understood as a boon not only to opposition prospects for victory, but also to the potential for democratization of authoritarian regimes.

But, as I show in my article, forming coalitions can also be risky. Coalitions have the potential to significantly improve opposition performance, boosting vote shares and helping parties overcome the difficulties of an unlevel playing field. Doing so, however, can also make oppositions more vulnerable to subsequent repression. In particular, where oppositions come very close to victory but fail to take power—an outcome I refer to as a nearly stunning election—regimes are left with both the incentive and capacity to crack down and bolster their autocratic control.

Using original cross-national data on opposition performance in authoritarian elections since the end of the Cold War, I show that opposition coalitions are associated with higher opposition vote shares. But I also demonstrate that the nearly stunning election scenario—which is, in many cases, facilitated by coalitions—is associated with greater democratic regression in elections’ aftermath, including increased repression and poorer electoral quality in future contests. These downsides persist into at least the medium term and become even more pronounced over time, undermining the potential for opposition parties to build on their gains and promote the kind of gradual moves toward democracy that other scholars have heralded.

Using the case of Cambodia, I show qualitatively how the very features that make opposition coalitions a useful tool in strengthening performance also invite new threats from regimes. Cambodia’s opposition united and came very close to a shocking upset victory in 2013 only to see their fortunes reverse by the next election, as the regime cracked down and ultimately banned the unified party outright. Other cases, from Venezuela to Zimbabwe, exhibit similar patterns.

The findings do not mean that oppositions should forgo forming pre-election coalitions altogether. But they do implore us to take more seriously the risks that coalitions and strong challenges entail. The conclusions echo the classic line from the television drama, The Wire: when “you come at the king, you best not miss.”

About the Author: Oren Samet is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research “When you come at the king: Opposition coalitions and nearly stunning elections” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Abolishing structural domination: US Reconstruction and the double bind of emancipation” by Michael Gorup is summarized by the author below.

What does it take to abolish structurally entrenched domination? In recent years, political theorists have developed increasingly sophisticated accounts of the structural bases and dimensions of dominating power. However, little has yet been written about what a structural conception of domination might mean for emancipatory politics. This article argues that if domination is rooted in social structures (e.g., laws, property relations, institutions), then it can only be eliminated by the transformation or abolition of such structures. For this to happen, agents advantaged by prevailing structures—i.e., dominators—will often have to be brought under a form of power that lays beyond their control and is indifferent to their interests. Defeating domination therefore seems to require the embrace of dominating power. I call this dilemma the double bind of emancipation.

To develop the notion of the double bind of emancipation, and to begin to think constructively about how it might be addressed, I turn to debates regarding land confiscation during the Reconstruction era in the United States (1865-1877). The social dominance of the antebellum planter class had an important structural basis, rooted above all in land ownership. Even after slavery’s end, control of land enabled planters to continue to wield dominating power over persons they formerly enslaved. In response, Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens proposed land confiscation and redistribution as an emancipatory form of counter-domination. Confiscation would simultaneously destroy the material bases of planter power and grant formerly enslaved people economic independence. However, it would also entail subjecting planters to a form of state imperium that could be—and, at the time, was—plausibly described as dominating.

Drawing on Stevens’s thought, I argue that the double bind can be addressed if emancipatory politics is guided by a social theoretic account of domination’s structural predicates. Emancipation from structural domination requires identifying and eliminating the conditions that reproduce domination over time. This may entail temporarily abridging the status quo freedoms of dominators. Such is the cost of counter-domination. But there may yet be good reason to judge this cost bearable—above all, because the status quo itself is not cost-free. The choice faced during Reconstruction was not between a non-dominating status quo of constitutional responsibility and a highly risky, if potentially rewarding, strategy of revolutionary rupture. It was between a deeply dominating status quo and an emancipated future that could only be achieved through the episodic embrace of uncontrolled—i.e., dominating—state power. In such a situation, there is no royal road to freedom.

About the Author: Michael Gorup is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New College of Florida. Their research “Abolishing structural domination: US Reconstruction and the double bind of emancipation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Authoritarian cue effect of state repression” by Jiangnan Zhu, Steve Bai, Siqin Kang, Juan Wang, and Kaixiao Liu is summarized by the author(s) below.

In both democracies and autocracies, stringent state-sponsored social control has long been expected to provoke backlash from the public. However, recent empirical evidence challenges this assumption and reveals a counterintuitive pattern: citizens in authoritarian states could welcome, rather than resist, various forms of social control such as censorship or state repression. Why is this the case? Existing explanations primarily focus on the strategies employed by autocratic governments to manipulate the informational environment or exploit salient social cleavages. The government either convinces citizens that social control is beneficial or garners support by targeting specific subgroups within the domestic population. 

However, can citizens support state repression even in the absence of government maneuvering? In this paper, we theorize an “authoritarian cue effect” and argue that instances of state repression might be interpreted as cueing messages that implicitly signal the regime’s disapproval of the punished behaviors. When the government punishes a behavior, citizens tend to perceive the repressed behavior as harmful to society, thus subsequently considering repression necessary. In other words, public opinion about repression, instead of static, can be murky, unstable and malleable. People employ instances of state repression as a baseline to infer whether the behavior has negative externalities for society. 

Employing a novel belief correction survey experiment, we empirically record the cue effect of state repression. In our experiment, we presented around with six online speech scenarios and prompted them to speculate whether the individuals involved would be punished by the police. We only revealed the actual outcomes of these cases to the treatment group, who were informed that individuals in all six cases were detained by local police authorities, while the control group was not presented with the actual outcomes of these cases. Our results suggest that the treatment group perceived the behavior with more negative externalities; additionally, they also tended to support heavier regulation of online speech. The results have been tested for robustness across three waves of the experiment, involving approximately 3,000 respondents recruited from mainland China with diverse demographic backgrounds.

As such, this paper reveals a normatively dark picture about authoritarian politics by showing that authoritarian state repression might evade public opinion backlash in a less costly manner than previously presumed. The attitudinal effect of state repression creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: repression is “automatically” legitimized because it shifts citizens’ underlying perceptions of what unacceptable behavior is.

It should be noted that this cue effect might travel beyond the context of state repression and could potentially be extended to general policy-making in autocracies. If citizens, once informed of policies carried out by the government, might automatically adopt the regime’s position, the state is then unlikely to face public opinion backlash even when carrying out potentially unpopular policies. As such, the implications of our theory fundamentally challenge our understanding of contentious politics and public opinion in authoritarian states, which might largely underestimate authoritarian resilience.  

About the Author(s): Jiangnan Zhu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong, Steve Bai is a Ph.D student in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, Siqin Kang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen, Juan Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, and Kaixiao Liu is a Ph.D student in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Their research “Authoritarian cue effect of state repression” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Persuasion in veto bargaining” by Jenny S. Kim, Kyungmin Kim, and Richard Van Weelden is summarized by the author(s) below.

An underappreciated aspect of agenda-setting is the opportunity for the proposer to engage in persuasion to convince the veto player.  While the importance of agenda-setting authority has long been recognized (Romer and Rosenthal 1978), agenda-setting is almost always associated with an opportunity to advocate in favor of the proposal.  In this article we demonstrate control of the information process broadens the scope for the agenda setter to secure favorable policy outcomes. 

Take as a leading example an interest group that both develops legislation and lobbies for its passage.   We interpret policy development as the interest group using its resources and expertise to draft legislation and informative lobbying as information design to persuade a critical policymaker.  In our analysis the interest group wants to move the policy in a particular direction, but the policymaker’s preferred policy depends on the unknown state of the world.  For example, an industry lobbyist always wants to reduce regulation whereas the policymaker’s ideal policy depends on the regulation’s environmental effectiveness.  We study how the ability to engage in informative lobbying shapes the legislation the interest group will develop and put forward. 

We show that the interest group can achieve its maximal payoff by either providing no information or by revealing the outcome of a simple binary experiment.  If the legislature always supports reducing regulation, the interest group would not reveal any information.  This is because the proposed policy would make the critical legislator indifferent between the new policy and the status quo, meaning the policy is proportional to the expected environmental consequences.   Informative lobbying cannot change the expectation on average, it only succeeds in creating uncertainty about the policy, which never benefits a (risk averse) interest group.  

When the legislature is less aligned, and so in some cases may prefer to increase regulation, informative lobbying can be strictly beneficial.  The key is that the interest group’s agenda-setting authority ensures that regulation won’t be increased.  Consequently, by revealing whether the legislature’s ideal is on the opposite side of the status quo, the interest group can secure greater policy concessions in expectation.   

Optimally, the interest group would commission a study that reveals only whether the environmental damages of deregulation would be very harmful.  In a favorable legislative environment, the interest group would solicit the endorsement of a free-market think tank which supports deregulation except when the consequences would be catastrophic, but if the legislature is more skeptical it would solicit the endorsement of a more ideologically centrist one (e.g. American Enterprise Institute vs Brookings).  So, even if it had unlimited control over the information available, the optimal experiment is to reveal a simple endorsement decision by an appropriately chosen expert. 

Our analysis provides a first step in understanding how agenda setting and persuasion interact and shows that studies which do not incorporate persuasion fail to fully capture the scope of proposal power.  Persuasion is particularly important when the proposer and veto player are misaligned and so, absent persuasion, the value of agenda-setting authority is muted. 

About the Author(s): Jenny S. Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Emory University, Kyungmin Kim is a Professor of Economics at Emory University, and Richard Van Weelden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Their research “Persuasion in veto bargaining” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.