The forthcoming article “Playing politics with traffic fines: Sheriff elections and political cycles in traffic fines revenue” by Min Su and Christian Buerger is summarized by the author(s) below.

Politicians often make strategic decisions around elections to influence voters’ choices. For instance, they frequently adopt popular budgetary measures, like increasing spending or cutting taxes, just before an election to appeal to their constituents. While these tactics are common among national and state politicians, our research delves into the local arena by examining the behaviors of county sheriffs during election years. 

County sheriffs play a pivotal role in the United States. They oversee a wide range of public safety issues beyond the jurisdiction of city and state police departments. Since sheriffs are directly elected by county constituents, they are one of the most visible and influential actors in local politics. This unique position provides an opportunity to analyze how elections can influence local policy decisions. 

We selected a policy area – traffic fines – sheriffs’ pre-electoral policy manipulation. Traffic stops represent the most common interaction between the public and law enforcement. Additionally, sheriffs wield significant discretion in establishing and enforcing traffic fine policies. We anticipate that, during an election year, sheriffs may reduce traffic fine issuance to prevent voter discontent and negative perceptions of law enforcement performance. 

To test our expectation, we utilized a panel dataset encompassing 57 California counties from 2003 to 2020, spanning four election cycles. Employing fixed-effects models, we investigated the presence, duration, and magnitude of a political cycle in a county’s traffic fines revenue. Our findings were revealing: in sheriff election years, traffic fines revenue decreased by 30 percent. Notably, this decline was short-lived, observed only in the election year. Furthermore, the drop was even more pronounced when an incumbent sheriff sought reelection or when the election was highly contested. 

Our study bridges three pivotal domains of research: political science, law enforcement, and public administration. By illustrating the influence of local elections on traffic enforcement outcomes, our study introduces a new dimension to our understanding of the intricate relationship between politics and policies at the local level. Considering the prevalence of traffic stops, our findings can aid policymakers and reform advocates in gaining a deeper understanding of the electoral motivations that could shape policy initiatives and the implementation of policing practices.

About the Author(s): Min Su is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration at Louisiana State University and Christian Buerger is an Assistant Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI. Their research “Playing politics with traffic fines: Sheriff elections and political cycles in traffic fines revenue” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Evaluating (in)experience in congressional elections” by Rachel Porter and Sarah A. Treul is summarized by the author(s) below.

Candidates for U.S. Congress with a history of holding elective office (as city councilors, state legislators, mayors, etc.) are thought to have a sizeable electoral advantage over candidates lacking an elected background. Having run and won office before, experienced candidates have an established campaign infrastructure and network of donors they can draw on from their campaign’s outset. Experienced candidates also benefit from their public service reputation because voters attribute desirable traits like honesty, integrity, and competence to candidates with an elected background. Because experienced candidates systematically beat amateurs in elections, prior elected experience has become the standard indicator for challenger “quality” in congressional research.   

Our paper asks whether experienced candidates still possess an electoral “edge” over amateurs. To do this, we compiled data on the political backgrounds, personal characteristics, and campaign fundraising for all candidates who appeared on the ballot for the U.S. House of Representatives between 1980 and 2020. We uncover a surprising finding: candidates without prior elected experience are entering the U.S. House today at rates not seen since the widespread adoption of primaries. From the early 1980s to mid-2010s, three-quarters of newly elected House members possessed elected experience; conversely, just half of freshmen members elected from 2016 to 2020 held prior office. 

We attribute this decline in the proportion of experienced candidates entering Congress to electoral losses. Experienced candidates today are more often failing to gain their party’s nomination in safely partisan open seats and, instead, are losing to amateurs who go on to win uncompetitive general elections. We investigate why experienced candidates are losing more often and show that, in modern elections, amateurs increasingly possess the kinds of electoral benefits that have traditionally advantaged experienced candidates. In particular, we find that amateurs compose the majority of top campaign fundraisers today. We also find that amateurs now possess the kinds of valence characteristics that give candidates an advantage in congressional elections. Among Republicans, we find that candidates are advantaged if they are political “outsiders” with no experience in politics—elected or otherwise. Among Democrats, we find that candidates are advantaged if they are female or non-white. Notably, the vast majority of female and non-white Democrats running and winning today lack elected experience. 

Our findings offer a reconsideration of long-held theories regarding candidate success in congressional elections. Our work aligns with trends documented within American and comparative politics toward growing public dissatisfaction with politicians and anti-establishment sentiment among voters. Lastly, this article raises important questions about the implications of electing political amateurs to Congress. 

About the Author(s): Rachel Porter is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and Sarah A. Treul is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their research “Evaluating (in)experience in congressional elections” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Citizens as a democratic safeguard? The sequence of sanctioning elite attacks on democracy” by Marc S. Jacob is summarized by the author below.

In various democracies worldwide, including Türkiye, Hungary, and Poland, democratically elected incumbents have eroded crucial democratic institutions during their terms. Many of these politicians have managed to maintain electoral support despite widespread public endorsement of democratic governance. This raises important questions: Why do voters often fail to oust these politicians in elections? And are there specific segments of the electorate, such as politically informed, liberal, anti-majoritarian, or moderate voters, who might be more inclined to withdraw their support from such politicians? 

A crucial aspect of how citizens can remove undemocratic politicians from office revolves around the sequence in which political elites come to power, undermine democratic institutions, and how voters respond in elections. In electoral democracies, elites are initially elected into office and, over time, can either bolster or undermine democratic institutions, such as the integrity of electoral bodies. Voters can only directly respond when elites violate democratic principles in the subsequent election, meaning that voters can only react retrospectively to undemocratic elite behavior. Another implication of this sequence is that voters must disapprove of this elite conduct, and a sufficiently large number of them must translate this disapproval into revised vote choices. 

To investigate how voters assess and ultimately react in their voting choices to undemocratic elite behavior, I conducted a survey experiment in Poland. This experiment simulated the real-world election sequence, where participants were placed in a hypothetical runoff election between candidates from the two principal political alliances in Poland (the incumbent national conservative Law and Justice party and the liberal Civic Coalition). After selecting a candidate, participants were informed whether their chosen candidate won or lost the election. In the event of a victory, they were also informed if their candidate had undermined electoral integrity by refusing to appoint members from another party to the Electoral Commission. In case of defeat, they were informed whether their candidate conceded to the election’s winner. Participants then evaluated this behavior in terms of approval and perceived adherence to democratic principles and indicated whether they would support that politician in the subsequent election. 

The results indicated that Polish voters generally disapproved of their preferred candidate’s undemocratic conduct. However, this disapproval had minimal impact, if any, on reducing support for politicians who had violated electoral principles. Even though more informed and liberal-democratic-oriented voters were more critical of undemocratic conduct, the results suggested that segments traditionally seen as more supportive of democracy would not necessarily remove undemocratic politicians from office. 

What follows from this evidence? Citizens tend to dislike undemocratic conduct even when committed by politicians they support. However, this disapproval mostly does not manifest in their political behavior. Effective containment of the decay of democratic institutions requires changes in political behavior, but this study suggests that most citizens are unwilling to reconsider their choices even when they oppose undemocratic elite conduct. 

About the Author: Marc S. Jacob is a postdoctoral fellow with the Polarization Research Lab at Stanford University and recently completed his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Their research “Citizens as a democratic safeguard? The sequence of sanctioning elite attacks on democracy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Great expectations: The effect of unmet labor market expectations after higher education on ideology” by Loreto Cox is summarized by the author below.

Higher education has massively expanded around the world—graduation rates in the OECD countries increased from 31% in 1995 to 49% in 2017 (OECD 2017). On average, higher education graduates earn 56% more than high school graduates (OECD 2017). Yet, there is great variation in outcomes and many graduates benefit less than they expected (or not at all) from their education. Teichler (2007) found that 19% of European college graduates find their work situation four years after graduation worse than expected. Data collected for the current study shows that in Chile, one year after graduation, 65% of graduates earn less than they expected when they finished their studies. 

What are the political consequences of these unmet expectations? After years of investing effort and money, how does realizing that the labor market does not value their studies as expected affect graduates’ political stances? The effects of unmet expectations on graduates’ political behavior have received little scholarly attention. Expectations play a fundamental role in individual satisfaction and are likely to matter in higher education. 

This paper focuses on the effect of the gap between expected and actual outcomes from higher education on ideology regarding government vs. individual responsibility. I study the case of Chile, which has experienced one of the world’s greatest expansions of higher education enrollment since 1990. My research strategy relies on two different empirical methods: a survey experiment and a panel analysis, which produce consistent results. I use a large sample and novel two-wave panel with an embedded experiment that I designed and implemented with the collaboration of 49 higher education institutions, which together enroll 72% of the country’s undergraduates. The panel follows students as they enter the labor market, surveying 14,233 higher education students or recent graduates around the time of graduation in 2016 and administering a follow-up survey to 3,948 of them one year later. 

In the experiment, subjects were asked how much they expect to earn after graduation and then half of them randomly received information on the average labor outcomes of past graduates of their institution who were awarded the same degree, based on administrative data. Larger gaps between respondents’ expectations and past graduates’ outcomes resulted in more pro-government ideology. The analysis of the respondents’ actual gaps after one year yields similar results. Both sets of results show stronger effects for unmet expectations than for exceeded expectations, in line with loss aversion. The consistent experimental and panel results appear to come from a reduction in perceptions of social mobility: unmet expectations erode perceived social mobility, which in turn implies a pro-government, leftward shift.  

Theoretically, this finding adds a new, previously understudied dimension to the long-standing association between material conditions and ideology: the role of expectations. It may also help explain the politicization of higher education and the emergence of protests among the young and educated, who often promote left-wing ideologies in Chile and elsewhere.

About the Author: Loreto Cox is an Assistant Professor at the Escuela de Gobierno, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Their research “Great expectations: The effect of unmet labor market expectations after higher education on ideology” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Can Close Election Regression Discontinuity Designs Identify Effects of Winning Politician Characteristics?” by John Marshall is summarized by the author below.

More than one hundred published articles now use what I call politician characteristic regression discontinuity (PCRD) designs. These designs compare outcomes of interest across districts that narrowly elected politicians who differ in an observable characteristic X, such as gender, incumbency, party affiliation, or partisan alignment with other levels of government, from the candidate they defeated. PCRD designs are appealing and important because of their potential to investigate whether the characteristics of politicians matter for government responsiveness, electoral success, or citizen participation and welfare.

This is a non-standard application of the regression discontinuity (RD) design. RD designs typically compare units above and below a threshold; indeed, close elections can identify an average individual-level effect of getting elected by comparing politicians who narrowly win to those who narrowly lose. In contrast, PCRD designs compare districts narrowly won by one type of politician to districts narrowly won by a different type. By connecting the standard RD to this non-standard application, this article seeks to clarify what effects PCRD designs can and cannot identify.

A key conceptual decision for researchers using PCRD designs is to define what is and is not part of their treatment of interest, and thus their target estimand. I consider two leading estimands, which are both local to districts with close elections between candidates with and without the characteristic of interest. Akin to conjoint experiments, the first is the average effect of electing a politician with (binary or binarized) characteristic X, holding all their other politician characteristics Z constant (usually averaging over the distribution of Z in close elections between candidates with and without characteristic X). Rather than isolate the effect of X, the second estimand is the average effect of the bundle of characteristics that come with possessing X relative to not possessing X. Applied researchers consider both estimands, although many papers should state their estimand more explicitly.

I focus mostly on the challenges of identifying the effect of a particular X, using university education as another example in this blog. While separating the effect of a leader’s education from other characteristics may be theoretically appealing, PCRD designs yield biased estimates under the relatively weak standard RD assumptions for two reasons. The obvious reason is that politicians’ characteristics are usually correlated. Consequently, university educated politicians naturally differ from less educated politicians in other ways, like their policy preferences. This article highlights a subtler reason: PCRD designs introduce a form of post-treatment bias, even if university education were randomly assigned, by conditioning on a close race. For example, if electorates prefer more educated politicians, then the average university educated politician who narrowly wins must be less desirable to voters in other ways – what I call compensating differentials, such as advocating unpopular policies. The direction of bias will depend on the application, although PCRD designs may understate the effect of X when the candidate characteristics that appeal to voters affect district outcomes similarly.

My analysis has several implications for using PCRDs to isolate the effect of a single politician characteristic. First, the bias due to compensating differentials only disappears where the potentially large set of such compensating differentials do not influence a candidate’s vote share or do not affect the outcome of interest. Such assumptions, which are far stronger than the usual RD continuity assumption, are rarely empirically plausible. Averting the natural correlations between characteristics requires further assumptions, which may rely on manipulations that are not possible in isolation.

Second, if neither assumption holds, the need for compensating differentials implies that we should expect to find imbalances across other politician characteristics. While close elections still guarantee continuity in district-level covariates, balance tests for politician-level characteristics now serve to illuminate the nature of the compound treatment. Instead of implying an PCRD design is valid, failing to detect differences between observable politician characteristics suggests that there are differences in unobserved characteristics or between combinations of characteristics.

The second estimand, which is carefully articulated and exemplified by Hall (2015), embraces a bundled treatment. Rather than attempt to distinguish the effects of X from Z, this approach obviates the problem of politician-level confounding by subsuming all (observed and unobserved) politician characteristics into a broad conception of treatment. My identification result demonstrates that, under the standard RD assumptions, PCRD designs capture the effect of an average bundle of characteristics for politicians defined by X (weighted by the correlation between X and each Z) relative to an analogous average bundle for politicians who do not possess X, among the set of politicians in close races.

Beyond the appeal of requiring weaker identifying assumptions, the value of an estimand encompassing many characteristics depends on the application. The broad treatment is likely to be most useful when the analyst cares about bundles of characteristics that approximate available policy choices, such as whether political parties should recruit university educated candidates. Because some characteristics in the bundle are unobserved and each characteristic’s contribution to the overall effect is not identified, the bundled approach is less useful for testing theories which seek to estimate effects of a particular politician characteristic holding other characteristics equal, such as whether rising education has improved governance.

Ultimately, PCRD designs work differently from standard RD designs. To identify effects of specific well-defined treatment in the way that standard RD designs usually do, PCRD must impose strong additional assumptions. To maintain the relatively weak standard RD assumptions, researchers must embrace a bundled treatment that may be policy-relevant but less useful for accumulating evidence about theoretical mechanisms and informing high-dimensional policy decisions.

About the Author: John Marshall is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Their research “Can Close Election Regression Discontinuity Designs Identify Effects of Winning Politician Characteristics?” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Whose critique matters? The effects of critic identity and audience on public opinion” by Yehonatan Abramson, Anil Menon, and Abir Gitlin is summarized by the author(s) below.

Diaspora communities – overseas citizens or co-nationals abroad – have become increasingly active in criticizing their “homeland” (or country of origin). Eritreans abroad rallied in Geneva protesting against human rights violations in Eritrea; some segments within the Indian diaspora have voiced criticism over changes to India’s citizenship law; the 2022 invasion of Russia into Ukraine triggered protests among Russians abroad in solidarity with Ukraine; and several Jewish-American groups criticize Israel for its policies in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. 

One of the goals of these “naming and shaming” campaigns is influencing public opinion in the criticized country. But under what conditions can critical statements influence the public opinion on human rights issues within the country being criticized? Can criticism from diaspora members be more effective at moving domestic public opinion than criticisms from resident citizens or non-diasporic foreigners? Does it matter whether the criticism is delivered in front of an international or domestic audience?  

We examine these questions using a pre-registered survey experiment in Israel. We exposed Jewish-Israelis’ to criticism from either an Israeli, Jewish-American, or American speaking to either an Israeli-domestic or international audience. We then measured how the identity of the critic (Israeli, Jewish-American, or American) affects citizens’ evaluations of the critic, evaluations of the criticism, and positions regarding Israeli human rights record and practices. 

Our study finds a clear ingroup advantage. Israeli respondents expressed more agreement with the criticism and evaluated the critic more positively, when the criticism was delivered by an Israeli critic compared to non-Israeli ones (Jewish-Americans or Americans). This ingroup advantage is also relevant when examining the effects of criticism on public attitudes regarding human rights. We find that Israelis became less supportive of improving existing human rights practices (a backlash effect) only when the critics are non-Israeli. 

That said, diaspora critics still have a slight advantage over non-diasporic foreigners. In our survey, the intentions of Jewish-Americans critics were considered more positive than the intentions of non-Jewish Americans. 

We also find that the identity of the audience only mattered for Israeli critics. When an Israeli speaks abroad, their criticism is considered less constructive compared to criticism delivered domestically. However, for all other outcomes, the identity of the audience did not seem to have an effect. 

In the broader discussion about mitigating backlash to “naming and shaming,” our findings suggest that criticism from “insiders” is perceived as more constructive and could be more effective. Diaspora critics might also be more influential when compared to complete outsiders. Even in the “hard case” of Israel, characterized by sustained societal disapproval of the global human rights regime, we find that diaspora critics were still evaluated as more well-intentioned relative to foreign critics. Thus, human rights organizations might be better off working through local networks or involving diaspora activists in their efforts.

About the Author(s): Yehonatan Abramson is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Anil Menon is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California – Merced, and Abir Gitlin is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their research “Whose critique matters? The effects of critic identity and audience on public opinion“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Tempering Senses of Superiority: The Virtue of Magnanimity in Democracies” by Juman Kim is summarized by the author below. 

The problems of increased polarization and mutual disrespect in politics have become so commonplace that they rarely surprise us any longer. We find it increasingly difficult to engage in dialogue and communication with our political adversaries. We tend to shamelessly disregard them so easily and hold them in contempt. We often belittle and despise them, asserting our own superiority. Such practices can inspire confidence and help us stay motivated and engaged; also, they can exhaust us, prompting us at times to avoid or reduce cross-party interaction altogether. This is not a flaw attributable only to career politicians, but the one to which most ordinary citizens are also vulnerable. 

Why are democratic citizens so prone to these tendencies? How can we accurately assess the phenomenon of mutual disrespect and civic enmity so pervading most democracies and offer a normatively preferable—yet also practically constructive—prescription? Apparently, simply calling for mutual respect—deliberative or agonistic—is neither realistic nor entirely desirable.  

This paper argues that our urges of superiority must be understood as a feature rather than a bug in democratic politics. Ordinary citizens are prone to understand their political views and those of their opponents in a particular frame of mind, separating what is good, high, and noble from what is bad, low, and despicable, even while at once upholding—or certainly not explicitly discrediting—the foundational principle of democratic equality. The sense of superiority is an integral part of democratic sentiments. What we urgently need to discuss, then, is how to keep alive the sense of superiority that motivates ordinary citizens to participate in democratic conversations while preventing the energies stemming from the very feelings from escalating civic enmity. 

Drawing primarily on Aristotle—especially his Rhetoric—this paper thoroughly examines impudence and magnanimity as two distinct manifestations of the same underlying sense of superiority. Unlike impudence—which involves a reckless and destructive expression of feelings of superiority conducive to heightened aggression—magnanimity does not give rise to an aggressive form of superiority. Why? The reason is that the magnanimous cannot express and retain their sense of superiority through hounding and pouncing on their opponents because the genuine sense of superiority that they wish to savor depends largely on whether they treat offenses against themselves lightly and refuse to confront their opponents in an impetuous or blatantly aggressive way. 

This paper presents a novel, everyday-level democratic theory of magnanimity, highlighting magnanimity as a virtue in the sense of a motivational force that rouses activity or energy in people rather than that of a character trait that bears a strong ethical overtone. The virtue of magnanimity so understood involves our desire for superiority—and therefore our impulses of disregard for our opponents’ opinion—but its tempered manifestation helps us engage in cross-party conversations and keep them going without engendering or aggravating the climate of civic enmity. To promote this peculiar attitude toward political adversaries alone can make a welcoming and valuable contribution to contemporary democratic theory and practice.

About the Author: Juman Kim is an Assistant Professor at Towson University. Their research “Tempering Senses of Superiority: The Virtue of Magnanimity in Democracies” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Is authority fungible? Legitimacy, domain congruence, and the limits of power in Africa” by Kate Baldwin, Kristen Kao, and Ellen Lust is summarized by the author(s) below.

Scholars, policymakers, and development practitioners recognize that leaders’ de facto authority often differs significantly from their de jure powers, but they lack a clear understanding of what limits authority. Previous research has found leaders take on roles beyond their formal responsibilities, for example by organizing labor for community projects, collecting taxes, and brokering voter turnout. Studies have also shown leaders are more effective in mobilizing over some activities than others. For instance, Malawian religious leaders were more effective in getting people not to attend public gatherings during the Covid-19 pandemic than in asking them to take other precautionary measures, like handwashing. But questions remain: if leaders act in ways beyond their legally prescribed responsibilities and do so with varied effect, what explains the limits to their authority?  

We argue that leaders have advantages in organizing citizens’ compliance with activities that match their domain of authority, or for which they have “domain congruence.” In our study, we operationalize domain congruence by considering the degree of match between leaders and activities on two dimensions: geographic scope (local versus supra-local) and field of expertise (customary versus state). When there are greater matches between leaders and activities on these dimensions, leaders should be more effective in mobilizing citizen compliance.  

We employ survey experiments in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia to test whether domain congruence predicts citizens’ willingness to comply with leader requests across different activities and examine the mechanisms that explain its importance. Specifically, we study how calls from members of parliament, local councilors, and local chiefs may influence citizens’ expressed compliance across three activities: voting for a particular candidate in presidential elections, contributing to an education fund, and contributing to a burial fund.  This allows us to consider how leaders with different geographic (local versus supralocal) and substantive (customary vs. state) domains can mobilize citizens in activities realized at the local versus supra-local level and requiring customary versus state expertise. Our experimental design also permits us to explore whether sanctioning, coordination, or legitimacy better explain individuals’ willingness to comply with leaders’ directives.  

We find that limits on leaders’ authority exist and that the concept of domain congruence helps predict the activities over which leaders have greatest influence. Moreover, leaders’ domain legitimacy – the belief that it is right and proper for the leader to demand citizens’ engagement over certain activities – may underpin the relationship between domain congruence and authority. 

These results have important implications. For scholars, they suggest that leaders’ influence cannot be studied in the absence of specific contexts and activities and that general measures of authority (including trust in leaders) are insufficient to understand how much power leaders will have in organizing citizens for particular purposes. Research designs that stylize authorities or activities, often divorcing them from each other, are thus limited, as are studies that seek to understand leaders’ influence by focusing on single types of leaders or activities. For practitioners and policymakers, our study suggests that leaders who have greater domain congruence should be better at mobilizing participation behind particular projects. Thus, programs and policies that take domain congruence into account are likely to be more effective. 

About the Author(s): Kate Baldwin is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University, Kristen Kao is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, and Ellen Lust is the Founding Director of the Governance and Local Development Institute at Yale University and the University of Gothenburg and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. Their research “Is authority fungible? Legitimacy, domain congruence, and the limits of power in Africa“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Expedience and experimentation: John Maynard Keynes and the politics of time” by Stefan Eich is summarized by the author below. 

Questions of temporal politics—from time horizons to intertemporal decision-making—have recently acquired a new prominence and salience, no doubt partially driven by the pressing challenges of climate politics. Considerations of time have of course long been foundational for historians of political thought and political theorists have more recently attended to the temporal dimension of modern politics by reframing time as an ineliminable dimension of power and a scarce resource with a distinct distributional politics, but also as a legally, socially and economically structured dimension of political struggles more broadly. 

As I argue in this article, John Maynard Keynes should be seen as a neglected and misunderstood contributor to such debates about the temporal nature of modern politics and the politics of temporality. Keynes is often seen as the quintessential thinker of the short run. Indeed, his quip that “in the long run we are all dead” has become a misleading encapsulation of his entire thought. But Keynes simultaneously engaged in extensive speculations about the future. Far from dismissing the long run, he also declared, that “in the long run almost anything is possible.” In the article, I use the seeming tension as an opening into Keynes’s politics of time, both as a dimension of his political thought and a contribution to debates about political temporalities and intertemporal choice. Behind Keynes’s seemingly contradictory pronouncements on the long run stands an underappreciated conception of political temporality that framed and guided his thought.  

We can distinguish here between four aspects. First, Keynes offered a powerful critique of naturalized and impoverished conceptions of “the future” that flattened time and often served to justify denial and postponement. This, and only this, was the long run that he rejected as dead. Second, Keynes sought to make visible a broader politics of time, including the need for alternative conceptions of future possibilities that are not merely extrapolations of the present. Third, this entailed for Keynes re-imagining the entwined relation between past, present, and future. The recognition of multiple competing temporalities implied here a refusal to pit present and future against one another. Fourth, Keynes derived from this appreciation of the entwinement of present and future an awareness of the performative power of divergent conceptions of the future. His insistence on radical uncertainty translated thus into a skepticism toward intertemporal calculus as not only futile but at risk of undermining actual possibilities. In drawing attention to the performativity of competing visions of the future, Keynes instead advocated bold experimentation to open up unrealized possibilities. 

Recovering Keynes’s conception of political temporality offers underappreciated conceptual resources for thinking through the fraught political challenges of intertemporal decision making and for reconceptualizing political temporalities under conditions of precarious uncertainty, as opposed to calculable risk. Most strikingly, it points to the need to grapple with how to align multiple overlapping time horizons while appreciating the performativity of competing conceptions of the future. For Keynes, acknowledging radical uncertainty and the performative politics of future possibilities did not act as an impediment to action but instead culminated in a call for bold and creative experimentation. Such an experimental attitude to intertemporal choice was meant to open up alternative futures that are not yet known or even imaginable; and thereby fill the future with possibilities that are not outgrowths of the present but first have to be experimentally discovered. 

About the Author: Stefan Eich is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Their research “Expedience and experimentation: John Maynard Keynes and the politics of time” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Presidential Cues and the Nationalization of Congressional Rhetoric, 1973–2016” by Benjamin S. Noble is summarized by the author below. 

Presidents occupy a unique position as both the head of the executive branch and a de-facto party leader. In this dual role, they nationalize politics and polarize lawmaking. Members of Congress know this, and they reference the president in their rhetoric to nationalize debate and polarize constituents. However, I argue that lawmakers should reference the president more often when they are in the non-presidential party. As Americans have become negative partisans—motivated by their dislike of the other party rather than support for their own—lawmakers in the opposition party have incentives to use the president as a negative cue. By invoking the president, they can signal information to otherwise inattentive constituents about policy and the kind of representation they provide. Although presidential co-partisans might be motivated to support the president and appeal to co-partisan constituents, I show that these incentives are weaker and can be damaging, mobilizing out-party opposition more than they increase presidential party support.  

I support this argument in two parts. First, I search through a database of two million House and Senate floor speeches given between 1973-2016 for direct references of the president. I find that lawmakers—at the individual level—reference the president more often when the White House is controlled by the other party (as compared to when they are presidential co-partisans). I also show that this reference gap is moderated by constituency support for the president. The gap is larger for out-party lawmakers representing states or districts that voted more heavily against the president in the last election.  

But how do constituents respond to presidential references? To find out, I conducted a survey experiment in the summer of 2021 where participants were asked to read a hypothetical policy speech given by a hypothetical Republican or Democratic senator. I randomized whether the senator did or did not reference President Biden when discussing policy. When republican survey-takers saw the republican senator referencing the president (versus the republican senator not referencing the president), republicans were more supportive of that senator and preferred lawmakers to stand up for their principles rather than compromise with the other party. However, there is no evidence that the democratic senator was able to increase their approval among Democrats by referencing President Biden. In fact, referencing the president was damaging—republican survey-takers decreased their support for the democratic senator. Ultimately, these asymmetric responses among the public help explain the asymmetric patterns we see in congressional floor speeches. 

This research highlights the president’s role as a nationalizing symbol in congressional rhetoric—one out-partisans use strategically to polarize their co-partisan constituents. Ultimately, the findings are important for understanding how legislators respond to, and reflect, conditions of nationalization and negative partisanship within the institution of Congress.

About the Author: Benjamin S. Noble is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Their research “Presidential Cues and the Nationalization of Congressional Rhetoric, 1973–2016” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.