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.

The forthcoming article “The Political Consequences of Depression: How Conspiracy Beliefs, Participatory Inclinations, and Depression Affect Support for Political Violence” by Matthew A. Baum, James N. Druckman, Matthew D. Simonson, Jennifer Lin, Roy H. Perlis is summarized by the author(s) below. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election highlighted two concerning trends in contemporary America: increasing rates of depression and the possibility, if not the reality, of political violence. Despite frequent simplistic portrayals between mental health and political violence, little is known about whether and when the two relate to one another. Recent work makes clear that mental health can have notable effects on politics–depression reduces turnout and can be a byproduct of polarized elections. In this paper, we extend work on mental health and politics by exploring the relationship between depression and support for political violence. We theorize that depression on its own is unrelated or possibly negatively related to support for political violence. That said, when it is conjoined with conspiratorial beliefs or a participatory inclination (i.e., a habit of political participation), and especially in the presence of both, it should positively relate to support for political violence. Depression can breed a sense of loss of control. Conspiracy beliefs provide a target to blame for that sense of loss. A participatory inclination, in turn, increases the likelihood that an individual will view taking or supporting action against those perceived as culpable as a means of regaining the lost sense of control. We test these expectations with a large panel survey that included measures of support for election violence and the January 6th insurrection (immediately after it occurred). The data strongly support our expectations: we find that among those who hold conspiracy beliefs or have participatory inclinations, and especially among those with both characteristics, depression is positively associated with support for election violence and the Capitol riot. The effects of a participatory inclination are particularly robust for men, who, more than women, tend to respond to depression by attempting to assert control through overt activity. Moreover, they hold across parties and support for Trump—that is, the relationships are orthogonal to party identification or candidate preference. We find that interventions to reduce depression could substantially reduce support for violence (potentially by 15 percentage points or more). These relationships suggest that taking steps to vitiate the illness (rather than criticize those experiencing it) could be vital not only for personal and public health but also for democracy. 

About the Author(s): Matthew A. Baum is the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, James N. Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, Matthew D. Simonson is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jennifer Lin is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and Roy H. Perlis is the Director of the Center for Quantitative Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Their research “The Political Consequences of Depression: How Conspiracy Beliefs, Participatory Inclinations, and Depression Affect Support for Political Violence” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Where Motivated Reasoning Withers and Looms Large: Fear and Partisan Reactions to the Covid-19 Pandemic”  by Isaac D. Mehlhaff, Timothy J. Ryan, Marc J. Hetherington and Michael B. MacKuen is summarized by the author(s) below.

Partisans today appear to believe whatever their leaders say and disbelieve information that challenges their predispositions. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, this partisan motivated reasoning might have had life and death consequences—contrary to expert recommendations, many Republican politicians, notably President Trump, minimized the threat posed by Covid-19 and opposed mitigation policies. 

However, emotions are one thing that can help citizens overcome partisan motivated reasoning. Anxiety, specifically, can prompt citizens to reason more even-handedly and produce less biased, more considered judgments. Previous evidence that anxiety could overcome partisan motivated reason, however, was mostly either gathered using lab or survey experiments or during times when partisanship was less of a force.  

We tested the degree to which anxiety influenced political attitudes and behaviors in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Covid-19 presented a genuine threat to Americans for more than a year, and it unfolded at a time when the impact of partisanship was at a fever pitch. The combination allowed us an unprecedented look into anxiety’s potential to interrupt partisan habits in a real political episode. We found both good and bad news. 

Using original panel survey data collected from April to November 2020, we measured the degree to which citizens feared becoming seriously ill from Covid-19 along with their support for a range of mitigation policies, including mask mandates and business closures. We found that increases in anxiety about the pandemic encouraged people to support mitigation policies at higher rates. These changes were especially pronounced among Republicans, many of whom spurned President Trump’s view on the pandemic’s severity and supported mitigation policies. In fact, at the highest levels of anxiety, Republicans were nearly indistinguishable from Democrats in their support for mitigation policies. We also pinpointed key mechanisms. Anxiety led people to search for more information about the pandemic from beyond their usual news sources. It was also associated with more accurate knowledge about the pandemic, including one fact (whether Covid-19 is more dangerous than the flu) that was subject to high-profile debate between Republicans and Democrats. 

When it came to the presidential election, however, more fearful Republicans were only slightly more likely than less fearful ones to defect from Trump. Although many Republicans feared becoming ill and, as a consequence, diverged from Trump on mitigation policies, few held him politically accountable. Fear had a sizeable effect on vote choice only among independents.  

In addition to providing evidence of the large-scale influence of emotions in politics, our findings help explain a puzzle in the 2020 election: Majorities of Republicans disagreed with their party leader on the most salient issue of the election, yet still voted for him at historically high rates. We suggest that anxiety’s potential to interrupt partisan motivated reasoning in some—but not all—domains accounts for this discrepancy. 

About the Author(s): Isaac D. Mehlhaff is a Postdoctoral Scholar at The University of Chicago, Timothy J. Ryan is a Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Marc J. Hetherington is a Raymond Dawson Distinguished Bicentennial Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Michael B. MacKuen is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their research “Where Motivated Reasoning Withers and Looms Large: Fear and Partisan Reactions to the Covid-19 Pandemic” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Religious Mobilization and the Selection of Political Elites: Evidence from Postwar Italy“ by Massimo Pulejo is summarized by the author below. 

Despite worldwide trends towards secularization, local religious leaders remain an important point of reference for many communities across the globe, in both developed and developing countries. On top of being spiritual guides, religious leaders are in the position to orient the social and political choices of citizens, especially among the most faithful. Indeed, in the runup to an election, religious authorities often make open endorsements of political parties and candidates, which may have a concrete impact at the ballot box. But what makes religious leaders so effective as political sponsors? And how do they deliver their endorsements in practice? 

Using Italian Catholic bishops as a case study, this article shows that the electoral influence of religious leaders hinges on two key factors. First and foremost, to be able to mobilize the community in support of a candidate, religious leaders need to be sufficiently embedded within their local jurisdiction. Namely, the analyses demonstrate that personal connections between a religious leader and a political candidate are only conducive to more electoral support when the bishop was born within the electoral district, as opposed to having been assigned there at a later stage in his life. In fact, when they enjoy a connection to a bishop native of their electoral district, Christian-Democratic candidates can expect sizable electoral gains, and a significant boost in their probability of winning a seat. Second, as a means to convey their electoral preferences to large segments of their communities, local religious leaders may take advantage of religious festivals. Consistent with this idea, the results show how the impact of connections on votes is stronger if the election takes place shortly after the local religious festival. Third, to be effective, religious leaders also need their organization to approve of their political involvement. Indeed, decomposing the effect over time reveals that the electoral influence of bishops dissipates after the Second Vatican Council, which discouraged the involvement of the clergy into political matters. 

These findings suggest that the electoral influence of religious leaders does not simply stem from their spiritual authority. Rather, it critically depends on both the personal characteristics of leaders and the contextual factors that may favor or impair the delivery of their political messages.   

About the Author: Massimo Pulejo is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Milan. Their research “Religious Mobilization and the Selection of Political Elites: Evidence from Postwar Italy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Damaged Relations: How Treaty Withdrawal Impacts International Cooperation” by Averell Schmidt is summarized by the author below. 

Over the past few years, there have been several high-profile cases of states withdrawing unilaterally from multilateral treaties and international organizations. These developments have sparked widespread fears about the unraveling of interstate cooperation, the collapse of international institutions, and the demise of the liberal international order.  

Despite these fears, opinion remains divided about whether and how treaty withdrawal affects interstate cooperation. Some theories suggest that withdrawal should not have an independent effect on cooperation because it merely reflects shifts in factors that made cooperation possible in the first place, such as changes in domestic politics or the distribution of power. Other theories suggest that withdrawal could earn the exiting state a reputation for unreliability, undercutting other states’ willingness to enter into agreements with it in the future.   

This article reports that unilateral treaty withdrawal has a significant and negative effect on future cooperation between the withdrawing state and remaining treaty members but does not affect the withdrawing state’s relations with other states. Existing scholarship is hard-pressed to explain this variation. I develop an experiential theory of international cooperation that accounts for states’ differing reactions to exit.  

I argue that states learn through their direct experiences cooperating with one another. Treaty members experience withdrawal differently than non-members in two key respects. First, treaty members experience the breaking of commitments directly, damaging the withdrawing state’s relations with treaty members. Second, treaty members bear the material consequences following the breakdown of cooperation. These relational and material factors interact to shape states’ reactions to withdrawal. Damaged relations undermine treaty members’ willingness to cooperate with the withdrawing state. When the costs of exit are high, the consequences of withdrawal can spill across issue areas. 

I test my argument by applying a difference-in-differences design to an original dataset of all multilateral treaty ratifications and withdrawals recorded in the United Nations Treaty Series. My analysis compares the rate at which treaty members and non-members ratify agreements with the withdrawing state in the years before and after exit occurs. Several important findings emerge from my analysis: 

• Treaty members ratify 7-8% fewer treaties with the withdrawing state in the years after exit occurs. 
• This effect is not due to changes in the withdrawing state’s behavior, and withdrawal has no significant effect on the ratification behavior of treaty non-members.  
• This effect increases with the salience of withdrawal, the amount of public attention it garners.  

• This effect persists within diverse issue areas, including security, economic, human rights, and environmental cooperation; however, the spillover effect across issue areas increases with the material consequences of withdrawal. 

This article is part of a larger project in which I am examining the consequences of treaty withdrawal on the content and evolution of international laws and institutions. This research aims to explain how patterns of interstate cooperation change over time and why cooperation succeeds in some places yet fails in others. 

About the Author: Averell Schmidt is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research “Damaged Relations: How Treaty Withdrawal Impacts International Cooperation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “(The Impossibility of) Deliberation-Consistent Social Choice” by Tsuyoshi Adachi, Hun Chung, and Takashi Kurihara is summarized by the authors below.

There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that ‘deliberation’ and ‘aggregation (or voting)’ have their own respective virtues and that each plays an important role in the democratic process that cannot be properly reduced to the role performed by the other. Many people now think that in order to achieve democratic legitimacy/justification of the resulting outcomes, democratic institutions should incorporate both ‘democratic deliberation’ and ‘aggregative voting’ into its process, where people “first talk, then vote.” (Goodin 2008: ch. 6)  

Suppose then we have a two-stage democratic process in which people deliberate and persuade one another by exchanging reasoned arguments in the first deliberative stage, and then vote for the final outcome in the second aggregative stage with their post-deliberation preferences. What is the proper normative relationship between the first deliberation stage and the second voting stage? In this paper, we propose the following normative condition: 

• NNRD (Non-Negative Response toward Democratic Deliberation): If some individuals, through democratic deliberation (in the first stage), change their preferences toward other individuals’ preferences, then the result of the social choice rule (in the second voting stage) should not make everybody who has successfully persuaded others through reasoned deliberation worse-off than what they would have achieved without deliberation. 

NNRD characterizes what we believe to be the proper normative relationship between the two democratic stages of deliberation and voting. If NNRD is violated, then people can be made worse-off by persuading others via democratic deliberation. This disincentivizes people to deliberate, which defeats the very purpose of introducing a separate stage of deliberation into our democratic processes. Hence, it is important for any two-stage democratic process that involves both deliberation and voting to satisfy NNRD. Furthermore, it turns out that NNRD is weaker than strategy-proofness and is logically implied by it. (Proposition 1) So, if we wish our democratic processes to avoid giving people incentives to strategically misrepresent their preferences, then they must at a minimum satisfy NNRD. 

We prove that there exists no social choice rule that simultaneously satisfies NNRD along with the Weak Pareto and the No Universal Vetoer axioms. The Weak Pareto axiom expresses the democratic requirement to respect citizens’ unanimous preferences, which is a very minimal notion of popular sovereignty. The No Universal Vetoer axiom expresses our democratic commitment to political equality by not conferring too much arbitrary decision-making power on a single individual. Our impossibility theorem shows that these three normative principles cannot be simultaneously incorporated into a two-stage democratic procedure that involves both deliberation and voting.      

Then, how might we escape the impossibility result? It turns out that if we relax Weak Pareto to Top Unanimity—which requires the social choice rule to choose the alternative that is unanimously top-ranked, whenever there exists such an alternative—then we get a possibility result (Proposition 4). However, by giving up Weak Pareto, the democratic process can no longer eliminate dominated and unanimously dis-preferred alternatives that have been identified through democratic deliberation in the first stage. Similarly, if we relax No Universal Vetoer to No Dictatorship, then we again get another possibility result (Proposition 5). However, the cost here is that we must allow a single individual, who (despite not being a full-fledged dictator, who nonetheless) can always get either their best or second-best alternative regardless of the preferences of other individuals, which goes against our normative commitment to political equality.  

In short, our paper formally demonstrates that there are virtually no aggregation rules that can properly accommodate the results of such successful deliberation and at the same time respect deliberative democracy’s ideal of unanimous consensus and political equality. We can escape the impossibility result by relaxing the axioms. However, each potential escape route necessarily compromises some core normative value of democracy. 

About the Authors: Tsuyoshi Adachi is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, Hun Chung is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, and Takashi Kurihara is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics at Tokai University. Their research “(The Impossibility of) Deliberation-Consistent Social Choice” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.