Why do some authoritarian regimes contribute more to climate change than others? I suggest that climate inaction in nondemocracies is shaped by a combination of fossil fuel wealth and executive constraints. Fossil fuel wealth undermines climate action by giving leaders of authoritarian regimes incentives to capture oil and gas rents that help them maintain power. Executive constraints, however, can restrict carbon-intensive rent-seeking and therefore moderate the role of fossil fuel wealth in undermining climate action. This argument provides a novel explanation for variation in efforts to address climate change among nondemocracies: the lack of institutional constraints on autocratic leaders’ use of fossil fuel wealth for political gain. I evaluate this argument using panel data on greenhouse gas emissions, oil and gas income, and executive constraints in 108 countries governed by authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2021, finding that oil and gas income leads to higher emissions, but that these effects decline significantly with executive constraints.

This article explores Leo Strauss’s thoughts on Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1954 “Natural Right” course transcript. One of the significant features of this transcript is that it contains an original interpretation and tentative critique of Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Although Strauss considered Tocqueville to be an indispensable observer of modern liberal democracy, he saw significant limits to Tocqueville’s thought. By comparing him with Aristotle and Nietzsche, among others, Strauss criticizes Tocqueville’s understanding of justice, history, and democracy. Strauss concludes that Nietzsche offers a more profound critique of liberal democracy, but one that leads to right-wing extremism. Strauss urges his students to be satisfied with Tocqueville’s more moderate and humane criticisms. Although Strauss’s tentative critique is illuminating and worth careful consideration, I challenge his interpretation and offer a Tocquevillian response to his overly intellectualized conception of social and political change.

We live in a period of hopes and fears for democracy. The fears, however, are now foremost in our minds. Democratic erosion is now taking the perverse form in which institutions long associated with democracy, especially competitive elections, have become vehicles for authoritarian populists to undermine other institutions necessary to democracy, including rights and the rule of law. Yet although the democratic project seems to be backsliding, the democratic values of citizens remain relatively strong. Hopes for democracy will involve continuing to defend, reform, and reinforce electoral democracy, while supplementing these institutions with “democratic innovations”—processes that tap these democratic values with smarter and better citizen participation, more equal and responsive representation, and better deliberation. If we can target the democratic deficits in representative democracies with these kinds of innovations, the democratic project will continue to march forward, and our hopes will have places to land.

Entrenched ethnoracial hierarchies that persist alongside formal democratic rules threaten commitments to democracy. Previous research has shown how marginalization and oppression harm minoritized group members, but has rarely considered the potential harm entrenched group-based hierarchies pose for democratic society overall. This paper offers two innovations. First, we argue that ethnoracial hierarchies have society-wide implications. Entrenched systems of ethnoracial marginalization undermine support for democracy and respect for democratic rights, even among members of privileged groups. Second, group consciousness conditions the effects of ethnoracial hierarchy among minoritized group members. Specifically, when minoritized individuals hold a structural dimension of group consciousness, they tend to sustain commitments to democracy. Insights from interviews with Indigenous and Afrodescendant activists and policy makers conducted during field research in Peru facilitate development of these theoretical expectations. Subsequent analysis of survey data cross-nationally throughout Latin America and over time in Bolivia demonstrates that ethnoracial hierarchies are associated with weaker democratic commitments across society, while reducing these hierarchies strengthens support for democracy. Among minoritized group members, however, structural group consciousness helps to mitigate these negative effects. This paper contributes a theoretical framework and empirical evidence concerning the challenges ethnoracial hierarchies pose for democratic commitments not only among those who belong to minoritized groups, but for people across society.

The theory and practice of what has come to be called “deliberative democracy” have been revived for the modern era with a focus on deliberative microcosms selected through random sampling or “sortition.” But might it be possible to spread some of the benefits of deliberation beyond mini-publics to the broader society? Can technology assist with scaling an organized deliberative process? In particular, would those who experience such a process become more deliberative voters? Would their considered judgments from deliberation influence their voting? We draw on a larger than usual experiment with public deliberation and a one-year follow-up in the mid-term U.S. elections to suggest answers to these questions. It has implications for whether spreading an organized deliberative process could, in theory, be used to create more deliberative elections.

As a wave of backsliding has swept across both new and established democracies, scholars have sought to identify formal and informal institutions that can act as guardrails of democracy. But while informal norms, party structures, and formal institutions such as separation of powers have all been singled out as potential bulwarks against democratic backsliding, the literature has had less to say about what role, if any, federalism might play in stopping democracies from sliding into autocracy. While some constitutional designers and scholars have argued that federalism can help to prevent the emergence of a national tyranny, most contemporary research has emphasized the damaging effects federalism can have on democracy. In this article, we assess the relationship between federalism and threats posed by national rulers, with quantitative analysis of that relationship in countries around the world and with structured, focused comparative case studies in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, and India. Our quantitative analysis finds no systematic relationship between federalism and backsliding, while our comparative case studies support our argument that federalism is only likely to serve as a bulwark against autocratic threats posed by national rulers under a limited set of conditions.

Democratic electoral systems characteristically take a Count-and-Report Approach to enfranchised citizens’ failure to turn out in political elections: The number of non-votes is counted and publicly reported, but non-votes are given no effect in the allocation of political offices. We morally assess this model in the context of legislative elections, and argue that it is pro tanto less desirable than another, counterfactual model which we label Proportional Non-Voter Sortition. This model provides that citizens’ non-votes shall be legislatively represented by legislators who are selected by lot from the non-voting part of the demos, and whose share of seats is proportional to the aggregate rate of non-voting in the legislative election. Our assessment of the two models specifically turns on the claim that a democracy’s legislature should reflect the full diversity of political views that exists within its demos (legislative inclusivity), and it offers two reasons to expect that Proportional Non-Voter Sortition serves legislative inclusivity better than the Count-and-Report Approach: 1) Proportional Non-Voter Sortition uniquely incentivizes political parties to integrate non-voter views into their political agendas and mobilisation activities; and 2) Proportional Non-Voter Sortition additionally enables the legislative articulation and advocacy of non-voter views by placing people in the legislature who are descriptively representative of non-voters. Through our discussion of different models for the post-electoral management of non-votes, we contribute to a body of normative democratic theorizing about citizens’ non-voting, but raise a distinct question that so far has remained unexplored.

Sweden’s adoption of proportional representation (PR) is interesting because it involved static structural and institutional factors, well captured by variance-based left-threat thesis, and four temporal factors—sequencing, timing, historical change, and duration—that historical case studies highlight. We integrate these two sets of factors. We fuse the more static, temporally homogeneous world created by the left-threat thesis, that is well suited to explain cross-sectional variations, with the more dynamic, temporally heterogenous world presumed by the case studies that is attuned to temporal processes. It illustrates how comparative historical analysis (CHA) can translate temporal anomalies into generalizable temporal mechanisms and how nested analysis, together with causal graphs, provide helpful tools for updating theories. We ultimately employ an abductive approach that evaluates evidence not just for its inferential leverage of confirming theories but also for its inductive potential to generate new, more test-worthy hypotheses.

Anti-reclamation movements are common in Indonesia, but their effectiveness varies. Such movements, which oppose the infilling of coastal waters and wetlands, consistently draw support from environmentalists, fisherfolk, and coastal residents. To succeed, however, they must transcend these constituencies and mobilize broad coalitions. In this paper, I apply the concept of political opportunity to explain variation in the ability of anti-reclamation movements to achieve this goal. Specifically, I argue that the opportunity to build broad coalitions depends on the positioning of political, economic, and communal elites. Disagreement among these groups creates opportunities for activists to recruit some of them as allies in the construction of economically diverse, cross-class coalitions. Consensus, by contrast, excludes elites as potential allies, forcing activists to build geographically expansive but class-based coalitions. To develop my argument, I draw on local news archives and primary source documents to compare similarly situated anti-reclamation movements in Bali and Makassar. In Bali, the movement flourished by cultivating an alliance with communal elites and local businesses. In Makassar, the movement withered because public officials, local businesses, and communal elites all welcomed reclamation. My findings imply that anti-reclamation movements are most likely to succeed when they emphasize communal identities with cross-class appeal. Yet such tactics alienate parallel movements from one another and undermine national activism. As a result, anti-reclamation movements fight the same battles over and over without achieving national reforms that would empower coastal communities to participate in coastal planning. Under such conditions, reclamation deepens the vulnerability of coastal communities to climate change.

While it is commonly understood that the poll tax and literacy tests, among other measures, were used effectively in the South to disenfranchise Black voters from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, what is not well known is how much those disenfranchising laws mattered. Specifically, how much did the enactment of poll taxes or literacy tests affect turnout in federal and state elections? And how much did those disenfranchising provisions dampen vote totals for Republican candidates in the South? Using the staggered implementation and removal of several disenfranchising policies over a 101-year period, we answer these questions and provide some precision to our collective knowledge of the “disenfranchising era” in American electoral politics. Overall, we find that the poll tax was the main driver of disenfranchisement in Southern elections, with literacy tests and the Australian ballot providing some secondary effects. We also find that ex-felon disenfranchisement laws were considerably more important—both in reducing turnout as well as Republican vote share in Southern elections—than has been traditionally understood. Finally, we unpack the “South” and unsurprisingly find that racial politics drove these results: the disenfranchising institutions were more impactful in states with a larger Black population share. Our results show the powerful effects of disenfranchising policies on electorates and electoral outcomes. We discuss these results in both their historical context as well as with a mind to the continuing use of disenfranchising provisions in law today.

Opponents of authoritarian regimes are often assumed to desire democracy in place of the current regime. In this paper, we show that authoritarian dissidents hold divergent attitudes towards democracy and identify a key bloc within the regime opposition: “non-democratic critics” (NDCs) or those who are dissatisfied with the current regime but resist adopting democracy. We develop the concept of NDCs, theorize why they exist and how they differ from supporters of democracy and the status quo, and test implications of this framework using interviews and an original survey across China. We find that nearly half of respondents who oppose the current Chinese regime are non-democratic critics who also do not support democracy. Compared to democracy and status quo supporters, NDCs have a distinct set of political and socio-economic demands and higher uncertainty about the performance of democracy in meeting these demands. We also find that NDCs are economically better off than democracy supporters, suggesting that unequal access to the benefits of state-led economic development may motivate differing attitudes toward democracy among regime opponents. These findings put forth an important explanation for why the world’s largest authoritarian regime endures—those who oppose the regime have divergent and unclear visions of what political system should be adopted in its place.

A number of important studies have documented gender gaps in the effectiveness or performance of individual representatives. Yet whether these differences are observable when it comes to responsiveness to public opinion is unclear. In this article, I examine the degree to which representatives use social media to dynamically respond to shifts in issue salience among the electorate. After combining nearly 400 bi-weekly repeated public opinion surveys from YouGov asking voters about their issue priorities, I trained a large language model to classify the universe of elected U.S. and UK representatives’ social media messages on Twitter to the same issues. Findings reveal that women representatives demonstrate greater responsiveness than their male counterparts to shifts in issue salience according to both women and men constituents. Despite an overall bias toward male constituents, female representatives play a crucial role in narrowing the gender gap by consistently aligning their attention with the issues prioritized by female constituents. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of elite-voter responsiveness but also underscore the substantive benefits that women representatives provide for all constituents.

Every complex organization is sometimes marked by preference heterogeneity, disagreement, and conflict. Within political parties, such frictions are traditionally viewed negatively, while recent research has started to perceive them more positively. How might such contradictory evaluations be explained? Through a three-step conceptual analysis we (1) identify two analytical perspectives on intraparty friction, one rooted in a primarily structural conception of parties, one in a primarily behavioral conception; and (2) specify a minimal definition of intraparty friction, which underpins a hierarchical concept structure to (3) suggest a way to resolve contradictions in the consequences attributed to intraparty frictions. Structuralist accounts often view frictions as negative due to a more demanding conceptual threshold, suggesting different types and levels of risk taking by conflict partners. Conversely, behavioralist perspectives see friction more often as beneficial because they focus on expressed disagreement without necessitating an organizational response. Our conceptual tools have important implications for research on membership organizations generally.

We examine the effects of the Nobel Peace Prize on the support for women’s rights groups to highlight the roles of the positive symbolic action, “prize and praise,” in international relations. Based on psychological theories, we argue that the Nobel Peace Prize increases the support for women’s rights activists by reassuring, persuading, and pressuring people across the world. We substantiate the claim by exploiting the as-if random assignment of interviews around the announcements of the Nobel Peace Prizes. The analyses indicate that when the prize was awarded to women’s rights activists, it increased people’s trust in women’s organizations. The analysis of mechanisms implies that the prize pressured conservative people to amend their attitudes. We also explore macro-level implications, finding that the prize decreased violence against women. However, these changes are short-lived. These results imply that symbolic actions entail real-world changes; however, the question of how to sustain these changes remains.

It is widely agreed that the increased polarization many countries experience is bad for democracy. However, existing assessments of how polarization affects democracy operate with simplified understandings of both polarization and democracy. Bringing empirical studies and democratic theory into dialogue, I argue that polarization cannot be understood as a single phenomenon that can be evaluated in one way. Moreover, its different kinds affect different parts of the democratic system in distinct ways. First, we must distinguish between the degree of polarization in a given context and the different kinds of polarization at play. Second, we must consider whether people have good reasons for their polarizing behavior or whether it is entirely irrational. If people have good reasons for their polarizing behavior, the problem lies elsewhere than in polarization itself. Third, we must distinguish between the content of polarized opinions and the process of opinion formation. Both can be assessed with democratic criteria, but they raise different questions. Finally, for democratic evaluation it matters where polarization occurs and thus, we must differentiate between different sites of polarization: civil society, election campaigns, and legislatures. I recommend a systemic approach to assessing the democratic implication of polarization, which analyzes both the effects of polarization at different sites and on democracy as a composite whole.

The neologism “mansplaining” captures an insidious dynamic in which men explain things to women that women already understand, assuming that, by virtue of being a woman, she lacks the man’s knowledge. Mansplaining has started to receive some attention in contemporary scholarship, conceptualizing the phenomenon and identifying its epistemic harm. My purpose is to consider mansplaining and its harms from the perspective of democratic theory. Setting the problem of mansplaining against the norms we expect of democracy—equality, inclusion, and recognition—I argue that mansplaining poses harms that are not only individual and epistemic but also collective and relational. I distinguish two types of mansplaining based on women’s expertise and experience to elaborate on its collective epistemic harms to decision making and its relational harm of political exclusion. Mansplaining poses further relational harms of inequality and misrecognition, undermining the equal social relations and social trust required for deliberation.

Across the world, political parties are incorporating social movement strategies and frames. In this study, we pivot from the dominant focus on party characteristics to analyze drivers of support for movement parties in six European countries. We report results from a choice-based conjoint survey experiment showing that contrary to previous research, movement party voters favor neither candidates who are institutional outsiders nor those who actively participate in protests. Candidate policy positions are the most important driver of the vote for movement parties. Movement party voters, additionally, prefer candidates who either display anti-elitist sentiments or who want to ensure the smooth running of the current political system. These insights invite renewed attention to movement parties as an electoral vehicle whose voters prioritize decisive policy change.