Contrary to dominant theories of postindustrial society, this article advances an alternative account of digital capitalism that repositions the factory—so often associated with industrial manufacturing—as a defining yet largely overlooked feature of the internet economy. I pursue this claim by interpreting data centers and microwork platforms as digital embodiments of the factory system through a historical theory of the factory model that reconstructs the consistent mechanisms of control and extraction that have distinguished factories as consolidated infrastructures of production since their inception. I define these “protocols of production” as formal rules deployed by a combination of technological systems, spatial arrangements, and management regimes devised to fragment tasks, discipline workers, and supervise production. By probing the socioeconomic consequences of the factory’s algorithmic redeployment and adaptation to global data production, I contend that these absent factories have amplified alienation and precarity as structural social qualities of the digital labor process.

At the turn of the twentieth century, most cities in America featured a patronage-based system of governance, but over the next few decades, patronage was replaced by civil service. Civil service restructured the relationship between elected officials and government employees, with employees benefiting from a variety of new protections. Yet in studying this change, scholars have largely ignored the role local employees themselves might have played in the transformation. We argue that city employees stood to benefit from civil service, and in places where they had agency and clout, they were important drivers of its adoption. We collected a dataset for more than 1,000 municipal governments, determining whether and when they adopted civil service and whether their employees were organized in an occupational organization. Our analysis of these new data shows the influence of city employees was an important contributor to the spread of civil service in American local government.

We revise the conventional wisdom that Africa’s international borders were drawn arbitrarily. Europeans knew very little about most of Africa in the mid-1880s, but their self-interested goals of amassing territory prompted intensive examination of on-the-ground conditions as they formed borders. Europeans negotiated with African rulers to secure treaties and to learn about historical state frontiers, which enabled Africans to influence the border-formation process. Major water bodies, which shaped precolonial civilizations and trade, also served as focal points. We find support for these new theoretical implications using two original datasets. Quantitatively, we analyze border-location correlates using grid cells and an original spatial dataset on precolonial states. Qualitatively, we compiled information from treaties and diplomatic histories to code causal process observations for every bilateral border. Historical political frontiers directly affected 62% of all bilateral borders. Water bodies, often major ones, comprised the primary border feature much more frequently than straight lines.

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) sector assumes increasing the number of women involved in peace negotiations drives better outcomes for local women. However, empirical support for this assumption is inconsistent. This article tests how power alters the relationship between women’s formal (Track 1) involvement in peace negotiations and the inclusion of women-specific provisions in peace agreements. Using an original dataset comprised of 2,299 Track 1 delegates involved in 116 comprehensive peace agreements finalized between 1990 and 2021, I find women’s involvement in peace negotiations is positively correlated to comprehensive agreements containing provisions for women. However, this correlation is dependent on women holding positions of power—simply having women in the room is insufficient. This article offers a novel quantitative approach to WPS studies, provides nuance to theories linking descriptive and substantive representation, and casts doubt on the longstanding assumption that increasing women’s involvement inherently enhances gender equality.

We develop State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for state legislators across 97 legislative chambers over recent decades, based on the number of bills that they sponsor, how far those bills move through the lawmaking process, and their substantive importance. We assess the scores through criterion and construct validation and reveal new insights into effective lawmaking across legislators. We then offer two illustrations of the immense opportunities that these scores provide for new scholarship on legislative behavior. First, we demonstrate greater majority-party influence over lawmaking in states featuring ideological polarization and majority-party cohesion, and where there is greater electoral competition for chamber control. Second, we show how institutional design choices—from legislative rules to the scope of professionalization—affect the distributions of policymaking power from state to state.

Congressional observers have long been interested in the distinction between legislative “workhorses” and “showhorses.” However, when scholars operationalize this by measuring legislator productivity, they often neglect many realities of modern lawmaking by focusing on the traditional bill sponsorship and passage process. To better align measurement with practice, we compile widely available data on bill sponsorship, cosponsorship, and amendments; we also use text-as-data methods to credit instances of behind-the-scenes lawmaking via text reuse between bills. We weight achievements from each of these lawmaking methods to create the Lawmaking Productivity Metric for House Members of the 101–113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship provides important insights about who the congressional workhorses are. In particular, we find that traditional measures systematically undercount the legislative successes of women and likely Black Members of Congress because they disproportionately legislate in less visible ways.

This article challenges the common assumption that the partisan identification of bureaucratic elites is fixed over time. Building on principal-agent and organization theory, we hypothesize that bureaucratic elites may respond to political turnover by adjusting their partisan identification toward that of their (new) elected principals. We test this prediction using data from the American State Administrators Project (ASAP) over the 1964–2008 period, which allows us to study the same US agency leaders (N=951 individuals) before and after partisan shifts in their agency’s elected principals. We find significant evidence that agency leaders remaining in office following a shift in the party in power on average reorient their partisan identity in response to such turnover events. These adjustments are stronger for agency leaders directly appointed by, or in more frequent contact with, their elected principals. Our results suggest a malleability of partisanship seldom attributed to bureaucratic elites in public and academic discourse.

In recent decades, the term “politics” has become almost synonymous with conflict. Results from eight studies show that individuals averse to conflict tend to select out of surveys and discussions explicitly labeled as “political.” This suggests that the inferences researchers draw from “political” surveys, as well as the impressions average Americans draw from explicitly “political” discussions, will be systematically biased toward conflict. We find little evidence that these effects can be attenuated by emphasizing deliberative norms. However, conflict averse individuals are more willing to discuss ostensibly political topics such as the economy, climate change, and racial inequality, despite reluctance to discuss “politics” explicitly. Moreover, they express greater interest in politics when it is defined in terms of laws and policies and debate is deemphasized. Overall, these findings suggest the expectation of conflict may have a self-fulfilling effect, as contexts deemed explicitly “political” will be composed primarily of conflict seekers.

This article is the first comprehensive treatment of countermajoritarian roll call outcomes in the U.S. Senate, 1789–2022. Divergences from majoritarian principles are rooted in part in malapportionment and equal representation by state. Roll calls where a majority of the chamber votes one way while the other side represents most of the U.S. population are frequent across Senate history, depending on the proportion of the population covered by the majority party and the degree of conflict in the agenda. Other departures from majoritarian principles derive from the presence of supermajority requirements within the chamber. Such decision thresholds likewise are prevalent across Senate history, with significant increases since the 1970s. Although the two sources of countermajoritarian potential tend to be mutually reinforcing, under certain conditions they work against one another. The partisan impact varies over time, but in the modern chamber, Republicans have benefited more from Senate countermajoritarianism than have Democrats.

The profession has been increasing efforts to ensure ethical research in politics and international relations (IR) with robust institutional review procedures. But this ethics turn has not been evaluated systematically to date. Drawing on two original datasets that record reporting on the ethical practices of research in key political science and IR journals (2000–18), we analyze how scholars report on ethics of research involving human participants as well as archival, social media, and textual data from the perspective of feminist ethics of care. We find that women report ethics more than men, women and men report on different dimensions of ethics, and these differences are starker at the intersection of gender and method. We identify a new dimension of gender-based inequality in the profession which, we argue, stems from voluntary practices of ethics reporting that persist globally in academic publications. An agreed international standard of reporting research ethics is needed.

Must absolutist states resort to intimidation and coercion to tackle subjects’ disobedience driven by their pursuit of reputation? Since canonical early modern Western thinkers broached but did not solve this question, I turn to the most renowned ancient Chinese Legalist Han Feizi’s understudied account of reputation for answers. Whether as a means or an end, individuals’ pursuit of reputation always challenges the authority of the absolute monarchy that endeavors to centralize state power. Forcefully confronting this pursuit is the barely but only acceptable way for the state to tackle this challenge, as non-confrontational strategies favored by many Western thinkers inevitably fail due to their incompatibility with the logic of political absolutism. Thus, Han Feizi unwittingly exposes the tension between political absolutism and reputation. This exposure adds nuances to his view of human nature and helps us understand how individuals’ morally ambiguous pursuit of reputation obstructs the centralization of state power.

U.S. homesteading has been linked to establishing federal sovereignty over western lands threatened by the Confederacy, foreign powers, and the Indian Wars in the last half of the nineteenth century. However, the bulk of homesteading actually took place in the early twentieth century, long after these threats to federal ownership ceased. We argue that this “late homesteading” was also an effort to enforce federal rights, but in response to a different threat—a legal one. Questionable federal land policies in the late nineteenth century dispossessed massive amounts of Indigenous lands, and exposed the federal government to legal, rather than violent, conflict. Late homesteading was used to make the dispossession permanent, even in cases where a legal defeat eventually occurred. Examining the qualitative evidence, and using data on the universe of individual homesteads and federal land cessions across the 16 western states, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis.

This study addresses the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians “crying wolf” over fake news. Strategic and false claims that stories are fake news or deepfakes may benefit politicians by helping them maintain support after a scandal. We posit that this benefit, known as the “liar’s dividend,” may be achieved through two politician strategies: by invoking informational uncertainty or by encouraging oppositional rallying of core supporters. We administer five survey experiments to over 15,000 American adults detailing hypothetical politician responses to stories describing real politician scandals. We find that claims of misinformation representing both strategies raise politician support across partisan subgroups. These strategies are effective against text-based reports of scandals, but are largely ineffective against video evidence and do not reduce general trust in media. Finally, these false claims produce greater dividends for politicians than alternative responses to scandal, such as remaining silent or apologizing.

Why are democratic publics reluctant to use force against fellow democracies? We hypothesize that the democratic peace in public opinion owes, in large part, to racialized assumptions about democracy. Rather than regime type per se doing the causal work, the term “democracy” inadvertently primes the presumption that target countries are predominantly white. This implicit racialization, in turn, explains the reluctance of the American public to support aggression against fellow democracies, most notably among respondents higher in ethnocentrism who disproportionately drive the democratic peace treatment effect. Two original survey experiments, a large-scale word embedding analysis of English texts, and reanalyses of published studies support this expectation. Our results suggest that the democratic peace in public opinion is, largely, an ethnocentric and racialized peace. The findings hold implications for the role of racism and racialization in foreign policy opinion research generally.

Tens of millions of individuals are displaced due to violence, and most are hosted by other households in their home countries. We ask what motivates people to host the forcibly displaced. We are interested in whether empathy increases the willingness to host but also consider alternative explanations. To explore the correlates of hosting we collected survey data from 1,504 households in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fielded in-depth interviews, and implemented an experiment. We employ a novel strategy to measure hosting behavior, where household characteristics are measured prior to the arrival of displaced persons. We find that households with higher empathy are more likely to host in the 10-month period following the survey. There is no evidence that ethnicity, religiosity, or wealth affect hosting behavior. Results from the experiment suggest that it is difficult to increase hosting propensity in the longer term (4+ months) through simple interventions.

How might the ideas and practices of Global South migrants and activists inform normative frameworks and conceptual repertoires that political theorists and activists bring to bear on questions regarding justice and migration? Taking seriously the call for conceptual innovation to move beyond Eurocentrism this article builds on oral histories collected from refugees and migrants from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan to argue that the concept of haqq raises important questions about the reliance on statist justice in contemporary theorizing about migration ethics and provides insights into alternative ethical concerns. Ideas and practices of haqq foreground social relationships as well as the imbrication of responsibility and entitlement for communities and individuals. Crucially, engagement with haqq helps dislodge assumptions regarding state-enforced rights as universal vehicles of justice. Consequently, different ethical questions and imaginaries become available for consideration that resonate much beyond debates about migration.

To what extent do peers affect criminal behavior? In this article, I study peer effects among ex-combatants in Colombia. Following a theoretical framework that differentiates the impact of economic conditions from that of social networks, I rely on individual-level data on over 16,000 former paramilitaries in Colombia to study the relationship between illegal gold production and recidivism. I show that when the economic benefits of illegal sectors increase, ex-combatants favor criminal activities. More importantly, I show that an increase in wartime peers’ criminality increases an ex-combatant’s criminal activity. I complement these results with the analysis of an original survey about the social connections of ex-combatants and explore the potential effect of tackling wartime networks as a policy to reduce crime after conflicts.