In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Discussant) Abigail Marie Thomas, University of Texas-Austin
• (Discussant) Michael Promisel, Catholic University of America
• (Chair) Susan D. Collins, University of Notre Dame

Session Description:

An unparalleled influence on European thought, Aristotle was a prime target of criticism during the intellectual and political upheavals of early modern Europe. Yet, as we have gained distance from Aristotelianism in recent centuries, his writings have resurfaced as a source of unorthodox insights for understanding, critiquing, and reimagining political life amidst contemporary crises. This panel explores both the potential insights Aristotle can offer to those grappling with contemporary challenges—such as the rise of populist politics and shifting conceptions of gender identity—and the trajectory of Aristotelian moral and political thought in the early modern period, particularly during the Protestant Reformation.

The first two papers analyze contemporary populist politics through Aristotelian lenses. Armando Perez-Gea’s “Aristotle’s Craftsman: Should Lifelong Businessmen Hold Political Office?” considers the rising influence of businessmen in American politics, with figures like Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy. Aristotle’s argument that craftsmen should not hold office due to the deleterious effects of their occupation is familiar to many scholars. However, Perez-Gea highlights a neglected concern in Aristotle: exclusively exercising one kind of rule makes exercising another kind of rule difficult. In the American context, he argues that the rule over individuals who alienated their labor (arche oikonomike) is different in kind from the rule between free and equal citizens (arche politike). A lifelong experience as a businessman can undermine one’s aptitude to serve as a democratic official.

The second paper, Evelyn Behling’s “Aristotle, Populism, and Defining the Political Need for Expertise,” analyzes contemporary populism and anti-populism through Aristotle’s theory of stasis. Aristotle argues that regimes must balance the rule of the many and the few, integrating both “arithmetic” and “proportional” equality. Behling suggests that Aristotle supports roles for expertise in governance but warns against using inequality in one area to justify broader unqualified inequality, as this leads to democratic discontent. Aristotle also advises that the many must recognize the necessity of the few in order to maintain a just regime, offering a challenge to both populists and their critics.

The third paper critically examines contemporary gender trends through Aristotelian thought. Carol Kowara’s “Soft Girls and Trad Wives: Listening for Echoes of Aristotle in Viral Femininity” argues that while there are Aristotelian resonances in these two ideals, Aristotle’s writings on eudaimonia, friendship, and the household reveal significant flaws in both trends. Kowara critiques the “soft girl” ideal for lacking a robust conception of selfhood and the proper ends of human life, and the “trad wife” ideal for failing to recognize family life as a political relationship. She also highlights the hidden labor and wealth behind these trends. She closes by asking whether these trends offer a flawed representation of domestic excellence and non-economic living worth taking seriously.

The fourth paper examines how Aristotelianism contributed to the moral hierarchy that Martin Luther rejected in the 16th century. Haidun Liu’s “Teleology and Hierarchy between Aquinas and Luther” explores Aquinas’ often-misunderstood incorporation of supererogation into a teleological ethics, and how this concept underpinned an axiological hierarchy in which monastic life is superior to lay life, and spiritual pursuits superior to political pursuits. Liu then turns to Luther’s rejection of this hierarchy, and his replacement of the underlying Aristotelian teleology with his ethics of obedience and doctrine of vocation (Beruf). Surprisingly, Luther’s ethics of obedience serves an equalizing role, affirming the equal worth of individuals called to occupy societal stations that appear unequal.

The final paper offers a contrasting perspective on the Reformation’s engagement with Aristotle. Alexander Batson’s “Reconsidering Aristotle in the Reformation: Philip Melanchthon’s Aristotelian Political Philosophy” challenges the view that the Reformers rejected Aristotle, which is based on a narrow focus on a few of Luther’s writings. Batson shows that Aristotle was an essential part of the creation of a new Protestant moral philosophy in the aftermath of religious crisis, especially for the Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon, known as “the Ethicist of the Reformation”. Batson examines how he, through extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, crafted an Aristotelian Protestant moral philosophy that organized Aristotelian definitions of virtue, justice, and passion under recognizable Lutheran terms.

Papers:

Aristotle’s Craftsman: Should Lifelong Businessmen Hold Political Office?
Armando Perez-Gea, Stanford University

Now that the businessman and celebrity Donald Trump is starting his second term, he has brought two high-profile businessmen to help him make government more efficient – Musk and Vivek. This desire to bring businessmen without political experience into government contrasts with Aristotle’s claims that craftsmen should not be allowed to hold office (or even be citizens). While the focus of Aristotle’s arguments is on the physical and mental effects of being a craftsman, I believe that there is another concern found in Aristotle: exclusively exercising one kind of rule can make exercising another kind of rule hard for the ruler. I argue that the kind of rule exercised over individuals who sell their labor (arche oikonomike) is a different kind of rule than the rule between free and equal citizens (arche politike); hence a lifelong experience as a businessman can make it harder to be a good public official.

Aristotle, Populism, and Defining the Political Need for Expertise
Evelyn M. Behling, University of Notre Dame

This paper analyzes contemporary populism and anti-populism using Aristotle’s account in the Politics of the causes of stasis, or intra-regime conflict. Commentators for nearly the last ten years have discussed the rise of populism throughout the world, whether in the forms of anti-EU sentiment, the Trump presidencies in the United States, or farmer or trucker protests in places as differing as Poland, Canada, and India. Whatever forms these populisms take, they have in common a distrust of and backlash against “elites” and “experts” who are considered by populists to wield political power in insufficiently representative ways. Conversely, critics of populism warn of “democratic backsliding” and distrust populist aims, worrying that populists undercut societally necessary forms of expertise. At contest are the meanings of democracy and representation, or what it means for the many to be involved in politics, and conversely, the role of experts in politics, who are few.

In Politics Book Five, Aristotle suggests that regimes which best integrate justice and maintain stability successfully integrate the rule of the many and the few, taking account of both “arithmetic” and “proportional” equality in their views of justice. Yet, akin to the dynamics between contemporary populists and their challengers, integrating these multiple kinds of equality is a fraught endeavor, with many possible pitfalls leading to regime instability caused by both actual and perceived injustice. The paper contends that Aristotle would be in support of political roles for specific expertise, and thus, a political place for the rule of the few, since such expertise is necessary for politics to perform its definitional purposes on his account. He would warn experts, however, not to consider their being unequal in one respect to make them “unequal unqualifiedly,” a misapprehension he attributes to the oligarchs in Politics Book Five. Such a misapprehension promotes in Aristotle’s oligarchs a “grasping for more” of both honor and wealth which in turn promotes just anger in the many democrats. This process of oligarchic overextension is characterized by Aristotle as possibly the greatest spring of intra-regime conflict. At the same time, Aristotle would warn the many to not forget the need for the few for any political order to succeed, encouraging them to welcome the expertise of the few in promoting a just regime. Thus, Aristotle poses challenges both to today’s populists and anti-populists.

Soft Girls and Trad Wives: Listening for Echoes of Aristotle in Viral Femininity
Carol Kowara, University of Chicago

In the last decade, two trends challenging core tenets of first- and second-wave feminism have gained a politically significant following online: the “soft girl” and the “trad wife.” Both aesthetic ideals or movements are heterogeneous and difficult to define, but the former combines a rejection of hustle or “girl boss” culture with an embrace of self-care, leisure, and feminine energy, while the latter adopts traditional gender roles and emphasizes a concern for home-making and sometimes child-rearing. While some “trad wives” present Christian doctrine and the Bible as their guides, this paper considers another source of tradition and asks what harmonies and dissonances the “soft girl” and “trad wife” trends have with Aristotle’s words on women and wives in his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics.

The paper begins by taking stock of similarities in the trends and Aristotle’s thought. For instance, the “soft girl’s” rejection of a life devoted to money-making resonates with Aristotle’s argument that money cannot be the ultimate purpose of a human life at the start of the Ethics. Likewise, the pride and joy “trad wives” appear to take in contributing to their households by producing goods within the home (or on their property) and caring for their children parallel Aristotle’s remark that virtuous husbands and wives “enjoy” “assist[ing] each other by putting their special [functions] into the common enterprise” (NE 1162a20-24, transl. Reeves).

However, while there are clear Aristotelian resonances in the “soft girl” and “trad wife” ideals, Aristotle’s writings on eudaimonia, friendship, and marital rule reveal significant flaws in both trends. The “soft girl,” for example, seems to lack a robust understanding of what the self is and, as a result, in many cases ends up espousing thinly veiled consumerism or egoism as self-care. If “soft girls” do not consider what their ultimate purpose in life might be, they may end up pursuing ends that, like careerism, also do not make them happy or better friends to themselves. Similarly, some “trad wives” seem to argue that wives should simply submit to their husbands in all cases, but Aristotle’s portrait of marriage as a political relationship calls for wives to exercise virtue and look out for their own advantage as well as their husbands’.

Towards the end of the paper, I consider how the leisured life of contemplation in Aristotle’s texts, the carefree spirit of the “soft girl,” and the aesthetic kitchen productions of the “trad wife” depend on wealth acquired through slave labor, a husband, or social media productions. Some commentators see this tension as a reason to read the “soft girl” and “trad wife” as expressions of dissatisfaction with late-stage capitalism. I add another angle to this discussion by suggesting that both feminine ideals can be seen as aspirational portraits of lives imbued with Aristotle’s praise of household management and subordination of wealth acquisition to it. I close by pondering the popularity of the “soft girl” and “trad wife” and the possibility that they present, in a flawed way, a kind of domestic excellence and prioritization of homelife worth taking seriously.

Reconsidering Aristotle in the Reformation: Melanchthon’s Political Philosophy
Alexander Batson, University of Texas at Austin

The Reformation’s legacy in the history of political thought has been mischaracterized by the myth that the Protestant reformers jettisoned Aristotle. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is true that Luther fulminated against the philosopher as “antithetical to the Gospel”. But Luther was an outlier. While he issued these fiery critiques, his esteemed colleague Philip Melanchthon was just down the hall at the University of Wittenberg, not only lecturing on Aristotle, but writing lengthy commentaries on the Ethics and Politics. In a series of works completed between 1529 and 1550, Melanchthon crafted a distinctly Protestant moral philosophy which rested upon foundational Aristotelian assumptions about virtue, the passions, and human nature. And as the most influential figure in the development of Lutheran university culture, Melanchthon stands as the origin point of a robust tradition of Protestant Aristotelian moral philosophy which dominated northern European intellectual life for the next two centuries.

Co-sponsored by Division 59: Education Politics and Policy

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Chair) Beatriz Magaloni, Stanford University
• (Presenter) Agustina S. Paglayan, UCSD
• (Presenter) Omar Wasow, UC Berkeley
• (Presenter) Robert A. Blair, Brown University
• (Presenter) Steven Levitsky, Harvard University
• (Presenter) Pablo Beramendi, Duke University

Session Description:

Western countries are experiencing a potentially defining moment in human history: Will liberal democracy survive the current resurgence of authoritarianism? Will liberal education survive the ongoing culture wars and the intensification of indoctrination efforts? Or are these recent trends heralding the emergence of a new post-liberal world order?

Join Agustina Paglayan (UCSD), Beatriz Magaloni (Stanford), Margaret Levi (Stanford), Omar Wasow (UC Berkeley), Robert Blair (Brown), and Steven Levitsky (Harvard) for a timely and provocative discussion of Paglayan’s recent book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education (Princeton University Press, 2024) — and what it suggests about these questions and challenges.

“Raised to Obey” offers a powerful lens to reconsider the origins of one of society’s most universal institutions — primary education — and its relationship to crises of power, governance, and social order. Drawing on new evidence from two centuries of education provision in Europe and the Americas, Paglayan demonstrates that elites expanded access to primary education not to promote equality, democracy, industrialization, or even a common national identity, but to instill unquestioned obedience to the state and its laws. The book shows that efforts to increase the state’s capacity to forge social order through indoctrination are particularly likely to intensify when elites face mass unrest, internal threats against the status quo, and fears of a breakdown of social order. Today, the original objective of disciplining children remains at the core of how most schools operate. This unsettling truth challenges conventional wisdom about the relationship between the state, democracy, and modern education, and sheds light on the enduring role of schools as tools of social control rather than equality or liberation.

In this panel, a diverse group of scholars will explore the forward-looking implications of “Raised to Obey” for perennial and pressing debates about politics and power: How does the book reshape our understanding of the sources of political power? What insights does it offer for debates about democratic erosion and why democracies often fall short of delivering progressive redistribution? What lessons does it offer for civil society organizations and foreign actors seeking to advance democracy and consolidate peace in post-conflict settings? How does “Raised to Obey” help us understand and respond to today’s curriculum and culture wars, debates over indoctrination, and attacks on academic freedom? Finally, what insights does it offer for the future of education systems? Can education systems move beyond their origins in social control to fulfill their potential as tools for strengthening democracy and promoting equality?

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Chair) Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University
• (Presenter) Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• (Presenter) Daniel P. Carpenter, Harvard University
• (Presenter) Margaret Weir, Brown University
• (Presenter) Pepper D. Culpepper, University of Oxford

Session Description:

The United States is widely recognized as the quintessential consumer society, one where huge companies like Walmart and Amazon are famous for enticing customers with cheap goods and speedy delivery. In this author meets critics panel, scholars of American political development and comparative political economy (Daniel Carpenter, Pepper Culpepper, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Margaret Weir) discuss Kathleen Thelen’s new book “Attention, Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy” (Princeton University Press 2025). This book traces the origins and evolution of American retail capitalism from the late nineteenth century to today, comparing developments in the United States with those in Europe. By placing the rise of America’s Amazon economy in a broad comparative-historical context, Attention, Shoppers! reveals how large discount retailers have successfully exploited a uniquely permissive regulatory landscape to create a shopper’s paradise built on cheap labor and mass consumption.

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Chair) Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University
• (Presenter) Susan C. Stokes, University of Chicago
• (Presenter) Sheri Berman, Barnard College, Columbia University
• (Presenter) Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Clemson University
• (Presenter) Jennifer McCoy, Georgia State University
• (Presenter) Murat Somer, Ozyegin University Istanbul

Session Description:

Book: Depolarizing Politics and Saving Democracy (Forthcoming, Princeton University Press)

Authors:

• Jennifer McCoy, Regent’s Professor of Political Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, and Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Murat Somer, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, and Senior Democracy and Development Fellow, Central European University, Budapest

The roundtable features leading scholars of democracy who will comment on a forthcoming book by Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, Depolarizing Politics and Saving Democracy. The discussants will reflect on the book’s findings and proposals for overcoming polarization and addressing democratic backsliding given their own expertise.

The book addresses the rise of pernicious polarization – the division of society into mutually antagonistic political camps — in democracies around the globe and the question of how to understand and address it. The book argues that problems of democracy and pernicious political polarization are closely interrelated. The solutions to pernicious polarization lie in democratic politics, democratic reforms and what the authors call democratic remaking.

The book posits that four fault lines of polarization are critical to address in contemporary cases of extreme political polarization: national identity and belonging; liberal versus majoritarian democracy; income and wealth inequality; and competing visions of the social contract. The book then presents two potential strategies, active depolarization and transformative repolarization, and five principles to address polarization: cross-cutting effect principle; inclusive incentives principle; non-pernicious incentives principle; positive-sum outlook principle; grounded politics and coalition-building principle. It draws on historical and contemporary experiences of a wide range of countries.

The book then addresses two crucial cases of pernicious polarization today – the backsliding wealthy, established democracy of the United States and the autocratizing electoral democracy of Turkey. It concludes with a review of the toolbox of strategies and interventions identified in the empirical chapters and the need for innovative solutions to remaining crucial challenges for today’s polarized democracies. the role of International and Comparative Political Economy in understanding and navigating the disrupted world.

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Chair) Jane Mansbridge, Harvard Kennedy School
• (Presenter) James S. Fishkin, Stanford University
• (Presenter) John Gastil, Pennsylvania State University
• (Presenter) Jane Suiter, Dublin City University
• (Presenter) Mark E. Warren, University of British Columbia
• (Presenter) Cristina Lafont, Northwestern University

Session Description:

Fishkin’s new book Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? (Oxford University Press) argues that deliberation, if sufficiently frequent and widespread, could address two fundamental problems facing democracies around the world: extreme partisan polarization and the manipulation of public opinion clouding public will formation.

Democracy needs to make a connection between “the will of the people” and what is actually done. This connection has broken down in a world of propaganda, social media enclaves, misinformation, and manipulation. Meanwhile our political divisions seem ever more intractable and our democracies ever more ungovernable. Based on decades of applying and perfecting methods of deliberative democracy in countries around the world, Fishkin argues that deliberative democracy can have surprisingly positive effects on all these problems. Fishkin’s method of Deliberative Polling has been applied 150 times in countries around the world. In this book, Fishkin synthesizes the results and shows how they can be applied to help resolve many of democracy’s seemingly intractable challenges. Deliberative democracy can be applied to major national and local decisions, it can spread in the schools, it can be used by corporations, it can make for more meaningful ballot propositions, it can help reform the primary system, it can scale with technology, it can be incorporated into innovative constitutional processes (as in the Law on Deliberative Polling in Mongolia). Furthermore, it can help reform electoral democracy, help preserve the guardrails that protect the electoral process, and provide key policy inputs in almost every contested issue area from climate change to the rights of minorities. Fishkin ends by laying out a vision for how to combine elections with deliberation and build a more deliberative society—one that cures our extreme partisanship and leads to substantive dialogues that foster mutual respect and more engaged voters.

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Chair) Michael Tesler, UC Irvine
• (Presenter) Vincent L. Hutchings, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• (Presenter) Ashley E. Jardina, The University of Virginia
• (Presenter) Antoine J. Banks, University of Maryland
• (Presenter) Maneesh Arora, Wellesley College

Session Description:

Anti-minority rhetoric in American politics has grown more overt. What were once fringe comments on Stormfront have now become typical campaign appeals from many mainstream political elites. If there was ever a doubt, this is a poignant reminder that the boundaries of what is “acceptable” and “unacceptable” to say and do are fluid and socially enforced. In “Parties and Prejudice”, Arora argues that the interaction between social norms and party politics determines whether overt prejudice is accepted by the public and what the political consequence of such speech will be. Moreover, identifiable historical and contemporary factors have led anti-minority messages against certain groups to be more socially acceptable, and more electorally advantageous, than others. Using a case study approach that incorporates dozens of experiments, survey data, T.V. news coverage, and real-world examples, “Parties and Prejudice” shows that norms of acceptable political rhetoric have developed in distinct ways for Black, Muslim, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Inegalitarian norms are also more strongly engrained in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party. This panel brings together distinguished scholars of race, public opinion, and political psychology to critically evaluate this book and discuss directions for future research.

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Presenter) Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University
• (Presenter) Trevor Brown, Cornell University
• (Presenter) Lilliana Hall Mason, Johns Hopkins University
• (Presenter) Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University
• (Presenter) Katherine J. Cramer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• (Chair) Jack Lucas, University of Calgary

Session Description:

For most of American history and as recently as 35 years ago, both political parties attracted support from both rural and urban areas of the country, but since the late 1990s, rural places nationwide have increasingly supported the Republican Party, and urban and suburban places, the Democratic Party. In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown take a macro-historical, developmental approach to explaining the emergence and entrenchment of the rural-urban political divide. Drawing on decades of place-based and individual-level survey data, as well as interviews with 60 local party leaders and former elected officials from rural areas, they reveal the impact of three processes: the rise of place-based economic inequality, the perception of elite overreach, and conservative mobilization. The authors show how the rural-urban divide threatens the health of democracy–in Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they probe the capacity of public policy and political organizing to mitigate it. The book bridges two broad research traditions—historical institutionalism and political behavior—and offer fresh ways to think about the causes and consequences of polarization. In this panel, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown will provide an overview of their new book, followed by critical reflections from leading scholars in the study of urban-rural politics, political polarization, political representation, and place-based social identities.

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Chair) Vinicius G. Rodrigues Vieira, IDP University
• (Presenter) Rogers M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania
• (Presenter) Christina Davis, Harvard University
• (Presenter) Ashutosh Varshney, Brown University
• (Presenter) Sener Akturk, Koç University

Session Description:

How does the definition of peoplehood shape the rise of far-right populism along with distribution of political power between ethnic and racial groups, on the one hand, and economic sectors, on the other? The book, Shaping Nations and Markets: Identity Capital, Trade, and the Populist Rage (Routledge Series in Nationalism and Ethnicity, 2024), offers a theoretical framework to unpack the complex relationships arising from the political upheaval that has been storming democracy in both developed and developing nations since the last decade. Therefore, the work contributes to answer the following question outlined in the theme statement: “What can political science tell us about the roots of division and disorder today?”

In a nutshell, by employing a mixed-method approach that brings together regression analysis and elite interviewing along with archival research, the book argues that ethnic, racial, and religious cleavages ground competing stories of peoplehood in the form of narratives of national identity. Hence, minorities or vanishing majorities have incentives to increase or at least keep their identity capital—that is, the form of power that stems from their recognition as members of the nation. Ownership of identity capital, in turn, is contingent upon the centrality that a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group has in a story of peoplehood that set the parameters for defining who belongs to a given nation regardless of formal rules of citizenship.

The empirical focus lies on the struggles about nationalism and economic globalization that have been taking place since the onset of the 21st century in Brazil, India, and the United States and culminated in the ascent of leaders like Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump to power. In addition, the book brings evidence on shadow cases that explores how struggles of peoplehood and power linked to the concept of identity capital explain Brexit, Mexico’s left-wing populism under Lopez Obrador, the patterns of populism in the European Union, and the lack of meaningful far-right movements in party politics in Canada. Finally, the book generalizes the argument beyond the main and shadow cases by identifying through linear models that the higher the degree of ethnic fragmentation of a country, the higher the chances of the same nation to elect a populist leader.

The book findings indicate that populism should be understood as the process through which identity capital is mobilized and, hence, narratives of national identity and stories of peoplehood are contested. So, more than discontent with the redistributive effects of economic globalization, the rise of Bolsonaro, Modi, and their populist counterparts in the Global North – particularly Trump in the United States – results from the mobilization of specific ethnic, racial, and religious segments with the aim of changing longstanding narratives of national identity. The transformation of what it means to be Brazilian, Indian, and American, in turn, empowers certain social groups and economic sectors over others.

In the case of Brazil, there is a high correlation between economic sectors, such as agribusiness, which concentrate most non-white workers (who represent the Brazilian ideal of racial diversity, now strongly contested by Evangelicals who want a Christian-centric nation) and the pursuit of liberalization, which nevertheless failed. In India, Hindu-dominated regions backed liberalizing interests, an expression of the affinities between Hindutva and neoliberalism. In the United States, since the early 2000s there has been a growing association between whiteness and opposition to trade liberalization – seen in the growing nationalist-protectionist rhetoric associated with a white-centric discourse and opposition to a multicultural America.

The panel brings together the author (Rodrigues Vieira) and critics of the book from different perspectives. Smith, who wrote extensively about stories of peoplehood, will discuss the theoretical framework and the concept of identity capital, as well as its application to the American case. Being a major specialist in trade politics, Davis shall focus on the controversial claim that identity shapes commercial preferences as much as political institutions and organized interests. Varshney will debate the findings related to India, while Akturk will assess the case selection and the use of the literature on nationalism the book makes. With this composition, the panel therefore intends to contribute to enlighten the understanding of power transformations that stem from disputes around competing stories of peoplehood as set in the congress main theme.

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Chair) Thomas Zeitzoff, American University
• (Presenter) Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College
• (Presenter) Alexandra Arons Siegel, University of Colorado Boulder
• (Presenter) Joshua A. Tucker, New York University
• (Presenter) Carly Nicole Wayne, Washington University in St. Louis
• (Presenter) Tamar Mitts, Columbia University

Session Description:

This Author Meets Critics panel will discuss Tamar Mitts’s Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025). Mitts’s book examines the question of how extremist groups adapt and persist in the face of increasing content moderation efforts. Using original data from over a hundred hate and militant organizations, it reveals how inconsistencies in platform policies create “safe havens” where dangerous organizations can organize, recruit, and mobilize. By examining the broader online ecosystem rather than focusing on individual platforms, the book sheds light on the unintended consequences of current strategies to regulate harmful content. The panel will engage with Mitts’s findings and explore the broader issue of moderating online platforms in a digital age. How can governments and tech companies balance free speech, censorship, and security? What are the possible downstream effects of current strategies, and what approaches are more or less likely to be effective? Featuring experts in American, Comparative, and International Politics, as well as social media, misinformation, and political violence, this panel brings together leading voices in the field for an engaging and timely discussion on one of today’s most persistent global challenges.

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

• (Chair) Ryan D. Griffiths, Syracuse University, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
• (Presenter) David T. Smith, University of Sydney
• (Presenter) Stephen M. Saideman, Carleton University
• (Presenter) Laia Balcells, Georgetown University
• (Presenter) R. Joseph Huddleston, Seton Hall University

Session Description:

There is a growing interest in a national divorce between Red State America and Blue State America. In February 2023, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that “We need a national divorce…We need to separate by red states and blue states.” Although this controversial comment by a sitting member of Congress received criticism, Taylor Greene’s pronouncement does resonate with a sizable percentage of the American electorate. Recent movements like Yes California have called for a national divorce along political lines. A recent Axios poll shows that 20% of Americans favor a national divorce. These trends show a sincere interest in American secession, and they will likely increase in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election.

Proponents of secession typically draw on three arguments. First, Red and Blue America have irreconcilable differences, and, like a failed marriage, the best way forward is to recognize those differences and separate. Second, Americans have a legal and normative right to secession. Third, America is just too big, and splitting it into smaller and more manageable units would make for healthier politics.

The thesis of this book is that these arguments are not only incorrect, but that secession is the wrong solution to the problem of polarization. Red and Blue America are not neatly sorted and geographically concentrated. Splitting the two parts would require a dangerous unmixing of the population. Rather than focus on national divorce as a solution, the better course of action is to seek common ground. The aim of the book is to disabuse readers of the belief that secession will fix America’s problems.

The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work will be published as a trade book with Oxford University Press in 2025. It is aimed at a generalist audience and designed to influence public debate. The author brings to the discussion an expertise on how secession works globally.

There will be five panelists for this Author Meets Critics roundtable. They are all experts on secession and/or American politics. Core themes in the panel include American polarization, conflict, and identity.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Matthew Kavanagh, Georgetown University
• (Discussant) Charley Ellen Willison, Cornell University
• (Discussant) Ashley M. Fox, SUNY at Albany

Session Description:

In times of crisis and political upheaval around the globe, governance and health policy implementation become one of the battlegrounds for defining belonging, justice, and the state’s legitimacy and ability to respond to citizen need. Global disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the stark inequalities embedded in health systems everywhere, underscoring how public goods are often unevenly distributed amid rising distrust, polarization, economic upheaval, and political disruption. The politics of health often extend beyond moments of crises, and in their aftermath continue to be shaped by narratives of power, inclusion, and exclusion that vary across borders, communities, and across time.

This panel examines how health policies reflect and reshape broader political divisions rooted in citizenship, generational priorities, and structures of government. Whether addressing cross-border health inequities, demographic pressures on welfare systems, or multi-level implementation challenges, the panel highlights how states and institutions both respond to and perpetuate structural inequities. In doing so, it also underscores how health governance can become a site for reimagining power and citizenship, revealing opportunities for, and barriers to, more inclusive and effective health policy and promotion.

Lucia Vitale’s paper examines how “Assembled Access” shapes cross-border health citizenship in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Her research reveals how fragmented care systems force marginalized populations to manage their own medical coordination, leading to incoherence, inconsistency, and deeper inequities in healthcare access, reinforcing exclusionary frameworks of political inclusion and exclusion.

Jacques et al. investigated how aging populations influence political priorities and healthcare spending. Using survey data and party positions across seven countries, they show that older voters favor parties perceived as health care leaders, prompting parties to prioritize health care. This politically driven focus on health care contributes to rising public expenditure.
Deviana Dewi’s research on Indonesia’s stunting reduction policy highlights how weak multi-level coordination limits the reach of interventions. Her work emphasizes the importance of translating national strategies into local action by improving horizontal and vertical governance, demonstrating that effective public health policies require not only strong design but also coordinated implementation.

Emma Willoughby’s historical analysis of Vietnam’s market governance shows how the state shifted from controlling populations to accommodating informal enterprises during economic reforms. Her work illustrates how “fence-breaking” behavior redefined governance, highlighting the state’s adaptation to grassroots economic activity and how market reforms reshaped the relationship between citizens and the state.

Rachel Kulikoff explores how model-based health data, such as infant mortality rates (IMR), affect political science research. She shows how differences in estimation methods and regional smoothing can influence findings, making causal claims about regime transitions and health outcomes more complex. Her research underscores the importance of considering proximate causes and data limitations.

Collectively, these papers demonstrate how health governance serves as a lens for understanding political contestation and transformation amid crises. By examining how states allocate resources, navigate competing interests, and address—or exacerbate—inequities, the panel illustrates the ways in which health policies both shape and are shaped by power dynamics. This discussion enriches ongoing debates about the capacity of political institutions to foster resilience, accountability, and collective well-being in an era of heightened global uncertainty and conflict. Ultimately, the panel invites reflection on how reimagining governance in the health sector can illuminate pathways toward more equitable and inclusive political systems.

Papers:

The Borders of Health Citizenship

Lucia Vitale, University of California, Santa Cruz

Traditionally, we’ve considered access to health services in a siloed approach, with voices in global health highlighting transnational trends in non-state service provision, and social policy experts underlining the national patterns of state-provided health care. Despite these useful contributions, local health systems often require that individuals on the margins navigate a fragmented mix of health services, sometimes across national borders, in order to piece together some semblance of primary health care access.

Methods: This project uses the case of the Dominican Republic (DR)-Haiti border because the health effects of migration, securitization, and fragmentation are experienced by border residents in a heightened manner. Tension over migration and its intersections with climate change and issues of global health security mire the border context, as border residents are made to navigate an array of health care providers in order to piece together some semblance of primary health care access for themselves and their families. Sharing vastly diverse histories, political climates, and levels of development, these tensions are concentrated in the border area by virtue of sharing a small island land mass.

This project asks: How much access do different groups residing in the DR-Haiti border area have to health services?; How do these different groups access health care?; and, What does this style of access say about the right to health in our modern era?

To answer the above questions, this project collects data at three scales—the transnational, national, and local. This constellation of sites sets up three important comparisons: (1) a subnational comparison between northern and southern border sites, (2) a cross-border comparison, and (3) a comparison between health services that originate at the national and transnational scales. Local-scale data collection included two qualitative methods: focus groups and interviews; and one quantitative method: an original survey measuring health care access. National and transnational scale data collection relies on semi-structured elite and expert interviews. By triangulating between these multiscalar sites and between different forms of data, this research design aims to come to terms with a wide range of health experiences and outcomes in contexts that are variegated by a wide range of transnational, national and local influences.

Findings: This article defines a new conceptual framework for assessing health care access in our modern era, characterized by increasing migration, the securitization of health policy, and the fragmentation of health systems. This new concept, “Assembled Access,” explains a new era of health care in which those on the margins, with varying levels of success, assemble health services in a way that comprises a bottom-up access to health care. By centering the ways in which vulnerable populations navigate health systems rather than the systems themselves, “Assembled Access” provides a novel framework to analyze access to health care in practice.

Conclusions: “Assembled Access” has implications for the coherence, consistency, and equitability of care that patients receive. (1) Incoherence- By moving between a multitude of providers for preventative care, diagnostics, treatments, and follow-up visits, patients are tasked with understanding the intricacies of their medical cases, relaying that information to each new provider, and safekeeping any hard copies of lab results. Lapses in this chain of communication, or misunderstandings between patient and doctor can be dangerous for those that obtain care through “Assembled Access.”

(2) Inconsistency-This type of access additionally has implications for the consistency of care that patients receive. By piecing together health services when and where they are available, the unreliability of any one service in a patient’s assemblage is important to the overall ability to access health care. With changing NGO and foreign aid priorities, externally provided care can be inconsistently accessible by patient populations when these providers either withdraw services from one area to focus on another, or when they shift health priorities from one type of care to another. Strategic border management additionally makes care less consistently available by intermittently closing off care to outsiders.

(3) Inequitability- Most importantly, “Assembled Access” has implications for equity of care. By off-loading the responsibility of organizing care from the systems that provide health services to marginalized populations, health care access in the modern era is made more inequitable. Rather than health systems themselves taking on the responsibilities of maintaining health records, communicating between providers, finding care, and directing treatment plans, marginalized populations instead take on these additional organizational burdens.

Aging and Growing Health Care Costs: The Political Pathway
Olivier Jacques, University of Montreal, School of Public Health; Sharon Baute, University of Konstanz; Marius R. Busemeyer, University of Konstanz; David Weisstanner, University of Aarhus

There is an ongoing debate concerning the effect of population ageing on health care expenditures. On the one hand, since per capita health care costs tend to rise exponentially in old age, total health care costs grow mechanistically with the rising the share of the elderly in the population. Moreover, ageing decreases GDP growth, which favours an expansion of the share of health care spending relative to the economy. On the other hand, older individuals today are in much better health than previous generations were, thereby reducing the impact of population ageing on health care costs. Additionally, other factors, such as the inflation of the costs of health technology, have a significantly larger effect on health care costs than ageing.

However, this debate has not considered a crucial political channel. We contend that ageing leads to health care cost growth because older respondents are more likely to prioritize health care over other priorities, to vote for the parties to which they give the issue ownership of health care and for parties that prioritize health care.

Our paper fills a significant gap in the literature regarding individuals and political parties’ preferences for health care. Previous studies on public opinion towards health care expenditures rely on unconstrained questions about health care and are unable to measure the trade-offs between health care and other policies. Hence, previous studies have not found that age is related to preferences for health care spending (Jordan 2010; Naumann 2018; Vallée-Dubois 2022). Moreover, very few studies have analyzed parties’ positioning on health care (e.g. Green-Pedersen and Jensen 2019) and which groups of voters react to parties’ proposals about health care.

We test our argument on three levels of analysis. Firstly, we rely on original survey experimental techniques to measure priorities between health care and other social policies. We conducted an original survey in June 2024 with representative samples in four countries among 8000 respondents. Using this survey, we show that older respondents are likely to prioritize health care when facing a situation of trade-offs between health care and other priorities and are more likely to vote for the parties that they perceive as the best to manage the health care system, that is, parties with issue ownership of health care.
Next, we rely on the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) to extract parties’ positions on health care in seven countries over several decades. We analyze if an aging population correlates with more attention paid to health care in a party system. As a third step, we pair this dataset with national election polls, collected by the World Political Cleavages and Inequality database (Gethin et al., 2022). This enables us to analyze if older respondents are more likely to vote for parties that give more attention to health care.

Our study has important political implications. Validating our argument would involve that as the population gets older, parties are more likely to prioritize health care over other public expenditures, thereby contributing to a politically driven mechanism of growing health care costs.

The Politics of Implementing a Multi-Sectoral Policy in a Decentralized Context

Deviana Wijaya Dewi, Johns Hopkins University

Nutrition has gained global traction, with the Sustainable Development Goals now including a focus on ending all forms of malnutrition by 2030 and the declaration of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016–2025). The uncomfortable question is not so much why conditions are bad but why they have not improved, despite the significant knowledge gained over the years. Stunting, a form of chronic child malnutrition, serves as a key indicator of poverty and underdevelopment across countries. The Lancet 2013 series identifies ten essential interventions to reduce stunting, which could lead to a 20% reduction in stunting if 90% of the target population were reached. Indonesia has implemented many of these recommended nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions. Yet, why did the stunting rate remain alarmingly high, placing Indonesia among the 34 countries contributing to 90% of the global burden of stunting between 2010 and 2013?
The primary issue lies in the lack of coordination across existing programs at various levels of government, resulting in limited coverage of interventions for the target population groups. This highlights the need for effective policy implementation that moves beyond the “what” — technical knowledge — to the “how” of nutrition governance. As Bernard Schaffer aptly stated, “Policy is what it does,” meaning a well-designed policy can only be judged by its implementation and the tangible changes it produces on the ground. Stunting has gained political commitment and been a policy priority for Indonesia since the launch of the National Strategy to Accelerate Stunting Reduction in 2018. This strategy has been implemented in a phased manner to cover all 514 districts by 2022. Addressing a cross-cutting issue such as stunting requires multi-sectoral (horizontal) coordination among ministries and agencies, as well as vertical coordination among different levels of government to translate national policies into local-level actions.
This paper aims to explore these processes by examining the political and institutional aspects of nutrition policy implementation in Indonesia. In addition to desk reviews, data were collected through elite interviews with 15 stakeholders at the national level in Jakarta and 39 stakeholders at the sub-national level in two districts: Pandeglang and Southeast Maluku. The paper’s contribution lies in enhancing understanding of how to translate national-level policies into local-level implementation, particularly when horizontal and vertical coordination are essential.

The Use of Health Data in Political Science: Endogeneity, Models, and Mechanisms

Rachel Kulikoff, University of Michigan

When political scientists use public health data, three challenges hamper researchers’ ability to make accurate empirical claims and advance theoretical arguments. First, researchers overlook the endogeneity of raw health data, which is shaped by the political actors who produce and share it. Second, researchers lack an understanding of the complexity behind the collection, processing, and modeling of that raw data. Third, researchers fail to account for the causal mechanisms that are more proximate to health outcomes. This paper will show that these problems are consequential in political science research and argue that researchers can implement best practices to mitigate the issues.

For example, one of the key variables used to understand the impact of democracy on health is infant mortality rate (IMR). IMR seems ideal as a dependent variable, because it is available across countries and over time, and because one can easily download a clean dataset. However, politics can drive IMR data collection just as much as IMR itself. That is, if there are systematic differences in data quality by regime type, IMR might look relatively worse in democracies because they are better at collecting and sharing data than autocracies. Democracies are known to be more transparent in data sharing than autocracies, and their collection of birth and death data in vital records systems is far more complete.

Moreover, all IMR “data” used in political science research are actually estimates generated from models, and therefore the analytical choices made by these modelers can influence political science conclusions. For example, one prominent IMR model uses lag-distributed income, a function of GDP, in predicting IMR; thus, empirical strategies attempting to relate GDP to IMR in political science papers would be tautological. Additionally, that model smooths estimates over space and time, meaning that country-year estimates of IMR are influenced by other countries in their region. This smoothing could make it more difficult to detect changes in IMR after a discrete democratization event. At least two reputable teams model IMR, the UN’s Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (IGME) and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Although there is broad correlation between these two estimates, both the underlying philosophies and some country-specific estimates vary greatly between the two groups.

Relating health outcomes to politics also necessitates considerations of proximate causes: what aspects of democracies or democratization might influence health outcomes? These more proximate causes might mediate any relationship that exists between regime transition and IMR. For example, in Global South contexts, big decreases in IMR may be explained by increased access to bed nets to prevent malaria while in countries that are more developed, prenatal care and decreases in preterm birth might be more proximate.

These mistakes not only may account for the reason why research on regime type and population health outcomes is equivocal, but also apply to a broad range of health data. This paper will argue that in using health data, political scientists should consider the political endogeneity of the data underlying their health estimates, the complexity of health data models, and the causal mechanisms proximate to health outcomes. It will also make recommendations for how to make more effective use of health data, in light of these challenges.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Debra Javeline, University of Notre Dame
• (Discussant) Erin Sikorsky, Center for Climate and Security

Session Description:

The climate crisis is fundamentally reshaping how we will understand international relations and state behavior in the 21st century. Traditional frameworks for analyzing power, cooperation, and governance were developed in an era when environmental stability could be taken for granted. Yet as we enter deeper into the Anthropocene, climate change is transforming the material foundations of international politics – from critical resource supplies to the viability of human settlements. In line with the 2025 APSA theme of “Reimagining Politics, Power, and Peoplehood in Crisis Times,” this panel explores how the climate crisis intersects with and disrupts core dynamics of international politics. The papers examine how states are adapting their approaches to resource security, how the basis of international power may shift in a warming world, how climate cooperation is complicated by great power competition, and how climate-driven migration could reshape democratic governance. Together, they reveal the importance of rethinking many concepts and relationships in an international system facing new constraints and imperatives as the climate crisis unfolds.

Papers:

Power Shifts in the Anthropocene?

Tanisha Fazal, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Page Fortna, Columbia University

The climate crisis is the existential problem of our time. But the field of international relations has been slow to begin grappling with what it will mean for relations among states, and perhaps for the international system itself. This paper considers the implications of climate change for a fundamental concept in, and component of, international politics: power. Beginning with material power, we discuss how climate change will affect power under two boundary scenarios: a world of unmitigated climate catastrophe, and a world of rapid technological change away from fossil fuels. We consider implications for the main dimensions of power: economic, demographic, and military might, as well as implications for the global distribution of power.

Polarity and International Regimes: Implications for Climate Cooperation

Samuel Houskeeper, Princeton University

Effective climate change mitigation and adaptation will require deep international cooperation regimes. But rising security competition between the US and China and a potential global return to bipolarity or even multipolarity may complicate efforts to construct and maintain international regimes. I argue that there are two channels through which the n-value of polarity and the intensity of security competition between poles affects international cooperation regimes. In the first channel, which has received most attention, poles facing increased security competition will be less likely to cooperate with each other to provide collective goods due to lower trust, heightened focus on relative gains, and heightened focus on short-term security threats. In the second channel, which I focus on, poles facing increased security competition will also have a more difficult time coercing third-party states to comply with the cooperation regime. Greater tensions between poles increases dependence on allies, providing third-party states with exit options and bargaining leverage. In practice, this may mean that the United States or China could be less willing to strain relations with a strategically valuable and environmentally significant actor (such as Indonesia) in order to change its environmental behavior. Although US or Chinese attempts to enforce a global climate change regime are hypothetical, I leverage past cases of cooperation regimes with case studies of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and the ozone protection regime. These cases span both bipolar and unipolar periods and vary along the key explanatory variables of issue area and relative power implications.

Strategic Stockpiling and the Energy Transition

Jeremy L. Wallace, Johns Hopkins University

The international trade order’s disintegration and the pressing nature of the energy transition has turned attention to the politics of physical materials and supply chains. Most analyses in political science mining these veins focus on tariffs and the domestication of production. Yet another avenue for resilient supply is stockpiling. In this analysis, we build on work from agricultural economists (e.g. Williams & Wright 1991) to explore incentives for storing reserves of critical minerals for the energy transition. Whereas uncertainty for agricultural commodities is a function of weather, our analysis investigates supply and demand uncertainties related to trade wars, tariffs, and technological developments.

Climate Change, Migration, and the Future of Democracy

Angela Chesler, University of Pennsylvania

How will climate migration impact democracy in the Anthropocene? Climate change is profoundly shaping the landscape of global migration. Already, environmental shocks uproot over 25 million people a year – more than three times the number of people displaced by war. With an estimated 143 million people displaced by environmental shocks by the year 2050, there is no doubt that climate change will be a key driver of demographic change in the coming decades. Meanwhile, global democracy is in crisis. Focusing on the Global South, this chapter undertakes a theoretical and empirical investigation into how, where, and under what conditions climate-driven migration may threaten democracy as the effects of global warming unfold. To do so, this chapter reviews the literature on environmental migration, identifying the most likely patterns of human movement and demographic shifts resulting from climatic change. Leveraging the extant research on the political consequences of migration, I chart the potential pathways through which climate migration may challenge or advance democratic development in the most vulnerable places. While much of the developing world is ill-equipped to address the challenges of large-scale population movement, demographic transformations also create opportunities for democratic political change.

Co-sponsored by Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Niklas Plaetzer, University of Chicago
• (Discussant) Alyssa Battistoni, Barnard College

Session Description:

In the face of unprecedented climate catastrophe scholars across the environmental humanities including those within political theory have argued for the necessity of constituting a new vision of earth. This desired new vision primarily revolves around how to position the place of the human in environmental devastation. One prominent line has argued for decentering the human experience in climate catastrophe (Chakrabarty, Bennett) to make room for thinking about how we are but one part of a broader earth system that existed long before we did. Decentering the human in our understanding of earth reorients our political visions, and ultimately our actions, so to approach the environmental question from a holistic perspective that honors the environment prior to honoring any economic commitment. For these scholars, the question of economic domination would be resolved through a holistic treatment of the earth system and our place in it. The other prominent line of thinking urges that appealing to the problem of economic domination on a global scale can render quick political action from the grassroots level to address the environmental problem, a problem that is notoriously time-bound.

This paper argues that both approaches face what I call the “addressee problem.” Both appeal to an unknown addressee, a not yet known movement or set of actors who are to take on the work of establishing a path towards building an environmental politics. Both approaches assume such addressee will be global in their orientation. This appeal would be enriched, I argue, by returning a set of actors and moment in time and where a global vernacular about a shared world and earth was lost.

The 1970s marked a turning point in global politics. Often treated as a decade delineating the foreclosure of the end the “global sixties”: an era defined by the ability of several movements from the Civil Rights movement to Black Power, and African and Caribbean anticolonial struggles to speak to one another and to be understood in a shared vernacular about where the locus of their domination lay. The decade also marked the beginning of an era where the recognition of a shared earth became central to debates over how an ever present globalizing economic order should be constituted. The decade has often been referred to as the temporal site of the rise of a modern neoliberal politic, one that has foreclosed the possibility of a kind of grassroots global vernacular and set of movements established in the 1960s, replaced instead by an economic vernacular that established the concept of a shared earth through the prism of economic extraction. Amidst this unravelling of grassroots tradition, some activists associated with these movements continued to think about what kinds of politics were necessary for addressing this new vision of earth architected by economic and political global elites.

I turn to two itinerant Black activists known for their work articulating the connection between land, sovereignty, ecology, and labour on a local and global scale between 1967 and 1975: Audley Moore and Pauluu Kamarakafego. I argue that their theories around creating local and global politics amidst the nadir of grassroots global movements reveals a type of grammar they found necessary for establishing a shared vernacular bring an earth bound orientation towards global politics into existence, as well as tracking the difficulty they faced in imagining how to build such a vision. Much of the difficulty arose around appealing to a not-yet known addressee, or one that was in a state of fracture. The issue, they realized, was distinct from creating a people through the container of a nation-state or even through the appeal to a federation. A new vision of what constituted a people needed to created in tandem with creating a new vision of earth.

Papers:

The Greenlash Spiral: Climate Obstruction between Neoliberalism and Neocolonialism

William Callison, Hunter College CUNY

Existing climate models do not factor in a surging global far right. Nor do they assume the recent climate policy rollbacks by centrist and rightwing governments. To the contrary, models for meeting the “new” target of 2.0°C warming are premised on the global spread of social democratic welfarism paired with rapid decarbonization. With the recent victories by far-right parties and course reversals by state-sized asset managers, however, we are not simply diverging from lines on scientific models. We are witnessing successive phases of “greenlash” against the most moderate environmental regulations, often resulting in the removal or deferral of previously agreed targets by nation states and international institutions. In the process, we also see so-called “green capital” showing various shades of brown – that is, deepening its ties to fossil capital and allying itself with the far right. This paper theorizes the trajectories of “greenlash” politics while surveying cases of obstruction in North and South America. By examining the relationship between key actors at the state-capital nexus – such as Elon Musk and Javier Milei – the paper charts the interplay between neoliberal privatization and neocolonial extraction. To counter new forms of greenlash, in short, we need to grasp the evolving relationship between the profit imperative driving fossil capital and the cultural politics deployed by the international far right.

No Humans Involved: The Erasure of Earthwork in Historical and Contemporary Environmentalisms

David Temin, University of Michigan

In December 2022, 196 countries met in Montreal at the Conference of the Parties (COP) on biodiversity. There, they adopted an agenda-setting new framework for biodiversity conservation with the title of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity (GBF) framework. While the GBF has a total of 23 targets, its most significant proposal is target 3, advertised as the “30X30” program or the “Global Deal for Nature” in an echo of Green New Deals proposals. In a nutshell, the 30X30 program calls for governments to give protected status to 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine areas by the year 2030. This paper argues that the 30X30 program rests on erasing the presence, livelihood, and political self-determination of the approximately 1.8 billion people currently inhabiting areas targeted for biodiversity conservation—suggesting that there are “no humans involved” or that their rights and interests are a matter of secondary consideration next to implementing technically correct policy to conserve nature. First, I trace the political function of these ideas indirectly by offering a colonial genealogy of key ideas in these governance proposals, especially notions of saving the “wild” or “wilderness.” Second, I detail claims offered by Indigenous peoples and other communities marginalized by biodiversity conservation (as well as those of ecologists), from which I draw out an anti-colonial orientation rooted in identifying clear systemic connections between racialized capitalist hierarchy and ecological crisis. The paper concludes by suggesting that the erasure of these peoples—often themselves involved in in situ environmental protection—with the political horizon of their eventual further displacement or marginalization also erases a suite of peripheral ecological labor that is or could be a constructive contribution to resolving the ecological crisis, what I call earthwork.

Fossil Power

Elaine L Colligan, University of Chicago

Environmental activists have recently claimed that the root cause of climate change is the “fossil fuel industry,” which acts at every turn to obstruct decarbonization efforts. These claims are framed as critiques of the undue influence of private corporations on the state, or “corporate power.” Yet, a closer look reveals that the “fossil fuel industry” scrambles the categories of “private corporation” and “public state.” What seems at first glance to be a private industry is, in fact, a tentacular conglomerate that is legally, financially and politically dependent on state power. By the same token, modern states are radically reliant on oil and gas infrastructures and commodities: these products maintain a material status quo that sustains daily “public order” and facilitates the policing of borders and governance of populations. As such, although activists are correct to critique the oil and gas industry’s outsized influence on climate policy, my paper argues that their claims open up a much larger question: what is the relationship between modern power and fossil fuels? That iceberg is the object I set out to theorize as “fossil power,” or a historically unprecedented régime of power marked by a co-sustaining relationship between flows of fossil energy, globally mobile capital, and state governmentality. I argue that to get this into view, we must move from the grammar of a Marxist framework centered on the “economic power” of fossil capital to a Foucauldian framework that problematizes the construction of a world based on fossil energy. On the one hand, the fossil fuel industry maintains and reproduces the fossil-fired “technosphere,” the conglomerate of energy infrastructures that make possible both modern sovereignty and biopolitical governance. On the other hand, their continued investment activities, from exploration for new reserves to the maintenance of and re-investment in fossil infrastructure and commodities, reproduce a present that expects a fossil-fired future. Fossil power therefore references not only the historically unique relationship between political power and control over flows of fossil energy that marks contemporary politics, but also the forms of subject formation entailed by the maintenance and reproduction of that world, which I theorize as “fossil rationality.”

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Omar Garcia-Ponce, George Washington University
• (Discussant) Isabel Laterzo-Tingley, University of Texas, Austin
• (Discussant) Regina A. Bateson, University of Colorado – Boulder

Session Description:

Crime and violence pose significant challenges to democratic governance. In many Global South countries, the relationship between insecurity and democracy presents a paradox: as crime and violence threaten citizens’ basic rights, societal responses to these threats can themselves imperil democratic institutions. When faced with persistent insecurity, public demands for swift action can put democracy at risk. For example, citizens may take justice into their own hands, normalize or resort to violence, or support authoritarian leaders who promise security at any cost, even at the expense of democratic freedoms. This panel explores how societies respond to crime and violence, investigating the implications of these responses for democratic institutions, values, and behavior. Drawing on diverse cases and methodological approaches, the papers shed light on how citizens and communities adapt to, resist, and sometimes perpetuate violence within contexts of insecurity.

Using original survey data, Barham and García-Ponce uncover gendered patterns of normalization of violence among youths in the context of Mexico’s drug war, suggesting that prolonged exposure to criminal violence may hinder the development of democratic norms and values in gender-specific ways. Bateson challenges conventional understandings of citizens’ responses to violence by reconceptualizing vigilantism as contentious politics rather than a mere response to state failure. This novel perspective reframes vigilante actions as efforts to build political power and achieve policy goals. The political dimension of vigilantism connects directly to Masullo, Krakowski, and Morisi’s finding that crime exposure in Brazil increases support for extralegal enforcement while leaving broader democratic commitments intact—suggesting that citizens strategically compartmentalize their support for democratic values. Similarly, García-Ponce and Rios-Figueroa provide experimental evidence that Mexican citizens maintain a commitment to democratic ideals despite ongoing security challenges, emphasizing that there is substantial variation in levels of democratic resilience across segments of society. Finally, the panel also addresses practical solutions for strengthening democratic responses to insecurity. Amat, Pinckney, and Henao’s field experiment on nonviolent action training in Venezuela demonstrates that civil society can be equipped with tools to advance democratic change even under severe repression. This finding suggests that appropriate institutional support and training can help channel societal responses to insecurity in ways that reinforce, rather than undermine, democratic values.

Collectively, these papers deepen our understanding of societal responses to crime and violence and the risks they pose to democracy. While the persistence of violence threatens democratic norms and institutions, the papers show that citizens often demonstrate unexpected resilience in their commitment to democracy. By examining both the challenges and opportunities arising from different societal responses to violence, this panel also provides valuable insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to strengthen democratic institutions in the face of security threats.

Papers:

Gender and the Normalization of Violence

Elena Barham, Columbia University; Omar Garcia-Ponce, George Washington University

Youths exposed to environments of pervasive criminal violence and impunity are likely to internalize aggressive behaviors, sometimes normalizing violence as a societal norm or perceiving it as legitimate and necessary. This article explores the gendered dimensions of violence normalization among Mexican youth within the context of the ongoing drug war. Leveraging a nationally representative survey, novel measures of patriarchal norms, and census data, we uncover significant gender-based differences in attitudes toward and acceptance of everyday violence, with males exhibiting a greater tendency to view various forms of violence as acceptable. We examine how these differences are shaped by economic conditions and social norms, emphasizing the influence of patriarchal structures and experiences of violence at both community and individual levels. Our findings shed light on the broader consequences of gendered violence normalization, particularly for social cohesion and the development of democratic norms and values in societies severely affected by crime and violence.

Vigilantism as Contentious Politics

Regina A. Bateson, University of Colorado – Boulder

Vigilantism poses serious threats to human rights, the rule of law, and democratic governance. Yet we still know surprisingly little about when, where, and why vigilantism occurs. Intuitively, vigilantism would seem to be a response to crime, insecurity, and a lack of effective state-provided policing. Indeed, from South Africa to Scandinavia, vigilantes worldwide routinely claim to be acting out of necessity, stepping up to protect their families and their communities because the state has failed to do so. Yet viewing vigilantism exclusively through the lenses of security and state failure or absence creates more puzzles than it resolves. First, why is vigilantism uncorrelated with crime? If insecurity is common, why is vigilantism relatively rare? And why does vigilantism happen in low crime, high rule of law settings like Canada, Japan, or Sweden? Second, if vigilantism is a rational attempt at deterrence or retribution, why are vigilante punishments often risky, costly, and disproportionate to the alleged crime? Third, if vigilantism is the result of state absence or weakness, why is the state present and involved in many acts of vigilantism (either as a target, a perpetrator, or an intervenor), and why do vigilantes frequently seek out and engage with state actors? To resolve these contradictions, this chapter offers a novel theory of vigilantism as contentious politics. In important ways, I argue that vigilantism is similar to other forms of contentious political behavior, like strikes, blockades, and riots. This matters because conceptualizing vigilantism as contentious politics provides a powerful framework for understanding how and why vigilantism occurs. Several concepts from the contentious politics literature are especially relevant. Repertoires of violence offer a new explanation for the seemingly irrational forms of punishment common in vigilantism. Theories of high-risk collective action help us understand why vigilantism is hard to execute, and why it tends to occur in certain settings, but not other places with more acute security problems. And finally, the idea of claims-making sheds light on vigilantes’ otherwise puzzling interactions with the state. Ultimately, the chapter argues that we should be skeptical of vigilantes’ self-proclaimed status as defenders of law and order. Rather, we should view vigilantes as the political actors they are – people who seek to build power and advance their policy objectives through high-risk collective action and processes of claims-making, shaped by pre-existing repertoires of violence and contention.

Crime Exposure, Democratic Decoupling, and Political Attitudes in Brazil

Juan Masullo, Leiden University; Krzysztof Krakowski, King’s College London; Davide Morisi, University of Southern Denmark

How does crime influence democratic attitudes and behaviors? Existing research offers conflicting findings: some argue that crime fosters antidemocratic preferences, while others suggest it increases democratic engagement. To reconcile this paradox, we conceptualize democracy as a multifaceted system with distinct dimensions that can be decoupled. We differentiate between various (anti)democratic preferences tied to core democratic features and argue that contextual exposure to crime may bolster support for undemocratic enforcement measures without diminishing commitment to procedural democracy. To test this, we conducted a large online survey (N=3108) in Brazil, a country deeply affected by diverse forms of crime, using two embedded experimental protocols. Our findings show that crime exposure increases support for unlawful enforcement practices, such as police overreach and vigilante justice, while leaving attitudes toward military coups, executive aggrandizement, and support for democracy as the best form of government unaffected. Understanding the nuanced relationship between crime exposure and (anti)democratic attitudes, especially in contexts where crime is pervasive and exploited for political gain, is crucial for balancing public security with democratic stability. Finding that crime exposure leads people to tolerate breaches of the rule of law to combat crime and punish criminals is deeply concerning. Yet, our findings offer cautious optimism: support for undemocratic enforcement does not necessarily undermine commitment to other tenets of democracy.

A Faustian Bargain? Security vs. Democracy in Contemporary Mexico

Omar Garcia-Ponce, George Washington University; Julio Rios-Figueroa, ITAM

Escalating crime and violence have profoundly disrupted citizens’ daily lives in several Latin American democracies, raising fundamental questions about democracy’s value in the face of insecurity. To what extent are citizens in such contexts willing to sacrifice their democratic freedoms and voting rights in exchange for the promise of safety? Using a conjoint experiment with a nationally representative sample of 2,700 respondents, we examine the relationship between democratic values and security concerns in Mexico. We assess how citizens weigh trade-offs between democratic institutions, security measures, and economic well-being. The conjoint experiment presented participants with pairs of hypothetical societies that varied across five dimensions: income levels, democratic institutions, local security, national security, and due process protections. Our findings reveal that citizens prioritize democracy over income or security, although substantial heterogeneity in preferences is observed across geographic regions, violence levels, sociodemographic characteristics, and political preferences. Notably, hypothetical increases in violence have stronger effects on preferences than potential reductions, and local security concerns outweigh national security considerations. These findings suggest that despite serious security challenges, Mexican citizens maintain a strong commitment to democratic values and institutions.

Does Training Activists in Nonviolent Action Work? Evidence from Venezuela

Consuelo Amat, Johns Hopkins University; Jonathan Pinckney, University of Texas at Dallas; Laura C. Henao, Johns Hopkins University

The mechanisms underpinning success in maximalist nonviolent movements include mobilizing large numbers of people, maintaining nonviolent discipline, forging cross-sectoral alliances, galvanizing defections, and imposing costs on the status quo. It requires strategic planning, as well as combination of peacebuilding and contentious tactics. Can trainings in strategic nonviolent action and peacebuilding make activists better at accomplishing these tasks? In this study we experimentally evaluate the effects of a training program in nonviolent action and peacebuilding through a randomized controlled trial across 12 states in Venezuela that trained more than 700 activists and civic leaders. Using pre and post intervention surveys, social media data from X/Twitter, a novel local events dataset, and in-depth interviews, we show that such training not only significantly increases participants’ knowledge, skills, and confidence in nonviolent action but also led to significant changes in the composition of activist alliances and actions. These findings provide strong evidence that nonviolent action can indeed be learned, and that training programs can increase the capacity of pro-democracy movements in dictatorial settings.

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Thomas Risse, Freie Universität Berlin
• (Presenter) Michael Zuern, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
• (Presenter) David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego
• (Presenter) Stephanie Anderson, University of Wyoming
• (Presenter) Cristiane Carneiro, University of Sao Paulo
• (Presenter) Tanja A. Boerzel, Freie Universität Berlin

Session Description:

Around the globe, liberal ideas and institutions are under pressure. Authoritarian regimes claim superiority of their developmental models referring to their seemingly higher efficiency and effectiveness in fighting pandemics, reducing social inequality, or controlling migration. Likewise, populists of various colors attack liberal elites for their failure to address these societal challenges, accusing them of moral bankruptcy. Postcolonial critics refer to the implicit complicity, if not the root cause of colonial structures, arguing that liberalism has served as justification for violence, exploitation, exclusion, and injustice. Criticism is also voiced by supporters of liberalism. They denounce the liberal hypocrisy of using double standards, highlighting the blatant discrepancy between liberal principles and illiberal practices, as showcased by the border regimes of liberal democracies. In a similar vein, progressive liberals deplore the societal rift and rising inequality produced by neoliberal policies. Liberal ideas, institutions and practices are contested both from within and outside liberalism. The roundtable discusses the various contestations of the liberal script from a global and comparative perspective. It is based on a book series just published by Oxford University Press on “Contestations of the Liberal Script” edited by the SCRIPTS Cluster of Excellence at Freie Universität Berlin and its international partners. Panel participants focus on polarization and radicalization around the globe (Börzel), the type of contestants from a comparative perspective (Zürn), a global public opinion survey on attitudes toward the liberal script (Giebler), deep contestations of the Liberal International Order (Lake), the crisis of US democracy (Anderson), and the contestations of liberalism in Latin America (Lucena).

Co-sponsored by Division 26: Law and Courts

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Rebecca D. Gill, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• (Discussant) Matthew D. Montgomery, Texas Christian University

Session Description:

As democratic institutions around the world face growing public distrust, courts remain both a crucial arbiter of the rule of law and a contested site of political struggle. In an era of increasing polarization, misinformation, and institutional upheaval, how do citizens perceive judicial legitimacy? How do political elites attempt to reshape or capture the judiciary to serve partisan ends? And what role do courts play in either stabilizing or exacerbating democratic backsliding? This panel brings together five papers that explore these urgent questions through empirical studies of judicial independence, descriptive representation, media influence, judicial rhetoric, and partisan polarization.

One paper examines Mexico’s sweeping judicial reforms, in which the country’s judges are now elected, potentially consolidating power rather than fostering true judicial independence. Another paper analyzes how the diversity of state supreme courts influences public perceptions of legitimacy, particularly through intersectional leadership. A third study leverages digital trace data to assess how individuals consume court-related news and how media exposure shapes public trust in the judiciary. A fourth project explores the influence of Supreme Court justices’ own public rhetoric on institutional support, testing whether justices can bolster—or erode—confidence in the Court. Finally, a fifth paper investigates the intersection of partisan identity, affective polarization, and judicial decision-making, revealing how negative partisanship influences reactions to legal rulings.

Together, these papers engage with the 2025 conference theme—Reimagining Politics, Power, and Peoplehood in Crisis Times—by illustrating how judicial institutions are not only shaped by political and social divisions but also actively contribute to them. As courts navigate these turbulent times, understanding public trust, legitimacy, and institutional resilience remains more important than ever. This panel offers a critical examination of how law and courts function in an era of democratic crisis and what this means for the future of governance and justice.

Papers:

Dividends of Diversity: Leadership on State Supreme Court Legitimacy

Rorie L. Spill Solberg, Oregon State University; Eric Waltenburg, Purdue University

Women and people of color are increasingly present in US political institutions, raising the question: Does their growing presence affect attitudes about institutional legitimacy? According to descriptive representation, the legitimacy of institutions should increase as institutions diversify, yet research finds mixed results. Individuals who perceive their group as losing representation have lower levels of support. This dynamic is particularly pertinent for the judiciary, which relies on legitimacy, measured as diffuse support, as the basis for its viability and authority. Without diffuse support, judicial legitimacy is in grave danger.

In See Jane Judge, a piece we published in PGI in 2021, we presented respondents with an audio or video clip of an Indiana state supreme court oral argument. We found that the effects of a White female chief justice were variable. We build on that work here, using the same experimental design, substituting a clip of the California state supreme court where an Asian American woman presided. We will analyze the effect of intersectional leadership and compare it with the findings from our earlier work. We anticipate similar findings in that women will be more supportive as will those who only hear the argument rather than see the justices in action, thus less aware or cued that a woman occupies the center seat compared to men who see the dynamics of oral argument.

Motivated Reasoning and Attitudes toward Supreme Court Controversies

Michael Salamone, Washington State University

The public standing of the United States Supreme Court is in a precarious position. Not only is the Court’s favorability at a historic low point, but attitudes toward the institution are increasingly divided along party lines. Moreover, the conservative, Republican-appointed supermajority on the bench has made controversial decisions on a wide range of issues, from abortion to affirmative action to executive power. This has produced backlash from Democratic elites. While Republicans have welcomed the Court’s new ideological shift, many Democrats (including President Biden) have called for some form of institutional reform to curb the justices’ power.

At the same time, Democrats have been critical of some of the Court’s conservatives for reasons not related to policy. Specifically, Justice Clarence Thomas drew attention when investigative journalists revealed that he had been accepting (and not reporting) gifts from Harlan Crow, a wealthy Republican donor and conservative activist. Similarly, Justice Alito was reported to have taken a luxury trip with Paul Singer, a billionaire whose business was involved in Supreme Court litigation. While Democrats, the ideological opponents of these justices, have called for legislation to enforce an ethics standard that would prevent these apparent financial conflicts of interest, Republicans, the ideological allies of these justices, have argued that this is merely an attempt by the political left to delegitimize the Court.

In this paper, I theorize public response to these two controversies (policy and ethics) are linked by a process of motivated reasoning. Using a survey experiment, I will test the hypothesis that respondents’ perceived credibility of a justice’s involvement in an ethics scandal is contingent on their ideological agreement with the justice. Whether or not respondents are exposed to reporting on these scandals (as well as an ethics scandal regarding left-leaning Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s book sales), and whether respondents are given information about the ideological positions of the justices, will be randomized. Post-treatment, respondents will be asked to rate the likelihood that each justice was actually involved in an ethical scandal; they will also be asked a battery of questions to assess their overall support for the Court as an institution.

This study will contribute to the field in several ways. First, it will provide additional context to recent developments in the study of the Court’s legitimacy (e.g., Gibson 2024). Second, it will contribute to the literature exploring the role of motivated reasoning in understanding public opinion toward the Supreme Court (e.g., Badas 2016; 2023). And third, it will expand our understanding of the politics surrounding Supreme Court ethics scandals (e.g., Boston et al. 2023; Krewson, Schoenherr, and Shieh 2024).

Perceptions of Judicial Independence and Support for Courts

Amanda Driscoll, Florida State University; Michael J. Nelson, The Pennsylvania State University

In September 2024, Mexico implemented a major reform to its judicial system, dramatically changing the balance of power among the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature. Starting in June 2025, over 7,000 Mexican judges, including those on federal courts, will be elected, marking the largest judicial elections in world history. Although this move appears to give Mexican voters a say in selecting judges, it is likely to create the appearance of accountability while consolidating power under a single political party.

Governments threaten court reforms all the time, but they rarely happen—let alone at this scale. Drawing on an original 4-wave panel survey fielded as the Mexico reforms are pushed through and implemented, as citizens select their judges, and as the immense coverage of these reforms dies down, we assess how the implementation of these reforms shapes citizens’ evaluations of judicial independence and, by extension, their willingness to engage with the judiciary.

We argue that perceptions of judicial independence and support for courts are inversely correlated; Not everyone wants an independent judiciary. For government supporters, a “captured” judiciary is advantageous as it eliminates a check on the executive’s policymaking plans, and aligns with their preferences over policy outcomes. Our results help to explain why court reforms can often be popular (contrary to the prevailing wisdom about judicial legitimacy) and help to explain why “capturing the referees” is a first stop for would-be authoritarians, especially in polarized environments.

The Influence of Supreme Court Justices’ Public Rhetoric on Support

Natalie C Rogol, Rhode Island College; Matthew D. Montgomery, Texas Christian University; Anna McCaghren Fleming, Mercer University

In the past few years, there has been an increase in complaints against the Supreme Court by the public and elected officials alike. Presidents, governors, and other elected officials may speak out and criticize the decisions, social media erupts with memes, hashtags, and complaints (at least from the politically attuned), and the fragmented U.S. media presents ideologically congenial interpretations of decisions and actions of the Court to the mass public. These and other instances of ill will towards the Court can further deplete the popular standing of the Court (Montgomery, Fleming, and Rogol 2024). In this project, we explore what happens when Supreme Court justices attempt to replenish good will, or conversely, derogate their institution, by publicly speaking out about the Court. We test the effect of justices’ own rhetoric on specific and diffuse support for the Court, perceptions of politicization, support for the action of justices speaking out, and support for Court reforms. We hypothesize that subjects will be moved by justice statements, and most notably so, when the justice is identified as being ideologically aligned with the subject. Conversely, we expect that respondents will react oppositely to an outpartisan message.

Using Digital Trace and Panel Data to Understand Attitudes towards Institutions

Joshua Boston, Bowling Green State University; Christopher Krewson, Brigham Young University

As public support for political institutions trends to dangerously low levels (Gallup 2023), scholars of institutions have become increasingly concerned. While all institutions rely on public support to retain their authority, power, and influence, the U.S. Supreme Court is especially vulnerable to these changing circumstances (Tyler 2006).

Closely connected to public perceptions of institutions is the news media. Judicial politics researchers have long considered the important role of the news media in disseminating information to the mass public about Court politics and policy-making. In particular, many studies provide evidence of the media’s effect on public perceptions of the Court (e.g., Spill and Oxley 2003; Zilis 2015; Linos and Twist 2016; Hitt and Searles 2018).

Unfortunately, we have little information on how media shapes views of the Court in the real world. Experimental studies teach us that exposure to news media content related to Court decisions, nominations, scandals, etc., shape public support for the Court (Bartels and Johnston 2013; Armaly, Krewson and Lane 2024; Boston et al. 2023). But in these settings, lab and survey respondents are treated with news content in artificial and externally invalid ways. The actual effect of the media depends on whether, how, how often, and how prolonged individuals are exposed to information about the Court. Other observational work assumes attitudes are connected to Court-specific events, but without directly measuring awareness or exposure to information about those events (Hitt and Searles 2018; Nelson and Tucker 2021; Boston and Krewson 2024).

Our study overcomes these challenges. We employ a two-pronged approach to analyze how people react to news media and form attitudes towards the Supreme Court in the real world. First, we obtain a nearly complete record of a nationally representative sample’s internet engagements with traditional, social, and other forms of news consumption for the entire month of June, 2025. Second, we deploy a two-wave panel survey. At the beginning of the month, we survey their backgrounds, predispositions and attitudes towards the Court. At the end of the month, and after the Court has released all of its end-of-term decisions, we re-survey our respondents. This allows us to understand the types of media people consume, and how the media shapes their attitudes. Importantly, we use both the panel design and matching methods to make informed inferences about the causal effects of people’s news consumption on attitudes towards the Court.

Co-sponsored by Division 48: Health Politics & Health Policy

Full Paper Panel – Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Discussant) Adam Seth Levine, Johns Hopkins University
• (Discussant) Ann C. Keller, University of California-Berkeley
• (Chair) Matt Motta, Boston University School of Public Health

Session Description:

Global health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have exposed deep fault lines in political institutions, public health systems, and citizen trust. Disparities in state capacity, institutional design, and public perception of expertise have influenced health outcomes, particularly in polarized contexts. This panel examines how partisan dynamics, electoral incentives, and anti-establishment rhetoric shape responses to public health crises. Misinformation and evolving institutional roles during crises highlight the potential for governance structures to either mitigate or worsen public health challenges. The discussion addresses the strategic motivations behind misinformation and explores pathways for strengthening health governance to rebuild democratic accountability and restore public trust.

Tiago Tasca’s research examines subnational variation in Brazil’s vaccination decline, focusing on the Southern region. Using mixed methods, he finds that disparities in vaccination rates stem from differences in state capacity, public trust, and misinformation. Municipalities prioritizing high-complexity care over primary healthcare and regions with higher political distrust exhibit lower vaccination rates.

Sarah Rozenblum’s comparative analysis of the U.S. CDC and Korea CDC highlights how institutional design and political pressures shaped COVID-19 responses. While the U.S. sidelined its CDC in favor of ad hoc bodies, South Korea empowered its health agency. Her research underscores how electoral incentives and institutional capacity influence public health governance during crises.
Kasia Klasa’s four-state case study examines the evolving role of U.S. state legislatures in crisis response, focusing on their growing influence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her research reveals how legislative oversight reshaped executive authority and state-level disaster systems, highlighting how within-state partisan dynamics impact public health emergency governance and state capacity.

Robert Brehm’s research investigates whether vaccine skepticism has become a core component of Republican identity, aligning with broader anti-intellectualism and in-group cohesion. He examines the bidirectional relationship where strong Republican identifiers adopt anti-vaccine beliefs, while those with health-skeptic views increasingly align with the Republican Party, revealing how public health skepticism reshapes partisan identity and political behavior.
Praneetha Vissapragada’s study examines why populist politicians in the U.S. and India spread COVID-19 misinformation despite public health risks. She argues that misinformation serves populist goals by reinforcing anti-establishment narratives and personalizing power. Her analysis highlights how this strategy undermines democratic accountability and public trust while benefiting populist leaders politically.

These papers examine how political actors, institutions, and ideologies influence public health responses during crises. The panel highlights conditions that shape governance outcomes and demonstrate how misinformation and polarization complicate crisis management and how political considerations can exacerbate or work to resolve acute health crises, like pandemics. The discussion considers how institutional design, accountability, electoral politics, and communication strategies affect public trust and explores the challenges democratic institutions face in maintaining effective health governance.

Papers:

Health Politics in Polarized Times: State Capacity and Vaccine Hesitancy in Brazil

Tiago Gabriel Tasca, University of California, Santa Cruz

What explains the subnational variation of healthcare outcomes? After years of full coverage, Brazil’s vaccination rate has declined since 2015, placing 68% of its municipalities at high risk for poliomyelitis and 85% for measles. However, this decline has not been uniform across the country. It has affected regions where vaccination rates were historically high, such as the Southern region. This paper examines subnational variation in vaccination uptake using a mixed-methods approach that combines an original dataset, surveys, and in-depth interviews (n = 101) conducted between 2022 and 2024 with health professionals (e.g., nurses and doctors), policymakers (e.g., municipal health secretaries), technocrats, and policy experts in Brazil. Fieldwork for this study includes interviews in twenty-four municipalities in Southern Brazil across three states (Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul) and interviews with critical bureaucrats in Brasília at the Ministry of Health. The study argues that both subnational state capacity and vaccine hesitancy explain variation across municipalities. On the one hand, subnational state capacity encompasses the government’s ability to supply vaccines effectively, including aspects of governance, funding, and human resources. A critical factor is whether local governments have prioritized primary healthcare by adequately funding it, thereby expanding the capacity to provide vaccination services through extended hours, additional vaccination clinics, and increased health professionals. I find that municipalities that prioritized electorally more visible high-complexity care over primary healthcare exhibit lower vaccination rates. On the other hand, public opinion has also shifted, showing increased distrust in vaccines. In 2015, 99% of Brazilians strongly agreed that vaccines are important for children, which decreased to 88% by 2022. Those who found vaccines compatible with their beliefs fell from 95% to 79%. This paper identifies three main predictors of vaccine hesitancy: institutional trust, political partisanship, and misinformation. In Brazil’s highly polarized political environment, affective polarization influences people’s compliance with public health measures like vaccinations. Trust in different levels of political institutions (state, municipal, and federal) leads to varying levels of vaccine hesitancy. Furthermore, belief in misinformation about vaccines has negatively impacted vaccine uptake.

Governors and the Role of State Legislatures during Crisis Response

Kasia Klasa, University of Michigan

States possess broad authorities in disaster preparedness and response, having a key role in coordinating a response with the federal government and in supporting local jurisdictions. This paper analyzes the underexplored relationship between the Governor and their respective State Legislature during crisis response. Much of political science scholarship examines the role of the federal government, notably Congress, as well as federal partisanship in determining state capacity. Instead, I focus on within-state partisanship throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2023), asking the questions: (a) what is the role of state legislatures in crisis response (i.e., disasters and public health emergencies), (b) how did that role change during COVID-19, and (c) how do state legislatures impact state capacities for disaster response?

To answer this question, I conducted an in-depth case study of four US states: Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Using a variety of primary data sources, I triangulate across state policy documents and policies, transcripts of state legislative sessions, and elite interviews of the governor’s office, state bureaucrats, and state politicians. Initial findings suggest that the state legislature is growing in importance and influence over crisis response authorities across US states. Additionally, state legislatures are starting to radically change and reshape state-level disaster response systems, particularly for public health emergencies.

Vaccine Skepticism and Republican Identity: Bidirectional Belief and Partisanship

Robert Brehm, University of Virginia

This research investigates whether anti-vaccine beliefs have solidified as a distinct component of Republican political identity, where skepticism toward vaccines and expertise serves as a key marker of in-group cohesion, and aligning with growing anti-intellectualism among Republicans. It examines a bidirectional relationship between partisan identity and beliefs about vaccines and expertise: individuals who prioritize “Republican” or “conservative” as central to their identity are increasingly adopting anti-vaccine and health-skeptic beliefs, while those who strongly identify with such beliefs are increasingly aligning themselves with the Republican Party. This reciprocal dynamic may reflect how public health skepticism is reshaping political identity and partisanship in the United States.

To explore these dynamics, a survey experiment will present respondents with four vignettes, randomized to compare how Republicans approach these issues. Each vignette offers a choice between two fictional candidates in a primary setting who have written op-eds in USA Today. The op-eds express candidate stances on abortion, vaccine skepticism, anti-expert rhetoric, and a control issue, and respondents will evaluate the candidates on a feeling thermometer scale capturing how partisan identities and public health beliefs influence political attitudes. These preferences will be examined through frameworks of issue ownership, political realignment and evolution, and social identity theory to assess whether vaccine skepticism is emerging as a cohesive partisan stance.

Comparative Analysis of COVID-19 Misinformation in the US and India

Pavani Praneetha Vissapragada, University of Michigan

Misinformation rates around the world have been growing over the past 5 years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation was tied to thousands of avoidable deaths globally leading to the WHO declaring an “infodemic”. Paradoxically, some of this misinformation came from politicians, who should have incentives to improve population health outcomes for reelection. I argue that the spread of misinformation is incentivized by populism and that populist politicians particularly benefit from the spread of misinformation. I define populism as anti-pluralist, anti-establishment, anti-institutionalist and promoting the personalization of power. In this research, I argue that 1) populist politicians are more likely to share misinformation than non-populist politicians and 2) misinformation allows populist politicians to achieve populist goals. To test this theory, I use Facebook data to study the amount and political impact of misinformation transmission by populist politicians in two countries – the United States and India.

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Discussant) David Temin, University of Michigan
• (Chair) Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago

Session Description:

Over the past decade, the movement to decolonize the social sciences has gained significant momentum, parelleling broader global concerns about democratic decline. Yet, the intersection of decolonization and democratic studies remains largely underexplored. What would it mean to decolonize the study and practice of democracy? How might our understanding of democracy shift if we decentered Western historical experience and the liberal democratic theory which undergirds much of this?
This panel seeks to advance this critical research agenda by exploring foundational questions through the lens of political movements, regimes, and theorists from the Global South: What, exactly, is democracy? If it means “rule of the people,” can it truly exist within societies and international systems characterized by deep inequalities in wealth and power? How does the foregrounding of global political economy challenge the analysis of democratization and democatic deepening/backsliding premised on methodologically nationalist assumptions of comparative politics? Can, for example, nations—especially those in the Global South—claim democratic legitimacy if their sovereignty is compromised by external actors?

To address these questions, we focus on critical analysis of global political economy as well as democratic experiments originating in the Global South, analyzing their distinctive features and the lessons they offer. By examining these cases and foregrounding global dynamics, the panel aims to contribute to a richer, more multifaceted understanding of democracy and its potential for transformation in a deeply unequal world.

Papers:

National Sovereignty and Methodological Nationalism in Democratic Theory

Noaman G. Ali, University of Bath; Luke Melchiorre, Universidad de los Andes

In the past decade, the movement to decolonize the social sciences has gained significant momentum, paralleling growing global concerns about democratic decline. Scholarship, however, on decolonizing the social sciences and democratic studies have seldom intersected. This paper draws on critical scholarship and theories from the Global South to expand the scope of democratic studies, both substantively and methodologically. We contend that the dominant liberal framework in the study of democracy, with its narrow focus on formal procedures and institutions, is constrained by methodological nationalism, which obscures how global political economy shapes power relations at both domestic and international levels. Societies in the postcolonial Global South, in particular, are profoundly affected by external economic processes imposed without their input. Despite raising important questions of democratic legitimacy, as recent counter-power-focused theories of democracy put forward, studies of democratization continue to ignore or downplay such routine external disruptions to popular empowerment. In contrast, scholars from the Global South have compellingly argued that the economic restrictions of the Washington Consensus during the third wave of democratization reduced democracies to “choiceless” or “low intensity” forms. By emphasizing these extra-national dynamics, we contend that efforts by Global South countries to defend national—especially economic—sovereignty are essential for fostering more egalitarian distributions of power on a global scale. Thus, national sovereignty should be a crucial dimension in the study and assessment of democracy. Broadening our understanding of democracy, therefore, requires a deconstruction, or decolonization, of liberal frameworks.

Conceptual Hybridity and Normative Innovation in Political Theory

Elena Ziliotti, Delft University of Technology

What does it mean to decolonize the study and practice of democracy? This question is crucial given that many democratic institutions and the language of democracy in contemporary societies of the Global South are of Western origin. Often, these institutions were imposed by foreign powers or adopted by local elites with minimal input from Indigenous populations. Decolonizing democracy, however, does not imply the wholesale rejection of Western ideas but calls for their critical evaluation—accepting or rejecting them based on their relevance and value.

When local populations see democracy as more valuable than alternative systems, I argue that political theorists should explore ways to attune democratic concepts and institutions to the aspirations and needs of local populations. This approach, which I term “normative hybridity,” facilitates the creative redefining and refashioning of public political concepts and fundamental political ideas in a given sociopolitical context.

I draw on academic debates surrounding Confucian democratic theory to illustrate two methods for implementing normative hybridity in democratic theory-building. This innovative methodological framework contributes to contemporary political theory and provides a pathway for influencing non-Western policymaking in a more inclusive and context-sensitive manner.

Ethnocratic Genealogies and the Myth of Black Citizenship in the Americas

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes, University of Toronto

This manuscript maps the founding of ethnocracy within European modernity, exploring its centrality to the development in the Afro-Americas, namely the United States and the Caribbean. Ethnocracy, understood broadly as ethno-class rule, colonizes democracy by negating civic egalitarianism, thereby instituting colonial relations as the basis of sovereign rule. While focused on the United States, this work situates Blackness within the broader Afro-Caribbean and diasporic experiences that Sylvia Wynter, Claudia Jones, George Padmore, Frantz Fanon and other key Afro-Caribbean thinkers have demonstrated as foundational to the epistemic, material and colonial structures of the Global South. These thinkers foreground the ways racialized domination and colonial sovereignty have linked the Caribbean and the Americas as interconnected sites of anti-Black violence and its dialectical Black resistance. Drawing on the concept of ethnocratic emancipation, this manuscript critiques how racial democracy in the United States mirrors colonial dynamics that render Black political subjects as exiles under the guise of second-class citizenship. By engaging Wynter’s critique of modernity’s overrepresentation of Man and Claudia Jones’s theorization of diasporic liberation, I position U.S. Blackness as inextricably linked to Afro-Caribbean struggles against coloniality and ethno-class hegemony. The project interrogates how the coloniality of sovereignty produces Black political exile across the Americas, interrogating the myth of citizenship as a universal category. Employing Decolonial Studies, Black Studies, and Critical Race Theory, this manuscript advances the Global South’s intellectual tradition by theorizing Black life in the U.S. as a critical extension of Caribbean modernity and the region’s ongoing quest for human liberation through democratic revolution.

Revolution, Speech, and the Paradoxes of Freedom: The Thought of Hoang Van Chi

Kevin D. Pham, University of Amsterdam

Once anticolonial revolutionaries expel their colonizers, what stands in the way of creating democratic, long-lasting political freedom? This paper discusses two answers according to a prominent Vietnamese anticolonial intellectual: vanguardism and restrictions on speech. It uncovers a theory of postcolonial free speech from the thought of Hoang Van Chi, a prominent Vietnamese anticolonial intellectual who sought to explain the dynamics of conflict between intellectuals and Communist Party leaders in North Vietnam as they sought to establish democracy and socialism after gaining national independence from French colonial rule. I focus on two paradoxes that his theory addresses. First, his theory explains an irony within the thought and actions of Vietnamese anticolonial revolutionaries: in their struggle to create a freer society, they argue it is necessary to limit freedom of speech. He argues that self-censorship on the part of intellectuals was pragmatic for anticolonial struggle, but once independence was achieved, self-expression was necessary for developing (a previously colonized, undeveloped) people into thinkers capable of creating sincere literature which is necessary for national identity. However, a centralized, puritanical, vanguardist regime stood in the way of this project by limiting and controlling speech. Second, Hoang Van Chi’s life and writings suggest the ways freedom of speech is coextensive with freedom of mobility, and this raises a more general point about an inherent paradox: democracies depend on both freedom of speech and defined boundaries but freedom of speech requires defying boundaries. In 1955, he, with thousands of others, migrated from communist North Vietnam to anti-communist South Vietnam where he was freer to express his criticisms of communists. And in his writings, he relies on ancient Chinese history in which freedom of movement for scholars during the Zhou dynasty meant freedom of speech and thus the flourishing of intellectual diversity.

Old Practices in New Times: Gender and Democratic Resilience in the Americas
Jennifer M. Piscopo, Royal Holloway University of London

Across the globe, rising autocratization and democratic backsliding threaten the past decades of women’s rights gains. As these processes of de-democratization have reached Global North democracies once thought invulnerable, commentators and policymakers alike have begun asking, “what can be done?” In the Global South, however, the resistance already has unfolded for quite some time. In contexts where democracy always has been fragile and incomplete, the tools of and strategies for resistance are not new, but long-practiced by social movements and pro-democracy elites. Women’s movements and gender equality activists, in particular, have considerable experience resisting efforts to undercut their human rights. Those in the Global North need not invent new modes of resistance; instead, they can draw inspiration from historical and contemporary examples from the Global South.

Drawing on case studies from Latin America, this paper analyses two modes in which women’s rights advocates resist de-democratization. First, women mobilize and advocate as outsiders, via social movements. During the third wave of democratization in the 1980s, pro-democracy movements and feminist movements co-evolved. Chilean feminists marching against the military dictatorship demanded ‘democracy in the country and in the bedroom’, for instance. This mobilization occurred despite the very high costs imposed by state security forces, including arrest, imprisonment, and torture. Even after many countries formally transitioned to electoral democracy, pro-democracy and feminist movements continued to mobilize, seeking social justice for groups that remained marginalized and redress for crises posing threats to peace and stability. Since the 1990s, Latin American women have been peace activists, human rights defenders, and environmental advocates. Even during nominally democratic times, human rights movements and environmental movements have faced oppression and violence from right-wing forces. From Mexico to Colombia, women human rights defenders have been kidnapped and killed. Despite the obstacles, women activists persist by reminding themselves that inaction costs more than action and by crafting communities of solidarity and care.

Second, women exert leverage as insiders, via the institutional channels that remain even as checks-and-balances are undone and normal policymaking routes are collapsed. Anti-democratic leaders cannot fully dismantle the state overnight nor can they immediately eliminate all checks-and-balances. Drawing on examples of femocrats seeking to protect reproductive rights and anti-violence against women policies, the paper argues that feminist elites have used institutional channels to curb or soften repeals—or even pass new policies to mitigate the damage done. Women who are regime insiders form important bulwarks against de-democratization, holding the line on the inside while their colleagues demand accountability from the outside. While debates about insider and outsider strategies long have caused tension within feminist movements, the Global South experience demonstrates the importance of an ongoing, multi-fronted resistance. For Latin American women’s rights advocates countering rising autocratization and democratic backsliding in the present moment extends their longstanding efforts to ensure gender justice through policy and practice. The task of protecting democracy is thus not new, though it may be particularly urgent.

Co-sponsored by Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Roundtable with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Clemson University
• (Presenter) Sheri Berman, Barnard College, Columbia University
• (Presenter) Frances E. Lee, Princeton University
• (Presenter) Fernando Rosenblatt, University of Manchester
• (Presenter) Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University
• (Presenter) Kurt Weyland, University of Texas at Austin

Session Description:

The recent rise of populism across developing and developed countries questions the common sense that liberal democracy was safe as “the only game in town.” As populism began to proliferate post-2008, many dismissed it as a temporary pathology of the historical moment, not a genuine alternative to democracy or as a phenomenon circumscribed to developing countries of weak democracies. The spread of personalistic populism long after the crisis abated, and its appearance in new forms (i.e. among the Populist Radical Right), raises the possibility that it might have a long-term effect on democracies. Under procedural conceptions of democracy, democratic institutions have intrinsic value, independent of the substance of social conflict and its outcomes, because they allow a peaceful mechanism for resolving these conflicts and addressing collective problems. Populist leaders question democratic institutions by claiming that they suffer from representational deficits and the incapacity or unwillingness of selfish elites to promote “the will of the people.” Public disenchantment with democratic institutions might seem increasingly drawn to this alternative. The purpose of this roundtable is to question, critique, and contemplate the long-term effects of populism on democratic order. Our main questions are: Does plebiscitarian populism have a point? Have states and social scientists given too much priority to orderly procedures and democratic survival, at the expense of effective conflict resolution through determined policy change? Do procedural conceptions of democracy, including how we measure and categorize countries as democratic or nondemocratic, need to change to better balance effectiveness with liberal rules? What are the future implications of plebiscitarian populism for democracy when we consider not liberal protections or stability, but effective problem solving? If, as has been historically typical, plebiscitarians cause far more problems than they solve, will mass publics eventually tire of plebiscitarian alternatives? Or are we more likely to see the damage done by today’s populist become the stepping stone for tomorrow’s new populist?

Co-sponsored by Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Discussant) Orçun Selçuk, Luther College
• (Discussant) Laura Gamboa, University of Notre Dame
• (Chair) Laura Gamboa, University of Notre Dame

Session Description:

Democracies in many corners of the globe today are under threat, often at the hands of their elected leaders. These incumbent-led attacks on democratic institutions have directly limited the ability of regime opponents to operate, while also reshaping the behaviors of various political actors in response. A large body of literature has explored the causes of this form of democratic backsliding, but far less is known about the role of opposition groups in resisting it or its longer-term consequences. This panel explores these critical issues.

Slater examines the experiences of Malaysia and Indonesia to argue that for both democracy and diversity to thrive, political coalitions supporting these values must win. Ramirez focuses on the role of institutional design in shaping divergent outcomes in democratic backsliding and demonstrates how Brazil’s centralized and professionalized electoral system facilitated a quicker return to institutional equilibrium, while the U.S.’s fragmented system led to more prolonged disruptions. Schafer uses the case of Turkey to highlight the rise of political self-censorship as a direct consequence of democratic backsliding, showing how attacks by politicians on journalists have led journalists in Turkey to self-censor unlike those in the diaspora. Meanwhile, Yoel examines the role of international actors in aiding opposition movements against backsliding, arguing that foreign policy rhetoric in leading democracies—through mechanisms such as naming and shaming—can empower oppositions by signaling international support and enabling the transnationalization of their struggles. Finally, Riedl and Friesen use a novel dataset on democratic resistance to explore how context-specific factors shape opposition strategies, finding globally patterned “playbooks” of resistance and identifying the critical role of the interaction between institutions and social mobilization in sustaining democracy.

Together, these contributions shed light on the multifaceted dynamics underlying democratic backsliding and opposition resistance.

Papers:

Battles for Pluralism: Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Great Democratic Unknown

Dan Slater, University of Michigan

In a pattern oft-repeated across world history, the culturally diverse nations of Indonesia and Malaysia have moved in recent decades from strict hegemonic rule to open political competition. Out of one, many. Whenever and wherever such transitions occur, most typically with the end of an empire or the demise of a dictatorship, it is highly uncertain whether democracy and diversity can flourish – either alone or in tandem. Battles for Pluralism historically traces these parallel transitions in two of the world’s only Muslim-majority democracies. It offers a comparative perspective on the enduring and surprisingly successful struggles of pluralists in Indonesia and Malaysia to build winning coalitions in support of both securing democracy and protecting diversity. It places special stress on how the decaying decades of authoritarian hegemony laid obstacles in the path of democracy’s champions and diversity’s defenders, and on how elite failure rather than a lack of mass support has limited and continues to threaten pluralism’s gains. The book’s simple guiding conviction is that for democracy and diversity to work, political coalitions supporting democracy and diversity need to win.

Populist Undermining and Resilience of Electoral Institutions

Cristina Ramírez, Kings College London

This work will contribute to the understanding of the causal relationship between the design of electoral institutions and their efficiency in upholding their democratic purpose when subjected to endogenous challenges. A comparative analysis of the resilience of the electoral governance models of Brazil and the U.S. when subjected to the manipulation of two similar authoritarian populists, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, will be carried out. Akin to an engineer evaluating two skyscrapers after an earthquake, this study evaluates how these “’political skyscrapers” systems were able to maintain democratic integrity (equilibrium) under pressure. The choice of the US and Brazil offers a pertinent contrast: while both are prominent federal democracies that recently experienced the undermining impact of populism, they operate under distinct institutional frameworks. The hypothesis proposed is that, even in mature democracies, institutional design matters: Brazil demonstrated an easier realignment to its established political norms and practices, at least partly attributed to specific mechanisms (centralization and non-partisanship) designed to promote an efficient and professional electoral management and limit political intervention, while the US exhibited a more prolonged disruption from its institutional equilibrium explained by the misalignment of a system resistant to change due to an extensive political tradition.

Online Intimidation by Political Elites and Journalistic Self-Censorship

Dean Schafer, Mississippi State University

When political elites make journalists the target of their opprobrium on social media, do journalists respond by self-censoring? Such online acts of intimidation might go unnoticed by democracy watchdogs because they do not directly result in jail or violence, even if they have a chilling effect on journalists’ reporting unfavorable news about politicians. In this way, online intimidation serves as a more subtle mechanism for dampening diagonal accountability and deepening democratic breakdown.
This article tests the repressive effect of intimidation by examining tens of thousands of interactions between government officials and journalists in a competitive authoritarian regime, Turkey. I combine network analysis with topic modeling of longitudinal social media data to see whether journalists—after receiving negative attention from political elites—engage less frequently on social media, and whether they change the topics they focus on. Political elites in this sample include all members of Turkish parliament and journalists are everyone at Turkey’s twenty largest news outlets, which includes many individuals who reside outside of Turkey. Specifically, the dataset includes 1,017 parliamentarians and 894 journalists. This study monitors these actors’ social interactions and topics of engagement over four years (2019-2023), using a TERGM to model their online behavior. I expect that many Turkish journalists will indeed self-censor—avoiding topics that incite criticism by members of government—but that those who reside outside the country will not, suggesting that online intimidation has a repressive effect when it credibly signals the real possibility of physical repercussions.

Most studies of the media in backsliding democracies and authoritarian regimes focus on overt repression and violence (Bartman 2018; Mazzaro 2021) or media ownership by elites close to the government (Cook et al. 2022; Grossman, Margalit, and Mitts 2022). While such research is important for understanding the consolidation of authoritarian regimes, the role of self-censorship among journalists is particularly consequential during the process of democratic backsliding, and yet remains understudied (Yesil 2014; Koo 2024). This research helps fill that gap by examining an entire political system: the online behavior of all members of parliament and most journalists. This analysis therefore contributes to better understanding the speed and extent to which media independence is compromised in semi-authoritarian environments. It also contributes to the literature on digital authoritarianism (Xu 2021; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013), and whether social media is insulated from—or more vulnerable to—political control.

International Rhetoric and Opposition Resistance to Democratic Backsliding

Benjamin Yoel, Michigan State University

In recent decades, scholars have recognized that international factors play an important part in regime change. And yet, most studies have focused on international factors in the context of democratization, thereby overlooking democratic backsliding. Moreover, we know even less about how key political actors in leading democracies speak about oppositions in democracies experiencing backsliding. Thus, I ask: How do international endorsements affect the success of opposition movements in backsliding democracies? I expect international actors to be especially likely to talk about opposition movements in backsliding democracies to signal their comment to democracy. I also argue that international endorsements can lead to greater success for oppositions in backsliding democracies through two mechanisms. The first mechanism suggests that naming and shaming of incumbents by international actors can lead incumbents to make concessions to oppositions. The second mechanism suggests that endorsements are a way for key international actors to provide direct support to oppositions. I test these arguments using an original corpus of oral remarks and press releases by the US Secretary of State, from 1997 to 2023, about democratic backsliding in other countries. The findings lend support for my arguments. My findings contribute to work on international relations, regime change, and social movements by elucidating the conditions under which international support can help opposition movements in backsliding democracies.

The Democratic Attacks and Resistance Events (DARE) Dataset

Paul Friesen, Cornell University; Rachel Beatty Riedl, Cornell University

This paper builds on a newly constructed dataset of instances of democratic resistance across the world, which connects forms of democratic erosion and specific attacks on institutions or groups to particular pro-democracy opposition agency and institutional resilience. We argue that the kind of “playbook” resistance actors have in responding to attacks on democracy is context-specific and globally patterned: how the attacks take place (by whom, against whom, and whether they are legal/ institutionalized channels or extra-institutional/coercive channels) greatly influences how likely and how effective democratic resistance is, and where it emerges from. This specificity also suggests the potential for patterns, that attacks against institutional checks and balances to concentrate power in the executive catalyze certain types of responses among certain types of democratic actors, and less mobilization by others. It also suggests potential for learning across contexts, both amongst would-be autocrats attempting to limit rights and checks on power, as well as for democratic dissidents who seek to maintain full competition, expression, and participation. This research agenda identifies these interactive and sequential patterns and draw lessons about the effectiveness of democratic resistance strategies. We find that – contrary to some expectations – institutions that are attacked are the most likely to respond with resistance, rather than complimentary horizontal institutional resistance. We also find that resistance level and effectiveness range significantly for each domain, with the judiciary being the most effective, followed by non-violent social mobilization, the legislature, bureaucratic administrative entities, then opposition politicians, and lastly international NGOs. We also demonstrate that interaction between institutional spaces and social mobilization is a key element of democratic resistance, as further evidence that such institutions are not inherently democratically self-enforcing.

Co-sponsored by Division 40: Information Technology, & Politics

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) Lynette H. Ong, University of Toronto
• (Discussant) Lizhi Liu, Georgetown University
• (Discussant) Eddie Yang, University of California, San Diego

Session Description:

Information and communication technology was once believed to be a liberating force that could promote freedom in authoritarian regimes. However, it has also been harnessed as a powerful tool for authoritarian control, enabling new forms of propaganda, censorship, and state surveillance in the digital era and contributing to a resurgence of nativism and authoritarianism. How have authoritarian governments managed to overcome the liberating potential of digital technology and social media, turning these platforms into instruments of control? What are the social consequences of digital authoritarianism? This panel seeks to address these questions by focusing on China, one of the most advanced authoritarian states with immense digital capabilities.

The first two papers/book chapters address the overarching strategies used by authoritarian regimes to harness digital platforms, algorithms, and corporate partnerships for maintaining power while managing societal perceptions. Yingdan Lu, Xinyi Liu, and Carl Zhou investigate how entertainment platforms in China amplify state propaganda. Analyzing data from Bilibili, they demonstrate how algorithms and content strategies significantly enhance the reach of state-sponsored videos. Their findings reveal an algorithmic pathway that authoritarian regimes exploit to bolster their online visibility and influence. Lynette Ong and Jesslene Lee explore how the Chinese state collaborates with private and state-owned corporations to manage public opinion online. By outsourcing technical expertise, the regime calibrates digital repression, using big data to suppress dissent while monitoring public sentiment. Their research underscores the strategic partnership between the state and corporations in digital authoritarianism.

The other two papers/book chapters focus on the broader societal effects, including shifts in public opinion, trust in institutions, and political behavior resulting from digital authoritarianism. Tony Zirui Yang analyzes censorship patterns in China, showing that discussions about democracy are frequently suppressed unless they include conspiratorial content. This censorship fosters conspiratorial thinking, which diminishes trust in foreign democracies while reinforcing trust in domestic institutions. These insights highlight the broader societal and ideological consequences of censorship. Xu Xu examines the societal effects of digital surveillance in authoritarian regimes. Comparing digital and in-person surveillance, Xu finds that the former is less intrusive, making it more palatable to citizens. Digital surveillance discourages political participation while preserving interpersonal trust and regime legitimacy, enabling its rapid expansion without significant public resistance.

Taken together, these papers engage in a dialogue about how authoritarian governments leverage advanced digital technologies to shape public opinion and maintain regime stability. They contribute to the theme of APSA 2024, Reimagining Politics, Power, and Peoplehood in Crisis Times, by offering insights into how technological shifts are reshaping authoritarian politics globally. In addition, they enhance our understanding of how digital technology deepens the divide between democracy and dictatorship by influencing public opinion, political behavior, and governing institutions worldwide. This panel not only enriches academic discourse but also offers valuable insights for policymakers and activists concerned with human rights, digital repression, misinformation, and the role of digital technology in authoritarian regimes.

Algorithmic Amplification in China: How Platforms Boost State Visibility

Yingdan Lu, Northwestern University; Xinyi Liu, Northwestern University; Carl Zhou, University of Amsterdam

Social media have been widely employed by authoritarian regimes for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda to compete for online attention. Although effective propaganda states can invest massive resources and efforts to disseminate state propaganda, the personalized curation and filter bubbles embedded in social media algorithms complicate efforts to reach users with nonpolitical interests. While research has focused on the content and dissemination strategies of authoritarian political propaganda, less is known about the role of platform algorithms in increasing or inhibiting the reach of political propaganda. Through the collection and analysis of a novel dataset of 120,245 trending and recommended videos on Bilibili, one of China’s largest entertainment platforms, we find that recommendation algorithms on entertainment media are designed to amplify the visibility of state-produced content. Coupled with a different content mix featuring a significantly higher presence of propaganda content than non-regime accounts, state-sponsored accounts leverage both new content strategies and algorithmic settings on the entertainment platform to increase the reach of their propaganda. These findings highlight an algorithmic pathway through which authoritarian regimes may increase their online influence, offering critical insights into the role of social media algorithms in an authoritarian context.

Outsourcing Censorship: State-Business Collaboration in the Digital Age

Lynette H. Ong, University of Toronto; Jesslene Lee, University of Toronto

The digital age has afforded autocrats new technologies of control, allowing it to pre-empt and repress dissent. But, the exercise of digital repression operates differently than in conventional form. In the digital era, autocrats may have to outsource digital repression to business corporations that have the technical know-how to manipulate algorithms, and conduct censorship. We study management of public opinions in China, a double-edged sword in the autocratic setting. While public opinions allow the rulers to gauge public sentiments and become more responsive to citizens’ demands, they can also spiral out of control and destabilize the regime. Based on an analysis of public procurement documents, we found that the Chinese state has outsourced online public opinion management to private and state-owned corporations. These corporations provide the technical expertise that allow the state to harness big data to calibrate the repression of online public opinions. This study draws broader implications for autocratic exercise of digital repression and statecraft, one that is based on outsourcing of censorship to business corporations.

Censorship and Conspiratorial Thinking in Authoritarian Regimes

Tony Zirui Yang, University of Oxford

This article investigates censorship patterns in China, one of the most sophisticated authoritarian regimes globally, and their downstream effects on public opinion toward the Chinese regimes and foreign democracies. Analyzing millions of censored posts from 2016 to 2022, I demonstrate that discussions about democratic institutions are more likely to be censored—except when they contain conspiratorial content. To examine the broader implications of these censorship patterns, I conduct two surveys in China: one observational and one experimental. The findings reveal that censorship fosters higher levels of conspiratorial thinking among ordinary Chinese citizens across diverse demographic groups. This, in turn, erodes democratic values and negatively influences evaluations of foreign democracies. However, unlike in democratic contexts, where conspiratorial thinking undermines trust in domestic institutions, in China, censorship-induced conspiratorial thinking bolsters trust in domestic institutions while reducing broader forms of social trust. These results underscore the insidious effects of repressive tools like censorship, which extend beyond the immediate suppression of dissent to fostering long-term cynicism toward democracies.

The Unintrusive Nature of Digital Surveillance and Its Social Consequences

Xu Xu, Princeton University

The world has witnessed an explosion of digital surveillance in recent years. Yet we rarely saw massive surveillance states before the digital age. This book chapter examines citizens’ reactions to digital surveillance versus in-person surveillance in dictatorships to identify potential causes for the expansion of digital surveillance. I argue that digital surveillance is less offensive than in-person surveillance because it does not involve human intrusion into citizens’ private lives. I manipulate information about surveillance operations in a field experiment among college students in two regions of China. I find that digital surveillance is less likely to undermine interpersonal trust and regime legitimacy than in-person surveillance. However, both types of surveillance are effective in discouraging political participation. In addition, I establish the external validity of the experimental results by using a nationally representative survey and a natural experiment caused by the 2015 Tianjin explosion. Overall, digital surveillance discourages political participation, and the unintrusive nature of digital surveillance suggests that it can expand rapidly without facing much resistance from society.

Co-sponsored by Division 47: Sexuality & Politics

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Clyde Wilcox, Georgetown University
• (Presenter) Angelia R. Wilson, University of Manchester
• (Presenter) Paul A. Djupe, Denison University
• (Presenter) Melissa Deckman, Public Religion Research Institute
• (Presenter) Andrew R. Flores, American University

Session Description:

The rise of MAGA and the election of Trump in 2024 raises questions regarding the relationship between the political leaders of the Christian Right and those of the Republican Party. The expert panelists will draw on voter data from the 2024 election cycle to consider the preferences of Christian Right voters in the Presidential election, State elections, and ballot initiatives as one indicator of Christian Right support for the MAGA and/or Republican political agenda. In addition, panelists will present initial findings regarding discursive indicators of political alignment of Christian Right political leadership with the leadership and political agenda of the Republican Party. The discussion will focus on what this evidence suggests regarding the similarities and differences between the preferences of Christian Right voters, those of the Christian Right leadership, and those articulated by Republican candidates and leadership in the 2024 election cycle. The aim of these investigations is to discern the current Christian Right political influence in the Republican Party and its future importance in setting the socio-political agenda.

Co-sponsored by Division 21: Conflict Processes

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Laia Balcells, Georgetown University
• (Discussant) Salma Mousa, University of California, Los Angeles
• (Discussant) Aidan Milliff, Florida State University

Session Description:

This panel examines the psychological dynamics of inter-group cooperation and conflict. The papers collectively ask what drives prejudice and tension between groups, and what factors or interventions could shift individuals toward greater cooperation and reconciliation. The papers tackle a range of group divisions including ethnic violence, partisan polarization, and refugee-host community segregation, and draw evidence from a range of contexts, including Nigeria, Israel, Ghana, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Uganda, and the United States. The first set of papers consider factors that may increase prejudice and prevent cooperation. First, Bollen and Chang find that the visibility of inequality heightens animosity between ethnic groups, and develop a new measure to capture this previously understudied aspect of inequality. Next, Gilchrist argues that narratives about past ethnic violence contribute to current tensions. She presents survey evidence suggesting that Nigeria’s strategy of downplaying and avoiding national discussion of past violence has only backfired, allowing divisive narratives to flourish locally instead. Building on the theme of evaluating strategies to manage conflict, a second set of papers turns to examining which factors or interventions may foster cooperation between previously conflicting groups. Kazis-Taylor suggests that in intractable conflict settings, older adults, who have lived through longer stretches of conflict, become “war-weary” and more supportive of peace settlements as they age. However, they do not develop warmer views of the other side. Next, using the case of partisan polarization in the US, Weiss, Green, and Willer investigate whether elite messages can encourage individuals to cooperate across group divides. They find that cooperative behaviors are malleable, but prejudicial attitudes are not, echoing the findings of Kazis-Taylor. Finally, Wai examines the efficacy of an inter-group contact intervention with refugee and native farmers in Uganda. She finds that while contact may reduce some forms of prejudice, it does not necessarily lead to an increase in cooperation, since individuals continue to view their own group as more hard-working and capable. Taken together, the papers push forward the study of inter-group cooperation and prejudice, questioning old assumptions and introducing new measurement strategies, sources of data, and theoretical innovations to the literature.

Papers:

Visible Inequality and Intergroup Political Conflict

Paige Bollen, Ohio State University; SoYun Chang, Ohio State University

Scholars have long theorized that interethnic inequality can exacerbate interethnic tensions. While measures have been proposed to capture the level of inequality between groups, few have distinguished whether and how much this inequality is visible to members of these groups. We propose a new measure of intergroup inequality that centers on the degree to which subordinate groups are exposed to dominant group members with particular public and private goods. Combining census and survey data in South Africa and Ghana, we compare this measure to common measures of interethnic inequality. We demonstrate that accounting for the degree to which inequality is visible to other groups differentially influences political and social attitudes towards different social groups. This paper adds to the vast literature on political conflict between groups by highlighting the theoretical and empirical leverage gained through better measuring not only the degree of inequality between different groups but also the extent to which it is visible.

War or Peace? Civilian Attitudes toward Conflict Resolution

Hannah Kazis-Taylor, Princeton University

When do civilians in conflict settings prefer a negotiated settlement versus to continue hostilities? Drawing on decades of survey data from Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland, I show that successive generations have substantially increased their support for peace negotiations and concessions over their lifetimes. I propose that one mechanism explaining this shift in views with age is a learning process. While younger people are more optimistic about the chances of decisive victory, waves of fighting concluding in indecisive outcomes show people that an outright military victory is unlikely. Although people increasingly support negotiations and concessions with age, perception of the other side does not moderate with age. The findings suggest that civilians in conflict settings increasingly support a “pragmatic peace” with age.

Forgive or Forget? Historical Narratives and Ethnic Tension in Post-War Nigeria

Narrelle Gilchrist, Princeton University

Many governments in post-conflict settings attempt to erase their violent pasts, leaving out all or large parts of their history from school curricula. While some hope this policy will help individuals forget about the past and move on, it may simply allow local, polarized versions of the past to flourish instead, fueling current divisions and mistrust. When past conflicts are not discussed openly in schools, what and where do younger generations learn about their nation’s violent past, and how do these narratives affect current inter-group relations? When are resentments and heightened prejudices sustained and passed down to youth, and when do they fade away? I answer these questions using evidence from Nigeria – a country which has rarely taught its history in the 50 years since the devastating Biafran Civil War. Surveying 2584 secondary school students and their parents across 1292 households, I find that in the absence of formal education about the Biafran Civil War most Nigerian families have passed on surprisingly few details about the conflict to their children. Children are also unlikely to learn substantial amounts about the war from media or other sources. However, the (vague) knowledge of the war youth do have tends to be ethnically charged and emotional, particularly among the most victimized group. This sentiment about the past is correlated with current ethnic prejudice and support for secessionist movements. Crucially, these findings hold true both in places with current grievances and segregation, and in those with inter-ethnic peace and integration. This suggests the passage of time and inter-ethnic contact in the present may not be enough for past tensions to fade, but instead a more direct engagement with details about the past (including in formal educational settings) could be key to peace-building.

Can Politicians Depolarize Voters? Evidence from U.S. Governors

Chagai Weiss, Stanford University; Donald P. Green, Columbia University; Robb Willer, Stanford University

Existing research suggests that partisan polarization is driven, at least in part, by politicians’ actions. Thus, elites’ bipartisan appeals may depolarize voters. To test this expectation at scale in a naturalistic setting, we collaborated with the U.S. National Governors Association on a randomized placebo-control trial, evaluating the effects of the “Disagree Better” media campaign portraying Democrat and Republican governors acknowledging their ideological differences while endorsing bipartisanship and encouraging citizens to engage in constructive conversations across party lines. Leveraging addressable TV advertising technology, we assigned over 8,700 survey respondents to receive exposure to the “Disagree Better” campaign for two weeks, followed by a post-treatment survey. We show that treated respondents were more likely to recall the campaign and—consistent with its primary message—engage in bipartisan behaviors and report higher levels of conversational receptiveness. However, we find no effects on partisan animosity, support for politicians’ bipartisan behavior, and a broad range of secondary outcomes. Our findings demonstrate that by acting as positive role models, political elites can encourage engagement in civic behaviors even absent attitudinal change, highlighting the promise of top-down approaches to reduce polarization.

Maybe in My Backyard: Dynamics of Refugee-Host Cooperation

Rebecca Wai, University of Michigan

Research testing the intergroup contact hypothesis is rooted in the assumption that reducing prejudice is the key first step to better coexistence between outgroups. Yet other barriers may prove a more serious threat to intergroup contact. I focus on one of the four optimal conditions hypothesized to support successful intergroup contact — cooperation among peers — and show other barriers to cooperation that can derail contact initiatives even if prejudice is already low. I work with an NGO based in the West Nile region of Uganda to evaluate a program designed to promote intergroup contact between refugees and Ugandan nationals by putting them in farmer groups together. From surveying 1200 participants in farmer groups, I find that while in mixed (refugee and host) farmer groups prejudice is lower than in homogeneous groups, participants are not more willing to cooperate with outgroups. Combining intensive qualitative fieldwork, survey data (n=1200), and vignette experiments (n=800) that mimic real-world work scenarios, I find that even those who have low outgroup prejudice have mismatched baseline expectations of the outgroup’s work effort, which makes participants systematically misinterpret each other’s behavior. While Ugandan nationals have a lower expectation of refugees’ work effort contributions compared to co-nationals, refugees have the same expectation for both the ingroup and outgroup. As a result, they play different strategies of cooperation – refugees punish the outgroup more harshly than nationals do, and nationals reward the outgroup less than refugees do. This prevents successful cooperation even when bringing participants together as peers in a cooperative situation. My findings call into question the implicit assumption that prejudice is the largest barrier to whatever positive outcome — peace, public goods provision, equal opportunity through intergroup contact interventions. I also propose a new explanation for why so many contact interventions appear to fail or return mixed results – while most of the literature focuses on taste-based discrimination (prejudice), it is often ability-based discrimination (mismatched expectations) that most affect cooperation.

Co-sponsored by Division 32: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Vincent L. Hutchings, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• (Discussant) Ismail K. White, Princeton University

Session Description:

Understanding Black political identity is foundational to explaining U.S. politics. The modern U.S. political era, defined by runaway polarization, is outlined in large part by Black citizens and their relationship with the two major parties. The authors on this panel examine the dynamic connections between Black citizens and the two parties, paying particular attention to their historical connection to the Democratic party in contrast to more recent changes in Black support for Republicans. Knowing how Black citizens are responding to, and potentially contributing to, the growing polarized divide is fundamental to understanding what emerges next from this time of crisis in U.S. politics.

Papers:

Black Voter Subgroups and Declining Democratic Support

Arica N. Schuett, Emory University

Although Black voters continue to support Democrats in high numbers, there is some evidence of declining support among this group in recent elections. In addition to reports of declining Democratic support in 2020, polls in the first half of the 2024 election cycle showed as much as double the previous high Republican support from Black voters. Given the stability of Black Democratic support in presidential elections, the persistence of this trend through the spring and summer of 2024 was surprising and difficult to ignore. I employ a method incorporating vote-validated national surveys, census data, and vote returns to assess which subgroups of Black voters shifted toward Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Analysis of 2020 finds no evidence that the primary demographic groups to whom this trend is attributed, Black men and youth voters, have shifted towards Republicans relative to their levels of support in 2016. Instead, I find evidence that among voters, the share of conservative Blacks and self-identified Black Republicans who supported Trump increased from 59% in 2016 to 78% in 2020. In contrast, the share of voting Black Democrats and Independents who supported Democrats in each election increased by 2% and 7%, respectively. Even though Trump gained among the Black electorate most likely to support him in the first place, because this group grew only modestly in size and turned out less, Republicans gained fewer net votes from Black voters in 2016 than in 2020. Additional analysis will broaden this examination to measure changes in support in 2016 and 2024.

Conservative Kickbacks: How Sexism Swung Black Men to Trump and the GOP

Crystal Robertson, University of California, Irvine; Michael Tesler, UC Irvine

Several surveys showed that Donald Trump made significant inroads with Black men in the 2024 election. According to data from the AP-Votecast’s super-sized surveys, Trump’s share of the Black male vote increased from 12% in 2020 to 25% in 2024. Just 10% of Black women, by contrast, voted for him in the 2024 AP-Votecast survey. Many astute analysts, including Barack Obama, suggested that sexist aversion to Kamala Harris’s bid to become the country’s first female president played an important part in this sizable gender gap among Black voters.

The story, however, is more complex. We argue that key factors, such as the rise of the Black manosphere, inflation, and the declining salience of racial justice protests, alleviated some of the strong “racialized social pressures” (White and Laird 2020) that prevented Black men with sexist attitudes from supporting Trump and the Republican Party back in 2020. Those factors, we further contend, were shifting some of these sexist voters to Trump and the GOP long before Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

Our empirical evidence strongly supports that contention. First, we leverage data from the YouGov/SAY24 Project’s enormous panel survey to show that sexist attitudes were one of the strongest independent predictors of which Black men changed from supporting Joe Biden in 2020 to supporting Trump in 2024; but we also show that these shifts don’t simply stem from an aversion to Harris. Instead, data from the May and July panel waves of the SAY24, reveal that Black men with sexist attitudes switched to Trump well-before Harris entered the presidential race. Consistent with that finding, our analyses of the Cooperative Election Study’s 2020-2022 panel survey also show that Black men with sexist attitudes were already shifting their partisan preferences toward the GOP in 2022.

We conclude with a discussion of both the normative and political implications of our findings.

Evaluating Black Perceptions of White Partisanship

Julian Wamble, George Washington University

While much of this work on the relationship between race and partisanship focuses on stereotypes that characterize Black Americans as more Democratic and liberal than their White counterparts, less attention has been paid to how Black Americans perceive White partisanship. This paper argues that Black Americans view Republican partisanship as a default behavior for White Americans, associating it with negative characteristics. Using a combination of original experimental data and large-scale observational datasets, this study provides robust evidence that Black Americans, in the absence of partisan cues, are more likely to assume White individuals are Republicans rather than Democrats. Additionally, White Republicans are perceived as more likely than their Democratic counterparts to hold prejudicial attitudes toward Black people. These findings contribute to the literature on race and partisanship by offering a nuanced understanding of how Black Americans strategically assess and navigate interactions with White individuals in political spaces.

Support, Shift, or Neither: A Qualitative Approach to Black Non-Voting in 2024

Alexandria Janee Davis, University of California, Los Angeles

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, several media pundits focused on members of the Black electorate’s support for the shift to Former President Donald Trump. This shift in Democratic support is largely placed on Black male voters despite small sample sizes for Black voters in poll sampling and Black men supporting the Democratic party at higher rates than their male counterparts. Understandings of Black political behavior in 2024 focus primarily on vote choice when they should focus on the decision to participate at all.
This paper seeks to better understand the psychological calculus that Black individuals consider when getting out to vote within a measure of racial group apathy specific to Black Americans. Broadly, this project asks 1) To what extent is the Black psychological calculus represented by a measure of racialized apathy? 2) What are the motivations and determinants of political apathy specific to Black Americans? Regarding determinants of racialized apathy, I hypothesize that Black men and Black people aged 18-29 will be more likely to be non-voters and express apathetic sentiments or attitudes. I also hypothesize that refusal to acknowledge racialized social constraint, negative evaluations of political parties, and increased racial consciousness will be correlated with non-voting. Using semi-structured interviews, I will interact with Black men and Black young people to understand Black individuals’ distinct political decision-making processes and provide clarity on Black political behavior in 2024 and beyond.

Understanding Unlikely Trump Voters

Andra Gillespie, Emory University

One of the surprises of the 2024 election was the magnitude of the shifts in support for Donald Trump amongst minority voters, particularly Black men, Latinos and Asian Americans. In addition to discussions of the lack of Democratic mobilization, early hypotheses proffer that Trump improved his vote share among these groups (particularly the men in these communities) because of general perceptions that he would be more adept at managing the US economy or because of outreach efforts targeting young men that would have also reached and appealed to young men of color. We also have to test to determine whether sexism may have played a role in shifting some voters of color toward Trump.

With this in mind, this paper seeks to understand the dynamics of the changes in voter behavior by looking at interview data from “unlikely Trump voters,” or voters whose demographic characteristics have historically predicted Democratic voting behavior. The interview protocol will use grounded theory and approach to allow for respondents to explain their vote choice in their own words. Most important, it allows respondents the opportunity to identify the policy arenas in which they want Trump to effect change first. This project is intended to be a longitudinal project, so the goal of paper will be to determine these unlikely Trump voters’ attitudes towards the Trump administration at the outset of his second term and then revisit them later to see how they interpret the Trump Administration’s performance over time.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Christina Davis, Harvard University
• (Discussant) Daniel W. Drezner, Tufts University
• (Discussant) Daniel L. Nielson, University of Texas at Austin

Session Description:

In an increasingly interconnected global economy, economic sanctions have emerged as an important tool for advancing foreign policy objectives. However, the complexity of globalization presents challenges in understanding both the causes and outcomes of sanctions. This panel examines the factors driving the use of economic sanctions, focusing on domestic and international influences. It also evaluates the effectiveness of sanctions in altering state behavior and reshaping international economic relationships. The papers in this panel explore diverse channels of influence, including shipping, data, and trade policies. Davis and Lim highlight the critical role of multilateral cooperation in the success of targeted maritime sanctions. McLean and Yu demonstrate how targeted sanctions can pressure governments to reallocate resources, leading to reduced military spending and arms trade. Li presents survey evidence from China showing that in authoritarian contexts, firms are more likely to support trade and investment restrictions when framed as protecting national security. Peterson, Peksen, and Park contribute new data through comprehensive coding of government restrictions, advancing the study of sanctions. Finally, Newman and Oppenheimer analyze how sanctions on data transfers can foster evasion networks, shifting connections and undermining sanctions’ objectives, as evidenced by Russia’s response to sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives, this panel provides a nuanced understanding of economic sanctions and their role in a complex, globalized economy.

Papers:

Targeted Sanctions and Maritime Shipping Activity

Christina Davis, Harvard University; Taegyun Lim, Harvard University

States are increasingly relying on sanctions while narrowing their focus to specific targets. However, even so-called “smart sanctions” require the cooperation of third parties to maximize their effectiveness. Using satellite tracking data of vessel movements from 2013 to 2022, this paper empirically examines the impact of targeted sanctions on maritime shipping activity. Specifically, we assess the role of third-party cooperation and the effectiveness of multilateral sanctions. Our findings reveal that targeted sanctions have only a short-term impact, with sanctioned vessels resuming normal operations within approximately three months. In contrast, multilateral sanctions demonstrate significantly greater durability in reducing the activity of targeted vessels, primarily because they garner broader support from non-allied states. This paper contributes to the growing literature on economic sanctions by introducing novel data on targeted shipping sanctions and their implications.

Redistributive Politics under Sanctions

Elena V. McLean, SUNY, University at Buffalo; Chamseul Yu, Texas A&M University

The application of economic sanctions has changed significantly in two recent decades: Western governments have shifted from the use of comprehensive sanctions toward more targeted measures. Consequently, more narrowly tailored sanctions against individuals, companies, and organizations have increased substantially since the early 2000s. Unlike conventional sanctions that deliver broad economic impacts, targeted sanctions reduce the welfare of members of the government’s supporting coalition. The government experiences pressure to compensate these members to maintain their loyalty and ensure continued implementation of government policies. This decision requires reallocation of budget resources to provide private compensation to affected supporters. We expect redistribution to result in government spending cuts, including reductions of the military budget. This argument yields observable implications: unlike comprehensive sanctions, targeted measures should lead to reduced military expenditures. We also show that such reductions are reflected in other indicators, such as arms trade. These results hold during peace and conflict years.

Does National Security Trump Business Interests?

Sichen Li, Princeton University

What determines firms’ attitudes towards trade and investment restrictions in an authoritarian context? Contrary to conventional wisdom that innovative, large, and multinational firms are strong supporters of economic openness, I argue that a restrictive policy framed to defend national security can dampen those firms’ opposition to protectionist measures by shaping their perspective to align with statists who prioritize national interests instead of businesspersons who emphasize firm-specific interests. Based on a survey experiment involving 1,127 firm managers in China, I find that when provided with a national security justification, respondents increase their support for protectionist trade and investment policies by around 15% compared to the control group. Higher innovativeness, larger size, and more involvement in the world economy do not increase firms’ resistance to the national security framing. National security framing can silence supporting voices for economic openness, challenging corporate power founded on innovation, scale economy, and participation in trade and cross-border investment.

Government-Imposed Restrictions on International Economic Relations

Timothy M. Peterson, Arizona State University; Dursun Peksen, University of Memphis; Kee Hyun Park, Arizona State University

The scope of sanctions programs has evolved considerably over time.Yet contemporary research struggles to differentiate government-imposed sanctions on qualitative and quantitative dimensions. Studies frequently aggregate coercive behaviors into discrete episodes and then treat these episodes as a single observation. While this approach was motivated by theoretical concerns and was useful to answer many research questions when sanctions were less varied, these existing conceptualization and operationalization practices could limit our ability to isolate the causes and consequences of sanctions in the contemporary period. We introduce new data that uses the “restriction” (the specific prohibited interaction) as the unit of analysis; and we code all government-mandated restrictions by the US, EU, and UN on the international flow of goods, services, money, finance, and investment, as well as restrictions on travel, media, and diplomacy for the years spanning 1992 to 2024. These data are suited to address research questions regarding what affects the composition of government-imposed economic restrictions against target states as well as how the composition of economic restrictions affects sanctions effectiveness and the broader reshaping of economic and political networks.

Economic Coercion and International Data Flows

Abraham Newman, Georgetown University; Harry Oppenheimer, Georgia Institute of Technology

How might economic coercion impact international information flows? While there is a sizable literature on the core networks essential to globalization (e.g. investment and trade), there is almost no literature on data. Building on work related to anti-money laundering and network theory, we argue that sanctions on data transfers will generate a set of evasion relationships – spoilers, bridgers, and dealers – which may help target states mitigate the impact of coercion. Spoiler firms are large, well-known global businesses in states with continuing economic relations with the target. Bridgers are domestic firms that obfuscate their identity to serve as an interface between the sanctioned state and the global network. Finally, the dealers are firms in the shadow economy that serve the less visible parts of the network. We demonstrate our theory with new data on Russia’s connections to the global internet pre and post its invasion of Ukraine. We supplement this data and analysis with original research on the corporate ownership and operation of Russia’s international internet links. We find providers in all three classes increased their share of outbound Russian internet traffic after the invasion. We identify large networks in countries like China, providers owned by companies we link directly back to Russia, and providers registered in known tax shelters and linked to shell companies. Overall, we contribute to the growing literature on global interdependence, highlighting how risky markets remain part of complex networks. Our findings also demonstrate how sanctions may drive actors to use more opaque and less accountable intermediaries, which over time could threaten the objectives of the original sanctions effort.

Co-sponsored by Division 16: International Political Economy

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) Stephen Chaudoin, Harvard University
• (Discussant) Jiakun Zhang, University of Kansas

Session Description:

The international free trade regime is under attack by its very own architects. Unified calls for de-risking at the G7 as well as the United States frequently leveraging tariffs on friends and foes alike has made economic security a buzz word in policy making circles. How will the politics of trade shift now that free market principles are quickly being eroded under the guise of national security? This panel will dive into the shifting politics of trade by examining this economic security movement from several different lenses. We consider how elites, firms, and the mass public navigate these waters as well as whether these changes to the liberal international order will shift patterns of global leadership.

The panel’s first paper examines how elites in the United States Congress determine which traded products should be freely traded with rival states and which should be securitized. The second paper examines the interplay between elites and public opinion to examine the externalities of such policies. The third paper builds onto the next two by examining the actions of firms and how they respond to episodes of political risk which prompt these economic security policies in the first place by examining the case of Japanese firms and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finally, paper four examines how trade dependence and other political factors shape the responses of global states to China’s efforts to position itself as a leader within the evolving liberal international order.

National Security or Protectionism? How Traded Products Become Securitized

Timothy Cichanowicz, University of Kansas; Jiakun Zhang, University of Kansas

How do policymakers decide which traded products become securitized? The deglobalization movement is resulting in policymakers debating the merits of maintaining economic ties between democratic and nondemocratic states. Products as varied as semiconductors, electric vehicles, consumer drones, and even garlic are being debated within democracies as items worthy of having their trade limited on national security grounds. What determines which products become securitized and why? We examine theories of top-down national security decisionmaking and bottom-up special interest-driven trade politics to determine what pushes legislators to securitize products traded bilaterally between democracies and geopolitically distant states. To test these theories, we gather every “tough on China” bill written in the contemporary United States Congress. Of these bills, we take the bills that limit bilateral trade between the US and China and then code characteristics of the bill as well as the traded product securitized by them to test which explanation is most robust in determining how US-China trade becomes securitized.

Economic Securitization and Domestic Public Reactions

Yue Lin, University of California, Berkeley

When do elite cues effectively mobilize public support for safeguarding economic national security? Under what conditions will domestic public support, oppose, or remain indifferent to elites? Building on the existing literature on informational and partisan messaging, I argue that economic securitization – the practice of invoking national security concerns about foreign entities in elite rhetoric and policy proposals – can garner public support through a new channel: affective appeals. By stimulating voters’ in-group identity, nationalism, and anti-corporate sentiments, economic securitization may trigger public support more effectively than merely blaming foreign entities. However, this effect is conditional on the audience’s prior exposure: positive experiences with foreign companies can foster resistance to switching, which further dampens public support for economic securitization. Additionally, this effect is moderated by factors like the number of local jobs created by foreign companies, voters’ partisanship, and their perceptions of the foreign firms’ countries of origin. Empirically, I propose an original survey experiment to test these propositions. I also draw on the case of banning TikTok to investigate the buffering effect of voters’ prior experience. Petition data reveals that opposition to a securitized ban often centers on the benefits TikTok offers, including community building, well-being enhancement, and profit opportunities. Overall, this study aims to illuminate the policy implications of safeguarding national economic security and the domestic consequences of intensified scrutiny of foreign firms.

National Interests and Firms’ Divestment: Japanese FDI during Russia-Ukraine War

Naho Ohta, University of California, San Diego

Why do some multinational firms divest in response to significant political shock, while others do not? Existing research focuses on firms’ economic characteristics as the determinants, and overlooks how domestic politics shapes firms’ decisions on foreign direct divestment (FDD) in the democratic context. I argue that firms are more likely to continue operations when they carry out the national interest – the supply of critical goods for domestic demands (i.e., energy, food). To mitigate price uncertainty of the goods arising from the shock, home governments whose survival depends on voters’ economic standings delegate the projects to certain firms. Otherwise, firms are more likely to divest to reduce financial losses. By constructing the most comprehensive data on Japanese firms’ divestment during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and leveraging originally collected firm-level membership in various political communities, I demonstrate how private firms serve as agents of the state in democracies.

Bridging Trade and Power: Global Responses to China’s Leadership Attempts

Qiang Wu, Texas A&M University

In an era where trade and security have become increasingly intertwined, this paper examines how countries worldwide navigate their relationships with China’s emerging leadership initiatives, particularly through the lens of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. As China’s economic influence expands and its foreign policy grows more assertive, countries face complex decisions in balancing economic opportunities against security considerations, especially as trade relationships become increasingly securitized.

Built upon previous studies focusing on the first Belt and Road Forum, this paper leverages the three Belt and Road Forum as a key indicator of China’s leadership ambitions and countries’ responses to them. The global attendance patterns across the Forum’s three iterations reveal how nations navigate the evolving dynamics between China’s rising influence and the established liberal international order (LIO). This approach provides a unique window into countries’ strategic calculations as they manage their relationships with China in an environment where commercial ties increasingly intersect with security concerns.

My research examines multiple factors shaping countries’ engagement with China’s leadership initiatives, including trade dependence, domestic political economy conditions, and historical path dependencies. Analyzing these variables against participation patterns in the Belt and Road Forum display how nations balance economic opportunities with security considerations in their foreign policy decisions. This analysis is particularly relevant as the international society is facing increasingly securitized trade relationships, where commercial ties are viewed through the lens of national security implications.

Co-sponsored by Division 14: Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Democracies

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Pepper D. Culpepper, University of Oxford
• (Discussant) Leah Stokes, UCSB

Session Description:

Climate change is the existential challenge of this century. How countries meet it is a product of politics, which responds to both structural economic roots and politically salient events that focus public attention on the consequences of climate change. In line with the theme of this year’s APSA conference, which invites us to reimagine politics in the face of the pressing crises of today, the papers on this panel constitute a conversation about the varying ways in which political polarization and the economy refract individual attitudes and political party strategies for addressing climate change.

Two of the papers examine the effects of climate change events on politics. The paper by Culpepper, Lee, and Shandler investigates the effects of a scandal surrounding the oil giant Exxon and climate change attitudes. In France, Germany, and Great Britain, they find that exposure to information about the scandal increases both the salience of and the public demand for climate change policies. In the United States, Republicans react differently than Democrats to the scandal, leading to no net effect. The paper by Fasolin and Valentim examines the effect of climate change events – floods – on the decision of people to enter local politics in Brazil. They find that climate change events reduce both the age and education level of mayoral candidates, thereby increasing the involvement of underrepresented actors in politics.

The next two papers on the panel look at how the structure of the labor market influences climate change preferences, both at the individual and aggregate levels. The paper by Heddesheimer, Hilbig, and Voeten explores the way that a far-right party, the German AfD, exploited its opposition to ambitious climate change policies to attract support. Using a difference-in-differences design, they show AfD support increased in counties with more polluting jobs after this platform change. A panel survey further demonstrates that individuals in these occupations also shifted towards the AfD. The paper by Stutzmann uses original data from Germany to explore the effects of employment in the knowledge economy – both in jobs associated with the knowledge economy and the contextual effects of living in local economies dominated by the knowledge economy – on preferences for climate change mitigation.

The final paper on the panel, by Bergquist, Franzblau, and Mildenberger, pans out from individual cases to map the patterns of public polarization on climate change across the globe. The paper draws an original dataset of over 2 million survey responses from 97 surveys conducted between 1998 and 2023, covering more than 100 countries.

Exxon Knew: How Scandals Influence Climate Change Attitudes in Four Countries

Pepper D. Culpepper, University of Oxford; Taeku Lee, Harvard University; Ryan Shandler, Georgia Tech

Corporate scandals serve as focusing events, which bring a policy issue sharply into perspective and change public perceptions of it, forcing its way onto the political agenda. In this paper we use survey experimental data to study the public opinion effects of media coverage of corporate scandals. We argue that the scandals are most likely to serve as focusing events when they both lead to demands for more regulation from the public and raise issue salience, and that the anger created by scandals is especially likely to trigger both reactions. We test these propositions using a large two-wave online survey in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, using realistic media treatments of scandals the energy sector. Our pooled data confirm our pre-registered expectation that exposure to scandals increases the salience of and preferences for climate change regulation. At the country lever, the results hold up in France, Germany, and the UK, but not in the US. In the US, views about the importance of the energy sector to the economy moderate this effect, with those viewing energy as extremely important to the economy – largely those respondents who identify closely with the Republican Party – unaffected by the scandal article.

Climate Change and Political Entry: Evidence from Brazilian Municipal Elections

Guilherme Natan Fasolin, Vanderbilt University; António Valentim, London School of Economics and Political Science

Does climate change affect who runs for office, and how? As extreme weather events intensify, they create social and economic challenges that likely impact political candidacy. We build on existing research on mass political participation and the political economy of candidate entry and test how extreme weather events affect decisions to pursue a political career. Using a novel dataset of flooding events and mayoral candidates in Brazil (2000-2020), we employ a difference-in-differences design to assess the impact of floods on the demographic composition of the mayoral candidate pool. We find that floods reduce the education level and age of candidates. Using data on federal transfers, corruption audits, surveys, and elite interviews, we show the effects on education can be driven by rent-seeking and outside options, whilst mobilization and recruitment patterns drive the age effects. By shedding light on the effects of climate change on candidate selection, this study highlights how climate change can paradoxically increase the representation of underrepresented groups in politics.

The Green Transition and Political Polarization along Occupational Lines

Vincent Heddesheimer, Princeton University; Hanno Hilbig, UC Davis; Erik Voeten, Georgetown University

Green transition policies set long-term targets to reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants, posing a threat to workers in polluting occupations and communities reliant on these occupations. Can far right parties attract voters who anticipate losing from the green transition? We explore this in Germany, which has ambitious green policies and a large workforce in polluting occupations. The far right AfD started campaigning as the only party opposing green transition policies in 2016. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show AfD support increased in counties with more polluting jobs after this platform change. A panel survey further demonstrates that individuals in these occupations also shifted towards the AfD. Probing mechanisms, we find suggestive evidence that growing far right support is due to changing perceptions of social stigma and lower status. Our results highlight the need for a new research agenda on a backlash against the normative dimension of the green transition.

Green by Knowledge? How Local Knowledge Economies Shape Climate Action Support

Sophia Stutzmann, Universität Konstanz

The rise of the knowledge economy, fueled by rapid technological change, is transforming societies and labor markets in particular. A crucial implication of the literature examining its political consequences is that the growing knowledge economy contributes to a socially more progressive society by, for instance, fostering support for green policies. Moreover, while the earlier literature on the knowledge economy has focused on tech companies, nowadays green industries have become an important part of knowledge economies as well. Thus, we examine whether living in a strong local knowledge economy is associated with more support of climate action and whether this relationship is moderated by whether an individual works in a knowledge economy job. On top of compositional effects by highly educated individuals, we also expect contextual effects through, for instance, better infrastructure to be at play in fostering support for climate action in strong local knowledge economies. We combine individual-level data from an original survey fielded in Germany in 2021 (N=4,100), based on which we construct our measure of whether an individual works in a knowledge economy job, with macro-level data at the district level, including the share of employment in the knowledge economy. Preliminary results indicate that, as expected, individuals in strong local knowledge economies have significantly higher support for climate action. Furthermore, this effect is more pronounced for those in a knowledge economy job. We further explore heterogeneities with respect to gender and place of living, which both play an important role in moderating the existing relationships.

Cross-National Patterns in Climate Opinion Polarization

Parrish Bergquist, University of Pennsylvania; Emma Franzblau, University of California Santa Barbara; Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara

Addressing climate change will generate complex patterns of economic winners and losers around the world, sparking substantial distributive conflict at nearly every national and subnational level. To date, the effects of this political conflict on public climate opinion has often focused on several high-profile cases, particularly the United States, where politicization of climate change has generated public opinion polarization along both ideological and partisan lines. Yet, we still don’t have a systematic understanding of how unique the US case is from a global perspective. Numerous large scale cross-national surveys include both questions on climate opinion and measures of ideological and partisan preferences, using a meta-analysis of these data we aim to uncover the patterns of public polarization on climate change across the globe. We present an original dataset of over 2 million survey responses from 97 surveys conducted between 1998 and 2023, covering more than 100 countries.

Co-sponsored by Division 11: Comparative Politics

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) Jorge G Mangonnet, Vanderbilt University
• (Discussant) Vasiliki Fouka, Stanford University
• (Discussant) Asli Cansunar, University of Washington
• (Discussant) Edgar Franco Vivanco, University of Michigan

Session Description:

This panel explores patterns of exclusion, representation, and popular resistance by underrepresented groups across diverse historical and geographic settings. It examines how periods of enfranchisement, marginalization, oppression, and insurrection have affected the mobilization of historically disenfranchised ethnic, racial, and religious groups, as well as the creation and persistence of institutions designed to control them. By examining the interplay between state-building efforts and identity politics, the panel sheds light on critical processes of institutional development, identity-based conflict, and nation-making. Through case studies spanning colonial and post-colonial contexts, the panel investigates how underrepresented groups navigated political systems explicitly structured to exclude them—often leveraging identity as a strategic tool for collective action—while local elites exploited these systems to stifle mobilization and secure their power. The questions explored in this panel are deeply connected to the 2025 APSA conference theme of “Reimagining Politics, Power, and Peoplehood in Crisis Times.”

Bosley, Phadnis, and Zaw examine the evolution of identity-based political blocs in British India’s colonial legislature, showing how the expansion of the electoral franchise deepened religious and class divisions among Indigenous legislators. Marcellin and Mangonnet analyze how slave resistance in the American South was influenced by sensationalist media coverage of the Haitian Revolution, highlighting how cognitive heuristics shaped identity and resistance behaviors despite oppressive conditions. Callis and Carter explore how the manipulation of voter registration in 1931 Peru, through the lens of elite identities, shaped the socioeconomic and ethnic composition of the electorate in the first mass participation elections. Dunning examines how the regulation of slavery in imperial Brazil contributed to the construction of an autonomous state bureaucracy, challenging the power of slaveholder elites through legal mechanisms. Johnson-Kanu analyzes the influence of colonial land cessions on post-colonial identity and political participation in West Africa, showing how resistance to colonization shaped local perceptions of belonging and state legitimacy.

Together, these five papers offer important insights into the historical relationship between power, identity, and political mobilization.

Papers:

Identity-Based Coalition Blocs in the British India Legislature, 1921-1935

Mitchell Bosley, University of Michigan; Ajit Phadnis, IIM Indore; Htet Thiha Zaw, University of British Columbia

Studies on democratization in the Global South focus on post-independence states, overlooking the historical evolution of representative institutions under colonial rule. In this paper, we look at the case of British India, one of the largest colonial states by population and economic power, to argue that the partial electoral franchise brought new identity-based political blocs to the colonial lawmaking process. While elected indigenous legislators were at some point united against appointed representatives of the colonial government in key issues, opposing coalitions with indigenous legislators emerged along religious and class, especially when electoral constituencies were organized along these identities. The division by religion and class grew stronger over time after franchise expansion. We provide empirical evidence for this with text-as-data analysis of the British India legislature over three decades (1916-40), showing the impact of franchise expansion in 1921 and 1935. The findings provide a new perspective on colonial legislatures’ role in policy formation after franchise expansion.

Triggering Events, Local News, and Slave Resistance in the American South

Colette Marcellin, Vanderbilt University; Jorge G. Mangonnet, Vanderbilt University

Why do racial minorities resist their oppressors even when domestic conditions are unfavorable for collective action? This study examines slave resistance in the American South from 1783 to 1809, focusing on the influence of the 1791 Haitian Revolution. Existing explanations that emphasize socioeconomic grievances or political opportunities struggle to account for rebellion in a context characterized by paternalistic traditions, strong pro-slavery consensus, and considerable military power. We argue that the Haitian Revolution inspired resistance in the American South through “cognitive heuristics,” a process where oppressed groups use informational shortcuts—often unreliable, such as rumors or propaganda—to draw inspiration from foreign, successful examples. These shortcuts, while resonating with local experiences, overlook key contextual differences, leading to biased perceptions of feasibility. Using historical data on slave revolts and Southern newspaper coverage, we show that counties with greater reporting on Haiti—which was rife with misinformation, sensationalism, and propaganda—experienced higher levels of slave resistance. Preliminary findings from a difference-in-differences design suggest a significant link between sensationalist media coverage and episodes of resistance. Qualitative case studies from Virginia and South Carolina further illustrate the interplay between triggering events, local informational environments, and slave uprisings.

Colonization and the Politics of Belonging in Africa

Ada Johnson-Kanu, University of Kentucky

Scholars have shown that historical institutions are path dependent and are associated with economic and political outcomes today. Scholarships focus on the effect of colonial and precolonial institutions on contemporary outcomes. In this paper, I ask how colonization and the resistance to it influences individuals’ behavior and interaction with the state in post-colonial African societies. I look at the cessation of precolonial lands to colonial authorities to understand how individuals view and participate in politics in Africa. I code the contents of treaties signed by European colonizers and African leaders from the map of Africa by treaty. Using this dataset along with survey responses from the Afrobarometer, I study how ceding rights by precolonial leaders influences individuals’ belonging in post-colonial West Africa. I extend this study by analyzing how individuals who live in or are from areas that resisted colonization view themselves as part of the post-colonial state.

Constructing Electorates: The Influence of Elite Identity on Voter Registration

Anna Firestone Callis, Tulane University; Christopher Lee Carter, University of Virginia

Local economic elites often pose substantial barriers to free and fair elections. While research on electoral fraud and clientelism focuses on how elites use economic and coercive power to mobilize voters in favor of pro-elite candidates on election day, this paper examines a less explored channel through which elites can influence electoral outcomes: the manipulation of voter registration. We examine various identity characteristics of elites, including professional and ethnic (Indigenous) identities, and analyze how these identities–and their intersection–shape voter registration. We study voter registration for Peru’s 1931 elections–the first with mass popular participation. To estimate causal effects, we leverage exogenous variation in the composition of early-twentieth-century provincial-level voter registration councils. Our outcomes include the ethnic composition, size, and socioeconomic characteristics of the 1931 electorate. Our findings offer novel insights into how identity characteristics shape electoral expansion (or malfeasance) in new democracies.

Freedom and the Deep State: Slavery, Bureaucracy, and Institutions in Brazil

Thad Dunning, University of California, Berkeley

When and how do states become autonomous of powerful elites? A vast literature highlights the political, social, and economic consequences of slavery in the Americas. Yet previous research—particularly in political science and particularly in work on Latin America—appears to have missed important channels through which the regulation of slavery contributed crucially to state-building. I argue that the regulation of slavery in imperial Brazil contributed to the construction of a bureaucracy that was autonomous in many ways of slave-holder interests. The bureaucracy led rather than followed formal legislation regulating slavery, I argue, due to monarchical imperatives of political survival. I empirically examine two main vehicles through which an autonomous state was built: responses to lawsuits for freedom brought on behalf of enslaved persons and enslaved persons’ appeals for protection in the carceral system. The argument may contribute new comparative insights to our understanding of state-building in the Americas..

Co-sponsored by Division 21: Conflict Processes

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Francesca Parente, Christopher Newport University
• (Discussant) Carly Nicole Wayne, Washington University in St. Louis
• (Discussant) Lauren E Young, University of California, Davis

Session Description:

This panel brings together four papers that answer causal questions about violence and political behavior using experimental methods, including two survey experiments, one field experiment, and one lab-in-the-field experiment. Answering causal questions in conflict settings is notoriously difficult, because the explanatory variables we might care about (for example, exposure to violence, exposure to violent rhetoric, or exposure to memorialization sites) are not randomly assigned. The papers in this panel seek to address the causal mechanisms that underpin the relationship between violence and political outcomes, attitudes, and participation in a broad range of conflict settings around the world. Taken together, the panel contributes to important conversations on conflict processes, including both what we can learn about the impact of violence and memorialization of violence on political attitudes, as well as how we as political scientists might study such questions.

Balcells, Parente, and vanderWilden use a field experiment to evaluate the impact of visiting the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on antisemitism and attitudes toward democracy and present-day injustices, including the current war in Gaza. Davis and Turnbull conduct a survey experiment in Nigeria to assess how exposure to candidates that condone electoral violence affects political participation. Mailhot considers how international missions affect institutional trust in post-conflict Bosnia and Kosovo using survey experiments. Finally, Milliff and Read use a lab-in-the-field experiment in India to assess how disapproval messages from various actors affect attitudes toward vigilante violence.

The papers in this panel are geographically and thematically diverse, spanning contexts as varied as a memorial museum in the United States, electoral politics in Nigeria, post-conflict institutional reforms in the Balkans, and responses to vigilantism in India. Each paper highlights how experimental methods can be adapted to suit different political, cultural, and social contexts, offering lessons not only for academic audiences but also for practitioners and policymakers working on conflict resolution and violence mitigation.

Papers:

The Effect of Memorial Museums: A Field Experiment at the USHMM

Laia Balcells, Georgetown University; Francesca Parente, Christopher Newport University; Ethan vanderWilden, University of Wisconsin – Madison

How are historical atrocities memorialized and what impact do these memorials have on society today? A burgeoning literature has begun to evaluate the efficacy and effects of different “sites of memory,” and at times, museums, that deal with traumatic, problematic, or dark pasts. These studies have demonstrated their potential for both inter-group reconciliation and social backlash. However, much of this literature concentrates on sites that address a polarized social context, such as a civil war or former dictatorship. What, if any, effects do sites of memory have when they are relatively uncontested and do not implicate their main audience? We address this question in the context of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington D.C., which presents a narrative that is not inherently socially polarizing and that does not imply guilt to large portions of its primary audience (Americans and most other visitors), but still focuses on the history of a discriminated minority group (Jews). We conduct a field experiment at the USHMM to study how university students react to the museum’s presentation of the Holocaust. We are interested in several possible outcomes that could be affected by the museum visit, including antisemitism, feelings towards democracy, and attitudes towards present day injustices. This research adds to our understandings of how museums and both in- and out-group narratives are internalized and can affect public opinion.

Can Violence Narratives Shape Political Participation? Evidence from Nigeria
Justine Davis, University of Michigan; Megan Turnbull, University of Georgia

How do ordinary citizens engage with politicians and their political environment where elections are frequently manipulated with fraud and violence? We explore this question with a survey and conjoint experiment in Nigeria, a country that has some of the highest rates of election violence in Africa. We argue that in contexts where violence is expected and where many candidates either implicitly or explicitly condone or justify it, voters still have preferences over candidate behavior and characteristics which condition their participation in politics generally. We pay special attention to the narratives candidates who use violence deploy by examining whether respondents are more likely to select candidates who express remorse, use violence defensively, or use violence exclusively as opposed to other electoral manipulation strategies. Going beyond traditional assessments of vote choice as an outcome, we also examine whether exposure to certain types of candidate narratives reduces or increases political participation beyond voting, such as mobilizing in support or in condemnation of violent candidates, volunteering to reduce violence, or joining political parties. Our findings nuance expectations of the effects of electoral violence on political participation and better help us understand the challenges facing voters in contexts where violence is rife.

Mission Embedding and Institutional Trust in Conflict-Affected Countries
Cameron Mailhot, University of Arizona

What impact do international missions have on post-conflict institutional trust? Institutional trust is crucial for durable, democratic transitions out of armed conflict. Missions are often deployed to assist in institutional reforms with the goal of bringing about its improvement, yet institutional trust remains highly variant. While existing scholarship focuses primarily on institutional process and output as determinants of trust, less attention is paid to the impact that international missions have on trust in the institutions they help reform. I argue that the embedding of missions in post-conflict countries leads to divergences in institutional trust and that this impact is driven by two interrelated mechanisms: public discourse surrounding and civilians’ assessment of each mission. Results from a set of survey experiments in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as sentiment analyses of over 28,000 Albanian-language newspaper articles, support this argument. These findings suggest that the (re)establishment of institutional trust in war-torn societies is dependent, in no small part, on the international mission charged with the institutional reform process and the relationship that domestic constituencies develop with each mission.

Dis-Endorsement Messages Attrit Public Approval of Extralegal Violence

Aidan Milliff, Florida State University; Blair Read, MIT

Vigilantism and extra-legal violence present significant challenges to the rule of law in many countries. While vigilantism has deleterious consequences for due process rights, governance, and state legitimacy, it is often very popular or understood as a “necessary evil” by large segments of the public. This study examines whether disapproval messages, delivered by different social authorities, can reduce public support for extra-legal violence. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment in Uttar Pradesh, India, we expose participants to a hypothetical but locally-relevant vignette describing a mob attack against a religious minority, followed by a disapproval message from either a social peer, a local elected official, or a majority religious authority. Results reveal significant variation in approval rates across conditions, with the message from the religious leader eliciting the lowest approval of extra-legal violence. These findings highlight the potential of authority figures to shift public attitudes in violence-prone contexts.

Co-sponsored by Division 46: Qualitative Methods

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Busra Nur Ozguler Aktel, Georgia State University
• (Presenter) Austin Knuppe, Utah State University
• (Presenter) Narmin Butt,; University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
• (Presenter) Tanya Bandula-Irwin, University of Toronto
• (Presenter) Shivan Fazil Sabr, Boston University
• (Presenter) Busra Nur Ozguler Aktel, Georgia State University

Session Description:

Recent developments in the Middle East, including the war on Gaza and shifting dynamics in Syria, highlight profound changes in regional politics, domestic landscapes, and social fabric. These transformations directly affect conflict dynamics and the ability to conduct meaningful fieldwork in the region. This roundtable will bring together scholars with diverse fieldwork experiences in conflict zones to reflect on the challenges posed by these evolving circumstances.

We will explore innovative methodologies that adapt to restricted access and volatile conditions, discuss ethical considerations unique to working in such environments, and examine how researchers can navigate the balance between producing rigorous scholarship and prioritizing safety for themselves and their interlocutors. By fostering collaborative dialogue, this session aims to provide practical insights and encourage scholarly engagement with the pressing realities of conducting research in conflict zones.

Co-sponsored by Division 31: Women, Gender and Politics Research

In-Person Created Panel

Participants:

• (Discussant) Edana Beauvais, Simon Fraser University

Session Description:

Right-wing, nationalist, populist parties are gaining electoral successes around the globe. But what does the rise in nativism and far-right populism mean for gender and politics? This panel addresses this question from both the demand-side of the voter and the supply side of the political parties. With respect to voters, this panel considers how voters’ gender identities impact their support for radical right parties, and how exogenous shocks resulting in sudden gains in women’s empowerment can create a backlash effect. With respect to parties, this panel considers how far-right leaders use rhetoric to draw on paternalistic norms and feelings of aggrieved masculinity to capitalize on a backlash against women’s empowerment, and how right-wing populist parties seek to frame or reframe women’s policy issues. This panel also considers women’s engagement and influence in far-right movements, clarifying how narratives related to empowerment and traditionalism shape the motivation, recruitment, and influence of women in the far-right. Papers in this panel draw on data from around the world–including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Europe, and Latin America–and a range of methodological techniques, including survey data and quantitative analyses, archival research, and qualitative interviews and ethnography, to answer the question: What does the rise in right-wing populism and nativism mean for gender and politics?

Papers:

Hypermasculinity and Support for Trump and Radical Right Parties
Dietlind Stolle, McGill University; Minna Kirsten Fisher, McGill University; Elisabeth L. Gidengil, McGill University

Hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity have been on display in several elections campaigns recently. Yet these concepts have not yet entered the political analysis in systematic ways. Differentiating men and women based on their gender identity might help us understand better how these group identities are used for and converted in political behavior.

In this paper, we present measures of gender identity from three surveys: the European Solidarity Survey, the ESS as well as the ANES. The measures enable us to differentiate both women and men in terms of the strength (and sometimes importance) of their gender identity. Drawing on this original survey data, we use these measures to analyze support for Donald Trump in the US as well as for similar populist radical right wing parties in Europe. Our aim is to see whether the use of more fine-grained measures of gender identity provide a fuller understanding of the relationship between sex and political preference than would be possible using the typical “gender gap” approach that focuses on the differences between women and men to the neglect of the differences among women and men themselves.

Our theoretical argument draws on the literature on masculinity and femininity and especially the notion of masculinity threat. We argue that changes in cultural values and societal transformations pose a threat to white men who are experiencing a loss of their traditional dominance. Hypermasculine men are expected to be the most likely to respond to this loss of status by supporting Trump or radical right parties. Given that femininity is a less valued and less precarious status, we argue that hyperfeminine women will be less likely to support Trump and similar party leaders and their parties in Europe than their male counterparts. Nonetheless, they will be more likely to favor Trump and RRP than women who do not feel as feminine or place as much importance on their femininity.

Our results indicate that gender identity creates a much larger gap between men in particular then the conventional gender gap. However the size of that gap varies across countries. We complete our analysis with the examination of social media accounts of RRP party leaders to understand whether their hypermasculine messaging in particular further facilitates the relationship between gender identity and RRP voting.

Women’s Empowerment and Patriarchal Backlash: The Case of Italy
Simone Paci, Stanford University; Beatrice Montano, Columbia University; Chiara Superti, Columbia University

From economic crises to global pandemics, unexpected shocks to cultural and social dynamics may challenge the status of the dominant group and produce significant political backlash as a consequence. This paper studies this phenomenon in the context of a patriarchal society such as Italy in the 1950s-70s. During the First World War, a high number of young males did not return to their Italian municipalities. As a result, there was an exogenous increase in the access of women working outside the house in years to follow to meet the demands of the job market. We show how areas that saw a larger increase of women in the labor force in the 50s due to this exogenous shock had a higher rate of votes against divorce and abortion in the 1970s. We interpret this as a patriarchal backlash to female economic empowerment that took the form of a vote against initiatives that emancipate women.

From Paternalism to Aggrieved Masculinity: Far Right Gender Politics in Chile
Gwynn Thomas, SUNY, University at Buffalo

Gender politics are central to understanding the rise of illiberal and authoritarian political movements and the crisis of liberal democracy. Along with their open contempt for democratic processes, these far-right parties and leaders, such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, and Trump in the United States, specifically target reproductive rights, the rights of sexual minorities, and the broader cultural shifts towards greater gender equality to garner political support. Their critiques are often weaponized through the spread of disinformation across social media platforms. If we are to confront the current threats to democracy and to reimagine more equal and just political communities, we need to understand the gender politics of the far right.

In this paper, I examine the political strategies of the far right in Chile to better understand how they are employing gender in their attempts to limit democratic rights and participation. The centrality of gender to the politics of the far right is not a new political phenomenon. However, in this paper, I argue that the rise of powerful feminist movements and their political successes in promoting gender equality has shifted both the political strategies and the ideological understanding of gender by far-right leaders and parties. Prior to 2000, the political right in Chile—and elsewhere in Latin America—was rooted in a traditional form of heteropatriachy that valorized the family and rooted men’s political power in their roles as fathers and heads of households, while positioning women as mothers, wives, and daughters. The more recent right-wing populist movements, however, have embraced a virulent form of hyper-masculinity often based on explicitly misogynistic and homophobic appeals. These movements specifically target feminist beliefs, movements, and activists to gain political support and to justify their attempts to limit the rights of women and sexual minorities. These attempts often include forms of violence. This targeting of feminist gains by rising right-wing populists as a political strategy shows both how powerful feminist ideas have become and the importance of backlash politics in understanding the rise of right-wing populism.

To trace theses changes in the gendered political strategies and ideologies of the far right, I draw on over 10 months of field research in Chile between 2019-2025 and employ a range of methods, including archival research, media analysis, and interviews. Specifically, I analyze the changing political rhetoric and strategies of the far right during Chile’s failed constitutional process of 2020-2023. In response to the political crisis created by massive social protests in 2019, Chileans voted in a national plebiscite in 2020 to write a new constitution and elected a constitutional assembly to take on this task. In the first process, the political right was marginalized as the delegates to the first constitutional assembly reflected the political actors that had emerged during the social protests, including political independents, environmentalists, Indigenous communities, and feminist activists, among others. The first draft guaranteed women’s sexual and reproductive rights, including access to abortions, protected sexual minorities, and made the state responsible for the social welfare of its citizens by overturning the privatization of health, education, and retirement. Focusing on the plebiscite, I examine the role of gendered appeals in the highly organized disinformation campaign by the right that helped defeat the first draft constitution. Returning to the drawing board, Chileans embarked on a second attempt. I again analyze the political strategies used by far-right, particularly Jose Antonio Kast and his Partido Republicano, to win a plurality of delegates to the second constitutional assembly. The second constitutional draft centered the protection of private property, maintained a neo-liberal market-economy, rejected a broad vision of social welfare, and targeted the recent gains in reproductive rights and the rights of sexual minorities. The feminist movement helped to mobilize Chileans to reject (56%-44%) this second constitutional draft in December of 2023. The loss was led by women and the young: women under 35 voted by 70% to reject the threat to their rights. This extraordinary sequence of events in Chile provides a unique opportunity to analyze the changing political strategies of the far-right and the centrality of gendered claims in their political projects and strategies. My analysis thus shows how right-wing populists seek to capitalize on gender backlash politics and how changing gender ideologies on the far right are driving the illiberal political projects that endanger liberal democracies.

Violence against Women and Right-Wing Populism: Insights from Poland and the UK
Anna Gwiazda, King’s College London

The literature on gender and right-wing populism extensively examines reproductive rights but gives less attention to violence against women, a global issue with severe health, social, and economic consequences. How do right-wing populists address this problem? For instance, the Trump administration reframed domestic violence as a criminal rather than a gendered issue, restricted avenues for reporting sexual discrimination and reduced resources for abuse and rape victims. Right-wing ideology, rooted in conservative values and emphasizing traditional family structures and gender roles, often displays a reluctance to address gender-specific aspects of violence. Additionally, anti-gender populist and exclusionary rhetoric can further hinder comprehensive legal reforms. Yet, the urgency of the problem, particularly amid the Covid-19 “shadow pandemic” and rising domestic violence rates, has demanded state intervention. This article employs an intersectional feminist lens to analyze discourses and the interplay between strategic behaviour and ideological contradictions in the adoption of Poland’s Domestic Violence Act Amendments (2023) and the UK’s Domestic Abuse Act (2021). By comparing Poland’s Law and Justice Party’s approach with the British Conservative Party’s stance, the study uncovers nuanced dynamics, contributing to debates in feminist comparative politics and public policy while highlighting the challenges feminist praxis faces in the context of right-wing populism and democratic backsliding.

Far-Right Feminism: Examining Women in Far-Right Movements in Canada and the US

Esli Chan, McGill University

Far-right movements, like QAnon and the Proud Boys, are increasingly prominent in contemporary and formal politics. While far-right sentiments have long existed in society, the rise of social media, globalization, and economic anxieties have fueled populist attitudes and backlash towards marginalized populations and distrust towards political institutions and democratic processes (Wilson, 2020; Mudde, 2007; Miller-Idriss, 2021). Far-right movements have often characterized by the male demographic of their participants and leaders and its ideologies rooted in toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, and white supremacy (Matfess & Margolin, 2022; Moskalenko et al., 2023; Ebner & Davey, 2019; Freeden, 1996; McClinktock, 2021).

However, women have also been crucial players in the spread of far-right ideologies (Blee, 2012; Campion, 2020; Doyle, 2022; Petõ, 2020; Leidig, 2021), including the TradWives, Moms for Liberty, and the Queen of QAnon. Women are said to join far-right movements because they find solace through the structures of traditional gender and family roles and security through political belonging (Dworkin, 1983; Blee, 2002, Miller-Idriss, 2020). Participation in far-right movements is often characterized by shared anti-feminist and patriarchal beliefs, which would appear to be antithetical to women’s liberation or existence. This is underpinned by feminist theoretical assumptions that women tend to be progressive actors. Scholars, however, find that the far-right can also employ similar narratives of liberation and political autonomy that could appeal to women and other minorities (HoSang & Lowndes, 2019). This presents a dilemma where women reconcile the idea of feminist liberation with patriarchal far-right ideologies. This project asks, how do women in far-right movements navigate the tensions between gender and far-right worldviews, particularly in relation to the interplay between narratives of feminist liberation and anti-feminist far-right ideologies? Subsequently, how do these worldviews shape the motivation, recruitment, and role of women in far-right movements?

While this paper is part of a larger doctoral study which employs hybrid ethnographic and mixed methods approach, this paper presents the theoretical chapters to this work and the preliminary findings from the digital trace analysis portion. First, this paper addresses the theoretical approach to reconciling women’s participation in far-right movements by considering feminist theories of liberation and agency and contending with the possibilities of the existence of a far-right feminism. Second, this paper employs a digital trace analysis technique which evaluates the online network and activity of far-right women. It develops a seedlist of prominent far-right women actors of interest, and considers the linguistic, rhetorical, and behavioural patterns of these selected actors online. It evaluates their engagement on platforms such as X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. These findings are assessed in conjunction with the theoretical framework to inform a holistic interpretation of the worldview and activities of far-right women. In this project’s further iteration, these findings will be supplemented with ethnographic fieldwork and interview data, as well as online topic modelling approaches.

In sum, this research contributes to larger discourse regarding the precarity of women’s liberation and autonomy, evaluating how the far-right can pose as a possible alternative for women’s political engagement. It refines a contemporary understanding of political polarization and extremist threats posed by far-right movements through evaluating the ways that women may contribute to these movement’s activities and ideologies.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University
• (Discussant) Nermin Allam, Rutgers University
• (Discussant) S. Laurel Weldon, Simon Fraser University

Session Description:

In these challenging times for gender justice, democracy, and peace, Gender Equality Machineries (GEMs) – the state-based structures that promote the rights, status, and condition of women in their full complexity and seek to strike down gender-based inequities – play an important role in preventing the reversal of women’s rights and gender justice. This panel endeavors to “go global” with the scholarship on GEMs and state feminism, which has primarily only focused on the Global North, by bringing together research on Mexico, Brazil, Jordan, South Africa, and Iran. The collection of papers speaks directly to the conference’s theme by analyzing how GEMs support the pursuit of gender equality in contexts where political institutions, bureaucracies, and civil society are threatened by authoritarianism, conflict, and democratic decline.

As “critical actors” in promoting gender equality policy, GEMs have the potential to compel governments to keep gender equality a top priority, to deepen democracy and democratic practices, and are a major vector for gender mainstreaming. GEMs also partner with women’s civil society organizations to support marginalized groups and communities to better achieve their complex policy goals through “state feminism.” However, research on GEMs and state feminism has predominantly focused on Global North countries. While GEMs exist and operate in all of the world’s regions, questions remain about how these institutions operate in political contexts where democracy is fragile or autocracy remains in place, whether and how they create opportunities for gender justice in authoritarian contexts, and how these state-based institutions interact with autonomous women’s movements in a diverse range of political, cultural and socioeconomic contexts found in the countries of the Global South. This panel endeavors to answer some of these pressing questions.

Maneuvering Weak Institutions: Women’s Machineries in Afghanistan and Iran

Mona Tajali, Stanford University

Feminist activists have long demanded state-level institutional structures that promote and protect women’s rights, in turn contributing to democratization and development. This demand was further supported from transnational and international feminist communities when the Beijing Platform for Action of the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women emphasized the “creation and strengthening of national machineries for the advancement of women at the highest possible level of government” (United Nations 1995). Like their counterparts in other regions, women’s rights activists in many Muslim countries have also organized for the creation of such formal structures, though their efforts have been impacted by the legacy of weak institutions that foster authoritarian rule and limited democratic governance.

This paper outlines the challenging trajectory of feminist advocates in Iran and Afghanistan as they campaigned and organized for formal national-level institutions (or machineries) in promotion of women’s rights in contexts with weak state institutions and strong patriarchal control, often justified through conservative religious interpretation. Inspired by international and transnational efforts on Gender Equality Machineries, particularly post 1995, this paper argues that women critical actors in these contexts managed to position themselves as feminist insiders to pressure for the formation of national-level machineries on women’s rights. These institutions include cabinet-level bodies in Iran, such as the Vice Presidency of Women and Family Affairs (2013 to Present) and its predecessors, Center for Women and Family Affairs (2005 to 2013) and Center for Women’s Participation (1997-2005). In Afghanistan, they include the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs (2001 to 2021), and the closely related Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (2002 to 2021). Although the bodies in Afghanistan are now both dissolved, the history of their workings and women’s experiences of policymaking are nonetheless important.

Based on in-depth interviews with key women who helped form and later served in these institutions, this research highlights the various opportunities and obstacles that institutionalization of women’s rights faced throughout the past decades. It especially analyzes feminist actors’ strategic interactions with key male elites and maneuvering weak and limited commitments both on behalf of the state as well as the international community on women’s rights and gender equality. Using a feminist institutionalist lens, this research sheds light on the complexities of effectively institutionalizing women’s rights in undemocratic contexts, highlighting the various factors and actors involved at national, international, and transnational levels. This comparative research ends with an analysis of the key demands of the feminist movements from both countries on future approaches towards institutionalization of women’s rights amidst extensive backlash against women’s rights in recent years.

Brazil’s GEM: Institutional Location as a Double-Edged Sword

Simone R. Bohn, York University

Having an agency within the state primarily devoted to promoting women’s rights has been paramount to designing, approving, implementing, and monitoring public policies for women. International organizations dedicated to the advancement of women’s condition around the world have long acknowledged the critical role that these GEMs, gender equality machineries, women policy machineries (UN DAW, 2005) or women policy agencies (Stetson and Mazur, 1995) play. In fact, the United Nations’ recommendation that member countries put them in place dates back five decades: The first World Conference on Women in 1975 in Mexico (UN, 1976: 14) made that recommendation, following the work and guidance of internationally recognized civil society women leaders in promoting women’s equality.

Brazil established its WPA long after the United Nations’ original call for action. Although there had been previous federal agencies dedicated to policies for women, they either lacked decision-making autonomy and political strength or amounted to short-lived experiences. The Special Secretariat of Public Policies for Women (or SPM, Secretaria Especial de Políticas Públicas para Mulheres) only came into being in 2003 and represented the culmination of decades of struggles of Brazil’s women’s movement actors. The left-leaning government of the Workers’ Party (or PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores) created the SPM. The PT has historically been allied with and supported by the bulk of organized women in Brazil (albeit not in its entirety).

Using longitudinal data and in-depth interviews with femocrats and activists, this paper analyzes the PT’s presidencies’ enhancement of SPM’s institutional strength, given its place within the state apparatus, its status and its budget. However, having substantial institutional power, including direct access to a women-friendly head of government, which is thought to be a factor shaping GEM’s success, turned out to be a double-edged sword in the case of SPM. It did help the GEM cut through some forms of resistance to the gender mainstreaming process while ensuring sustained access to budget and personnel. On the other hand, it made SPM over-reliant on particular policy tools – at the expense of policy institutionalization. More importantly, the SPM’s case demonstrates that heads of government, even when allies from progressive parties, can behave in idiosyncratic ways or face spates of political debility – all to the detriment of specific public policies for women and the GEM itself.

GEMs in Jordan: Critical Actors or Tools of the State?

Summer Forester, Carleton College

Scholarship on Gender Equality Machinery (GEMs) in the Global North suggests that these institutions can serve as critical actors for improving the lives and status of women. Research on GEMs in the Global South is more mixed. At times, GEMs can spark policy change on critical issues like violence against women and women’s political representation. At other times, authoritarian regimes use these institutions symbolically to elevate their profile and legitimate the regime in the international arena. Moreover, autocracies can engage in “genderwashing” whereby the regime takes credit for advancements in women’s rights to distract from other persistent nondemocratic practices (Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2022). As such, questions remain about the extent to which GEMs can function as critical actors for gender justice in the Global South.
This paper analyzes the case of Jordan’s National Commission for Women (JNCW) to understand the degree to which this GEM is succeeding in its pursuit of women’s rights in the Kingdom. Drawing on both archival research and interviews with Jordanian activists and policymakers, I endeavor to demonstrate how the JNCW has changed over time, how the regime interacts with the JNWC, and how the institution interacts with autonomous civil society actors. I argue that the JNCW has, indeed, served as a critical actor for women’s rights, but it is often constrained by the state and the state’s interests.

GEMs in México: Catalyzing the Feminist Agenda amidst Cataclysms?

Gisela Zaremberg, FLACSO

The gender mainstreaming approach has expanded across various mechanisms for the advancement of women globally and particularly in Latin America. The five-year follow-up to the commitments made since the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, the robust regional conferences promoted by international cooperation—highly influential in Latin America—and the extensive networks of both institutional and non-institutional activists in the region strongly propelled the advancement of GEMs in this region. Among the paradigmatic cases is the development of Mexico’s National Women’s Institute (INMUJERES by its acronym in Spanish), which has recently been transformed into the Women’s Secretariat. What have been the critical obstacles and opportunities for its development? Specifically, from a feminist governance perspective: what are its possibilities as a catalytic actor in advancing the feminist agenda in the country, in contexts of successive different kinds of crises around violence and deterioration of human rights, limited public budget and economic restrictions and political hyper-polarization and conservative anti-gender threats?

Co-sponsored by Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Elizabeth F. Cohen, Boston University
• (Presenter) Seyla Benhabib, Yale University
• (Presenter) Ayelet Shachar, University of Toronto
• (Presenter) Paulina Ochoa Espejo, University of Virginia
• (Presenter) Matthew Longo, Leiden University
• (Presenter) Anna Jurkevics, University of British Columbia

Session Description:

Responding to ever-increasing pressures of migration, states, supranational, and subnational actors deploy complex moves and maneuvers to reconfigure borders, rights, and territory, giving rise to a changing legal cartography of international relations and international law. This roundtable brings into conversation 5 scholars with diverse perspectives on this new reconfiguration of rights, territoriality, and jurisdiction at the empirical and normative levels to examine its implications for the future of democratic governance within and across borders. The participants bring legal, historical, philosophical, critical, discursive, and postcolonial perspectives to bear on the subject of state territoriality – ostensibly, the most stable and unquestionable element undergirding the current international system – has been rewritten and dramatically reimagined. The discussion will be based on essays published in the volume Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration, Asylum, and Shifting Borders published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) Page Fortna, Columbia University
• (Discussant) Page Fortna, Columbia University
• (Discussant) Brian Lai, University of Iowa

Session Description:

This session not only addresses pressing contemporary challenges but also lays a foundation for practical applications and long-term solutions in countering terrorism and radicalization. By exploring how extremist leaders leverage online platforms, the intersection of counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics, the impact of leadership transitions within terrorist organizations, the relationship between terrorism and repression of religion, and the evolution of violence in response to political agreements, we also bring together groundbreaking research methods, and advanced data gathering techniques.

The first study examines the pathways of radicalization within White Nationalist movements through an analysis of White Nationalist leaders’ online interpersonal communications with their followers on Twitter and Facebook. Utilizing a newly-constructed, large-scale dataset encompassing hundreds of White Nationalist leaders’ accounts and those of their followers across more than 30 countries, this paper analyzes followers’ engagement with different types of leader appeals. By employing a supervised machine learning approach, the authors uncover how misinformation and affective-laden rhetoric shape follower engagement and radicalization. The findings highlight distinct rhetorical strategies used by extremist leaders and their relative efficacy, with emotional appeals and misinformation playing critical, but unique roles in fostering radicalization.

The second paper examines how the convergence of counter-narcotics (CN) and counter-terrorism (CT) determine the US prioritization of dismantling illicit markets. When it comes to dismantling illicit networks controlled by terror groups (TG), USFP is strong in the Middle East and Asia but not in Africa, even though the latter continent has far more TG and is geographically of close proximity to the US than the other two regions. This paper explores the reasons behind that by examining how USFP determines the dismantling of illicit networks controlled by TG. USFP dismantles illicit markets where TG and drug cartels converge (Middle East, Asia), as opposed to where they don’t (i.e., Africa). The study highlights the puzzling gap by using Social Network Analysis (SNA) models, fuzzy logic model, and primary and secondary data sources. This paper illustrates two SNA models: bi-directional and unidirectional.

The third study examines leadership transitions and violent dynamics in terrorist organizations. This paper evaluates the effect of leadership transition – and namely the interregnum period between leaders – on a terrorist organization’s use of violence. The authors posit that longer transition periods will be associated with a greater risk of fratricidal violence within the organization and that the leaders that emerge will be associated with shorter tenures. Furthermore, the findings indicate that leadership uncertainty has a strong impact on the nature of violence and the success of new leaders. This paper speaks to the greater literature of weakening of TGs in the Middle East and the rebirth of TGs in different regions, such as Islamic State (IS) in Africa.

The fourth paper examines opportunistic repression to understand the relationship between terrorism and religious regulation, particularly in Muslim-majority countries (MMC). Some scholars argue that terrorism is a byproduct of state repression, especially religious repression, when it comes to MMCs and Islamist terrorism. Others contend that state repression – including repressive religious regulation – is a rational state strategy for combatting or mitigating terrorism. This study employs multiple empirical tests, including a latent variable model, utilizing new data on religious regulation from three newly independent MMCs – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The preliminary conclusion is that religious repression has a life cycle such that even if states may initially be responding to a real or perceived threat of terrorism, it can accelerate for other reasons unrelated to terrorism.

The fifth paper examines terrorism in Northern Ireland before and after the Good Friday Agreement. The Good Friday Agreement has often been cited as marking the shift away from sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. However, sectarian violence has remained, and to better understand the peace process, the study uses a newly compiled and geo-referenced dataset on terrorism in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 2001. Through a combination of spatial, quantitative, and qualitative methodologies, the author assesses changes in the quantity and quality of terrorism in Northern Ireland, including the number of attacks, the deadliness of attacks, the destructiveness of attacks, and the perpetrators of attacks.

Papers:

Online Radicalization and Recruitment in the Global White Nationalist Movement

Carly Nicole Wayne, Washington University in St. Louis; Taylor Nicole Carlson, Washington University in St. Louis; Erin Rossiter, University of Notre Dame

This study examines the pathways of radicalization within White Nationalist movements through an analysis of White Nationalist leaders’ online interpersonal communications with their followers on Twitter and Facebook. Utilizing a newly-constructed, large-scale dataset encompassing hundreds of White Nationalist leaders’ accounts and those of their followers across more than 30 countries, the study analyzes followers’ engagement with different types of leader appeals. Employing a supervised machine learning approach, we uncover how misinformation and affective-laden rhetoric shape follower engagement and radicalization. Our findings highlight distinct rhetorical strategies used by extremist leaders and their relative efficacy, with emotional appeals and misinformation playing critical, but unique roles in fostering radicalization. This research advances understanding of the dynamics of online extremism and provides a foundation for developing interventions to counteract these processes. The results have significant implications for addressing domestic and global extremism, informing policies to mitigate violent political mobilization, and crafting effective de-radicalization strategies.

Dismantling of Illicit Networks: Convergence of Drug Cartels and Terror Groups

Ruqaya M. Abdirahman, Georgetown University

When it comes to dismantling illicit networks controlled by terror groups (TG), USFP is strong in the Middle East and Asia but not in Africa, even though the latter continent has far more TG and is geographically of close proximity to the US than the other two regions. Theories on post 9/11 CT policy are also not enough to explain why some TG financial networks were dismantled but not others. This paper explores the reasons behind that by examining how USFP determines the dismantling of illicit networks controlled by TG. USFP dismantles illicit markets where TG and drug cartels converge (Middle East, Asia), as opposed to where they don’t (Africa). This also shows that CT policies have less to do with terrorism and more to do with national security, and although the two seem to be synonymous, they differ in application (not all terrorism threatens US national security). In networks that pose a direct threat to US national security (convergence of TG and cartels), the US puts in the effort to dismantle. The study highlights the puzzling gap in the dismantling of illicit markets by using Social Network Analysis (SNA) models, fuzzy logic model, and primary and secondary data sources. This paper illustrates two SNA models: bi-directional (two-way relationship) and unidirectional (one-way relationship).

Understanding the Relationship between Terrorism and Religious Regulation

Mostafa El Sharkawy, University of Michigan

What is the relationship between terrorism and religious repression? Some argue that terrorism is a byproduct of state repression, especially religious repression, when it comes to Muslim majority countries (MMCs) and Islamist terrorism. Others contend that state repression – including repressive religious regulation – is a rational state strategy for combatting or mitigating terrorism. This paper asks whether the threat of terrorism is a smoke screen for states to justify increasing religious repression or a rational response to a security threat. The author employs multiple empirical tests, including a latent variable model,  utilizing new data on religious regulation from three newly independent MMCs that have experienced both exposure to terrorism and increasing levels of religious repression since 1991 – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Our preliminary conclusion is that religious repression has a life cycle such that even if states may initially be responding to a real or perceived threat of terrorism, it can accelerate for other reasons unrelated to terrorism.

Uncertainty at Top: Leadership Transitions, Violence in Terrorist Organizations

Stephen C. Nemeth, Oklahoma State University; Brian Lai, University of Iowa; Sloane Kathryn Ward, University of Wisconsin – Madison; Reagan Page, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

While the study of leaders and their effects on state behavior has progressed markedly, the same cannot be said for the leaders of non-state actors. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of leadership transition – and namely the interregnum period between leaders – on a terrorist organization’s use of violence. We posit that longer transition periods will be associated with a greater risk of fratricidal violence within the organization and that the leaders that emerge will be associated with shorter tenures. This occurs because longer interregnums will lead to greater uncertainty about the leader and the future direction of the organization. The longer these different beliefs become entrenched, the more violence has to be used by potential leaders to remove dissenters. These blocs are likely to remain after the transition, negatively affecting the tenure of new leaders. We test this theory on a newly collected database of terrorist leaders. Our findings indicate that leadership uncertainty has a strong impact on the nature of violence and the success of new leaders.

Terrorism in Northern Ireland before and after the Good Friday

Shannon Colleen Hartmann, University of Nevada, Reno

The Good Friday Agreement has often been cited as marking the shift away from sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Media and researchers have frequently hailed the agreement as successful in ending armed conflict and promoting cooperation. However, sectarian violence has remained, but the quality and quantity of this violence have shifted. To better understand the peace process, it is necessary to look at how violence has changed over time. Using a newly compiled and geo-referenced dataset on terrorism in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 2001, I compare the quality and quantity of terrorist attacks throughout the peace process and in the years directly after the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement (December 1998). By investigating the changes in sectarian violence throughout the peace process and in the years that followed, it is possible to better understand how the agreement was successful and where it failed. Using a combination of spatial, quantitative, and qualitative methodologies, I assess changes in the quantity and quality of terrorism in Northern Ireland, including the number of attacks, the deadliness of attacks, the destructiveness of attacks, and the perpetrators of attacks. Through spatiotemporal analysis, it is possible to understand the patterns of violence better and assess changes in those patterns over time. Summary statistics and regression analysis can help evaluate whether these changes are significant. Finally, case studies and process tracing can help us better understand the causes of these changes and their relationship to the agreement. The findings from these analyses can help assess the impacts of the Good Friday Agreement on sectarian violence and inform future peace processes.

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Jeanne Morefield, University of Oxford
• (Presenter) Joseph E. Lowndes, Hunter College – CUNY
• (Presenter) Alberto Toscano, Simon Fraser University
• (Presenter) Kevin M. Bruyneel, Babson College
• (Presenter) Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University
• (Presenter) Jakeet Singh, York University

Session Description:
Over the last decade, increasing numbers of liberals have described the rise of far–right populist movements in the United States and around the world as a resurgence of political and rhetorical fascism. Debates within liberal circles tend to focus on both the similarities (or lack thereof) between our contemporary moment and those of the interwar period, and on identifying the various failures of liberal democracy that have led / are leading to fascist drift. This roundtable, by contrast, starts neither with definitions nor with failure but, instead, with the long-term entanglements of liberalism and fascism that treats fascism as a constituent feature of the relationship between “liberal democracy” and imperial capitalism. Fascism, from this perspective, is the containing impulse associated with the “counter–revolution of property” (in Du Bois’ framing) that asserts itself along the racial peripheries of the liberal world order: in the prison, at the border, in the colonies. Participants on this roundtable will explore these connections through the liberal-fascist intimacies that coalesce around: the defence of so-called western civilization: the aesthetic similarities between liberal and fascist fantasies about “human trafficking” and global conspiracy; the shared fixation with the lost values of merit, fairness and safety that reinforce property relations; the gender norms and forms of racial domination that emerge in the fascist-liberal alliance to attack and demonize immigrants, transgender athletes, “blood thirsty criminals,” and the “radical left.” In all, participants challenge the common sense that fascism is liberalism’s opposite (the product of its failures) and that liberalism is always the antidote to fascism. Rather, from the perspective of this roundtable, fascism is liberalism’s doppelganger.

Co-sponsored by Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Bonnie Honig, Brown University
• (Discussant) Lori Marso, Union College

Session Description:
This panel explores the phenomenology and lived experiences of race and gender, examining their centrality to justice, democracy, and collective belonging. Responding to contemporary challenges such as rising authoritarianism, xenophobia, and social inequality, the panel highlights how narrative, storytelling, and embodied experience offer transformative resources for reimagining key political concepts like freedom, justice, and equality. Drawing from Black studies, political theory, and phenomenology, the panel interrogates the intersections of race, gender, and democracy to reveal how lived experience disrupts traditional frameworks and inspires democratic renewal.

Papers:

The Limits of Liberalism and the Centrality of Race in Tommie Shelby

DeMarcus Pruitt, Brown University

This paper examines the foundational role of race in American democracy by critiquing liberalism—or how the majority of Americans perceive justice—and its ability to address racial justice effectively. By critically engaging with Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos, which offers the most robust attempt to politicize liberalism’s capacity to confront and eradicate race, racism, and the ghetto, this study evaluates the limitations of John Rawls’s egalitarian framework and Shelby’s adaptation. Shelby’s focus on racial justice, particularly his interpretation of the ghetto as a violation of Fair Equality of Opportunity (FEO), attempts to politicize race but constrains its scope by framing racism as both an ideological and systemic issue. However, Shelby does not conceptualize white supremacy as its own distinct system with obligations and duties, a perspective central to Charles Mills’s critique of liberalism.

While Shelby argues that race is biologically contingent but anthropologically necessary—emphasizing the need for a cohesive Black cultural framework to guide moral identity—Toni Morrison’s theorization of the whiteness embedded in American literature, particularly in her novel Home, reveals a deeper understanding of race as central to American democracy. Morrison’s work provides the seeds for recognizing race as a constant within American political life, yet challenges us to envision politics that do not remain tethered to racialized frameworks. Pruitt critiques Shelby’s and liberalism’s frameworks as conservative and insufficiently transformative, while acknowledging their significant contributions to addressing race as a political problem on par with gender and class.

Through the insights of Charles Mills and Toni Morrison, this study argues that race functions as a political system foundational to American democracy rather than as a peripheral ideological distortion. Morrison’s literary critique offers a radical departure from Shelby’s Rawlsian reliance, reimagining democracy as rooted in historical accountability, collective care, and solidarity. By juxtaposing Shelby’s Rawlsian approach with Mills’s critique of white supremacy and Morrison’s egalitarian vision, this work proposes an insurgent framework for racial justice that avoids the unintentional post-racial language and abstractions often perpetuated by liberal frameworks.

Written on Our Skin: The Projection and Disruption of Racist Narratives

Damali Britton, Brown University

Darnella Frazier’s recording of a Minneapolis police officer killing George Floyd played an important role in galvanizing record-setting participation in the transnational 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests and the indictment of Floyd’s murderer. The wide circulation of the recording and public responses to it raise questions about when and how people are able to read such videos as evidence of antiblack violence. This paper argues that amid white supremacist narratives that dismiss or justify the violation of black people, the circulation of these videos is not enough to prompt people to see them as depicting racist violence. Drawing on Judith Butler’s essay “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” I illustrate the ways witnessing acts such as Frazier’s enable subsequent viewers to perceive the antiblack violence captured in these videos. I analyze Frazier’s narration to demonstrate how narratives can shape people’s ability to see antiblack violence. This paper contends that if it is true that narratives can impair how people see, as Butler suggests, then disrupting harmful ones is eminently important. Frazier and the other witnesses challenged prevailing narratives that render black drug users disposable and provided an account of Floyd’s story that is now available for reflection and examination for years to come.

Political Responsibility, Claim-Making, and the Moral Psychology of Citizenship

Miko Nathaniel Zeldes-Roth, University of Toronto

In this paper, I theorize how ideals of white citizenship—understood as the notion that whiteness is a defining criterion of political equality—enable white Americans to disavow the political demands made on them by Black and Brown Americans. I theorize this as a disavowal of political responsibility that is sustained by a moral psychology of racial innocence.
To make this argument, I draw upon Joel Olson’s theorization of white citizenship, James Baldwin’s reading of racial innocence, and Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of political responsibility. Extending Olson, I examine how white citizenship can be utilized as a modality of thinking by white Americans in response to the political demands made upon them by Black and Brown Americans. I argue that white citizenship invites white Americans to judge such demands based on the racial identity of the actor alone. As a result, white citizenship frames these demands as those made by political subordinates, in which race is a cause of wrongdoing (or lack thereof). In so doing, white citizenship frames political responsibility as a matter of liability—based solely on imagined dominant status—and therefore collapses the claims of subordinated groups into matters of guilt or innocence.

White citizenship can thus sustain a moral psychology of racial innocence. I read racial innocence as an epistemology of simultaneous acknowledgement and refusal of responsibility for racial injustice. Extending Baldwin’s reading of racial innocence, I note that it is ultimately a willful refusal of one’s political responsibility for racial privilege and domination. Turning to Arendt, I note the affinity between collective guilt and innocence: both obstruct practices of political responsibility. I argue that both collective guilt and innocence are contained within the moral psychology of racial innocence. Rather than responding to the claims made on us, racial innocence functions as a rhetorical sleight of hand that recognizes wrongdoing with an expectation of future exculpation. In so doing, racial innocence frames race as a cause, thereby reifying the logic of white citizenship. When white Americans view themselves as guilty or innocent of racial injustice solely because they are white, then this conclusion affirms ideals of white citizenship (and attendant political hierarchies). Racial innocence thus allows white Americans to absolve themselves in response to political demands made on them, rather than to take political responsibility by engaging those demands substantively.

Eros, Not Agape: James Baldwin’s Love for the World

Ferris Lupino, NYU

While many political theorists find no place for love in politics (many, in fact, insist love and politics are opposed), others turn to love as a means for fostering community and extending belonging to the most marginalized. This is, for instance, the promise of Martin Luther King’s “beloved community,” and Jennifer Nash finds something similar when she finds in black feminist love-politics a goal of “transcending the self and producing new forms of political communities.” This paper takes up this debate about the place of love in politics by examining an increasingly discussed instance of it—Hannah Arendt’s critique of James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” in which Arendt criticizes Baldwin’s “gospel of love.”

Recent commentary on Arendt’s letter to Baldwin tends to take up Baldwin’s writings on love to demonstrate the limitations 1) of Arendt’s critique of love in politics, and 2) of Arendt’s concept of love for the world. These commentaries overlook, however, that Baldwin himself later endorsed Arendt’s critique of love in politics explicitly. To help make sense of this endorsement, I examine the ways in which Arendt and Baldwin are both critics of the agapic love-centered politics of King and other Christian civil rights activists. Rather than reading Baldwin as a corrective to Arendt, then, I show how both thinkers champion an erotic politics that grounds a new common sense in shared love for the world. I come to this reading by comparing Arendt’s writings on the Greek polis to Baldwin’s writings on love and politics with a particular emphasis on his post-68 work.

While Arendt is often read as unfairly critical of the Black Power movement of that period, critics tend to lament Baldwin’s turn to Black Power rhetoric in the late 60s and early 70s. These complaints stem, I argue, from the same reading of “The Fire Next Time” that casts him as a defender of agapic politics and a corrective to Arendt. But rather than read Baldwin as breaking from agape, I show a persistent concern in Baldwin with an erotic politics aimed at attachment to the world. This concern both demonstrates his affinities with Arendt and clarifies their positions regarding the Black Power politics of Ture and Hamilton (among others). Reading Baldwin and Arendt together on love for the world, in other words, shows the strengths and limitations of both thinkers’ approaches and how each might presuppose and require the other. Reading them in this way demonstrates, moreover, the value of eros for contemporary mobilizations of love-politics.

Co-sponsored by Women’s Caucus for Political Science

Roundtable with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) Roselyn Hsueh, rhsueh@temple.edu; Temple University
• (Presenter) Robin L. Turner, rlturne1@butler.edu; Butler University
• (Presenter) Alice Kang, alicejkang@gmail.com; University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• (Presenter) Abby B. Cordova, acordov3@nd.edu; University of Notre Dame
• (Presenter) Natasha Behl, nbehl@asu.edu; Arizona State University
• (Presenter) Erica Townsend-Bell, etowns@okstate.edu; Oklahoma State University
• (Presenter) Nermin Allam, nermin.allam@rutgers.edu; Rutgers University

Session Description:
Women of color in comparative politics (WOCs in CP) face distinct challenges in the subfield, the discipline, the (research) field, and beyond academia. Raced-gendered obstacles to benefitting from professional networks include too-often being the only one in home departments, in graduate school, on conference panels, and in Americanist-dominated POC spaces; ascriptions of foreigner status (to those with ties to the Global South); misogynoir and other forms of anti-Blackness; Indigenous erasure; neocolonialism; and racialized sexual harassment. Women of color comparativists continue to make their way in scholarly networks nevertheless. Supportive networks have played an important role in survival, well-being, and professional success of the roundtable presenters, who employ diverse methodologies, study varied substantive topics, and focus on different geographic regions. The presenters, who all earned tenure and promotion, will share their experiences navigating the discipline, highlighting how they have found, crafted, and sustained networks as a launching point for inclusive conversation, strategizing, and problem-solving with attendees.

Co-sponsored by Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Discussant) Randall A. Hansen, University of Toronto

Session Description:

The year 2024 marked a significant shift toward illiberalism, with nationalist and anti-immigration parties achieving major electoral victories across various countries. In France, the National Rally led the first ballot. Austria’s Freedom Party secured the largest share of votes in the general election. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first in Thuringia and narrowly missed the top spot in Saxony. In the United States, Donald Trump reclaimed the presidency, while Republicans regained control of both houses of Congress (NB: the far-right is a faction within the Republican Party loyal to Trump). Despite differences in foreign policy, support for Ukraine, and economic stances (e.g., tariffs), these movements share a central platform: significantly reducing immigration and promoting mass deportation — often framed euphemistically as “re-emigration.”

This panel brings together scholars from Europe, the United States, and Canada to explore two critical dimensions: (a) the racial, religious, and institutional factors driving and limiting these anti-immigrant and xenophobic movements and (b) strategies to counter these trends. The focus will be twofold. First, it will examine the history of comparable illiberalisms: racialization within the British Empire (Givens) and America’s history of deportation, forced transfer, and expulsion (Adamson). Second, it will analyze the constraints on these efforts, including varying degrees of religious diversity (Torpey), the scope for framing of open immigration as essential to national values (Bloemraad), and the role of judicial institutions in checking illiberal immigration policies (Joppke). Through these discussions, the panel aims to deepen understanding and foster dialogue about countering the rise of far-right ideologies in global politics.

Papers:

Theorizing the Intersections of Migration and Race

Terri E Givens, University of British Columbia

Although it is clear that immigration policy is often connected to a country’s ideas about who is or isn’t desirable, we need more tools to understand the links between countries, their immigration policies, the historical impact of settler colonialism, and racialization over time. Drawing on her comparative race theory, Givens uses several case studies to examine the evolution of racialization and immigration restrictions, particularly in the context of the British Empire and the emigrants who settled in the Western Hemisphere and Australia.

Deportations, Transfers, and Expulsions: An American History

Fiona B. Adamson, SOAS University of London; Kelly M. M. Greenhill, Tufts and MIT

President Donald J. Trump’s plan of mass deportation was a centerpiece of his election campaign, and Trump’s surrogates have promised to begin implementing it on day one of his presidency. Although it has been pitched as a bold policy initiative, it follows in the footsteps of a long history of the United States using the mass removal or forcible displacement and transfer of populations as a policy tool. Previous examples include the US Operation Wetback under Eisenhower, the 1930s Mexican Repatriation, but also the use of forced repatriations and population transfers abroad – such as Operation Keelhaul in the 1940s, the post-WWII Potsdam Agreements, and the US Pacific Operations in the wake of the Vietnam War. The paper will also discuss historical precedents, such as the role played by forced population transfers in US state-building, the US role in events such as the Greek-Turkish population exchanges authorized by the 1923 Lausanne Convention, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s M-Project. The paper will provide an overview of US involvement in forced population transfers and expulsions, and their domestic and geopolitical logics. We will place proposed mass deportations in the context of previous historical cases of US policies of mass removals, deriving lessons and discussing foreign policy implications.

Framing Immigrant Rights: Human Rights versus National Values

Irene Bloemraad, University of British Columbia

How can advocates make effective claims for the rights of immigrants, especially those in irregular or undocumented status? Social movement and public opinion researchers have long examined the ways that framing strategies can shape public opinion by appealing to broad values. But we have limited evidence on how effective such strategies are when it comes to immigrant populations. Using a series of surveys conducted in Canada between 2020 and 2022, we assess the meaning and effectiveness of appeals to two common frames: human rights and national values. First, we document the appeal of such frames. Next, we use two preregistered survey experiments to test the frames’ effectiveness. Although both frames resonate with the public, only appeals to national values increased recognition of a ‘social rights’ problem over food insecurity. Using responses to open-ended questions in a third survey, we speculate on why national value appeals might, perhaps counter-intuitively, generate more recognition of problems. We find that human rights and national values have substantial overlap in meaning, but that a national value frame elicit more pro-social, affective and communal word associations. In contrast, a human rights frame primarily evokes general principles like democratic rights with little affective overtone. Ultimately, human rights appeals do little to advance immigrant rights, at least in the short term.

(Neo-)Liberally Open: The Limited Effects of Populism on Migration Policy

Christian Joppke, American University of Paris

Cas Mudde once remarked that, with respect to their favourite plank of restricting immigration, right-wing populist parties are dogs that bark but rarely bite. This paper defends this view, with a focus on Western Europe. The great post-guestworker restrictions of family and asylum migration in the 1980s preceded the rise of populism, and the chiselling that followed thereafter did not change their direction at all and their quality at best a little. Much in line with the neoliberal political order in which they thrive, and eager to repress racialist animus that may thrive among some of their supporters and activist cadres, the restrictive focus of populist parties is on unearned and costly migration, but not on high-skilled and self-paying and productive labor migration. One earlier party program of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) praised the “Canadian Model” (of skill-prioritizing labor migration) and the “Australian Model” (of brutishly externalizing asylum migration) in tandem. But even on their favourite turf of restricting irregular, family, and asylum migration, liberal “rule of law” difficulties stubbornly stand in the way of effectively reducing these migrations. This paper demonstrates this with the logistical and legal difficulties of deporting that technically and morally most vulnerable migrant category, those with no right to reside on the territory at all, and even if they committed serious crimes including terrorist acts.

Citizenship and Belonging: The United States, Germany, and Italy

John Torpey, CUNY Graduate Center

This paper examines variations in the patterns of acquisition of citizenship, on the one hand, and in the rights and obligations thereby acquired, on the other. The cases to be examined are the United States, Germany, and Italy. The rationale for examining these three country-cases is that, while the three are broadly comparable high-income countries, the United States has long been understood as a “nation of immigrants” with considerable religious diversity (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, etc.), whereas that is not true of the other two. In contrast, Germany is a religious duopoly (Protestant and Catholic, though with a growing Muslim immigrant population), while Italy is a traditionally Roman Catholic country that is the historical seat of a religious institution with global reach and a mandate of inclusion that distinguishes it from sectarian Protestantism. The goal is to understand how these religio-political constellations have done in facilitating the integration and inclusion of immigrants in the national community.

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) Natasha Piano, UCLA
• (Discussant) Emilee Chapman, Stanford University
• (Discussant) Natasha Piano, UCLA

Session Description:
This Theme Panel brings together historical, contemporary, and comparative perspectives in political theory to reimagine three key conceptual categories at the core of democratic politics: parties, partisanship, and peoplehood.

Over the past two decades, and even more so after the Covid-19 pandemic, Western democracies have witnessed the exacerbation of socioeconomic inequalities and the inability of mainstream parties to effectively voice the disaffection and claims of broad portions of the citizenry. The hyperpolarization of domestic politics, the toxic rise of ‘conspiracy thinking’, and the endangering of liberal democratic pluralism has contributed to the sweeping success of right-wing, nationalistic, and xenophobic populisms, promising to bring “the People” back into politics and politics back to “the People”. The shifting axis of a new political geography of party systems (globalists/nationalists rather than Left/Right) has increased electoral volatility and opened windows of opportunity to anti-establishment movements across the political spectrum. Accelerating these transformations has been a structural fact of contemporary politics: every democracy operates today within a global order largely shaped by international institutions and marked by challenges that demand globally coordinated strategies – a condition that has easily triggered hatred against transnational technocracies and their allegedly apolitical appeals to science and expertise in multiple realms (healthcare, technology, the environment, etc.). Finally, Western liberal democracies have been increasingly challenged by alternative political models consolidating in Asia and Far Eastern Europe, heralding authoritarianism as the most effective way to govern globalization and respond to the failings of liberal democratic regimes.

Our panel, directly inspired by the theme statement of APSA 2025, assembles a diverse pool of junior and senior scholars to shed new light on these challenges in contemporary democratic theory and practice. It does so by drawing on the insights – historical, conceptual, and normative – of burgeoning bodies of political theory literature on parties, partisanship, and peoplehood and by weaving together perspectives from Western and non-Western traditions.

Papers:

Inventing Parties through Deliberation: The Case of Early Republican China

Dongxian Jiang, Fordham University

Contemporary democratic theory often contrasts political deliberation with party politics and views deliberation as a remedy for the factionalism and polarization associated with party competition. As Nancy Rosenblum (2010) observes, this view aligns with the tradition of antipartyism in Western political thought. This article examines a curious historical case that challenges this dichotomy. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China, reformist thinkers embraced the transformative potential of party politics. They believed that party competition could foster civic engagement and strengthen ties between elites and citizens, thus bolstering national strength in the face of external imperialist threats. However, they also recognized that China’s agrarian society lacked the social foundations (such as class divisions) for stable party formation. Early Republican party politics, dominated by personal networks rather than coherent platforms, devolved into chaos, with little substantive disagreement between parties on policy or ideological grounds.
In response, Zhang Shizhao, a leading political thinker, proposed a “political deliberation conference” (zhengjian shangque hui) in 1912. This innovative idea sought to dissolve existing parties and convene aspiring politicians for reasoned discussion. Through repeated deliberations, participants would clarify their positions, coalesce into two strong parties, and mobilize citizens in competitive parliamentary elections. In this proposal, political deliberation is used to invent functional parties. Though Zhang’s proposal faced resistance and was never realized, it remains a valuable case for understanding how deliberation might facilitate party formation during democratic transitions. By analyzing Zhang’s Manifesto of the Political Deliberation Conference and related writings, this article explores the overlooked potential of deliberation to shape party politics in contexts with limited democratic traditions.

Partisan Juries and the Path to Virtuous Governance

Elena Ziliotti, Delft University of Technology

In many contemporary democratic societies, political parties appear to be facing a profound crisis. One of the key drivers of this trend is the growing influence of political leaders in democratic politics coupled with the erosion of traditional political ideologies. Despite this crisis, political parties remain primarily responsible for preselecting the country’s political leadership. This role is critical, as the quality of candidates who stand for election—and ultimately lead the country—depends heavily on the effectiveness of these preselection processes.

I draw on contemporary debates in Confucian political theory to tackle these challenges. I propose a normative criterion for political parties to improve their recruitment systems and enhance the quality of political leaders in democratic societies. I introduce the concept of “partisan juries” as a pathway to realizing intra-party ethical screenings of future political leaders. These juries would evaluate the ethical suitability of future political leaders for their positions. Their deliberations would be facilitated by trained moderators and supported by expert assessments and interviews with character witnesses. This approach seeks to bridge democratic practices with the ethical imperatives of political leadership, offering a pragmatic framework for fostering virtuous governance in contemporary democracies.

Ethical screening mechanisms within political parties do not undermine existing practices of intra-party democracy. Rather, they address certain deficiencies in aggregative and deliberative approaches to intra-party democracy. Moreover, they provide Confucian democrats with a powerful tool to demonstrate that democracy offers the most suitable sociopolitical framework for achieving the Confucian ideal of virtuous governance in modern politics.

Populism vs. Conflictualism: Savonarola and Machiavelli on Partisanship

David Ragazzoni, University of Toronto

Between the 13th and the 17th centuries, Western political thought underwent a major paradigm shift: from the art of ruling free republics in the pursuit of the common good to a science about the means to preserve and expand political rule (“reason of state”). This transition entailed two alternative visions of partisanship in public life: on the one hand, the pursuit of collective harmony against manifestations of discord and threats of divisiveness; on the other, the pragmatic acknowledgment that a state thrives also through the skillful use of partisan networks. Within this arch, my paper examines how Machiavelli pioneered a new understanding of partisan politics; why and how he came to do so; and why reclaiming his distinct vision offers important insights into rival theories and practices of partisanship in our populist present.

Machiavelli was among the first thinkers to acknowledge the role of public opinion in the rise and fall of political leaders, and to explore both the constructive and the destructive sides of political conflict in the life of a republic. In doing so, he broke new ground vis-à-vis the Humanist ideology of consensus, calling for a more nuanced conceptualization of the ties that bind, or separate, a republic’s citizens amidst the factionalism that had long been plaguing his native Florence.

My paper makes a twofold argument. First, it shows that Machiavelli carved out a distinctive space for conflict in the life of republics to escape the longstanding equation between internal adversaries and public enemies as well as the false dichotomy between civil concord and civil war. This challenging endeavor is evident in his attempts at a “technification” of political concepts and categories, which – especially in “Discourses” – often lead to puzzling oxymorons (e.g., “undivided disunity”, “non-tumultuous tumult”). Such “terminological fluctuations” (Pedullà, 2018) are indicative of a normative concern with the nature, scope, and potential of political conflict, setting the stage for a vision of politics that is intrinsically and productively partisan. Second, and relatedly, my paper unearths the sermons and political writings of Girolamo Savonarola as the underexplored source of Machiavelli’s revolution in the language and theory of politics.

The palingenesis (spiritual and constitutional) urged by the Dominican friar paved the way for a reconceptualization of partisanship in late 15th-century Florence, against both the Scholastic and the Humanist lexicons of politics. First a self-stylized opponent of all factions in the name of friendship, concord, and peace (the moral compass of his Mendicant Orders), Savonarola later turned into an apocalyptic preacher chastising all opponents to his reformist vision. In a famous letter to Ricciardo Becchi, written on 9 March 1498 and recalling Savonarola’s last sermons, Machiavelli commented extensively on the friar’s dexterous use of the friend/enemy distinction. As the future author of “The Prince” noted, Savonarola forged a proto-populist distinction between “his partisans” (“excellent people”) and “his opponents” (“almost villainous”), the former “soldiered under God” and the latter “under the Devil” (a distinction that Machiavelli would partly rephrase in “Discourses” I.16.3 when differentiating “partisan friends” from “partisan enemies”). At the same time, on Machiavelli’s account, Savonarola skillfully “changed coats”: adapting his partisan preaching to the rapidly evolving political situation of Florence, he no longer “unite[d] his partisans through hatred of his adversaries” but coalesced them all against his archenemy, Pope Alexander VI – a move that contemporary democratic theorists working on partisanship and populism would describe as “partisan holism”.

My paper examines the extent to which Savonarola’s ‘populism’ influenced Machiavelli’s ‘conflictualism’; how Machiavelli capitalized on the “Savonarolan moment” to think through and beyond the Friar’s theory and practice of partisanship; and why these two rival visions of partisan politics are worth revisiting and comparing today in our-hyperpolarized times.

Civilized Barbarians and Other Paradoxes of State-Centered Thinking

Paulina Ochoa Espejo, University of Virginia

The current crisis of democracy circles around the definition of “The People.” Who are the “real people” who get to rule in a democracy? How should we determine “the people’s” boundaries? It is not surprising that groups lacking well-defined borders, or that have polities differ­ent from the sovereign territorial state —such as indigenous people, migrants and their diasporic communities, or racial and ethnic minorities within the state—are often seen as a problem by mainstream politicians and publics. This paper argues that many of the paradoxes of peoplehood in traditional democratic theory emerge from a confusion of two different notions of “the state.” The modern sovereign territorial nation state is often seen as the only ideal standard of political organization, while other political forms such as empires, city-states, villages, and regional federations have been considered marginal, if not barbaric. Contrasting versions of 17th century political thought (Hobbes’s De Cive, and the pre-Hispanic Nahua Altepeme) the paper argues that the modern sovereign state is in fact less dominant than contemporary political thought presumes, and that polities that Political Theory has historically considered “barbaric” are in fact civilized, common and well-established. The sovereign state is only one option among many. “Ideal” democratic thought need not be state-centered, and “realist” thinking can also focus on the other existing alternatives.

Co-sponsored by Division 11: Comparative Politics

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame
• (Discussant) Dawn L. Teele, Johns Hopkins University
• (Discussant) Rikhil R Bhavnani, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Session Description:
Women’s political underrepresentation remains a global challenge. Even when women achieve electoral success, entrenched elites and party gatekeepers often hinder their leadership. This panel brings together papers from diverse contexts—Zambia, the United Kingdom, and India—to examine pathways to women’s political leadership. Davis et al. employ a novel network survey of candidates to explore women’s influence on policymaking in Zambia. Prillaman et al. analyze novel data to assess the actual and perceived political authority of women elected via quotas in India. Senk et al. utilize structural topic models and data from press releases to study how women govern when elected to top leadership positions in the United Kingdom. Karekurve-Ramachandra et al. use novel administrative data to reveal male gatekeeping in quota seats in rural India.

Papers:

Partisanship, Gender, and Structure of Politician Network​s in Zambia

Justine Davis, University of Michigan; Leonardo R. Arriola, University of California, Merced; Donghyun Danny Choi, Brown University; Melanie Lauren Phillips, University of California, Berkeley; Lise Rakner, University of Bergen

Although women have entered government in African countries at an unprecedented rate over the past three decades, it remains unknown to what extent they have acquired the influence necessary to shape policymaking. Are women able to exercise personal influence to the same degree or in the same ways as their male counterparts? We argue that women tend to be less influential than men due to the structure of their personal networks with other politicians. Prior scholarship on African politics has demonstrated that political outcomes depend on the personal ties that connect politicians to one other. Based on a novel network survey among Zambian candidates, we demonstrate that women tend to be peripherally situated within networks. We find that women are systematically less likely to be connected to others in social or work networks among politicians. We also demonstrate that, while having fewer connections than men, women have connections with more important people in both social and work networks.

Family Politics: Collective Governance and Women’s Political Representation

Alba Huidobro, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Deepak Singhania, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar; Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Stanford University

Electoral quotas for women are the most common institutional solution to the problem of political gender inequality today, but widespread qualitative evidence from India – home to the largest such quota policy – suggests that men can co-opt these institutions. We measure actual and perceived political authority using data from elected officials and their families, bureaucrats, and citizens across two states and more than 6,000 respondents in rural India. Our data reveal that local Indian politics, across the board, is a family affair. Unlike typical conceptions of representative democracy, we document how local governance tasks are collectively shared between elected representatives and their family members in both male and female-led localities. However, female representatives have significantly less political authority than male representatives. We provide suggestive evidence that this authority gap derives from resource inequalities and patriarchal decision-making. We further show that women’s political authority is associated with citizen political behavior. These findings have implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and representation.

Do Women Ministers Govern Differently? Gender Differences in Issue Priorities

Kaitlin Senk, Rice University; Tiffany D. Barnes, University of Texas at Austin; Diana Z. O’Brien, Washington University in St. Louis

In recent years, women’s access to government ministry positions has increased across countries with a growing number of women gaining access to prestigious, ‘masculine’ ministries. While much of the research thus far has examined how women gain access to these top leadership positions, little has been done to explore how women govern in these positions. Do men and women in top ministerial positions govern differently? We collect ministry press releases for the Foreign Affairs (1997-present), Defense (2002-present) and Home Office (2003-present) secretaries from the United Kingdom. Using structural topic models (STM), we explore whether men and women in these prestigious ministry positions use their press releases to talk about substantively different issues. We find that women in the Foreign Affairs ministry are more likely to discuss topics like the security council and peacemaking, sanctions, human rights violations and violence, while men Home Office secretaries are more likely to talk about immigration, visas, and victims of violence, after accounting for different governments. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how women govern in executive leadership positions.

The Limits of Electoral Gender Quotas in Rural Local Bodies

Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra, University of Southern California; Gaurav Sood, Independent

What are the consequences of gender quotas on women’s descriptive and substantive representation? Using a novel dataset of over 20,000 rural local governance bodies spanning 20 years, we find that randomly implemented gender quotas for women do not substantially increase the chances of women winning elections to the same seat once the seat is unreserved. Troublingly, even fifteen years of exposure to local women leaders has limited
effects. We probe the reasons for this finding using an original phone survey. When we try to reach elected representatives in reserved seats using their official numbers, male relatives frequently intercept the call, suggesting “gatekeeping.” Data suggest that in poor, rural areas, quotas may fail to transform who is de facto in power. In all, unlike more hopeful findings from urban areas, our findings suggest that quotas mechanically improve the representation of women but do not create conditions for women to be in power after the quotas are withdrawn.

Co-sponsored by Division 54: Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Kamal Sadiq, University of California, Irvine
• (Presenter) Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
• (Presenter) Jennifer L. Hochschild, Harvard University
• (Presenter) C. Daniel Myers, University of Minnesota
• (Presenter) Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, Irvine

Session Description:
Twenty-five years ago, many of us opened our emails to find a disgruntled e-mail message signed by one “Mr. Perestroika.” The message initially went to seventeen recipients who quickly forwarded it to others, and soon the Perestroika revolt became a major movement calling for change in the American political science community.

The panel proposed here will present data assessing the success of this movement. Did it accomplish what it needed to? What remains to be done? Most importantly, what does it tell us about the nature of political science, methodological pluralism and diversity, the process of publishing scholarly work, and graduate education in the discipline?

Data come from a snowball sample of political scientists obtained in early 2025. Several participants in the initial movement, recent APSA officers, and young scholars discuss the findings from these data.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Yuko Kasuya, Keio University
• (Discussant) Yesola Kweon, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU)
• (Discussant) Dong-Hun Kim, Korea University

Papers:

Political Polarization and Anti-Democratic Attitudes in Asia

Hirofumi Miwa, Gakushuin University; Ikuma Ogura, Hitotsubashi University; Tetsuro Kobayashi, Waseda University; Han Il Chang, New York University; Yi-ting Wang, National Cheng Kung University; Sherly Haristya, LSPR Institute of Communication & Business; Ling Liu, Waseda University; University of Vienna; Yuko Kasuya, Keio University

Political polarization is a critical issue in global politics, with profound implications for democratic governance and social cohesion. While extensively studied in Western contexts, especially in North America and Europe, polarization in non-Western regions, particularly Asia, remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by analyzing polarization in several Asian countries that recently held national-level elections. The research introduces innovative contributions, including a simultaneous examination of ideological, affective, and leader-level polarization, and a novel distinction between symbolic and operational ideological dimensions. Additionally, the study investigates perceived polarization, acknowledging the divergence between perceived and actual polarization in the context of information disorder. An online survey conducted during election periods in India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Taiwan reveals that symbolic ideological polarization correlates with anti-democratic attitudes, while affective polarization in Asian contexts is linked to stronger democratic values.

Gender Gap in Affective Polarization in East Asian Democracies

Moohyung Cho, Ewha Woman’s University

Recent research on affective polarization investigates whether it manifests uniformly across various partisan, social, and demographic categories. However, little is understood about whether affective polarization develops equally among men and women and what causes any observed gender gap. This paper explores the extent and determinants of the gender gap in affective polarization in three East Asian democracies: South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Utilizing the five modules of the CSES dataset, I measure individual-level affective polarization across these three countries over the past two decades. Empirical analysis leveraging the CSES’s pooled and time-series data demonstrates different patterns and temporal dynamics of affective polarization and its gender gap among East Asian democracies. Specifically, men have shown higher affective polarization than women in Japan and South Korea for most periods, whereas women exhibit greater affective polarization than men in Taiwan, particularly since the 2010s. I also find that these cross-country variations can be attributed to micro-level factors (individual partisanship) and macro-level factors (women’s political empowerment). For example, the significant gender gap in Japan is a result of men’s stronger partisanship coupled with low levels of women’s political empowerment. In contrast, the gender gap is much narrower in Taiwan, where women’s partisanship has been stronger due to higher levels of female political empowerment in recent years. This paper contributes to existing research by highlighting affective polarization in a non-Western context and its potentially gendered nature.

Partisan Sorting, Polarization and Undemocratic Attitudes: Evidence from Korea

Hyun Su Kim, Korea University; Hyeok Yong Kwon, Korea University

Over the past decades, democratic backsliding has emerged as a significant threat to both emerging and established democracies. In this paper, we examine how partisan sorting—the alignment between individual ideology and partisanship—affects (un)democratic attitudes among the public. We argue that partisan sorting influences support for (un)democratic actions and norms by the incumbent both directly and indirectly through affective polarization. Additionally, we propose that since partisan sorting is shaped by elite cues, its effects vary based on individuals’ electoral status as winners or losers and the partisanship of the incumbent. Using causal mediation analysis with individual-level survey data from South Korea during the democratic Moon Jae-in government and the undemocratic Yoon Seok-yeol government, we find evidence supporting our hypotheses. Democratic supporters consistently uphold democratic norms and values during both governments, whereas Conservative supporters exhibit undemocratic attitudes during the Yoon government. Our findings suggest that the impact of partisan sorting, along with its polarization-mediated effects on (un)democratic attitudes, depends on who is in power and the party with which individuals identify.

Multiverse of Partisan Animosity: Negative Partisanship on Race and Immigration

Jongwoo Jeong, Washington University in St.Louis

Scholarship in American politics increasingly emphasizes negative partisanship, yet it has largely overlooked its heterogeneity across racial groups, often limiting analysis to the traditional White-Black racial divide. This study addresses this gap by examining the existence, uniqueness, and explanations of negative partisanship among Asian Americans and Latinos. Using feeling thermometer scores and open-ended survey responses capturing American “Dislikes” toward major political parties from the American National Election Studies, 1984-2020, I show that Asian Americans and Latinos do develop negative partisanship but to a lesser degree. Second, I show that the meaning of negative partisanship among Asian Americans and Latinos is unique compared to that of White and Black Americans, utilizing topic models and supervised machine learning. Third, I demonstrate that factors known to explain Asian American and Latino political behavior, such as partisan ambivalence, pan-ethnic attachment, and perceived social discrimination, further increase the heterogeneity in the development of negative partisanship. My findings suggest caution against overlooking the heterogeneity in partisan hatred and animosity, as ‘hatred comes in various flavors’ in the era of race, immigration, and polarization.

Co-sponsored by Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University
• (Presenter) Geoff Mann, Simon Fraser University
• (Presenter) Hagar Kotef, SOAS, University of London
• (Presenter) Cristina Beltran, New York University
• (Presenter) Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University

Session Description:
This panel faces the difficulties of political work in a broken world. How do we challenge or even navigate utterly shattered systems, without completely breaking ourselves or retreating inward, when everything falls apart and action seems futile? From radically different perspectives, we will each ask about the possibility of working forcefully and ethically in a morally compromised political world, of employing impure strategies of resistance when all else fails, of making due out of nothing to nevertheless make the world (slightly) better. Without dismissing the importance of utopian thinking, we seek to highlight here rather modes of invisible or disreputable action under the radar — actions that might otherwise seem morally compromised, insufficient, or non-cathartic.

Geoff Mann examines uncertainty in the face of ongoing climate catastrophe, and the possibility of unexpected solidarities in the shared experience of climate unwinding. He is interested in considering what walls it might break down or undermine to claim that because of ecological unwinding this time is “different”, especially regarding what people expect of others when they can’t form what we usually call “expectations” about the future. Hagar Kotef examines the medical facility in the detention camp Sde Teiman, opened in October 2023 for detainees from Gaza, and asks how medical ethics can be adhered to within such a broken place. The medical facility puts physicians in an impossible bind: On the one hand, refusing to treat patients there (many, at least in the first week, Hamas militants who took part in the Oct 7th attacks) would reproduce the complete abandonment of these people by the Israeli medical system, as Israeli hospitals refused to treat them. On the other hand, treating them also implicates the doctors in torture and war crimes. Based on a series of interviews with physicians who worked in the facility, Kotef asks what–if any–are the ethical, legal, and “right” options available for these physicians. Cristina Beltran examines what emerges from democratic political failure; she contends that the presence of an increasingly multiracial and gender diverse conservatism in the US exposes the need for liberals and progressives to reckon with their own demographic fantasies and political failures, including mistaken and often limited accounts of solidarity, persuasion, identity, and movement building. In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, a multiracial and gender-diverse conservatism is here to stay and Latinx citizens are likely to be an increasingly significant aspect of the American Right, but this does not mean that U.S. demographics now favors conservatives. Instead, taking up various accounts of loss, failure, and aesthetics, she argues that the rise of multiracial conservatism offers progressives the difficult but necessary opportunity to reimagine practices of democratic world-making that promise not only justice, but pleasure, joy and beauty. Libby Anker argues for a political strategy of “Going Low” to fight dirty for democracy and economic equality. She calls for strategies that fight for radical futures made without presumptions of exemplarity, without investments in moral goodness or pre-justified action. She argues against the moralizing righteousness of the claim to “Go High”, especially when fighting against the global forces of fascism and capital that reject laws, norms and moral standards in their quest to dominate the political. Going Low entails searching for and articulating political visions of democracy that come from places deemed low-moral, low value, or low class, those that take the low road to fight for equality when the chips are down but the stakes are high.

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) Irfan Nooruddin, Georgetown University
• (Discussant) Niloufer Siddiqui, SUNY, University at Albany
• (Discussant) Ashutosh Varshney, Brown University

Session Description:

Political parties have, at the best of times, been described as indispensable to democracy. But in times of rising authoritarianism, institutional fragility, democratic backsliding, their roles as gatekeepers of democracy is even more pivotal. This panel examines how parties and grassroots organizations strategically navigate institutional frameworks to communicate, maintain relevance, consolidate power, connect with voters, and balance organizational mandates. The papers explore these dynamics in the context of India, the world’s largest democracy and offer insights into how political actors reshape democracy under crises of inclusion, representation, and institutional legitimacy.

The first paper, “The Historical Roots of Party Fragmentation and Centralization in India,” explores the long-term consequences of historical institutional dynamics on the modern party system. It traces how party fragmentation and the centralization of regional parties emerged in response to the Congress Party’s dominance and resource asymmetries, offering a model to understand how political parties adapt to maintain relevance and control in competitive democracies.

The second paper, “Parties Against Democracy: The Unexpected Consequences of Electoral Quotas,” examines grassroots democratic competition using data from 500,000 contests over 25 years. It demonstrates how inclusionary institutions like quotas for marginalized groups can unintentionally undermine democracy by reducing participation and contestation. The paper traces this trade-off to institutional incentives that drive ruling parties to disproportionately target reserved seats through state-backed coercion, entrenching their dominance and subverting the democratic goals of these quotas.

The third paper, “How Grassroots Organizations Reconcile Mandate and Electoral Engagement,” investigates how grassroots organizations respond to democratic backsliding and threats to their survival. The paper argues that such organizations strategically balance their commitments to organizational mandates and political partisanship by acting as discretionary partisans, thereby navigating the tension between autonomy and electoral engagement under majoritarian regimes.

Finally, “Crowds as Content: Party Campaign Strategy in the Digital Age” examines how parties adapt traditional campaign methods to the demands of the digital era. Despite the availability of cost-effective online strategies, parties in India continue to rely on mass rallies to generate digital content that mobilizes voters and reinforces their political dominance. This paper highlights the evolving links between physical and digital modes of political communication.

Together, these papers underscore the role of political parties and grassroots organizations as strategic gatekeepers and communicators in an era of democratic backsliding. By repurposing institutions, grassroots mobilization, and leveraging technological shifts, parties restructure democratic processes to reinforce their dominance. This panel contributes to a broader understanding of the resilience and fragility of democracy and democratic actors in an era of democratic threat.

Papers:

The Historical Roots of Party Fragmentation and Centralization in India

Neelanjan Sircar, Ahmedabad University

Today, state-level politics in India is dominated by regional parties with low intra-party democracy that are typically built around one person or family. To understand this phenomenon, this paper provides deep evidence for a formal model in which a party with superior resources can always co-opt the strongest candidate in the constituency (dominant party model). However, without such significant resource advantages, the threat of candidate defections can decimate a party. In order to guard against this possibility, smaller parties tend to be centralized around an individual so that all political attribution accrues to the leaders at the top rather than the candidates on the ground (party retrenchment model), as is seen in most regional parties today.

Using a combination of historical analysis and statistical analysis of Indian elections from the very first elections in 1952 to today, I trace the modern characteristics of the party system to two key factors. First, because India was granted universal franchise upon gaining independence from Britain, it did not undergo a social process that cleanly mapped ideologies or social cleavages to parties so that all ideologies could more or less be represented in the dominant Congress Party. This allowed the Congress Party to use its superior resources to engineer defection from its competitors. Second, the Congress Party sought to build its legitimacy through elections, and thus new states were generated to maintain the Congress Party’s electoral advantage. But these states, a by-product of social mobilizations against the Congress, became the basis state-level opposition to the Congress. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s disastrous decision to formally suspend democracy in 1975 (and return to democracy in 1977) only served to push resources toward the Congress Party’s opposition.

In this new world, small, centralized parties consistent with the party retrenchment model began to gain power. At the heart of these assertions is a close elections regression discontinuity design for every seat contested in a state election between 1977 and 2007, which demonstrates that small, regional parties are indeed more sensitive to political defection and choose to centralize power by rotating which candidates are given the opportunity to contest the election.

Parties against Democracy: The Unexpected Consequences of Electoral Quotas

Anirvan Chowdhury, University of Louisville; Anustubh Agnihotri, Ashoka University

Democracy is often conceptualized and measured through the dual lenses of participation and contestation (Dahl 1971; V-DEM 2023). Correspondingly, efforts to deepen democracy focus on reducing barriers to these dimensions, often through institutional mechanisms promoting inclusion. One common approach to addressing historical political marginalization is the introduction of electoral quotas, which reserves seats for underrepresented groups.

In this paper, we identify and explore the origins of a democratic trade-off associated with such quotas. Using granular data from over 500,000 contests held across five local electoral cycles in West Bengal, India, we document a robust decline in both turnout and contestation in seats randomly and algorithmically reserved for women and ethnic minorities. In contrast, we find little evidence of similar effects in the neighboring state of Bihar. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork in border districts, we trace the origins of this divergence to institutional differences that shape party competition and incentives.

In West Bengal, the partisan nature of local (Panchayat) elections and the indirect election of village Presidents (Pradhans) raise the stakes of Panchayat elections and shapes parties’ electoral strategies. Control of Panchayats becomes central to the economic and political fortunes of parties, incentivizing large-scale coercion to capture these bodies. Reserved seats are disproportionately targeted for two reasons: quotas limit the pool of eligible candidates, reducing the resources required for coercion; and candidates from marginalized groups often lack the capacity to resist state-sponsored coercion. Consistent with these theoretical predictions, we find that state-backed candidates are significantly more likely to win reserved seats, often with larger victory margins. Reserved seats are also more frequently won unopposed, highlighting how coercion neutralizes contestation.

Taken together, these findings demonstrate how political parties, as gatekeepers of democracy, can subvert inclusionary institutions to instead entrench their dominance, thereby undermining the very democratic goals these institutions intend to achieve.

How Discretion Shapes Civil Society-Opposition Party Alliances against Democratic Backsliding

Feyaad Allie, Harvard University; Pratik Mahajan, Yale University

Civil society and related grassroots organizations (GOs) matter for democracy. Yet most work on GOs centers citizens who use them as sites of movement organization, or political parties who strategically form grassroots ties for electoral mobilization. We center GOs as agentic actors with the potential to influence electoral politics. We study a context in which GOs fear for their survival under the risk of crackdown from majoritarian governments and become partisan mobilizers for opposition parties. However, they face a key tension when making this transition: balancing their commitment to their mandate without being subsumed by political parties that may not fully align with their groups’ interests. We argue that GOs can resolve this tension by entering electoral politics as discretionary partisans, where a) they are the first movers of partisan activities during election campaigns rather than awaiting cues from parties, while b) strategically varying the intensity of their electoral engagement to maintain their principled reputation. We study this dynamic through a mixed-methods approach in India, where GOs increasingly engage in electoral politics to counter the majoritarian ruling party. Using an ethnographically developed measure of electoral engagement intensity in a pre-registered vignette experiment with 730 representatives of 153 unique GOs, we find that GOs temper their engagement when candidates exhibit traits that conflict with their organizational mandates. We triangulate these findings through 62 days of shadowing GO-Party collaboration during an election campaign. A second vignette experiment with 736 representatives from three opposition parties shows how parties further enable discretionary partisanship of GOs—parties prefer GOs that clearly signal shared partisan goals and have ties to communities of strategic importance to the party. Taken together, our findings highlight this discretionary behavior as an option for GOs beyond electoral disengagement and blind partisanship.

Crowds as Content: Party Campaign Strategy in the Digital Age

Shahana Sheikh, University of Pennsylvania

What explains the puzzling persistence of in-person mass campaign rallies, even as lower cost online alternatives for targeted party-voter communication become increasingly available? Drawing on intensive qualitative fieldwork in India, I develop a theory that emphasizes content-complementarity: a mutually reinforcing relationship between physical and digital modes of campaigning. Social media creates a demand for online content and in-person mass campaign rallies supply valuable content to parties. The anticipated effects of rally content also alter how parties conduct rallies. Empirically, I test key implications of my theory with observational data from party social media accounts, original survey experiments with approximately 4,000 voters, and a novel survey of approximately 400 party functionaries. I show the centrality of rallies to the digital campaigns of major parties in north India. I demonstrate that digital content about the size and composition of rally crowds shapes voter perceptions and voter mobilization. In the digital age, parties transcend the limits of place and time through online rally content, and exposure to this content influences voters.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong, University of Michigan
• (Discussant) Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong, University of Michigan
• (Discussant) Soosun You, University of Pennsylvania

Session Description:
When and why are women’s bodies politicized, how are they used as instruments of power, and who benefits from these processes? This panel examines the political and economic consequences of state and societal actions involving women’s bodies—whether through victimization, commercialization, or idealization as symbols of motherhood. Drawing on contemporary and historical data and employing diverse methodological approaches, this panel explores how women’s bodies become sites of political contestation, reinforcing or challenging existing power structures, particularly through the lenses of security, welfare, and cultural norms. Together, these papers demonstrate the far-reaching political, social, and economic implications of the politicization of women’s bodies.

Papers:

Domestic Legitimacy and Accountability for Sexual Violence in Liberia

Summer Lindsey, Rutgers University, New Brunswick; Sumin Lee, Texas A&M University

How does legitimacy accrue to governments of conflict-affected states? One way that governments try to bolster their domestic legitimacy during and after civil war is by demonstrating that they can and will hold themselves and others accountable for sexual violence perpetrated during the war (Lee 2022, Loken et al 2018). However, we know little about whether and how accountability efforts actually affect the views citizens hold about their state. We argue that domestic accountability measures for sexual violence, particularly trials, have gendered effects on state legitimacy. We conduct an original survey experiment in Liberia to assess the effects of hypothetical trials for different war crimes on how citizens evaluate their state alongside measures of general well-being and perceived security. This study contributes to the discussion on the unique nature of accountability for gender-based crimes and raises questions about how legitimacy can be garnered through justice provision in conflict-affected states. The study also provides a timely account of local opinion about trials for war crimes in Liberia, where the government is facilitating new efforts to hold perpetrators to account.

The Other Comfort Women: The Local Impacts of U.S. Military Bases in South Korea

Jeongmin Park, Princeton University; Diana Kim, Georgetown University

Foreign military deployments are often associated with more support for the country by incurring material benefits for residents interacting with the forces. Departing from this narrative, we explore the local-level socioeconomic consequences of hosting U.S. military bases, focusing on the commercialization of women—a topic that has remained underexplored due to limited data availability. Using rich archival data on local prostitution from 1967 to 1982 in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea—home to one of the largest U.S. military deployments globally—we investigate the role of U.S. military deployments in shaping local economies. From the 1960s, American soldiers were the primary patrons of local sex work, until a 2004 policy criminalized the hiring of sex workers by military personnel. We show that localities hosting U.S. forces are associated with higher levels of prostitution, and that the South Korean government concentrated efforts to provide “clean” prostitution in areas hosting U.S. bases. These areas sustained higher levels of prostitution even after 2004, accompanied by a long-term crowding-out of manufacturing industries. Our findings highlight the enduring socioeconomic burdens borne by host communities and contribute to the literature on alliances and overseas military deployments by uncovering the overlooked local impacts of military presence.

When Parties Matter for Gender Politics: Political Parties and Welfare Policies

Keonhi Son, The Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES)

Recent studies have increasingly explored the historical origins of gender policies in Western countries, leveraging new empirical evidence. Much of the scholarly attention has focused on the role of women as political actors in shaping public policies that enhance women’s status. However, political parties—arguably pivotal actors in influencing gender policies, particularly during periods when women had limited access to political resources—remain understudied. To address this gap, I draw on a new historical database encompassing paid maternity leave, family allowances, and gender composition of MPs within political parties across 20 advanced capitalist countries from 1900 to 1975. My analysis reveals that the extent to which parties advocate for gender policies depends significantly on the nature of the policies and the level of female representation within each party. First, social democratic parties tend to support family allowances when these are universally entitled (vis-à-vis employment-based) or/and directed toward mothers (vis-à-vis than male breadwinners). This aligns with their core electorate—male workers—who often opposed employment-tied family allowances, viewing them as tools of labor control or substitutes for wage increases. In contrast, Christian democratic parties exhibit strong support for family allowances, particularly when these benefits supplement the male breadwinners’ wage. Second, both Christian democratic and social democratic parties demonstrate greater commitment to gender policies when women are more prominently represented within these parties.

Shifting Norms? Examining the Drivers of Changing Child Sex Preferences

Bianca Chiu, Berkley; Soosun You, University of Pennsylvania

Scholars of gender and politics have long investigated the extent to which norms constrain girls and women across different life stages, from birth and childhood socialization to employment, marriage, and childbirth. While such constraints are often persistent, some instances demonstrate that shifts away from traditional norms, such as the declining son preference in East and South Asian countries. This paper examines the causes of these shifts in son preference as a lens for understanding how norms change or do not change. Utilizing an original dataset that leverages technological openings and restrictions (e.g., introduction of ultrasonic devices and IVF technology, as well as laws prohibiting fetal sex determination) and access to social welfare for family members (e.g., elderly pension) across East and South Asian countries over last several decades, this paper shows how diverging child sex preference was shaped by women’s access to technological and economic resources vis-à-vis their family members.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Eunji Kim, Columbia University
• (Discussant) Margaret E Roberts, University of California, San Diego

Session Description:
Short-form video platforms have transformed the political communication landscape. TikTok surged in popularity in 2018, particularly among younger audiences, prompting copycat products like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, both released in 2020. The affordances of these platforms—an immersive, vertical viewing format, a low barrier to content creation, and an attention-driven, hyper-personalized feed—have generated tremendous demand for this new medium, giving rise to a newly emergent class of content creators (and therefore political actors). The rise of TikTok has reshaped political communication on social media, from elite discourse and information flows to grassroots organizing and traditional campaigning.

Despite their growing cultural and political significance, short-form video platforms remain understudied within political science research. Part of the challenge lies in the scarcity of publicly available, granular data from TikTok, which dominates the short-form video space. The lack of transparency around its recommendation systems and the anonymized nature of user behavior have hampered systematic investigation. Moreover, TikTok’s rapid adoption worldwide raises pressing questions around algorithmic bias, misinformation, echo chambers, and foreign influence.

Indeed at the time of this writing, TikTok faces a potential ban in the U.S., stemming from concerns about data privacy and potential Chinese state influence on the platform’s inner workings. The panel’s participants have contingency plans in place to ensure relevant findings come out of data collected irrespective of any disruption to TikTok service (with the exception of the activation study) and in some cases to leverage any potential ban in quasi-experimental designs.

This panel brings together scholars who, despite these data challenges, are pioneering innovative methodologies and drawing on novel datasets to deepen our understanding of short-form video’s role in contemporary politics. They explore a range of pivotal themes: How is political information produced and distributed on short form video platforms? How can we best use video, audio, and text together to better undesrtand short form video platforms? Which types of political messages or narratives tend to go viral, and what factors drive their amplification? How much hate speech is observable on the platform, and how well does the platform moderate it? What is the causal effect of starting to use TikTok? And does TikTok’s algorithm favor messaging that aligns with China’s geopolitical interests?

Donnay et al. provide a comprehensive analysis of hate speech on TikTok, combining descriptive statistics with experimental methods. They map the prevalence of hate speech across regions, time, and topic, while evaluating TikTok’s responsiveness in terms of content moderation.

Guinaudeau et al. examine how political information is created and disseminated on TikTok. Drawing on a large, representative sample of TikTok videos published in the United States with a focus on the months preceding and following the U.S. 2024 election, their initial findings indicate that political content spreads faster than entertainment, and that there’s notable concentration of influence among a small group of creators, contradicting the platform’s democratic image. The study highlights the risk that politically extreme discourse could dominate the platform, and calls for further scrutiny of TikTok’s algorithms and societal impact.

Guess et al introduce a new method for analyzing TikTok style video content using audio, video, and text. They apply this strategy to an exploratory analysis of the political content on TikTok posted around the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The topic model style strategy will be applicable to other forms of diverse short-form video content.

Barnehl et al. investigate whether TikTok artificially amplifies pro-China content, addressing concerns about potential state media influence on the platform. The paper proposes a method of assessment that centers on using an LLM-classifier to identify content aligned with Chinese state media objectives and examines algorithmic distribution via longitudinal analyses of views, likes, comments, and moderation. Preliminary initial analyses have yet to yield clear evidence of preferential treatment or asymmetric moderation of pro-China content.

Rutherford et al. conduct an “activation study,” to investigate the political and social consequences of starting or increasing TikTok use. The research provides a clean, causally identified method of assessing the impact of TikTok use on political attitudes, knowledge, and social wellbeing, providing a more holistic understanding of the platform’s influence compared to prior deactivation studies. It will also be one of – if not the – first social media “activation” experiment, complementing a series of prior “deactivation” experiments on other platforms, but allowing for an even more direct measure of the quantity of interest: the impact of platform usage.

Papers:

Scrolling through Hate: TikTok, Hate Speech and Content Moderation

Karsten Donnay, University of Zurich; Fabrizio Gilardi, University of Zurich; Gloria Gennaro, UCL; Benjamin Guinaudeau, NYU; Dominik Hangartner, ETH Zurich; Colin Henry, University of Zurich; Solomon Messing, New York University; Joshua A. Tucker, New York University

The spread of hateful content on social media is intensifying, prompting heightened regulatory scrutiny and demands for accountability from platform providers. However, content moderation efforts often fall short due to the conceptual and technical challenges of identifying hateful content, as well as the uneven distribution of resources across jurisdictions.

This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of hate speech on TikTok through a combined descriptive and experimental methodology. In the first part, we provide descriptive statistics on the prevalence of hate speech in political TikTok posts and comments over the course of the study, broken down by country, region, time, and topic. This approach clarifies not only how frequently hate speech appears on the platform but also uncovers its key motivators. Identifying where hateful content surfaces allows us to formulate hypotheses about the underlying mechanisms driving its production and dissemination.

In the second part, we perform an experimental assessment of TikTok’s responsiveness to user reports of hateful content, focusing on recently posted material in select English-speaking countries. Our findings not only furnish a global perspective on the extent and patterns of hate speech on TikTok but also illuminate the platform’s content moderation strategies in the face of mounting regulatory pressure.

Video as Data: Understanding the Political Content on TikTok

Andy Guess, Princeton University; Brandon Michael Stewart, Princeton University; Benjamin Guinaudeau, NYU; ; Solomon Messing, New York University; Joshua A. Tucker, New York University

A central challenge for understanding content on TikTok lies in the diverse forms that its short-form videos take. While foundation models for text and images allow for rich exploration of transcripts or thumbnails, there are few tools for the exploratory analysis of the video content itself which use the audio, video, and text features of the input. We introduce an exploratory topic model for video content and use it to characterize the diversity of political content on TikTok around the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The tools developed here are generalizable to other forms of short-form video content.

The Political Supply of TikTok

Benjamin Guinaudeau, NYU; Solomon Messing, New York University; Kylan Rutherford, Columbia University; Joshua A. Tucker, New York University

TikTok has rapidly emerged as a preeminent social media platform, propelled by its algorithmically curated feed of short-form videos. Although it is widely believed to shape political debate and amplify particular viewpoints, how TikTok’s recommender model affects the formation of political preferences and the functioning of representative democracy remains unclear. Drawing on a representative sample of TikTok videos published in the United States around the 2024 Presidential election period, this study examines (1) how political information is created on TikTok and (2) how such content circulates across the platform.

Preliminary findings indicate that the platform’s strong emphasis on virality encourages political content producers to react swiftly to major political events but also to abandon these topics just as quickly once they have been covered. Additionally, our analysis reveals that political content tends to spread more rapidly than entertainment content, compounding the already pressing concerns about misinformation. While we do not detect a pronounced ideological bias in the algorithm’s content distribution, our findings confirm the existence of two disjoint separate agendas for conservative and moderate users. Finally, by analyzing the distribution of political content producers, we document a notable concentration of influence in the hands of a relatively small group of creators. This “information oligopoly” stands in contrast to TikTok’s reputation as a platform that democratizes content production by empowering individual users.

We conclude by discussing the political implications of this paradox, highlighting how the dynamics of TikTok’s attention-driven ecosystem may exacerbate polarization and distort democratic discourse. This study underscores the need for ongoing scrutiny of TikTok’s algorithmic architecture and its broader social impact, especially in contexts where the rapid spread of information and misinformation can have significant political consequences.

To Be or Not to Be on TikTok: A Large (De)activation Experiment

Kylan Rutherford, Columbia University; Solomon Messing, New York University; Joshua A. Tucker, New York University; Tiago Augusto da Silva Ventura, Georgetown University

Many prior studies have attempted to evaluate the impact of social media use through “deactivation,” or incentivizing individuals to stop using social media for a period of time. Deactivation studies have been the preferred method of studying the causal impact of platform use in the past because large scale saturation of platform use would leave the methodologically cleaner “activation” experiments subject to severe concerns around external validity: the 10% of the population not using a particular platform are probably substantially different from the population of interest, which is the 90% of the population using the platform. However, this deactivation approach only conveys half of the story; the act of starting to use a platform, or increasing use of a platform, is different from taking a temporary hiatus, and arguably more directly captures the effect of using the theoretically motivated concept of platform usage. Here, we take advantage of TiktTok’s moderate level of use in the U.S. to actually run an activation experiment that will be less subject to concerns regarding external validity. When a platform is popular enough to be used by one-third of the population, that leaves many realistic potential users available for study. To do so, our study evaluates the impact of social media use by incentivizing new users to create a TikTok account and use TikTok for a period of two months. We compare this group to a control group of individuals who do not use TikTok.

Social media impacts individuals both through what they are exposed to on the platform, and what offline experiences they substitute for social media use. It is thus difficult to disentangle whether an observed effect is due to a gain/loss in offline experiences, or exposure to online content and interactions. Our study will seek to disentangle these effects with a combination of behavioral and survey outcomes. Participants will submit a screenshot report of their weekly social media use and health statistics, and answer three surveys at the beginning, after one month, and after two months. We will evaluate the treatment’s impact on political attitudes, political knowledge, and social wellbeing.

Propaganda or Pairty? TikTok’s Algorithm and Pro-China Messaging

Hennes-Michel Barnehl, UC San Diego; Keng-Chi Chang, University of California, San Diego; Benjamin Guinaudeau, NYU; Solomon Messing, New York University; Margaret E. Roberts, University of California, San Diego; Kylan Rutherford, Columbia University; Joshua A. Tucker, New York University

Chinese-owned social media platforms—most notably TikTok—have received scrutiny for two perceived threats: (1) the Chinese government’s access to platform data, and (2) its ability to affect recommendations and platform content in anti-democratic ways. In this work, we focus on the latter: we examine the production and distribution of content that aligns with China’s state media agenda, with attention to how the algorithmic distribution of this set of content may differ from other content on TikTok.

Using a systematic sample of TikTok content, we train an LLM-classifier to identify whether content is supportive or oppositional to China, the Chinese government, and Chinese international objectives. We compare the distribution curves for views, likes, comments and other engagement signals to gather evidence about algorithmic distribution. Our preliminary initial results provide no evidence of increased reach or engagement with content based on its position towards China’s State media objectives. We also investigate our data for evidence of asymmetric moderation.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) James F. Hollifield, Southern Methodist University
• (Discussant) Randall A. Hansen, University of Toronto

Session Description:
This panel speaks to the conference theme of “reimagining politics, power and peoplehood” by examining contemporary migration politics through the lens of colonial histories. Taking a global and comparative perspective, with a focus on cases from across the Global South, the papers on this panel interrogate the influence of colonial legacies in shaping contemporary migration politics. Collectively, the papers refine our understanding of colonial mobility control practices and their enduring effects, by examining factors such as: the role of corporations in shaping both colonial and post-colonial migration policies in Saudi Arabia (Thiollet); the relationship between sovereignty and migration in the EU’s post-colonial overseas territories (Sharpe); colonial practices of indentured labor and their impacts on contemporary labor migration mobility in South Asia and the Gulf (Sadiq); the influence of colonial governance frameworks on contemporary returns and removals in the Levant (Hoppermann); and the significance of colonial practices of forced exile and banishment for understanding contemporary state practices of deportation, transnational repression and externalization (Adamson and Han). In doing so, the panel builds on and dialogues with recent works in the field that have sought to “decolonize” migration studies by drawing on historical work on colonial regimes of mobility control as a means of shedding light on contemporary practices of migration. The papers collectively push these debates forward by drilling down into the variety of ways in which colonial mobility regimes manifested in different contexts, and how their legacies have helped to shape a range of contemporary post-colonial mobility control practices. Composed of a mix of junior and senior scholars from institutions in North America (US, Canada); Europe (UK, France) and Asia (Hong Kong), the panel brings a global historical perspective to one of the most pressing and polarizing policy issues in contemporary politics, using a focus on colonial histories and legacies as a way of understanding the origins of contemporary political “crises” around migration.

Papers:

Corporate Colonialism and its Legacies: Migration and Citizenship in Saudi Arabia

Helene C. Thiollet, Sciences Po

Building on the concept of the of the colonial migration state, this paper examines migration politics within Saudi Arabia’s corporate colonialism. It focuses on how public-private intermediation shaped migration management and established the foundations of a migration rentier society. The U.S.-Saudi partnership through Aramco institutionalized the sponsorship system (kafala), creating strict hierarchies of nationality and skill. These divisions structured labour markets and wages, while urban segregation reinforced social and economic inequalities. The legacies of these colonial dynamics continue to shape migration and citizenship policies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf today.

Postcolonial Non-Sovereignty: Complexities of Migration in the Dutch Kingdom

Michael Orlando Sharpe, CUNY-York College/Graduate Center

This paper explores cross-jurisdictional migration between the Dutch Caribbean islands as parts of the European Union’s ‘Overseas Countries and Territories’ through their constitutional ties to the Netherlands and the Netherlands itself. Since the 1954 termination of colonial relations, the Netherlands Caribbean colonies became “equal partners” of the Dutch Kingdom with Dutch nationality and “the right of abode”. (Oostindie and Klinkers, 2003) This has resulted in thousands of islanders’ migration to the Netherlands and resentments around crime, “national trauma”, (Emmer, 2007), and second-class citizenship. (Allen, 2010) European Dutch island residence is restricted because of the potential overrunning of their small populations and labor markets. As of 10/10/10, the Dutch Kingdom consists of the Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao, and St. Maarten with Bonaire, Saint Eustatius, and Saba (BES) being integrated as Dutch “special municipalities”. Some relaxation of regulations has produced an influx of European Dutch. Ironically, similar rhetoric used by European Dutch right wing and populist politicians to negatively characterize islanders is being utilized by nativist populist island politicians against European Dutch migration. This paper looks at internal migration within the Dutch Kingdom how it reveals imbalances and can both undermine and strengthen the legitimacy of the Dutch Kingdom and the OCT’s.

Legacies of the Colonial Indenture Regime: Return and Repatriation in South Asia

Kamal Sadiq, University of California, Irvine

This paper examines why South Asian states maintain restrictive migrant return and repatriation protocols despite their dependence on migrant remittances and the profits they generate. Dependence on migrant remittances and investment gains would lead us to expect labor rights-enhancing return/repatriation protocols in high volume emigration states. Yet, many sending states in South Asia maintain robust return/repatriation protocols that were first introduced by the British Empire under the colonial indenture regime. This paper first examines the striking parallels between colonial and modern labor emigration out of South Asia where temporary status, restricted contracts, and limited mobility persist. Second, the paper shows which colonial-era bureaucratic barriers shaped current return/repatriation frameworks in sending states. Lastly, the paper points to restrictive protocols on migrant return based on i) socio-economic class, ii) education, and iii) gender demonstrating why labor return/repatriation policies were introduced. Using archival and historical institutional data from the colonial indenture regime and modern South Asian labor migration to the Gulf, the paper demonstrates the institutional mechanisms and conditions that enable rights-enhancing labor return and repatriation policies in one of the world’s largest labor sending regions.

Tracing the Colonial in Refugee Governance: Returns and Removals in the Levant

Judith Hoppermann, SOAS, University of London

This paper examines refugee returns and removals in the Levant, tracing their historical roots to colonial governance frameworks and their enduring influence on contemporary migration policies. Focusing on Lebanon, it highlights how return practices are shaped by the interplay of state and non-state actors, including the United Nations, and rooted in the legacies of the colonial Mandate period. During this era, migration governance served as a tool for state making, establishing patterns that continue to inform current practices. Contemporary refugee returns and removals reveal deeper political logics tied to state-building and the preservation of legitimacy. By situating these practices within a broader historical trajectory, this analysis demonstrates how colonial governance strategies persist in shaping the interactions between international organizations, state institutions, and local actors, reinforcing structures of authority and control in migration governance across the region.

Colonial Strategies of Mobility Control: Forced Exile and Spatial Exclusion

Fiona B. Adamson, SOAS University of London; Enze Han, University of Hong Kong

This paper examines colonial practices of forced exile, banishment and deportation as forms of spatio-political exclusion. Forced exile has historically functioned as an imperial strategy for suppressing political dissent and reinforcing imperial control. As a mechanism of exclusion, deportation and related practices enabled colonial powers to displace and spatially remove individuals deemed subversive or resistant to authority, thereby neutralizing organized opposition. During colonial rule, authorities used practices of forced exile, banishment and deportation to isolate influential leaders, intellectuals, and activists from their communities, fragmenting movements for self-determination. By removing dissenters to remote regions or foreign territories, networks of resistance were disrupted in ways that also produced a climate of fear and compliance. Deportation practices served to assert the dominance of the colonial state, demonstrating its capacity to control both the physical and ideological spaces of colonized populations. In this way, it performed a dual function as both a tool of mobility control but also an instrument of political repression and deterrence.

In the paper, we document examples of the use of these practices by European empires, focusing particular attention on how “spaces of exception” — such as islands and camps — constituted part of the overall spatial infrastructure of colonial systems of control. We examine how these earlier practices compare with the contemporary state use of extradition, transnational repression, and other regimes of mobility control, in which managing dissent is intertwined with managing populations. Analyzing forced exile as a colonial strategy of political control underscores its role in maintaining hierarchies of power and reveals its enduring legacy in contemporary state practices. In doing so, our research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that analyzes state policies of mobility control not merely as legal or administrative acts but as historically rooted practices of socio-political exclusion.

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Zein Murib, zmurib@fordham.edu; Fordham University-Lincoln Center
• (Presenter) Callan Hummel, calla.hummel@ubc.ca; University of British Columbia
• (Presenter) Addye Susnick, addyesusnick@alumni.ubc.ca; University of British Columbia
• (Presenter) Elizabeth Baisley, keab@queensu.ca; Queen’s University

Session Description:
In 2014, Laverne Cox was featured on the front page of Time Magazine under a headline celebrating the “Transgender Tipping Point.” The intervening years have failed to deliver on this promise as anti-trans sentiment diffuses globally. Hundreds of anti-trans bills have been introduced and approved in state legislatures across the US, teaching about gender diversity has been banned in the UK, and several leaders have gained power in Latin America by running on platforms promising to restore “traditional gender roles.”

This roundtable brings together leading and emerging scholars of trans politics and life to discuss the alarming rise of anti-trans rhetoric, laws, and sentiment in the US, Canada, Latin America, and Western and Central Europe. Of particular importance in these developments are the ways that anti-trans bigotry — smuggled into democratic discourse through the language of opposition to “gender ideology” — works hand-in-glove with xenophobia, racism, and imperialism to prop up and support far-right ascendancies worldwide. Participants will raise and answer questions related to these developments, including: how purportedly scientific logics drive the dis/misinformation that fuels anti-trans mobilizations, the mechanisms that link the unlikely coalitions of religious, far-right, and corporate actors behind efforts to politicize “gender ideology,” strategies for resistance that are on-going and taking shape in the face of these assaults, and how political science can approach this moment of crisis.

Co-sponsored by Division 33: Religion and Politics

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

• (Chair) David T. Buckley, University of Louisville
• (Discussant) Steven Brooke, University of Wisconsin- Madison

Session Description:
Religion’s impact on democracy, whether promoting Third Wave democratization or threatening liberal rights through the rise of fundamentalism, was central to the growth of scholarship on religion in political science in the late Twentieth Century. The global study of democracy is as vital as ever, with significant challenges facing democratic institutions across regions. New scholarship on religion and democracy is now assessing the contribution of religious dynamics to democratic fragility and resilience. This panel gathers five papers, reflecting diverse regional and methodological perspectives, that focus on the diverse responses of religious elites and populations to ongoing challenges to world democracy. In keeping with the section’s call for papers, the papers all grapple with the nature of social cleavages tied to religion and how those divisions shape the nature of democratic politics.

A shared thread through the papers is the varied preferences of political and religious populations during periods of regime change and democratic uncertainty. To what extent does decision-making by religious traditions, movements and parties vary from that of secular actors in political society (Grewal)? To what extent is there internal variation among religious movements or individuals in their decision-making (Shamaileh and Ciftci; Sperber)? And in each case, what explains this variation (Reheman; Buckley)? Explanations may be theological, resting on distinct interpretations of scripture or religious social teaching. Explanations may, however, draw more on psychological or material motives, for instance distinct experiences of repression at the hands of coercive states.

Additionally, the papers advance comparative scholarship on religion and democracy by working past a blunt dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism. While much scholarship on religion and democracy’s Third Wave, for instance, rested on a fairly crisp distinction between support for democracy or dictatorship, this era of democratic backsliding presents more nuanced institutional equilibria. Scholarship related to religion and democracy needs to reflect this “gray area” reality. With this in mind, papers on the panel take up strategies related to specific institutional choices like lustration (Grewal), multidimensional views of religion and political institutions during a time of rapid transformation in Syria (Shamaileh and Ciftci), responses to populist and illiberal threats to rule of law (Buckley), reactions to strategic manipulation of electoral systems (Sperber), and distinct institutional preferences in public opinion (Reheman),. In each instance, the papers address religious preferences over political institutions that go beyond a blunt democracy-authoritarianism divide.

The panel’s geographic and religious diversity also advances scholarship in this area. Two papers grapple with Christian-majority contexts (Buckley and Sperber), where earlier scholarship on religion and the Third Wave at times overstated the unity of Christianity’s support for democratization. In each of these papers, the authors highlight significant variation among Christian churches in their posture towards periods of democratic backsliding. Three papers (Shamaileh and Ciftci, Grewal, and Reheman), in contrast, examine patterns in Muslim-majority cases, where earlier scholarship often exaggerated an essentialist “Muslim exceptionalism” in resistance to democracy. Each paper challenges this assumption, again tracing internal variation within Muslim-majority societies in postures toward democracy and associated political institutions.

Papers:

Salafis, Sufis and the State in Post-Assad Syria

Ammar Shamaileh, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies; Sabri Ciftci, Kansas State University

The sudden collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s authoritarian regime in Syria may fundamentally reshape religious and political discourse in the Middle East and North Africa. A shift in discussions has already been observed at both the geopolitical and domestic levels, with broad policy interventions addressing the resurgence of Islamist politics. Some others offer more nuanced explanations of intra-sectarian socio-religious cleavages, minority rights, and a pluralist constitution. Domestically, one emerging line of inquiry relates to the increased salience of the differences in visions for Syria between various religious groups. Specifically, in the context of a highly diverse religious landscape the division between Salafist and Sufi elites is posed to play a significant role in the future of Syria. Rather than focusing on elites, this study seeks to understand the preferences of their constituents to the extent that elites from these two outlooks will likely cater to their religious base to exert any influence. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) takeover of Damascus has raised questions regarding what a Salafist political rule might look like in Syria. While hints of their vision can be partially gleaned from their governance in Idlib, little is known about the institutional preferences of Syria’s Salafists and Muslims from other religious orientations. This is especially a prominent issue since the religious market in Syria is unlikely to be dominated by a single sect or religious group. This project draws on novel survey data from Syria that explores religious orientation and the expectations and preferences of Syrians regarding the state and the political regime that is being formed. To that end we field a battery of questions used to measure Salafist and Sufi orientations and use these to explore differences in expectations regarding the role of the state and their preferences for the structure of politics in Syria. This study aims to move beyond broad preferences over regime type like democracy or authoritarianism to understand what the ideal state and regime looks like from the perspectives of Syrians. As such it adds to our understanding of how religious orientations in a plural religious setting map onto preferences about the ideal state and structure of political institutions.

The Elect vs. the Elected? African Catholic Bishops and Post-Third Wave Democracy

Elizabeth S. Sperber, University of Denver

Midwives of democracy—this is what scholars termed many African Catholic and mainline Protestant churches during third wave transitions to electoral democracy. In subsequent decades, however, these states faced persistent challenges to democratization. Employing an original archive of pastoral letters published by the Catholic Church in several sub-Saharan states, this paper systematically traces the processes (i.e., strategies and tactics) that Catholic Bishops have employed to promote or defend democracy between 1990 and 2023. In doing so, the paper also challenges dominant theories of religion-state relations, which have emphasized religious competition, political theology (ideas), and national history to explain variation in Catholic bishops’ willingness to promote democracy in specific times and places. Yet, evidence presented here suggests that bishops are more consistent in certain areas of democracy promotion over time and across cases than these theories would expect. Simultaneously, I identify new areas of variation across bishops’ public pro-democracy advocacy, such as issue areas (e.g., constitutional reform, elections and party politics, judicial politics, and international relations). The paper concludes with notes towards an updated theory of religion-state relations to better explain how the powerful Catholic church has interacted with postcolonial African states during the post-Cold War period.

To Purge or to Pardon: How Experiences of Repression Shape Lustration in Tunisia

Sharan Grewal, American University

During transitions to democracy, elites routinely debate how to treat the remnants of the old regime. Among the consequential decisions they must make is whether to ban prior regime officials from running in future elections, a move often labelled lustration. How do elites go about making this choice? I explore how individual experiences of repression under the old regime shape how the new elite vote on lustration. Leveraging data from Tunisia, I show that members of parliament who had personally been repressed by the old regime were on average more supportive of lustration, in line with literature on how repression breeds revolutionary attitudes. However, an important sub-group, the Islamists, show the opposite effect, a finding that holds also when exploiting a quasi-natural experiment where their repression was plausibly as-if random. Interviews with these Islamist MPs show that repression can also breed fear and caution, leading them to be the most wary that lustration might spark a coup that could mean their re-imprisonment. Overall, the paper sheds light on the individual-level factors that shape support for lustration.

What Happened to the Catholic Wave?

David T. Buckley, University of Louisville

This paper sets out to conceptualize and explain religious responses to democratic backsliding. What positions do prominent religious elites express when democratic institutions that they previously defended become fragile? What explains variation in these postures, even within a single, supposedly-unified religious tradition? I take up these questions in a set of countries often seen as central to post-Cold War democratization: the “Catholic Wave” (Philpott 2004), which stretched from Latin America to Central Europe and Asia. While this set of countries accounted for a significant share of Third Wave democratization, it has also been at the center of more recent democratic backsliding. The paper first conceptualizes potential religious responses in these political environments, developing a typology of response combining the scope of religious concern (critical vs. supportive) with the extent of response (intensive vs. withdrawn). It then tests the role of two factors, religious capacity and secular threat, in explaining the predominant posture of religious elites in the new context of backsliding. Analysis rests on an original, systematic dataset of religious statements regarding democratization in “Catholic Wave” countries, drawn primarily from national bishops’ conferences, as well as cross-national data on variation in religious capacity and the nature of secularist mobilization.

State vs. Faith: State-Led Secularization, Backlash, and Islamism among Muslims

Wali Reheman, American University

This study investigates how state-led secularization of politics shapes political attitudes among Muslims in Muslim-majority countries. Using an age-cohort-period model and survey data, the analysis suggests that the marginalization of religious institutions during formative years increases support for political Islamism later in life. This effect is consistent across multiple dimensions, including support for Sharia-based laws, religious individuals in public positions, and belief in religious leaders’ influence in governance and voter decisions. Importantly, economic development moderates this relationship: in lower GDP per capita contexts, marginalization strengthens political Islamism as a cultural defense, while in higher GDP per capita contexts, it aligns with secularization trends, reducing religious influence. These findings highlight the conditional effects of state secularization policies and their role in shaping divergent political attitudes in varying economic contexts.

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Patricia Moynagh, Wagner College
• (Presenter) Mary Andrea Caputi, California State University, Long Beach
• (Presenter) Erica Suzannette Lawson, University of Western Ontario
• (Presenter) Catherine Wineinger, Western Washington University
• (Presenter) Min Joo Lee, Occidental College
• (Presenter) Kathryn J. Perkins, California State University, Long Beach

Session Description:
Pursuant to the publication of our co-edited book, Edward Elgar’s Research Handbook on Feminist Political Thought, Patricia Moynagh and Mary Caputi propose two roundtable panels for APSA 2025. These panels will each feature 7-8 contributing authors as well as our participation as co-chairs. These panels will allow us to showcase the book’s breadth of scholarship on cutting edge topics of concern to feminist theory that speak directly to various crises in today’s turbulent world. Each of the book’s twenty-four essays argues from a different angle that feminism offers a crucial corrective to the divisions, animosities, and gridlock that characterize politics today. Included among the topics addressed are the rise of the alt right, “white” feminism, transmisogyny, Black maternal grief, Chinese feminism, carceral feminism in India, abortion, and neocolonial gendered politics. We have received confirmation from our authors regarding their enthusiastic willingness to participate in these panels. We envisage two panels that will allow our authors to describe their contributions to the Handbook followed by a discussion with the audience regarding how feminism has changed in the twenty-first century and now addresses a wider array of topics than in the past. The book’s co-editors, Patricia Moynagh and Mary Caputi, will serve as co-chairs of each panel.

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Michal Smetana, Charles University
• (Presenter) Lauren Sukin, University of Oxford
• (Presenter) R. Charli Carpenter, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• (Presenter) Stephen Herzog, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
• (Presenter) Naomi Egel, University of Georgia
• (Presenter) Jeffrey W. Knopf, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
• (Presenter) Marek Vranka, Charles University
• (Presenter) Ondrej Rosendorf, Institute of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University

Session Description:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the European security architecture. Since the beginning of the military campaign, Moscow has accompanied its use of conventional force with more or less explicit nuclear threats to influence Western policy toward Ukraine. In light of these developments, this roundtable will discuss the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on the international norm against nuclear weapon use, the “nuclear taboo.” We have assembled a diverse group of prominent scholars who previously published cutting-edge research investigating the non-use of nuclear weapons in world politics. Our speakers will discuss the issue from the perspective of state-level normative contestation as well as public and elite attitudes toward nuclear weapon use. Furthermore, they will debate the claims about the alleged erosion of the nuclear taboo in the context of the more general dynamics of the global nuclear order. Finally, the speakers will reflect on the current state of nuclear taboo scholarship and recommend avenues for future research in this area.

Co-sponsored by Division 38: Political Communication

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

• (Chair) Michael Bossetta, Lund University, Sweden
• (Presenter) M. Brielle Harbin, United States Naval Academy
• (Presenter) Danielle K Brown, Michigan State University
• (Presenter) Ben Epstein, DePaul University
• (Presenter) Katherine Haenschen, Northeastern University
• (Presenter) Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• (Presenter) Lindsay Hoffman, University of Delaware
• (Presenter) Ashley Muddiman, University of Kansas

Session Description:
As political communication scholars, one of the primary ways we address global democratic threats is through our teaching. How and what we teach influences the next generation of citizens and equips them to become change agents in society. However, we currently lack a common platform to share, discuss, and develop best practices for teaching our discipline. In this roundtable discussion, we reflect upon the key challenges in teaching political communication, share our experiences from diverse courses and classrooms, and invite a broader discussion of how we might foster an inclusive and impactful teaching network for political communication.

A specific focus on teaching political communication is especially important during times of anti-democratic extremism, polarization, and global crises, where broader societal divisions over race, class, gender, religion, and citizenship status are reflected in our classrooms. In addition, the course material we teach is often highly salient in public discourse and requires regular updating to keep pace with rapid developments in the field and politics. These developments include ongoing changes in the ways that political messages are communicated and the need to develop digital media literacy skills specifically tailored to help navigate the media and political worlds of today and tomorrow. Worryingly, right wing attacks that increasingly politicize higher education threaten not only academic freedom but also our ability to facilitate critical debates in the classroom. These challenges are best addressed through a diverse range of perspectives that our global community of scholars can provide.

Therefore, this roundtable addresses the following questions:

1) What are the discipline-specific challenges we face in teaching political communication? How can we address these challenges as a community?
2) What best practices can we observe in designing course themes, learning outcomes, and teaching methods in political communication?
3) How can we design and share teaching materials that are informed by, and contribute to, the scholarship of teaching and learning?
4) What teaching practices can we foster to better align our teaching with APSA’s mission of diversity, equity, and inclusion on a global scale?
5) What concrete initiatives can we take to increase the effectiveness and impact of our teaching in addressing global crises?

Roundtable participants bring novel perspectives to these questions from a wide range of teaching experiences. Participants’ teaching expertise covers a wide range of political communication courses (theory, method, and supervision), levels of instruction (high school, Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD), and institutional contexts (US and EU).

Co-sponsored by Division 38: Political Communication

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Paasha Mahdavi, University of California, Santa Barbara
• (Discussant) Amanda Kennard, Stanford University

Session Description:
Climate change is one of the most pressing crises that humanity faces, and mitigating the problem requires the rapid deployment of new low-carbon energy technologies. Clean and renewable energy deployment is already generating countless political conflicts at the local level around the world, and the outcomes of these local conflicts will shape the future of the energy transition. This panel seeks to better understand the local politics around clean-energy siting, by examining institutional and behavioral drivers and consequences of clean-energy siting decisions in diverse geographic contexts.

The first two papers examine the local politics of clean energy facility siting in the United States, which is one of the world’s largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases. In 2022, the US finally enacted landmark federal laws—the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act—which together contain hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to promote a transition to a cleaner energy system. These investments support several broad categories of projects, including electricity generation and clean-energy manufacturing. These two types of project generate distinct distributions of costs and benefits and, consequently, give rise to distinct political conflicts. Accordingly, two papers on our panel examine the local politics that arise in the implementation of federal programs that support electricity generation and manufacturing facilities. The first paper asks how incentives for solar electricity generation facilities are distributed among different segments of the population, whether and how misaligned incentives are a source of conflict, and how the lack of transparency or consistently regulated siting processes can impede coordination around the creation of broad and equitable community benefits. The second paper focuses on political communication and public reactions to clean-energy manufacturing facilities in a diverse set of political and economic contexts. The paper asks whether federal investments are generating expansionary momentum or backlash. Together, these two studies speak to the durability of the incentive-based approach to promoting clean energy in the United States.

The third and fourth paper shift the focus from the local consequences of energy facilities to the drivers of siting decisions. The third paper uses Denmark as a setting to examine the political determinants of clean-electricity facility siting within the decentralized institutional structure prevalent in many countries including but not limited to the United States and much of Europe. Building on the premise that local politicians are responsive to the preferences of their own electorate, this article develops and tests a new theoretical model of how local governments site energy developments. The authors argue that energy siting decentralization may hurt both efficiency and the perceived democratic legitimacy of the transition to a zero carbon economy.

Conversely, the fourth paper examines the political determinants of energy infrastructure siting in the top-down decision-making structure common in many parts of the Global South, particularly when projects are supported by external donors. The paper uses sub-Saharan Africa as a setting within which to examine the proportion of fossil and renewable energy infrastructure that can be explained by political targeting compared with geographic endowments. Initial results indicate that, in countries where fossil fuel is disproportionately politically targeted compared to other aid projects, renewable energy projects are also disproportionately likely to be politically allocated. The study implies that international efforts to support the green energy transition likely entrench local elites and raise questions about the efficacy of Just Energy Transition Partnerships.

Papers:

Overcoming Coordination Barriers to an Equitable Mid-Transition in Pennsylvania

Sara Constantino, Northeastern University

The U.S. is currently navigating a bumpy mid-transition—the period during which fossil-based energy systems coexist with new zero-carbon systems. This period is characterized by substantial coordination challenges that if left unresolved can have negative impacts on social, economic and political outcomes and constrain the expansion of renewable energy. Coordination challenges can emerge at many levels, including in the negotiation practices surrounding the local siting of renewable energy projects, which often lack transparency and community engagement, impeding the creation of broad community benefits and support for these projects. Here, we conduct and analyze in-depth qualitative interviews with key stakeholders across two case studies in Pennsylvania—a state with high projected solar development in the short-run as well as a long history of mining and oil and gas extraction— to study how incentives for solar development are distributed among different segments of the population, whether and how misaligned incentives are a source of conflict, and how the lack of transparency or consistently regulated siting processes can impede coordination around the creation of broad and equitable community benefits. Our initial results reveal four sources of conflict around utility-scale solar development: 1) the importance of and concern about continued energy extraction and environmental degradation; 2) the cultural and economic importance of productive farmland to communities; 3) potential for coalition building but lack of communication across groups, sometimes due to siting practices; and 4) lack of institutional capacity at the local level to deal with emerging issues around solar.

Assessing Feedbacks from Green Industrial Policy in the United States

Parrish Bergquist, University of Pennsylvania

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed the US Congress in 2022 and invests $800 billion to promote clean-energy technology development, manufacturing, and adoption in the United States. The success of these investments in promoting a transition to a cleaner economy depends not only on their immediate economic effects but also on their political effects. Through politicians’ communication about the IRA and the projects it supports, a changing interest group landscape, and public perceptions of costs and benefits from IRA-supported projects, clean-energy investments may generate expansionary political momentum (positive feedbacks) alongside reactionary, inertial forces (negative feedbacks). Polarization overlays these feedback processes as a mediating force, even as polarization is a condition that the IRA could ameliorate. In this paper, I present the results from four case studies that examine politicians’ credit claiming for IRA investments and public reactions to the projects, with the goal of assessing the visibility of the government role in supporting clean-energy manufacturing projects and, relatedly, whether the IRA is building momentum for the clean-energy transition or generating backlash. I use focus groups and interviews in four communities in Michigan that are slated to receive IRA investments and that reflect variation in local political and economic contexts. The study assesses the nation’s prospects for effectively addressing climate change through an industrial-policy approach, while advancing conceptual understanding of the policy feedback process in an era of polarization.

Decentralization and the Green Transition: Deployment of Wind Energy in Denmark

Michael Hankinson, George Washington University

Reducing emissions to combat climate change requires the rapid deployment of renewable energy. In many countries, the power to site these are in the hands of local governments. Yet, we know little about how this political decentralization shapes the siting of renewable energy developments. Building on the premise that local politicians are responsive to the preferences of their own electorate, this article develops and tests a new theoretical model of how local governments site energy developments. The key outcome of the model is a prediction about where voters will approve of new wind turbine construction. The model predictions are evaluated on a new and granular dataset on the siting of all wind turbines in Denmark from 2007 to 2021. The analysis provides strong support for the theoretical model. Building on these findings, we argue that political decentralization on this issue may hurt both efficiency and the perceived democratic legitimacy of the transition to a zero carbon economy, as local officials have no incentive to optimize energy efficiency and disregard potential nuisances for those in adjoining municipalities.

The Political Geography of the Energy Transition in the Global South

Cleo O’Brien-Udry, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

What proportion of existing fossil fuel infrastructure in the Global South can be explained by political targeting compared to geographic endowments? How does this fossil fuel targeting affect countries’ ability or willingness to transition to renewable energy sources? Canonically, natural resources for energy generation are geographically determined–but renewable energy sources are more flexible in their potential locations. I examine the political determinants of energy generation projects before and during the international community’s green energy investment push. Using geolocated Chinese and World Bank-sponsored energy projects over time and measures of political targeting, including leader birth regions, ethnicities, and traditional voting blocs, I map the political geography of the energy transition in sub-Saharan Africa. Initial results indicate that, in countries where fossil fuel is disproportionately politically targeted compared to other aid projects, renewable energy projects are also disproportionately likely to be politically allocated. Results are significantly stronger for Chinese projects—suggesting that domestic leaders are directing this political targeting. International efforts to support the green energy transition likely entrench local elites and raise questions about the efficacy of Just Energy Transition Partnerships.

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Erin Pineda, Smith College

Session Description:
Social movement collectives offer us a deep understanding of the conditions of ongoing injustice, and radical movements readily generate dreams of future just arrangements. Internally, members generate collective and individual-level practices to toggle between the current injustice and the present/future visions of justice. What are the personal and political ethics that arise in the context of radical social movements? How have movements conceptualized the place and meaning of these practices? As scholars of liberation politics, we can look to existing and past social movements to better understand the moral and spiritual practices of those who continuously bear witness to imaginations of a more just world. Some examples of these sorts of political ethics include Robin DG Kelley’s notion of freedom dreaming, a collective act engaged in practices of love, freedom, and imagination. Foucault argues that revolutionary movements that can critique relations existing at a hyper-local level render the reproduction of the state within the movement impossible. The Combahee River Collective advances a practice of constant reflection through practices of criticism and self-criticism.

In this panel, we will specifically theorize about, debate and discuss ethical practices of liberatory social movements. Ethical practices are ways for individuals and collectives to interrupt the operations of the unjust social structure. If the self and the collective are sites of reproduction of structure, then how have social movements conceived of an ethics that might interrupt injustice and realize liberatory alternatives?

Papers:

The Politics of Personal Transformation for Highly Aspirational Movements

Natasha Harshad Patel, Stanford University

Many of today’s left movements and some right movements seek extensive restructuring of society. Some examples include prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition, Hawaiian sovereignty, and Christian nationalism. PIC abolition seeks to remove prisons as a response to violation of criminal laws and generate a new system of response to wrongdoing (Davis and Rodriguez 2000). The Hawaiian sovereignty movement seeks to overthrow the colonial and corporate entities that govern Hawaiian land and people and restructure society to allow for a Hawaiian way of life (Goodyear-Kaopua, Ikaika and Kahunawaika’ala Wright 2014). Christian nationalism seeks to move to a post-secular society in which Christian dominion organizes culture, education, and all social, political and economic institutions (Wolfe 2022 and Stewart 2020). The desire to restructure the dominant institutional and ideological arrangements demands an amount of ‘faith’ or wholehearted ‘belief.’ Such restructuring politics hold space for high levels of uncertainty about the movements’ eventual outcomes and uncertainty about when those outcomes might be realized. When moving through the archive of such highly aspirational political movements, there is a noticeable pattern of personal practices and moral transformation members need to adopt in order to realize the aims of the movement.

These movements pair widespread critiques of society and calls for institutional and ideological restructuring with a highly localized politics of personal transformation. Each movement asks people to take on practices and mindset transformation in their own lives to best live in accordance with the vision of the world the movement aims to realize. Each of these movements has generated a following of adherents who attempt to internalize their movement’s ethics, going so far as to transform their personal judgments, practices and passions. In this paper, I argue that the politics of personal transformation that emerges includes three cognitive dimensions: developing a political analysis of how injustice is produced and perpetuated, honing intuitions about what justice is, and maintaining a thoughtfulness about one’s emotions.

In this paper, I theorize about the relationship between aspirational movements and a politics of personal transformation: What does personal transformation have to do with wide-reaching structural change? Why do some movements view personal transformation as not only instrumental for, but also constitutive of structural change? In answering these questions, I draw theorists into a deep study of a particular strand of personal political ethics that emerges from highly aspirational political movements, and has resonances across historical contexts – Gandhi’s conception of “being the change,” Foucault’s “government of the self,” what Thomas Hansen synthesizes as “belief as practice” and what Feminist Philosophers have described as “the politics of personal transformation” (Foucault 1994, 89; Hansen 2009, 5; Tessman, 2000, 375).

Alienated Activism: A Structural Theory of Black Social Movements

Jordie Davies, University of California, Irvine

How can we understand the emergence of a new Black social movement— Black Lives Matter— during the first Black presidency? In this essay, I argue that, rather than patriotism or affinity for the United States, alienation has the power to bring Black people into social movements to solve intractable political problems. Black social movement organizations mobilize Black alienation through practices of organizing and political education. These practices create alternative political values including: identity affirmation, collective action, and social transformation. I describe this process as alienated activism.

A number of philosophical and sociological texts espouse theories of alienation and argue that it is primarily demobilizing for politics (Seeman 1959; Durkheim 1897). In my work, I draw from studies on the persistence of anti-Black racism as well as alienation to delineate the specific experience of Black alienation (Hartman 2006; Shelby 2002; Fields 1982; Fanon 1952; Marx 1867). I argue that Black alienation primarily stems from 1) the persistent experience of anti-Black racism and 2) the lack of opportunities for government recourse. Because individuals observe that the state does not respond to anti-Blackness, or that it is invested in anti-Blackness, they turn to activism, which encompasses a range of types of political engagement and agitation that aims for broad social and political change.

Scholars of social movements and Black political behavior have offered emotions, anger, and commitment to political issues as explanations for motivations to participate in activism (Walker 2020; Phoenix 2019; Han 2009; Gould 2009). Some scholars focus on how legislatures and policymakers respond to protest (Gause 2022; Gillion 2020; Gillion 2012; Weldon 2012). Alienated activism intervenes in these literatures to center the experience of anti-Blackness and government neglect as motivations for political participation.

But exactly how can alienation be mobilizing? What is the link between Black alienation on Black social movements? While experiences of alienation can be politicizing, alienation itself is not always enough to mobilize people to political action. To demonstrate the process of alienated activism, I turn to the Chicago Black Lives Matter movement. Current studies in Black Lives Matter and social movements have emerged and importantly lay out the theoretical and political significance of the BLM movement (Harris 2023; Woodly 2022; Ransby 2018; Taylor 2016). Yet, the movement has yet to be fully represented, from a social science perspective, as a generationally and ideologically diverse, local political force comprised of many organizations. Attending to the local is how we can understand how the alienated are mobilized into social movements at the grassroots level.

Between Rikers and Alcatraz: Anticolonial Solidarity on Stolen Land

Leila Ben Abdallah, Cornell University

In 1970, Assata Shakur left New York for San Francisco. Picking up a job as a doctor’s assistant, Shakur found herself volunteering on Alcatraz during Indian of All Tribe’s (IAT) nineteenth-month long takeover of the island. Her reflections on Alcatraz and IAT in her autobiography are brief, reduced to paragraphs that congeal her transit to the island, descriptions of its physical conditions, and encounters with the occupant-organizers into a portion of her autobiography overshadowed by her involvement in the Black Liberation Army, trial and imprisonment after her arrest on the New Jersey Turnpike, and arrival in Cuba. Yet embedded in her condensed memories of Alcatraz lies details of a conversation before departing: “I will always be grateful for having had the opportunity to visit Alcatraz. I will never forget the quiet confidence of the Indians as they went about their lives calmly, even though they were under the constant threat of invasion by the FBI and the u.s. military…They were really open with me and, after a while, we talked about the struggle in general. They had many of the same problems we had…They damn sure had the same enemy, and they were doing as bad as we were, if not worse.”

She continues: “They told me to check out Akwasasne when i returned to New York. It was a territory they had liberated on the border between New York and Canada. I told them if they ever came to New York they should visit me and check out Harlem. ‘Sure. When are you going to liberate it?’ they asked.” Her reflections on Alcatraz and IAT’s takeover ends as soon as it begins, as she abandons the question to review how she spent her remaining time in the Bay Area with various organizations. The conversation between Shakur and IAT organizers provides an intimate window into aspects of IAT’s takeover of Alcatraz neglected in existing literature, that of shared struggle and the pursuit of liberation.

Liberation grounds IAT’s query. Existing literature on the takeover, however, does not attend to this vision of liberation. In this paper I argue that if we begin with Assata’s reflections on the island, our reading of IAT’s vision, actions, and words bring forward questions existing literature and historiographies of the takeover fail to attend to. More specifically, I dwell on the question of liberation left unanswered. What does it mean to liberate Harlem, which itself sits on Lenape land? If we center land as the kernel of liberation, how might that reorient the stakes of revisiting the history of indigenous and black freedom struggles on and between islands that materially reflect settler carceral state violence? How can a recovery of land’s centrality in movements for solidarity energize present debates within anticolonial theory, racism, empire, and solidarity?

My turn to these questions is motivated by a desire to flesh out IAT’s political imagination as one tied to anticolonial, anti-imperial, and anti-racist commitments in solidarity with freedom struggles often viewed as incommensurate with their own. I place the takeover of Alcatraz to a much larger genealogy of radical organizing than its current confines to the Red Power Movement. In doing so, I argue that the takeover illustrates strategies and tactics deployed to contest the settler state and shape plans for, on and through the island. Yet my engagement with Shakur and her reflections on Alcatraz is neither instrumental nor reductive. Through a reading of IAT periodicals and Shakur’s collective writings, I offer a critical history to emphasize not only the intellectual exchange across struggles but also to add to scholarship that grapples with the personal and political ethics of anticolonial solidarity that unravelling our colonial present demands.

The Organizer as Missionary: Ritual and Conversion in SNCC’s Community Organizing

Mie Inouye, Bard College

This chapter of my book manuscript, The Organizer: Self-Emancipation and Organization in the American Social Movement Organizing Tradition, draws on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC’s) community organizing project in the Deep South from 1961-1964 to theorize the organizer as missionary and the canvass and the mass meeting as rituals that aim to effect a conversion of both organizer and community.

The chapter reconstructs one provisional resolution of an antinomy of self-emancipation that I introduce in the book’s introduction. On the one hand, oppressed people can only achieve emancipation through their own efforts. At the same time, the subjectivity of oppressed people is shaped by their participation in oppressive institutions in ways that make it difficult for them to access the beliefs, desires, and capacities necessary to engage in resistance and social transformation. At the level of theory, I argue, this contradiction cannot be resolved. But, in practice, organization breaks the impasse. The figure of organizer holds the tensions and contradictions involved in the process of making a self that is capable of pursuing its own emancipation from within an oppressive social structure. Each chapter considers a different way of conceptualizing the role of the organizer in this process, alongside a practice or set of practices of self-emancipation from the twentieth-century U.S. social movement organizing tradition.

Political theorists and organizers often describe SNCC organizers as facilitators who enabled indigenous leaders to develop a sense of their own efficacy. While acknowledging this dimension of SNCC’s organizing, this chapter draws out the Baptist influences on SNCC’s community organizing tactics to highlight another dimension of their approach: missionary work. While SNCC organizers rejected the assimilationist logic of Baptist missionary work, they shared with that tradition a belief that external intervention in a community was necessary in order to un-do the incapacitating effects of oppression. They also drew on and reinterpreted the missionary practices of the house visit and the mass meeting as rituals of self-emancipation. Through close readings of SNCC handbooks and field notes, I reconstruct a theory of self-emancipation through sustained participation in organizations aligned with a particular conception of the world. This theory of self-emancipation depends on an understanding of the self as not fully transparent to itself, as socially constituted, as capable of change, but also as sticky. Interpreting the canvass and the mass meeting, I develop an account of democratic participation as collective, embodied, repetitive practices—or rituals—that aim not only to develop within the individual a sense of their own efficacy, but to give the individual a sense of belonging to a powerful collective. Finally, I articulate a corresponding concept of freedom not as transcending habituation, but as collectively taking responsibility for the ways in which we are habituated and seeking to organize and habituate ourselves differently.

In-Person Created Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College

Session Description:
Recent research into the possible causes of division and disorder has pointed to misperceptions as a possible culprit. Whether focusing on misperceptions about the demographic make-up or policy preferences of out-partisans (e.g., Ahler and Sood 2018; Levendusky and Malhotra 2016) or misperceptions on a range of policy issues (Thorson 2024), false beliefs can distort mass opinion, fuel affective polarization, and even facilitate democratic backsliding (Nyhan 2020; Braley et al. 2023)..

This session seeks to enhance our understanding of misperceptions and their consequences by, first, introducing novel ways of conceptualizing misperceptions and theorizing how corrective interventions can be strengthened. Second, the session highlights research that tests the effectiveness of corrections in reducing false beliefs, issue polarization, and affective polarization across a range of domains. From correcting false beliefs about criminal and welfare policy to misperceptions about norms held by the out-party, the research in this session sheds new light on the role of corrective information in changing attitudes and polarization. In summary, this session helps illuminate the nature of misperceptions and ways to reduce them, thus contributing important insights into interventions that hold promise for reducing division and discord in polarized societies.

Papers:

Partisan Misperceptions as Pseudo-Beliefs

Erin Elizabeth Walk, University of Pennsylvania; Yphtach Lelkes, University of Pennsylvania; Sean Westwood, Dartmouth College

Misperceptions of out-party attitudes and beliefs frequently underpin discussions about the causes and solutions to escalating political discord in the United States (Hartman et al. 2022, Braley et al. 2023, Moore-Berg et al. 2020, Finkel et al. 2020). Partisans wildly misperceive the other side across a variety of dimensions including their policy positions (e.g., Levendusky and Malhotra 2016), their demographics (e.g., Ahler and Sood 2018), and their meta-perceptions (e.g., Mernyk et al. 2022). Much of the literature suggests that these misperceptions intensify polarization and contribute to democratic backsliding (Braley et al. 2023). For example, if individuals believe the other side endorses anti-democratic policies, they may feel justified in preventing them from gaining power—even through undemocratic actions. As such, correcting such misperceptions “hold[s] particular promise for ameliorating political sectarianism” (Finkel et al. 2020) (although see Dias et al, 2024).

While some literature has pushed back against the promise of corrections of partisan misperceptions (Druckman 2023) or the degree to which people misperceive the other side (Orr and Huber 2021), the overwhelmingly majority of this research begins with the assumption that survey measures tap into the respondent’s genuine perceptions about specific criterion. That is, they are not merely wild guesses or an opportunity to engage in partisan cheerleading and the content of the misperception matters. That is, specific beliefs about the percentage of Democrats who are Black or Republican support for abortion are consequential.

There are a number of reasons we might be skeptical of the veridicality of these measures, however (Graham 2023). Survey researchers have long known that respondents are willing to give responses to questions they have never previously entertained, including about made-up policies and events (Converse 1963, Bishop et al. 1980). Asking people to estimate outgroup attitudes on a never-before-entertained survey question may yield responses that are more reflective of on-the-spot reasoning or the desire to comply with perceived social norms than of deeply held beliefs (Zaller and Feldman 1992, Groenendyk et al. 2023).

Consistent with this reasoning, recent evidence suggests that (incorrect) beliefs about politicized and unpoliticized falsehoods are particularly unstable (Graham 2023). Furthermore, misperceptions might be overstated due to respondents’ incorrect assumptions about how common these attitudes are among the broader public (Orr and Huber 2021). Finally, given that these questions, which typically ask about perceived outgroup animosity or perceived support for anti-democratic attitudes, are negatively valenced, they also provide respondents an opportunity to engage in partisan cheerleading (Bullock and Lenz 2019), wherein they provide inflated numbers to signal disapproval.

We evaluate the degree to which political misperceptions represent genuine beliefs through an analysis of panel data, cross-sectional survey data, and an embedded survey experiment. Building from research suggesting that lack of attitude stability (Converse 1964), correlations with attitudes towards fictitious issues (Bishop et al. 1980), and lack of attitude calibration (Graham 2023, Pasek et al. 2015), are indicators of non-attitudes, we measure these metrics in regards to questions about in- and outparty attitudes. We show that misperceptions are, among a large set of items, the least stable survey item. Asking about certainty, which some have argued separates the misinformed from the merely uninformed (Pasek et al. 2015), does not resolve these issues. In addition, reported association between norm-specific misperceptions and a person’s own support for a norm is reduced when we account for their propensity to give insincere responses. This propensity is at least as strongly related to norm support as is the norm-specific misperception.

Corrections with Consequences: How Preregistration Bridges Beliefs and Attitudes

Edward Hohe, Ohio State University

While recent research finds individuals update their beliefs in the direction of facts when presented with corrective information durably and homogeneously, people’s downstream attitudes are often insulated from these factual corrections. If those whose misperceptions have been corrected maintain the same policy and candidate preferences as those who are not corrected, these corrections have not brought reality to bear on real world political outcomes. An expectancy-value approach sees attitudes as the product of beliefs about the object’s characteristics and the evaluation of those characteristics. In traditional correction experiments, individuals are free to revise their expectancy-value calculation to ensure their partisan goals are served by holding their downstream attitude constant. They accomplish this by conveniently deciding that the belief holds little value after all. Pre-registration has swept the social sciences to address precisely this problem in the scientific community. Requiring researchers to dictate how evidence will guide their conclusions prior to observing the data requires converting general inclinations into precise commitments and limits hindsight-bias induced opportunities to insist their priors were correct. There may be no dependable, naturally occurring bridge between beliefs and attitudes. However, we may be able to build such a bridge by asking subjects to preregister a threshold for attitude change. I experimentally test whether the value of the pre-registration logic extends beyond academic work and can empower the public’s capacity for making better informed decisions.

Correcting Misperceptions: Effects on Criminal Justice Policy Preferences

Katie Gouge, Ohio State University; Thomas Wood, Ohio State University

Misperceptions about criminal justice issues—such as crime rates, the effectiveness of punitive policies, or racial disparities in sentencing—are pervasive in the United States. These inaccuracies often underpin public support for specific criminal justice policies, such as mandatory minimum sentences or increased policing. This paper examines the extent to which factual corrections can reshape these misperceptions and, in turn, influence individuals’ policy preferences. Drawing on a series of survey experiments, I test whether providing accurate, evidence-based information can shift public attitudes toward more rehabilitative or less punitive approaches to criminal justice.

This research engages with the broader political science literature on misperceptions, which has long debated the durability of false beliefs and the potential for corrections to mitigate them. While some scholars argue that factual corrections are often ineffective due to motivated reasoning and partisan bias, others suggest that under certain conditions, corrections can lead to substantive attitudinal and behavioral changes. This paper situates criminal justice misperceptions within this recurrent debate, highlighting how issue salience, political ideology, and emotional framing influence the receptivity to factual corrections.

The findings suggest that while factual corrections alone may not completely dispel entrenched misperceptions, they can significantly reduce support for punitive criminal justice policies by altering the perceived trade-offs between public safety and fairness. These results have important implications for policymakers, advocates, and scholars seeking to promote evidence-based approaches to criminal justice reform in a polarized political environment.

Correcting Misperceptions in Welfare Policy: Insights from Ten State Experiments

Lucia Lopez, University of Houston

Welfare policies often include features meant to demonstrate recipients’ effort—such as work requirements, time limits, and administrative burdens. Recent work shows that these ‘effort-signaling’ features address public concerns about free-riding, increase support for welfare generosity, and improve perceptions of welfare beneficiaries. Although these features have been implemented at varying stringency levels across U.S. states since the 1990s, public support for welfare generosity has remained stagnant. This study argues that persistent misperceptions—particularly underestimations of these requirements—undermine their intended effects. This study combines existing data on work requirements and time limits with original data on administrative burdens gathered through interviews and information requests to conduct experiments across 10 diverse states (n=5,400). These experiments test whether correcting state-specific misperceptions about welfare policies can increase program support and improve the perceptions of beneficiaries. The study makes three key contributions: (1) documenting the extent to which Americans know about welfare state policy in their state and whether they underestimate their state’s effort requirements, (2) demonstrating how correcting these misperceptions shapes policy attitudes, and (3) revealing how these corrections transform views of welfare recipients’ deservingness. Results show that misperceptions are correctable and enhance both public support for welfare generosity and perceptions of recipients as deserving of assistance.

How Partisans Underestimate (and Are Influenced by) Dynamic Bipartisan Norms

Trystan Loustau, Boston College; Jordan Wylie, Boston College; Stylianos Syropoulos, Arizona State University; Ashley Fabrizio, Stanford University

Norms within the American political landscape are continually evolving. Building on prior work that suggests framing social norms as dynamic (changing over time) rather than static (fixed in the present) can encourage individuals to adopt counter-normative behaviors and attitudes, we investigate the efficacy of dynamic norm interventions in reducing political polarization. We specifically focus on bipartisan norms as our intervention to directly address the partisan roots of our division. This interdisciplinary paper features contributions from both social psychology and political science scholars.

In a pilot study (N = 50), we identified credible dynamic bipartisan norms (i.e., policies and beliefs on which both Republicans and Democrats show increasing support). In Study 1 (N = 389), we observed that Democrats and Republicans underestimated current in-party and out-party support for these norms and misperceived the dynamic trend, believing that Republican support had decreased over time, when it has actually grown. In Study 2 (N = 1,187), we tested whether exposure to these bipartisan norms would affect ideological and affective polarization. Participants exposed to dynamic-normative information on bipartisan issues showed less ideological polarization but not significantly less affective polarization, contributing to evidence that suggests there are differences in the mechanisms underlying ideological and affective polarization.