I checked 18 political science journals on Wednesday, October 28, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period October 21 to October 27, I found 37 new paper(s) in 13 journal(s).

American Journal of Political Science

Learning traps
Hassan Sayed
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When constituents are uncertain about whether leaders' policy preferences align with their interests, policy choices generate a trade‐off between payoffs and information. Leaders can experiment with their preferred policy, but if the outcome is bad, constituents learn this and threaten office removal. I use a repeated model of political agency to analyze how this trade‐off shapes long‐lived, term‐unlimited leaders' policy choices. When there is uncertainty about the optimal policy for constituents, leaders implement “learning traps”: spatially intermediate policies that halt learning about what the best policy is. They experiment only when their preferences are very likely to be aligned with constituents, a contrast to the “gambling for resurrection” logic ubiquitous in the literature. I provide a case study that examines how the 1861 reforms ending Serfdom in Imperial Russia represented the logic of a “learning trap” and illustrate additional applications of the model to political contagion and economic policymaking.
Structure and agency in emancipatory reform: A blueprint from a Black union
Benjamin T. Lynerd
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The National Labor Convention of 1869, the first of its kind for African American workers, yielded a grand strategy for achieving full emancipation, in which those long subjected to domination might attain durable independence. Drawing upon decades of Black republican thought, this agenda combined macro‐level reforms targeting agrarian and industrial monopolies with micro‐level interventions into the habits of the working class. While the project fell short, its multivalent approach nevertheless offers republican theorists today a framework for better understanding the structural dynamics of domination and how to overcome them.
The threat‐enhancing effect of authoritarian power sharing
Jack Paine
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Power‐sharing deals can potentially solve the autocrat's commitment problem, yet often fail to prevent conflict. This article develops a dynamic model to examine a largely overlooked friction: Sharing power within an authoritarian regime bolsters the opposition's coercive capabilities. The resultant threat‐enhancing effect creates two distinct commitment problems for the opposition, which determine if and when power sharing occurs. First, the opposition cannot commit to refrain from leveraging its enhanced threat. The ruler prefers to incur a revolt than peacefully share power if the threat‐enhancing effect is large. Second, the threat‐enhancing effect tempts the opposition to wait for a future power‐sharing deal, which undercuts the opposition's commitment to revolt today. New dynamic implications arise: delayed power sharing, conflict, or an increased willingness for the ruler to share power are all possible. Scrutinizing the opposition's limited commitment ability contrasts with the predominant existing focus on the autocrat's commitment problem.

American Political Science Review

When Politics Enters the Waiting Room: Far-Right Electoral Victories Exacerbate Discrimination in Access to Healthcare
MERLIN SCHAEFFER, ALESSIO ROMARRI, DINA ROSENBERG, KRZYSZTOF KRAKOWSKI
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Far-right political shifts have been linked to increased racism, raising concerns about their impact on minority access to public services. This study investigates whether far-right electoral victories encourage discrimination by street-level bureaucrats, who are expected to act impartially. We conducted a nested research design in Italy, combining a field-experimental audit with a regression discontinuity design focused on municipalities near the electoral threshold for far-right mayors. Research assistants with native-Italian and West-African accents contacted municipal healthcare offices to request registration with a general medical practitioner. Compared to native-Italian callers, those with West-African accents faced significantly higher rates of scrutiny and dismissive responses. Leveraging close elections, we find that this disparity was exacerbated in municipalities where far-right candidates narrowly won. These findings demonstrate that far-right electoral success can undermine impartiality and equal access to essential services.
The Symbolic Politics of Housing
DAVID E. BROOCKMAN, CHRISTOPHER S. ELMENDORF, JOSHUA L. KALLA
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Voter opposition to development contributes to America’s housing shortage. Prevailing explanations emphasize NIMBYism (opposition to housing nearby) and homeowners’ self-interest. However, homeownership often fails to predict housing policy views, while NIMBYism offers little insight into support for policies that do not concern specific proposed housing projects—the focus of much recent policymaking. Drawing on symbolic politics theory, we argue that voters’ affect toward groups that housing policies make salient powerfully shapes their judgments about housing policies. We present evidence supporting this theory. Experiments show that affect toward developers and investors who build housing, government actors who approve it, and residents who move into it explain anti-development preferences when policies make these groups salient. Providing further causal evidence, short-form videos that manipulate affect toward developers have meaningful downstream effects on support for new development and permitting reforms. Ironically, voter dislike of the very actors who could ameliorate the housing shortage further exacerbates it.

British Journal of Political Science

Geoengineering, Moral Hazard, and Disrespect
Alice Baderin, Maxime Lepoutre
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Scientists and policy makers are increasingly exploring solar geoengineering as a tool for combatting anthropogenic climate change. Yet these technologies have drawn intense ethical criticism. One of the most influential critiques – the ‘moral hazard’ objection – holds that pursuing solar geoengineering risks undercutting mitigation efforts; and that, as a result, governments should halt the development of solar geoengineering. This paper argues that the moral hazard objection faces a dilemma: either the proposed solution to the moral hazard effect (that is, stifling geoengineering) is unnecessary, or it expresses a morally troubling form of disrespect. Articulating this dilemma serves three purposes. It shows, first, that the moral hazard objection is substantially more difficult to vindicate than it initially appears. Second, it clarifies what would need to be shown, empirically, to overcome this ethical hurdle. Finally, and crucially, it sheds light, more broadly, on what it means to respect people’s agency when designing and implementing public policies.

Electoral Studies

‘The winners take it all, the losers standing small’: Party centralization and Duverger's law
LuĂ­s Locatelli, George Avelino, Ivan Chaves JucĂĄ
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Motivation or ability? Explaining the effect of party polarisation on proximity voting
William John Atkinson
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Populism and conspiracy theories: A cross-national analysis
Patrick S. Sawyer
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European Journal of Political Research

Generic title: Not a research article
Pocketbook politics and climate action: How economic strain reduces support for green parties – ERRATUM
Frederik Thieme
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Contested terrain: How attitudes toward gender issues relate to voting behavior
Melanie M. Dietz, Sigrid Roßteutscher
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While research increasingly links sexist attitudes to far-right support, public debates have moved well beyond women’s equality to encompass LGBTIQ+ rights. Yet studies have been slow to follow, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of attitudes toward trans, intersex, and non-binary people and how they associate with party choice, especially beyond far-right support. Drawing on original data from the German Social Cohesion Panel (2022/23), we are, to our knowledge, among the first to investigate a broader range of gender-related attitudes and find, first, that these constitute two empirically distinct dimensions, binary and non-heteronormative gender issues , that while conceptually intertwined, warrant separate examination. Second, while support for binary gender issues is widespread, non-heteronormative issues remain highly contested. Third, these dimensions relate differently to vote choice: attitudes toward binary gender issues show partisan sorting across the left-right spectrum, while attitudes toward non-heteronormative gender issues reveal a specific antagonism between the Greens and (center-)right parties. Finally, considering both dimensions together uncovers an asymmetry: voters of (center-)right parties form a cohesive conservative bloc, while supportive voters with different attitudinal profiles disperse across (center-)left parties.
Gender inclusivity and perceptions of party ideology: Observational and experimental evidence
James Adams, David Bracken, Noam Gidron, Will Horne, Seonghui Lee, Diana O’Brien, Lie Philip Santoso, Kaitlin Senk, Randolph T. Stevenson
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Do citizens use gender-based heuristics to infer political parties’ ideological positions? We posit that citizens view more ‘gender inclusive’ parties as more left-leaning than comparable male-dominated organizations. Cues about gender inclusivity, moreover, come not only from women’s presence in parties’ legislative delegations but also from other visible signals of women’s incorporation into parties – including as leaders and supporters – and through organizational rules promoting women’s inclusion. We present analyses of election survey data from 21 Western publics over time, which show that, controlling for the left–right tones of parties’ manifestos, citizens perceive more gender-inclusive parties as more left-wing and that the cumulative impact of the various dimensions of gender inclusivity is substantial. We next report experimental evidence from four countries, which provides further support for gender-based heuristics. Our findings highlight the importance of not just the message but also the messenger in shaping citizens’ assessments of parties’ ideological perceptions.

Party Politics

Losing the engaged without winning the disengaged: Personalism and the choice of political news
Troels BĂžggild, Helene Helboe Pedersen
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When political news centers on the policy work or private lives of individual politicians rather than on parties, it can obscure the collective actors citizens must judge at elections. The usual defense is that such personalism attracts readers, especially those otherwise unlikely to choose political news. We test this claim in survey experiments in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States ( N = 3039). Respondents chose between an entertainment article and a political article whose subheadline attributed a new bill to a party, an individual politician (individualized), or the politician’s personal story (privatized). Personalism recruited no readers. Effects are negative in all countries and pooled amount to a significant five percentage point loss. The losses were concentrated among politically engaged citizens, while the least engaged, the very readers personalism is meant to attract, were unmoved. Party-centered news thus entail no audience sacrifice as citizens prefer the format that keeps parties visible.
The rise of nationalist populism: Comparing Western European right-wing political parties RuedaDaniel. The rise of nationalist populism: comparing Western European right-wing political parties. London and New York, Routledge, 2025, ix + 263pp., ÂŁ38.39 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-032-85278-2.
Ensar Kıvrak
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Political Analysis

Generalizing Causal Effects with Noncompliance: Application to Deep Canvassing Experiments
Zhongren Chen, Melody Huang
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Standard approaches in generalizability often focus on generalizing the intent-to-treat effect. However, in practice, a more policy-relevant quantity is the generalized impact of an intervention across compliers. While instrumental variable methods are commonly used to estimate the complier average causal effect (CACE) within samples, standard approaches cannot be applied to a target population with a different distribution from the study sample. This article makes several key contributions. First, we introduce a new set of identifying assumptions in the form of a population-level exclusion restriction that allows for identification of the target CACE (T-CACE) in both randomized experiments and observational studies. This allows researchers to identify the T-CACE without relying on standard principal ignorability assumptions. Second, we propose a class of inverse-weighted estimators for the T-CACE and derive their asymptotic properties. We provide extensions for settings in which researchers have access to auxiliary compliance information across the target population. Finally, we introduce a sensitivity analysis for researchers to evaluate the robustness of the estimators in the presence of unmeasured confounding and extend existing tests to evaluate instrument validity in this context. We illustrate our proposed method through extensive simulations and a study evaluating the impact of deep canvassing on reducing exclusionary attitudes.

Political Behavior

Learning from Coalition Politics: How Episodes of Increased Complexity Can Enhance Citizens’ Political Efficacy
Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Ida BĂŠk Hjermitslev, Mathias Wessel Tromborg
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Beliefs About Public Opinion and the Perceived Legitimacy of Policy Decisions
Nils D. Steiner, Claudia Landwehr
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Democratic legitimacy is typically thought to depend on whether political decisions reflect public opinion, or majority preferences. Do citizens share this standard? And what if citizens are wrong about public opinion? We study how beliefs about public support for controversial policy proposals are associated with the perceived legitimacy of adopting them, and whether accurate polling information changes these judgments. In a representative survey experiment in Germany, respondents reported their own position on four such proposals, estimated public support, and rated the legitimacy of adopting each one. For a random subset of proposals, respondents received accurate polling information showing that the proposal lacked majority support. We find that perceived public support predicts legitimacy judgments even after accounting for respondents’ own policy preferences. Yet these perceptions are often inaccurate and shaped by respondents’ own views. Corrective polling information modestly lowers perceived legitimacy, especially among those who initially overestimated public support. The findings suggest that misperceptions of public opinion can distort, but accurate information can also partly correct, citizens’ assessments of democratic legitimacy.
Do Political Elites Evaluate Election Outcomes More Favourably than Citizens? Evidence from Parallel Surveys
Henrik Bech Seeberg, Martin BĂŠkgaard
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The Labour Market Link: An explanation of Brexit support
Katy Morris
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Where can we expect support for populist parties and initiatives to be weakest, and why? We argue support will be weakest in places that have experienced strong growth of employment in high-quality jobs, because such growth has positive spillover effects that shape wider perceptions of the economic status quo and the prevailing ideological climate. We test this proposition in relation to Brexit support at the time of the 2016 EU referendum and in the present day, using Census data to proxy the rate at which highly paid jobs replaced low- and mid-paid jobs in English and Welsh Local Authority Districts 1991–2016, and substantiate it at both the area and the individual-level. High-quality employment growth is a more powerful predictor of Brexit support than alternative local economic indicators and individual-level effects are sizeable. All else being equal, analysis of Understanding Society data shows the probability of Brexit support is only 30% among respondents in places that experienced very strong high-quality employment growth, compared to 55% among those in places with negative growth. These findings have important implications for how left behind places should be defined and for strategies that seek to address political discontent.
What Drives Voter Bias Against Muslim Politicians? An Experimental Examination
Henning Finseraas, Rino Heim
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Religious and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in political office, but its reasons are debated. Using administrative data from Norwegian local elections, we show that candidates with Muslim names receive fewer personal votes, and propose that this is (partly) due to political beliefs about Muslims as politicians.To examine this claim, we identify salient political beliefs and implement a conjoint experiment that estimates anti-Muslim bias with and without information on these beliefs.In a low-information setting, respondents exhibit a substantial anti-Muslim bias, but providing belief-relevant information reduces this anti-Muslim bias by 2–5 percentage points. The largest reduction occurs when respondents learn candidates’ positions on minority-rights issues. This reduction is driven by right-wing voters and is large enough to eliminate the left-right gap in anti-Muslim bias. These findings show a strong political component in the anti-Muslim bias.
Immigration and Nationalistic Attitudes: Panel Evidence from Chile
Catalina Vega-MĂ©ndez, Giancarlo Visconti
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Does rapid and large-scale migration fuel nationalism? Using administrative and panel survey data from Chile, we show that sudden, large-scale migration inflows increase identity-based nationalistic attitudes, such as national pride, among native-born citizens. These “immigration shocks” appear to activate perceptions of identity threat, leading to stronger expressions of national pride and belonging. Supplementary evidence from surveys, media reports, social media, and crime records suggests that this nationalism is predominantly exclusionary: areas most affected by migration also experienced spikes in anti-migrant rhetoric, hate crimes, and support for a newly formed far-right party. These findings underscore how rapid demographic changes can reshape political attitudes and contribute to the rise of exclusionary forms of national identity.

Political Geography

Powers of ecological horror
Jared D. Margulies
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Forest governance as carceral formation: Policing and punishment in the ordinary governance of British Columbia's forests
Kyla Simone Piccin
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Political Psychology

Rejecting authoritarianism: When threats to democracy shape values
Amy Erica Smith, Mollie J. Cohen, Mason W. Moseley, Matthew L. Layton
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As politicians with authoritarian tendencies win elections globally, it becomes urgent to understand the social psychological mechanisms underlying support for such candidates. Prior research identifies authoritarianism as a likely predictor of vote choice. Contrary to views of authoritarian parenting as a stable, exogenous disposition, however, we argue that such attitudes can also evolve during campaigns, as voters take cues from elites. Analyzing AmericasBarometer data and a five‐wave panel study, this paper assesses authoritarian parenting values over Brazil's 2018 presidential campaign. Consistent with prior literature, authoritarian parenting attitudes early in the campaign predict who supported and opposed the authoritarian candidate Bolsonaro. However, these attitudes change over the campaign. This polarization is asymmetric, limited to Bolsonaro's opponents, who become increasingly anti‐authoritarian. The results illuminate how polities can resist authoritarian leaders and call for a reconsideration of authoritarianism in the public.
Putting your money where your mouth is: Expressions of Chinese nationalist sentiments are not just cheap talk
Charles Chang, Michael Masterson
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Do nationalist expressions reflect a willingness to pay costs or are they cheap talk? This is important because theories expect nationalism affects a wide range of outcomes that pose costs to participants, including international conflict and participation in boycotts. However, past research has either relied on self‐reports that cannot rule out cheap talk or outcome measures at higher levels of analysis, such as international trade flows, that do not directly link individual‐level nationalist sentiment to behavior. In contrast, we measure both nationalist sentiments and costly behavior on an individual level using the content of millions of Chinese social media posts and the nationality of the brand of users' devices, for example type of cellphone, as a costly behavioral measure. We find that nationalist sentiment makes citizens less likely to use US and Japanese brands with an instrumental variable analysis.
Political psychology in an era of personalization: Misinformation research, generative AI, and the promise of tailored experiments
Yamil Ricardo Velez
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Voters increasingly inhabit personalized information environments, where content, algorithms, and social cues vary across people. Yet popular approaches to studying and addressing features of information environments such as misinformation exposure often flatten this heterogeneity: Measures and interventions are developed for populations rather than individuals. Using misinformation as an illustrative case, I argue that population‐based methods for measuring and intervening on beliefs can obscure why some beliefs matter politically while others do not. I advocate for tailored approaches that adapt research designs to groups and individuals. Tailoring can increase relevance, facilitate persuasion, and create fruitful conditions for testing influential theories of opinion formation and change. I conclude by discussing the promise of a personalized political psychology that aligns measures and interventions with the idiosyncratic ways voters form and express opinions.
Climate change and conflict: The vicious cycles undermining climate action, and what can be done to break them
Boryana Todorova, Matthew J. Hornsey, Winnifred R. Louis, Kelly S. Fielding
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In this review, we synthesize evidence to argue that climate change and conflict are mutually reinforcing. We first examine conflict as a barrier to mitigation, focusing on four faultlines that slow climate action: (a) ideological polarization, (b) “elite versus ordinary people” narratives, (c) intranational, place‐based conflicts, and (d) international disputes. The consequence of these conflicts is worsening climate change, which in turn increases the prevalence of factors known to be conflict amplifiers: heat stress, economic stress, widening inequality, and forced displacement. Our analysis points to the potential for recursive “climate–conflict loops”, fuelled in part by erosion of institutional trust, shrinking moral circles, political polarization, and de‐prioritization of long‐term climate goals. In a spirit of optimism, however, we identify three buffers capable of breaking these vicious cycles: maintenance of procedural and distributive justice, enhancing information integrity, and scaffolding institutional cooperation. We conclude by proposing a research agenda that integrates psychological mechanisms into dynamic, multi‐level accounts of how climate impacts and political conflict coevolve.
Do “warm glow” feelings affect climate mitigation behaviors? A field experiment on consumer electric energy choices
Jennifer Jerit, Jason Barabas, Hwayong Shin, Molly Gahagen, Scott May
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Addressing the climate crisis is going to require behavioral change in many aspects of daily life. A growing literature suggests the promise of “warm glow” messaging that features the pleasure and satisfaction one experiences from acting sustainably. Yet previous research has relied almost exclusively on self‐reported behavioral intentions, leaving open whether such appeals meaningfully affect real‐world, costly choices. We partnered with a local organization to conduct a field experiment on energy choices in Hanover, New Hampshire. Using a randomized roll‐out design in early 2025, we systematically varied the timing of postcard mailers that contain a warm glow message encouraging customers to increase the renewable content of their energy option. Analyses of administrative data on consumer energy choices reveal that warm glow messages delivered in a field setting have a null effect on adoption of higher‐renewable power choices, with a small number of customers changing to the greener but more costly option. Our study provides novel behavioral evidence on the real‐world impact of intrinsic motivation appeals in the climate domain.

Political Science Research and Methods

Do felon voting rules affect criminal prosecutions?
Hannah Simpson, Sidak Yntiso
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Felon disenfranchisement laws can alter the composition of the electorate. Accordingly, we argue that in states with such laws, elected prosecutors may be tempted to assign felon status strategically. We test our argument using criminal case data from Virginia and leveraging a sudden policy change—unexpectedly announced by the Governor on April 22, 2016—enfranchising all felons upon completion of their prison or probation sentence. Using well-known racial differences in partisanship as a measure of likely political alignment, we show that the announcement corresponded to an increase in criminal charge severity and sentence length for defendants who were politically unaligned with their prosecutors, and a decrease for aligned defendants. Evidence suggests that these changes may have been partially motivated by partisan concerns in the lead-up to the 2016 federal elections.
Polity size and women’s representation: evidence from two large-scale boundary reforms
Moa Frödin Gruneau, Jan Teorell, KÄre Vernby
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Do larger polities hinder gender parity in elected office? We theorize that when populations grow faster than elected assemblies, a “seat congestion” effect intensifies competition for nominations, enabling men candidates to crowd out women. We test this argument using two nationwide natural experiments: Swedish municipal amalgamations in 1952 and 1973 that abruptly increased electorates. We track the effects in newly digitized historical panel data. Where electorate-per-seat ratios rose, growth in women’s representation slowed. Decomposition analyses show that expanding councils only partially offsets congestion. By identifying polity size as a systematic brake on descriptive representation, the study adds a demographic dimension to debates on institutional design and points to an overlooked cost of increasing jurisdictional size.

Public Choice

The cultural roots of state-owned enterprises: evidence from Europe
Ákos Dombi, Piotr Matuszak, Katarzyna Szarzec
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This paper examines the cultural roots of state ownership of enterprises. Drawing on data for European countries, we show that the scale of state ownership of enterprises is smaller in individualist societies than in collectivist ones. This relationship is robust to a broad set of cultural, economic, and historical controls. We address endogeneity concerns by using genetic, epidemiological, and linguistic data as instruments for individualism. We propose several political economy mechanisms underlying this relationship. First, in collectivist societies, voter preferences are tilted toward more extensive state ownership of enterprises. Second, in collectivist societies, interest groups may be stronger and democracy may be weaker, both of which can result in a larger share of state-owned enterprises in the economy. We provide empirical evidence supporting these channels. Finally, we show that the negative relationship between individualism and the scale of state ownership also holds in non-European countries.
Nonviolent protest and ideological change in education: a public choice approach
Joshua D. Ammons, Ali Palida, Ilia Murtazashvili
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This paper applies a public choice framework to examine how successful nonviolent protest campaigns are associated with changes in the ideological orientation of state education systems. We conceptualize education as a site of political bargaining in which organized interests shape educational governance and classroom political socialization. Using cross-national data on political mobilization and educational ideology, we estimate the effects of successful nonviolent campaigns on nationalist, socialist-communist, and democratic ideological emphasis within classroom instruction. We find that successful nonviolent campaigns are associated with declines in nationalist and socialist-communist ideological emphasis alongside increased emphasis on democratic norms and democratic institutions. We do not interpret these shifts as movement from indoctrination to ideological neutrality. Rather, following recent work on political socialization and educational ideology, we treat all educational systems as engaged in ideological transmission and interpret the findings as shifts in the ideological orientation emphasized within educational practice. The results suggest that successful nonviolent mobilization is associated with broader political and institutional realignment that reshapes educational political socialization. Parallel estimates for successful violent campaigns do not display the same consistent pattern, although this contrast is descriptive rather than a direct test of the difference between campaign types.
Does policy advocacy generate good PR? Evidence from labor unions and minimum wages
Jeffrey Clemens, Michael R. Strain
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Judicial performance and public procurement choice
Alessandro Cavalieri, Alessandro Melcarne, Giovanni Battista Ramello
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This paper investigates whether judicial performance influences the choice of procurement procedures adopted by public authorities. Using data on Italian municipal public works contracts between 2009 and 2012, it examines the choice between negotiated procedures and formal tendering mechanisms in a range where both options were legally available. Identification relies on a spatial discontinuity design that exploits exogenous variation in judicial delay across court jurisdictions, further refined through intra-regional border comparisons and coarsened exact matching. The results show that longer judicial delays significantly reduce the likelihood of using negotiated procedures and increase the use of formal auctions. Consistent with a growing body of literature showing that inefficient courts increase contractual uncertainty, we argue that poor judicial performance shifts procurement choices toward highly formalized procurement mechanisms rather than more discretionary and market-oriented forms of contracting. In this sense, formal procurement procedures may partially compensate for weak judicial enforcement by shifting transaction governance toward greater ex-ante specification, procedural control, and verifiability. More broadly, the paper suggests that judicial ineffectiveness may contribute to the expansion of bureaucratic controls, shifting governance away from market-based arrangements and toward increasingly proceduralized administrative structures.
Picture book of apportionment and voting difficulties
Donald G. Saari
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The geometry associated with apportionment and voting methods enables us to “see" what difficulties will arise, why certain complexities are inevitable, how to create supporting examples, and identify similarities of the problems afflicting both areas. Although several new results become apparent, such as the harsh consequences for a method satisfying IIA and a replacement for the modified divisors that are used with monotone apportionment approaches, the emphasis is to use this picture book approach to explain why certain behaviors must happen.
When does artificial intelligence strengthen the case for markets? Revisiting the socialist calculation debate
Niclas Berggren
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Research & Politics

“Manifestly unlawful”: How US troops think about the duty to disobey illegal orders
Charli Carpenter, Heather Kumove, Geraldine Santoso
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US troops are required to disobey unlawful orders but obey lawful ones – yet social scientists know very little about how they draw that line or what drives the decision to actually disobey when it counts. We asked 818 active-duty American troops to define “manifestly unlawful orders” in their own words, as well as whether they would obey or disobey specific scenarios in which they might be asked to directly and intentionally target unarmed civilians. A majority of troops could provide clear examples of situations in which they would feel compelled to disobey orders. Of specific scenarios, over a third of US troops were prepared to disobey orders to target civilians, either with nuclear weapons or if asked to shoot civilian protesters. Controlling for gender, age, branch of service, party affiliation, voting behavior, rank, income, and education, we find simply thinking ahead about the concept of “manifestly unlawful orders” is the single biggest predictor of soldiers’ willingness to refuse to harm civilians.
Worth a try? The electoral consequences of symbolic legislation
Nicole Huffman, John V. Kane, David L. Stack
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With the US Congress increasingly gridlocked, fewer bills are becoming law. Nevertheless, members continue to engage in what we call “symbolic legislating”—that is, introducing legislation that has effectively no chance of securing enough votes to become law. Despite its prevalence, little is known about the electoral implications of sponsoring symbolic legislation. It is possible that voters reward their legislator’s efforts to move the status quo closer to their position even if it has no chance of becoming law. On the other hand, because symbolic legislation is doomed to fail, it may decrease a legislator’s perceived effectiveness and, thus, their political support. Alternatively, it is possible that sponsoring symbolic legislation has no impact beyond a cue of the politician’s position. In this Research Article, we test these competing hypotheses using a survey experiment. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that, assuming shared party and issue position, sponsoring symbolic legislation is strongly rewarded. Moreover, the effect is even stronger among voters who are most likely to attend to this information in the real world and operates similarly across parties.