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The article challenges the assumption that the Reconstruction generation distinguished between civil rights, with respect to which the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment would require equality, and political and social rights, which will be excluded from coverage. Topics include the claim that social rights were not a concept relevant to coverage of Article IV's Privileges and Immunities Clause, and whether the Amendment reaches public rights and privileges as opposed to private rights.

The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a key source of information on who votes. Turnout estimates derived from the CPS are often cited in academic research on participation, widely used in the calibration of surveys, and central to ongoing legal and policy debates over the protection of voting rights in the United States. We compare CPS estimates to official voter turnout records from 2008–18 and document consistent, significant discrepancies that call into question the reliability of CPS turnout statistics. Specifically, the CPS overestimates black and Hispanic turnout relative to non-Hispanic whites, whether relying on turnout rates as a share of eligible citizens or the racial/ethnic composition of the voting population. Sampling error and commonly used adjustments to CPS estimates do not account for or correct this bias, and thus academics and policy makers should use discretion when judging recent shifts in voter turnout with survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study is to illustrate the problem of freedom of assembly during the COVID-19 pandemic against the background of the experiences of the Republic of Poland and the United States of America. This freedom is provided for in the constitutions of both states, which implies that public authorities are obliged to implement it also in COVID-19 conditions. Hence, the question arises as to whether, and if so to what extent, public authorities in Poland and the United States (countries belonging to the United Nations and obliged to consider the standards of human rights protection resulting from international law) applied solutions realising freedom of assembly in the conditions of COVID-19. The authors try to determine the extent of the impact of legal measures applied by public authorities in both countries on the realisation of freedom of assembly and the public reaction produced by these measures. The choice of such a context for assessment was justified by differences in the legal culture of the countries being compared, the structure of the state, and the approach of both the public authorities and the society to freedom of assembly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guarantee Clause provides that “[t]he United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Based on its original public meaning, the guarantee of a republican government protects core political rights and contains readily ascertainable standards founded on majority rule and a prohibition of minority-party entrenchment. The Supreme Court failed to develop a standard for adjudicating partisan gerrymandering claims because the Equal Protection Clause and the “one person, one vote” framework are fundamentally incompatible with the harms associated with partisan gerrymandering. Such claims involve harms to majority rights that strike at the core of the republican guarantee. The use of advanced technology and household-level data means partisan gerrymanders will only become increasingly precise and durable, leading to more situations where parties earning a minority share of votes nonetheless hold a permanent majority of seats. Given these new challenges, the Supreme Court should revisit partisan gerrymandering under the majoritarian standards derived from the Guarantee Clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on close relationship between the US military and American religion. Topics include Army instrumental in shaping and growing the US economy leading the new state's territorial expansion and maintaining public law and order; and including the establishment of temporary and permanent military outposts used both for projecting imperial power and controling the occupied territories and populations.

The text is organized into five sections: why partisan polarization might harm democracy; political institutions under polarization; the relationship between social polarization and partisanship; the relationship between polarized behavior and institutions; and recourses for upholding democracy under extreme partisan polarization. It is sure to be a volume that scholars across the discipline will reach for in their own work and would be assigned to both graduate and undergraduate American politics courses on understanding partisan polarization in the United States. [Extracted from the article]

A populist turn in the argument for laissez-faire occurred between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. The essay focuses on Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, the supply-side economists, and eulogists of free enterprise like Michael Novak. They reversed the standpoint of previous advocates of the minimal state, who had feared that the enfranchised poor majority would soak the rich, by arguing that the statist danger came in fact from the liberal elites, pressing on with the expansion of governmental functions against the will and interests of ordinary Americans. Such a shift complemented that occurring in the idiom of the political Right since the 1960s. The economic populism of Friedman and Buchanan, in particular, derived from a blend of abstract analysis and a reassertion of freedom as the constitutive value of the country – they combined the universality and prestige of the economic idiom with a normative vision of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of extreme polarization, intense political divisiveness, and gridlocked government, many Americans are turning to reforms of the democratic processes that create incentives for candidates and officeholders to appeal to broader coalitions. A centerpiece of these efforts is ranked-choice voting (RCV). RCV allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference: first, second, third, and so on. To determine the winner, the candidate with the fewest “first choices” is eliminated and those ballots are then counted for the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until a candidate either has a majority of the votes or until only two candidates remain. Voters in Maine and Alaska have endorsed RCV for federal and state elections in recent years, and RCV continues to gain traction in a variety of large cities throughout the country, including New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Oakland. Some reformers have also proposed that states move to RCV in presidential elections, as Maine recently did. Yet RCV now faces an existential legal threat. In 2017, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, the State’s highest tribunal, advised that RCV violates the state constitution. Were that interpretation correct, it would imperil RCV nationwide. Nearly 40 state constitutions include provisions similar to that in Maine’s constitution. These provisions declare that candidates are to be elected to office if they receive “a plurality of the votes” or the “highest,” “largest,” or “greatest” number of votes. Maine’s highest court concluded that RCV’s multi-round tabulation process violates this type of provision. Even in states without such a constitutional provision, state statutes often include the same requirement. In short, if the Maine decision is correct and adopted more broadly, it could prevent state and local governments throughout the country from adopting RCV. This Article is the first to examine the history, context, and meaning of these widespread plurality-vote provisions. After doing so, this Article concludes that RCV does not violate these provisions. The history of these provisions reveals that many states initially required winning candidates to receive a “majority of the votes” and that plurality provisions eventually came to replace these majority thresholds. The purpose of these plurality-vote provisions was to ensure that a winner could be identified through a single popular election, rather than requiring multiple separate elections to determine a winner or leaving the choice to the legislature. RCV offers precisely that: voters cast a single ballot in a single election and the candidate with the most votes, once the counting is complete, wins the election. Instead of plurality-vote provisions, a “majority of votes” is required to win in two state constitutions, some state statutes, and certain proposed reforms to the voting rules for presidential elections. These provisions pose a different challenge for RCV: whether the winner in an RCV election has received a “majority” of the relevant votes. The winner in RCV receives a majority in the final round of tabulation, but that might not be a majority of all the ballots (some voters might not have ranked either of the two candidates left in the final round of tabulation). This Article concludes that RCV is also best interpreted as consistent with most of these “majority-vote” provisions. Thus, if Americans choose to adopt RCV for presidential, national, state, or local elections, these plurality- and majority-provisions in state constitutions and state law should pose no legal obstacle to properly drafted RCV legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the U.S. military, in its promulgation of the U.S. Navy's Office of the Chief of Naval Operations Instruction (OPNAVINST) 3120.32D, risks conflict with international law and standards concerning compulsory self-incrimination. Topics discussed include evolution of the law regarding self-report regulations, international covenant on civil and political rights, and difficulties in application of self-report regulations.

A convention of democracy is that government should promote the common good. Citizens' common good is based in their shared civil interests, including security of themselves and their possessions, equal basic liberties, diverse opportunities, and an adequate social minimum. Citizens' civil interests ground what John Rawls calls "the political values of justice and public reason." These political values determine the political legitimacy of laws and the political constitution, and provide the proper bases for voting, public discussion, and political justification. These political values similarly provide the terms to properly understand the separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, and free exercise of religion. It is not a proper role of government to promote religious doctrines or practices, or to enforce moral requirements of religion. For government to enforce or even endorse the imperatives or ends of religion violates individuals' freedom and equality: it encroaches upon their liberty of conscience and freedom to pursue their conceptions of the good; impairs their equal civic status; and undermines their equal political rights as free and equal citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Anglophone literature on local and regional development policy there are tendencies to overextension of claims from one side of the Atlantic to the other, or there is no comparative framing at all. As a result the specificity of the West European case tends to be lost. In contrast with the USA, the West European instance is very different indeed. Although there have been changes since the postwar golden years of urban and regional planning, central government remains crucial in the structuring of local and regional development and has given expression to counter-posed class forces: regional policy was historically an aspect of the welfare state as promoted by the labor movement, while urbanization policy has been much more about the forces of the political right. In the USA, by contrast, local governments and to a lesser degree, the states, have been and continue to be supreme; in contrast to Western Europe, location tends to be much more market-determined, with local and governments acting as market agents. Class forces have seemingly been much weaker, territorial coalitions occupying the center ground. As a first cut, these differences have to do with state structure: the Western European state is far more centralized, facilitating the implementation of policies that are relatively indifferent to local specificity, while in the USA the converse applies. State structures, however, are parts of broader social formations and reflect the different socio-historical conditions in which West European societies, on the one hand, and their American counterpoint, on the other, have emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Western" democracies take an uneven view of the state's role in reintegrating the incarcerated following punishment. Particularly in the United States, where retributivism remains punishment's dominant justification, questions of punishment center on how wrongdoers ought to suffer for transgressions. Thus, reintegrative programs are viewed as a question of policy preference for various jurisdictions, and a question of grace for the state. A republican political theory, centered on our civic bonds, emphasizes different commitments. On this view, punishment is justified where a citizen attacks another in ways that deny their civic equality and undermine our ability to maintain a common civic life. But the same justification that requires protecting civic equality through punishment compels the state to reintegrate offenders after punishment; the right to punish and the obligation to reintegrate are complementary political duties. As such, reintegrative policies are not merely the state's choice but rather a state duty and an offender's right. This article explores the obligations the state owes ex-felons in reintegrating them into civic society across a range of political and civic rights. It also addresses reintegration's important role in ameliorating the racial scars of American criminal punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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According to many contemporary scholars, an originalist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment is difficult, if not impossible, because the Amendment did not have a coherent original meaning. Its provisions, it is argued, were ambiguous and vague--and deliberately so. But as will be set forth in this article, a review of the commentary from the drafting and ratification of the Amendment provides substantial evidence that proponents of the Amendment held a coherent understanding of Section 1. Further this evidence indicates that the major interpretive disagreements arose not among supporters but between supporters and opponents, and even these were generally limited to disputes on only two (albeit major) interpretive issues: (1) whether the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" included intermarriage and political rights, (2) whether these "privileges and immunities" would be subject to congressional redefinition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of detention as a tool of immigrant enforcement has grown in the United States and around the world. In this article, I examine the practices used to structure the physical detention of immigrants and explore the role that carceral immigrant control plays as a form of labor market governance. I argue that the same security and detention practices that equate being out of status with criminality are also used to tag immigrants as unskilled. Through the delineation of skill categories, which are vested with certain political rights, I posit that this carceral enforcement of skill categories shapes how immigrants are able to navigate the labor market, with particular attention to the implications for recipients of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past work finds that political attitudes vary in the extent to which they are held with moral conviction -- a distinctive facet of attitude intensity associated with animosity toward political opponents and resistance to compromise. We examine moral conviction as it arises on a timely political issue: immigration. Our approach is distinctive in that we measure attitudes about immigration in general, but also several subcomponents of the issue (e.g. attitudes toward building a border wall and making English the official language of the US). We find that attention to moral conviction reveals a face of public opinion that other measures do not. Opinions on the conservative side of immigration topics tend to be more strongly held and more consistent across issues. But those with opinions on the liberal side of the issue exhibit greater moral conviction, suggesting that they might be easier to mobilize and more resistant to compromise. We also assess the extent to which morally convicted attitudes can be traced to specific values and aspects of socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the case of Oliver Lee in Hawaii, for his professional survival and rights of a free man under the protection of the First Amendment of the Constitution. Lee is a naturalized citizen of Chinese-German background and an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Hawaii. Lee was recommended for tenure in a split vote by his department but was questioned for being an advisor of the anti-war student group, Student Partisan Alliance. The decision of the Hearing Committee noted that the administration did not have reasonable cause to revoke the letter of intent.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Cities annex adjacent communities for a variety of economic and political reasons, including efforts to capture a larger tax base. Cities sometimes refuse to annex low-income minority neighborhoods or annex them less frequently than they do nearby high-income White neighborhoods, a process known as municipal underbounding. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required federal oversight over municipal annexation in 15 states and succeeded in preventing the underbounding of many African-American neighborhoods prior to its effective invalidation in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court. I examine the annexation practices of 276 cities across 37 states to answer 3 questions: Did the Supreme Court's action lead to declines in the annexation of African-American neighborhoods? Did such declines constitute municipal underbounding? Were they attributable to efforts by cities to bolster their tax base? I find that Section 5 cities annexed neighborhoods with approximately 3- to 5-percentage-point lower shares of African Americans after 2013, leading to the underbounding of these communities. I find no evidence that this was attributable to efforts by cities to annex only higher income neighborhoods. My analysis does not control for key neighborhood-level factors that may shape annexation decisions, such as property values, infrastructure conditions, and residents' preferences for being annexed. Takeaway for practice: Planners should be aware of and remain vigilant to the underbounding of African-American neighborhoods. I argue that planners can work to prevent underbounding by encouraging the adoption of and using state laws that require third-party oversight over annexation and by leveraging federal funding for infrastructure improvements in underserved unincorporated neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oscillating between more and fewer, women's problems are universal in nature and, are found in all societies since the genesis of human civilization. Women's struggles in diverse societiescould be mirrored across times, cultures, nationalities, religions and geographies etc. to contribute a global change to their position. Viewing the U.S. womens' movement from a Pakistani perspective, this trans-historical article reviews the evolution of the womens' rights movement in the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th Century, and the emergence of contemporary womens' rights movement in Pakistan.Though there are countries that conferred fundamental rights on their women prior to the U.S., the latter out shines them in terms of the length and intensity of womens' struggle whose match is hard to befound else where.In the upshot of a remarkable transformation, the post-bellum U.S. introduced a novel way of life that had challenges for everybody--particularly women. Going all the way through a desperate struggle for their social, personal, sexual, economic, and--above all--political rights, the new woman surfaced strong, determined, self-reliant and professional. This comparative overview stresses the gradual and incomplete nature of the American womens' rights movement and considers how emerging Pakistan womens' activists might, like the American women, draw upon elements of their own culture to argue for improved status and greater autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elections and their aftermath are matters left to the states by the U.S. Constitution. But the Supreme Court has made clear that the right to vote is federally protected, and fiercely so. When an election failure takes place and deprives citizens of their votes, challengers must resort to state law remedies. Many states have procedural requirements for election challenges that are stringent to the point of being prohibitive. This Note argues that the due process concerns raised by these burdensome state procedures are amplified by their voting rights context. Where a voter must take to the courts to vindicate her right to vote, she should not be further deprived by an unfair process. Federal courts hearing cases about unfair election-challenge procedures have been reluctant to interfere and are thus overly deferential to the states. This Note offers a new approach for "electoral due process" claims--an approach that is properly preservative of voters' substantive rights and their rights to a fair hearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the most recent iteration of Black freedom struggles in the United States, what is the story of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)? This special issue is interested both in the political life of the M4BL and in the stories of those who made this movement possible. We are interested in the critical moment of encounter, when because someone's life was taken, a community's life, an activist's life, or our collective lives changed. From representations of maternal, familial, or communal grief to the sexual and gender politics which prescribe and proscribe how individual Black lives come to matter or not matter, this issue interrogates the politics of Black life and Black living. These interrogations are especially salient in a political moment where liberal humanist conceptions of "the human" fail to compel broad empathy and structural protection for the value of Black people. We collectively ponder: what does "life" mean in the context of M4BL and what is the fundamental meaning of "lives" when centering those on the margins? How has technology shaped the way we tell the stories of individual and collective Black lives? What tools does the Movement for Black Lives offer up to us, not only for reconceptualizing the social structures which shape Black living, but also for reconceptualizing our current understandings of Black life in the first place? How do we center healing, restoration, and transformative justice in our freedom and justice praxes? What forms of mourning and becoming emerge as a result of communal and activist encounters with police violence? What does a life lived in solidarity with other social movements around the globe, for instance in Brazil and Palestine, look like? In asking these questions, both the co-editors and the contributors seek to understand the life contexts and livelihoods of Black people living at the beginning of the 21st century. Although contemporary realities are deeply rooted in historical lived experiences, we have entered a unique era in anti-Black racial terror. These living stories must be told. This special issue is but one collective documentation of a wide range of stories from multiple frequencies of contemporary Black life, death, community, healing, freedom-dreaming, and working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit's ruling in the 2017 case Igartúa v. Trump which deals with political rights and litigant Gregorio Igartúa's claim that Puerto Rican citizens have a right to vote in American presidential elections. The U.S. constitutional law case United States v. Carolene Products Co. is addressed, along with the court's denial of a rehearing of an en banc nonapportionment claim.

Given the finding that the marginalized are less politically engaged, we examine those who are arguably the most marginalized-the undocumented-and ask: what underwrites recent cases where the undocumented have been politically engaged in meaningful and substantive ways? Additionally, how does this compare with the existing literature on the practice of citizenship for those with formal rights? And what are the implications for our understanding of political participation in the contemporary USA? We seek to address these questions by examining cases where undocumented immigrants act like citizens even though they lack formal political rights. Our cases deviate from previous literature which argues that more marginalized people participate less and that those without formal rights engage in contentious politics in lieu of 'normal,' institutional politics. Our analysis of the DREAMers and of immigrant worker centers helps us rethink this traditional distinction between 'normal' and contentious politics. Moving beyond a focus on the specific actions that fall into each category, we instead emphasize how the context for these actions is crucial to understanding the foundations of political participation. In particular, we argue that the same 'normal' political actions taken by citizens versus noncitizens reveals different foundations underneath; for those without formal rights, what underwrites participation in 'normal' and contentious politics alike is what we call grassroots citizenship. We examine how the political participation of undocumented workers and DREAMers takes place within immigrant organizations and how it relies on three pillars: solidarity, critical analysis, and collective action. While previous literature has emphasized the urban and local nature of active, alternative citizenships, our cases operate at multiple scales, demonstrating how grassroot citizenship can be leveraged and 'scaled up' to state and national levels. Additionally, through an analysis of grassroots citizenship, we get some purchase on the question of why politicians sometimes listen to people who cannot vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her various roles as First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton has long maintained that the subjugation of women poses a national security threat to the United States. Clinton's proposition has come to be termed the "Hillary Doctrine." Yet does this principle receive support from the empirical record? In this paper, we offer a test of the Hillary Doctrine by analyzing if more anti-American terrorism emanates from countries that restrict women's rights than from countries that are not gender restrictive. Using a time series, cross-national analysis of 156 countries from the period 1981 to 2005, our negative binomial models offer strong support for the Hillary Doctrine and suggest that the promotion of women's rights may well enhance the national security of the United States with respect to terrorism. These results are robust to a wide range of changes to the empirical research design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]