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Abstract: Travel bans were a globally prevalent policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, travel bans against China and European countries proved a broadly popular mitigation tool among Americans. Why did Americans support COVID-19 travel bans? We fielded two novel survey experiments, surveying 3000 American citizens across five waves (between March 2020 and March 2021). In randomizing the country of origin of those potentially subject to travel ban measures, we find consistent evidence that racial attitudes drive support for travel bans. The strength of this relationship varies across political parties and across hypothetical target countries but is not explained by objective caseloads that change across countries and over the course of the pandemic.

Rural voters are often portrayed as a monolith of White and conservative, although 22% of the rural population are non-White. Rural minorities, specifically Black rural voters, intersect two potentially competing identities informing political partisanship. First, place: there is a growing geographic schism between rural and urban voters, with rural voters aligning more closely with the Republican party. Second, race: there is a political gap between White and Black voters, with Black voters aligning more closely with the Democratic party. Using data from the 2019 and 2020 ANES Studies I investigate the effects of these intersecting identities on political identification accounting for rural resentment. Rural resentment, or feelings of a loss of political power to urban areas, is found among both White and Black rural voters. For Black rural voters, a strong race identity can buffer the effects of rural resentment, keeping them from pushing toward the Republican party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White identity is forged through violence. The moment that whites aspired to be white, they set themselves up for immediate, inevitable failure: they try to inhabit an identity of superiority that cannot exist, and this sets them into a perpetual identity crisis, an existential emergency that threatens who they are and who they think they want to be. The ensuing identity formation—white by force—comprises an entire set of strategies, tactics, institutions, and structures meant to prop up an inherently failure-based identity and to do so through brutality, resentment, anger, contrived fear, and murder. Such an identity impacts everyone, including white people themselves, in devastating ways. In what following article, I will put forward a theoretical model called "White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception", conceptualizing key aspects of this model to provide an emerging vocabulary for studying, discussing, and dismantling white identity, violence, authoritarianism, racism, and the existential crises that we are all facing. Our discourse around race and racism, since the Civil Rights Era, needs new language from which to diagnose an inherently violent identity formation that ultimately benefits no one, especially not people of color or white people from lower socioeconomic strata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in nonpartisan news is essential to civil society—but is declining in the United States. However, language that demonstrates active engagement with opposing views may build trust. One way to demonstrate such active engagement is conversational receptiveness: the use of linguistic features such as agreement, acknowledgment, subjectivity, and positive emotion, among others. A review of prior work on conversational receptiveness suggests its usefulness in interpersonal conflict. This toolkit might effectively apply also to the challenge of restoring trust in nonpartisan media. A demonstration study illustrates proof of concept: In 600 opinion articles from prominent news sources, more receptive language was associated with reader trust. Pending programmatic research will address limitations, feasibility constraints, open questions, and future empirical directions—including causal tests in applied settings. At a minimum, extrapolating conversational receptivity from its role in interpersonal conflict suggests a role in building trust in nonpartisan media. Conversational receptiveness might present a cost-effective, scalable approach for media producers to bridge political divides and rebuild trust—without alienating existing audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions do politicians make overtly religious appeals in front of mixed secular-religious audiences? In the US context, other scholars have argued for the strategic usefulness of multivocal appeals: religious politicians can use coded language to win support from religious voters without losing support from secular ones. However, US politicians often use overtly religious language in their communications to mixed audiences, at the risk of losing support from secular voters. This pattern presents a puzzle that we address using a series of formal models and two large online survey experiments. We argue that when religious-secular cleavages are sensationalized, making religious voters see dangers in placating secular voters, religious voters are more likely to reward overtly religious messages, with no increased penalty for such messages from secular voters. Under these conditions, religious politicians become more likely to use overtly religious language in their political messaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberalism advances democratic rights and representation through three principles. First, it seeks to protect individuals from abusive state power. Second, it shares an affinity with the epistemology of the Enlightenment, where an objective world can be discovered and observed. Third, it limits "tyranny of the majority" through civil liberties that counter the weight of public opinion and political rights that enable political competition of ideas. Rapidly evolving demands for recognition in the United States have advanced a broad critique of liberalism, highlighting the boundaries it imposes on representation as well as its limited success protecting rights. This essay traces disenchantment with liberalism to two very different sources: first, many progressives who resent how the jurisprudence of equal opportunity obscures efforts to achieve actual equality reject "anonymity" under the law-removing a core civil rights principle for promoting fairness. Such demands for more explicit rights and representation conflict with the majoritarian model's application of liberalism, which biases cultural assimilation over multicultural integration. Movements for recognition increasingly challenge both assimilation and the institutional devices of multicultural integration. The other source of tension around recognition comes from the right, where populists have set out to revive nativist ideas of coerced assimilation or outright homogenization through exclusion (ie, nonrecognition). Such failures of representation have promoted subjectivist views as a credential for contesting facts. The paper argues for "pluralist solidarity" as a tool for reconciling multiculturalism with new rights and demands for recognition emanating from liberalism's traditions of individual liberty. This device aims to help separate the quest for recognition and dignity from the subjectivity that contributes to post-truth politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When can we expect multiple racial groups to find common ground in the face of potentially unequal distributive urban policies? While we understand a great deal about the role of elites in inter-ethnic coalition building, we know less about the conditions under which cooperative behavior among their co-ethnic voters is more likely. Research has found that multiracial coalitions are critical to the political incorporation of racial/ethnic minority group interests at the local level but conflict between minority groups persists due to both real and perceived competition for resources. In this paper, we argue that elite co-ethnic endorsements can increase co-ethnic voters' support for urban distributive policies that disproportionately benefit outgroups over one's own ingroup. We test our theory using a survey experiment from a representative sample of more than 1800 Los Angeles County voters. We find that respondents are less likely to support policy proposals that exclusively target benefits toward ethnic outgroups compared to when their ethnic ingroup exclusively benefits from an identical proposal. But we also find that the presence of co-ethnic endorsements can increase support for proposals that benefit an ethnic outgroup. We find this effect among Black, Latino, and Asian Americans in our sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do members of the evangelical religious tradition choose to identify themselves, and how do they define terms such as "evangelical" or "born-again?" Extant scholarship traditionally utilizes quantitative data in order to isolate the pitfalls associated with this conflation. In order to validate these quantitative measures and to better understand how adherents of the evangelical religious tradition conceptualize these identities, I leverage 63 face-to-face interviews conducted with white evangelicals. I find that "evangelical" is not commonly used among adherents, who view the term as esoteric and ill-defined. Democrats specifically recoil against the term due to its perceived conservative nature; however, some Republicans also eschew identifying as such, viewing it in some cases as too liberal or contaminated by the media. I also find that the term "born-again" is much more commonly used, regardless of the respondent's partisanship. This work reveals the continuing politicization of "evangelical" and the endogeneity of religious orientations to politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does money in politics affect democratic performance? I study the effect of the Supreme Court's 2010 landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down existing state bans on independent campaign expenditures, on democracy in the U.S. states. Results from a difference‐in‐differences design indicate that the Citizens United ruling had a substantial negative effect on state democratic performance and that this effect is largely independent of the effect of Republican party control identified by previous research. The results suggest that unlimited political spending may pose a threat to the health of democracy in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the spring of 2020, literary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were quick to appear. Poetry, essays and diaries proliferated, and collective initiatives sprang up, with authors delving into a crisis that was national as well as global; political as well as health-based. In their lockdown works, US-based authors tackled their experience in the context of the country, chronicling the virus alongside inequality, racism and environmental challenges. Sheltering in place on either side of the Continental Divide, Pam Houston and Amy Irvine maintained an intense correspondence that was later published as Air Mail. Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place, which this article approaches as representative of ecofeminist COVID literature. It tracks their epistolary journey from the self to the social and back, discussing their narrative of the pandemic within the framework of their shared stance. Their letters are read as heirs to second-wave feminism and analysed as one instance of the current permeation of ecofeminist theories, specifically the material perspective. Through the study of Houston and Irvine's correspondence, this article aims to illuminate the cultural work done by American ecofeminist writers during an extraordinary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American women remain vastly under-represented in positions of political power, and researchers have argued that this representational deficit is partially due to a political candidacy gap. In this article, we investigate the importance of gender identity at a formative moment in the development of political ambition. More specifically, we contacted thousands of local party leaders, donors, and activists to solicit advice for one of two student clubs: one women's group and one gender-nonspecific group. Our experiment suggests that overt gender identity can lead to greater guidance opportunities – particularly from Republican women. Moreover, while the advice offered to the women's club was far more likely to be gendered, the advice given to this group did not include a greater emphasis on the challenges associated with a political career. These findings suggest that organizational gender identity can meaningfully affect political mentorship experiences and, ultimately, the candidate pipeline.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since first airing on HBO in 2011, Game of Thrones (GOT) has proven to be a fruitful text for teaching and studying politics. In 2022 the prequal to GOT—House of The Dragon (HOTD) debuted on HBO. This paper conducts discourse analysis on the entire first season with two goals in mind. First, we demonstrate how pop culture is impacted by real world politics by examining the change in gender and racial representation in HOTD compared to GOT and argue that this change was a product of cultural backlash that GOT received and a result of changing political attitudes over the time of both shows airing. Second, we use the show's content as text to teach American and Comparative politics concepts. In the appendix we provide three examples of low, mid, and high-stake assignments that use show content in teaching political science courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to the perceived legitimacy of appellate courts when they allow cameras into their courtrooms? We implemented two experiments that exposed people to real video clips from two courts. In the first experiment we varied the modality (video or audio), contentiousness (neutral or contentious), and camera angle (static or dynamic) of exchanges between an attorney and judge and then measured people's views toward judicial legitimacy. We found that static angles do not appear to influence legitimacy but using dynamic angles might have a limited effect. Watching a neutral exchange might increase judicial legitimacy—compared to listening to that exchange—but watching a contentious exchange might decrease it. In a second experiment we examined whether the presence of judicial symbols interacts with these effects. Evidence here is suggestive that these symbols could mitigate the negative effect of exposure to contentious content. Our results, though initial and limited in a number of ways, underscore both the complicated nature of cameras in the courtroom as well as the strong need for additional studies on a topic of great importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American political rhetoric has become increasingly zealous in its use of right-wing, Christofascist and apocalyptic imagery. While its contemporary moment is deeply connected to the current Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, it has a much longer history in American popular culture. This article specifically links this contemporary movement to the Fallout franchise, a popular post-apocalyptic video game series to illuminate cultural patterns of America's apocalyptic political rhetoric. The video game series begins as a trope-laden post-apocalyptic western of survival by the gun. Later and more recent iterations have emphasized settler-colonialist nation building, and other forms of troubling American exceptionalism in a post-nuclear world. The explicit connections between these militaristic and political conceits is so ubiquitous in American media that it has become a cultural point of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tsinghua Journal of Education is the property of Tsinghua University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Previous research finds that grant spending can improve the standing of politicians and institutions with some in the public. It is unclear whether this effect holds for federal agencies as well, which are largely responsible for allocating these funds. We develop a theory that links agency grant spending to the likelihood of an individual supporting the awarding federal agency, with the expectation that this relationship is conditioned by the citizen's partisan identification. Using a survey experiment, we find that an increase in federal grant spending, from agencies that they politically oppose, is associated with Republicans offering a more negative evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At Easter time in 2022, Craig Romney took his family to Washington, D.C. to see the sights. Craig's father, Mitt Romney, the junior senator from Utah, joined them for a trip to the White House that Mitt had arranged. Joe and Jill Biden appeared mid-tour to show the guests around, patiently bringing them to the swimming pool and the bowling alley and letting everyone pose for pictures at the Steinway grand piano. As they departed, the youngest Romney grandchild offered his thoughts on the president: "I thought he would be less old." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Claire Jean Kim's book, "Bitter Fruit," which examines the racial tensions between black and Korean Americans in New York City during the 1990s. The book introduces the concept of "racial triangulation" to analyze the relationships between these two groups and emphasizes the importance of local and national political processes in shaping racial populations. However, the article points out some limitations of the book, such as its under-examination of violence in constructing black identities and its lack of focus on political economy. Overall, "Bitter Fruit" provides a valuable analysis of black-Korean conflict and challenges prevailing intellectual forces within political science. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the nationalist rhetoric of Biden and Trump in the 2020 presidential election, focusing on how the candidates represented, and contested, the meaning of American national identity. To do so, we construct a novel analytical framework to undertake a contextual content analysis of Biden and Trump's campaign tweets (n = 4,321). We demonstrate that the meaning of national identity was a key source of contestation in the election, and that the parameters of this contestation closely tracked a longstanding cleavage in American political culture between civic and ethnic nationalist traditions. Biden largely drew upon the civic nationalist tradition to defend a conception of American national identity that is grounded in liberal myths and symbols. By contrast, Trump largely drew upon the ethnic nationalist tradition to defend a conception of American national identity that is grounded in white American myths and symbols. Critically, both candidates used these opposing nationalist traditions to frame each other as a grave threat to the nation's "true" identity and, ultimately, as un-American. This "nationalist polarization" of presidential politics is a troubling development for the future of American democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of the 1619 Project in 2019 by the New York Times Magazine has proved to be a discursive pivot for historiographic debate over the place of liberty, justice and servitude in the social history of the USA. Discussion around this event has been focused and intense, but little has been done to situate the Project in either a wider field of historical sociology or a longer trajectory in the discourses of social and political history. By tracing a certain genealogy in this historiography back through the recent New History of Capitalism to a broader Atlantic and even global set of concerns in late-twentieth century social and cultural history, the article focuses on something I have named the Hall-Colley debate. Back in the early 2000s, this debate struck at the very heart of how liberty, captivity, servitude and domination are conceptualized and experienced historically, and it indicates an early formation of something much more developed by the time of the 1619 Project. While delving into the historiographic particulars of this debate around empire, freedom and capitalism, the purpose of this analysis is to identify how something one might call the 'hierarchy of unfreedoms' has gradually insinuated its way into the discourses of historical sociology up to and including the 1619 Project. The implication of this development has been a growing censoriousness in how we do social history, an increasingly maladroit handling of historical revision and reassessment, and a strengthening tendency towards closure in how we explore socially heterogenous experiences of unfreedom in unanticipated places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do executive agencies form coalitions? Legislative coalitions are widely theorized and studied, but less attention has been paid to executive coalitions. Executive agencies’ dependence on the political branches calls for a distinctive theory of coalition building. This article presents such a theory, arguing that agencies form coalitions to optimize their autonomy given their subordinate position in a separation of powers system by signaling to overseers that their policies are efficient and should be maintained. Bureaucrats form coalitions actively to advance their policy goals in the face of political opposition. Using data on dozens of agencies over seventeen years, I find that agencies are most likely to form coalitions when their preferences are misaligned with the president but aligned with each other. I also find evidence that coalitions send credible signals that bureaucratic policies are efficient since Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is less likely to request regulatory revisions of policies produced by coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White identity is forged through violence. The moment that whites aspired to be white, they set themselves up for immediate, inevitable failure: they try to inhabit an identity of superiority that cannot exist, and this sets them into a perpetual identity crisis, an existential emergency that threatens who they are and who they think they want to be. The ensuing identity formation—white by force—comprises an entire set of strategies, tactics, institutions, and structures meant to prop up an inherently failure-based identity and to do so through brutality, resentment, anger, contrived fear, and murder. Such an identity impacts everyone, including white people themselves, in devastating ways. In what following article, I will put forward a theoretical model called “White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception”, conceptualizing key aspects of this model to provide an emerging vocabulary for studying, discussing, and dismantling white identity, violence, authoritarianism, racism, and the existential crises that we are all facing. Our discourse around race and racism, since the Civil Rights Era, needs new language from which to diagnose an inherently violent identity formation that ultimately benefits no one, especially not people of color or white people from lower socioeconomic strata.

How can we measure the resource mobilization (RM) efforts of social movements on Twitter? In this article, we create the first ever measure of social movements' RM efforts on a social media platform. To this aim, we create a four-conditional lexicon that can parse through tweets and identify those concerned with RM. We also create a simple RM score that can be plotted in a time series format to track the RM efforts of social movements in real time. We use our tools with millions of tweets from the United States streamed between November 28, 2018, and February 11, 2019, to demonstrate how our measure can help us estimate the saliency and persistency of social movements' RM efforts. We find that our measure captures RM by successfully cross checking the variation of this score against protest events in the United States during the same time frame. Finally, we illustrate the descriptive and qualitative utility of our tools for understanding social movements by running conventional topic modeling algorithms on the tweets that were used to compute the RM score and point at specific avenues for theory building and testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous scholarship has linked increased representation of women, racial/ethnic minorities, the LGB community, and the working class to more representative legislative agendas and roll call voting. But it is unclear if descriptive representation of historically excluded groups also affects policy innovativeness. Borrowing from interdisciplinary research, we argue that diverse legislatures are more innovative, so long as legislators operate in a quality deliberative environment. We measure the descriptive representation of seven different underrepresented groups in state legislatures from 1984 to 2016. We find that representation of women is a key predictor of innovation, operationalized as the tendency for states to adopt new policies early. We also find the effect of women is not dependent on critical mass, is undermined by high levels of polarization, and helps boost the capacity of legislatures to produce unique policy language. Some models are suggestive of a relationship between racial/ethnic minority (Black, Latinx, Native American) representation and innovation, but the results are inconsistent. The study provides insights into how representation of women can enhance legislative capacity to innovate in public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A partisan divide over LGBT rights has emerged in the U.S. Yet unlike other issues on which the parties have traded places or polarized, most of the change on gay rights has occurred within one party, the Democrats. How did this unusual change occur? LGBT rights was originally a fringe cause, rejected by most politicians in both parties. As gay rights activists slowly became more prominent in the Democratic Party, many politicians adapted, abandoning earlier positions informed by their personal backgrounds and state or district constituencies. Meanwhile, incorporating the religious right led most Republicans to maintain the anti-LGBT rights stand that was once common to both parties, even as public opinion shifted. The result was a partisan divide in this issue area that had consequences for policy. The role of adaptation by incumbents in producing it—contrary to some prominent models—is evident in both Congressional co-sponsorship and roll-call data. The growing party divide is also evident in platforms. These findings contribute to a broader understanding of how party position change occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gender pay gap serves as a barometer of gender inequality. Researchers across a variety of disciplines have researched the economic, political, and social factors contributing to the gender pay gap. Yet, much of the existing research focuses more on national trends and less on the variation among states. In this study, we investigate the political factors associated with state variation in the gender pay gap using 2010–2019 panel data provided by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Using a linear model with fixed effects for state and year, as well as a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition model, we test the relationship between the state-level gender pay gap, equal pay protections, and descriptive representation. Our findings suggest that stronger equal pay protections and more women elected to state political office are associated with smaller gender pay gaps in the American states. Electing more women alone, however, is unlikely to mitigate the gap. Implications for future policies and scholarly research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Law & Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Societe (Cambridge University Press) is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The goal of horizontal redistribution is to provide economic resources to groups that have experienced discrimination and exploitation. In the United States, horizontal redistribution based on race remains controversial, particularly among white Americans. Not surprisingly, many white Americans oppose racial redistribution policies in some cases because of resentments they have toward racial outgroups. But this is not the only way that racial attitudes shape policy support. Chudy (2021) demonstrates that racial sympathy, or white distress over the misfortune of racial outgroups, can increase support for racially redistributive policies. However, supporting horizontal redistribution may be easier for individuals who are more economically secure, even when they are racially sympathetic. In this study, we explore whether the influence of racial sympathy is conditional on economic position. We expect that the influence of racial sympathy will be strongest among individuals who have higher incomes, as they are less concerned with competition over resources. Using the 2013 CCES, we use a newly developed measure of racial sympathy (Chudy, 2021) to study white Americans’ support for policies designed to provide resources to black Americans. Consistent with expectations, we find that whites with higher levels of racial sympathy have higher levels of support for such policies, but that this pattern is stronger among whites who are more affluent. For white Americans of lesser means, the relationship between racial sympathy and support for racial redistribution is weaker, likely because of concerns for their own relative economic status.

American political parties continue to grow more polarized, but the extent of ideological polarization among the public is much less than the extent of perceived polarization (what the ideological gap is believed to be). Perceived polarization is concerning because of its link to interparty hostility, but it remains unclear what drives this phenomenon. We propose that a tendency for individuals to form broad generalizations about groups on the basis of inconsistent evidence may be partly responsible. We study this tendency by measuring the interpretation, endorsement, and recall of category-referring statements, also known as generics (e.g., "Democrats favor affirmative action"). In study 1 (n = 417), perceived polarization was substantially greater than actual polarization. Further, participants endorsed generics as long as they were true more often of the target party (e.g., Democrats favor affirmative action) than of the opposing party (e.g., Republicans favor affirmative action), even when they believed such statements to be true for well below 50% of the relevant party. Study 2 (n = 928) found that upon receiving information from political elites, people tended to recall these statements as generic, regardless of whether the original statement was generic or not. Study 3 (n = 422) found that generic statements regarding new political information led to polarized judgments and did so more than nongeneric statements. Altogether, the data indicate a tendency toward holding mental representations of political claims that exaggerate party differences. These findings suggest that the use of generic language, common in everyday speech, enables inferential errors that exacerbate perceived polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual campaign donors offer reliable support for extremists in US politics. Can such support waiver during economic crises, which often bolster extremists' popular appeals? Linking nationwide campaign finance and real estate transactions, I examine how the foreclosure crisis affected Republican donors' willingness to donate to Tea Party candidates, an insurgent right-wing faction of the Republican Party that opposed foreclosure relief. Individual-level longitudinal analyses demonstrate that Republican donors in distressed neighborhoods became less likely to contribute to Tea Party candidates but continued to give to other, more mainstream, Republican candidates. The Tea Party movement's unsympathetic portrayal of underwater home owners likely alienated Republican donors who witnessed neighbors of the same race as themselves suffering the plight of foreclosures. Despite the resulting fund-raising losses, Tea Party candidates performed better in primary elections in crisis-stricken districts. These findings challenge long-standing claims about how the US campaign finance system fuels polarization and extremism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American identity politics in art and the university arise in the wake of the social movements of the 1960s and focus on solidarity for marginalized groups, along with the critique of the representations which have served to marginalize them. This article bookends the rise of American cultural politics with Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and Linda Nochlin's academic feminism in art history, then turns to the right-wing reaction of offense at iconoclasm towards cultural heritage in the 1980s and 1990s. It ends with the constricted nature of cultural politics in America today, both on the right and the left, arguing that on both sides a distorted idea of the right to offense is at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 11, 2021, US President Joe Badin announced that he would bring together the leaders of a variety of democracies in the world for a virtual Summit on Democracy, to be followed by a second face-to-face summit about a year later. The summit will include commitments and initiatives centered around three main axes: resisting tyranny, combating corruption, and promoting respect for human rights. After a year of consultations, coordination and action, the leaders meet again, to present progress against their commitments. The two summits will bring together heads of state, civil society, the charitable sector and the private sector. In light of the above, this paper seeks to read the American move from the perspective of (international relations theories). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's office seeking has been the subject of considerable research, but how likely a female candidate is to seek one office over another has not. Using a unique data set of office seeking in California local governments between 1996 and 2019, we address the likelihood that women will seek certain types of offices over others; and whether and how female office seeking is affected by the context of local elections. In general, we find that women are most likely to seek citywide administrative offices, followed by school board seats. Local office-seeking by women, however, also varies by jurisdiction size, political context, and over time, particularly for county-level offices. Our focus on offices as a key part of female candidate entry sheds important new light on candidate behavior and the prospects for greater descriptive representation in local government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Democratic and Republican parties have polarized since the 1960s. Does the American public believe that the parties have grown "too extreme?" I leverage data from 18 national surveys to explain perceptions of party extremity as well as text-analysis of open-ended survey responses from an additional national survey to examine what the public associates with the concept of extremity. Three key results emerged. First, a growing proportion of Americans believe that both parties are too extreme, but this belief remains in the decided minority. Second, ideology and partisanship interact to shape beliefs about extremity. Moderates are more likely to believe that both parties are too extreme, but this is conditional on the presence of partisan motivations to say that only one party is too extreme. Finally, the public has a multifaceted conceptualization of extremity that is frequently tied to perceived procedural failures with only the highly knowledgeable reliably connecting perceived extremity to programmatic considerations. These results suggest that elite partisans have little reason to moderate their views given that most Americans do not perceive them to be too extreme, partisan considerations gain them ideological leeway, and many fail to connect extremity with the parties' ideological reputations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisans in the American electorate are affectively polarized, which coincides with the tendency for partisan geographic sorting. Could mate selection pressures contribute to this geographic tendency, and how might they interact with out-party affect? I propose a model in which an individual's perception of their mate success in a niche is key. I argue that perceived mate success is a function of a niche's partisanship and one's out-party affect, which in turn, incentivizes sorting. The model is partially tested with conjoint experiments on multiple U.S. samples. Results show that partisans perceive a lower probability of mate success in niches with greater shares of out-partisans and that mate success interacts with negative out-party affect. I also replicate findings on political mate choice preferences with a more appropriate method. Lastly, this project links instrumentality and affect, which is a departure from past work. In doing so, it contributes to research on the consequences of mate pressures for political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how a key stratum of the partisan elite—party activists—have been positioned across time and policy issues. We examine the extent to which activists have polarized symmetrically or asymmetrically and find that only on the issue of abortion has one party’s activists (Republicans) polarized notably more than the other’s. The article also analyzes party activist proximity to the mass public’s policy preferences and finds that Democrats are consistently closer to the public on economic issues, and Republicans are consistently closer on a subset of non-economic issues. Our findings suggest the need for more nuanced theories of party activism and polarization along with providing a useful lens through which to view party electoral competition.