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Do politicians who work alongside an ethnically diverse group of political elites improve their views toward ethnic outgroups? Political elites serve critical roles as elected representatives and public figures, but we do not know whether the act of political elites working together in an ethnically diverse environment impacts how they view ethnic outgroups. I argue that political elites work in a competitive environment wherein increased ethnic diversity can promote ethnic animosity and worsen outgroup views. However, elites share interests in maximizing resource distribution, which can lead to positive interethnic contact, improving outgroup views. I test these arguments by collecting original data from municipal government committee members in India. I show that elite outgroup views shift only to a limited extent in response to either increased committee diversity or engaging in interethnic contact. While interethnic contact shows the most promise for improving outgroup views, neither diversity nor contact alone seem to be solutions to intra-elite ethnic animosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If a statute substantially changes the way patents work in an industry where patents are central, but says almost nothing about patents, is it patent reform? We argue the answer is yes -- and it's not a hypothetical question. The Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA") does not address patents, but its drug pricing provisions are likely to prompt major changes in how patents work in the pharmaceutical industry. For many years scholars have decried industry's ever-evolving strategies that use combinations of patents to block competition for as long as possible, widely known as "evergreening," but legislators have not been receptive to calls for reform. The IRA may just succeed in changing that pattern, at least to some extent, by imposing drug pricing reforms that alter the incentives for evergreening in the first place. In this Article, we lay out the case that the IRA contains implicit reforms to the pharmaceutical patent system. Its details are not straightforward, nor is its implementation, but its effects could nevertheless be major. Drug patent reform, a longtime priority for activists and scholars, may in fact have already happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a judge's identity affect perceptions of their ability to preside fairly? We theorize that identity categories operate as ideological cues and that the public views judges perceived as ideologically proximate to be fairer, more impartial, and more inspiring of trust in courts broadly. Using a conjoint survey experiment with a diverse national sample, we find support for this theory and show that race, gender, and especially sexuality are used as ideological cues. The effect of identities is conditioned by respondent partisanship. Democratic respondents trust judges with marginalized identities more than judges with dominant identities. Republicans are relatively indifferent to judges' race or gender but are significantly less trusting of gay judges. We also uncover limited effects when judges preside over a case in which their identity is salient. These results suggest that the public does not seek descriptive representation as such but uses identity categories to achieve ideological congruence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors comment on the article "Epistemic rights and responsibilities of digital simulacra for biomedicine" by M. Cho and N. Martinez-Martin. Topics discussed include the ethical challenges that Cho and Martinez-Martin outline that need to be addressed, phases of the exclusion cycle theory developed in the context of social exclusion, and legal and ethical aspects of avoiding exclusion cycles.

Effective message framing motivates individuals to act for and defend human rights. What effective message framing motivates individuals to defend human rights? Recent experiment-based framing studies show that personal frames are more successful than informational or motivational frames in increasing the advocacy activities of human rights organizations. This study tested the justice frame using the Philippine case of extrajudicial executions. Employing internet-based survey experiments, we tested the effects of the justice frame on consensus and action mobilizations as well as the three frames mentioned above. Our results showed that combining justice and the personal frame is more effective. We also examined emotions inflicted by framing. Our results reveal an association between empathy and anger as a reaction that connects exposure to personal frame and mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does transitional justice affect trust in government? Political trust is central to peaceful conflict resolution, but less is known about the ability of different transitional justice efforts to build confidence in government after war. Using survey-experimental evidence from post-conflict Guatemala, I compare how three commonly deployed justice policies (trials, truth commissions, and reparations) and political rhetoric accompanying them affect citizen attitudes toward government. Exposure to information about a trial or reparations program, which convey costly signals, led to significantly higher levels of political trust and perceived political legitimacy, when compared to the truth commission treatment. Further, a moral rhetoric emphasizing the normative claims of war victims was significantly more effective than either an instrumental rhetoric emphasizing institutional benefits or the absence of justification, regardless of policy content. The micro-level evidence reveals how the trust-building functions of transitional justice are far from uniform, speaking to the pivotal role of political communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of reviewers for the "American Political Science Review" is presented, including Maria Abascal, Daniel Aldrich and David Barrett.

Social exclusion is complex, intractable, and devastating. It occurs where individuals or groups cannot fully participate in the typical activities of the societies in which they live, whether they are excluded economically, politically, or live in segregation. In this review, I highlight recent work in the area of social exclusion and ethnicity, focusing on Europe and Eurasia. Scholarship reveals ethnic hierarchies of exclusion in hiring and housing markets, educational approaches that cloak assimilationist practice in the language of inclusion, a plethora of strategies that minorities use to navigate exclusion, and more. While new research brings innovation and insight, it nevertheless remains fragmented along several dimensions. As scholars work to move the field forward, bridging substantive areas of exclusion, studying the complex dynamic of interactions between majorities and minorities, and collaborating across methodological divides would be particularly valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divergent public responses to police brutality incidents demonstrate that for some, police violence is an injustice that demands remediation, while for others state violence is justice served. We develop a novel survey experiment in which we randomize the race and gender of a victim of police violence, and then provide respondents with an opportunity to establish justice via compensation. We uncover small but consistent effects that financial restitution is most supported for a White female detainee and least supported for a Black female detainee, and this is largely driven by White respondents. Beyond the treatment effects, we show that Black respondents are much more likely to perceive detainees as deserving of restitution; across all treatments, Black respondents are 58 percent more likely than Whites to support a financial settlement. We further show that White respondents' perceptions of deservingness are highly related to their perceptions of who is at fault for the beating—the detainee or the police—and whether the detainee was involved in crime. Black respondents remain likely to award a settlement even if they think the detainee was at fault and involved in crime. Our results provide further evidence that perceptions of who deserves restorative justice for state violence are entangled with race in targeted ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on three conceptual lenses through which a better understanding of the politics of religion in contemporary China is expected to obtain. On the basis of a genealogical and discursive analysis of 'religious freedom' as a paradoxical concept and institution, and by identifying the 'post-colonial' condition of contemporary China, this article argues for a non-dichotomous understanding of the Chinese and Western political approaches to religion and religious freedom and attempts to further locate the real logic of the Chinese politics of religion in the Chinese Communist Party's agenda for the 'Chinese state building'. Four interrelated factors, i.e. China's economic development, the Chinese nationalism, the authority of the Chinese Communist Party, and international relations and global competition, that are especially important for the Party and governments at all levels in their setting and implementing of policies on religion are considered, in order to provide an explication of the dynamic, multiple forms of negotiation between modern secular politics and its 'heterodoxies' that define the politics of religion in mainland China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past 25 years, education funding in Oklahoma has stagnated. In some schools, students learn about American politics from tattered textbooks in which George W. Bush is listed as the current president (Hendry and Pasquantonio 2018). Across the board, teachers are grossly underpaid, yet many are compelled to buy school supplies with their own funds (Felder 2018a). Moreover, in one out of five schools, students come to class only four days a week (Carlson 2018). After the state legislature failed to pass a funding package to sufficiently increase spending on schools and salaries in early 2018, teachers across Oklahoma walked out on their jobs to protest at the Capitol for nine days. In addition to sharing their grievances, the hundreds of protesting educators had something else in common: many were women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This experiment sent state legislators an email from an individual seeking advice on running for office, varying the gender and party of the sender. This project explores two inquiries—who the legislators choose to respond to and how the legislators' own gender and partisan identities shape that decision. I theorize that women in politics is a salient issue for legislators; therefore, they will be more willing to advise politically ambitious women. Overall, I find that legislators are more willing to offer help when the aspirant is a woman and of the same party. When primed to further consider women in politics, legislators are more likely to offer gender-specific advice. Democrats rather than women legislators drive this heightened responsiveness to the woman aspirant. These findings highlight what role public officials can play in closing the candidate gender gap, and how legislators' multiple identities intersect and frame their decisions to aid political aspirants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the use of an experimental approach in the study of African politics. It discusses criticisms and suggests ways on how to overcome the challenge to the experimental method's use in studying politics by working with local communities during the research process. Possible challenges while working with local implementers include concerns about internal validity and relevance of the project to local populations.

The compatibility of Islam with the international human rights norms has been a continuous topic of debate. Diversity in Islam inevitably leaves all arguments inconclusive. This article compares the text of the Qur'an, which is the highest authority in Islam, with the International Bill of Rights (IBR) by focusing on economic rights and justice. The Qur'an and the IBR seek an egalitarian economic system that sets restrictions on the use of property. This article draws attention to the Qur'anic verses' emancipatory promise, which is also embedded in the IBR, but is often undermined by the privileged of both Muslim-majority and in other states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2017–18, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) changed its domestic security strategy in Xinjiang, escalating the use of mass detention, ideological re-education, and pressure on Uyghur diaspora networks. Commonly proposed explanations for this shift focus on domestic factors: ethnic unrest, minority policy, and regional leadership. The CCP's strategy changes in Xinjiang, however, were also likely catalyzed by changing perceptions of the threat posed by Uyghur contact with transnational Islamic militant groups in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and a corresponding increase in perceived domestic vulnerability. This threat shifted from theoretical risk to operational reality in 2014–16, and occurred alongside a revised assessment that China's Muslim population was more vulnerable to infiltration by jihadist networks than previously believed. Belief in the need to preventively inoculate an entire population from "infection" by these networks explains the timing of the change in repressive strategy, shift toward collective detention, heavy use of re-education, and attention paid to the Uyghur diaspora. It therefore helps explain specific aspects of the timing and nature of the CCP's strategy changes in Xinjiang. These findings have implications for the study of the connections between counterterrorism and domestic repression, as well as for authoritarian preventive repression and Chinese security policy at home and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses issues on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, particularly contextual bias. Other topics include the transnational disconnect between low-resource deployment environments and high-resource training environments, the transfer learning methods, and the dynamics of cross-context translation in the use of AI in the medical fields.

Recent studies provide conflicting accounts of whether indirect contact with the American carceral state mobilizes. We revisit this controversy, using a large national survey of Black Americans that includes a novel measure of social connections to people with felony convictions to examine spillover dynamics. We find that while ties to the carceral state are widespread, the impact of these connections on participation is moderated by the severity of state-level felony disenfranchisement laws. In states with the most severe disenfranchisement policies, close ties to people with felony convictions increase both voting and nonvoting participation, but there is no effect in states with more moderate laws. The findings suggest that surrogate participation may be at work, whereby formally removing the rights of one group in a way that seems extreme or unjust mobilizes those close to them, and highlight the importance of policy context on political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On November 8, 2016 Donald Trump, a man with no office-holding experience, won the Electoral College, defeating the first woman to receive the presidential nomination from a major party. This paper offers the first observational test of how sexism affects presidential vote choice in the general election, adding to the rich literature on gender and candidate success for lower-level offices. We argue that the 2016 election implicated gender through Hillary Clinton's candidacy and Donald Trump's sexist rhetoric, and activated gender attitudes such that sexism is associated with vote choice. Using an Election Day exit poll survey of over 1300 voters conducted at 12 precincts in a mid-size city and a national survey of over 10,000 White and Black Americans, we find that a politically defined measure of sexism—the belief that men are better suited emotionally for politics than women—predicts support for Trump both in terms of vote choice and favorability. We find the effect is strongest and most consistent among White voters. However, a domestically defined measure of sexism—whether men should be in control of their wives—offers little explanatory power over the vote. In total, our results demonstrate the importance of gender in the 2016 election, beyond mere demographic differences in vote choice: beliefs about gender and fitness for office shape both White men and women's preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can a sitting president be subpoenaed, indicted, or prosecuted for criminal activity? This article concludes that a president can be. Strong arguments for presidential immunity emphasize the unique position of a president in the constitutional order. Only Congress, advocates of immunity claim, can discipline presidential lawbreaking. However, arguments for presidential immunity depend upon contestable assumptions regarding the respective institutional authority of Congress and the judiciary. If institutional authority is viewed differently—and this article offers good reason to do so—then the contours of presidential immunity should be narrowly drawn so as to invite judicial intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why, when, and how does populism emerge in a stable democracy? This article investigates the political logic and ideological appeal of a rarely explored form of populism: technocratic populism. Technocratic populism uses the appeal of technical expertise to connect directly with the people, promising to run the state as a firm, while at the same time delegitimizing political opponents and demobilizing the electorate by instilling civic apathy. Technocratic populism is an anti-elite ideology that exploits competence to create the appearance of authenticity and proximity to ordinary people. It is less exclusionary than nativist or economic forms of populisms and its broad appeal is therefore arguably more threatening to representative democracy. In order to understand the appeal of technocratic populism, as well as why it arises at critical junctures when dominant ideologies are in turmoil, we argue that one must not ignore its historical roots, which shows that it transcends both regime changes and the traditional left–right divide. The article develops and examines these points using evidence from communist-era populist campaigns against "elitist" dissidents (from Charter 77) in the Czech Republic, and demonstrates how post-1989 politicians have exploited and also adapted ideas and strategies from the authoritarian past for the new democratic setting. The article highlights the adaptive character of technocratic populism across political regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists the reviewers including Max Abrahms, Alan Abramowitz and Scott Abramson.

Innovation is a primary source of economic growth and is accordingly the target of substantial academic and government attention. Grants are a key tool in the government's arsenal to promote innovation, but legal academic studies of that arsenal have given them short shrift. Although patents, prizes, and regulator-enforced exclusivity are each the subject of substantial literature, grants are typically addressed briefly, if at all. According to the conventional story, grants may be the only feasible tool to drive basic research, as opposed to applied research, but they are a blunt tool for that task. Three critiques of grants underlie this narrative: grants are allocated by government bureaucrats who lack much of the relevant information for optimal decision-making; grants are purely ex ante funding mechanisms and therefore lack accountability; and grants misallocate risk by saddling the government all the downside risk and giving the innovator all the upside. These critiques are largely wrong. Focusing on grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical research, this Article delves deeply into how grants actually work. It shows that--at least at the NIH--grants are awarded not by uninformed bureaucrats, but by panels of knowledgeable peer scientists with the benefit of extensive disclosures from applicants. It finds that grants provide accountability through repeated interactions over time. And it argues that the upside of grant-investments to the government is much greater than the lack of direct profits would suggest. Grants also have two marked comparative strengths as innovation levers: they can support innovation where social value exceeds appropriable market value, and they can directly support innovation enablers--the people, institutions, processes, and infrastructure that shape and generate innovation. Where markets undervalue some socially important innovations, like cures for diseases of the poor, grants can help. Grants can also enable innovation by supporting its inputs: young or exceptional scientists, new institutions, research networks, and large datasets. Taken as a whole, grants do not form a monolithic, blunt innovation lever; instead, they provide a varied and nuanced set of policy options. Innovation scholars and policymakers should recognize and develop the usefulness of grants in promoting major social goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do Americans support the government’s use of torture? We argue that perceptions of threat undermine the extent to which American public opinion serves as a bulwark against government torture. Although surveys demonstrate that a slim majority of the American public generally opposes torture, using a nationally-representative survey experiment, we show that Americans are considerably more supportive of government abuse when it is directed at individuals who they perceive as threatening: specifically, when a detainee has an Arabic name and when the alleged crime is terrorism. Given the malleability of public opinion as a potential constraint on abuse, our results underscore the importance of institutional protections of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how engagement of community in research is helpful for the science by identifying incorrect interpretations, study design, and correcting the method of delivery.

The article reports that the scholars of minority politics are found across disciplinary boundaries including in political science, sociology, economics and psychology as they can be found across countries and continents because study of groups and their oppression has relevance cross-culturally.

Can human rights institutions influence individual behavior? This article tests the ground level effectiveness of two strategies that aim to eliminate discrimination: a powerful, top-down combination of incentives and norm promotion and a bottom-up NGO-based effort. The study uses a hard case, that of discrimination against the Roma (commonly known by the disfavored term “Gypsies”), spans three towns, Murska Sobota and Novo mesto in Slovenia and Čakovec in Croatia, and includes altogether 606 subjects. Levels of discrimination are estimated via trust games played with money, which are particularly appropriate because the Roma are widely stereotyped as cheaters and thieves. The findings suggest that the EU accession process, widely regarded as a strong incentive-based and norm promoting rights change mechanism, may not substantially reduce discrimination on the ground. Instead, they suggest that ground level organizing aimed at improving relations between Roma and non-Roma helps reduce discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article describes the concept of black-box medicine describing briefly the baseline of extant personalized medicine and then addressing how black-box medicine departs from that baseline and focuses on questions of enablement and written description as a requirement for obtaining a patent.