Contrary to calls for increased relevance, the discipline of political science has had lasting impacts in shaping environmental policy analysis. The ideas and approach advocated by former APSA president Elinor Ostrom, most comprehensively articulated in Governing the Commons, have diffused to shape or reinforce generations of sustainability scholarship. We identify four “ideal type” problem conceptions that are distinguished based on their consistency or inconsistency with Ostrom’s inductive approach to problem structure and economic welfare emphasis, and four corresponding schools that reinforce each: commons (Type 1), economic optimization (Type 2), compromise (Type 3), and prioritization (Type 4). Whereas the prioritization school seeks to understand and identify lessons for minimizing the impact of human activity on the natural environment, the diffusion of the commons’ metaphor has led political scientists to champion frameworks that bias Type 3, 2, and 1 orientations. The latter all rest on moral underpinnings that promote human material interests as their goal, rather than recognizing them as also a primary cause of environmental degradation. A fundamental conceptual reorientation is required if social scientists in general, and political scientists in particular, are to generate an understanding of and identify tools for ameliorating rather than exacerbating today’s Type 4 climate change and species extinction crises.

We describe an emerging research practice that we call Large-N Qualitative Analysis (LNQA), outline its core components and codify best practice. LNQA starts with hypothesized regularities and causal mechanisms. Regularities take two basic forms: Y generalizations (if Y then X) or X generalizations (if X then Y), albeit with more complex variants. To establish a causal generalization requires defining its scope. The strength of the regularity is simply the percentage of cases conforming with the causal claim. The causal force of LNQA, however, comes from within-case causal inference, which demonstrates the presence and operation of the postulated mechanisms in all cases in the scope. The method thus partly obviates problems arising from case selection in qualitative and multimethod work. We also identify a multimethod variant (M-LNQA), which combines LNQA with experimental, quasi-experimental, or observational statistical analysis. An appendix introduces over fifty examples of the method.

This article examines how Indian anticolonialists drew on Darwinism and evolutionary theory to resist British imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival material from The Bengalee (and beyond), I show how Indian nationalists marshaled evolutionist schemas to contest stage-based accounts of social advancement rationalizing despotic rule in India. I argue that Darwinian evolutionism enabled anticolonialists to respond to a particular decolonial dilemma—that of developmentalism, the unilinear notion of historical time justifying India’s political subjection. While Darwinism’s social application is commonly understood to sustain imperialism, I demonstrate that it served, in the colonial context, to deconstruct historicist tropes portraying India as politically immature. Drawing on evolutionism, nationalists contested the presumptions of imperialist discourse and reconceptualized progress in novel, anticolonial terms. Darwin’s travel to India thus exposes a distinctive decolonial quandary, the syncretic Indian anticolonial response to it, and the intractability of the contradictions facing decolonizing movements globally.

Calculations of the electoral effects of incorporating new voters and beliefs on how inclusion alters gender hierarchies constitute two central motivations of decision makers when facing the prospect of suffrage reform. In contrast to the dominant electoral approach, by focusing on the case of early (before World War II) women’s suffrage in Latin America, I show that both these motivations are necessary and need to align for reform to occur. To explain the (mis)alignment of electoral calculations and social order concerns in Latin America, I consider the region’s historical oligarchic–anti-oligarchic cleavage structure, which is rooted in overlapping class and religious divisions. In most cases, this cleavage produced contradictory motivations and led actors to block women’s enfranchisement. Only cases of weak cleavages or low politicization of the issue had early reform. To illustrate the argument, this article uses process tracing to analyze Uruguay and Ecuador as successful early reformers and Peru as a negative case.

Who should have rights to territory? Dominant political theories hold that either individuals or state-based groups (states, nations, or state-based civic peoples) have foundational territorial rights. However, they cannot accommodate some Indigenous peoples’ claims that the land should be subject neither to private ownership nor to sovereign state control. Given these claims, some scholars have recently revised these theories to mediate between state jurisdiction and private property. But those revisions have thus far neglected the views of Indigenous peoples who did not experience Anglo-American settler colonialism. This article therefore examines contemporary territorial rights theories in light of the experience of colonial Spanish America. Using sixteenth-century documents in which Indigenous communities conceptualized and asserted their rights to territory, historical evidence of political struggles between these communities and the colonial state, and interpretations of colonial legal thinkers from the seventeenth century (particularly Juan de Solórzano Pereira), I argue that, in addition to individuals and state-based groups, we should consider another subject of territorial rights: pueblos, or grounded communities.

Attitudinal differences between urban and rural voters in America have been in the spotlight in recent years and engaging rural populations politically has been growing in importance, particularly since the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, social and geographic sorting is increasing the salience of a rural identity that drives distinct policy preferences. While recent research has examined how rural identities drive social and economic policy preferences, rural Americans are also particularly relevant to the fate of environmental policy. Farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners manage huge portions of American lands and watersheds and are important stakeholders in the implementation of environmental policies. Despite this, the environmental policy preferences of rural Americans have received little attention from the research community. This study fills a gap in the literature by investigating how collective identities among rural Americans drive environmental policy preferences. Through eight focus groups and thirty-five interviews with rural voters across America (total n=105), this study explores how four components of rural American identity—connection to nature, resentment/disenfranchisement, rootedness, and self-reliance—inform specific rural perspectives on environmental policy. The findings have implications for how to best design, communicate, and implement environmental policies in a way that can better engage rural Americans on this issue.

Debates about transparency standards in social science research often lack specificity, mischaracterize the status quo, or stress the value of replication. These debates frequently talk past each other and provide limited practical guidance for qualitative and multi-methods research. Focusing on text-based sources, we provide a review of qualitative research that identifies deficiencies in transparency practices, and advances a five-point framework for improving transparency premised on better specification of sources’ location, production, selection, analysis, and access. We next draw on a multi-year deliberative forum on qualitative transparency to identify researchers’ concerns about changing the status quo. We then showcase illustrative examples of enhanced transparency and conclude with recommendations for how to improve transparency practices for text-based sources. We argue that greater research transparency yields numerous benefits, including facilitating scholarly exchange, improving graduate training, and aiding knowledge cumulation. Rather than advancing replication, which may be undesirable for various qualitative research traditions, new transparency technologies are promising because they allow authors to more easily provide additional context, present complexity, and unpack relevant contradictions about politics.

Women’s political representation has increased rapidly in the past few decades, but significant barriers continue to circumscribe women’s political participation in a myriad of ways. Previous research has indicated that online abuse constitutes one such obstacle. Yet, only a small number of studies have systematically examined and compared the experiences of online abuse of men and women politicians. We argue that it is not enough to merely state that online abuse is gendered if we wish to understand and tackle such abuse: it is essential to know how it is gendered. In this article we conceptualize gendered online abuse in terms of three dimensions—frequency, character, and consequences—so that we can provide a more comprehensive empirical understanding of its prevalence. Using original survey data and interviews with a large number of Swedish MPs, we demonstrate the merit of unpacking the concept of such abuse in respect to different analytical dimensions. We find all three dimensions to be gendered in the Swedish context but in different and sometimes unexpected ways. Although women do not experience a higher frequency of online abuse than men, the character of the abuse is gendered insofar as women MPs are subjected to more sexualized and gendered harassment. We also find that men exposed to high levels of online abuse seem slightly more inclined to leave politics, whereas women report that they feel that their personal agency is circumscribed to a greater extent.

This article develops W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism to illustrate the entanglement of popular sovereignty and empire through an excessive form of western self-determination and theorizes how features of this formation remain today. Democratic despotism implies that, in western democracies at the turn of the twentieth century, popular sovereignty was an impulse to partake of the wealth and resources obtained by empire. Western democracies issued a claim to determine themselves (democratically) and others (despotically), in what I call “self-and-other-determination.” I frame the question of imperial democracy within the literature on empire and racial capitalism and the writings of Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman to conceptualize how racial affective attachments allow citizens past and present to restrict democratic concern to a limited community, whose wealth relies on the imperial exploitation of racialized others. I discuss the absence of these questions in the literature on self-determination and reflect on the implications of my framework for the contemporary rise of right-wing populism.

There are two opposed views on the proper relationship between academic research and political activism. The first argues that academics who study politics must remain objective, hence precluding activism. The second argues that academics can and should also be political activists, hence precluding scholarly objectivity. This article argues against an assumption shared by these otherwise opposing positions: that activism and objectivity are incompatible. It conceptually identifies and then normatively defends a form of objectivity characterized by active engagement with evidence that is what Max Weber calls “inconvenient” for one’s existing beliefs and commitments. Far from being incompatible with political activism, this form of objectivity is essential to its success. Since scholars, activists, and scholar-activists alike would all benefit from active engagement with inconvenient evidence, I conclude that academic institutions should promote this form of objectivity among both activist and non-activist scholars, while political organizations should promote the same virtue among both academic and non-academic activists.

I investigate whether the strength of the class cleavage in Western Europe still “translates” into the electoral mobilization of the left. This research question is addressed through comparative longitudinal analysis in nineteen Western European countries after World War II. In particular, the impact of class cleavage is investigated by disentangling its socio-structural (working-class features) and organizational (corporate and partisan) components, thus accounting for its multidimensional nature. Data show that both components have a significant impact in Western Europe after 1945. However, while the socio-structural element is still nowadays a substantial predictor of left electoral mobilization, the impact of the organizational element has decreased over time and has become irrelevant in the last twenty-five years. Therefore, the class cleavage is not entirely lost in translation, but left electoral mobilization is no longer dependent upon the organizational features of trade unions and political parties that originally emerged to represent working-class interests.

The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper-partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to 1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, 2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, 3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and 4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policymakers to respond to these and future collective action challenges.

In highly oppressive environments, collective resistance is very costly. Non-collective resistance constitutes a less risky alternative. Focusing on a particular oppressed setting, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I identify everyday forms of non-collective resistance: signaling, persevering, eschewing, and coping. Characterized by low visibility and targeting political goals indirectly, these activities have not yet been recognized as forms of resistance. However, they constitute important resistance efforts that deliberately obstruct oppressive regimes. These efforts show that individuals who are not visibly resisting their rulers cannot be assumed to be loyal or to suffer from a barrier of fear, as often suggested by theories in politics. They also offer an important addition to theories that identify violence as a common response to oppression, suggesting that peaceful non-collective activities constitute an everyday alternative.

This article considers how, and under what conditions, actors in irregular conflicts weaponize nature. When do insurgents and counterinsurgents pursue environmental degradation—ranging from limited and short-term damage to ecocidal violence—as a tactic of war? To what extent do we see variation in the frequency and form of environmental warfare? And when do conflict actors exercise restraint in their use of violence against the natural environment? Often, the intentional destruction of the natural landscape is difficult to explain by reference to operational strategy or tactical logic alone. Deliberate attacks on the natural landscape, the frequency with which these tactics are deployed, and the diverse forms they take are conditioned by context-specific incentives, constraints, and intervening variables. I identify six categories of incentives and constraints that influence the decision to engage in environmental destruction: strategic, tactical, political, ideological, cultural, and technological. Using suggestive evidence from multiple case studies, I theorize some possible interactions between incentives and constraints that help to explain variation in the form and frequency of environmental warfare tactics.

How do involuntary interactions with authoritarian institutions shape political engagement? The policy feedback literature suggests that interactions with authoritarian policies undercut political participation. However, research in racial and ethnic politics offers reason to believe that these experiences may increase citizens’ engagement. Drawing on group attachment and discrimination research, we argue that mobilization is contingent on individuals’ political psychological state. Relative to their counterparts, individuals with a politicized group identity will display higher odds of political engagement when exposed to authoritarian institutions. To evaluate our theory, we draw on the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study to examine the experiences of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. For all subgroups and different types of institutions, we find that, for those with a politicized group identity, institutional contact is associated with higher odds of participation. Our research modifies the classic policy feedback framework, which neglects group-based narratives in the calculus of collective action.

Over the past fifteen years, a narrative has developed that IR scholars have become a “cult of the irrelevant,” with declining influence on and engagement with policy debates. Despite these assertions, the evidence for limited policy engagement has been anecdotal. We investigate the extent of policy engagement—the ways in which IR scholars participate in policy-making processes and/or attempt to shape those processes—by surveying IR scholars directly about their engagement activities. We find policy engagement is pervasive among IR scholars. We draw on theories of credit-claiming to motivate expectations about how and when scholars are likely to engage with practitioners. Consistent with our expectations, much of this engagement comes in forms that involve small time commitments and provide opportunities for credit-claiming, such as media appearances and short-form, bylined op-eds and blog posts. However, sizable minorities report engaging in consulting activities not for attribution/publication and writing policy briefs, and a majority of respondents indicate they engaged in these activities several times a year or more. We find only small differences in engagement across gender and rank. Our results demonstrate that, for IR scholars, some form of policy engagement is the norm.

How do European far-right parties reconcile their long-standing nationalism with their allegiance to European “civilization”? Although they are certainly not contradictory, simultaneously adopting national and supranational identities requires considerable discursive maneuvering to articulate clearly. In this article, I argue that the European Far Right negotiates the boundaries between its national and supranational identities through two discursive mechanisms, abstraction and embedding, which present civilizationism as nonthreatening to and partially constituted by nationalism. Specifically, abstraction links European civilization to general features of a shared heritage, whereas embedding connects civilization to elements of the nationalist repertoire. I demonstrate the Far Right’s monopolization of civilizational discourse and use of these twin mechanisms through quantitative and qualitative analyses of more than 1,000 party manifestos and more than 650,000 tweets. These findings contribute to the growing scholarly literature that treats civilizations as supranational “imagined communities” and has implications for the study of nationalism, civilizationism, and the Far Right.

Recent scholarship on the role of national party organizations in American politics—specifically, the Democratic and Republican National Committees—has argued that political science research has thus far undervalued the importance of these organizations. These studies have noted the importance that party leaders—including presidents, Congressional leaders, and governors—place on the national committees’ role in shaping a party brand. Notably, these studies are all qualitative historical accounts—perhaps because finding consistent quantitative data from within the DNC and RNC across time is complicated due to limitations in access to archival resources across both parties and time. I present a new quantitative data set measuring DNC and RNC activity on the basis of an external source: New York Times coverage of national committee activity in the period 1953–2012. I use this data to test the claim that, while “party branding” is a core national committee goal, the DNC and RNC do not consistently engage in it. I find that monthly New York Times references of party branding operations decline for parties that hold the White House. Meanwhile, coverage of other service operations does not decline, suggesting committees step back their branding role when their party has control of the executive branch of the federal government.

Vast disparities between and within American states’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have evoked renewed attention to whether greater centralization might enhance investments in subnational capacity and remedy subnational inequalities or instead erode subnational organizational capacity. Developments in American public education (1997–2015) offer perspective on this puzzle, which we examine by applying interrupted time series analysis to a novel dataset to assess the implications of centralization on subnational investments in administrative and technical capacity, two dimensions of organizational capacity. We find simultaneous subnational erosion in administrative capacity and growth in technical capacity following centralization, both of which appear concentrated in low-poverty areas despite centralization’s explicit antipoverty purposes. Public education reforms highlight both the challenge of dismantling subnational inequality through centralization and the need for future research on policy designs that enable centralization to yield subnational capacity that is able to remedy inequality.

This article theorizes the politics of responsibility—activist struggles over who will be held accountable for structural injustices like the “catastrophic” changes underway in our climate. To do so, it develops a politicized conception of responsibility, one that treats responsibility as a social construct and a terrain of contestation. Building on the work of feminist philosophers of responsibility and on the praxis of “kayaktivism,” this politicized account treats responsibility as a social practice of interrogating and contesting shared ethico-political judgments. On this understanding, taking responsibility or stepping up is a way of making responsibility—literally of (re)constructing those social practices and judgments through conscious efforts to persuade others, challenge prevailing norms and interpretations, change people’s beliefs about how the world works, revise popular expectations of social actors and institutions, and disrupt business as usual. The article highlights the centrality of norms and power to social practices of responsibility and suggests alternative perspectives on familiar philosophical worries about blame, complexity and agency, and justification.