Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 23, 2020

In my scholarly work, I have sought to understand institutionalized multilateral cooperation in world politics, and the context of such cooperation: extensive economic interdependence, or globalization. What are the political implications of economic interdependence? Under what conditions are states facing globalization willing to share their authority with multilateral organizations over whose policies they exert only indirect and collective influence? I have developed interpretive frameworks and some theory to address these issues. In other work, I have helped to develop precepts for qualitative research design, and I have explored some normative issues associated with institutional accountability and legitimacy. My work on multilateral institutions, which was done in a period of increasing multilateral cooperation, is challenged by increasing inequality in capitalist democracies, financial crisis, and nationalist forms of populism. I am now seeking to understand the international and comparative politics of climate change, which I regard as an existential crisis.

Where does the state come from? Two canonical answers have been interstate wars and contracts between rulers and the ruled in the early modern period. New scholarship has pushed back the historical origins of the European state to the Middle Ages, and focused on domestic institutions such as parliaments, universities, the law, inheritance rules, and cities. It has left open questions of the causes of territorial fragmentation, the structural similarities in state administrations, and the policy preoccupations of the state. One answer is a powerful but neglected force in state formation: the medieval Church, which served as a rival for sovereignty, and a template for institutional innovations in court administrations, the law, and the formation of human capital. Church influence further helps to explain why territorial fragmentation in the Middle Ages persisted, why royal courts adopted similar administrative solutions, and why secular states remain concerned with morality and social discipline.

We present a “developmental” approach to understanding why rising polarization in the United States has not been self-correcting but instead continues to intensify. Under specified conditions, initial increases in polarization may change the meso-environment, including such features as state parties, the structure of media, and the configuration of interest groups. These shifts can in turn influence other aspects of politics, leading to a further intensification of polarization. This analysis has four important benefits: (a) It directs our attention to the meso-institutional environment of the American polity; (b) it clarifies the features of the polity that have traditionally limited the extent and duration of polarization, and the reasons why their contemporary impact may be attenuated; (c) it helps us analyze asymmetrical, or party-specific, aspects of polarization; and (d) it provides an analytic foundation that connects discussions of American politics to the comparative politics literature on democratic backsliding.

What are the sources of democratic stability? The evidence from three modern waves suggests that stability rests on economic growth, strong states, and liberal institutions. But can we secure democratic stability beyond liberalism? This question is relevant to those developing countries that have little hope, and perhaps little interest in liberal democracy. But it is also increasingly relevant to those developed nations where the achievements of the twentieth-century liberal order are being eroded. This article takes a fresh look at democratic stability by reviewing the evidence from the last two and a half millennia. Particular attention is devoted to the case of ancient Athens, which highlights the importance of alignment between shared norms and appropriately designed institutions. Athens’ case suggests that goods that we usually associate with modern liberal democracy do not necessarily rely on a given set of values and do not have a unique institutional manifestation.

Misinformation occurs when people hold incorrect factual beliefs and do so confidently. The problem, first conceptualized by Kuklinski and colleagues in 2000, plagues political systems and is exceedingly difficult to correct. In this review, we assess the empirical literature on political misinformation in the United States and consider what scholars have learned since the publication of that early study. We conclude that research on this topic has developed unevenly. Over time, scholars have elaborated on the psychological origins of political misinformation, and this work has cumulated in a productive way. By contrast, although there is an extensive body of research on how to correct misinformation, this literature is less coherent in its recommendations. Finally, a nascent line of research asks whether people's reports of their factual beliefs are genuine or are instead a form of partisan cheerleading. Overall, scholarly research on political misinformation illustrates the many challenges inherent in representative democracy.

Despite their centrality to modern democracy, until recently political parties were relegated to the margins of normative democratic theory, taking a back seat to social movements, civil society associations, deliberative experiments, spaces for local participatory government, and direct popular participation. Yet, in the past 15 years, a burgeoning literature has emerged in democratic theory focused directly on parties and partisanship; that is our focus in this review. We locate three main normative defenses of parties: one centered in the special role parties can play in political justification as agents of public reason, a second that looks to the way parties contribute to deliberation, and a third that focuses on the partisan commitment to regulated political rivalry and peaceful rotation in office. In this last connection, we survey work on the constitutional status of parties and reasons for banning parties. We then consider the relation of partisanship to citizenship, and in a fourth section we turn to the ethics of partisanship. Parties and partisanship are interwoven but separable: If partisans are necessary to realize the value of parties, the reverse holds as well, and parties are necessary to realize the value of partisanship.

Climate warming is the fundamental challenge of our time, not only because it will radically transform our natural environment but also because it will redefine jobs and livelihoods. This article builds an interpretive bridge for understanding the political consequences of how climate change pressures will affect work, production, and technology. We organize this review along three themes: commodification and the processes through which costs and resources are made visible; the production of knowledge and the politics of representing the future; and just transitions and how to distribute the costs and the opportunities of change equitably. These themes all address the ways that the dominance of the market—both in rhetoric and in policy—eclipses the materiality of economic production and social exchange. Together, however, the three themes also allow us to contemplate new political and institutional actions for tackling the twinned challenges of mitigating climate change and safeguarding our livelihoods.

The last two decades have seen a revival in work that takes the role of individual leaders and elites seriously. This article surveys new research that explores how biographical factors influence their behavior. We call this literature the personal biography approach to political leadership. Our survey first lays out four mechanisms through which biographical characteristics might affect leader behavior. We then discuss the main findings, grouping them according to socializing experiences (e.g., education, military service, and prior occupation) and ascriptive traits (e.g., gender, race, and ethnicity). We also consider the methodological problems, especially endogeneity and selection effects, that pose challenges to this style of research. We conclude with an assessment of gaps in the literature and provide suggestions for future work in the biographical vein.

In the contemporary context, it is inescapable that racism is a factor in US public opinion. When scholars take stock of the way we typically measure and conceptualize racism, we find reason to reconceptualize the racial resentment scale as a measure of perceptions of the reasons for political inequality. We also see reason to move beyond thinking of racism as an attitude, toward conceptualizing it as a perspective. In addition, we see reason to pay closer attention to the role of elites in creating and perpetuating a role for racism in the way people think about public affairs. The study of racism is evolving in parallel with the broader public discussion: toward a recognition of the complex and fundamental ways it is woven into US culture and political life.

Recent years have seen a tremendous surge of public interest in partisan gerrymandering, including robust reform efforts and multiple high-profile court cases. Political scientists have played an important role in this debate, reaching an unusually high level of public engagement. Yet this public-facing period has to some extent obscured promising avenues for future research within the discipline. I review the history of political science and redistricting and describe how research on this topic has been shaped by the newfound interest. The goals of the law differ from those of political science, so research that focuses squarely on the former often misses opportunities to advance the latter. I lay out the contours of this difference and then suggest reframing the existing metrics of partisan gerrymandering to make them useful for more traditionally scientific questions. Finally, I offer some ideas about what those future questions might look like when reframed in this way.

Globalization has reduced the importance of distance between countries. Yet, within countries, geography matters now more than ever. Economic activities, including production and employment, occur unevenly across space within countries, and globalization consequently impacts various regions differently. Some areas benefit from international economic integration while others lose, and as a result, economic geography shapes citizens’ experience of globalization. Economic geography also influences governments’ responses to globalization and economic shocks. Economic geography consequently merits the attention of political scientists. By examining economic geography, researchers will find new traction on long-standing theoretical debates and valuable insights on recent developments, including the growing backlash against globalization. The challenges of studying economic geography include causal complexity and measurement issues.

Transnational actors and transnational governance now form core elements of global environmental politics alongside intergovernmental diplomacy and institutions. This article explores how and under what conditions this transnationalism has arisen, as well as its implications for world politics. It considers what effects transnational actors and governance have had on political outcomes, their relation to states and intergovernmental institutions, and normative questions around their legitimacy and accountability. The critical role of transnational actors and institutions in environmental politics has made the field a laboratory for broader questions concerning the evolution of global governance in world politics more generally. As global environmental challenges continue to magnify and affect other spheres of political activity, understanding these dynamics will become increasingly important.

In this article, I review the social science literature on racial fluidity, the idea that race is flexible and impermanent. I trace the ongoing evolution of racial classifications and boundaries in the United States and Latin America, two regions that share a history of European colonization, slavery, and high levels of race mixing but that have espoused very different racial ideologies. Traditionally, for many groups in the United States, race was seen as unchangeable and determined by ancestry; in contrast, parts of Latin America have lacked strict classification rules and embraced race mixing. However, recent research has shown that race in the United States can change across time and context, particularly for populations socially defined as more ambiguous, while some Latin American racial boundaries are becoming more stringent. I argue that the fluidity of race has redefined our understanding of racial identities, and propose several directions for future political science scholarship that bridges disciplines and methodological approaches.

Scholars continue to disagree about the relationship between economic development and democracy. I review the history of the debate and summarize patterns visible in data available today. I find a strong and consistent relationship between higher income and both democratization and democratic survival in the medium term (10–20 years), but not necessarily in shorter time windows. Building on several recent studies, I sketch out a new conditional modernization theory, which can account for such lags. The key idea is that the effect of development on democracy is triggered by disruptive events such as economic crises, military defeats, or—most generally—leader change. Political outcomes depend on both the development level and, at intermediate income ranges, how citizens coordinate. Waves of leader turnover in autocracies correlate with temporarily stronger links between income and democratization, which, in turn, coincide with the first two waves of democracy.

Contemporary political science takes bargaining to be the central mechanism of democratic decision making, though political theorists typically doubt that processes that permit the exercise of unequal power and the use of threats can yield legitimate outcomes. In this review, we trace the development of theories of institutional bargaining from the standpoint of pluralism and positive political theory before turning to the treatment of bargaining in the influential work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Their ambivalence about bargaining gave rise to a new focus on the value of negotiation and compromise but this literature constitutes an unstable midpoint between the justificatory ambitions of deliberative democracy and the desire to provide plausible models of political decision making. Instead of advocating changes in mindset or motivation, we argue that a fair bargaining process requires institutional reform, as well as a justificatory framework centered on the preservation of egalitarian decision making.

Research on clientelism often starts from a shared puzzle: How can clientelism be a viable electoral strategy if voters can renege on their commitments to politicians? The standard solution proposed is that politicians resolve this commitment problem with voters through monitoring and enforcement. But there has been startlingly little evidence of individual-level monitoring and enforcement in the recent literature, and many studies now document the use of clientelism even where politicians are aware that the commitment problem remains completely intractable. When read together, recent studies suggest that the focus on resolving the commitment problem is a red herring. Instead, it is increasingly clear that clientelism does not need to be monitored and that the commitment problem does not bind as politicians choose their electoral appeals. New puzzles, motivated by advances in the recent literature, deserve comparatively more attention in future research.

How are the contours of Western European politics shifting? To what extent do these shifts reflect changes in the underlying social and economic structure of European polities? In this article, we reflect on insights from the classic literature on how cleavages structure party systems and consider how the emergence and persistence of new parties and new ideological conflicts are leading to both shifts of dividing lines of party competition and the fragmentation of party systems. While increasing attention has been given to the so-called second dimension of European electoral politics, we highlight the relatively limited focus on structural changes that are helping to drive this transformation. We identify some socio-demographic developments that are potentially generating new cleavages in Western European democracies: the expansion of higher education; mass migration and the growing ethnic diversity of electorates; the aging of societies and sharpening of generational divides; and increased geographical segregation of populations between prospering, globalized major cities and declining hinterlands.

Authoritarian regimes become more likely to democratize when they face little choice or little risk. In some cases, the risk of democratization to authoritarian incumbents is so low that ending authoritarianism might not mean exiting power at all. This article develops a unified theory of authoritarian-led democratization under conditions of relatively low incumbent risk. We argue that the party strength of the authoritarian incumbent is the most pivotal factor in authoritarian-led democratization. When incumbent party strength has been substantial enough to give incumbent authoritarian politicians significant electoral victory confidence, nondemocratic regimes have pursued reversible democratic experiments that eventually culminated in stable, thriving democracies. Evidence from Europe's first wave of democratization and more recent democratic transitions in Taiwan and Ghana illustrate how party strength has underpinned authoritarian-led democratization across the world and across modern history.

This article reviews the cumulation of evidence from survey experiments in the field of international political economy (IPE) and discusses their strengths and weaknesses in explaining the backlash against globalization. I first review the advancements made by the most commonly used survey experiment design in IPE, namely the Globalization-as-Treatment design, in which scholars randomly assign information about different features of globalization and solicit respondents’ attitudes toward protectionism. Then I discuss three issues with this design in addressing key puzzles in the emergence of globalization backlash: (a) using a coarse informational treatment that stacks the deck against the economic self-interest hypothesis; (b) overattributing globalization as a source of hardship; and (c) neglecting heterogeneous room-to-maneuver beliefs across and within countries. The article suggests alternative designs and strategies to study these questions. Evidence from survey experiments suggests that much of the globalization backlash we witness today is deeply rooted in domestic politics.

International actors at times seek to help bring peace, democracy, and human rights. Studies of how international actors help enforce political bargains between incumbent governments and their domestic opponents are proliferating. They show that opposition groups have trouble trusting incumbents to adhere to the political bargains they strike because incumbents can use their familiarity with state institutions and can use their asymmetric hold on power during bargain implementation to violate terms by retaining more of the status quo than agreed. International actors can overcome these “reversion problems,” however, by using monitoring mechanisms (often focused on electoral campaigns) and incentives conditioned on compliance. Reversion problems, and enforcement by international actors as a solution, are common across issue areas—arising when domestic actors try to end civil conflict, open elections, and reduce repression—but the literatures in these issue areas have largely remained segregated. This review proposes advancing this research agenda by unifying them and (re)examining the conditions under which this solution works best.