Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 26, 2023

Political scientist Hakeem Jefferson (Stanford University) facilitated a discussion about race, policing, and the state of American democracy with fellow political scientists Cathy J. Cohen (University of Chicago), Yanilda M. González (Harvard Kennedy School), Rebecca U. Thorpe (University of Washington), and Vesla M. Weaver (Johns Hopkins University) on May 26, 2021. The conversation occurred a year after George Perry Floyd Jr., a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by a White police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Moving beyond common notions of democracy that focus primarily on voting and electoral participation, the panelists discussed how American policing and the criminal justice system, more broadly, redefine citizenship, redistribute power, and shape marginalized people's understanding of their place in society. Closing remarks addressed the potential for change in how criminal justice institutions treat marginalized people and how political scientists can more usefully contribute to efforts that strengthen democracy for all. This is an edited transcript of the conversation and includes a bibliography of the sources mentioned. A video of the conversation is available online at https://www.annualreviews.org/r/BeyondtheBallotBox.

What do we know about women's negotiation of power in the Global South? The prevailing view tells us that women's power in the Global North is greater than in the South. Yet across analytic levels, the developing world provides striking models of the assertion of women's power that challenge established concepts of political and economic development. At the macro level of state development, research identifies how the subordination of women has been central to the creation and modern infrastructure of liberal democratic states or political orders. Data analysis here provides complementary evidence that the most effective alternatives to patriarchal political orders are originating in the developing world. At the meso level of policy-making processes, developing-world states are more likely than developed-world states to recognize and co-opt women's power. Finally, at the micro level, intrafamily negotiations of patriarchal power are most dynamic in the developing world, with the greatest promise to improve our understanding of the broader systems of power that drive states, policies, and welfare.

Over the past two decades, there has been growing scholarly interest in nonviolent resistance—a method of conflict in which unarmed people mobilize collective protests, strikes, and boycotts in a coordinated way. Mass movements that rely overwhelmingly on nonviolent resistance sometimes feature unarmed collective violence, fringe violence, or even organized armed action. What do we know about the effects of violent flanks on movement outcomes? This article reviews findings on the relationships between nonviolent and unarmed resistance, violence, and the outcomes of mass mobilization, as well as the directionality of these relationships. The balance of empirical evidence suggests that organized armed violence appears to reduce the chances for otherwise nonviolent movements to succeed, whereas unarmed collective violence has more ambiguous effects. The field will benefit from greater analytical precision in comparing the units of analysis, scope, intensity, and media framing of violent flank activity.

Global climate change is opening up new questions and reinvigorating old lines of inquiry in the study of international energy politics. Many policymakers and stakeholders are pushing for a clean energy transition away from the fossil fuels that have long dominated the world's energy supply. On some issues, there is considerable consensus between political scientists and other analysts, such as the basic categories of the “winners” and “losers” from the clean energy transition. On other issues, however, political science tends to depart significantly from other disciplines. The politics of the desired clean energy transition are highly complicated and filled with obstacles beyond those typically highlighted by either economics or physical sciences. For these reasons, energy politics associated with oil and other fossil fuels are far from over and continue to develop, even as new political dynamics associated with the clean energy transition emerge.

What role do business leaders play in American democracy? The dominant narrative in political science holds that business leaders have disproportionate influence; this influence has increased over time; the public opposes business engagement in politics; and a reform agenda could counteract business influence. I contrast this narrative with a second narrative that also emerges from the literature: Business leaders are fragmented and fail to achieve many of their goals; their power has weakened over time; the public wants more business engagement with politics, not less; and no viable reform agenda would fundamentally alter business power. The juxtaposed narratives reveal several insights, including a profound ambivalence among the public about the role of business in democracy. Survey evidence confirms that Democrats in particular are both especially opposed to and especially supportive of business engagement in politics, indicative of the veracity of the competing narratives.

This article explores the effects of the state on the creation of social trust. It identifies four theories connecting these two variables. The first and probably most important one stresses the role of the state as a third-party punisher of free-riders, especially in large societies where people have continuous interactions with strangers. The second claims that citizens extrapolate state officers’ corruption levels to ordinary citizens’ trustworthiness. The third claims that the state promotes trust by increasing income equality, and the final one claims that the state fosters trust by providing information about types of people. Finally, the article discusses how the empirical models relating to the state and trust deal with endogeneity problems, how outcomes from experimental analyses question the results obtained from observational data, and how this work affects our ideas about what trust ultimately refers to.

This article reviews the field of citizenship studies, with attention to the causes and consequences of policy. It summarizes key findings and points of consensus across three research domains: the determinants of citizenship policy, the consequences of citizenship policy, and the consequences of citizenship, i.e., the utility of obtaining citizenship for immigrant integration. After identifying strengths and weaknesses of each, I propose new directions in research that widen the field in terms of cases and generalizable theory while also deepening the field through serious attention to approaches that center the immigrant experience.

We provide a unified language for studying power sharing in authoritarian regimes. Power-sharing deals entail not only sharing spoils between a ruler and challenger, but also establishing an enforcement mechanism. An arrangement does not truly share power without reallocating power to make it costly for the ruler to renege. Institutional concessions, such as delegating agenda control over policy decisions or empowering third-party enforcers, can reallocate power. However, weak institutions create a Catch-22 that inhibits credible commitment. When institutions are weak, self-enforcing power sharing is still possible if challengers have coercive means to defend their spoils. However, challengers can leverage their coercive capabilities to overthrow the ruler. This double-edged sword implies that a strategic dictator shares power only under specific conditions: challengers can credibly punish an autocratic ruler; if the ruler shares power, the challenger must willingly forgo taking harmful actions; and the ruler willingly acquiesces to diminished power and rents.

A recent wave of research in political science examines the past using statistical methods for causal inference and formal theory—a field widely known as historical political economy (HPE). We examine the development of this field. Our survey reveals three common uses of history in HPE: understanding the past for its own sake, using history as a way to understand the present, and using history as a setting to explore theoretical conjectures. We present important work in each area and discuss trade-offs of each approach. We further identify key practical and analytical challenges for scholars of HPE, including the accessibility of data that do exist and obstacles to inference when they do not. Looking to the future, we see improved training for scholars entering the field, a heightened focus on the accumulation of knowledge, and greater attention to underexplored topics such as race, gender, ethnicity, and climate change.

The study of agenda setting has become curiously disconnected from democratic theory and democratization. Following Schattschneider, Dahl, and recent developments in political theory, I call for its reintegration in theoretical and empirical realms. The concept of agenda democracy allows for better understanding of contests over institutions, significant historical-institutional transformations, the study of inequality and its mechanisms of generation and maintenance, and the building and undermining of democracy. Agenda democracy requires a broad understanding of agendas (beyond a mere menu of final policy choices), recognizes that many democratic regimes have institutions that systematically render agendas nondemocratic, and compels us to look at the interstices of institutions and society (party transformation, petition and grievance mechanisms, advocacy campaigns, initiatives to expand what I call the shortlist of the possible) for moments of significant change. Agenda democracy compels the examination of democratizing agenda restrictions, the study of conservative organizations in politics, and the consideration of decomposing the term “movement.”

In political science, one issue still in need of greater theorizing is the proper measurement of bureaucratic autonomy, that is, the degree of discretion that political principals should grant to bureaucratic agents. This article reviews the literature on bureaucratic autonomy both in US administrative law and in political science. It uses the American experience to define five mechanisms by which political principals grant and limit autonomy, then goes on to survey the comparative literature on other democratic systems using the American framework as a baseline. Other democracies use different mixtures of these mechanisms, for example by substituting stronger ex post review for ex ante procedures or using appointment and removal power in place of either. We find that the administrative law and social science literatures on this topic approach it very differently, and that each would profit from greater awareness of the other discipline.

A growing literature explores how local environments, or contexts, affect political behavior, especially by shaping interpersonal contact with social out-groups. While many studies still draw directly on long-standing hypotheses from contact theory, this research agenda increasingly focuses on new research questions, beyond the classic social psychology literature, and new empirical cases, including from across the lower- and middle-income world. We develop a typology of forms of context and contact to aid the aggregation of findings across disparate cases and demonstrate that the mechanisms that may account for the political effects of intergroup context and contact are broader than those typically explored in psychologically oriented research. We propose future directions for research in this area, including greater focus on the intersection of ethnic and class-based contact and greater attention to how built or computer-based environments may mediate or mirror the effects of demographic contexts.

Research on the economic backgrounds of politicians is once again flourishing in political science. In this article, we describe the economic characteristics that scholars have recently studied and the common threads that have emerged in modern work on this topic. This growing literature is largely united by a shared concern about the unequal economic makeup of institutions: Recent studies generally agree that politicians tend to be vastly better off than citizens on every economic measure and that politicians from different economic backgrounds tend to think and behave differently in office. However, the literature is far from a consensus regarding why politicians are so economically advantaged. Going forward, there are numerous opportunities for future work to address this gap; to extend the literature to new countries, institutions, and time periods; and to better understand how economic backgrounds intersect with race, gender, and other social characteristics.

Bureaucracy is everywhere. Unelected bureaucrats are a key link between government and citizens, between policy and implementation. Bureaucratic politics constitutes a growing share of research in political science. But the way bureaucracy is studied varies widely, permitting theoretical and empirical blind spots as well as opportunities for innovation. Scholars of American politics tend to focus on bureaucratic policy making at the national level, while comparativists often home in on local implementation by street-level bureaucrats. Data availability and professional incentives have reinforced these subfield-specific blind spots over time. We highlight these divides in three prominent research areas: the selection and retention of bureaucratic personnel, oversight of bureaucratic activities, and opportunities for influence by actors external to the bureaucracy. Our survey reveals how scholars from the American and comparative politics traditions can learn from one another.

Although struggles for reparations for slavery and its legacies date back to the earliest period of US politics, they have received relatively little attention from political scientists. Focusing on reparations claims, I argue, can enhance the study of Black social movements and political thought. The recent resurgence of demands for redress for racial injustice, both in the United States and internationally, and contemporary divisions over the politics of memory suggest why reparations are an important indicator of the prospects for multiracial democracy. Because the language of reparations has been used to advance a range of political ends, I conclude by considering some of the dilemmas that remain unresolved in the literature.

We begin our review with research related to the racial formation and racial position of Asian Americans. How we define this fast-growing group and how it is situated in the broader racial landscape are critical to understanding its politics. We then turn to research on the history of Asian American civic engagement. These two research areas provide important context for the rest of the review, which covers three additional themes: (a) political participation; (b) partisanship, vote choice, and issue orientations; and (c) political representation. The last section returns to the theme of racial position, including its role in contemporary Asian American activism and its centrality to future research in the field.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in southern distinctiveness within the United States and its ramifications for the nation. This review provides an analysis of recent works and the interpretive issues they raise. I argue that collectively they have broken with the long-established image of the South in political science, the study of which was long organized around the region's anticipated convergence to the patterns of the post–New Deal North. Recent texts have instead emphasized an enduring commitment to white supremacy and a determining influence for the region in shaping national politics and institutions. I identify two broad pathways of southern influence and discuss the debates over its sources. I then discuss recent works on southern regimes and the debates these have provoked. I conclude by suggesting that overcoming the limits of recent works will ultimately undermine some of our more sweeping interpretive claims and foundational premises.

The article reviews the recent advances in comparative political economy. It reconnects knowledge on growth regimes and welfare regimes by analyzing how growth and welfare regimes covary over both time and space. It underlines the fact that governments pursue different growth strategies to adjust to new economic environments, focusing in particular on welfare state reforms. Synthesizing the literature, we propose a definition of growth and welfare regimes that integrates different engines of growth as a way to track general trends in the evolution of capitalism. We analyze the main trends of three eras of capitalism: Fordism, neoliberal financialization, and the digitalized knowledge-based economy. We trace the various paths of change by identifying the five growth strategies governments have pursued to adapt their growth and welfare regimes to the new capitalist era. The result is not a typology of fixed types of capitalist models but a dynamic process of adjustment.

The concept of racist dehumanization is essential for political scientists who seek to understand the nature, scope, and consequences of white racial prejudice in the United States today. Racist dehumanization consists of a variety of processes that construct, refashion, and maintain race by coding some people as white and therefore fully human and others as other than white and therefore less than fully human. In this review, we focus on the racist dehumanization of Indigenous people and Black people, arguing that processes of dehumanization have long been implicated in both the practice of race-making and concurrent efforts to exploit and dominate racialized groups. We posit that contemporary white racial prejudice can be understood, in part, as the residue of these processes, and we conclude by describing how accounting for racist dehumanization can transform the study of white racial prejudice.

The public's health is intimately linked to politics and policy. But political science has yet to make a major contribution to understanding the political economy of health (as distinct from medical care). In order to advance understanding of the drivers of health in an era of emerging infectious disease and global pandemics, more political scientists must begin to do what we are uniquely well situated to do: analyze in a contextualized way the pathways and mechanisms through which power configurations cause illness and inequity. This article reviews key findings from recent literature about the policy, political, and structural contributors to population health and health equity and sketches what a political economy of health more deeply rooted in political science could look like.