Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 26, 2023

The structure and governance of global supply chains not only shape social and environmental outcomes for both countries and firms, but also affect the quality of life at the local level, for those who live and work at each site of production. Existing literature on supply chain governance focuses on the transnational firm and has yielded a wide range of theoretical and empirical findings about firm- and nation-level outcomes. However, we know less about the drivers of variation in more localized social and environmental outcomes across production sites, which may result from local, national, and global actors and institutions that may interact. I provide a brief overview of the dominant literature on supply chain governance, highlighting the tendency to take an actor-centric approach. I then identify opportunities to study local social and environmental consequences of networked production using a more explicitly multi-actor and multi-level approach that can allow us to identify potential trade-offs, double wins, or spillovers between social and environmental outcomes.

This article reviews the state of the literature on the politics of global health governance and associated political dynamics of actors involved in this issue space. We identify seven eras in the field, beginning with the period of empire and colonialism and ending with the COVID-19 outbreak. The field of global health has long had a focus on infectious disease, often rooted within a state-centered approach to transnational global health problems with recurrent debates about whether and how restrictions on trade and travel should be imposed in the wake of disease outbreaks. This statist focus is in tension with more cosmopolitan visions of global health, which require broader health system strengthening. In the mid-2000s, a golden age emerged with the influx of new financing and political attention to addressing HIV/AIDS and malaria, as well as reducing the risk posed by infectious disease outbreaks to economies of the Global North. Despite increased awareness of noncommunicable diseases and the importance of health systems, events of recent years (including but not limited to the COVID-19 outbreak) reinforced the centrality of states to global health efforts and the primacy of infectious diseases.

This is both an exciting and fraught time in the study of gender and sexuality in global politics. On the one hand, feminist scholars build on more than 30 years of research in the field, with increasingly diverse scholars doing increasingly interdisciplinary research. On the other hand, crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and global inflation have shown that there are many sites of sharp, continuing gender inequities. In response to this combined excitement and challenge, this article addresses four areas of gender and IR research that are both enduring and growing: gender and political economy, gender and security, queer approaches, and feminist foreign policy. As we discuss each of these areas, we begin with a recent exemplar of scholarship and then discuss other scholarship in that area to give a sense of contours of each subfield of inquiry.

In this review, we focus on political inequality in rich democracies. In the two main sections, we look at participation and representation, respectively. The former discusses whether rising income inequality and the weakening of trade unions have led to higher levels of inequality in participation. The latter looks at substantive and descriptive representation and asks how they might be linked. Research highlights that people with fewer individual resources participate much less than those with more resources, and collective organizations lose their ability to counter these trends. In terms of representation, the pattern is very similar. Not only are the opinions of decision-makers more congruent with those of the better off but policy choices also reflect their preferences more clearly. As the social distance between rulers and ruled increases, representative democracy gets more biased in favor of higher-status social groups.

There is an unexamined paradox in the history of government in the West. The so-called absolutist monarchs of Europe overwhelmingly chartered republican corporations—e.g., towns, universities, and guilds whose members elected their leaders. Indeed, modern constitutional democracy is patterned after them. Yet, modern democracies themselves have overwhelmingly chartered authoritarian corporations—e.g., universities and business corporations whose subjects have no vote. After this Great Inversion, corporations, which once distributed power and wealth, now concentrate them, straining constitutional democracy. Against this backdrop, this article analyzes the major types of relation maintained between states and corporations: constitutive (states charter corporations), mimetic (states and corporations recurrently copy one another's organizational features), and instrumental (each leans on the other, and sometimes captures it, to better advance its own purposes). The article then examines the special challenges that corporate economies pose to constitutional democracy and considers whether a partial reversal of the Great Inversion could reduce them.