Abstract:

Contemporary analyses of Athenian democracy have focused on binaries suchas mass/elite, free/slave, and male/female, overlooking the urban/rural divide. In this article, I argue that urban/rural was acentral cleavage in the Athenian demos. Ancient thinkers including Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle paid close attention to urban/rural differences and their consequences during the fifth century. Plato and Aristotle in particular developed sophisticated institutions and strategies to mitigate urban/rural divisions. Attending to the Athenian urban/rural divide deepens our understanding of the demos and highlights the importance of attachments to place, home, and customary ways of life for democratic stability.

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Abstract:

Prominent interpretations of Benjamin Constant have found in the sociological method of his famous lecture on the ancients and moderns proof that he held an ‘immanent’ conception of rights, deriving them from the conventions and attitudes of particular historical contexts. I argue Constant held a transcendent conception of rights, meaning that they exist outside history and are operative regardless of historical context. Constant held that liberal rights derived from the natural equality of mankind and were therefore normatively compelling in all contexts. Recognizing the transcendent basis of liberal rights helps us understand his famous lecture and suggests he is closer to natural rights thinkers than previously thought.

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Abstract:

This paper uses resources from ancient democratic theory to assert a deep connection between democracy and environmentalism. I leverage arguments from two critics of Athenian democracy, Aristophanes and Plato, who thundered that democracy was so ontologically destabilizing that it would lead to animals ruling over humans. Using this ancient notion of democracy, the current human/nonhuman relationship can be recast as an eco-political regime called anthropoligarchy, an oligarch/demos conflict in which the human few dominate over a vast nonhuman demos viewed as incapable of ruling. In the end, the theory of anthropoligarchy provides a normative framework for understanding environmental politics in the Anthropocene.

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Abstract:

Most of the money spent in U.S. congressional campaigns comes from donors residing outside the race’s electoral district. Scholars argue that legislators accepting out-of-district donations become “surrogate representatives” for outside donors. Yet researchers have neglected a critical question: How do geographic constituents react when their representatives accept money from outside donors? We argue that geographic constituents feel forced to share their representatives with out-of-district donors at the expense of their own representation. In an experiment during the 2021 U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia, we found that Georgians who learned about out-of-district donations to particular candidates expected their senator to spend significantly less time and effort working for the interest of Georgians. A follow-up experiment during the 2022 U.S. Senate elections identified local identity as a moderating variable. Relative to those receiving no prime, respondents whose local identity was primed and who learned about out-of-district donations expected their senator to spend less time and effort working for geographic constituents. Our findings highlight the rivalrous nature of representation and the trade-offs accompanying out-of-district donations and surrogate representation.

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Abstract:

How can a populist leader make the claim ‘I’m not a politician’ while competing for or even holding the highest political office? And if populist leaders are not politicians, as they claim not to be, then what are they in the minds of their supporters? To answer these questions, this article focuses on the antipolitics of right-wing populist movements. We argue that the negative moral connotations that politics itself has in the mind of many populist supporters compel populist leaders to appropriate nonpolitical symbolism to separate themselves from the ‘corrupt’ political sphere. We then show how right-wing populists posit thefamily and familial rule as a counter-ideal for societal organization and a preferable alternative to the ‘corrupt’ world of politics and political rule. Right-wing populist efforts to restructure the political realm after the familial realm helps explain some of its most distinctive features, such as ostentatious nepotism, norm-breaking, and anti-pluralism.

Abstract:

A long-standing line of research attributes criminal justice outcomes in America to punitive attitudes held by the public. For these scholars, one possible mechanism driving this relationship is a punitive public electing punitive politicians. This article presents new evidence complicating that story by demonstrating that citizens’ punitive attitudes do not directly translate into their electoral choices. We use three conjoint experiments to demonstrate this disjunction. Our first two experiments demonstrate agreement about which classes of offenders are more deserving of release. This agreement holds for Democrats, Republicans, and respondents at all levels of racial resentment. However, when respondents were asked to choose between hypothetical candidates promising to release these same classes of offenders, the consensus breaks down. In an hypothetical electoral context, partisan and racial resentment-based divisions emerge. These findings suggest that the translation between public levels of punitiveness and their electoral preferences regarding candidates’ criminal justice policies are not straightforward.