Recent publications and acceptances
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Koreman, Sam. 2024. "Publicity's Misinformation Problem." Res Publica.
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This paper argues that everyday practices crucial for ensuring politically engaged citizens such as sharing news articles or deliberating about potential laws can also be responsible for undermining the state’s efforts to publicize the law. Theorists view publicity—a requirement that laws should be public and accessible—as having crucial normative and practical importance in liberal democracy and, more broadly, in ensuring the rule of law. Due to egalitarian concerns, laws are often long, complex, and specific to ensure that street-level bureaucrats exercise low levels of discretion in applying the law. This—what I deem the institutional publicity problem—means that the law is so inaccessible that busy, everyday citizens must turn to third-party sources to understand policymaking. These intermediaries often make mistakes promulgating the law. Misinformation is hard to counteract, and pre-existing beliefs affect information acceptance. This all represents a behavioral publicity problem: morally and legally permissible actions can complicate and undermine reasonable efforts of citizens to learn about the law. I argue that the state is caught between a rock and a hard place. While there are benefits to having the state fight against misinformation, it also raises serious concerns about democratic engagement. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-024-09661-3
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Scholten, Melle and David Leblang. 2023. "Land/Labor Ratios, Citizenship, and Migrants: Exploring the Hidden Links in the Political Economy of Immigration Regimes." World Politics.
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Within sovereign states citizenship is arguably the most important political marker of in- and outsiders. As a result, questions about who gets to reap the benefits of citizenship often result in distributional conflict. This conflict becomes inflamed when a country goes through a period of significant inward migration. Given that citizenship is so important and so contentious, from where do the rules governing its acquisition come? Our starting point is the acknowledgment that migrants are mobile labor. From this perspective, countries in which elites benefit from an increased supply of productive labor—that is, those with high land/labor ratios—will be more likely to adopt policies that attract migrants, such as easier naturalization rules, including birthright citizenship. We illustrate the plausibility of our argument with some statistical evidence and suggest some avenues to further explore this crucial question. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/915397/pdf
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Bibeau, Alexis, Evelyne Brie, Yannick Dufresne, and Gilles Gagné. 2023. "Religiosity MAtters: Assessing Competing Explanations of Support for Secularism in Quebec and Canada." Politics and Religion.
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Secularism—i.e., the separation between the state and religious institutions—is a fundamental characteristic of liberal democracies, yet support for secular arrangements varies significantly across Western countries. In Canada, such attitudinal divergences are observable at the regional level, with citizens from Quebec displaying higher levels of support for secularism than other Canadians. In this paper, we test three hypotheses to account for this regional discrepancy: religiosity, liberal values, and out-group prejudice. Using data from an online panel survey (n = 2,000), our findings suggest that support for secularism in Quebec is mostly explained by the province's lower baseline levels of religiosity, anticlerical feelings, and by its distinctive understanding of liberalism. These factors are likely to result from Quebec's unique religious and sociohistorical history. Results also suggest that while negative feelings toward religious minorities are positively correlated with support for secularism across the entire country, negative feelings toward ethnic minorities are associated with lower support for secularism in Quebec. These findings disprove the commonly held assumption according to which support for secularism is driven by ethnic prejudice in Quebec. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/religiosity-matters-assessing-competing-explanations-of-support-for-secularism-in-quebec-and-canada/2230C7A516F31DBC2BBDCA01F0CF13AA?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=RAP_Sep23
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Magula, Justin. 2023. "Exploring factors and implications of violence against civilians: a case study of the Soviet-Afghan war." Small Wars & Insurgencies.
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The Soviet-Afghan War serves as a significant case study to understand why states resort to violent acts against civilians during war. This study takes a multidimensional approach, examining strategic, operational, and individual factors and applying theories of violence and mass killing. By analyzing the conditions that led the Soviets to target civilians, this investigation identifies a nexus of interconnected factors. At the strategic level, Soviet leaders pursued a swift victory to establish a Communist client regime while minimizing casualties and controlling information flow. Operationally, the ill-preparedness of the Red Army for counterinsurgency warfare, coupled with an entrenched organizational culture, led to the adoption of counterproductive enemy-centric tactics against Afghan noncombatants. Additionally, inadequate training, prolonged deployments, and a lack of disciplinary measures at the individual level contributed to the perpetration of violent acts. Understanding the underlying causes of violence against civilians, particularly in the context of Russian forces, holds practical importance. This knowledge can assist policymakers in devising strategies that mitigate wartime violence and enhance the protection of citizens. Drawing parallels to contemporary conflicts involving Russia, the study concludes by recommending future research directions and emphasizing the relevance of comprehending the targeting of noncombatants in ongoing conflicts, notably the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09592318.2023.2231198
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Lollis, Jacob and Mackenzie Dobson. 2023. "I’m Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers." Center for Effective Lawmaking
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In this Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) working paper, the University of Virginia’s Jacob Lollis and Mackenzie Dobson (CEL Graduate Affiliate) look into the effectiveness of LGBTQ lawmakers. The authors expand on earlier research that connects voter discrimination to effective lawmaking and argue that the prejudice that LGBTQ legislators face from voters enables them to be effective lawmakers. To test this, Lollis and Dobson take data on state legislators’ sexual identity and compare it to data on state legislative effectiveness scores (based on research from the CEL). Their research finds that LGBTQ lawmakers are 28% more effective than non-LGBTQ lawmakers. In addition, they use their original measurement which indicates the year the LGBTQ lawmakers publicly came out; they find that such lawmakers who have shared their identity with voters are 43% more effective than LGBTQ lawmakers that have not come out publicly. https://thelawmakers.org/legislative-research/im-coming-out-how-voter-discrimination-produces-effective-lgbtq-lawmakers.
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Pruit, Jean-Marc. 2023. "Black Atlantic Republicans and the Limits of the Plantation." Journal of Haitian Studies
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This article engages with two bodies of literature—the interdisciplinary studies of the Haitian Revolution and republican political theory—to make two corresponding interventions. First, I show how, despite republican political philosophy’s exclusion of the slave from the practice of freedom, Haitian revolutionaries and radical abolitionists—whom I call Black Atlantic Republicans— challenged this exclusion using republican logic. To make this point, I engage with shared understandings of tyranny and domination in David Walker’s Appeal and Toussaint Louverture’s personal correspondence. Second, using Jean Casimir’s notion of the counterplantation system and Louverture’s proclamations on labor, I argue that despite the Black Atlantic universalization of republican freedom, the ideology fails to properly theorize the domination inherent to plantation labor. This inability to theorize labor freedom, I claim, is endemic to republican political thought itself. We can arrive at this insight by centering the revolutionary Haitian masses rather than their leadership. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhs.2022.0005