Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy

Scholarship on elites and foreign policy has made important advances in identifying who elites are, what elites want, and how elites influence foreign policy. This review assesses these advances, focusing on the tension between elites’ expertise, on the one hand, and resentment of elites as selfish or unrepresentative of the people's interests, on the other. What remains missing in the literature on elites and foreign policy are the dynamics of elite politics. The same elites can behave very differently in different settings, and elites frequently do not get what they want on foreign policy despite strong preferences. To understand this variation, we need more research on three kinds of elite politics: how elites attain their positions; their incentives once they arrive in those positions; and how elites relate to each other and to mass publics. Without attending to elite politics, we miss important sources of state behavior. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Social Networks, Mass Publics, and Democratic Politics

The study of social networks as they relate to mass political behavior has roots in foundational social scientific works (e.g., Lazarsfeld, et al. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1944). Huckfeldt and Sprague ushered in the contemporary era of political networks research (e.g., “Networks in Context: The Social Flow of Political Information” in American Political Science Review 81.4 (1987): 1197–1216, and Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), picking up on the Columbia scholars’ early efforts to measure interpersonal influence and the consequences of group memberships in the United States. Drawing theoretical and conceptual distinctions between networks and contexts, Huckfeldt and Sprague popularized survey techniques for measuring individuals’ core discussion networks via name generators, and demonstrated relationships between individuals’ social networks and their opinions and perceptions. Subsequent works by these and other scholars have moved beyond community study designs, examining network effects in the areas of vote choice, attitude formation, and political participation. Major debates have focused on the extent to which individuals are exposed to disagreeable information via their social contacts (e.g., Mutz. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006); questions about causality (e.g., McClurg, et al. “Discussion Networks” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and the identification of mechanisms of influence (e.g., Sinclair. The Social Citizen: Peer Networks and Political Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Scholars have studied the role of social networks in mass publics around the world (e.g., Gunther, et al. Voting in Old and New Democracies. New York: Routledge, 2016), and how family networks and processes of socialization shape political attitudes. Current work is documenting how factors like gender, personality, emotion, and geography facilitate or hinder social influence; how online and offline worlds intersect; and how scholars can better measure broader patterns of social exposure and interaction.

Ideology: The Psychological and Social Foundations of Belief Systems

Defining ideology as a system of functionally inter-connected political attitudes and beliefs, we review evidence concerning (1) the nature and origins of ideology in mass publics and (2) the social and interpersonal nature of the motives underlying ideological coherence. One key conclusion that we draw is that the links between psychological attributes and subsets of ideological attitudes sometimes appear to be organic and functional but other times appear to be conditional on how the relevant attitudes are packaged with other attitudes into socially constructed ideologies. A second key conclusion is that the social motives that induce citizens to pull diverse attitudes into ideological alignment may also, in polarized contexts, induce people to adopt non-political identities and self-perceptions that are congruent with ideological stereotypes. We recommend a focus on the implications of these processes for polarization and democratic stability.

Off-Cycle and Off Center: Election Timing and Representation in Municipal Government

Who governs America’s cities: organized interests or mass publics? Though recent scholarship finds that local governments enact policies that align with citizens’ preferences, others argue that it is organized interests, not mass publics that are influential. To reconcile these perspectives, we show that election timing can help shed light on when voters or groups will be pivotal in city politics. Examining 1,600 large US cities, we find that off-cycle elections affect city policy responsiveness asymmetrically, weakening responsiveness on those issues where there is an active and organized interest whose policy objectives deviate from the preferences of the median resident. Here, we focus on public employees’ interests and find that local governments that are elected off cycle spend more on city workers than would be preferred by citizens in more conservative cities. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of interest groups and representation in local politics.

Quiet Politics in Tumultuous Times: Business Power, Populism, and Democracy

This article comments on a special issue of Politics & Society that examines “quiet politics” and the power of business in an era of “noisy politics.” The scholarship brought together in the issue shows that the world of business has indeed changed in the decade since Quiet Politics and Business Power was published, but also that quiet politics as a mode of low-salience interest advocacy seems alive and well. Building on this research, the article analyzes the different ways in which the rise of populist, noisy politics challenges business, how it challenges scholars studying business power, and how it challenges the functioning of the central feedback mechanism connecting political elites to mass publics in democracies—the media.

Pride amid Prejudice: The Influence of LGBT+ Rights Activism in a Socially Conservative Society

How do mass publics react to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+) advocacy efforts in socially conservative societies? We consider how the first-ever LGBT+ Pride in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina influences ordinary citizens’ attitudes and behavior regarding LGBT+ support. Using nationwide and local panel surveys, we find that support for LGBT+ activism increased locally after the Pride but did not diffuse nationwide, signaling how proximity mechanisms reinforce Pride effects. In survey experiments, we show that subjects are responsive to both mobilization and counter-mobilization appeals by local activists. We also find evidence from a behavioral experiment that the Pride had a positive effect on shifting the allocation of financial resources toward local pro-LGBT+ activists and away from opposition groups. Finally, in-depth interviews with local LGBT+ activists underscore the challenges facing LGBT+ activism in socially conservative societies but also point to the substantial possibilities of collective action on behalf of minorities at risk.

Radicalization to Terrorism

Terrorism and radicalization came to the forefront of news and politics in the US after the unforgettable attacks of September 11th, 2001. When George W. Bush famously asked "Why do they hate us?," the President echoed the confusion, anger and fear felt by millions of Americans, while also creating a politicized discourse that has come to characterize and obscure discussions of both phenomenon in the media. Since then the American public has lived through a number of domestic attacks and threats, and watched international terrorist attacks from afar on television sets and computer screens. The anxiety and misinformation surrounding terrorism and radicalization are perhaps best detected in questions that have continued to recur in the last decade: "Are terrorists crazy?"; "Is there a profile of individuals likely to become terrorists?"; "Is it possible to prevent radicalization to terrorism?" Fortunately, in the two decades since 9/11, a significant body of research has emerged that can help provide definitive answers. As experts in the psychology of radicalization, Sophia Moskalenko and Clark McCauley propose twelve mechanisms that can move individuals, groups, and mass publics from political indifference to sympathy and support for terrorist violence. Radicalization to Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know synthesizes original and existing research to answer the questions raised after each new attack, including those committed by radicalized Americans. It offers a rigorously informed overview of the insight that will enable readers to see beyond the relentless new cycle to understand where terrorism comes from and how best to respond to it.

How are Mass Publics Radicalized to Support Terrorism?

How can overreaction to a terror attack build support for terrorists (jujitsu politics)? A group of nobodies get together and declare war against some massive entity like the cell phone industry, perhaps because they believe the radiation is harmful and the towers are a blight....