Polihot

APSR — pp. 1-12 2026-07-30 Original A Democratic Theory of Labor Unions STEVEN KLEIN Abstract Recently, political theorists have been increasingly concerned with the implications of democratic values for work. This article contributes to these debates by examining the main vehicle through which workers, historically, have sought democracy at work: the labor union. The article defends a vision of economic democracy that arises from the practice of labor unions. It then emphasizes the distinctive features of labor unions that make them potential vehicles for democracy in other domains. Labor unions are particularly important means of advancing democratic values for three reasons: (1) their ability to appeal to the short- and mid-term self-interest of their members; (2) their anchor in the material reproduction of society; and (3) that they rely on attitudes of cooperation and solidarity among their members. Yet these three features also point to potential limitations of labor unions as laboratories of democracy.

PAR — 2026-07-29 Original The Matthew Effect in American Generosity? Philanthropic Disparities and the Role of Government Support Viviana Chiu Sik Wu, Ji Ma, Chao Guo

GOV 39/4 2026-07-29 Original Legislative Pork‐Barrel Funding and Public Policy Outcomes: The Role of Local‐Level Factors

APSR — pp. 1-12 2026-07-29 Original Is Blood Thicker Than Water(-and-Earth)? Partisanship Geography in Imperial China and the Limits of Quantitative History YAO LIN Abstract Using Wang Anshi’s Reform as a case study, Yuhua Wang’s “Blood is Thicker Than Water” ( American Political Science Review , 2022) argues that geographically dispersed kinship networks incentivize political elites to support the building of a strong state, whereas geographically concentrated kinship networks undermine state building. In this article, I improve the sample with the help of additional historical records and show that the reported correlation fails to replicate when either the control issue or the outlier issue is considered. I then propose two alternative hypotheses on the role of kinship network dispersal in Wang Anshi’s Reform, based on two common explanations of its partisanship geography in Chinese historical scholarship, that is, status competition and policy adaptiveness. After examining those hypotheses respectively, I reflect on the limits of quantitative history that this case illustrates.

APSR — pp. 1-21 2026-07-29 Original Contested Governance and Civilian Prosocial Behavior: Evidence from Lab-in-the-Field Experiments in India BRANDON BOLTE, VINEETA YADAV, BUMBA MUKHERJEE Abstract How does contested governance by states and competing armed actors affect the behavior of the governed? During civil conflicts, rebel organizations frequently provide public goods, judicial arbitration, and security, but these forms of governance often operate alongside local state institutions. Beyond avoiding violence, therefore, noncombatants must navigate the daily uncertainty of local governance by states and armed groups vying for territorial control. This, we argue, shapes their quotidian interactions with one another. Using a series of lab-in-the-field experiments and surveys from Naxal-affected Bihar, India, we find that individuals living under such contested governance exhibit greater interpersonal trust and trustworthiness and less opportunistic behavior. We propose two mechanisms to explain these patterns—fearing intra-community retaliation or substituting for the state with interpersonal reliance. Most evidence is only consistent with the latter. By connecting governance, rebellion, and social capital, this work makes important contributions toward understanding the micro-politics of local order during longstanding armed conflicts.

APSR — pp. 1-9 2026-07-28 Original Still Instrumentally Inclusive STUART J. TURNBULL-DUGARTE, ALBERTO LÓPEZ ORTEGA Abstract Do individuals in Western democracies shift their views on LGBT+ inclusion when exposed to opposition from Muslim out-groups? And is this “homonationalist” responsiveness stronger among anti-immigration individuals? Our article “Instrumentally inclusive [...]” addressed these questions using representative data from Britain (Study 1) and crowd-sourced data from Spain (Study 2). We revisit Study 2 in response to concerns about post-stratification weighting a convenience sample and erroneously inconsistent use of robust standard errors. Varying population reference parameters, weight caps, variance estimators, subgroup definitions, and covariate adjustments, we find strong support for the original findings. Neither reasonable alternative weighting schemes nor corrected variance estimators substantively change the results. In fact, the originally published point estimates are equal to or smaller than the median across alternative specifications. Consistent with the Article, we find that treatment increases support for LGBT+ inclusion in Spain, without consistent identifiable variation by immigration attitudes.

PMR — pp. 1-23 2026-07-28 Original Rethinking plural policing and network governance: internal and external mechanisms in the governance of security Charlotte Geertman, Richard Van Herzeele

PNAS 123/31 pp. e2601690123-e2601690123 2026-07-28 Original Parenthood decisions in uncertain times: Experimental evidence from four countries Arnstein Aassve, Letizia Mencarini, Chen Peng, Samuel Plach, Alonso Roman Amarales, Maria Letizia Tanturri

JPART — 2026-07-28 Original Institutionalized enforcement of administrative compliance: state regulator use of noncompliance burdens Mingxu (Emma) Li, Daniel L Fay Abstract Abstract Administrative burden scholarship typically examines rules and regulations affecting access to public benefits during initial citizen–state interactions. Scholars agree that individual burdens function as “hidden politics” because policy changes during implementation through bureaucratic discretion. Less is known about bureaucratic behavior or hidden politics enforced on third-party service providers maintaining compliance. In this article, we address this by examining noncompliance burdens imposed on abortion providers to understand if regulators emulate peers’ behavior. Using an institutional theoretical framework and administrative records from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (FAHCA) on abortion provider oversight, we construct a directed dyadic event history model using 1540 dyad-year observations to predict isomorphism or divergence of sanction activities across regulatory field offices. We find that regulatory field offices emulate behavior of others based on peer’s previous sanction behavior and oversight workload. We also find that regulators diverge from peers based on the regulatory conditions of their own jurisdiction.

PNAS 123/31 pp. e2606267123-e2606267123 2026-07-27 Original When coordination is avoidable: A monotonicity analysis of organizational tasks Harang Ju Abstract Organizations devote substantial resources to coordination, yet which tasks actually require it for correctness remains unclear. The problem is acute in multiagent AI systems, where coordination cost is directly measurable and can exceed the cost of the work itself. Distributed systems theory provides a precise criterion: Coordination is required when a task specification is nonmonotonic, meaning that as histories grow, new information can invalidate prior conclusions. Here we show that Thompson's classic taxonomy of interdependence maps to that criterion, yielding a decision rule for when coordination is required for correctness. We formalize the correspondence in a bridge theorem, apply the rule to 65 workflows from the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), and (with a calibrated large language model (LLM), 13,417 Occupational Information Network (O*NET tasks), and illustrate it in multiagent AI simulations. Under our decompositions, 74% of workflows and 42% of O*NET tasks are monotonic, implying that up to 24 to 57% of coordination spending is unnecessary for correctness.