Polihot

AJPS — 2026-03-25 Original Mutual restraint in nondemocratic legislatures Sarah Hummel Abstract Abstract Nondemocratic regimes sometimes benefit from tolerating the expression of critical opinions and visions for policy in their legislatures. Doing so enables them to gather important information about societal preferences, to co‐opt potential challengers, and to address other threats to their control. In these cases, regimes and deputies exhibit mutual restraint: deputies respect regime‐set limits on their freedom to express critical opinions, while regimes refrain from punishing deputies for expressing negative views when the stakes are acceptably low. By examining both the responsiveness of individual deputies and how regimes police the limits of acceptable behavior, we are better able to identify both the functions and strengths of nondemocratic legislatures. I illustrate these dynamics using data about deputy voting behavior and legislative success in the Kyrgyz Jogorku Kenesh (2016–2020).

AJPS — 2026-03-24 Original Unraveling authoritarian reform decision‐making: A metacognitive–subcognitive model

PMR — pp. 1-28 2026-03-24 Original Navigating financial distress and perceived vulnerability to build (financial) resilience during austerity: An exploratory study on the responses to shocks in local government

CQ 266 pp. 345-364 2026-03-24 Original Explaining China’s High Welfare Spending: Local Models and Drivers of Fiscally Oriented Affordable Housing

APSR — pp. 1-29 2026-03-24 Original Elite Partisan Disagreement and Military Victory: Evidence from South Korean Battle Experiments MICHAEL F. JOSEPH, JOON H. CHUNG, HUI SEONG PARK

PSJ — 2026-03-24 Original Democratic Values in Citizen Participation: What Citizens Prioritize in Participation Take Sipma, Frank Hendriks Abstract ABSTRACT Citizen participation is often initiated to strengthen democracy. While participatory innovations are typically assessed through normative frameworks emphasizing democratic values, little is known about which of these values are prioritized by citizens. This research note presents findings from an original survey conducted in the Netherlands in 2024, investigating which democratic values citizens prioritize in the context of citizen participation. Drawing on Hendriks' (2022) democratic values typology including inclusiveness, process fairness, efficaciousness, resilience and counterbalance, we operationalize five value statements and asked respondents to rank them. Citizens most frequently prioritize efficacious outcomes and fair procedures, while inclusiveness, resilience, and counterbalance receive less emphasis. This pattern highlights the central role of both effective governance and procedural fairness in citizen participation. Value priorities nevertheless vary across citizens: inclusiveness, understood as the inclusion of diverse perspectives, is more strongly emphasized by left‐wing citizens, whereas counterbalance is primarily prioritized by politically dissatisfied citizens, but remains a lower overall priority. These findings offer an exploratory first step in linking normative frameworks on democratic values with how citizens themselves prioritize those values.

APSR — pp. 1-8 2026-03-23 Original What Is the Wrong of Capitalism? A Reply to Chiara Cordelli NICHOLAS VROUSALIS Abstract Chiara Cordelli has recently criticized radical republicans for failing to ground a domination-based anti-capitalism. Cordelli argues that radical republicans “cannot prove either that domination under capitalism is less contingent than other wrongs, that capitalism’s distinctive wrong amounts to domination, or that such domination is unjust.” This article responds to Cordelli’s objections. I argue that Cordelli’s emphasis on capitalization does not threaten the non-contingency of capitalist domination; that capitalism’s distinctive wrong is domination and not alienation, and that this wrong is structural all the way down. Cordelli is right that capitalism involves alienation of our future to the vagaries of profit-maximization. But alienation is only a moment in capitalism’s fundamental wrong and ill—the domination of labor by capital.

APSR — pp. 1-20 2026-03-23 Original The Effects of Exposure to New Electoral Rules: Field Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone AVI AHUJA, GWYNETH MCCLENDON Abstract How do electoral rules influence voters? We build on existing research that has examined voter, rather than elite, reactions to electoral rules and implement a field experiment around a switch from single-member plurality rules to multi-member closed-list proportional rules (PR) in Sierra Leone, expanding the study of electoral rules’ influence on voters further into the Global South. We find that exposure to multimember district/PR increased women’s commitment to voting and decreased both men’s and women’s support for particularistic campaign appeals in this context. These results likely flow from voters’ perceptions of whether politicians are accountable to parties or to voters under different systems, rather than from increased party competition, new party entry, a clear switch to programmatic party competition, or increased trust in elections. We discuss the implications for studying electoral rules in clientelistic democracies.

APSR — pp. 1-22 2026-03-23 Original Do Elites Know Best? Candidate Selection and Policy Implementation in Postindependence Tanzania JEREMY BOWLES Abstract How do candidate selection processes shape policy outcomes? Studying Tanzania’s initial single-party legislative elections, I assess how electing candidates preferred by party elites affected policy implementation, which emphasized rural development during this period. Leveraging the deterministic assignment of ballot symbols—which was orthogonal to candidate characteristics but had large electoral effects—finds that their election substantially increased the supply of salient local public goods. Assembling novel candidate-level data, I document that elites prioritized candidates’ national prominence while voters prioritized their local ties. Rather than representing misaligned incentives, the results are consistent with elites, in an incipient regime, more quickly understanding which characteristics would matter for candidates’ performance in office. Beyond highlighting novel conditions under which elite-led candidate selection facilitates responsiveness, the results underscore the distributive consequences of candidate selection even in nondemocratic settings.

PMR — pp. 1-27 2026-03-22 Original The contested nature of New Public Governance as a third governance model Nicolette van Gestel, Ewan Ferlie Abstract This article examines New Public Governance (NPG), emphasizing the underexposed role of the national state. Focusing on Dutch labour market policy, it draws on document analysis and (group) interviews with 74 public and private stakeholders across national and subnational levels. While NPG principles are evident in network composition and collaboration, interaction between policymaking and implementation remains limited, indicating weak NPG diffusion. A longitudinal analysis over more than a decade, reveals structural barriers to interactive decision-making and performance enhancement. The findings point to a multifaceted form of state steering that generates divergent institutional arrangements and shifting power dynamics, with significant implications for governance and policymaking processes.