{"title":"Does the Second Amendment Make Gun Politics Obsolete?","authors":"Joseph Blocher, Andrew Willinger","doi":"10.1086/724162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724162","url":null,"abstract":"InAmerican law, the boundaries of regulation are set by—among other things— politics and the Constitution. Either one can serve as a constraint. Regulations that are politically unpopular or otherwise unfeasible are non-starters regardless of whether they satisfy the Constitution. Regulations that violate the Constitution, on the other hand, may be tremendously popular but will often be struck down by courts. The line between these political and constitutional constraints is never entirely clear, as political rhetoric and constitutional doctrine borrow from one another in innumerable ways. Elected officials take oaths to uphold the Constitution; judges often act in ways that appear political. But in a broad sense, judges are more commonly associated with the enforcement of constitutional law and regularly deny that they are doing politics—a matter for elected officials. Recognizing some slippage between the categories, we can draw a line between judge-enforced constitutional law and democratic politics. Formost of American history, the balance of gun rights and regulationwas set by politics—not, as one might suspect from its prominence in the current gun debate, the Second Amendment. Decisions about gun law were made by elected officials at the federal, state, and local level, responding to different forms of political pressure.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45325055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How the Christian Right Slayed a Monster and Reframed the Religion Clauses in Bremerton","authors":"Joshua C. Wilson, Amanda Hollis‐Brusky","doi":"10.1086/724187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724187","url":null,"abstract":"Abortion and religious liberty remain the core and foundational pillars of the Christian Right, even as the movement’s interests have diversified over the decades. As Jerry Falwell, a founding architect of the movement, stated, Christian conservatives sprang into action because they felt the nation was “virtually driving God from the public square. And then, of course, Roe vs. Wade in the middle of all that.” Two Roberts Court decisions last term thus represent the culmination of decades of dedicated work by the Christian Right. These two cases areDobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned national abortion rights and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the First Amendment case involving the high school coach discouraged from leading prayers on the field after football games. Just like Dobbs, Bremerton is the product of a decades-long investment in building institutions and ways of seeing the world that have marked the rise of the Christian Right. Moreover, this investment in institutions and ideas has succeeded in crystallizing a distinct Christian Right worldview—one centered on the identity","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43833415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Politics of Law: Capricious Originalism and the Future of the Supreme Court","authors":"Susan Liebell","doi":"10.1086/724164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724164","url":null,"abstract":"In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v.Wade, 1 the precedent that had guaranteed access to abortion as a fundamental liberty ensured by the Fourteenth Amendment for almost half a century. Most Americans don’t know much about the Supreme Court or the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization triggered political protests, extensive press coverage, and a wave of voter registration. Candidates for political offices revised their campaign strategies. Millions of dollars were poured into a state-wide referendum on abortion in Kansas. In his majority decision in Dobbs, Justice Alito insisted that the Constitution speaks clearly; abortion is not a fundamental right to be defended by the Court but a policy issue to be determined by the political branches of government. Yet voters are skeptical about whether the Constitution provides such clarity. Polls have consistently shown that people (especially those who identify as Democrats) believe the justices of the Supreme Court are increasingly political, pursuing conservative goals rather than impersonally ruling on constitutionality. Political scientists have","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45763698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Intersection of Direct Democracy and Representative Government: State Legislators’ Response to Ballot Measures","authors":"K. Ferraiolo","doi":"10.1086/724158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724158","url":null,"abstract":"Direct democracy in the United States exists alongside representative democracy as a forum in which citizens participate in the political decision-making process. Through their cooperation or obstruction, legislators can smooth or impede initiative implementation. Existing scholarship has explored legislative attitudes and behavior in limited contexts, concluding that legislators are hostile to direct democracy and seek to undermine its results. In this manuscript, I examine legislative attempts to amend or repeal ballot measures between 2010–2018 across all initiative states. The analysis focuses on the two issue areas most subject to legislative involvement: marijuana legalization and “governance” policies. I conclude that looser rules governing legislative behavior post-passage, narrower vote margins, and marijuana- and governance-related measures generate more frequent, and more extensive, legislative alteration attempts. The analysis advances the literature on legislative interference, providing insight into when, how, and under what conditions state government actors intervene in the initiative process.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44533495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Woke Can a Juror Be? The Jury in the Chauvin Trial, Critiques of Law Enforcement, and a New Model of Impartiality","authors":"S. Chakravarti","doi":"10.1086/724160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724160","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that in normalizing the language of the critique of law enforcement during voir dire in the 2021 trial of Derek Chauvin, three important changes occurred: the first was that Black jurors were less likely to be dismissed for opinions they have long voiced, but which had been seen as the basis for legitimate dismissal, the second was that it clarified what contextual impartiality should mean for the court given widespread scrutiny of the racial discrimination within and outside of the law. Lastly, the topics covered during voir dire served to highlight precisely the types of life experiences that may be valuable for the juror’s task of phronesis, Aristotle’s term for practical wisdom, necessary for deliberation and determining the verdict. The paper includes a close reading of the voir dire responses of several jurors in the Chauvin trial.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42294989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond the Anglo-World: Settler Colonialism and Democracy in the Americas","authors":"A. Dahl","doi":"10.1086/724166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724166","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that delimiting the settler colonial analytic to colonial legacies in the “Anglo-world” risks disavowing its congruent relationship with other colonial ideologies such as those of the Spanish imperial world. In examining Alexis de Tocqueville’s comparisons of Anglo- and Spanish American colonization alongside Latin American writers like Lorenzo de Zavala and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, it shows how they occupied a common discursive terrain in grappling with the prospects for democracy in the new world. For Tocqueville, the failure of Spanish American democracy compared to the United States stems from the different systems of land colonization at work in each context. Sarmiento and Zavala provide different accounts of American colonization that exhibit both intersections with and departures from Tocqueville. Bringing these writers together shows how settler colonial ideologies and imaginaries in the Americas circulated in a shared hemispheric space and reciprocally shaped one another in contingent ways.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49494686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Matthew J. Uttermark, Kenneth R. Mackie, C. Weissert
{"title":"The Color of Discretion: Race and Ethnicity Biases in School Suspension","authors":"Matthew J. Uttermark, Kenneth R. Mackie, C. Weissert","doi":"10.1086/724165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724165","url":null,"abstract":"Racial discrimination in school punishment is well documented but not well understood. We examine the politics of implicit bias as theorized by the Racial Classification Model using two types of school suspensions in a state with large numbers of both Black and Hispanic students. We find important differences in sanctioning patterns with Black and Hispanic enrollment as expected from differing stereotypes of those groups. There are also differences within Hispanic students in Florida—again highlighting the importance of group stereotypes. In addition, we find a spillover effect, where schools comprised of more Black (and to a lesser extent, Hispanic) students have higher suspension rates for not only Black students, but for White and Hispanic students as well.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49067978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On The Edge","authors":"Alyson Cole, Robyn Marasco, C. Tien","doi":"10.1086/722837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722837","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44323828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Catharine A. MacKinnon about Power, Politics, and Political Science","authors":"Robyn Marasco, Alyson Cole","doi":"10.1086/722808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722808","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49657361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexandra Filindra, Beyza E. Buyuker, Noah J. Kaplan
{"title":"Do Perceptions of Ingroup Discrimination Fuel White Mistrust in Government? Insights from the 2012–2020 ANES and a Framing Experiment","authors":"Alexandra Filindra, Beyza E. Buyuker, Noah J. Kaplan","doi":"10.1086/722763","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722763","url":null,"abstract":"Since the 1960s, political elites have used implicit and overt claims that the government discriminates against whites to mobilize white voters. As a result, many white Americans perceive government policies that address racial inequalities as a form of anti-white bias and politicians who criticize racial inequities as hostile to white interests. We hypothesize that white Americans who believe their group faces discrimination are more likely to mistrust the federal government. We test our hypothesis using three American National Election Study (ANES) cross-sectional studies (2012–2020), the 2016–2020 ANES panel, and a survey experiment. Our results show a negative and significant relationship between perceived ingroup discrimination and trust in government in 2012 and 2016 but not in 2020. A lagged dependent variable (LDV) analysis shows that the negative effect of ingroup discrimination remains significant even after an LDV is included in the model, but the reverse is not the case. Finally, a framing experiment suggests that those high on ingroup discrimination beliefs are more likely to think that politicians have an anti-white agenda, while those low on such beliefs are more likely to think that politicians have an anti-Black agenda.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41975129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}