Creating Contestation: Adversarial Politics and Institutional Change in Early Modern England asks where one of the defining features of modern elections—public, adversarial political choice—came from. For much of England's early parliamentary history, representatives were not selected through competitive elections in the modern sense. Instead, candidates, patrons, and other local elites frequently bargained over who would be returned to Parliament, with the electorate largely affirming choices already made. During the long seventeenth century, these arrangements began to break down and contested elections became increasingly common.

I argue that this transformation cannot be understood simply as the electoral expression of a singular social or ideological cleavage. Contests emerged from failures of coordination among political elites, particularly conflicts among patrons whose authority to nominate representatives had previously rested on relatively stable hierarchies. The book investigates why those arrangements became harder to sustain, examining changes in economic power, religion, Crown–elite relations, the value of parliamentary office, and beliefs about hierarchy, deference, and the legitimacy of open political conflict. The paper uses extensive quantitative data on contestation, candidates, their challengers and the social and economic conditions of England's long 17th century drawn from primary and secondary sources.

The book uses this history to develop a broader account of how decentralized, informal institutions change. Institutional theories often identify conditions under which one arrangement should replace another without explaining how that transition actually unfolds, particularly when institutions are not centralized. I distinguish between the breakdown of an established practice within particular political relationships and the subsequent process through which new behavior spreads, generates new expectations, and becomes regularized. The English case is especially revealing because this transformation was not linear: electoral contestation expanded dramatically, then receded, and eventually became widespread again under different political and social conditions. By tracing these changes from individual electoral disputes to broader patterns of political behavior, the book explains the origins a central institution of democracy, but also the dynamic process through which institutions emerge, stabilize, and transform again.

Political scientists increasingly use conversations as treatments. Sometimes these conversations are conducted by humans, but often and increasingly they will be conducted by generative artificial intelligence (AI). AI makes it possible to scale treatments that are responsive, and rich in real-world relevance. But this same interactivity creates specific challenges for causal inference. A respondent may be randomly assigned to a conversational condition, but the conversation that follows is not merely received by the respondent. It is generated jointly by the respondent and the conversational agent and is thus endogenous to who the respondent is. Consequently, when the theoretical object of interest is the conversation itself – or particular messages, features, or other attributes of that conversation – randomization of assignment does not necessarily identify the causal quantity the researcher seeks to estimate. This paper develops a potential outcomes framework for causal inference with conversations, with broad application but particular relevance to AI-mediated interaction. We distinguish among several causal objects: assignment to a conversational condition, assignment to a conversational policy, opening messages, messages within a conversation, realized conversational features, and the full realized conversation. Each corresponds to a distinct estimand and a different set of identifying assumptions. While some of these quantities are identified by standard randomized designs, others require additional assumptions or research designs, including sequential assumptions, representations of conversational histories, or explicit message-level interventions. The framework clarifies these distinctions and provides a common language for defining, interpreting, and designing conversational experiments as conversations increasingly become objects of causal inquiry.

This paper examines how population growth and urbanization—core processes of modernization—shaped subnational political development in 19th-century Britain. Using new data on the universe of Members of Parliament, I show that constituencies with larger and denser populations followed sharply different political trajectories, experiencing greater electoral contestation and the declining presence of traditional elites. Democratic reform amplified divergent constituency trajectories; particularly by reallocating geographic political power toward growing urban areas, rather than expanding the electorate. By comparing estimation approaches that capture both (i) historical divergence and (ii) marginal causal effects, the paper shows that population is strongly associated with political development in the aggregate, yet has limited causal leverage at the margin. The population revolution mattered for Britain’s political modernization, not because it reshaped local politics through incremental population change, but instead via cumulative, long-run processes that jointly produced both dense, urban populations and a new political class.

How should a scientific community allocate its finite capacity for inquiry? The questions researchers ask condition what they can learn about the world. In political science, one widely invoked criterion for question selection is whether a question is motivated by a “puzzle,” often understood as an empirical observation that contradicts prevailing expectations. This heuristic can generate important insights, but it also shapes inquiry in ways that this paper argues are not fully appreciated. I argue that widespread reliance on this criterion creates a form of selection bias into inquiry. Questions expected to revise existing understanding receive attention, while questions expected primarily to confirm, refine, or increase confidence in existing knowledge are comparatively neglected. A discipline can accumulate an expanding collection of revisions without establishing how much confidence should be placed in the claims being revised. I illustrate this argument using a simple formal model of Bayesian learning. The model demonstrates how puzzle-, and surprise-driven research more broadly, privileges belief revision over the systematic refinement of existing claims with implications for how knowledge accumulates.

A large literature considers the mid-century a key turning point in punitive public opinion in the United States. This article examines racial and geographic heterogeneity in changing public opinion during the mid-century using data on death penalty support from as early as 1953. I find that the punitive turn is characterized by divergence in death penalty support between Black and White people, and that White Southerners grew more supportive than Whites in the non-South from before to after the turn.

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The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) fundamentally changed the distribution of electoral power in the US South. We examine the consequences of this mass enfranchisement of Black people for the use of the carceral state—public and police—post-VRA. Did mass enfranchisement lead to increases in incarceration of Black people? We test this with new historical data on state and county prison intake data by race (1930–1985) in a series of difference-in-differences designs. We find that Section 5 of the VRA increased incarceration systematically in proportion to the electoral threat posed by Black voters. Our findings are robust to several tests of validity and temporal policy comparisons.

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Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act required covered jurisdictions—those deemed perniciously politically discriminatory to minorities—to preclear changes to their voting practices with the Department of Justice. By exploiting the use of a federally imposed threshold for how Section 5 coverage was applied in North Carolina, this article estimates the effect of coverage using a difference-in-differences design. This article finds that Section 5 coverage increased black voter registration by 14–19 percentage points, white registration by 10–13 percentage points, and overall voter turnout by 10–19 percentage points. Additional results for Democratic vote share suggest that some of this overall increase in turnout may have come from reactionary whites. This article finds that Section 5 coverage had a statistically and substantively meaningful effect on enfranchisement, although an effect consistent with the more modest of extant estimates in the literature.