This article presents new evidence on the efforts of states to collect and process information about themselves, their territories, and their populations. We compile data on five institutions and policies: the regular implementation of a reliable census, the regular release of statistical yearbooks, the introduction of civil and population registers, and the establishment of a government agency tasked with processing statistical information. Using item response theory methods, we generate an index of “information capacity” for 85 states from 1789 to the present. We then ask how political regime changes have influenced the development of information capacity over time. In contrast with the literature on democracy and fiscal capacity, we find that suffrage expansions are associated with higher information capacity, but increases in the level of political competition are not. These findings demonstrate the value of our new measure, because they suggest that different elements of state capacity are shaped by different historical processes.

Using the 2012 European Social Survey (ESS), this article provides the first comparative analysis of how conceptions of democracy differ between men and women in 29 countries, and how this relates to their overall satisfaction with and support for democracy. Women tend to consider less important those aspects of democracy that privilege male resources and power, such as representative institutions, political parties, and the media. Instead, women assign more importance to those aspects of democracy that are less prone to reproduce gender inequalities, such as those related to direct participation (i.e., referenda), public justification of government decisions, and the protection of social rights. These differences are small in size but are comparable to the effects of other individual-level characteristics such as income or education. Finally, gendered differences in conceptions of democracy are not associated with different levels of democratic support. Men and women are most supportive of democracy where they are able to develop differentiated views about which aspects of democracy are most important for them.

How should liberal societies select prospective members? A conventional reading of immigration history posits that whereas ascriptive characteristics drove immigration policy in the past, contemporary policy is based on the principle of nondiscrimination. Yet a closer look at the characteristics of those admitted reveals systematic group biases that run counter to liberalism's core moral commitments. This article first discusses liberal states' basic moral obligation to treat their citizens with equal respect. It then identifies ways in which the group biases produced by immigration policy violate that principle, when states either deprive their citizens of fundamental rights or stigmatize them through hierarchical constructions of citizenship. Three mechanisms are presented-structural bias, profiling, and positive selection-by which seemingly liberal admissions policies produce illiberal outcomes. The empirical analysis explores the resulting discriminatory group biases in the context of language and income conditionalities on family migration, excessive demand restrictions against economic migrants, and visa waivers for international travelers. We conclude that immigration reforms that mitigate, if not erase, these morally problematic patterns are within the reach of liberal states.

Through a discourse analysis of French and Swedish legislative debates from 1968 to 2017, this article examines how actors challenge and reinforce dominant ideas about the link between nationality and political rights. We argue that the broader political culture influences which discursive strategiesor 'frames'are more likely to structure parliamentary debates in different national contexts. However, our analysis also shows that legislators sometimes develop new discursive frames in which they reinterpret dominant norms to make them consistent with their views. Through this incremental process of reinterpretation and reformulation of dominant ideas, debates over noncitizen voting rights have chipped away at the link between nationality and political rights. Our findings suggest that initiatives to enfranchise non-citizens trigger lower levels of conflict when they can be framed as a policy tool for immigrant integration rather than as a matter of popular sovereignty.

Previous research shows that wars contributed to the expansion of state revenues in the Early Modern period and in the twentieth century. There are, however, few cross-national studies on the long nineteenth century. Using new unbalanced panel data on wars and public revenues from 1816 to 1913 for 27 American and European countries, this article provides new evidence that military conflicts very rarely triggered lasting increases in public revenues during those years. We argue that the uneven diffusion of military innovations reduced the probability that international wars would be sufficiently intense to push state actors to seek additional resources. Moreover, the distinction between international and civil wars was blurred by the opportunities for non-state actors to mobilize military forces comparable to those of the state. Therefore, only very intense international and civil wars had a lasting impact on state revenues, but such conflicts were extremely rare, both in Europe and the Americas.