We use newly digitized records from the post office to study the effects of strengthened state capacity between 1875 and 1901. Exploiting the implementation of the Pendleton Act—a landmark statute that shielded bureaucrats from political interference—across US cities over two waves, we find that civil service reform reduced postal delivery errors and increased productivity. These improvements were most pronounced during election years when the reform dampened bureaucratic turnover. We provide suggestive evidence that reformed cities witnessed declining local partisan newspapers. Separating politics from administration, therefore, not only improved state effectiveness but also weakened the role of local politics.

Debates over racial voting, and over policies to combat vote dilution, turn on the extent to which groups’ voting preferences differ and vary across geography. We present the first study of racial voting patterns in every congressional district (CD) in the United States. Using large-sample surveys combined with aggregate demographic and election data, we find that national-level differences across racial groups explain 60% of the variation in district-level voting patterns, whereas geography explains 30%. Black voters consistently choose Democratic candidates across districts, whereas Hispanic and white voters’ preferences vary considerably across geography. Districts with the highest racial polarization are concentrated in the parts of the South and Midwest. Importantly, multiracial coalitions have become the norm: in most CDs, the winning majority requires support from non-white voters. In arriving at these conclusions, we make methodological innovations that improve the precision and accuracy when modeling sparse survey data.

We offer a new perspective on how cultural markets are structured and the conditions under which innovations are more likely to emerge. We argue that in addition to organization- and producer-level factors, product features—the locus of marketplace interaction between producers and consumers—also structure markets. The aggregated distribution of product features helps producers gauge where to differentiate or conform and when consumers may be more receptive to the kind of novelty that spawns new genres, our measure of innovation. We test our arguments with a unique dataset comprising the nearly 25,000 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chart from 1958 to 2016, using computational methods to capture and analyze the aesthetic (sonic) and semantic (lyrical) features of each song and, consequently, the market for popular music. Results reveal that new genres are more likely to appear following markets that can be characterized as diverse along one feature dimension while homogenous along the other. We then connect specific configurations of feature distributions to subsequent song novelty before linking the aesthetic and semantic novelty of individual songs to genre emergence. We replicate our findings using industry-wide data and conclude with implications for the study of markets and innovation.

In property insurance claims triage, insurers often use static information to assess the severity of a claim and to identify the subsequent actions. We hypothesize that the pattern of weather conditions throughout the course of a loss event is predictive of the insured losses, and hence appropriate use of weather dynamics improves the operation of insurers’ claim management. To test this hypothesis, we propose a deep learning method to incorporate dynamic weather information in the predictive modeling of the insured losses for reported claims. The proposed method features a hierarchical network architecture to address the challenges in claims triage due to the nature of weather dynamics. In the empirical analysis, we examine a portfolio of hail damage property insurance claims obtained from a major U.S. insurance carrier. When supplemented by dynamic weather information, the deep learning method exhibits substantial improvement in the hold-out predictive performance. We further design a cost-conscious decision strategy for triaging claims using the probabilistic forecasts of the insurance claim amounts. We show that leveraging weather dynamics in claims triage leads to a reduction of up to 9% and 6% in operational costs compared to when the triaging decision is based on forecasts without any weather information and with only static weather information, respectively. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

How might our analysis of fascism be enriched if we turn our attention to how contemporary supremacist movements self-fashion themselves as more-than-human formations? How is fascist politics naturalized through claims that it is fueled by the agency and vitality of not just humans but also other-than-humans? How do right-wing supremacists’ assertions that theirs is an indigenous more-than-human politics that suffered but endured the violence of colonialism support the framing of fascism as a decolonizing project? In this article, we ground these questions in an ethnographic analysis of what we call the more-than-human turn in contemporary Hindu-supremacist politics in the northwestern Himalayan region, focusing specifically on two political projects: the Hindu right-wing's rediscovery of “ancient” Hindu rivers and communities in Ladakh and cow protection in Uttarakhand. In contrast to ontological anthropologists who suggest that cosmopolitics is plural and liberatory, we demonstrate how the inclusion of nonhuman entities in political life can serve to naturalize a fascist politics that seeks the extermination of those who are not part of the natural order of life. We urge anthropologists to make room for skepticism and critique in their analysis of cosmopolitical formations instead of prematurely celebrating “ecopolitics” as anti-Western and anticolonial.

This paper takes the late Qajar court and harem as a historically specific site through which we can examine the complex and diverse histories of slavery within the region in the nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which hierarchies of race, gender, and sex functioned as constitutive elements of this institution. I examine a particular albeit very elite site, Nasir al-Din Shah’s harem, occupied by a variety of enslaved and formerly enslaved constituents who were a product of the evolving slave trade. The essay ends by zooming in on the lives (and afterlives) of two eunuchs, Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram, who were part of the servant class of Gulistan Palace during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign, and whose life trajectories offer us some insight into the racial and gendered legacies of late nineteenth-century slavery in Iran.

Although the American Psychological Association has taken a strong antiracism stance, scientific racism continues to be published in psychology journals and scholarly books. Recent articles claim that the folk categories of race are genetically meaningful divisions and that evolved genetic differences among races and nations are important for explaining immutable differences in cognitive ability, educational attainment, crime, sexual behavior, and wealth; all claims that are opposed by a strong scientific consensus to the contrary. These claims remain a serious source of harm through the naturalization of inequality and through support for the work of racial extremists. Contemporary “racial hereditarian research” claims to rest on modern genetics and evolutionary biology and to draw on their methods, such as genome-wide association studies. These new arguments fail to meet the evidentiary and ethical standards of these disciplines for the study of human variation. If psychology adopted standards from genetics and evolutionary biology, the current racial hereditarian work would be ineligible for publication. Actions that the American Psychological Association can take to deal with scientific racism are described.