Authoritarian regimes have increasingly leveraged foreign media to project influence within democracies, yet evidence of these co-opted outlets’ actual effects remains scarce. This study presents findings from a field experiment conducted during Taiwan’s 2020 general election, assessing the impact of The China Times, a Beijing-backed media conglomerate, on voter behavior and attitudes. The experiment incentivized participants to engage in sustained consumption of real-time news from this outlet in the weeks leading up to the election. Results from a panel survey linked to individual-level web-tracking data reveal that exposure to The China Times sways voters in favor of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These effects, however, are primarily driven by nonpartisan and PRC-friendly voters. To the extent that I find effects among PRC-skeptics, they show evidence of backfiring. As Beijing’s media co-optation extends beyond Taiwan, my findings have broader implications for understanding the effectiveness and limitations of authoritarian influence operations.

Only 15% of African households possess a formal title for their agricultural land, despite the widespread availability of titles and their documented benefits. Local politics combine with national land regimes to explain this empirical anomaly. I combine 170,216 household-level observations of titling across 22 African countries with a novel geospatial measure of land values and the returns to agricultural investment. Households in areas with high returns to potential agricultural investment title more. However, in countries with centralized land tenure regimes, strong customary institutions attenuate this relationship; in countries with decentralized land regimes, strong customary institutions reinforce it. I use a case study in Côte d’Ivoire, including an original survey of 801 households and 194 customary elites, to trace these mechanisms at work. This research documents granular variation in the uptake of land titles, illustrates how local politics explain this variation, and outlines conditions under which customary elites impede development.

How can governments in racially divided societies protect vulnerable populations from political violence after large-scale internal conflict? When the dominant majority is bent on perpetuating its power and privileges in the racial hierarchy, benevolence by government interveners is unlikely to curb oppressive violence against subordinate groups. There is thus no alternative to using military coercion to crush insurgents and their civilian supporters. However, failing to maintain this coercive apparatus can exacerbate violence over the long term by triggering racialized revenge dynamics, particularly in communities that were occupied by troops of the subordinate minority. To substantiate these claims, we show that different parts of the postbellum American South experienced uneven spikes in white supremacist violence following the end of federal military occupation in the 1870s: counties that had previously been occupied by Black troops witnessed higher incidences of anti-Black violence than other areas. This effect persisted for many decades, contributing to the dismal climate of violence that prevailed during the nadir of American race relations.

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.

What explains the demand and supply of criminal governance? Contrary to traditional explanations of criminal governance as top-down control, this study integrates bottom-up demands for assistance and top-down supply of aid and coercion. We argue that the demand for criminal governance stems from civilians’ drive to satisfy their primary necessities, while security concerns motivate criminals to supply governance to prevent civilian resistance. The theory focuses on three main factors: economic difficulties, articulation/resistance capacity, and government response. The empirical strategy uses multiple list experiments conducted in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. On the demand side, results indicate that economic difficulties and civilian articulation capacity shape the demand for criminal aid. On the supply side, criminals largely neglect people’s economic needs. When criminals help, they do it for cheap and to neutralize potential civilian resistance or to compete against the state. However, when economic conditions worsen, criminals revert to imposing lockdowns.

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.

Democratic theorists hold that voting contributes to some political good: individual and collective autonomy, equality, justice, pluralism, stability, better policies, and many others. But elections are common under authoritarianism, and empirical research finds that holding elections can stabilize authoritarian regimes. This creates what we term the democrat’s dilemma, where citizens who vote in authoritarian elections may bolster the regimes they wish to unseat, even when they cast a vote for the opposition. We identify three major ways of thinking about the democratic value of electoral participation—justice-based, epistemic, and proceduralist approaches—and use them to examine the complex moral considerations that confront voters in authoritarian regimes. We contend that authoritarian elections’ residual democratic value can justify voting, even when doing so could further entrench the autocrat. Our argument also implies that the democratic principles that justify voting in authoritarian elections oblige citizens to choose the most democratic alternative.

A paradox has emerged in the growing literature on the legacies of the precolonial past: areas home to precolonial centralized polities are associated with beneficial long-run outcomes in some studies, but harmful ones elsewhere. This article introduces an original dataset of precolonial African states in the nineteenth century to explain this seeming contradiction. By developing a typology of precolonial statehood, I show that there is no single legacy of the precolonial past. Rather, statehood only increases civil conflict where political power was highly concentrated in a polity. Where political authority was more diverse, conflict prevalence is lower. A largely inverse pattern holds for development outcomes. These findings, and the associated dataset, suggest promising new pathways for understanding not only the legacies of Africa’s precolonial past, but the study of comparative state-building, which has largely relegated the African experience to a single story.

Can material reparations change political participation? To examine whether material reparations can increase political engagement among survivors of state violence, I use content analysis of survivor testimonies, interviews, and plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of reparations approval for surviving victims of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. After being approved for reparations, survivors are more likely to register to vote compared to those not yet enrolled in the reparations program. I present evidence that the symbolic value of reparations payments holds particular significance for survivors and suggest that the transitional justice experience provides an opportunity for them to revise their views of the state. These findings indicate that in post-violence contexts, policy experiences can be a consequential determinant of future political behavior, potentially expanding electoral engagement as societies move toward building peace and consolidating democracy.

This paper uses the gradual expansion of the European railway network to investigate how this key technological driver of modernization affected ethnic separatism between 1816 and 1945. Combining new historical data on ethnic settlement areas, conflict, and railway construction, we test how railroads affected separatist conflict and successful secession as well as independence claims among peripheral ethnic groups. Difference-in-differences, event study, and instrumental variable models show that, on average, railway-based modernization increased separatist mobilization and secession. These effects concentrate in countries with small core groups, weak state capacity, and low levels of economic development as well as in large ethnic minority regions. Exploring causal mechanisms, we show how railway networks can facilitate mobilization by increasing the internal connectivity of ethnic regions and hamper it by boosting state reach. Overall, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the effects of European modernization on nation building.

Ethnicity is an important cleavage in Africa, yet its influence on voting is contested. Selection biases from restricted choice sets complicate micro-level analyses, while ecological inferences and unobserved confounders hamper meso and macro-level approaches. Our new Covoting Regression (CVR) tackles several of these challenges. It estimates the effect of coethnicity on the probability that pairs of voters covote for the same party while conditioning on other shared characteristics. Thereby, CVR mirrors the micro-foundations of aggregate indicators such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index. We analyze Afrobarometer surveys from 28 countries and estimate that coethnicity increases covoting intentions between respondents by 17 percentage points. Politically relevant groups and covoting for ethnic parties drive this estimate, which is consistent across institutionally diverse countries and at least four times larger than that of other cleavages. The CVR addresses key issues in studying electoral consequences of socio-economic cleavages and bridges gaps between levels of analysis.

Public allegations of international law violations are common in international politics. When do these accusations generate international backlash for governments? We argue that political costs hinge on a rhetorical battle to shape perceptions of the government’s behavior. Governments use strategic messaging to contest information, challenge the appropriateness of international law, or cite extenuating circumstances. International organizations (IOs) counter government rhetoric to reinforce the law. These competing messages shape support for punishment among citizens and political elites. We test our argument with survey experiments measuring perceptions of alleged military aggression and human rights violations. Among the US public and a global sample of diplomatic elites, foreign government denials and claims about mitigating circumstances reduce punitive attitudes. IO rebuttals counter denials but can only partially neutralize other claims. We offer a new framework for analyzing the politics of noncompliance and present novel evidence illuminating the strengths and limitations of IOs in enforcing international law.

One of the persistent obstacles to trade liberalization is a government’s inability to commit and deliver compensation to trade losers. We argue that constitutional structures interact with the geographic profiles of industries to shape a government’s ability to commit to a compensation contract, defined as an interbranch contract whereby an executive branch promises compensation in exchange for legislative support for ratification. Our theory predicts that parliamentary systems are more likely to liberalize and compensate geographically concentrated industries because party leaders enforce a contract with a smaller number of legislators. Presidential systems are more likely to liberalize and compensate geographically diffused industries because legislature enforces a contract with a larger number of legislators. Using novel product-level data on agricultural trade liberalization and remote-sensed cropland in 38 democracies, we find evidence consistent with our argument. Qualitative studies of the sugar industry and interviews with policymakers provide further evidence.

In recent decades, political theorists have drawn on historical thinkers to explore how political elites can be held accountable. Rousseau, however, is often dismissed as reducing accountability to elections and participation to occasional ratification referenda. This article challenges that view. While Rousseau expected an elective aristocracy to execute laws ratified by the people, he also identified two mechanisms—scrutiny and recall—through which citizens could control these representatives. After reconstructing Rousseau’s account, I consider how these mechanisms could be adapted to contemporary democracies. Focused on executive accountability, the model is particularly suited to presidential systems with directly elected presidents. It combines a national jury—a citizens’ assembly chosen by lot and tasked with examining presidential actions—with the possibility of a recall referendum. By uniting deliberative scrutiny with the power to remove the head of state, this approach offers an underexplored complement to recent anti-oligarchic institutional innovations based on sortition.

Green transition policies set long-term targets to reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants, posing a threat to workers in polluting occupations and communities reliant on them. Can far-right parties attract voters who anticipate losing from the green transition? We explore this in Germany, which has ambitious green policies and a large workforce in polluting occupations. The far-right AfD started campaigning as the only party opposing green transition policies in 2016. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show AfD support increased more in counties with larger shares of employment in polluting occupations once the AfD adopted an anti-green platform in 2016. A panel survey demonstrates that individuals in these occupations also shifted toward the AfD. Probing mechanisms, we find that far-right support may stem from shifting perceptions of social stigma and lower status. Our results highlight the need for a new research agenda on backlash against the normative dimension of the green transition.

How can public agencies become more responsive to marginalized citizens? We develop a theory of bureaucratic responsiveness as the product of resources, representation, and recognition. While material investments and inclusion of marginalized personnel are insufficient in passive forms, they can be jointly activated through institutional recognition: organizational dynamics that enhance a social group’s visibility and ascribe value to efforts to meet their needs. We illustrate this in the domains of policing and gender, examining station-level Women’s Help Desks in India. Combining a large-scale experiment and sustained qualitative research, we reveal how the desks—when staffed by female officers—increased police responsiveness to women’s cases. This occurred as female personnel actively used help desk resources to build professional standing while supporting women. These gains, however, were constrained by patriarchal norms that limit reporting and prosecution of gender-based violence. Our findings illuminate possibilities and challenges of institutional change in unequal settings.

Political decentralization is often undermined by elite capture of the local state. In unequal contexts, contemporary accounts highlight that local executives lack de facto political authority because they are sidelined by unelected elites. This article investigates one purported institutional remedy: direct elections. Direct elections are promoted as a tool of democratic deepening that empowers local executives by disrupting elites’ hold on political institutions. Exploiting a quasi-experiment in rural Maharashtra, India, I find that direct elections increase the de facto authority of local executives. However, I find no evidence of disrupted elite dominance. Instead, I argue that direct elections shift the mode of elite capture from informal to formal channels. I use over two years of qualitative fieldwork, original survey and administrative data, and a vignette experiment to substantiate these claims. This study underscores the limitations of reforms to bring democracy “closer to the people” in contexts of entrenched elite dominance.

This article examines the problem of racialized vulnerability to systemic violence by engaging with the works of Judith Butler and discussing police brutality. Butler has been criticized for presupposing vulnerability as an ontological condition inherent in embodied life and obscuring the distinctive characteristics of racialized vulnerability. Wrestling with these criticisms, the article reads this presupposition as a “contingent foundation,” and it turns to Butler’s longstanding engagements with phenomenology to foreground the norms and frames that inform the ways in which vulnerability is always perceived, interpreted, and adjudicated. Expanding on Butler’s analysis of the 1992 Rodney King trial with the help of Frantz Fanon’s concept of “sociogeny” and working with the trial archives, jurors’ statements, media coverage, and King’s memoir, it outlines a critical phenomenology inquiring into the sociohistorical constitution of racial schemas that turn Black bodies into phobic objects and disproportionately expose them to violence carried out with impunity.

A decisive voter’s exact ideological preferences can be hard to predict, even for seasoned candidates. We develop a novel theory of electoral competition where candidates are evaluated on ideological and nonideological dimensions. The key feature of our theory is that an electorate’s partisan leaning serves as a signal of the median voter’s ideological position where extreme leanings are more informative about voters than centrist leanings. We show that this leads to an endogenous sorting of districts between “extreme” and “centrist” and that an increase in the importance of candidate competence for voters increases polarization—but only in extreme districts. We evaluate our theory using data from mayoral elections in Brazil’s 95 largest municipalities and exploit COVID-19 as a shock to the salience of candidate competence. We show that COVID-19 increases the salience of competence in these elections, leading to increased political polarization, which is concentrated in cities with extreme partisan leanings.

Research on partisan expressive responding suggests that the beliefs people express in surveys are more partisan than their underlying perceptions. This article examines the scope and importance of expressive responding through a meta-reanalysis of 44 studies from 25 articles. On average, treatments designed to reduce expressive responding shrink measured partisan bias by about 25%. Across the 242 survey questions in the data, treatments increase the correlation between the average Democrat’s and Republican’s beliefs from 0.81 to 0.86. Contrary to expectations derived from the two leading theories of expressive responding, misreporting (“cheerleading”) and congenial inference, there is no evidence that expressive responding increases in partisan identity strength or educational attainment. As research on expressive responding enters its third decade, greater emphasis on design-based tests of mechanisms may help build a firmer understanding of the nature and substantive importance of expressive responding—namely, whether the forces that produce expressive responding in surveys also shape real-world political judgments.