When do groups of citizens organize to resist criminal group presence, and what form does their resistance take? Criminal groups operate across the globe, imposing a variety of costs on local communities. Confronted with these conditions, citizens can either accommodate or contest; when they contest, they choose either to engage or to avoid the state. This article leverages variation in three municipalities across Mexico to illustrate how and why communities react differently to the presence of criminal organizations. While the degree of criminal competition and the strength of preexisting civil society drive whether groups of citizens contest, the degree of local state autonomy from criminal groups shapes the form-state centered or nonstate-that contestation takes. Organized crime is broadly considered an impediment to functioning democracy, but this article demonstrates that its presence can also push citizens in some cases to organize and engage with the state in ways that bolster democracy.
State reach has been linked to civil conflict, democracy, and the power of local authorities. The authors find evidence that state reach may also influence social institutions governing rights to both men and women, thus attempting to change the social institutions govevidence from Malawi to show that state reach is positively associated with the practice of gender-equitable property rights at the community level and household level, even when the importance of two key state reach mechanisms: state information dissemination and access to state forums. This research has implications for the study of the state, modernization, and social institutions, as well as for property rights and gender equality in Africa.
In autocracies, courts are often perceived as tools of the autocrats, with lawyers viewed as lacking influence. The authors reassess these assumptions by examining criminal defense lawyers as "rightful challengers" within China's legal system. Analyzing an original data set of drug cases in Chinese criminal courts from 2014 through 2018, the authors find that when a lawyer is present, judges are three times more likely to reject prosecutors' arguments and twice as likely to deviate from prosecutors' sentencing recommendations.The deviation on average results in sentences that are shorter than the prosecutor's recommendation- shorter by more than two months in addition to the already shorter sentences judges give compared to prosecutors' recommendations. These findings suggest that lawyers can exert a substantial impact on judicial decisions by encouraging judge-prosecutor disagreement, particularly in cases that are less politically sensitive. Original interviews and close examination of lawyers' arguments reveal that the quality of defense is crucial for understanding lawyers' effectiveness in influencing court decisions. These results highlight how seemingly powerless societal actors, such as lawyers, can act as rightful challengers to powerful state actors within authoritarian regimes.
Co-optation and repression are central to understanding authoritarian power sharing, but how autocrats implement these strategies with individual elites remains underexplored. The article proposes a theoretical framework conceptualizing dictators as managers of their ruling coalitions who routinely appoint, dismiss, promote, demote, shuffle, or reappoint elites for a mixture of strategic, nonstrategic, or even mundane reasons. The authors argue that autocrats have agency in choosing between dismissals and reshuffles as general elite management strategies. In the process, they alter the information environment and elite incentives with consequences for their own survival. Although dismissals as a general policy reduce elites'power, they also increase intraregime conflict and uncertainty and tend to have adverse effects on ruler survival. In contrast, reshuffles prevent elite coordination but ensure that elites have a stake in regime continuity. These arguments are tested using novel measures of dismissals and reshuffles in autocratic regimes and communist politburos while also considering the mechanisms and alternative explanations driving the results.The findings suggest that autocratic survival relies more on mundane and nonviolent elite management than seen in the predominantly conflictual accounts of authoritarian politics.
How does land reform occur and under what conditions do land transfers take place? The author argues that to understand contemporary market-driven land reform outcomes, one must examine the supply-side incentives of existing landholders in addition to demand-side explanations. Interviews and descriptive geospatial data from two provinces in South Africa show that landholders made land reform work for them and in doing so the redistribution of land reinforced past forms of segregation. These landholders' strategies were shaped by place-specific historical legacies of racial segregation: Some white farmers-in places in which spatial segregation fell on a rural-urban axis and economic segregation excluded black people from agriculture-used land redistribution to buffer their farms against predominantly black settlements. Other white farmers-in rural areas with dispersed spatial segregation and a large, but different, black farming sector-incorporated black farmers into the commercial value chain via land redistribution. The author's findings have implications for studies of redistribution in highly unequal contexts-that is, market-based redistribution can reinforce historical spatial and economic segregation.
Conventional wisdom holds that authoritarian states bear a cost to social stability for disclosing information. This study investigates the effect of an increasingly common transparency initiative in authoritarian countries: open government information (oc1). By publishing policy information, oc1 allows citizens to identify illegal government behavior. Drawing from the Chinese case, the author theorizes that although such policy transparency reveals whether governments violate laws, it encourages the use of institutional channels for resolving disputes. By redirecting popular discontent from the streets to institutions, such transparency initiatives foster social stability in autocracies rather than threatening it. Using online and in-the-field survey experiments about oc1 on land-taking compensation, the author shows that policy transparency improves citizens' preference for legal and political institutions and causes them to prioritize institutions over protest when they have grievances against the government. Multiple findings about the mechanisms suggest that policy information increases citizens' perceived fairness of institutions in resolving their specific cases.
Voters commonly respond to economic downturns by punishing incumbents. But what about the fate of the opposition? When assessing policymaker performance in tough times, do voters choose an established party with experience as head of government, or an inexperienced challenger? Research on the rise of challengers emphasizes issue opinions and elite strategies. The authors argue instead that perceptions of competence shape voter choices for incumbents, for main opposition options, and for challengers alike. Although selecting unproven challengers is risky, the authors predict that voters are more likely to take a chance when the duration of economic underperformance is long and the government's tenure is short. Depressing the competence of dominant parties opens a window for parties that lack executive experience. A series of analyses provides evidence to support this argument. By showing that parties in opposition can be distinguished on competence grounds, the study's findings widen the lens on how electoral accountability works.
This article investigates whether citizens meaningfully distinguish between profiles of politicians-government ministers in particular-based on the paradigms of democracy that the ministers embody. Although previous research shows that sociodemographic characteristics and political beliefs influence voters' candidate choices, research has paid little attention to whether candidates' representational paradigms influence voters. Using a conjoint experiment conducted across fifteen Western and Eastern European countries, this study examines respondents' preferences for candidates who embody six representational paradigms, which the authors derive from the literature. The findings reveal that citizens value candidates who represent the will of the people and do not belong to a particular political party, compared to those who are affiliated with political parties and are primarily accountable to a parliament. Moreover, the study demonstrates that trustful citizens prioritize candidates who embody a paradigm resembling the well-known responsible party model more than do distrustful citizens, and those with populist attitudes favor candidates with an instructed delegate paradigm and to a lesser extent, a technocratic paradigm.
The population of advanced capitalist democracies (ACDs) has aged substantially in the last decades. Yet we know little about the consequences of aging for the electoral politics of economic performance. This article develops a novel theoretical framework linking aging to lower economic growth in four interrelated steps. First, elderly voters care more about pensions than other voters do, but less about policies related to child care, family, and education. Second, elderly voters are less likely to penalize governments for low growth and unemployment.Third, gray power pushes governments to protect the growing share of budgets allocated to pensions at the expense of more growth-enhancing policies, most notably social and public investments, while also weakening policy responsiveness during recessions. Fourth, this policy reallocation undermines economic growth. The author tests this theory using multilevel and fixed-effects regressions, an instrumental variable approach, and causal mediation analysis on micro-and macrolevel data across twenty-one ACDs from the 1960s onward. The results show that aging fundamentally alters the electoral politics of economic stagnation in ACDs.
Prior scholarship finds that migrants embrace democratic ideals and promote democracy back home, but this work focuses on migration to high-income Western democracies. How does moving to autocracies shape migrants' democratic attitudes and behavior? Leveraging a field experiment facilitating migration from India to the Persian Gulf, the authors isolate the causal impact of migration on migrants' political preferences. After migrating, treated individuals exhibited significantly higher trust in Indian democratic institutions and greater political participation-except for voting, which is difficult to do from abroad. Additionally, they were no more willing to trade democracy for economic growth than control group subjects.The treatment group's political preferences stem from comparing their experiences under democratic and, as migrants, autocratic governments.The findings suggest that migrants value democracy for its political benefits, which outweigh preferences for higher economic development. This article clarifies the mechanisms by which migration shapes preferences for democracy and sheds light on how migration to autocracies shapes politics in sending regions more generally.
Recent decades have seen a sharp but regionally imbalanced expansion of bilateral and multilateral social security agreements (SSAs), which serve to bridge gaps in migrant workers' social protection by facilitating international portability of social rights and benefits. However, our knowledge about the factors shaping this remarkable, yet puzzling, development remains scarce. This study integrates literatures on international cooperation and the migration-welfare state nexus to formulate theoretical expectations about how migration patterns interact with democracy, economic development, and social security design to shape countries' SSA trajectories. The authors analyze a new global dyadic data set that covers almost 1,300 SSA adoptions throughout the post-World War II period. They find that a country-pair's level of development and similarity with regard to these three factors help to account for the countries' likelihood of establishing an SSA, with migration working as a demand driver. These findings help to explain gaps in social protection between migrants and native residents worldwide and suggest how those gaps may be bridged.
How do participatory institutions change over time? Previous research has focused on exogenous changes, such as legal reform or leadership replacement. But institutions also evolve endogenously, through processes of behavioral and compositional change on the part of citizen claimants and government officials. These processes can gradually reshape institutions to become more responsive to either expert or nonexpert claimants. The authors refer to such processes as brokered and grassroots models of social accountability. In the context of Mexico's access-to-information system, the authors employ new machine-learning-generated measures to analyze nearly two million information requests and responses filed between 2003 and 2019. They find evidence that shows claimants becoming more sophisticated over time, and officials becoming more responsive to these expert claimants-both findings consistent with a brokered accountability model. Quantitative and qualitative evidence reveals mechanisms of behavioral and compositional change by citizen claimants and government agents.
Despite high and rising levels of wealth inequality, many advanced democracies have cut taxes on inherited wealth in recent decades. To explain this puzzle, the authors argue that taxing inherited wealth is politically difficult because, paradoxically, the people who have the strongest material interest in higher taxes-low-wealth renters-are those least likely to express a clear opinion about inheritance taxation. Instead, the political terrain is shaped by the preferences of homeowners and their children, who have a strong material interest in lower inheritance taxes. Empirically, the authors first evaluate this argument using original survey data from the United Kingdom. In two survey experiments, they next examine how exposure to information influences views on inheritance taxation. While the authors find no effect of providing statistical information about the distribution of housing wealth, preferences are influenced by explanatory information that explicitly outlines the potential effects of inheritance taxation.
Many states, nongovernmental organizations, and philanthropists use soft power to achieve their political goals. However, we know little about which countries these actors target. The author argues that given the large number of potential targets and the high costs of conducting influence campaigns abroad, soft power entrepreneurs strategically direct their efforts toward those countries in which their campaigns have the best chance of making a difference. The author expects that campaigns predominantly target liberal democracies, since the free exchange of ideas and opinions is likely to generate the intended admiration and attraction. To test this argument, the author draws on hand-coded attendance data from one of the most prestigious exchange programs during the Cold War: Henry Kissinger's International Seminar (1952-1968). Results from numerous tests reveal that liberal democratic countries were more heavily targeted by Kissinger's program than were nonliberal countries.Together, the article shows how (non)state actors strategically influence foreign intellectuals to forge international alliances.
Under what conditions do reforms prompt violent counterreform? Reform threatens elite interests in structurally unequal societies, prompting elites to use their power to counter reform. Although the existing literature demonstrates the material logic of counter-reform, the authors build on critical race theory to argue that elites are more likely to target reforms meant for racially marginalized beneficiaries. The authors test this argument using original data on the largest communal land reform program undertaken in Latin America, the titling of collective lands belonging to Black communities in Colombia, through Law 70: the Law of Black Communities. The article shows that the legal recognition of Black collective property rights increased right-wing paramilitary attacks in municipalities in which Black communities requisitioned formal land titles. In addition, the authors demonstrate that titling reforms for peasant and Indigenous communities faced fewer attacks after legal recognition, relative to Black communities. These findings together offer new insights into the puzzling racialization of Colombian civil conflict since the 1990s.
Through the 1940s, Southern members of Congress strongly supported multilateralism in US foreign policy, backing the United Nations and other multilateral initiatives almost unanimously. But by the end of the 1950s, many of these members had turned against this institutional form. That shift bolstered domestic opposition to multilateralism, with lasting consequences for both US foreign policy and world order. This article assesses two complementary explanations for the change. First, changes in the Southern economy reduced the value of multilateral cooperation. Export-oriented agriculture, particularly cotton, became less important. Labor-intensive industries, especially textiles and apparel, became more sensitive to international competition. Second, multilateral rules on human rights increasingly threatened the South's racial hierarchy. White supremacy provided material benefits to white elites through voter suppression, legal impunity, and labor-repressive agriculture-benefits similar to those they derived from trade protection or access to foreign markets. Integrating these two explanations strengthens them both.
Ambassadors promote domestic exports to a host country and represent the interests of their home country at large. However, are trade benefits equally distributed domestically? In the United States, a substantial number of ambassadors are former governors or legislators-that is, politician ambassadors. The authors argue that these politician ambassadors are particularly equipped with knowledge and incentives to promote exports from their home states to host countries. Leveraging the biographic information of 164 ambassadors and US state-level exports to thirty major export destinations from 2002 to 2020, the authors find that the home states of politician ambassadors, compared to other states, on average enjoy a ten percentage point increase in exports to host countries. The home-state effect is particularly apparent in countries in which the United States exports the most in dollar value, and in industries that export final goods, such as beverages and electrical equipment. The past career paths and future career aspirations of ambassadors can shape how the benefits of diplomacy are distributed domestically.
The authors identify a paradox of perceived discrimination whereby perceptions of discrimination among disadvantaged groups are lower when dominant group attitudes are more discriminatory. This article forwards an explanation for this phenomenon based on the asymmetric effects of education on dominant and disadvantaged groups. Using individual- and school-level European data, the authors argue that education decreases discriminatory attitudes while increasing perceived discrimination through the interplay of cognitive sophistication, liberal instruction, and intergroup contact. At the country level, as education levels have increased over time, discriminatory attitudes have become less prevalent but perceptions of discrimination among disadvantaged groups have increased. The findings suggest that education increases awareness of discrimination among victims more than it decreases prejudice among perpetrators, challenging existing social hierarchies while simultaneously contributing to intergroup tensions.
How does foreign military training shape civil-military relations in recipient states? Existing works have mostly analyzed aggregate indicators of foreign training but paid little attention to the content to which soldiers are exposed. Also, studies have often fallen prey to coupism, thereby ignoring the more subtle ways by which soldiers can influence politics. In this article, the authors disaggregate foreign military training to assess how different course types influence military involvement in politics. They argue that soldiers exert higher levels of political influence when they receive domestically oriented training. Empirically, the authors leverage the wide-ranging dissemination of counterinsurgency training after the Cuban Revolution. They analyze original data on 22,000 course attendances at the School of the Americas to show that counterinsurgency courses increased soldiers' influence over politics, whereas training in conventional warfare stabilized civilian control. Their findings have implications for understanding why and when soldiers capture political institutions and dictate policies.
When faced with unfolding protests, autocrats frequently respond with anti-protest propaganda loaded with negative narratives about protesters. Although a substantial body of literature has suggested that anti-protest propaganda can effectively alter the way the public views protests, few researchers have examined the mechanism through which propaganda negatively affects public support for protests. In this article, the authors explain the role that anti-protest propaganda plays in weakening public support for protests. Using an innovative experiment involving mediation analysis, the authors administered a survey to 950 Vietnamese respondents. The experimental results showed that anti-protest propaganda may deter support for protests more by influencing the audience's beliefs about the intention and capacity of the government than by shaping perceptions of the protesters' legitimacy. This evidence suggests that even when it fails at discrediting protesters, anti-protest propaganda still serves as an effective warning, credibly signaling the commitment and ability of the government to punish protesters and their supporters.
