How and why do concessions, or promises to implement reform in the future, affect protest mobilization in autocracies? Concessions are a routine response to protest and generate a puzzling empirical regularity: Although autocrats often renege once protest abates, concessions can produce demobilization. We develop a model showing that concessions demobilize by exploiting heterogeneity among protesters. A subgroup of moderates, who derive symbolic value from the autocrat’s promise to reform, and a subgroup of radicals, who value only implemented reforms, must coordinate to sustain protest after a concession. Concessions undermine the between-group coordination necessary for protests large enough to prevent reneging. Some moderates demobilize in response to promised concessions, and in turn, declining turnout demobilizes radicals. Even autocrats in highly repressive regimes may concede because concessions and repression demobilize through distinct mechanisms. However, concessions lose efficacy as moderates lose trust in the autocrat. Morocco’s Feb20 movement illustrates the theory.
Are African elections subject to seasonal effects? I argue that agricultural seasonality patterns election outcomes by influencing voters’ retrospective performance evaluations. When countries hold elections after harvests, voters reward incumbents. As the year continues and conditions worsen, voters begin to sour on incumbents. I construct a measure of agricultural seasons using satellite imagery and pair it with an original dataset of 145 executive-election results from 32 countries, as well as with over 100,000 Afrobarometer survey responses. I first show a curvilinear relationship between the time from harvest and support for incumbent executives. Initially, voter support for incumbents increases following a harvest, but this relationship eventually reverses before the next harvest. To account for endogenous election timing, I also examine quasi-experimental evidence from two Zambian by-elections triggered by the deaths of incumbents. Finally, I analyze survey responses to probe for causal mechanisms and find evidence of sociotropic rather than pocketbook voting.
A growing body of research links public service provision to political geographies. Yet an increasing share of services in Western countries is delivered by private companies. This article argues that the political implications of service deprivation extend beyond state-provided services for two reasons: first, because private services support communities through socioeconomic channels, and second, because citizens can hold governments accountable for maintaining access to essential services, regardless of whether they are publicly or privately delivered. To test these arguments, I examine bank branch closures in Spain, which have harmed local economies, reduced financial access for individuals and firms, and generated grievances in affected communities. Difference-in-differences models, survey data, and qualitative protest event analyses show that branch closures fueled protest voting, increased distrust, and heightened economic pessimism among locals. The findings highlight how service privatization can reshape electoral behavior and contribute to political polarization, with implications for regulation and democratic accountability.
Why do autocratic regimes adopt reforms in one domain of gender policy while deferring them in another? Existing literature explains variation in state adoption of gender reforms through feminist mobilization, religious opposition, and policy type. I expand on the literature by developing a framework centered on the authoritarian logic of control and operationalized through carceral logic, which asserts state authority through punitive legal action, and moral domination, which governs through social discipline. I describe the Egyptian regime’s authoritarian logic of control as a macho mode of governance, in which control is performed through toughness and moral authority. Drawing on original interviews and legal analysis, I argue that the Egyptian regime reforms sexual violence laws, where punishment can be instrumentalized and moral discipline asserted, while avoiding family law reform, which requires confronting the patriarchal legal foundations of state power and disrupting alliances with religious authorities. The findings show how internal regime logics shape which feminist demands states act on.
The puzzle posed by the lack of viable parties in Western democracies in the left-authoritarian quadrant of a two-dimensional space likely has demand- as well as supply-side explanations. This paper focuses on the demand side and argues that left-authoritarian voters are internally divided by the extent to which they combine two distinct non-economic preferences: views on the socio-political order (libertarian vs. authoritarian) and views on immigration (cosmopolitan vs. nativist). Leftwing citizens holding the resulting three preference bundles - left-authoritarian-nativist, left-libertarian-nativist, and left-authoritarian-cosmopolitan - have distinct and predictable partisan leanings. This complicates party entry into the left-authoritarian quadrant. Furthermore, existing parties can try to preempt party entry by appealing to a subset of left-authoritarian citizens. Nevertheless, the lack of left-authoritarian parties is likely a fleeting historical phenomenon.
Can public health shocks boost right-wing populism? We investigate how the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted support for populists in Western Europe, an unresolved debate on which surprisingly little systematic evidence exists. Building on theories of populist mobilization in societal crises, we hypothesize a positive aggregate effect driven by declining confidence in public institutions, intensifying hostility toward outgroups, and opposition to government restrictions. Exploiting variation in local COVID-19 incidence stemming from the idiosyncratic timing of early superspreader events, we find a rise in online engagement with populists in regions with higher infection rates. We document a similar increase in populist support in the 2020 French municipal elections and in representative British and Dutch survey data. These varied sources corroborate our three posited mechanisms while casting doubt on possible alternative economic, social, and psychological channels. The findings broaden our understanding of the types of societal shocks that foster extreme politics.
Who helps refugees, and which refugee profiles attract more aid? Drawing on a representative face-to-face survey in Poland (N = 2,500), we examine how dispositional and situational empathy, and their interaction, shape assistance to refugees from the Global South (Syria) and Global North (Ukraine). We find that dispositional empathy, a stable personality trait reflecting the capacity to understand and share others’ emotions, strongly predicts helping behavior. By contrast, a perspective-taking experiment designed to activate situational empathy, a transient, target- and context-specific emotional response, had no effect. A conjoint experiment shows that respondents prioritize refugees in greater humanitarian need over those with higher economic potential, and that individuals with high dispositional empathy are especially responsive to vulnerability cues. By distinguishing between dispositional and situational empathy, integrating behavioral and attitudinal measures of helping, and comparing responses to Global North and South refugees, this study advances the understanding of the psychological underpinnings of prosocial behavior.
Subnational administrative units are fundamental to territorial states and their political topography, but we know little about how their borders are designed. I argue that indirect rulers engage in preservation by ethnically aligning administrative borders, which empowers peripheral actors. In contrast, centralizing governments disrupt ethnic groups and their ability for collective action by splitting groups (dismemberment) and/or creating diverse units (suffocation). I test this argument by studying colonial administrative unit designs in Sub-Saharan Africa. I contrast indirect British with more direct French colonial rule and use new historical data on administrative borders and ethnic geography. Modeling subnational borders with a probabilistic spatial partition model, I find strong positive associations with ethnic boundaries under British compared to French rule, which realized more extensive ethnic dismemberment but not suffocation. The results shed light on colonial administrative unit designs, thus highlighting the importance of unit endogeneity more broadly.
Given that there are few parties in the left-authoritarian quadrant of a two-dimensional ideological space, citizens that combine economically left and socioculturally conservative attitudes have been described as lacking representation. We do not know, however, whether left-authoritarian voters perceive this lack of representation themselves. We collect comparative data that include perceptual measures of parties’ positions across economic and sociocultural issues in ten countries, allowing us to compare the objective and subjective distances between voters and parties. We find that left-authoritarians are objectively the least well represented ideological group but this gap appears to be unnoticed by left-authoritarians. We furthermore uncover that left-liberals systematically perceive the smallest distance to their parties, even though they are not particularly close to them objectively. In showing large differences between the objective and subjective gaps in representation, our work calls into question research that has argued that objective gaps in representation trigger citizen political disaffection.
The electoral success of far-right parties forces mainstream parties to reconsider their strategies towards these challengers. Center-right parties in particular face trade-offs between a principled commitment to non-cooperation and their vote and policy goals. Accommodation may win back conservative voters, yet simultaneously alienate centrist supporters. Existing research has explored accommodation and dismissal primarily in the electoral arena, but less is known about the role of wholesale exclusion - the cordon sanitaire - in the legislative arena. Studying Germany, we examine how voters evaluate the willingness of the center-right (CDU/CSU) to collaborate with the far-right (AfD) in parliament. We show that voters overwhelmingly reject a coalition, while many are willing to tolerate issue-specific cooperation under certain conditions. By uncovering how voters balance principled commitments against instrumental policy goals, this study deepens our understanding of the electoral and democratic consequences of the cordon sanitaire.
Mass mobilization is widely regarded as a key driver of democratic change, yet concerns about its declining impact are growing. We examine how the effectiveness of mobilization in prompting democratic transitions has varied over the period 1900-2019 using formal statistical models. The results reveal pronounced temporal heterogeneity: mobilization has a positive and significant effect on democratic transitions from the early 1980s to the mid-2010s, but no detectable impact before or after. Leader turnover and coup attempts have been more likely to follow mobilization up to the Arab Spring, yet the increasing impact of mobilization after the 1980s is unique to democratization. Trends in commonly cited structural conditions for democracy do not align with the observed variation in mobilization's effectiveness. These findings challenge assumptions of time-invariant effects and highlight the importance of accounting for temporal variation in processes of democratization and political change.
Are there long-term benefits to military service under authoritarian rule? This paper examines whether wartime service or demonstrated loyalty during a civil war protects veterans from repression when a new regime takes power. Using geo-referenced data on World War I veterans, personnel records from the White and Red Armies, and Stalin-era secret police archives, I examine whether veterans of the Russian Empire and Civil War were treated differently during Stalin’s purges. Veterans were systematically targeted regardless of which side they fought on, and formal recognition for battlefield valor increased vulnerability to repression. Three mechanisms account for this pattern: revolutionary regimes perceive veterans as organizational threats; they view loyalty as contingent and untrustworthy; and they rely on bureaucratic records, making veterans legible as targets. For revolutionary autocracies capable of retrospective surveillance, these findings reveal that the very qualities making soldiers indispensable in wartime marked them as liabilities once power was consolidated.
Why are government jobs so attractive to talented individuals in many non-democratic countries? We identify state power as a key factor. We analyze the impact of China’s recent value-added tax reform, an expansion of taxation power, on citizens’ preferences for tax administration positions, as revealed by participation in the National Civil Service Exam. Using a difference-in-differences approach that leverages pre-reform subnational variation in tax composition and a dataset of 166,012 government job openings from 2010 to 2021, we find that the reform attracted more and higher-ability individuals to tax-related state positions. The effect is particularly strong for positions involving greater regulatory power or those located in prefectures with higher graft opportunities. An original survey reveals that exam takers perceive increased power and benefits in tax agencies after the reform. Evidence from Chinese General Social Surveys suggests the talent drawn to the state likely comes from the private sector.
This study leverages the adoption and subsequent abandonment of proportional representation in interwar France to examine how electoral systems shape politicians’ incentives to engage in programmatic redistribution. Using novel data on the legislative initiatives and manifesto commitments of members of France’s Chamber of Deputies, we compare politicians against themselves under different electoral rules. We find that politicians devote more effort to programmatic redistribution under France’s single-member majoritarian system than under the open-list proportional rule, both in parliament and while campaigning. Our results contradict canonical work by economists on the distributive effects of electoral rules, but are consistent with work by political scientists that emphasizes the tendency of electoral competition under open-list PR to devolve into personalism at the expense of programmatic policy. Our findings point to the distributive significance of institutional variation among PR countries and highlight the shortcomings of stylized contrasts between PR and single-member systems.
How do refugee experiences in receiving countries shape their political behavior after return? This article argues that inclusive reception policies that grant refugees political and economic rights can foster civic engagement after return. Leveraging the exogenous assignment of Mayan indigenous Guatemalans to refugee settlements in 1980s Mexico, I find that inclusive hosting increased post-return participation in nonviolent protest by 25 percentage points. The analysis draws on archival sources, an original household survey of 379 returnees, and 48 semi-structured interviews conducted during ethnographic fieldwork in three Guatemalan return communities. It probes four mechanisms plausibly driving this relationship: expectations of institutional responsiveness, increased political efficacy, strengthened organizational capacity, and peer learning. While most existing research focuses on the effects of refugees on host communities and determinants of return, this study examines how host reception policies influence refugee behavior after going home, with implications for post-conflict democratization and refugee policy worldwide.
Decentralization is often promoted as a means of improving public service delivery, strengthening accountability, and enhancing citizen engagement. However, its effects vary widely across contexts. This paper examines how decentralization reforms shaped attitudes toward public service provision in Ukraine. Using a unique panel survey from nearly 200 Ukrainian communities, we show that decentralization increased satisfaction with healthcare and education. Investigating the mechanisms behind this result, we demonstrate that in the Ukrainian case, decentralization improved public service provision not by promoting cleaner governance (i.e., less corruption) or greater spending, but rather because reformer communities - particularly in urban areas - used funds more effectively. Cross-national analysis of 28 European countries confirms that citizens in more decentralized systems report higher satisfaction with locally provided services. Our findings highlight the importance of local administrative capacity in realizing the benefits of decentralization, offering insights for both democratic reformers and post-conflict reconstruction efforts.
Public opposition constitutes an important barrier to refugee and migrant integration in many parts of the world. As a result, scholars have tested a variety of interventions to counteract negative views. We add to the literature on narrative strategies by demonstrating that a light-touch approach-listening to first-person personal narratives from members of an "immigrant outgroup"-can be effective even among those who hold more negative dispositions. We record two personal narratives developed by members of the Somali community in Kenya that highlight: (1) refugee hardships and (2) shared opposition to terrorism. Experimental data from a representative survey in Nairobi show that both treatments have positive effects on intergroup and policy attitudes. The effects are generally as large among those who have more negative predispositions toward Somalis. This approach holds promise as a low-cost, scalable strategy for advocacy organizations seeking to shift attitudes toward immigrant outgroups.
The literature on Political Business Cycles (PBCs) has suffered from two limitations, namely a dominant focus on government policies rather than outcomes that could influence voter behaviour, and a lack of attention to the relationship between PBCs and democratization. Using multiple fine-grained data on objective and subjective outcomes we examine the nature of PBCs in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region which has experienced substantial levels of democratization in recent decades. We demonstrate clear evidence for the existence of PBCs in Sub-Saharan Africa and that the nature of the PBC changes with democratization. Specifically, we show that PBCs in non-democracies focus more on the provision of private goods and less on public goods, with this reversing as countries democratize. These findings, which hold across data sources and are robust to various specifications, have important implications for our understanding of the link between elections and development outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.
Quotas have increased women's representation in politics, yet their capabilities are routinely questioned. This paper examines how these concerns shape the experiences of women politicians in their attempts to coordinate with the bureaucracy. Drawing on an original survey of elected officials in India, I find that women politicians report receiving significantly less assistance from bureaucrats with policy implementation compared to their male counterparts. Using data from a conjoint experiment with bureaucrats, I show that this gender gap is partially driven by bureaucrats' negative perceptions of women's effectiveness as policy implementers. Qualitative interviews and survey data further reveal that women face unique mobility constraints and restrictive social norms, which jointly hinder their ability to build critical networks that can help them overcome bureaucratic discretion. This paper offers one of the first theoretical and empirical accounts for the differential treatment women politicians encounter from bureaucrats, which can undermine their capacity to govern.
Theories of accountability predict that when governments underperform, voters and electoral challengers will hold incumbents accountable. Yet governments frequently fail to deliver on essential responsibilities like public service provision without electoral consequences. I propose that incumbents, knowing how hard problems like public service quality are to solve, proactively "play defense" to keep those issues off the electoral agenda. Local incumbents fear visible protest and viral events. As a consequence, they invest time and resources to prevent negative events from drawing public attention to hard-to-solve issues. Incumbents "playing defense" may even prioritize responding to demands from opposition groups, if those groups wield sufficient public influence. I illustrate this logic with a multi-method case study of piped water provision in Mexico City, using qualitative fieldwork and survey-, administrative-, and social media data. I show how local borough mayors monitored and intercepted disaffected actors to keep piped water off the agenda.
