Abstract Can participatory institutions (PIs) facilitate development when captured by the government? We propose an original theoretical framework to investigate how changing incumbent priorities can shape the developmental and political effects of captured PIs. While patrons concerned with survival can force PIs to specialize in political activities, those pursuing regime consolidation may incentivize PIs to multitask, delivering developmental gains and political rewards. We deploy our framework to study Venezuela's Communal Councils. Leveraging difference‐in‐differences analyses, an original survey of Council participants, and 51 interviews with government officials and grassroots Communal Council members, we find that Councils yielded both economic and political returns during an early period marked by political stability and regime consolidation. However, as Venezuela's economic collapse pushed the government into an authoritarian survival mode, Councils became politically specialized. While showing that captured PIs can foster development under certain circumstances, our findings cast doubt on PIs’ development‐enhancing potential under autocracy.
Abstract Large‐scale fires are becoming increasingly common due to climate change. While conventional wisdom suggests that firsthand experiences with natural disasters foster green coalitions by raising awareness of environmental degradation, we propose an alternative view: Natural disasters can heighten the perceived trade‐off between economic development and environmental policies. This study examines the case of Brazil, where large‐scale fires, by clearing natural vegetation, create new opportunities for land grabbing and the expansion of agriculture and livestock production. Using satellite, administrative, and electoral data, we provide evidence that large‐scale fires increase support for green candidates only in municipalities that are unlikely to reap economic benefits from fires. Survey data further indicate that voters prioritize environmental protection over economic growth only when they stand to receive limited or no benefit from the newly cleared land. Our findings suggest that the potential for natural disasters to foster green coalitions is contingent upon distributive concerns.
Abstract This article centers on the concept of “belonging” to argue that belonging and freedom are fundamentally related, and that this relationship cannot be easily captured in formal terms alone. I contend that experiences of incomplete belonging among citizens deserve attention from political science because, in addition to their more obvious challenge to equality, they also erode freedom, even in the context of robust formal guarantees. Citizens perceived as not fully belonging are more likely to eschew behaviors or opinions they know can exacerbate the likelihood of being perceived as interlopers. But although this challenge to individual freedom may be by itself worrisome, I focus on the ways in which some citizens’ unequal belonging undermines collective freedom—what Hannah Arendt calls political freedom—by confining some people's sincere expressions to narrow public spaces, limiting pluralism, and depleting the public space of opportunities for deliberation and political action.
Abstract We develop the concept of, and estimation tools for, durable majority gerrymanders : electoral district maps drawn to reduce an opposing political party's probability of winning a majority in a legislative chamber. Directly interpretable, forward‐looking, and motivated by the democratic principle that a party in power should have some chance of losing it, this measure provides new insights into the role of redistricting in state legislative elections. We show that, when map drawers are unconstrained, the ability to create durable majorities is so widespread that at least one party in every state can draw a map where a majority of legislative districts withstand almost any likely future electoral swing. Enacted maps are less durable due to a combination of underlying geography, voter partisanship, and state‐level guidelines. This paper provides the theoretical framework and empirical tools to understand which gerrymandered maps enable state‐level majorities to emerge and to endure.
International interventions often aim to reinforce both capacity as well as perceived legitimacy of national security forces. However, how peacekeeping operations manage to improve trust in the national police has received limited attention. In this article, we evaluate whether and how UN missions can (re-)build trust in the national police focusing on the case of Mali. We combine data on UN local deployment and nationally representative survey rounds from the Afrobarometer. We use the wealth of information from the survey to disentangle the mechanisms linking UN peacekeeping to positive changes in trust in national police. Employing a difference-in-difference estimation, we find that respondents in locations that hosted UN police report higher trust toward the national police forces compared to respondents in the control group. We find that this may be due to UN police improving perceptions of safety, accessibility to and integrity of national police forces.
Water is essential for human life, yet governments frequently leave vulnerable citizens to rely on informal channels for access. What can motivate governments to provide public services such as water to citizens trapped in informality? We theorize how accessing state services involves distinct strategic interactions between citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians at different formalization stages. A large factorial field experiment in Mumbai's informal settlements reveals that a bureaucratic facilitation drive significantly improved citizens' ability to access municipal water connections in policy-eligible settlements, but only when combined with a bottom-up political coordination campaign targeting elected officials. While bureaucratic assistance helped citizens through the petitioning stage of the formalization process, political pressure was needed to ensure service delivery in the infrastructural stage more open to political influence. Our findings illuminate how specific citizen empowerment campaigns reshape the incentives of otherwise reluctant bureaucrats and politicians to provide marginalized groups their basic human rights.
Abstract Conjoint survey designs are spreading across the social sciences due to their unusual capacity to estimate many causal effects from a single randomized experiment. Unfortunately, by their ability to mirror complicated real‐world choices, these designs often generate substantial measurement error and thus bias. We replicate both the data collection and analysis from eight prominent conjoint studies, all of which closely reproduce published results, and reveal high levels of measurement error in all. We then discover a common empirical pattern in how measurement error appears in conjoint studies and, with it, introduce an easy‐to‐use statistical method to correct the bias. Along the way, we provide a much simpler and simultaneously more powerful approach to designing, organizing, understanding, and analyzing conjoint data analyses.
State surveillance facilitates the collection of intelligence on dissidents while simultaneously providing information about the value of the status quo. I study this trade-off in a context where an uninformed government must decide whether to repress. Because citizens expect more informed governments to enact greater repression, autocratic surveillance can create a climate of fear. However, surveillance can also stimulate dissent when citizens have access to public information. State surveillance gives citizens an opportunity to coordinate, even in the absence of a preference for such coordination. Surveillance can amplify dissent by enhancing citizens' motivations for political activism aimed at drawing the government's attention to political and economic issues. Coordination distorts government learning, resulting in lower expected levels of repression. The analysis further indicates that the effectiveness of advanced surveillance technology depends on expectations regarding repression, thereby underscoring a psychological aspect of state control.
Prior research on the role the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has improving women's outcomes has shown ratification results in increased political and social rights, yet no improvements in economic rights. I challenge prior findings by providing evidence that CEDAW improves women's economic rights by reducing gendered legal barriers to employment. I also demonstrate CEDAW has unexpected but desirable downstream consequences that further improve women's economic outcomes by facilitating movement from the informal to the formal economy. Through matching within a difference-in-differences design, I show ratifying countries experience a significant increase in women's equality of economic opportunity and a significant decrease in the size of the informal economy. These results hold under multiple robustness checks and placebo tests. By examining specific outcomes that are relevant to CEDAW, I offer greater insight into CEDAW's impact on women's economic outcomes than previous research has afforded.
Most contemporary autocracies hold elections. Does the public value these elections? If so, do they value them enough to punish incumbents that subvert elections? We examine this question in contemporary Russia, examining whether individuals withdraw support from regime leaders when local elections are eliminated. Over the past 25 years, most Russian cities have replaced their directly elected mayors with appointed executives. This paper uses the largest data set on public opinion ever assembled on Russia-over 400,000 responses drawn from two decades by Russia's top polling agencies-to analyze how the elimination of elections in Russia's large cities has affected public attitudes toward the authorities. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that election cancellation reduces support for President Vladimir Putin. This effect is stronger in settings with histories of robust electoral competition. This suggests that the public is more likely to punish incumbents for eliminating elections when individuals have experience with competitive elections.
Polling in the 2020 US presidential elections significantly underestimated Trump support, calling into question the accuracy of all political surveys. Although many have speculated that this bias is due to Trump supporters refusing to respond to surveys, we have previously lacked the data to directly evaluate this theory. This paper leverages the rich and unique set of data collected alongside the 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES) to identify and quantify sources of error using the Total Survey Error framework. We document evidence of nonignorable unit nonresponse; that is, Trump supporters were less likely to respond and less likely to complete the 2020 ANES if they did respond. We are also able to rule out other potential sources of error. Our analyses identify a fundamental threat to political surveys, and careful diagnosis and quantification of the bias is critical for informing corrections and future survey design.
Politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens frequently argue that money has an outsized influence on US politics. Yet research on the effect of money on politicians' behavior finds limited effects, especially on voting behavior. I construct a formal model to show that these limited effects may be an artifact of the institutional powers of agenda setters, and the strategic nature of the data generating process. The model predicts that, under general conditions, vote buying against proposals can occur with no vote held, and that vote buying is most likely when uncertainty is high, the interest group and agenda setter are extreme, and the pivotal legislator is moderate. I argue that these conditions held during the 2021 negotiations over the Build Back Better Act. Using a synthetic control design, I test whether the swing voters in the Senate received more campaign contributions than they would have otherwise, finding evidence consistent with the model.
People are increasingly feeling global warming's effects through extreme heat and natural disasters. How do these climate shocks affect political attitudes? We argue that the effect of climate-related experiences depends significantly on self-interest. People in more vulnerable locations are more likely to respond to climate shocks with greater concern and more support for mitigation policy. We test this hypothesis with a macroeconomic model of climate change, geospatial data on climate shocks, and survey data of 148,712 people across 137 countries, and over time with the same 9,500 individuals in the United States. The results show that climate shocks heighten risk perceptions and lead to greater support for mitigation policies only among people in climate-vulnerable places. This responsiveness to experience is most evident in democratic countries and among people whose livelihoods depend on the weather. Integrating political economy and behavioral theories helps to explain how political attitudes change.
This article attempts to clarify the meaning of (de)politicization. Politicization sometimes refers to the inappropriate intrusion of partisan loyalties in nonpolitical social domains (affective politicization). Politicization can also constitute an ideal of civic agency and energy (contestatory politicization). In other contexts, politicization is meant as a kind of institutional corruption, in which government decisions are made for the sake of sectional advantage (patrimonial politicization). It can also refer to the imposition of controversial values judgments by ostensibly neutral institutions like the courts and bureaucracy (values politicization). These concepts raise divergent normative considerations of varying weightiness. This article motivates the potency of a fifth concept of politicization, which centers on the category of authoritative rule (archic politicization). It offers an ideal-typical contrast between political rule and depoliticized power, and it treats the distinct justifications for and objections to the substitution of depoliticized, impersonal reason for authoritative, political will.
Nondemocratic regimes sometimes benefit from tolerating the expression of critical opinions and visions for policy in their legislatures. Doing so enables them to gather important information about societal preferences, to co-opt potential challengers, and to address other threats to their control. In these cases, regimes and deputies exhibit mutual restraint: deputies respect regime-set limits on their freedom to express critical opinions, while regimes refrain from punishing deputies for expressing negative views when the stakes are acceptably low. By examining both the responsiveness of individual deputies and how regimes police the limits of acceptable behavior, we are better able to identify both the functions and strengths of nondemocratic legislatures. I illustrate these dynamics using data about deputy voting behavior and legislative success in the Kyrgyz Jogorku Kenesh (2016-2020).
We experimentally elicit views of what exploitation is from over 2,000 subjects. Our experimental design does not test existing theories of exploitation. Rather, it focuses on more fundamental properties that are the building blocks for these theories. We find, first, that exploitation is not a vacuous concept: Not all economic interactions are deemed exploitative. Second, contrary to several of the major approaches in the literature, both inequalities in the distribution of economic gains and asymmetric power relations contribute to exploitative relations. What matters most is the interaction of power and inequality: The effect of both elements together is significantly greater than the sum of each on their own. Finally, and perhaps remarkably, we found no major differences in exploitation ascriptions between experts and lay subjects. These findings have implications for the ethics of employment contracts, particularly in the context of sweatshop labor.
We analyze the effects of veto players when the set of available policies is not exogenously fixed, but rather determined by policy developers who work to craft new high-quality proposals. If veto players are moderate, there is active competition between developers on both sides of the ideological spectrum. However, more extreme veto players induce asymmetric activity, as one side disengages from development. With highly extreme veto players, policy development ceases, and gridlock results. We also analyze effects on centrists' utility. Moderate veto players dampen productive policy development, and extreme ones eliminate it entirely, either of which is bad for centrists. But some effects are surprisingly positive; somewhat extreme veto players can induce policy developers who dislike the status quo to craft moderate, high-quality proposals. Our model accounts for changing patterns of policymaking in the U.S. Senate and suggests that if polarization continues centrists will become increasingly inclined to eliminate the filibuster.
Many dictatorships end up with a series of disastrous decisions such as Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait. Even if a certain policy choice is not ultimately fatal for the regime, such as Mao's Big Leap Forward or the Pol Pot's collectivization drive, they typically involve both a miscalculation by the leadership and an institutional environment in which better informed subordinates have no chance to prevent the decision from being implemented. We offer a dynamic model of nondemocratic politics in which repression and bad decision making are self-reinforcing. Repression reduces the immediate threat to the regime, yet raises future stakes for the dictator; with higher stakes, the dictator puts more emphasis on loyalty than competence, which in turn increases the probability of a wrong policy choice. Our theory offers an explanation of how rational dictators end up in an informational bubble even in highly institutionalized regimes.
Conceptual change is commonplace in political theory. Recent scholarship argues that improving a concept, or "engineering" it, can sharpen its normative and explanatory power. This article illustrates what political theory can learn from conceptual engineering (CE) by examining the evolution of "corruption" as a case study. Traditionally defined as the "use of entrusted power for private gain," corruption has been revisited to capture broader institutional dysfunctions. We show how the recent re-engineering of corruption as a "deficit of office accountability" enhances the concept's ability to capture uses of office power that may undercut institutional functioning beyond illegal acts, including individual wrongdoing and faulty institutional design. Re-engineering corruption has normative value insofar as it helps policymakers and scholars alike to identify and address questionable uses of office power-including in nondemocratic regimes and nonpublic organizations. The article thereby argues that CE can enhance political theory's methodological toolkit and corroborate its practical relevance.
Do Americans have structured, stable, and consequential policy preferences that shape political outcomes? We explore this question through the case of abortion, using a large-scale panel dataset (n approximate to 130,000) and applying three key diagnostics: coherence, stability, and changes in vote choice. First, we demonstrate that abortion policy preferences exhibit logical coherence, both within and across reasons for seeking an abortion. Second, we show that these preferences are highly stable over time-more so than personality traits-suggesting that abortion attitudes are deeply engrained rather than fleeting opinions. Lastly, we find that abortion policy preferences, measured before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, predict shifts in intended voting behavior between 2020 and 2024. This overall pattern helps rule out key theoretical alternatives, such as non-opinions, attitudes following vote choice, and elite cues. Additionally, these findings highlight the significant and independent role of abortion attitudes in shaping American political behavior.
