In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Chinese-American voters exhibited one of the most pronounced rightward shifts among racial and ethnic minority groups, challenging assumptions of minority alignment with the Democratic coalition. Drawing on public-opinion surveys, this study applies a framework contrasting instrumental rationality and group-based interests to explain the shift. The Republican Party heightened the salience of issues tied to perceived self-interest—immigration, public safety, inflation, and affirmative action—while the comparatively weak social sanctioning mechanisms of the Chinese-American community reduced the costs of partisan defection. Consequently, instrumental considerations outweighed group concerns about exclusionary rhetoric, thus increasing support for Donald Trump. This partisan realignment also influenced Chinese Americans’ views on China-U.S. relations, adding complexity to bilateral dynamics. These findings highlight the conditional nature of minority partisanship, and the political relevance of self-interest when policy stakes are immediate and personal.
Global Justice Index, whose most results are presented here, is an ongoing, multiyear research project based at the Fudan Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences to assess countries’ contributions to and performance in the advancement of global justice. Building on the conceptual framework and measurement methodology that have been developed in previous reports of the project, the Global Justice Index Report 2025 presents the seventh annual assessment, drawing on country-level data for 2023. This report evaluates global justice across ten issue areas: climate change, peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, terrorism and armed conflicts, cross-national criminal governance, refugees, anti-poverty efforts, education, public health, and the protection of women and children. The indicators for these issues are selected and assessed with reference to the principles of the Common but Differentiated and Respective Capabilities and Cosmopolitan but Due-diligent Responsibilities. This report provides country rankings, regional comparisons, thematic analyses, and policy implications for each of the issue areas. To assess uneven data availability, it reports two versions of the Global Justice Index: a nine-issue index that covers 156 countries and excludes anti-poverty, and a 10-issue index that covers 142 countries. Both of these indices are calculated using the equal-weight geometric mean of the scores for their constituent issues. In the results, the United States, China, Germany, Japan, and several European countries occupy the leading positions in both versions of the index. Europe and North America continue to be the strongest performers as regions, and many of the lowest-ranked countries are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and in the fragile states in Oceania and Asia. The findings highlight persistent regional disparities, the importance of building comprehensive state capacity, and the growing interdependence of different dimensions of global justice in a period that has been marked by armed conflict, climate-related disasters, economic pressures, and geopolitical fragmentation. This report concludes by discussing the policy applications and methodological limitations of the index, as well as identifying directions for improving data quality, measurement, and future global justice research.
This paper argues that empirical political science has conflated two distinct identification problems: identifying treatment effects and identifying the causal mechanisms through which treatments operate. The credibility revolution strengthened the first task but was not designed to solve the second. Yet heterogeneous treatment effects are routinely interpreted as evidence of mechanisms, as though identifying a causal effect licenses inference about the pathway that produced it. The paper shows that such inferences are underdetermined when political outcomes aggregate multiple latent causal pathways into a single equilibrium category. Three empirically confounded sources of heterogeneity are as follows: scale heterogeneity, generated by nonlinear outcome transformations; threshold heterogeneity, arising from variation in proximity to decision boundaries; and mixture heterogeneity, arising from equifinal causal pathways. A latent-index framework demonstrates that significant interactions can emerge even when the structural treatment effect is homogeneous and there is no mechanism heterogeneity. An empirical illustration using the Colantone-Stanig trade-exposure data reproduces canonical interaction patterns in a constant-β simulation, showing that heterogeneous responses may arise in the absence of heterogeneous mechanisms.
This study examines whether populist incumbency mitigates the crises that often facilitate populists’ rise or instead contributes to their reproduction through governance. We employ a mixed‑methods design combining cross‑national panel analysis of 23 countries (2000–2022) with structured within‑case process tracing in Hungary, Brazil, and the United States. Using difference‑in‑differences and event‑study models with country and year fixed effects, the quantitative results show that populist incumbency is associated with substantively large declines in political institutional quality and with more diagnostically sensitive evidence of deterioration in social-liberal conditions, including weaker constraints on executive power and reduced protections for media freedom and civil liberties. In contrast, average macroeconomic performance does not exhibit robust improvement during populist rule, undermining claims of a systematic prosperity‑for‑democracy tradeoff. The qualitative evidence traces how these political, social, and economic outcomes can emerge: populist incumbents deploy delegitimation of oversight actors, crisis framing, and polarization as governance strategies that lower the political costs of institutional confrontation and enable concrete interventions that weaken accountability and narrow pluralism. Cross‑case comparison further indicates that the depth and durability of these effects vary with the strength of veto points, civil society counterweights, and informational pluralism. Overall, the findings contribute to debates on populist governance and democratic backsliding by showing how populist incumbency is associated with deterioration in political and social‑liberal outcomes without consistent economic gains, while also identifying scope conditions that shape heterogeneous trajectories across cases.
Using a comprehensive panel dataset of 48 sub-Saharan African countries from 1970 to 2024, this essay study employs a mixed-methods research design, triangulating regression analysis with fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), to investigate the causal impact of foreign aid on state-building. Transcending unidimensional correlational analyses, the article advances a “comprehensive multi-causal” theoretical framework that integrates probabilistic statistical trends with configurational logic. Departing from the reductive “aid-is-harmful” thesis, our findings delineate a nuanced and heterogeneous impact: while aggregate foreign aid exerts a statistically significant negative effect on state capacity, this relationship is highly bifurcated by types of aid. Specifically, concessional loans are robustly associated with enhanced state capacity, whereas grant aid correlates with its erosion. This divergence is driven by two distinct governance logics: concessional loans catalyze an “accountability logic”, wherein repayment obligations incentivize sovereign debtors to bolster revenue extraction, streamline bureaucratic coordination, and improve policy implementation. Conversely, grant-based aid reinforces a “rent-seeking logic” that compromises domestic accountability and attenuates endogenous institutional incentives. Crucially, these causal pathways are context-contingent; the magnitude and direction of these effects are moderated by structural variables, most notably ethnic fractionalization, regime type, and natural resource rents.
