This article examines the impact of party system institutionalization (PSI) on the survival and quality of democracy in Asia. To the best of our knowledge, no research has ever tested these relationships using sophisticated statistical methods. To address this gap, this article analyzes an original dataset of PSI in twenty-four democratic party systems in Asia since the end of WWII, combined with the V-Dem dataset for a number of variables measuring the quality of democracy, such as liberal democracy and accountability. We find that PSI has a nuanced, curvilinear relationship with both survival and quality of democracy. As in the “Goldilocks” story, excessive systemic institutionalization can be as detrimental to democracy, both for its survival and quality, as party system inchoateness.
Militaries sometimes defect during protests, including in democracies. The scholarship on defections in nondemocracies highlights militaries’ material interests, societal roles and socialties, and organizational divisions. In this article, I assess those factors for militaries in democracies while incorporating another consideration: civilian control and specifically the principle that militaries should obey the elected government’s orders. I argue that a crucial condition for defections in democracies is therefore executive self-coups. When protests are prompted by an executive’s attempts to decisively and illegally grab power, the military may see defecting as both necessary and justifiable. I find support for the importance of executive self-coups, combined with other conditions, using Qualitative Comparative Analysis of protests from 1991 to 2019 and case studies of Bolivia in 2019 and Ecuador in 2015.
Official media in authoritarian regimes typically supports pro-government narratives, yet it also reports on high-ranking officials after corruption investigations into them, despite risking public criticism and offering little new information to central leaders. Why does this occur? I argue that such reporting functions as intra-elite signaling. The central media’s selective focus on certain disgraced officials helps autocrats signal power consolidation, while local media imitation allows local elites to display loyalty. Using an original dataset of news reports on high-ranking officials investigated during China’s anti-corruption campaign (2012–2017), I find that central media disproportionately targeted “big tigers” linked to the top leader’s political rivals. Local media largely mirrored this pattern, highlighting the strategic role of official media in managing relations between autocrats and other elites.
This article explains when and why high courts in new democracies engage in post-decision monitoring to secure compliance with their rulings. We develop a theory of strategic monitoring in which judges, lacking enforcement capacity, selectively deploy oversight mechanisms in response to reputational risks generated by social pressure. Leveraging an original dataset of 6,093 decisions from Ecuador's Constitutional Court (2015–2024), we show that the presence and intensity of amicus curiae participation significantly increase the likelihood of monitoring, while budgetary resources and political salience do not. These findings indicate that courts engage in institutional triage, prioritizing cases where non-compliance is most likely to generate public scrutiny. The article advances a large-N perspective on post-decision enforcement highlighting the pivotal role of civil-society participation in strengthening judicial compliance.
The colonial origins of development paradigm have generated important explanations for unequal development in the Global South. Through a review of four recently published books, I critique the colonial origins framework to highlight its limitations. I first critique the colonial origins paradigm for its empirical focus on variation among formerly colonized countries, which obscures the large-scale and enduring inequalities between states in the Global South and the Global North. Secondly, I critique the colonial logic of "development," which centers the epistemic and material dominance of the Global North and marginalizes the ways of knowing and social organization of indigenous and internally colonized subjects. I conclude by discussing the implications of these critiques for how we understand global inequality and alternative solutions articulated from the Global South.
