abstract: This article explores whether local civic networks can reduce the risk of violence in communally divided societies. The author argues that dense associational networks can foster intercommunal peace near elections, but only when those networks are situated in communities diverse enough that civic networks foster intergroup contact and monitoring by local elites. Leveraging new village-level data and interviews from Côte d'Ivoire, the author examines the relationship between the country's civic associations and the political violence that occurred during national elections in 2020 and 2021. Contrary to the arguments of civil society skeptics, he shows that robust networks of voluntary associations had significant spillover benefits for peace, particularly in communally diverse areas. However, in areas with a dominant communal group, civic networks had little impact on the risk of violence. The findings inform debates about the constraints on intercommunal conflict and the significance of associationalism in divided societies.
abstract: Scholarship on political socialization has largely overlooked how forms of violence and repression experienced by young people living in authoritarian regimes affect their political development. Bringing together the literatures on political socialization and violence, this study aims to advance debates on youth political socialization in authoritarian regimes. How and where do young people in such contexts develop political orientations and behaviors, and through which mechanisms? To address these questions, this study draws on qualitative research with urban youths in Zimbabwe between 2019 and 2022 to demonstrate the significance of everyday encounters with authoritarianism in contested urban spaces. The authors advance existing scholarship by conceptualizing and analyzing diffuse socialization experiences and sites of socialization, showing how ruling party agents operating at urban markets use diverse socialization practices to cultivate loyalty to the ruling party among young traders. The authors argue that political socialization in this context does not foster genuine loyalty but provides tacit knowledge about authoritarian politics and how to navigate it through performative compliance.
abstract: This article investigates the relationship between diversity and state building by examining how diversity affects the costs of investing in fiscal capacity. The author argues that diversity—ethnic or religious—makes populations less legible to the state, thereby increasing those costs. Higher costs deter the state from investing in fiscal capacity in more diverse areas, which hinders fiscal capacity building in those regions. Instead, the state diverts investments to less diverse areas, which are typically populated by the core/dominant group. As a result, the dominant group bears a higher tax burden compared to minority groups, which do not experience comparable tax increases. The author tests these arguments using original data on local-level fiscal revenues in the late Ottoman Empire along with qualitative and quantitative evidence from archival sources and contemporary cross-national and subnational data.
abstract: Why are some small powers effective in setting the UN agenda, even in the face of large power opposition? The author argues that small states are more likely to be represented by experienced diplomats, who, over time, accumulate influence that can be deployed to shape the international organization’s agenda. To test these claims, the author assembled a data set of proposed agenda items and the tenure of all states’ ambassadors from 1946 to 2018 and conducted interviews with diplomats from forty-nine states. The author finds that smaller powers have more diplomatic experience than larger powers; that individuals with more diplomatic experience are more successful at agenda setting even when accounting for material power; and that random shocks to ambassadorial tenure, such as the death of an ambassador, have negative effects on diplomatic experience and effectiveness. These insights contribute to understanding the role of individuals and diplomacy in international relations and the ways in which small powers influence international politics.
abstract: Citizens' divergent understandings of democracy have important implications for democratic resilience, yet the sources of this heterogeneity remain contested. The author argues that partisan elite discourse is a key driver of these divergent understandings: political leaders' framing of democracy systematically shapes their supporters' democratic priorities. Observational and experimental evidence from Turkey supports this argument. The author establishes that Turkish party leaders differ in how they conceptualize democracy in public discourse, and these differences map onto their supporters' understandings of democracy. A population-based survey experiment shows that when leaders emphasize particular dimensions of democracy, copartisans also assign greater importance to those same dimensions of democratic governance. These findings highlight how partisan elite framing can influence mass conceptions of democracy in ways that enable democratic backsliding: would-be autocrats can exploit this dynamic to subvert liberal norms without significant backlash, even where overall support for democracy remains high.
