This article proposes that the specific conditions under which collective action happens in informal markets generate a non-linear relation between organizational density (the number of organizations representing a single constituency) and effective claim-making around common objectives, unlike the expectations of standard theories tailored to organizational activity in the formal sector. Informal workers’ capacity to demand resources from the government is best served by intermediate levels of organizational density, when organizations experience enough competition to make them responsive to their constituencies, but not so much that internal strife undermines their effectiveness in securing shared objectives. To test this argument, I leverage a mixed-methods approach to examine the case of informal workers’ organizational behavior in public and street markets in Mexico City.

Under what conditions do dictators enact pro-worker legislation? Conventional wisdom suggests that heightened mass discontent motivates dictators to make policy concessions to defuse revolutionary threats. However, a more protective labor law may decrease elites’ economic benefits—and thus loyalty to the regime. I argue that limited judicial independence helps dictators control the distributional outcomes of the law and therefore better respond to the twin challenges magnified by labor reforms. To test this argument, I conduct a cross-national analysis of sixty-eight autocracies from 1970 to 2008. I then examine an illustrative case—China’s 2008 Labor Contract Law—to illuminate how a non-independent judiciary gives autocrats more leeway to balance the interests of elites and the masses. This article contributes to our understanding of authoritarian survival strategies amid distributive tensions.

Why are perennially entrenched institutions so hard to reform? This article proposes a theory of institutional rebound based on China’s reforms to break the three “iron-institutions” in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). I argue that reforms triggered the rise of informal institutions, which impeded further reforms and made old rules rebound. When SOE cadres had denser political connections, they actively manipulated the rules to maintain privileges. When managers and workers had fewer political resources, they used performative resistance to delay reforms and penalize reform advocates. The pressure to complete reforms drove cadres to first target the powerless, replacing them with cronies, before having to move to the more powerful. The article combines in-depth interviews, secondary sources, and topical modeling of newspaper and journal articles across three decades.

We study the effects of transitional justice (TJ) programs that punish large numbers of human rights violators through the lenses of social psychology theories on how individuals respond to punishment in allocative situations, including how defendants in court trials evaluate their verdicts. We analyze subnational variation in procedures and outcomes of denazification trials in West Germany during 1946–1947. Consistently with established findings in social psychology, we find that procedural justice and the distributive fairness of outcomes can compensate for the anti-democratic attitudinal effects of being a defendant in a TJ trial. We also find evidence that procedural justice influences the democratic attitudes of family members of TJ defendants. The study has implications for contemporary cases of TJ programs that affect large numbers of perpetrators.

What determines the vote in referenda: issue-preferences or second-order considerations? Scholars suggest issue-voting is stronger in salient elections. Based on survey data collected during Chile’s constitutional referendum, the article challenges this argument. An innovative conjoint experiment allows us to estimate if different elements of the constitution sunk the proposal. Coupled with vote choice models, results indicate that second-order considerations played a more important role than the literature predicts. We argue this is because studies mostly study referenda on European integration in parliamentary systems. Unlike European integration, the constitutional proposal was not a cross-cutting “issue,” but one tied to the incumbent. Presidentialism exacerbated government/opposition dynamics, such that the incumbent’s popularity significantly affected vote choice. We discuss why this is similar to what transpired in other Latin American countries and draw lessons for participatory democracy.

This article reviews four recent books providing new perspectives on the sources of authoritarian durability and addressing the issues of intra-elite power-sharing and control of the masses. One of the main lessons derived from this research is that contingent sequences of historical events and rules of conduct mutually accepted by elites can play a greater role in the stability of a ruling coalition than a sheer balance of power prioritized by the rational choice approach. Another important takeaway is that increasingly refraining from repression, authoritarian rulers seek to project the image of their competence and indispensability. Apart from misinformation and censorship, during economic and political crises, leaders of competitive authoritarian regimes may deliver anti-democratic rhetoric and policies catering to genuine demands of the masses.

Conflicts between local communities and their governments over natural resource development are not new in Latin America. When mining and oil companies move in, communities have blocked roads, staged protests, and undertaken other forms of direct action. More recently, however, communities have expanded their tactics, turning toward the state and its participatory institutions to contest claims over their land. This article investigates this trend and the conditions that facilitate it by analyzing an original database of 102 attempts by communities in Colombia to implement one participatory institution—the popular consultation—to challenge large scale extractive projects. I argue that communities’ ability to contest extractive projects by leveraging participatory institutions depends on the balance of power between two external players—private firms and expert allies.

What explains why some governments advanced decentralized education in the 1990s while others shied away from such efforts? Some arguments suggest that decentralization was pursued to improve the coverage and quality of education. Others point to partisanship, ideology, or diffusion. Drawing on case studies of El Salvador and Paraguay, I argue instead that governments pursued education decentralization in part because it could be deployed as a political weapon to weaken teachers’ unions affiliated with the opposition, thus depressing mobilization and votes for their rivals. These findings contribute to the literature on decentralization by highlighting a new political motivation fueling decentralization efforts across the developing world—the demobilization of the opposition.

What are the consequences of election violence for citizens’ political attitudes? We argue that in polarized contexts, citizens’ interpretation of electoral violence depends on their partisan affiliations. When presented with information alleging co-partisans’ involvement in violence, people with strong partisan identities become more likely to assert that elections were free and fair. We test this expectation with a vignette experiment in West Bengal after India’s 2019 elections, presenting respondents with information about violence while varying the partisan identity of the perpetrator. Consistent with expectations, supporters of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) increased their evaluations of election quality when hearing about co-partisan violence. We find no evidence of disconfirmation bias for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters; their recent shift to the party plausibly explains this finding.

What explains variation in labor militancy and trade union tactics across similar oil regions? Existing literatures on the resource curse and labor in resource extraction provide contradictory expectations that do not account for variation. By comparing two prominent oil regions, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Russia and Mangystau, Kazakhstan, I find labor militancy is explained by more contingent factors than broader theories suggest. This article identifies oil privatization as a critical juncture that led to diverging path-dependent processes, finding that privatizing to foreign or domestic owners and the relative independence of the legal system explain the differing manifestations of labor militancy observed. These findings are potentially generalizable to post-communist and developing countries that privatize their extractive sectors and have a history of state control of labor relations.

What are the sources of incumbent parties’ superior financial resources in parliamentary election campaigns in Africa’s clientelistic democracies? Scholars have emphasized ruling parties’ access to state resources. We document a different mechanism, where government parties attract candidates willing and able to devote their personal resources to parliamentary (and by extension presidential) campaigns in the hope of gaining access to central resources. We support our theory with data from an original survey of candidates in the 2019 Malawi parliamentary election. Our findings show that government party candidates receive more resources from their party. More importantly, government party candidates also spend more of their own money in campaigns. The findings have implications for political competition and representation in Africa and beyond.

Although once the subject of intense theoretical debate, the lumpenproletariat is largely missing from class-based analyses of popular resistance under authoritarianism. This article introduces a new definition of lumpenproletarians in the developing world, focusing on the nature of their work. It then argues that, given their socioeconomic position, these people should eschew participation in conventional social movements but ought to back protests over state abuse. We evaluate this theory using quantitative and qualitative data from two authoritarian developing countries with large grey economies but different histories of unrest: China and Egypt. In both places, we find lumpenproletarians indeed tend to join demonstrations over government and police mistreatment. Moreover, the Egyptian experience shows that the group is susceptible to mobilization for both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ends.

A prevalent viewpoint is that wealth inequality leads to political inequality and that economic elites are more powerful when they control a larger wealth share. However, as wealth inequality changes are often endogenous, studying the political consequences of wealth concentration is challenging. I study a 1919 Danish land reform that confiscated 20 to 25 percent of the value of entailed estates, which were old aristocratic land and capital holdings. Using difference-in-difference estimation, I assess the political effects of this shock to local wealth inequality. I find no effect of a wealth inequality decrease on pro-elite political outcomes. These results question the degree to which wealth inequality matters for political equality under widely held political rights and strong rule of law.

Dominant political parties rule for prolonged periods of time by winning successive multiparty elections. However, the term “dominant party” encompasses an extremely diverse set of parties, ranging from ones winning unremarkable vote shares in established democracies to those garnering massive popular majorities in free but unfair elections. To grapple with such heterogeneity, this article proposes a three-part typology based on the foundations of a party’s electoral dominance—whether extremely high votes shares, steadfast support from legislative allies, or a favorable translation of votes into seats or office. These three types are internally homogenous but distinct from one another in ways predicted by the typology. The puzzles posed by each dominant-party type and the kinds of answers required to address those puzzles differ markedly.

We present a systemic threat theory to explain the introduction of Proportional Representation (PR). If facing a revolutionary threat, incumbents agree to enact electoral reforms such as PR to secure the stability of the parliamentary system, even if this could imply their own personal electoral loss. We argue that the theory can help explain the largest wave of PR adoptions in history, namely in the years immediately after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Incumbents came to over-estimate the true revolutionary threat in Europe. Simultaneously, reformist parliamentarian socialists came to push for PR to weaken the radicals within their party. Incumbents and reformist socialists could therefore support the same system. We test this using qualitative and quantitative data from Norway’s adoption of PR in 1919.

We know little about repression’s effects on opposition party mobilization under electoral authoritarianism. I argue that targeted repression of opposition leaders has both direct negative effects on mobilization and indirect effects on activist and voter support. However, party organizations and ideological leadership can adapt to mitigate targeted repression’s effects. In Germany, from 1878–1890 the social democratic party was banned and its leaders were expelled from their home districts. I estimate difference-in-differences models that leverage variation in expulsion timing and frequency to estimate their effects on electoral outcomes. Expulsions caused declines in social democrats’ electoral support. However, their effects diminished with each additional expulsion and after the first election post-expulsions, as local party organizations adapted to maintain mobilization in electoral districts despite targeted repression.

This article examines how “iteration”—the dynamic updating of a research design in the course of conducting a study—contributes to making fieldwork a powerful form of inquiry. Considering epistemic disagreement on the utility and acceptability of iteration and drawing on published work, our own experiences, and an original survey and interviews, we contend that iteration is a core aspect of field-based inquiry because such work often examines areas for which theory or empirical knowledge is underdeveloped and requires reacting as the research environment evolves. We demonstrate why iteration is challenging, consider the analytic risks it poses, and offer a framework to help scholars iterate in analytically productive ways. We conclude by outlining the implications for the discipline of embracing and being transparent about iteration.

Do oil busts destabilize petrostates? This article asserts that existing political resource curse theories overpredict the likelihood of instability during oil busts because they overlook petrostates’ agency. It argues that, by employing the “petrostates’ toolkit”—a collection of strategies for mitigating the negative consequences of low oil prices—most oil producers can survive even prolonged oil busts. Through within-case comparisons of thirty petrostates’ political stability before and after the 2014 oil price collapse, it finds that most petrostates were more or equally stable during the bust than before it. The article also presents a case study showing how Saudi Arabia used the petrostates’ toolkit to remain politically stable after the 2014 collapse. The article concludes that petrostates are not “over a barrel” during oil busts.

Research on repression has primarily focused on its destructive potential, namely how violence serves to eliminate threats. This article proposes an alternative role for repression: to build popular support. I argue that repression builds support for an autocratic regime when it targets groups perceived as dangerous. I refer to this phenomenon as a legitimation strategy of repression, which aims to gain the support of civilian bystanders beyond eliminating threats. To test the argument, I present a case study of state repression in Egypt after the 2013 coup. I explain how repression against the Muslim Brotherhood helped build popular support for the new regime. My findings contribute to scholarship on authoritarianism and repression by demonstrating the oft-overlooked role of civilian bystanders in shaping state violence.

Why do mortgage subsidies vary across countries? Until the 2000s, the U.S. and Germany provided large-scale subsidies for homeownership. Yet, their paths diverged when they faced deep economic crises at that time. While the U.S. doubled down on government support by quasi-nationalizing its mortgage market, Germany retrenched homeowner subsidies. This article argues that growth regimes shape coalitional logics that explain these contrasting outcomes. In the U.S. demand-led regime, where housing is key to growth, a bipartisan coalition entrenched mortgage subsidies to stimulate household credit and consumption. Germany’s export-led regime, where housing is less central to growth, produced a broad-based coalition that retrenched homeowner subsidies to boost competitiveness. Detailed case studies contrast the quasi-nationalization of U.S. government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) with the retrenchment of the German “homeowner subsidy” (Eigenheimzulage).

What is the relationship between institutional favoritism, economic well-being, and political trust? Due to the role that East Bank tribes played in supporting the monarchy during the state’s formative years, Jordan has institutionalized a type of political discrimination that privileges East Bank Jordanians over Palestinian Jordanians. An empirical examination of the political institutions of the state reveals that such discrimination remains pervasive. It was subsequently theorized that institutional favoritism’s impact on political trust is conditional on income due to the greater salience of group identity among individuals with lower incomes. Regression analyses of survey data reveal a consistent negative correlation between political trust and income among East Bank Jordanians. There is little evidence of a substantively meaningful unconditional relationship between national origin and political trust.

Why do states target some civilians with collective punishment while coopting others with material goods during an ethnic civil war? This article examines how the Turkish government calibrated its repression and cooptation policies towards the Kurdish population during the counterinsurgency of the 1990s. In contrast to the situational conflict dynamics emphasized by the civil war literature, we explain the distribution of cooptation and repression with the state’s identity policy: government policies were more punitive in areas that displayed strong Kurdish linguistic/political identity, or high tribal concentration, while they were more cooptative where the government had fostered a Sunni-Muslim Kurdish identity. The study is based on a novel dataset that includes information about displacement, tribal concentration, and violent events from archival sources.

How do leftist governments negotiate the trade-off between courting union support and maintaining the business sector’s trust? Scholars have argued that leftist parties will remain accountable to their labor base when powerful unions have strong ties to centralized leftist parties. However, I argue that strong party-union ties and party leadership centralization may, in fact, insulate leftist presidents against redistributive pressures from below. When party-union ties allow labor leaders to develop careers as professional politicians, these leaders become more responsive to the party’s goals than to their union base. Further, a centralized party organization can exclude unions and leftist factions from the design of redistributive policies. To test my argument, I use a case study of Brazil under the administration of the Worker’s Party (PT).

A redistributive wave across Latin America provided credence to existing explanations that emphasize the importance of democracy and the political left for democratic redistribution. Yet, neither of these theories tells the entire story behind the contemporary politics of inequality in Latin America. This article stresses the importance of party systems for democratic redistribution, especially their role in increasing the scope of social policy as well as igniting competitive electoral environments that incentivize political elites to redistribute, leading to the amelioration of inequality over time. Utilizing a time-series cross-sectional dataset on fifteen Latin American countries covering the period of 1990–2015, and extending the analysis to sixty-five global democracies, this article finds that countries with institutionalized party systems exhibit greater income redistribution and lower levels of inequality than those with inchoate counterparts.

Under what conditions do trade unions participate in elections during democratic transitions? Conventional explanations focus on unions’ economic interests, organizational power, and militancy in the lead-up to democratization. The behavior of the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT), however, challenges these expectations. Despite its organizational strength and prominent role in the country’s transition, as well as the presence of economic incentives for participation, the UGTT has eschewed formal electoral participation. This article leverages this case to theorize an additional factor shaping electoral behavior: internal cohesion. Drawing on in-depth interviews with union leaders and original survey data of union members, we show how the threat of internal fragmentation acts as a powerful internal constraint, even in situations where unions are otherwise well-positioned to engage in elections.

How do state-business relations interact with outward investment in authoritarian regimes? This article focuses on the importance of domestic political status and specifically business’ vulnerability to the state in explaining the dynamics of China’s outward investments. I present three types of domestic capital whose economic and political logics differ as they go abroad: tactical capital pursues political power and prestige, competitive capital pursues commercial goals, and crony capital seeks refuge from the state and asset expatriation. The Chinese regime’s approach to outward investment, which I characterize as mobilization campaigns adjusted over time and combined with targeted domestic regulation, endeavors to treat these different kinds of capital differently, deploying and disciplining tactical capital, enabling competitive capital, and constraining crony capital.

How do autocrats manage civil society? I develop a typology of authoritarian responses to civil society and show how leaders employ selective policies to adjudicate among risks and benefits in the third sector. Using data on laws managing foreign support of civil society in China and Russia, I find evidence of selective implementation that reveals which groups are seen as threatening or beneficial. While there are some similarities across the two countries, I find a divergence in their response to environmental groups, who are selectively repressed or neglected in Russia but selectively encouraged or co-opted in China. Using fieldwork interviews, I conduct a case study to show that while environmental groups in both countries pose some risk, the key difference is their perceived benefit.

Islamic law denotes as haram any forbidden behavior, object, beverage, or food. Despite subscribing to a similar Salafi ideology, very few jihadi groups use violence against haram targets (e.g., brothels, casinos, statues, liquor stores, mixed sex schools, and gay clubs). This study argues that haram-centered violence unites ethnically-mixed jihadi groups by fostering a superordinate Islamic identity that enables them to overcome their collective action problems. As a result, ethnically-mixed Salafi jihadi groups deploy haram targeting much more than homogenous ones. Using new disaggregated group-level data, our analyses demonstrate that the ethnic structure of Salafi jihadi groups shapes haram targeting, both in Dagestan and on a global scale. The article discusses these findings and directions for future research on religious violence.

Sustaining positive attitudes toward refugees is a priority as refugee crises surge worldwide. This study draws on eighty-five in-depth interviews with citizens in four provinces across Turkey. We identified prominent frames from Turkish political discourse and asked individuals to recount their self-narratives of attitude formation about Syrian refugees. We find that most respondents’ narratives included multiple frames, confirming that attitudes are often products of contradictory factors. Furthermore, humanitarianism and shared religion, frames thought to support positive attitudes, did not have such straightforward associations here. Humanitarianism was a positive force early, but had limits as compassion fatigue set in, and respondents described polarizing differences in religious practices rather than shared religion. Our work highlights the importance of examining attitude formation in non-Western settings for understanding views about and supporting societal inclusion of refugees.

In the past decade, political violence research has been deeply shaped by the “ethnopolitical exclusion” model of conflict, a research tradition that emphasizes the group-level mechanisms connecting ethnic identity to conflict processes. This review article examines three recent books that represent a new wave of scholarship that studies how different social, political, and institutional processes give rise to ethnically-organized violence. These works make several notable contributions. They move beyond static, structuralist approaches for understanding the emergence of ethnic “grievances” and focus attention on the dynamic processes and state policies that amplify or curb the political salience of ethnic appeals. They also shed new light on the nuanced role that ethnic demographic distributions play in the onset and termination of intrastate conflict.

The massification of secondary schooling constitutes the key educational project of the first post-war period. However, the resulting educational structures differed in terms of streaming and standardization. Despite their historical opposition to such expansion, center-right parties contributed to shaping these reforms. They generally opposed standardization because their distributive strategy rested on support from elites and middle classes. However, their stance on streaming varied. Centre-right parties supported streaming when they were linked to teachers and private providers who opposed comprehensive reforms, but supported de-streaming where such groups aligned with the left. This article shows how center-right parties in Bavaria, France, and Italy, with common partisan distributive aims, introduced varied public service reforms following from their links to different vested producers. It argues that theorizing such reforms requires considering both distributive and productive environments.

The increasing critique of representative democracy and its institutions determined reformers to consider the direct and deliberative processes as potential solutions to bridge the gap between elites and citizens. Substantial research investigates the functioning of these alternative models of democracy, but surprisingly little attention is paid to politicians’ perspectives and preferences for these reforms. This article fills this gap through an analysis of parliamentarians’ support for referendums and deliberative debates. It uses individual level data from the PartiRep Comparative MP Survey in fourteen European countries to identify individual-level determinants of legislators’ support. The findings reveal distinct explanatory factors of support for deliberative and direct reforms, which have important implications for democratic reform since elected representatives’ preferences strongly influence the type of innovation adopted.

Collective vigilantism, group violence to punish perceived offenses to a community, is both global and common in the contemporary world. It is also crucial for understanding state formation, contestation, crime, law and justice, inequality, and racial and ethnic conflicts. We review existing definitions and explanations for collective vigilantism, present a new typology of collective vigilantism that considers both the aims and level of organization of participating agents, and highlight important patterns that emerge from recent research, including the contributions to this special symposium. We present an argument for what a political science treatment of the topic can offer and introduce an ambitious research agenda that builds on cross-cutting themes and puzzles that emerge from the special symposium.

Mob vigilantism—the punishment of alleged criminals by groups of citizens–is widespread throughout the developing world. Drawing on surveys with more than 13,000 respondents from Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa, this article shows women are more likely than men to support mob vigilantism. Qualitative evidence, a vignette experiment, and survey measures suggest men and women differ in their beliefs about mob vigilantism. Men are more convinced that mob vigilantism creates risks of false accusation for those who do not commit crime. I trace this divergence in beliefs to differences in men’s and women’s personal risk of being accused of a crime that they did not commit. The results speak against the notion that women are inherently more opposed to violence than men.

Existing scholarship on vigilantism focuses on explaining factors that push citizens into the streets to take the law into their own hands. This article complements these theories by examining fear of reprisals that can keep vigilantes off the streets. It argues that vigilantism becomes rife when vigilantes find a systematic way to collude with state officials to obtain impunity. Qualitative data from Indonesia illustrate how street-level policemen grant selective impunity for vigilantism to gain public support for dispensing their more pressing duties. Contrary to conventional wisdom that links state-building to a decline in vigilantism, analysis of a sub-national dataset of 33,262 victims of vigilantism in Indonesia shows that a rapid expansion of the state’s coercive presence is associated with higher levels of vigilante violence.

Lynching is a surprisingly prevalent form of collective violence. We argue that two conditions can cause lynching: a shared morality based on salient collective threats, providing justification, and weak authority, creating opportunity. We examine this argument with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In Aceh, the province most impacted, the tsunami was a shock to morality (producing a religious revival) and authority (creating a situation of institutional flux). Using World Bank data, we find that Aceh saw an increase of lynchings, while lynchings stayed on average the same in other parts of Indonesia. Within Aceh, the increase was most pronounced where authority was most undermined and where locals had high levels of shared morality. These findings have implications for research on collective violence and the prevention of lynching.

What explains variation in the structure and practices of collective vigilantism? I develop a framework that focuses on relations among victims and between victims and the state. I use the framework to compare variation in collective vigilantism enacted by avocado and berry sectors in Michoacán, Mexico. Centralized collective vigilantism by the avocado sector entailed a single sectoral organization coordinating victims’ extra-legal activities with no interference from local politicians. By contrast, decentralized collective vigilantism by the berry sector consisted of multiple autonomous groups of victims in conflict with criminals, local political authorities and among each other as they competed for power and resources. These differences in collective vigilantism can be traced back to differences in the local political economies that shape relations among victims and between them and the state.

Today’s Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to racial violence, especially lethal police violence, and compared it to the “Jim Crow” U.S. South. However, this comparison requires more specific information about racial violence during this period. Uncovering and organizing this information are the main objectives of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. It documents racial killings in the American South, 1930–1954. Racial killings refer to killings where racial animus, or perceived infraction of Jim Crow norms, are documented or reasonably inferred from newspaper reports or U.S. government and civil rights organization documents. This research note discusses how the Archive contributes to basic comparative politics topics of democratic governance and subnational authoritarianism and methodological concerns, including the creation of databases used in the comparative study of collective vigilantism.