Volume 54, Number 2, January 2022

Regina Bateson, Voting for a Killer: Efraín Ríos Montt's Return to Politics in Democratic Guatemala

From 1982 to 1983, General Efraín Ríos Montt presided over an especially bloody period of the
Guatemalan civil war. Under Ríos Montt’s watch, the state killed approximately 75,000 of its
own citizens. Yet less than a decade later, the former dictator emerged as one of the most popular
politicians in newly democratic Guatemala. How did a gross human rights violator stage such an
improbable comeback? Using process tracing, I argue that Ríos Montt’s trajectory is best
explained by his embrace of populism as his core political strategy. This analysis deepens our
knowledge of an important case, while shedding light on broader questions about how and when
actors with profoundly undemocratic values can hijack democracy for their own ends.

David Pion-Berlin and Igor Acácio, Explaining Military Responses to Protests in Latin American Democracies

Social protests are a feature of democracy in Latin America. When the police cannot handle them, governments, facing threats to their tenure, are tempted to order the armed forces to step in. The military, when ordered to deploy in counter-protest operations, exhibits behaviors ranging from defiance to conditional and full compliance. The article investigates the sources of variation in military responses to mass protests, leveraging a small-n comparative analysis and a diverse case selection strategy. It draws on qualitative evidence from Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, democracies with a history of protests. It finds that a combination of the judicial risks soldiers assume if they repress, professional mission preferences, and social identity between the military and the protesters are the most compelling explanations for military responses.

Eric Mosinger, Kai Thaler, Diana Paz García, and Charlotte Fowler, Civil Resistance in the Shadow of the Revolution: Historical Framing in Nicaragua’s Sudden Uprising

Are long-standing, widespread grievances a necessary condition for civil resistance campaigns? We argue historical framing can enable sudden mass uprisings even where long-standing anti-regime grievances are absent. Protest cascades can develop to challenge relatively stable, popular governments through four interdependent historical framing mechanisms. First, protesters and bystanders may draw analogies to historical contentious episodes. Second, individuals or groups may imagine themselves occupying paradigmatic roles from past popular struggles, offering prescriptions for action. Third, protesters can adopt symbolic and tactical repertoires from previous contentious episodes. Finally, protesters may concentrate protests within symbolic space. We develop our theory with evidence from Nicaragua’s 2018 mass uprising, which nearly toppled previously-popular President Daniel Ortega, after violence against protesters activated powerful frames resonating with Nicaragua’s history of dictatorship and revolution.

Per F. Andersson, Taxation and Left-Wing Redistribution: The Politics of Consumption Tax in Britain and Sweden

Recent research claims that the link between partisanship and policy is weak and that left-wing governments tax the poor surprisingly heavily. In this article, I argue that left-wing taxation depends on the institutional context, not constraints from unions or overall spending. Using novel data, I demonstrate that the left tax more regressively in countries using proportional electoral systems, and more progressively in majoritarian countries. The political mechanism is evaluated in a comparison of Swedish and British tax policy after WWII. Uncertainty over future influence made the left in Britain wary of consumption tax, while the left in Sweden combined consumption tax with expanded social programs. Political risk shaped the strategies of key actors and helps explain the divergence in tax policy during this period.

Lucas González and Marcelo Nazareno, Resisting Equality: Subnational State Capture and the Unequal Distribution of Inequality

Inequality is unequally distributed across the territory, and national averages obscure this variation. Pockets of very high inequality persist at the subnational level of government, even when national governments implement large scale redistributive policies. This study investigates which factors at the subnational level may help explaining differences in income inequality across units. The main claim is that in subnational units where local economic elites capture provincial states by occupying relevant positions in their governments have lower taxes on land, spend less in social programs, have more repression of federal labor rights, and, as a consequence, have higher inequality. The study uses a large-N analysis of original panel data for Argentina, presents a comparative study of two cases, and explores some comparative implications in the conclusions.

Pär Zetterberg, Elin Bjarnegård, Melanie M. Hughes, and Pamela Paxton, Democracy and the Adoption of Electoral Gender Quotas Worldwide

This article theorizes and uses global and longitudinal data on gender quota laws to investigate how levels and dimensions of democracy affect the adoption of different quota types. Our results demonstrate that countries at middle levels of the democracy scale are more likely to adopt quotas. Within this diverse group of countries, those that have relatively low levels of electoral contestation (i.e., limited political rights) are most likely to adopt reserved seats. On the other hand, the likelihood of adopting candidate quotas is highest in countries where the protection of civil liberties (i.e., individual freedoms of association, etc.) is moderately high. Our findings suggest that different levels and dimensions of democracy provide political actors with incentives and constraints that create distinct trajectories for quota adoption.

Yuan Wang, Executive Agency and State Capacity in Development: Comparing Sino-African Railways in Kenya and Ethiopia

Why do infrastructure projects that are similar in nature develop along starkly different trajectories? This question sheds light on the varying state capacity of developing countries. Divergent from structural explanations that stress external agency and institutional explanations that emphasize bureaucratic capacity, I propose a political championship theory to explain the variance in states capacity of infrastructure delivery. I argue that when a project is highly salient to leaders’ survival, leaders commit to the project; leaders with strong authority build an implementation coalition, leading to higher effectiveness. I trace the process of the Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya and Addis-Djibouti Railway in Ethiopia, relying on over 180 interviews. This research highlights the individual agency within structural and institutional constraints, a previously understudied area in state capacity.

Steven D. Schaaf, When Do Courts Constrain the Authoritarian State? Judicial Decision-Making in Jordan and Palestine

Under what conditions will authoritarian courts issue decisions that constrain state actors? This study breaks new ground in authoritarianism research by explaining when authoritarian states are—and are not—held accountable to legal norms. I leverage evidence from interviews with Jordanian and Palestinian legal actors, original data on judicial decisions, and two years of fieldwork shadowing judges as they conducted business in the courthouse. I find that courts in Jordan and Palestine are hardly regime pawns, as judges routinely prioritize their own interests above those of regime elites. My results also demonstrate that lawsuits revealing instances of intra-state disunity are particularly good vehicles for expanding judicial authority over state activity and, further, that appellate courts are uniquely less capable of constraining state actors.
Volume 54, Number 2, January 20222022-10-04T20:17:06+00:00

Volume 54, Number 1, October 2021

Lindsay Mayka, The Power of Human Rights Frames in Urban Security: Lessons from Bogotá

Governments throughout the world invoke human rights ideas to motivate policy reforms. What impact do rights-based frames have on the policy process? I argue that rights-based frames can generate new resources and institutional opportunities that restructure battles over public policy. These resources and opportunities can both initially legitimate state interventions that violate rights, while also creating openings to hold governments accountable for abuses committed by the state in the name of human rights. I develop this argument by analyzing a militarized security intervention in Bogotá, Colombia, which the local government framed as necessary to stop the commercial sexual exploitation of children—yet yielded new rights violations. This article reveals the material consequences of human rights discourses in battles over policing and urban planning.

Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, Great Expectations, Great Grievances: The Politics of Citizens

To complain to and about government is an essential political act, with consequences for citizen-state relations. This article examines these dynamics in the policing sector, through a study of grievance redressal hearings in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The hearings provide a critical channel to justice for some of the most marginalized, including women. However, most participants become less satisfied following their hearings, as initial hopes are dashed against the constraints of local policing. The study highlights the promise and limits of formal complaints mechanisms, which can amplify citizens’ voices but—when coupled with an expectations gap—can also deepen grievances. Complaining, I argue, is a powerful but at times paradoxical form of voice, conditioned by citizens’ expectations and by state capacity.

Lasse Aaskoven and Jacob Nyrup, Performance and Promotions in an Autocracy: Evidence from Nazi Germany

Scholars of autocracies increasingly debate whether autocratic regimes promote their subordinates based on achievements, such as economic performance, and further a meritocratic system. This article argues that the extent to which autocratic regimes reward economic performance is not constant over the course of an autocratic regime’s lifespan but varies depending on the strategic goals of the regime and the regime’s ability to monitor its subordinates’ performance. We collect a new dataset on the careers of the regional leaders of the German Nazi Party, the Gauleiters, from 1936 to 1944, and a wealth of historical data sources from the regime. Using this, we show that better regional economic performance increased the chance of receiving a promotion before the outbreak of World War II but not after.

Daniel Fedorowycz, Managing Ethnic Minorities with State Non-Repression in Interwar Poland

Why were most ethnic minority organizations in interwar Poland permitted and sometimes encouraged by the state, when the ruling titular ethnic group pursued discriminatory policies against the same minority groups, faced hostility from these groups, and had the capacity to repress their organizations? Current literature focuses on repression as the main strategy deployed by states to manage these relationships. This article, on the other hand, asks why states allow minority organizations to operate. Using the logic of divide and rule, this article demonstrates that, in the case of multi-ethnic states, a state may prefer a plurality of organizations representing a certain minority ethnic group, particularly if the group is restive, in order to ensure that a united opposition cannot legitimately threaten the state’s political survival.

Jared Abbott, When Participation Wins Votes: Explaining the Emergence of Large-Scale Participatory Democracy

Why are large-scale participatory institutions implemented in some countries but only adopted on paper in others? I argue that nationwide implementation of Binding Participatory Institutions (BPIs)––a critical subtype of participatory institutions––is dependent on the backing of a strong institutional supporter, often a political party. In turn, parties will only implement BPIs if they place a lower value on the political costs than on the potential benefits of implementation. This will be true if: 1) significant societal demand exists for BPI implementation and 2) the party’s political opponents cannot take advantage of BPIs for their own gain. I test this theory through two detailed case studies of Venezuela and Ecuador, drawing on 165 interviews with key national-level actors and grassroots activists.

John K. Yasuda, Regulatory State Building under Authoritarianism: Bureaucratic Competition, Global Embeddedness, and Regulatory Authority in China

The regulator’s existence under authoritarianism is a precarious one. They must carefully address the regime’s desire for safer food, stable financial markets, and cleaner air without antagonizing politically favored firms or generating social unrest. At the same time, they face reputational pressures from their international counterparts to implement global best practices at home. This article highlights how enterprising officials have quietly sought to expand their authority in the context of an authoritarian regulatory state. By focusing on aviation, financial services, food safety, and environmental protection in China, I highlight how agencies, responding to domestic bureaucratic competition and embeddedness in global networks, have led to the emergence of four distinct types of regulatory authority: regulatory command, subversion, coordination, and ensnarement.

Sam Wilkins, Subnational Turnover, Accountability Politics, and Electoral Authoritarian Survival: Evidence from Museveni’s Uganda

Most non-democratic regimes engineer elections such that regime change is effectively impossible via the ballot. However, many of these elections see high turnover of politicians at the subnational level, often through competitive processes that occur within ruling parties. This is the case for President Yoweri Museveni’s dominant National Resistance Movement (NRM) in Uganda, the ranks of which have been decimated by intra-party competition at each election throughout its three decades in power. This competition includes high levels of voter participation in mass primaries and general elections and is particularly acute in the rural southern areas where Museveni’s simultaneous presidential candidacy draws most support. Based on qualitative data from the 2016 elections, this article investigates the relationship between this local, intra-party competition and Museveni’s survival, building a theory that local competition in electoral authoritarian regimes can provide an outlet for accountability politics by redirecting widespread voter frustrations away from a regime and towards expendable local politicians.

Yuhua Wang, Review Article, State-in-Society 2.0: Toward Fourth-Generation Theories of the State

I characterize modern social scientific studies of the state as comprising three generations: society-centered, state-centered, and the state-in-society approach. I then discuss how recent books by James Scott, David Stasavage, and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson advance the literature by taking the entire history of human political development into account. Lastly, I build on recent contributions in the field to propose what I call a “State-in-Society 2.0” framework, in which state-society linkages through elite social networks shape the strength and form of the state. The framework provides a potentially promising analytical perspective that sheds new light on the “meso-temporal” dynamics that link broad historical trends in state-society relations with state development outcomes in a variety of cases.
Volume 54, Number 1, October 20212021-10-13T22:12:12+00:00

Volume 53, Number 4, July 2021

Jimena Valdez, What Capital Wants: Business Interests and Labor Market Reform in Portugal and Spain

Under what conditions are governments able to liberalize labor markets? I leverage the cases of Portugal and Spain, two countries hit by the Eurozone crisis and constrained in their policy options, that diverge in the key measure mandated by international creditors to recover—the decentralization of collective bargaining. Against the common assumption that the liberalization of labor is widely embraced by capital, I show that governments are only able to advance labor reforms when there is a leading industrial export sector that benefits from it and provides a powerful domestic social partner. I test this argument with in-depth qualitative data collected during twelve months of fieldwork in both countries, including 129 interviews with politicians, policy-makers, and members of business associations and labor confederations, among others.

Iosif Kovras and Stefano Pagliari, Crisis and Punishment? Explaining Politicians’ Appetite for Retribution in Post-Crisis Europe

This article investigates the politics of holding bank executives accountable for banking crises. The post-2008 financial crisis was characterized by a significant variation in the endorsement of retributive justice. While some countries established special prosecutorial bodies and facilitated prosecutions, others relied on the existing prosecutorial mechanisms to seek out wrongdoing. The comparative experience of Iceland and Cyprus shows that the unfolding of the crisis shapes the appetite of politicians for retributive justice. With a banking collapse, politicians will be most proactive, as voters’ demand for justice is high and the risks for the banking industry are minimal. With a severe yet negotiated crisis following a bailout/bail-in, politicians are more reluctant to endorse policies that may risk the recovery of the fragile banking sector.

Anna Lührmann and Bryan Rooney, Autocratization by Decree: States of Emergency and Democratic Decline

States of emergency grant chief executives the power to bypass democratic constraints in order to combat existential threats. As such, they are ideal tools to erode democratic institutions while maintaining the illusion of constitutional legitimacy. Therefore, states of emergency should be associated with a heightened risk of autocratization––a decline in a regime’s democratic attributes. Despite this theoretical link and the contemporary relevance of both autocratization and states of emergency, no prior study has empirically tested this relationship. This article tests this relationship using data on sixty democracies for 1974 to 2016. We find that democracies are 75 percent more likely to erode under a state of emergency. This evidence strongly suggests that states of emergency circumvent democratic processes in ways that might promote democratic decline.

Kelly M. McMann, Matthew Maguire, John Gerring, Michael Coppedge, and Staffan I. Lindberg, Explaining Subnational Regime Variation: Country-Level Factors

Studies of a small number of countries have revealed that both democratic and non-democratic subnational governments can exist within a single country. However, these works have neither demonstrated how common subnational regime variation is nor explained why some countries are more prone to it. This article does both. We show that subnational regime variation exists in all world regions, in both unitary and federal states, and in both the present and past, using Varieties of Democracy global data from 1900 to 2018. The article also demonstrates theoretically and empirically how social heterogeneity and factors undermining a national government’s ability to extend control throughout a country promote this variation. Specifically, subnational regime variation is more common in countries that are ethnically diverse, rugged, and populous.

Harris Doshay, Solidarity or Distancing? How Official Status Influences Chinese Protestant Reactions to Repression

When facing state-backed repression, why do groups sometimes band together in solidarity and sometimes fail to do so? This study contributes to the literature on repression by studying how and why repressed groups react to repression, focusing on how registered civil society groups affect solidarity. Specifically, I trace the impact of the Chinese Communist Party’s Cross Demolition Campaign on patterns of solidarity and victim blaming among Christian Churches. I further demonstrate conditions under which repressed group members become more fragmented and scattered rather than more unified. Based on evidence from sixty-four elite and mass interviews, I find that registered groups’ legibility constrains their members, thus enabling dynamics of victim-blaming that hinder solidarity and further empowering the autocrat to divide and conquer potential opposition.

Gregory M. Thaler, Equifinality in the Smallholder Slot: Cash Crop Development in the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesian Borneo

This article presents a comparative ethnography of the smallholder agroforestry projects of an international environmental organization. Migrant ranchers in Brazil sell cattle from private properties in a heavily-deforested landscape. Indigenous farmers in Indonesia rely on subsistence food production on customary lands in a heavily-forested landscape. Despite these differences, the projects identify both migrant ranchers and indigenous farmers as “smallholders” and prescribe cash crop agroforestry as the solution to both their predicaments. In the face of expanding ranches and plantations, this cash crop solution accepts the destruction of forest ecosystems and livelihoods as inevitable, funneling smallholders into market agroforestry in agro-industrial landscapes. This article strengthens the case for comparative ethnography and challenges discursive conflations and political-economic biases of prevailing sustainable development policies.

Henry E. Hale and Volodymyr Kulyk, Aspirational Identity Politics and Support for Radical Reform: The Case of Post-Maidan Ukraine

How does ethnicity influence mass support for radical reforms? Treating ethnicity as a set of cognitively useful categories serving both ethnocentric and inclusive ends, we argue people can strive toward civic visions for their state yet interpret obstacles through “ethnic” lenses. We label this phenomenon aspirational identity politics, prominent when external aggressors exploit identity commonalities with home-state subpopulations. Consequently, ethnic cognition can facilitate radical reform support not only through ethnocentrism, but also by connecting prosocial dispositions to support for in-group favoring reforms. Accordingly, original survey data from Ukraine in 2017 reveal prosocial values better predict support for nine radical reforms––including in-group favoring ones––than does ethnocentrism. Support is also strongest among economically better-off people, indicating backing for radical reform is generally more about aspiration than desperation.

Jared Abbott and Benjamin Goldfrank, Review Article, Scaling-Up and Zooming-Out: Understanding How and When Participatory Institutions Matter

The three books reviewed here represent a new generation of rigorous scholarship on participatory institutions (PIs). They demonstrate that––under certain conditions––it is possible to build large-scale PIs that strengthen democratic governance and improve citizens’ lives. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain. Due in part to the absence of either high-quality national-level comparative data or fine-grained subnational data, and in part to research design choices of existing studies, the literature remains limited in its capacity to make general claims about the causes and effects of large-scale PIs. Ultimately, the key question collectively addressed, but not fully answered, by the works reviewed is whether governments can build PIs that deliver on their promise to improve the quality of democracy and enhance public service provision on a large scale in diverse contexts beyond Brazil.
Volume 53, Number 4, July 20212025-07-02T17:31:05+00:00

Volume 53, Number 3, April 2021

Virginia Oliveros, Working for the Machine: Patronage Jobs and Political Services in
Argentina

Conventional wisdom posits that patronage jobs are distributed to supporters in exchange for political services. But why would public employees comply with the agreement and provide political services after receiving the job? Departing from existing explanations, I argue that patronage employees engage in political activities because their jobs are tied to their patrons’ political survival. Supporters’ jobs will be maintained by the incumbent, but not by the opposition. Supporters, then, have incentives to help the incumbent, which makes their original commitment to provide political services a credible one. Using survey experiments embedded in a survey of 1,200 Argentine public employees, I show that patronage employees are involved in political activities and that they believe their jobs are tied to the political success of the incumbent.

Denise van der Kamp, Can Police Patrols Prevent Pollution? The Limits of Authoritarian Environmental Governance in China

China’s high-profile anti-pollution campaigns have fueled theories of authoritarian environmental efficiency. In a regime where bureaucrats are sensitive to top-down scrutiny, central campaigns are expected to be powerful tool for reducing pollution. Focusing on China’s nationwide pollution inspections campaign, I assess these claims of authoritarian efficiency. I find that central inspections (or “police patrols”) have no discernable impact on air pollution. I argue that inspections were ineffective because environmental enforcement requires a degree of sustained scrutiny that one-off campaigns cannot provide. The deterrent effect of inspections is also undercut by the regime’s ambivalence towards independent courts and unsupervised public participation. These findings suggest that China’s obstacles to pollution enforcement may be greater than anticipated, and theories of authoritarian efficiency overlook gaps in authoritarian state capacity.

Kristen Kao and Lindsay J. Benstead, Female Electability in the Arab World: The Advantages of Intersectionality

Many studies of women’s electability in the developing world focus on single traits such as gender, ethnicity, or religion. Employing an original survey experiment in Jordan, we examine the impacts of multiple, intersecting candidate identities on voter preferences. We show empirically that existing theories of electoral behavior alone cannot account for women’s electability. An intersectional lens that considers how power structures shape electability and produce complex effects that must be empirically verified in different contexts is needed. Although less electable overall, female candidates fare as well as males from similar social identity groups. Our findings underscore the need to apply intersectionality to theories of electoral behavior in the developing world and lay the groundwork for a larger research agenda explaining women’s electability in Arab elections.

Dina Bishara, Precarious Collective Action: Unemployed Graduates Associations in the Middle East and North Africa

Why did unemployed university graduates form collective associations in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa but not in others? Despite similar levels of grievances around educated unemployment, reversals in guaranteed employment schemes, and similarly restrictive conditions for mobilization, unemployed graduates’ associations formed in Morocco and Tunisia but not in Egypt. Conventional explanations—focused on grievances, political opportunities, or pre-existing organizational structures—cannot account for this variation. Instead, I point to the power of ideologically conducive frames for mobilization around the time that grievances become salient. A strong Leftist oriented tradition of student unionism in Morocco and Tunisia was necessary for the emergence of a rights-based discourse around the “right to work.” This was not the case in Egypt, where Islamists, not Communists, dominated student politics at the time that grievances around educated unemployment became salient. This article offers one of the first comparative studies of the mobilization of the unemployed in a non-Western, non-democratic context.

Cesar Zucco Jr. and Timothy J. Power, Fragmentation Without Cleavages? Endogenous Fractionalization in the Brazilian Party System

This article investigates the causes of party system hyperfragmentation in Brazil. We ask why hyperfragmentation—understood as extreme multipartism that continues to fractionalize—occurs despite significant changes to social cleavages or to electoral rules. Using survey data from federal legislators, we rule out the possibility of new issue-based multidimensionality. Using new estimates of the ideological position of legislative parties, we show that new party entry was not driven by polarization or convergence among traditional parties. We advance an alternative explanation of “fragmentation without cleavages,” arguing that changing dynamics of electoral list composition, federal party funding, and coalition management have changed the context of political ambition. For strategically minded elites, it is more attractive than ever before to be a dominant player in a small party.

Alexander Hudson, Political Parties and Public Participation in Constitution Making: Legitimation, Distraction, or Real Influence?

Over the past three decades, participatory methods of constitution making have gained increasing acceptance and are now an indispensable part of any constitution-making process. Despite this, we know little about how much public participation actually affects the constitution. This article investigates the impact of participation in two groundbreaking cases: Brazil (1988) and South Africa (1996). This analysis demonstrates that public participation has relatively small effects on the text, but that it varies in systematic ways. The theory advanced here posits that party strength (especially in terms of discipline and programmatic commitments) is the key determinant of the effectiveness of public participation. Strong parties may be more effective in many ways, but they are less likely to act on input from the public in constitution-making processes.

Alexandre Pelletier, Competition for Religious Authority and Islamist Mobilization in Indonesia

This article seeks to explain variations in the success of Islamist mobilization. It argues that Islamist groups do better where competition for religious authority is intense. These religious “markets” are conducive to Islamist success because they 1) lower the barriers of entry to new religious entrepreneurs, 2) incentivize established leaders to support Islamist mobilization, and 3) push moderate leaders into silence. The article develops this theory by examining sub-regional variations in Islamist mobilization on the Indonesian island of Java. Using newly collected data on Java’s 15,000 Islamic schools, it compares religious institutions across more than 100 regencies in Java. It also uses dozens of field interviews with Indonesian Islamists and Muslim leaders to show where market structures have facilitated the growth of Islamist groups.

Rehan Rajay Jamil, Review Article, Understanding the Expansion of Latin America’s New Social Welfare Regimes

Latin American countries have been described as truncated welfare states. However, the recent expansion of innovative social welfare programs have brought millions of excluded citizens access to social benefits. This review article examines a new body of scholarship that studies how democratic political competition has created the institutional context for social welfare expansion. This literature makes several important contributions to the study of distributive politics. It moves beyond regime type and party ideology and focuses on the nature of domestic political institutions and citizen-state linkages within Latin American democracies. Countries with robust political competition and denser ties to constituents have had the most extensive welfare expansion, and non-partisan programs have undermined clientelism. In single party dominated settings, the political incentives for informal and clientelist provision remains significant.
Volume 53, Number 3, April 20212025-07-02T17:31:14+00:00

Volume 53, Number 2, January 2021

Christopher Chambers-Ju, Adjustment Policies, Union Structures, and Strategies of Mobilization: Teacher Politics in Mexico and Argentina

This article analyzes the evolving mobilizational strategies of robust unions in contemporary Latin America. The origins of these strategies are rooted in the neoliberal adjustment policies in the early 1990s that compensated and reshaped power relations in labor organizations. With union compensation, a dominant faction concentrated power and embraced instrumentalism; the union exchanged electoral support with various parties for particularistic benefits. When adjustment policies were adopted without compensation, power was dispersed in an archipelago of activists. Unions then relied on movementism, which centered on contentious demand making and resistance to partisan alliances. Comparing teachers in Mexico and Argentina, this article contributes to broader debates about the effects of democracy on contentious politics and the changing partisan identities of workers.

Philip A. Martin, Giulia Piccolino, and Jeremy S. Speight, Ex-Rebel Authority after Civil War: Theory and Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

How do former armed militants exercise local political power after civil wars end? Building on recent advances in the study of “rebel rulers” and local goods provision by armed groups, this article offers a typology of ex-rebel commander authority that emphasizes two dimensions of former militants’ power: local-level ties to civilian populations ruled during civil war and national-level ties to post-conflict state elites. Put together, these dimensions produce four trajectories of ex-rebel authority. These trajectories shape whether and how ex-rebel commanders provide social goods within post-conflict communities and the durability of ex-rebels’ local authority over time. We illustrate this typology with qualitative evidence from northern Côte d’Ivoire. The framework yields theoretical insights about local orders after civil war, as well as implications for peacebuilding policies.

Yasser Kureshi, When Judges Defy Dictators: An Audience-Based Framework to Explain the Emergence of Judicial Assertiveness against Authoritarian Regimes

Under what conditions do judiciaries act assertively against authoritarian regimes? I argue that the judiciary coalesces around institutional norms and preferences in response to the preferences of institutions and networks, or “audiences,” with which judges interact, and which shape the careers and reputations of judges. Proposing a typology of judicial-regime relations, I demonstrate that the judiciary’s affinity to authoritarian regimes diminishes as these audiences grow independent from the regime. Using case law research, archival research, and interviews, I demonstrate the utility of the audience-based framework for explaining judicial behavior in authoritarian regimes by exploring cross-temporal variation across authoritarian regimes in Pakistan. This study integrates ideas-based and interest-based explanations for judicial behavior in a generalizable framework for explaining variation in judicial assertiveness against authoritarian regimes.

Nicholas Kerr and Michael Wahman, Electoral Rulings and Public Trust in African Courts and Elections

On the African continent, where elections are often surrounded by accusations of fraud and manipulation, legal avenues for challenging elections may enhance election integrity and trust in political institutions. Court rulings on electoral petitions have consequences for the distribution of power, but how do they shape public opinion? We theorize and study the way in which court rulings in relation to parliamentary election petitions shape public perceptions of election and judicial legitimacy. Using survey data from the 2016 Zambian election, our results suggest that opposition voters rate quality of elections lower when courts nullify elections. However, judicial legitimacy seems unaffected even for voters in constituencies where the courts have shown independence vis à vis the executive and nullified parliamentary elections won by the governing party.

Justin J. Gengler, Bethany Shockley, and Michael C. Ewers, Refinancing the Rentier State: Welfare, Inequality, and Citizen Preferences toward Fiscal Reform in the Gulf Oil Monarchies

Against the backdrop of fiscal reform efforts in Middle East oil producers, this article proposes a general framework for understanding how citizens relate to welfare benefits in the rentier state and then tests some observable implications using original survey data from the quintessential rentier state of Qatar. Using two novel choice experiments, we ask Qataris to choose between competing forms of economic subsidies and state spending, producing a clear and reliable ordering of welfare priorities. Expectations derived from the experiments about the individual-level determinants of rentier reform preferences are then tested using data from a follow-up survey. Findings demonstrate the importance of non-excludable public goods, rather than private patronage, for upholding the rentier bargain.

Suzanne E. Scoggins, Rethinking Authoritarian Resilience and the Coercive Apparatus

A state’s coercive apparatus can be strong in some ways and weak in others. Using interview data from security personnel in China, this study expands current conceptualizations of authoritarian durability and coercive capacity to consider a wide range of security activities. While protest response in China is centrally controlled and strong, other types of crime control are decentralized and systematically inadequate in ways that compromise the state’s coercive power and may ultimately feed back into protest. Considering security activities beyond protest control exposes cracks in China’s authoritarian system of control—an area where it is typically perceived to thrive—and calls into question our understanding of regime resilience as well as our current approach to assessing the role coercive capacity plays in authoritarian resilience elsewhere.

Catherine Reyes-Housholder and Gwynn Thomas, Gendered Incentives, Party Support, and Viable Female Presidential Candidates in Latin America

Women hold less than 10 percent of chief executive positions worldwide. Understanding how women democratically access these posts requires theorizing how they gain resources from established parties to mount viable electoral campaigns. We argue that in stable regimes marked by representational malaise parties respond to gendered incentives and nominate female candidates. Drawing on Latin American cases, we show how diverse parties nominated women in order to signal change or novelty, to credibly commit to “feminine” leadership and issues, and to mobilize female voters. A negative case depicts how a lack of representational critiques can fail to incentivize parties to back women instead of men. Our focus on gendered incentives provides a new framework that places political parties at the center of questions about women’s electoral opportunities.

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Review Article, Domestic and Global Dimensions of Post-Communist Institution-Building

This article reviews four recent books that inquire into the nature and challenges of institution-building in the post-communist region. The main lessons learned from this scholarship relate to the complexity of establishing effective domestic institutions securing property rights and the role of various domestic and global factors that shape these processes. Domestic variables include political connections, bargaining power, and the nature of a social equilibrium that shapes norms, expectations, and behavior of economic actors. Global factors include structural constraints and opportunities associated with the global financial system and institutions.
Volume 53, Number 2, January 20212021-01-19T01:28:36+00:00
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