In autocracies, why are certain bureaucrats more heavy-handed in their use of force than others during repression? In this article, we propose an incentive-compatible theory that explains the uneven compliance of bureaucrats in repressive campaigns. We argue that bureaucrats from less trusted backgrounds tend to implement repressive tasks more fervently to credibly display loyalty and bolster their career prospects. We provide evidence for our theory using China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–1959), a repressive campaign launched by Mao Zedong against alleged critics of his rule. We find that officials who were former undercover partisans, a faction considered untrustworthy by Mao, tended to prosecute more “rightists” in their jurisdictions and imposed harsher penalties on them. This study contributes to the literature by revealing the motivations of coercive agents.

A rich literature examines the determinants of income inequality. Less is known about the distribution of income composition, or the extent to which different socio-economic groups hold different sources of income. This article explores the drivers of income composition inequality
(ICI). Contrary to recent studies, which show that the composition of government has ceased to shape redistribution and income inequality dynamics, this article posits that left-wing parties are associated with lower income composition inequality. We test this expectation with data from thirty European countries between 2003 and 2017. Our results suggest that the polarization between capital and labor income holders declines under left-wing governments. We establish that this is mainly because left-wing parties seek to broaden access to capital income.

Which autocratic elites are more likely to be punished after being removed from office? Purges are an important tool of autocratic survival, helping dictators to eliminate potential rivals. However, expulsion is not always the end for victims, as some also suffer detention or execution. Although we have compelling theories on why certain elites are purged, we still lack strong understanding of why punishments may differ. Using individual-level data on autocratic elites from communist Eastern Europe between 1917–1991, I find evidence that military and internal security elites are more likely to be detained than civilians, owing to the higher coup risk they pose. Internal security elites are also more likely to be executed than other elites, due to long-term threats of their professional knowledge.

Since the 1990s, seventeen African states have added a second chamber to their legislatures. This sudden trend is puzzling for two reasons. First, bicameral legislatures have decreased by 33 percent worldwide. Second, although upper houses often aim to improve democratic representation, descriptive statistics suggest these institutional changes were not due to democratic or representative pressures. The changes occurred primarily in hybrid regimes. What explains this resurgence of bicameral legislatures in Africa? I argue that incumbents introduce a second chamber when the opposition has sufficient power in the lower chamber to contain the executive branch. I adopt a mixed-methods approach combining statistical analysis and two case studies of Côte d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe. I find that African incumbents have created a second chamber to (1) weaken the legislature as a whole and the opposition in particular and (2) manage intra-party dissent.

Extant theories posit that political conflict affords favorable circumstances for successful party building. However, crises do not necessarily engender the emergence of new parties with the capacity to integrate discontent. In this in-depth analysis of Chile, we show how lowering barriers to entry inadvertently precluded the development of a national political organization. We describe the nature of new political actors who emerged from the cycle of protest that erupted in October 2019. Our analysis shows that the traits of the umbrellas of lists of independents conditioned the ability of emerging actors to aggregate demands of different districts. The Chilean case illustrates how a cycle of protest can engender new, electorally successful political actors but does not assure these actors’ capacity to legitimate the political process.

Research in comparative politics on informal institutions can be grouped into analysis of norms and values within government institutions and studies of self-governance in communities that are relatively isolated from states. Three recent books by Nadya Hajj, Shelby Grossman, and David Skarbek advance this research agenda by showing that self-governance can be significant even in contexts where the state is present, including refugee camps, markets in urban settings, and in prisons. They also offer abundant insights into how to overcome challenges with measuring and analyzing informal institutions. Rather than prioritize private or public governance, the authors see these as imperfect alternatives that invite analysis of why private governance works better in some contexts than in others for communities seeking to improve their lives in challenging circumstances.

Can religious leaders who oppose state violence reduce its use? Communal elites, such as religious leaders, may oppose human rights violations. This article argues that these leaders, part of institutions embedded in local communities and with influence based on traditional power, reduce repression when they oppose dictatorships. The argument’s main implication is tested in Argentina during the Dirty War of its 1976–1983 military dictatorship, using original archival data on the country’s Catholic bishops. Opposed bishops are associated with reduced disappearances and killings. A variety of evidence is consistent with opposed bishops taking two types of actions to resist repression: assisting likeminded local agents and participating in human rights advocacy campaigns. The findings point to the importance of influential civil society actors in reducing state violence.

Under what circumstances do ethnoracial groups become programmatically differentiated? This article argues that ethnoracial programmatic differentiation results from major transformations in groups’ access to state power. Access to state power conditions ethnoracial groups’ perceptions of the state and their support for state-centric programmatic policies. As historically-excluded groups gain access to power, and historically-advantaged ones lose theirs, programmatic differentiation increases, the product of shifting relationships with the state. I evaluate this argument using survey data from the Andean region and demonstrate that ethnoracial groups have become programmatically differentiated where the indigenous have recently gained political power, but not elsewhere despite widespread structural inequalities and extensive indigenous organizational capacity. The findings shed light on why ethnoracialized preferences vary across contexts in unexpected ways.

Bolivia prohibits discrimination based on gender identity and passed a ground-breaking gender identity law. These laws had little support among voters and passed along with heteronormative measures. Why did activists succeed in proposing and passing legislation that most voters did not support? Why were Bolivia’s advances in LGBTQ+ rights accompanied by heteronormative laws? We argue that parties with deep ties to social movements are more likely to advance legislation that expands LGBTQ+ rights than other parties and that contradictory laws emerge where both organized religion and LGBTQ+ activists are party constituents. We describe how Bolivian trans activists leveraged their access to ruling party legislators, using interviews with activists and officials, and briefly discuss the cases of Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Colombia.

How does manipulation of primary elections affect the selection of women candidates for parliament? The underrepresentation of women in politics is a well-researched global phenomenon. However, as most work focuses on general elections, we overlook the disadvantages that women face in the selection process. Specifically, primary elections often provide ample room for manipulation. We argue that manipulation skews electoral contests in favor of candidates with material and inter-personal resources, who are more likely to be men. We collect unique data via on-the-ground observation of 119 primary election rounds (featuring 316 aspirants) in Malawi’s 2019 parliamentary election and interview candidates to shed light on hitherto uninvestigated internal party primaries. We show that while women running in free and fair primaries were more likely to win nominations than men, their chances were substantially reduced where primaries were flawed. The quantitative findings are corroborated by qualitative accounts of the gendered effect of primary-day manipulation in party primaries. The results have implications for debates on descriptive representation, electoral integrity, and political parties.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea occurred after twenty years of relative peace and the apex (and failure) of pro-Russian sentiments within Crimea. Annexation is surprising for Putin’s willingness to pursue such risky actions, but also because it required elite support within Crimea. This article uses process tracing to test ethnonationalism in explaining support for Russia’s annexation against a rival explanation focusing on the role of criminality and crime (financial-criminal incentive structure). By exposing how and which elites defected in Crimea, the article demonstrates that elite breakage and realignments occurred within a financial-criminal incentive structure to motivate engagement in annexation. In turn, this article discusses its broader implications for understanding Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine and the politics of conflict, nationalism, and the wider former Soviet Union.

This article explores how and why substate nationalism shapes support for redistribution. An experiment embedded in an original survey reveals that in Spanish regions with extensive substate nationalist mobilization, preferences for redistribution vary based on the proposed boundaries of redistribution. In this context, individuals have preferences regarding where redistribution will occur, and not just on how much there will be. The results provide the first micro-level evidence for how preferences for redistribution depend on the geographic boundaries of a proposed policy and why mobilized group identities interact with those preferences to determine support for redistribution. The findings suggest that substate nationalist mobilization has significant implications for policy preferences beyond secession.

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.

Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present evidence from conjoint experiments from three European regions with active territorial debates: Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. We find that territorial preferences matter more than others for candidate choice, as the reward (punishment) of congruent (incongruent) candidates is greater, and individuals are less willing to trade off on this issue. Our results have comparative implications for political competition in multidimensional spaces.

How do parties respond to media environments slanted against them? This article exploits variation in the level of media activism of Latin American left-wing governments to answer this question. I argue that the composition of governing parties’ bases of support shapes their communication strategy. While parties with unorganized supporters lack societal channels of communication with the electorate and are forced to resort to alternative media structures to disseminate information, parties with organized supporters communicate through affiliated societal organizations and do not depend on mediatized communication. To illustrate this theory, I process trace the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia, drawing on seventy original interviews with key decisionmakers. This article contributes to the literature on political parties by highlighting the overlooked communication function they fulfill.

We argue that authoritarian regimes engage in subnational propaganda targeting in pursuit of political survival. Drawing on an original dataset of propaganda collected inside North Korea, we show that the regime tailors messaging to elites and masses differently. We outline a schema of strategies and themes that authoritarian regimes utilize when crafting propaganda, theorize variations in their use, and test these variations empirically, using qualitative analysis, regression, and text analysis. We demonstrate that the North Korean regime targets Pyongyang-based elites with co-optational messages promising economic benefit, while the masses receive mobilizational messages focused on agricultural productivity. North Korean propaganda also legitimates the regime differently based on audience: messages to elites reassure them of their privileged status but messages to the masses remind them of why their sacrifices are necessary.

The world price of oil is in constant flux, but countries respond to this reality in very different ways. Some heavily regulate the degree to which world prices “pass-through” to the price of gasoline at the pump, while others let domestic gasoline prices track world markets. We develop a novel, weekly dataset—to our knowledge the most comprehensive in existence—to explore the political economy of pass-through policies in over 100 countries. We find that autocracies are more likely than democracies to limit pass-through, especially those that are weakly institutionalized, ineffective providers of public services, and neo-patrimonial. Our project sheds light on the domestic policy choices that affect climate change and has significant implications for understanding price regulation more broadly.

Autocrats must redistribute to survive, but redistribution is limited and selective. Who is entitled to redistribution underlying the authoritarian bargain? I argue redistribution is a question of citizenship. Autocrats use citizenship institutions, especially particularistic membership, to strategically limit and extend socio-economic rights to ensure both security and economic development. I apply this framework to China, where control over particularistic membership decentralized in conjunction with development strategies. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, government policies, and a database of local citizenship policies in China, I trace how local citizenship creates closure while economic development incentivizes strategic inclusion. By evaluating how authoritarian citizenship functions, this framework increases our understanding of individual-state relations in autocratic contexts.