Civilians living in areas of rebel control have a variety of tools through which they may challenge rebel rule. While studies have examined how civilians violently resist the rule of armed groups, few have examined non-violent challengers. By examining instances of non-violent opposition to rebel rule by civilians living under rebel control in “Eelam,” the areas of Sri Lanka controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, this article develops a conception of agency that reveals far more about the civilian/rebel relationship. Drawing on original interviews with key participants, we focus on two modes of “oppositional agency” in which women and clergy non-violently challenged the rebel government regarding its detention and recruitment practices, with some success.

Crackdowns on informal vendors are a common form of violence against the poor in many cities in developing countries. This article uses a media events database to examine crackdowns of informal vendors in Accra, Dakar, and Lusaka from 2000 to 2016. During this period, Accra demonstrated consistently high levels of violence towards vendors, while violence increased in Dakar and decreased in Lusaka. The article argues that these trends are driven by differences in political decentralization for municipal authorities, variations in their administrative mandates over vending, and the degree of influence vendors hold as an electoral constituency. Through a structured comparison of the governance of informal vendors across multiple cities, the article demonstrates how state violence manifests through everyday battles over access to public space.

Radical populists in the Andes have combined a populist program and a multicultural agenda. However, while populism centralizes power in the hands of the leader and emphasizes the unity of the people, multiculturalism grants cultural rights that strengthen societal autonomy, generating an inherent tension between these two modes of incorporation. How are populist governments able to combine unity and fragmentation as well as centralization and autonomy? This article develops the concept of populist multiculturalism, focusing on the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia, which has supported autonomy rights while simultaneously curtailing their implementation. Specifically, it examines the implementation of indigenous autonomous governments and prior consultation and the relationship between indigenous organizations and the ruling party. The article also extends this concept to Ecuador and Venezuela.

Sideways concessions to protest are policy reforms that decrease grievance among potential protesters, without being directly linked to the stated demands of the protest. By avoiding both the backlash effect of repression and the inspirational effect of direct concessions, they are theoretically powerful tools for quelling unrest. This article evaluates the effectiveness of sideways concessions at reducing individual mobilization potential using a survey experiment conducted in Kyrgyzstan in October 2015. The evidence shows sideways concessions are effective among respondents who were dissatisfied with the government and not optimistic about the future of the country. The article also demonstrates the plausibility of these results in other settings, drawing on observational data from the 2014 Gezi Park protests in Turkey and the 2013 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine.

Research on political accountability emphasizes elections and popular control, but often neglects how ordinary people hold their leaders to account in the context of daily life. Dominant scholarly approaches emphasize the logic of electoral sanctioning and removal, missing the importance of mutual respect between representatives and citizens. This article introduces a new logic of democratic accountability based on the social practices, daily political behaviors, and public deliberation between representatives and citizens. Using urban Ghana as a study site, this article uncovers the mechanisms through which a theory based on respect works in practice. By reconciling theories of political representation with deliberative democracy, the article places the voices of urban Ghanaians in conversation with Western political thought to broaden understandings of accountability in African democracies.

What explains variation in local health services? Comparative scholarship highlights economic factors, electoral competition, and partisanship to account for service disparities. Employing an original data set and qualitative case studies of health service provision in thirty-three metropolitan municipalities in Argentina between 1995 and 2015, we find that mayors are likely to provide more services when they are not aligned with the governor. Unable to access the discretionary resources and electoral support from governors that aligned mayors enjoy, non-aligned mayors exploit automatic provincial revenue-sharing health transfers, which reward municipalities that provide more services and have more infrastructure, in order to build territorial power. These findings highlight the importance of non-alignment and the conditions under which formula-based transfers encourage local service provision.

Can economic development retard democracy, defying expectations of classic modernization theorizing? If so, under what conditions? Our article addresses the puzzle of poor democratic performance in highly urbanized and industrialized post-communist states. We assembled an original dataset with data from Ukraine’s local and national elections and constructed district- (rayon) and region- (oblast) level indices of electoral quality. Regions and districts that score higher on developmental indices also score lower on electoral quality, including in Ukraine’s Western regions conventionally considered more democratic than the predominantly Russian-speaking Eastern regions. We explain these outcomes with reference to the peculiarities of Soviet industrial development, which facilitated the emergence of “oligarchs” in territories housing Soviet-era mega-industries. Our research contributes to comparative debates about the links between economic development and democracy.

When do electorally dominant parties lose power in democracies? Drawing on the experiences of India’s states during the period of Indian National Congress dominance, we argue that single-party dominance is less likely to endure under two conditions: first, when one of the opposition parties possesses a longstanding and robust party organization and, second, when there is a single social cleavage dividing the political class into two main cleavage groups. Both conditions contribute to the demise of a dominant party system by encouraging a previously fragmented opposition to consolidate behind one large party capable of challenging the dominant party. We provide support for our argument with evidence from across India’s states and with more in-depth case studies of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh.

Which electoral losers become the most disillusioned with democracy following the first free and fair elections? Exploiting surveys before and after founding elections in post-Arab Spring Egypt and Tunisia, we find that the most disillusioned losers were those residing in areas where the losing parties were strongest. We argue that expectations matter. Losers whose parties are strong locally tend to overestimate their popularity nationally and thus become more disillusioned after the first elections. Beyond these attitudinal results, we find that these areas witnessed a greater increase in support for candidates from former autocratic regimes in subsequent elections. These findings clarify subnational variation in electoral losers’ attitudes towards democracy. They suggest that decentralization may keep otherwise disillusioned losers invested in democracy.

This article investigates the electoral constraints on the inter-party mobility of candidates. We argue that the prevalent mode of interactions among candidates, voters, and parties in local, district-level electoral markets shapes the strategic constraints faced by potential party switchers. We suggest that strong linkages between voters and political parties reduce the market value of the candidates outside of their political parties, thereby constraining their inter-party mobility. These expectations are evaluated using candidate- and district-level data from Pakistan from 1988–2013. The results show that the strength of voter-party linkages in an electoral district, as measured by the lack of electoral volatility and the extent of straight-ticket voting in national and provincial elections, has a positive effect on the propensity of candidates to switch parties.

Regulation concerning GM crops around the world range from total prohibition to full openness and state-wide promotion. The Andean countries in Latin America provide an interesting setting to analyze the possible causes for this variation. Despite having similar conditions to plant GM crops, Colombia and Bolivia allow GM crop cultivation, while Ecuador and Peru do not. Interestingly, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s leftist president, could not ban GM crop production, and Alan Garcia (2006–2011) in Peru, despite his pro-GM stance, failed to adopt a permissive regulation. We argue that two factors explain these divergent outcomes regarding GM seed sowing and reform efforts in Andean countries: (i) the time in which regulatory measures were attempted, and (ii) the quick structural change that GM seeds generate once introduced into a country.

Twenty years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, organizations representing key voting constituencies—youth and the economically marginalized—are becoming major forces of opposition to the ANC-led government while explicitly framing their activities as non-political. They prefer instead to talk in terms of “rights” and “activism.” Drawing from fieldwork and online publications of three opposition organizations—#RhodesMustFall, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and Afriforum— this article argues that the abandonment of “politics” is more than rhetorical positioning. By framing their actions as non-political, these groups engage in a deep-seated critique of the possibilities presented by democratic politics and a lack of perceived efficacy or legitimacy of institutionalized contestation. Perhaps more importantly, it means that opposition politics are occurring in an environment without institutional incentives for cooperation.

Why have growth rates diverged between India and Pakistan since the 1990s? This article argues that differences in perceptions of political instability through the locations of political violence in the two countries have impacted growth through investment decisions. In Pakistan, kidnapping and terrorism in major cities has led to the domination of rent-implicated investment, thus limiting growth. In India, by contrast, political violence in the periphery or targeting minorities remains socially distant to the perspectives of investors, leading to more productive investments, and thus higher growth. The article provides a new set of explanations for differences in growth among middle-income countries by highlighting political instability and the salience of violence, the demand for rents as investments, and the limits of institutional explanations for growth outcomes.

To remain competitive in the global marketplace, states have increasingly been forced to supplement their domestic labor resources with foreign manpower. However, their admission policies for low-skilled workers exhibit puzzling cross-national variation. What determines this policy divergence among advanced economies that share many structural and institutional properties? This article offers a statist explanation. It argues that this variation is, at base, caused by two interrelated factors: the state’s perception of security risks involved in admitting particular ethno-national groups of labor migrants and inter-ministerial bargaining over policy authority within the state apparatus. This argument is developed through a comparison of the contrasting and empirically underexplored cases of foreign labor policy formation in Japan and Taiwan.

Levies imposed on the export earnings of natural resource producers provide the armed forces with sizeable off-budget revenue not subject to oversight or scrutiny. Why do some nations succeed at reforming or eliminating these levies, while others do not? This article argues that outcomes have to do with the balance of coalition strength between civilians and the armed forces. In the contemporary period, the military can no longer go at it alone, relying on tactics of coercive intimidation. Like civilians, it must find political party allies who can compete legislatively on its behalf. How coalitions congeal, come unraveled, or fail to develop is assessed through a small-N comparative study of Ecuador and Chile.

In light of the alleged democratic recession in recent years, comparative democratization research is now taking a turn to more party-political, agency-centered, and historically contingent explanations of democratic backsliding. I review three recent books that represent this trend to varying degrees. Based on a historical-institutional approach, I assess whether the theoretical propositions of these books are fruitful for explaining the gradual backsliding to competitive authoritarianism and illiberalism in recent decades. I find that the propositions in How Democracies Die in particular risk leading to excessively voluntarist conclusions that are insensitive to historical path dependencies. The other two books better capture the ways in which domestic institutional legacies have shaped democratic backsliding around the globe. I end the review by specifying two models that explain backslidings as institutional responses to 1) international “exogenous” shocks or 2) “endogenous” demands unleashed by dynamics of the democratic transition itself. I show that these two models provide a more comprehensive understanding of a diverse set of the most infamous recent backslidings in the United States, Venezuela, Hungary, and Turkey.

The state occupies a central place in the study of a range of political, economic, and social outcomes. This article brings into dialogue literature on the state and emerging research on criminal politics through a study of protection rackets. Conceiving of criminal protection rackets as institutional arrangements of extraction and domination, I develop a political economy framework to explain variation in forms of resistance to rackets. The framework shows that distinct configurations of economic and political resources influence the type of resistance available to subordinates. I illustrate the framework’s utility using micro-level data on resistance to rackets in Latin America. Attention to how resource endowments shape patterns of resistance to projects of extraction and domination provides a novel window into the bottom-up dynamics of state building.

To what extent can comparative methods and ethnographic inquiry combine to advance knowledge in political science? Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular method within political science. Yet both proponents and detractors often see it as a technique best suited for producing in-depth knowledge about a particular case or for explicating the meaning of a particular political behavior. This article argues that comparative ethnography—ethnographic research that explicitly and intentionally builds an argument through the analysis of two or more cases—can be of particular value to political scientists, and to scholars of comparative politics in particular. The approach can hone our theoretical models, challenge existing conceptual categories, and help develop portable political insights. This article has two goals: (1) to show that comparative ethnographic research deserves a prominent place in the repertoire of qualitative methods and (2) to elaborate the logics of inquiry behind such comparisons so that scholars will be better equipped to use them more frequently. Two or more cases are not always better than one, but comparative ethnography can yield new and different insights with important implications for our understandings of politics.

Intense polarization can birth enduring political parties. Yet, whereas civil war and authoritarian repression often produce two parties, populist mobilization more often produces one: a populist, not an anti-populist, one. Why not anti-populist parties? The article argues that successful populism, by its nature, inhibits anti-populist party building. Because successful populists discredit a wide array of elites and institutions, anti-populists, who come from these discredited elite and institutions, are unpopular and lack cohesion. Where populists govern over a decade, anti-populist party building remains difficult, but conditions become less unfavorable: populists inevitably lose popularity, and the opposition commits to elections and undergoes leadership renovation. The article compares four countries: three where no anti-populist party-building has occurred (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Thailand) and one where an anti-populist party almost took root (Venezuela).

Latin America is viewed as a region that has embraced a strategy of “open economy industrial policy” (OEIP). However, the region’s transition to OEIP has been neither complete nor irreversible. In this article, we argue that economic development concepts and instruments introduced during Brazil’s previous import-substitution industrialization regime still influence the country’s industrial policy. By tracing the evolution of local content requirements (LCR) in the Brazilian oil and gas sector, we show that conflicts between inward-oriented and outward-oriented forms of industrial development have been the main source of recent policy changes in the country. In addition, we show how institutional structures affect the implementation of economic ideas. The country’s centralized policymaking facilitated significant changes in the orientation of the LCR policy during the last twenty years.

This study builds on relational approaches to social mobilization and organizational ecology to explain local variations in protest frequency in the newer democracies of the developing world. I introduce the concept of keystone organizations, or organizations that justify protest and build influential networks that catalyze protest activity, to explain the localized growth of protest. I contribute to the literature on clientelism by showing that the networks that fuel political clientelism monopolize the organizational environment and discourage protest politics. I test my arguments statistically using an original dataset of protest events in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Yucatan, Mexico, during the 2000 to 2012 federal election seasons that I coded from local newspaper reports.

The theory argues that female presidents are more likely to (1) mobilize women on the basis of gender identity (core constituency); and (2) network with elite feminists (personal constituency). Only presidents who meet both conditions are most likely legislate on behalf of women. Controlled case studies illustrate the theory: Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil attempted to mobilize women on the basis of gender identity, but only Bachelet succeeded. Furthermore, only Bachelet maintained extensive ties with elite feminists. Original evidence shows that Bachelet, but not Rousseff, legislated in ways that statistically differed from her co-partisan male predecessor. Bachelet’s constituencies incentivized and enabled some of her pro-women proposals while a lack of expertise from feminists inhibited Rousseff’s pursuit of pro-women change.

In elections around the world, candidates seek to influence voters’ choices using a variety of intermediaries and by relying on either positive electoral inducements or coercive strategies. What explains candidates’ choices among different forms of clientelism? When do candidates incentivize voters using positive inducements and when do they choose coercive strategies? This article proposes a new typology of clientelism and tests two families of explanations for why candidates would choose to use state versus non-state brokers, and inducements versus coercion, as private incentives to voters. First, existing theory predicts that political conditions such as incumbency or co-partisanship with the national party should enable the use of public over private brokers and resources. In addition, we conjecture that clientelism carries programmatic signals, such that the choice between inducements and coercion depends on local political conditions. We test our predictions using a post-electoral survey fielded in 2014 in ninety rural Hungarian communities. We find little evidence that local political conditions are related to the choice between state versus non-state brokers, but significant support for the prediction that programmatic signals explain the choice between inducements and coercion.

In this review article, I review four recent books that deal with various aspects of post-Communist political economy and argue that they represent a major shift in the research orientation of this subfield. Early scholarship mostly analyzed the causes of the diverging transitional paths that the post-Communist economies took, while highlighting the impact of Soviet legacies, the political pressures that the reformers faced, and the role of Western influences. Recent work shifts focus to the consequences of the divergent transition paths. It seeks to understand how economic development is possible in the post-Communist world, where state agents are predatory, where civil society organizations are weak, and where regulatory mechanisms are underdeveloped.

Democracy is often a conquest of elite opposition parties. In electoral authoritarian regimes, opposition parties will promote suffrage expansion in order to weaken the ruling parties’ control over elections and improve their own electoral possibilities. Ruling parties, by contrast, will oppose suffrage expansion for the same reasons that opposition parties support it, and they will use their control of the political system to block it. Suffrage reforms typically occur in electoral authoritarian regimes only when there is a split within the ruling coalition that leads a faction to side with the opposition. I explore these arguments through detailed qualitative analyses of suffrage reforms in Chile in 1874 and Uruguay in 1918, as well as a quantitative analysis of a roll-call vote in Chile.

This article explores sub-national variation in jihadist Salafist mobilization through a comparative analysis of two Tunisian interior towns: Sidi Bouzid and Metlaoui. After the Arab Spring, while Sidi Bouzid emerged as a bastion of jihadist Salafism and Islamic State foreign fighter recruitment, the movement failed to gain broad-based legitimacy in Metlaoui. On the basis of the comparison, this study introduces a new explanation for the variation in jihadist mobilization: state-building legacies and collective memory. During the 20th century, Sidi Bouzid and Metlaoui were subjected to divergent processes of forced political incorporation that this study argues have had implications for how contemporary citizens respond to jihadist rhetoric. The final part of the article discusses how this insight informs the study of jihadist Salafism in other contexts.

The article examines how four states in the francophone Sahel have managed Salafi activity since independence. States that established institutional oversight mechanisms in the Islamic sphere prior to the emergence of Saudi Arabia as a global exporter of Salafi ideology have effectively counteracted the rise of political and jihadi Salafism in recent decades. Autocratic incumbents created national Islamic associations, determined the leadership makeup of these, and delegated state authority to non-Salafi leaders so as to regulate access to the Islamic sphere. The tacit cooperation arrangements between state and nonstate actors enabled the former to demobilize religious challengers. States that chose strategies other than institutional regulation contributed to the rise of political and security challengers. These findings challenge conventional assumptions about the inability of weak states to regulate their religious spheres and shed new light on the complex relationship between weak states and Islam.

Over the last fifty years, gender quotas have transformed the composition of national legislatures worldwide. But a lack of systematic cross-national longitudinal data limits the questions researchers are able to ask about quotas. This article introduces a new dataset—QAROT (Quota Adoption and Reform Over Time)—the first global dataset on gender quota adoption, implementation, and reform over time. Theoretically, we clarify important issues in extant quota research. The dataset moves beyond traditional categorizations of quota policies with new measures of quota design, quota thresholds, placement mandates, sanctions for non-compliance, and quota effectiveness. We also create a single-variable measure of the presence of an effective quota to be used by comparative politics researchers to control for this powerful institutional feature.

Available evidence indicates that there is considerable variation among autocracies in the extent to which subnational officials are rewarded for economic growth. Why is economic performance used as a criterion for appointment in some autocracies but not in others? We argue that in more competitive—though still autocratic—regimes, the political imperatives of maintaining an electoral machine that can win semi-competitive elections leads regime leaders to abandon cadre policies that promote economic development. Using data on turnover among high-level economic bureaucrats in Russia’s 89 regions between 2001 and 2012, we find that performance-based appointments are more frequent in less competitive regions. These findings demonstrate one way that semi-competitive elections can actually undermine economic development under autocracy

The farmacias del pueblo in the Dominican Republic sell generic drugs to eligible consumers at bargain-basement prices. While their proponents portray them as models of public enterprise and welcome their efforts to bring essential medicines to poor people, their critics worry that they are used less to protect public health than to purchase political support—with perverse consequences for democracy and distribution. Are the farmacias an indispensable source of essential medicine or an inefficient source of political patronage? I study their location and utilization; find that they are both located in low-income communities and open to better-off buyers; and conclude that by combining the efficiency of spatial targeting with the popularity of universal access, they offer developing democracies a sustainable approach to social policy.

Why do some participatory institutions develop strong institutional designs, when most have limited powers? Existing literature emphasizes the importance of institutional design in shaping the impact of participatory institutions, yet falls short in accounting for the origins of design. Through an analysis of Brazil’s health councils, this article argues that bundling the creation of a participatory institution with substantive policy reform can 1) create opportunities to pass the laws and regulations needed for a strong design and 2) introduce incentives for otherwise reluctant stakeholders to support the participatory institution as an instrument to obtain their substantive policy goals. This article highlights an unexpected benefit of institutional conversion, demonstrating that shifting the base of stakeholder support can sometimes strengthen institutions rather than undermining them.

The advanced economies are experiencing a set of shared challenges in the transition to a new “knowledge economy” characterized by rapid technological innovation and associated with a heightened premium on higher education. Yet individual countries are charting rather different courses as they navigate this transition. This article examines divergent trajectories of change in three coordinated market economies—Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. It argues that differences in the organization of business and labor, and in the institutions that structure their interactions with each other and with the state, have produced different coalitional alignments and led these countries onto divergent paths toward the knowledge economy today.