Volume 54, Number 2, January 2022

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.