Volume 56, Number 1, October 2023

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.