Volume 56, Number 2, January 2024

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.