Political scientists have historically viewed smallholder farmers in low-income countries as lacking the capacity to collectively oppose adverse policies. This article argues that they can if they are able to attribute price distortions to government action. Apart from direct taxes, however, this is likely to occur only when traders inform smallholders of unfavorable policies. When traders are also significantly harmed by a price-distorting policy (e.g., by an export ban), they are motivated to use their networks and financial resources to inform farmer protest. When traders can pass on price distortions to farmers (as with low export taxes), they will not. The article probes this argument through a controlled comparative case analysis of export bans and taxes on raw cashew nuts in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Authoritarian leaders frequently send mixed messages about law. While official rhetoric typically emphasizes obeying law, leaders have proven willing to sidestep the law when it proves inconvenient. We explore the impact of this duality on the attitudes of Russian citizens, drawing on three rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. To identify the separate effects of cohort, age, and survey year, we use existing estimates of a function relating age to the predisposition to form new attitudes. Our results indicate that one factor driving Russians’ attitudes on law-abiding is the strength of the Kremlin’s messaging on the importance of obeying the law especially in their formative years. This effect would have been strongest for the oldest Russians. Yet, ceteris paribus, more years lived in Russia lead to declines in law-abiding attitudes. The net result of these two effects is that older Russians profess greater law abidingness. Putin’s emphasis on obeying the laws on the books has left its mark in the increasing prevalence of law-abiding attitudes.

Why do most authoritarian regimes installed by populist chief executives not become full-scale, repressive dictatorships? As explanation, scholars argue that populist leaders base their rule on charismatic appeal and voluntary mass support; therefore, they do not need harsh coercion, which would undermine their popular legitimacy. While corroborating this argument, I highlight a crucial complementary factor: populist chief executives find it difficult to marshal large-scale political repression. After all, their insistence on personalistic autonomy and unconstrained predominance creates tension with the military institution, the mainstay of organized coercion. Due to this inherent distance, most populist rulers lack the dependable military support to sustain the imposition of harsh autocracy. I substantiate these arguments with relevant cases from contemporary Latin America, especially Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru.

Speechmaking is a vital resource for legislators and holds particular importance for women lawmakers, who frequently constitute a numerical minority and face constraints on their political influence. We argue that formal and informal institutions, district characteristics, and issue priorities shape women’s speech participation. Analyzing twenty-eight years of speeches from Chile’s Chamber of Deputies, we first show that women’s speeches constitute a small share of all speeches, directly corresponding to their numeric representation. Proportionally, however, women are over/under-represented in speechmaking across different policy areas. After controlling for various factors correlating with gender, including committee assignments, tenure, and district characteristics, women’s relative participation is similar to men’s in most topics but exceeds men’s in areas that disproportionately affect women’s lives, reflecting their commitment to substantive representation.

How do facilitating mechanisms affect the share of women in parliament? Specifically, is there an ideal combination of quota types and facilitating mechanisms that leads to greater female representation in parliament? This research uses a comprehensive dataset covering 186 countries in 2021 to provide a global landscape of the gender quota types and their facilitating mechanisms. Employing the OLS regression, we identified positive associations between placement mandates and strong sanctions and women’s parliamentary presence in legislative candidate system. In contrast, financial incentives under the reserved seat system showed a negative association. Our country-level analysis reveals that female aspirants face multifaceted challenges, suggesting that multiple issues should be addressed for financial incentives to effectively improve female representation.

Research in conflict studies comparing nonviolent and violent collective action has gained widespread attention due to the counterintuitive finding that nonviolent movements succeed more often than armed movements. However, rising repression and authoritarianism worldwide, alongside declining success rates for protest movements, highlight the need to further theorize and test the conditions under which nonviolent action succeeds. This article distills the different logics by which excluded minorities are advantaged or disadvantaged in nonviolent action. It also reviews three new books that advance the field of movement effectiveness in the short and long runs, and that demonstrate that success is context-dependent, with few characteristics universally conferring advantage or disadvantage. We conclude by outlining areas for future research, including the role of digital technologies.