Volume 57, Number 3, April 2025

Academia and policy worlds consider the skill-based discrimination of migrants at entry as legitimate and unproblematic. Yet, the apparently neutral criterion of “skills” is under increasing scrutiny and, we contend, rightly so: its blurriness is impractical for comparative purposes and conceals that selection endures after immigration. With a new dataset encompassing thirty diverse states from Asia, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean, we examine how entry regulations connect to immigrant rights and access to permanent residence. We identify four clusters of countries displaying varying relations of immigration selections at entry with packages of rights and the possibility to settle, thereby largely defining the trajectories that are possible for different categories of migrant workers. Variation matters: some states carefully select by “skills” at entry and control access to rights, but several others provide fairly equal rights to ample groups of migrants regardless of skills.

Why has Japan failed to fulfill the mission of its 2005 postal privatization legislation? The answer is informal institutions that empower the postmasters within the electoral system and facilitate the mobilization of elites on behalf of anti-reformist goals. To support this claim, I analyze three such institutions: the postmasters’ ownership of postal facilities; the re-employment of former bureaucrats by the postal system and of top postal employees elsewhere in the system; and sales and vote-mobilization quotas. Theoretically, this study analyzes four sources of informal institutional resilience following formal institutional change: the heretofore understudied participation of officialdom in the introduction, communication, and enforcement of informal institutions; the establishment of such institutions prior to new formal rules; institutional duplication across economic sectors; and institutional complementarities.

There is extensive research about how bureaucracies in the developing world depart from the Weberian ideal and the ways in which corruption distorts the provision of public services. However, less is known about how citizens respond to the corruption they encounter in daily life. In this study, we implement a conjoint experiment to investigate how citizens evaluate different forms of corruption in the public sector. We find that they prefer “speed money” corrupt bureaucrats and reject “petty theft” corrupt bureaucrats when seeking a government service. In addition, this preference for “speed money” is not more salient among citizens who perceive the bureaucracy as inefficient. Instead, those who can afford to pay bribes are more accepting of bureaucratic corruption.

This article examines how previously excluded social actors transform democratic institutions that offer limited, subordinated inclusion. It introduces the concept of “conversion from below,” which refers to endogenous institutional change driven by historically marginalized groups. By comparing three indigenous mobilizations aimed at broadening Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation and Consent (FPIC), the article demonstrates that institutional changes from below occur when there is ambiguity in the definition of the institution; this ambiguity can be exploited in favorable venues and when groups can signal their disruptive power. This study enhances our understanding of endogenous institutional change and sheds light on the dynamics of engagement and resistance of newly included groups with inclusionary institutions in Latin America.

Under what conditions can the Left become electorally competitive in exclusionary contexts where actors championing redistribution face barriers to entry? We argue that leftist parties can significantly increase electoral support during inclusionary institutional openings, such as peace processes, when previously excluded grassroots actors find new spaces to mobilize for redistribution. By engaging in hinge institutions—non-binding, nationwide platforms—grassroots movements strengthen their organizational and ideational endowments, becoming potent brokers for heretofore weak leftist parties. Using a difference-in-differences design and a novel database on citizen proposals to the Colombian peace table, we show that grassroots mobilization mainly increases the Left’s vote share in post-accord presidential elections at the municipal level. We unpack the mechanisms through in-depth interviews with key actors and party manifesto analysis.

This study explores the transition from patrimonial structures to the inclusion of ordinary citizens in public office, focusing on Swedish state-building. Analyzing newly collected data on 1,351 civil servants, the research reveals how the demand for competence led to the adoption of meritocratic recruitment starting in the seventeenth century. This shift contributed to Sweden’s elimination of systemic corruption by the nineteenth century. Key factors in this transition include the increasing complexity of public administration tasks, which drove education policies; the ennoblement of individuals to broaden the pool of qualified personnel; and tensions within the expanded noble class. Conceptualized as “administrative democratization,” this process initially enhanced competence at lower ranks and progressively empowered ordinary citizens in senior positions, underscoring education’s role in developing effective public administration.