Volume 57, Number 4, April 2025

Existing research contends that clientelist parties seek alternative voter mobilization strategies when material exchanges no longer guarantee office. This article argues that engaging in strategic interactions with influential interest groups constitutes an alternative way to mobilize support. Pressured by competition, clientelist parties align policy with interest group preferences and obtain support from members and followers in return. Using a comparative subnational design and primary data, I show how Mexico’s PRI passed a restrictive abortion amendment to obtain clergy support in Yucatán but abstained from reform in Hidalgo where it faced similar competition but perceived clergy as unable to bolster votes. The findings shed light on clientelist parties’ voter mobilization strategies and the policy effects of interest group interactions in new democracies and other developing contexts.

Is rising inequality an inevitable consequence of the transition to a knowledge-based economy? Departing from existing approaches in labor economics and comparative political economy, we develop an account of inequality in the knowledge economy that foregrounds the role of labor market institutions. We argue that collective bargaining institutions play a critical role in mediating the skill bias commonly associated with the diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICT), because they determine whether employers have the discretion to selectively reward strategically important high-skilled workers with greater wages and benefits. We then test our argument by carrying out cross-country analyses of both wage premia and non-wage benefits in the OECD countries. We find robust evidence in support of our theoretical propositions across a range of model specifications.

How can we explain the long-term decline in the class-based voting cleavage observed in high-income democracies since the 1960s? The causes of this decline are far from being fully understood. We hypothesize that the decline in this cleavage between the working class and other classes is connected to the shrinkage of the working class, increases in economic prosperity, and a reduction in levels of inequality. To test these hypotheses, we use a newly-assembled dataset including sixteen advanced democracies with a long temporal coverage (1964–2019) and a class voting index based on the difference between the proportion of a particular social class in a party’s electorate and the proportion of this social class in the electorate as a whole. Models using country fixed effects confirm a decline in the class-based voting cleavage across Western democracies. Controlling for several political variables, the size of the working class constitutes the best predictor of declines in class voting in affluent democracies.

This article investigates the impact of Chinese investment on authoritarianism through the lens of authoritarian linkage, focusing on the first decade of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and Malaysia. While both countries were electoral autocracies when the BRI was launched in 2013, their regime trajectories diverged. In Cambodia, Chinese investment reinforced elite patronage networks and coercive state-society relations, stabilizing the regime during political unrest. Conversely, in Malaysia, it contributed to the collapse of the long-ruling authoritarian coalition by exacerbating elite fragmentation and popular discontent over corruption, which has led to greater political competition. These findings demonstrate how domestic political economy dynamics mediate the effects of Chinese investment, revealing its variable influence on regime outcomes.

How do political elites in authoritarian regimes shape their public image? Drawing on a unique dataset covering official news releases of the daily public activities of all provincial party secretaries in China from 2016 to 2022, this study finds that authoritarian elites manipulate the propaganda apparatus to project various public images. Text analysis shows that provincial leaders employ a variety of themes and narratives to highlight their activities, resulting in four types of images: competence-oriented, benevolence-oriented, party-loyalty-oriented, and versatile. Case studies reveal how the configuration of conditions, such as the official’s age, professional background, political connections with the top leader, and the socioeconomic characteristics of their province, relate to their image-building strategies. The findings, which are supported by methods including topic modeling, machine learning, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, contribute to the literature on political propaganda by emphasizing the diversity of public images among senior political elites in non-democratic systems.

Understanding recentralization as a vertical phenomenon requires careful attention to the horizontal distribution of power at the national level. We articulate a theoretical argument that emphasizes the content of the coalition that enacts recentralization, demonstrating that politicians can return power to the center without empowering the president. In Mexico, the pluralism of the coalition that pushed for recentralization from 2007 to 2018 led to institutional designs that avoided investing authority in the presidency and opted instead to empower a series of autonomous constitutional bodies. The Mexican case thus points to a simple but powerful hypothesis to add to the literature on multilevel governance: the broader that coalitions that push for recentralization, the wider the set of actors who will be empowered at the center of the political system.