Volume 59, Number 1, October 2026

How do government-led social safety net programs in areas of violence, conflict, and state fragility shape trust in governments? Drawing on 394 qualitative interviews across twenty villages in Burkina Faso and Cameroon, we found that knowledge of governments’ roles in aid delivery programs can be a double-edged sword. While government attribution seems to improve attitudes towards governments in program sites, it widens the gap between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries’ confidence in state institutions. Indeed, non-beneficiaries with the highest levels of information and government attribution were likely to feel more neglected by the state than those with no information. We refer to this dynamic as an information paradox, wherein information about the government’s role boosts trust in the state for some and undermines it for others.

Constitution-making is cast as a state-society dialogue, with public consultation sustaining the legal fiction that “the people” write the social contract. I introduce will-confirmation—the interpretive practice whereby elites utilize underdetermined public input to legitimate representative claims. It has two modes: constructive (synthesizing ambiguous input into alignment) and dismissive (excluding contrary input as unrepresentative). Across thirty-seven interviews from Chile’s Constitutional Convention and Cuba’s Drafting Commission, I show how will-confirmation operates amid crises of representation. In Chile, drafters claiming to embody the people produced parallel monologues, aggravating rather than resolving a lack of elite consensus. In Cuba, drafters and regime-loyal intermediaries filtered input into centralized coherence, obscuring rather than remedying the absence of ideological pluralism. Will-confirmation reduced consultation to self-legitimation rather than a check on interpretation.

This article explains when and why high courts in new democracies engage in post-decision monitoring to secure compliance with their rulings. We develop a theory of strategic monitoring in which judges, lacking enforcement capacity, selectively deploy oversight mechanisms in response to reputational risks generated by social pressure. Leveraging an original dataset of 6,093 decisions from Ecuador’s Constitutional Court (2015–2024), we show that the presence and intensity of amicus curiae participation significantly increase the likelihood of monitoring, while budgetary resources and political salience do not. These findings indicate that courts engage in institutional triage, prioritizing cases where non-compliance is most likely to generate public scrutiny. The article advances a large-N perspective on post-decision enforcement highlighting the pivotal role of civil-society participation in strengthening judicial compliance.

How is between-group inequality related to collective action in broker-mediated patronage systems? Research typically examines between-group inequality at coarse scales, like countries, but I argue that hyper-local neighborhood context conditions politically relevant outcomes. Using original household survey data from over 200 Indian informal settlements, with social network data from a subset, I show local inequality between caste (jati) groups is associated with lower neighborhood collective action potential. Probing mechanisms, I show neighborhoods with higher between-group inequality exhibit more inter-caste conflict and weaker reciprocity; problem-solving networks are also more fragmented, and brokers struggle to build large, cross-caste followings, with adverse consequences for mobilization. These findings contribute to debates on how diversity and inequality structure political behavior and underscore the importance of micro-contexts where citizens interact and mobilize.

Why do authoritarian regimes tolerate minor opposition parties with little chance of winning power? This article argues that such parties persist because regimes deliberately structure political competition. Minor opposition parties enhance regime stability through two mechanisms. First, they boost electoral legitimacy by broadening political choice and sustaining the appearance of competition without threatening control. Second, they reduce electoral uncertainty by fragmenting opposition support, imitating major challengers, and occupying ideological niches. Focusing on Russia after the 2012 party registration reform, which sharply increased the number of parties, the analysis draws on an original dataset of 367 regional legislative elections (2003–2024). It shows that minor parties are more prevalent in politically vulnerable regions, increase turnout, weaken stronger opposition forces, and reinforce authoritarian resilience.

Why do revolutions produce sometimes strong yet unstable states after revolutionary victory? To answer this question, I utilize an original dataset and archival evidence to examine patterns of subnational-level state building in Communist China after 1949. I find that prior revolutionary experiences improved social compliance of state policies, but weakened the building of state institutions and incited public disorder. The key mechanism lies in the entrenchment of social antagonism developed during intense revolutionary struggle, which catalyzed public support for state-led social reform but also planted suspicion of perceived counterrevolutionary forces in both state and society. These findings challenge the notion that revolutions naturally create strong states and contribute to our broader understanding of how social mobilization affects state building processes.