Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present evidence from conjoint experiments from three European regions with active territorial debates: Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. We find that territorial preferences matter more than others for candidate choice, as the reward (punishment) of congruent (incongruent) candidates is greater, and individuals are less willing to trade off on this issue. Our results have comparative implications for political competition in multidimensional spaces.

How do parties respond to media environments slanted against them? This article exploits variation in the level of media activism of Latin American left-wing governments to answer this question. I argue that the composition of governing parties’ bases of support shapes their communication strategy. While parties with unorganized supporters lack societal channels of communication with the electorate and are forced to resort to alternative media structures to disseminate information, parties with organized supporters communicate through affiliated societal organizations and do not depend on mediatized communication. To illustrate this theory, I process trace the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia, drawing on seventy original interviews with key decisionmakers. This article contributes to the literature on political parties by highlighting the overlooked communication function they fulfill.

We argue that authoritarian regimes engage in subnational propaganda targeting in pursuit of political survival. Drawing on an original dataset of propaganda collected inside North Korea, we show that the regime tailors messaging to elites and masses differently. We outline a schema of strategies and themes that authoritarian regimes utilize when crafting propaganda, theorize variations in their use, and test these variations empirically, using qualitative analysis, regression, and text analysis. We demonstrate that the North Korean regime targets Pyongyang-based elites with co-optational messages promising economic benefit, while the masses receive mobilizational messages focused on agricultural productivity. North Korean propaganda also legitimates the regime differently based on audience: messages to elites reassure them of their privileged status but messages to the masses remind them of why their sacrifices are necessary.

The world price of oil is in constant flux, but countries respond to this reality in very different ways. Some heavily regulate the degree to which world prices “pass-through” to the price of gasoline at the pump, while others let domestic gasoline prices track world markets. We develop a novel, weekly dataset—to our knowledge the most comprehensive in existence—to explore the political economy of pass-through policies in over 100 countries. We find that autocracies are more likely than democracies to limit pass-through, especially those that are weakly institutionalized, ineffective providers of public services, and neo-patrimonial. Our project sheds light on the domestic policy choices that affect climate change and has significant implications for understanding price regulation more broadly.

Autocrats must redistribute to survive, but redistribution is limited and selective. Who is entitled to redistribution underlying the authoritarian bargain? I argue redistribution is a question of citizenship. Autocrats use citizenship institutions, especially particularistic membership, to strategically limit and extend socio-economic rights to ensure both security and economic development. I apply this framework to China, where control over particularistic membership decentralized in conjunction with development strategies. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, government policies, and a database of local citizenship policies in China, I trace how local citizenship creates closure while economic development incentivizes strategic inclusion. By evaluating how authoritarian citizenship functions, this framework increases our understanding of individual-state relations in autocratic contexts.

This article presents a novel argument about what enables democracies to survive when executives attempt to weaken institutional constraints. We argue that democracies erode because (1) an illiberal executive attempts to undermine democracy and (2) this executive commands a majority in the national legislature. Democracies survive if the executive is not deeply illiberal or if the opposition controls a majority of the national legislature. The empirical section presents data about executive illiberalism and the balance of power in the national legislature for thirteen Latin American presidents. We test our argument in four negative cases (episodes) in Argentina since 1983. We use primary sources including 125 original interviews to explain how two presidents who attempted to centralize power fell short of eroding democracy.

What explains the militarization of public safety? Despite its failures, police militarization remains a popular policy. Existing scholarship has mainly focused on the police adopting military weapons and tactics but has neglected a silent but consequential type: the appointment of military members as police chiefs. Whereas the conventional wisdom points to partisanship and violence as key drivers, I argue that the militarization of police leaders responds to political motives. Based on a novel data set on 5,580 appointments in Mexico and repeated event history analysis, I find evidence of a top-down militarization sequence. Mayors are more likely to appoint military chiefs when upper levels of government and peers embrace a militarized security strategy. I further illustrate how coercive pressures and strategic incentives drive this sequence.

Recent scholarship on resource politics has found that the “resource curse” is largely specific to the Persian Gulf states in which British oil interests ensured the survival of small states. However, this does not present the entire picture of the relationship between oil and sovereignty. I argue that oil was also involved in the process in which the region protected by colonial powers was divided into certain states out of many possible territorial arrangements, creating states that would otherwise not exist. Based on extensive archival research, I show that when nine Gulf sheikhdoms negotiated under Abu Dhabi’s initiative to create a federation, (1) oil production during the colonial period and (2) the protectorate system led Qatar and Bahrain to reject it and achieve sovereignty separately.

Despite the government’s enormous efforts to forestall widespread protests, China still witnessed many cross-provincial protests in the post-1989 era. How did Chinese citizens find the opportunity to stage cross-provincial protests in a political environment highly hostile to coordination beyond the community level? By tackling this puzzle, this study illuminates the Chinese state’s sophisticatedly differentiated strategies for coping with collective protests. Rather than attribute state leaders’ threat perceptions to static dimensions of protest movements, we posit that dynamic dimensions such as the pathway of scale shift often play a more important role. We propose a typology of pathways through which local protests spread across provincial borders—top-down, outside-in, and bottom-up—and elucidate how the interaction between the pathways and the nature of solidarity shaped government perception and strategy. Besides addressing an important puzzle in China and enhancing our understanding of the political environment in high-capacity authoritarian regimes, this study also underscores how an investigation of dynamic dimensions can provide new insights into the government’s calculations and strategies for managing popular protests.

Research on the international dimension of authoritarianism and democratization has focused on patron-client interaction. This article identifies a specific type of international involvement that is characterized by geopolitical competition. In “international competitive involvement,” multiple rival countries intervene simultaneously and oppositely to support opposing sides during a political transition, namely the military and a faction from the civilian actors. Drawing on evidence from Egypt, Sudan, and Myanmar, I develop a theoretical framework for this type of international involvement and argue that it significantly enhances the military’s repressive capacity and hardens its negotiation position. While the military in cases of non-competitive support perceives of bargaining as a potential option, competitive involvement forecloses the bargaining option as repression becomes the most viable course of action for the military.

Does civil resistance work? Research emphasizes the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance over violent resistance in achieving campaign goals, with the seminal study Why Civil Resistance Works (WCRW) by Chenoweth and Stephan being the main point of reference to date. I revisit this pivotal finding in three steps. First, I reproduce WCRW’s results on nonviolent effectiveness. Second, I discuss how cases may have been overlooked due to a streetlight effect. Third, I quantify the results’ sensitivity using simulations. I find that WCRW’s main findings on nonviolent effectiveness are highly sensitive to variable selection, under-coverage bias, bootstrapping, and omitted variable bias. As a routine reference in scholarship and the public discourse, assessing the robustness of WCRW’s findings is relevant to practitioners and researchers.

This article analyzes changing patterns of worker protest and mobilization in France, with particular emphasis on the post-1970s era of neoliberalism. It argues that processes of state-led disembedding of labor have underpinned major changes in the leadership, content, and class bases of worker contestation. Drawing on more than forty original interviews as well as extensive secondary sources, it highlights a long-term shift in the dynamics of labor’s political engagement, in which unions’ role has been increasingly displaced by broad-based, anti-systemic social movements. Protests have called into question the legitimacy of French capitalism and the state, revealing the dysfunctions of political representation with troubling implications for the stability of French democracy and the governability of advanced capitalist economies.

Why are citizens in some communities able to protest to bring attention to their grievances, while not in others? While a long literature has contended that informal civil society institutions facilitate contentious collective action, not all organizations do so, and some might even discourage it. I argue in this article that inclusive institutions—open to everyone in a community—facilitate protests, while non-inclusive institutions uniting some particularistic sub-groups within communities hinder them. The former provide communities with broad social networks fostering communal unity, while the latter erode communal unity through provoking internal conflicts. I provide evidence for this theory in the sub-municipal context of Mexico, using statistical analysis of data from an original survey of sub-municipal community presidents and qualitative fieldwork evidence from Puebla and Tlaxcala.

In this article, I examine the factors that influence the amount and content of news media reporting on violence against women (VAW) in Brazil. VAW was not considered a relevant political problem until very recently when states began to respond to feminist demands by adopting policies to criminalize VAW and providing resources to survivors. I theorize that the process of improving state action on VAW increases news media attention to these stories. I also argue that heightened political attention to VAW increases news media discussion of policies and laws addressing VAW. Employing time series analysis and computer text analysis of an original dataset from Brazil (2004–2019), I find that strong legislation and congressional bill introduction exert significant positive effects on news media reporting of VAW.

How do authoritarian regimes punish ordinary opposition voters? I argue that elected community politicians help make “punishment regimes,” which discourage opposition support, credible. Strengthened by decentralization reforms, community politicians have information and leverage necessary to identify and punish opposition supporters. When the regime wins community elections, these politicians extend the regime’s reach deep into communities. When opposition parties win, their reach is constrained weakening their electoral control. Using mixed-methods evidence from Tanzania, I show regime-loyal community politicians use their distributive and legal-coercive powers to “deliver the vote” leading voters in these communities to fear individual reprisals for opposition support. In contrast, voters fear individual punishment in opposition-run communities significantly less. This study demonstrates the importance of local institutions and elections when understanding regime durability.

This article investigates whether the Chinese public possesses structured political preferences or ideology. We show that ideology in China is organized around a state-market economic dimension and an authoritarian-democratic political dimension. The most politically informed individuals are the least likely to constrain their ideological preferences to one dimension, which we argue is a product of the Party’s propaganda efforts. We find that younger and better- educated individuals are the most likely to favor free markets and that while members of the Communist Party no longer possess any sort of distinct economic preferences, they are markedly more authoritarian. We conclude that the diffuse character of the Chinese public’s preferences provides the Party with an opportunity to divide and rule.

How do parties historically dominated by one group diversify their representatives? I argue that ethnic parties adjust their strategies according to the institutional rules in place and the demographics of relevant constituencies. I study South Africa, which has a Mixed-Member Proportional electoral system, where parties nominate Single Member District and Proportional Representation candidates. Using original data on the racial, ethnic, and career background of over 10,000 local candidates nominated by the historically white Democratic Alliance party, I find that the party engages in vote-based inclusion by nominating black candidates to predominantly black districts. And while the DA symbolically includes non-whites on its PR lists, white candidates dominate electable list positions. These findings provide a demonstration at the micro-level of why ethnic parties struggle to meaningfully diversify.

The massification of secondary schooling constitutes the key educational project of the first post-war period. However, the resulting educational structures differed in terms of streaming and standardization. Despite their historical opposition to such expansion, center-right parties contributed to shaping these reforms. They generally opposed standardization because their distributive strategy rested on support from elites and middle classes. However, their stance on streaming varied. Centre-right parties supported streaming when they were linked to teachers and private providers who opposed comprehensive reforms, but supported de-streaming where such groups aligned with the left. This article shows how center-right parties in Bavaria, France, and Italy, with common partisan distributive aims, introduced varied public service reforms following from their links to different vested producers. It argues that theorizing such reforms requires considering both distributive and productive environments.

The increasing critique of representative democracy and its institutions determined reformers to consider the direct and deliberative processes as potential solutions to bridge the gap between elites and citizens. Substantial research investigates the functioning of these alternative models of democracy, but surprisingly little attention is paid to politicians’ perspectives and preferences for these reforms. This article fills this gap through an analysis of parliamentarians’ support for referendums and deliberative debates. It uses individual level data from the PartiRep Comparative MP Survey in fourteen European countries to identify individual-level determinants of legislators’ support. The findings reveal distinct explanatory factors of support for deliberative and direct reforms, which have important implications for democratic reform since elected representatives’ preferences strongly influence the type of innovation adopted.

Collective vigilantism, group violence to punish perceived offenses to a community, is both global and common in the contemporary world. It is also crucial for understanding state formation, contestation, crime, law and justice, inequality, and racial and ethnic conflicts. We review existing definitions and explanations for collective vigilantism, present a new typology of collective vigilantism that considers both the aims and level of organization of participating agents, and highlight important patterns that emerge from recent research, including the contributions to this special symposium. We present an argument for what a political science treatment of the topic can offer and introduce an ambitious research agenda that builds on cross-cutting themes and puzzles that emerge from the special symposium.

Mob vigilantism—the punishment of alleged criminals by groups of citizens–is widespread throughout the developing world. Drawing on surveys with more than 13,000 respondents from Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa, this article shows women are more likely than men to support mob vigilantism. Qualitative evidence, a vignette experiment, and survey measures suggest men and women differ in their beliefs about mob vigilantism. Men are more convinced that mob vigilantism creates risks of false accusation for those who do not commit crime. I trace this divergence in beliefs to differences in men’s and women’s personal risk of being accused of a crime that they did not commit. The results speak against the notion that women are inherently more opposed to violence than men.

Existing scholarship on vigilantism focuses on explaining factors that push citizens into the streets to take the law into their own hands. This article complements these theories by examining fear of reprisals that can keep vigilantes off the streets. It argues that vigilantism becomes rife when vigilantes find a systematic way to collude with state officials to obtain impunity. Qualitative data from Indonesia illustrate how street-level policemen grant selective impunity for vigilantism to gain public support for dispensing their more pressing duties. Contrary to conventional wisdom that links state-building to a decline in vigilantism, analysis of a sub-national dataset of 33,262 victims of vigilantism in Indonesia shows that a rapid expansion of the state’s coercive presence is associated with higher levels of vigilante violence.

Lynching is a surprisingly prevalent form of collective violence. We argue that two conditions can cause lynching: a shared morality based on salient collective threats, providing justification, and weak authority, creating opportunity. We examine this argument with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In Aceh, the province most impacted, the tsunami was a shock to morality (producing a religious revival) and authority (creating a situation of institutional flux). Using World Bank data, we find that Aceh saw an increase of lynchings, while lynchings stayed on average the same in other parts of Indonesia. Within Aceh, the increase was most pronounced where authority was most undermined and where locals had high levels of shared morality. These findings have implications for research on collective violence and the prevention of lynching.

What explains variation in the structure and practices of collective vigilantism? I develop a framework that focuses on relations among victims and between victims and the state. I use the framework to compare variation in collective vigilantism enacted by avocado and berry sectors in Michoacán, Mexico. Centralized collective vigilantism by the avocado sector entailed a single sectoral organization coordinating victims’ extra-legal activities with no interference from local politicians. By contrast, decentralized collective vigilantism by the berry sector consisted of multiple autonomous groups of victims in conflict with criminals, local political authorities and among each other as they competed for power and resources. These differences in collective vigilantism can be traced back to differences in the local political economies that shape relations among victims and between them and the state.

Today’s Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to racial violence, especially lethal police violence, and compared it to the “Jim Crow” U.S. South. However, this comparison requires more specific information about racial violence during this period. Uncovering and organizing this information are the main objectives of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. It documents racial killings in the American South, 1930–1954. Racial killings refer to killings where racial animus, or perceived infraction of Jim Crow norms, are documented or reasonably inferred from newspaper reports or U.S. government and civil rights organization documents. This research note discusses how the Archive contributes to basic comparative politics topics of democratic governance and subnational authoritarianism and methodological concerns, including the creation of databases used in the comparative study of collective vigilantism.

Conflicts between local communities and their governments over natural resource development are not new in Latin America. When mining and oil companies move in, communities have blocked roads, staged protests, and undertaken other forms of direct action. More recently, however, communities have expanded their tactics, turning toward the state and its participatory institutions to contest claims over their land. This article investigates this trend and the conditions that facilitate it by analyzing an original database of 102 attempts by communities in Colombia to implement one participatory institution—the popular consultation—to challenge large scale extractive projects. I argue that communities’ ability to contest extractive projects by leveraging participatory institutions depends on the balance of power between two external players—private firms and expert allies.

What explains why some governments advanced decentralized education in the 1990s while others shied away from such efforts? Some arguments suggest that decentralization was pursued to improve the coverage and quality of education. Others point to partisanship, ideology, or diffusion. Drawing on case studies of El Salvador and Paraguay, I argue instead that governments pursued education decentralization in part because it could be deployed as a political weapon to weaken teachers’ unions affiliated with the opposition, thus depressing mobilization and votes for their rivals. These findings contribute to the literature on decentralization by highlighting a new political motivation fueling decentralization efforts across the developing world—the demobilization of the opposition.

What are the consequences of election violence for citizens’ political attitudes? We argue that in polarized contexts, citizens’ interpretation of electoral violence depends on their partisan affiliations. When presented with information alleging co-partisans’ involvement in violence, people with strong partisan identities become more likely to assert that elections were free and fair. We test this expectation with a vignette experiment in West Bengal after India’s 2019 elections, presenting respondents with information about violence while varying the partisan identity of the perpetrator. Consistent with expectations, supporters of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) increased their evaluations of election quality when hearing about co-partisan violence. We find no evidence of disconfirmation bias for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters; their recent shift to the party plausibly explains this finding.

What explains variation in labor militancy and trade union tactics across similar oil regions? Existing literatures on the resource curse and labor in resource extraction provide contradictory expectations that do not account for variation. By comparing two prominent oil regions, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Russia and Mangystau, Kazakhstan, I find labor militancy is explained by more contingent factors than broader theories suggest. This article identifies oil privatization as a critical juncture that led to diverging path-dependent processes, finding that privatizing to foreign or domestic owners and the relative independence of the legal system explain the differing manifestations of labor militancy observed. These findings are potentially generalizable to post-communist and developing countries that privatize their extractive sectors and have a history of state control of labor relations.

What are the sources of incumbent parties’ superior financial resources in parliamentary election campaigns in Africa’s clientelistic democracies? Scholars have emphasized ruling parties’ access to state resources. We document a different mechanism, where government parties attract candidates willing and able to devote their personal resources to parliamentary (and by extension presidential) campaigns in the hope of gaining access to central resources. We support our theory with data from an original survey of candidates in the 2019 Malawi parliamentary election. Our findings show that government party candidates receive more resources from their party. More importantly, government party candidates also spend more of their own money in campaigns. The findings have implications for political competition and representation in Africa and beyond.

Although once the subject of intense theoretical debate, the lumpenproletariat is largely missing from class-based analyses of popular resistance under authoritarianism. This article introduces a new definition of lumpenproletarians in the developing world, focusing on the nature of their work. It then argues that, given their socioeconomic position, these people should eschew participation in conventional social movements but ought to back protests over state abuse. We evaluate this theory using quantitative and qualitative data from two authoritarian developing countries with large grey economies but different histories of unrest: China and Egypt. In both places, we find lumpenproletarians indeed tend to join demonstrations over government and police mistreatment. Moreover, the Egyptian experience shows that the group is susceptible to mobilization for both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ends.

A prevalent viewpoint is that wealth inequality leads to political inequality and that economic elites are more powerful when they control a larger wealth share. However, as wealth inequality changes are often endogenous, studying the political consequences of wealth concentration is challenging. I study a 1919 Danish land reform that confiscated 20 to 25 percent of the value of entailed estates, which were old aristocratic land and capital holdings. Using difference-in-difference estimation, I assess the political effects of this shock to local wealth inequality. I find no effect of a wealth inequality decrease on pro-elite political outcomes. These results question the degree to which wealth inequality matters for political equality under widely held political rights and strong rule of law.

Dominant political parties rule for prolonged periods of time by winning successive multiparty elections. However, the term “dominant party” encompasses an extremely diverse set of parties, ranging from ones winning unremarkable vote shares in established democracies to those garnering massive popular majorities in free but unfair elections. To grapple with such heterogeneity, this article proposes a three-part typology based on the foundations of a party’s electoral dominance—whether extremely high votes shares, steadfast support from legislative allies, or a favorable translation of votes into seats or office. These three types are internally homogenous but distinct from one another in ways predicted by the typology. The puzzles posed by each dominant-party type and the kinds of answers required to address those puzzles differ markedly.