Which electoral losers become the most disillusioned with democracy following the first free and fair elections? Exploiting surveys before and after founding elections in post-Arab Spring Egypt and Tunisia, we find that the most disillusioned losers were those residing in areas where the losing parties were strongest. We argue that expectations matter. Losers whose parties are strong locally tend to overestimate their popularity nationally and thus become more disillusioned after the first elections. Beyond these attitudinal results, we find that these areas witnessed a greater increase in support for candidates from former autocratic regimes in subsequent elections. These findings clarify subnational variation in electoral losers’ attitudes towards democracy. They suggest that decentralization may keep otherwise disillusioned losers invested in democracy.

This article investigates the electoral constraints on the inter-party mobility of candidates. We argue that the prevalent mode of interactions among candidates, voters, and parties in local, district-level electoral markets shapes the strategic constraints faced by potential party switchers. We suggest that strong linkages between voters and political parties reduce the market value of the candidates outside of their political parties, thereby constraining their inter-party mobility. These expectations are evaluated using candidate- and district-level data from Pakistan from 1988–2013. The results show that the strength of voter-party linkages in an electoral district, as measured by the lack of electoral volatility and the extent of straight-ticket voting in national and provincial elections, has a positive effect on the propensity of candidates to switch parties.

Regulation concerning GM crops around the world range from total prohibition to full openness and state-wide promotion. The Andean countries in Latin America provide an interesting setting to analyze the possible causes for this variation. Despite having similar conditions to plant GM crops, Colombia and Bolivia allow GM crop cultivation, while Ecuador and Peru do not. Interestingly, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s leftist president, could not ban GM crop production, and Alan Garcia (2006–2011) in Peru, despite his pro-GM stance, failed to adopt a permissive regulation. We argue that two factors explain these divergent outcomes regarding GM seed sowing and reform efforts in Andean countries: (i) the time in which regulatory measures were attempted, and (ii) the quick structural change that GM seeds generate once introduced into a country.

Twenty years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, organizations representing key voting constituencies—youth and the economically marginalized—are becoming major forces of opposition to the ANC-led government while explicitly framing their activities as non-political. They prefer instead to talk in terms of “rights” and “activism.” Drawing from fieldwork and online publications of three opposition organizations—#RhodesMustFall, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and Afriforum— this article argues that the abandonment of “politics” is more than rhetorical positioning. By framing their actions as non-political, these groups engage in a deep-seated critique of the possibilities presented by democratic politics and a lack of perceived efficacy or legitimacy of institutionalized contestation. Perhaps more importantly, it means that opposition politics are occurring in an environment without institutional incentives for cooperation.

Why have growth rates diverged between India and Pakistan since the 1990s? This article argues that differences in perceptions of political instability through the locations of political violence in the two countries have impacted growth through investment decisions. In Pakistan, kidnapping and terrorism in major cities has led to the domination of rent-implicated investment, thus limiting growth. In India, by contrast, political violence in the periphery or targeting minorities remains socially distant to the perspectives of investors, leading to more productive investments, and thus higher growth. The article provides a new set of explanations for differences in growth among middle-income countries by highlighting political instability and the salience of violence, the demand for rents as investments, and the limits of institutional explanations for growth outcomes.

To remain competitive in the global marketplace, states have increasingly been forced to supplement their domestic labor resources with foreign manpower. However, their admission policies for low-skilled workers exhibit puzzling cross-national variation. What determines this policy divergence among advanced economies that share many structural and institutional properties? This article offers a statist explanation. It argues that this variation is, at base, caused by two interrelated factors: the state’s perception of security risks involved in admitting particular ethno-national groups of labor migrants and inter-ministerial bargaining over policy authority within the state apparatus. This argument is developed through a comparison of the contrasting and empirically underexplored cases of foreign labor policy formation in Japan and Taiwan.

Levies imposed on the export earnings of natural resource producers provide the armed forces with sizeable off-budget revenue not subject to oversight or scrutiny. Why do some nations succeed at reforming or eliminating these levies, while others do not? This article argues that outcomes have to do with the balance of coalition strength between civilians and the armed forces. In the contemporary period, the military can no longer go at it alone, relying on tactics of coercive intimidation. Like civilians, it must find political party allies who can compete legislatively on its behalf. How coalitions congeal, come unraveled, or fail to develop is assessed through a small-N comparative study of Ecuador and Chile.

In light of the alleged democratic recession in recent years, comparative democratization research is now taking a turn to more party-political, agency-centered, and historically contingent explanations of democratic backsliding. I review three recent books that represent this trend to varying degrees. Based on a historical-institutional approach, I assess whether the theoretical propositions of these books are fruitful for explaining the gradual backsliding to competitive authoritarianism and illiberalism in recent decades. I find that the propositions in How Democracies Die in particular risk leading to excessively voluntarist conclusions that are insensitive to historical path dependencies. The other two books better capture the ways in which domestic institutional legacies have shaped democratic backsliding around the globe. I end the review by specifying two models that explain backslidings as institutional responses to 1) international “exogenous” shocks or 2) “endogenous” demands unleashed by dynamics of the democratic transition itself. I show that these two models provide a more comprehensive understanding of a diverse set of the most infamous recent backslidings in the United States, Venezuela, Hungary, and Turkey.

The state occupies a central place in the study of a range of political, economic, and social outcomes. This article brings into dialogue literature on the state and emerging research on criminal politics through a study of protection rackets. Conceiving of criminal protection rackets as institutional arrangements of extraction and domination, I develop a political economy framework to explain variation in forms of resistance to rackets. The framework shows that distinct configurations of economic and political resources influence the type of resistance available to subordinates. I illustrate the framework’s utility using micro-level data on resistance to rackets in Latin America. Attention to how resource endowments shape patterns of resistance to projects of extraction and domination provides a novel window into the bottom-up dynamics of state building.

To what extent can comparative methods and ethnographic inquiry combine to advance knowledge in political science? Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular method within political science. Yet both proponents and detractors often see it as a technique best suited for producing in-depth knowledge about a particular case or for explicating the meaning of a particular political behavior. This article argues that comparative ethnography—ethnographic research that explicitly and intentionally builds an argument through the analysis of two or more cases—can be of particular value to political scientists, and to scholars of comparative politics in particular. The approach can hone our theoretical models, challenge existing conceptual categories, and help develop portable political insights. This article has two goals: (1) to show that comparative ethnographic research deserves a prominent place in the repertoire of qualitative methods and (2) to elaborate the logics of inquiry behind such comparisons so that scholars will be better equipped to use them more frequently. Two or more cases are not always better than one, but comparative ethnography can yield new and different insights with important implications for our understandings of politics.

Intense polarization can birth enduring political parties. Yet, whereas civil war and authoritarian repression often produce two parties, populist mobilization more often produces one: a populist, not an anti-populist, one. Why not anti-populist parties? The article argues that successful populism, by its nature, inhibits anti-populist party building. Because successful populists discredit a wide array of elites and institutions, anti-populists, who come from these discredited elite and institutions, are unpopular and lack cohesion. Where populists govern over a decade, anti-populist party building remains difficult, but conditions become less unfavorable: populists inevitably lose popularity, and the opposition commits to elections and undergoes leadership renovation. The article compares four countries: three where no anti-populist party-building has occurred (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Thailand) and one where an anti-populist party almost took root (Venezuela).

Latin America is viewed as a region that has embraced a strategy of “open economy industrial policy” (OEIP). However, the region’s transition to OEIP has been neither complete nor irreversible. In this article, we argue that economic development concepts and instruments introduced during Brazil’s previous import-substitution industrialization regime still influence the country’s industrial policy. By tracing the evolution of local content requirements (LCR) in the Brazilian oil and gas sector, we show that conflicts between inward-oriented and outward-oriented forms of industrial development have been the main source of recent policy changes in the country. In addition, we show how institutional structures affect the implementation of economic ideas. The country’s centralized policymaking facilitated significant changes in the orientation of the LCR policy during the last twenty years.

This study builds on relational approaches to social mobilization and organizational ecology to explain local variations in protest frequency in the newer democracies of the developing world. I introduce the concept of keystone organizations, or organizations that justify protest and build influential networks that catalyze protest activity, to explain the localized growth of protest. I contribute to the literature on clientelism by showing that the networks that fuel political clientelism monopolize the organizational environment and discourage protest politics. I test my arguments statistically using an original dataset of protest events in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Yucatan, Mexico, during the 2000 to 2012 federal election seasons that I coded from local newspaper reports.

The theory argues that female presidents are more likely to (1) mobilize women on the basis of gender identity (core constituency); and (2) network with elite feminists (personal constituency). Only presidents who meet both conditions are most likely legislate on behalf of women. Controlled case studies illustrate the theory: Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil attempted to mobilize women on the basis of gender identity, but only Bachelet succeeded. Furthermore, only Bachelet maintained extensive ties with elite feminists. Original evidence shows that Bachelet, but not Rousseff, legislated in ways that statistically differed from her co-partisan male predecessor. Bachelet’s constituencies incentivized and enabled some of her pro-women proposals while a lack of expertise from feminists inhibited Rousseff’s pursuit of pro-women change.

In elections around the world, candidates seek to influence voters’ choices using a variety of intermediaries and by relying on either positive electoral inducements or coercive strategies. What explains candidates’ choices among different forms of clientelism? When do candidates incentivize voters using positive inducements and when do they choose coercive strategies? This article proposes a new typology of clientelism and tests two families of explanations for why candidates would choose to use state versus non-state brokers, and inducements versus coercion, as private incentives to voters. First, existing theory predicts that political conditions such as incumbency or co-partisanship with the national party should enable the use of public over private brokers and resources. In addition, we conjecture that clientelism carries programmatic signals, such that the choice between inducements and coercion depends on local political conditions. We test our predictions using a post-electoral survey fielded in 2014 in ninety rural Hungarian communities. We find little evidence that local political conditions are related to the choice between state versus non-state brokers, but significant support for the prediction that programmatic signals explain the choice between inducements and coercion.

In this review article, I review four recent books that deal with various aspects of post-Communist political economy and argue that they represent a major shift in the research orientation of this subfield. Early scholarship mostly analyzed the causes of the diverging transitional paths that the post-Communist economies took, while highlighting the impact of Soviet legacies, the political pressures that the reformers faced, and the role of Western influences. Recent work shifts focus to the consequences of the divergent transition paths. It seeks to understand how economic development is possible in the post-Communist world, where state agents are predatory, where civil society organizations are weak, and where regulatory mechanisms are underdeveloped.

Democracy is often a conquest of elite opposition parties. In electoral authoritarian regimes, opposition parties will promote suffrage expansion in order to weaken the ruling parties’ control over elections and improve their own electoral possibilities. Ruling parties, by contrast, will oppose suffrage expansion for the same reasons that opposition parties support it, and they will use their control of the political system to block it. Suffrage reforms typically occur in electoral authoritarian regimes only when there is a split within the ruling coalition that leads a faction to side with the opposition. I explore these arguments through detailed qualitative analyses of suffrage reforms in Chile in 1874 and Uruguay in 1918, as well as a quantitative analysis of a roll-call vote in Chile.

This article explores sub-national variation in jihadist Salafist mobilization through a comparative analysis of two Tunisian interior towns: Sidi Bouzid and Metlaoui. After the Arab Spring, while Sidi Bouzid emerged as a bastion of jihadist Salafism and Islamic State foreign fighter recruitment, the movement failed to gain broad-based legitimacy in Metlaoui. On the basis of the comparison, this study introduces a new explanation for the variation in jihadist mobilization: state-building legacies and collective memory. During the 20th century, Sidi Bouzid and Metlaoui were subjected to divergent processes of forced political incorporation that this study argues have had implications for how contemporary citizens respond to jihadist rhetoric. The final part of the article discusses how this insight informs the study of jihadist Salafism in other contexts.

The article examines how four states in the francophone Sahel have managed Salafi activity since independence. States that established institutional oversight mechanisms in the Islamic sphere prior to the emergence of Saudi Arabia as a global exporter of Salafi ideology have effectively counteracted the rise of political and jihadi Salafism in recent decades. Autocratic incumbents created national Islamic associations, determined the leadership makeup of these, and delegated state authority to non-Salafi leaders so as to regulate access to the Islamic sphere. The tacit cooperation arrangements between state and nonstate actors enabled the former to demobilize religious challengers. States that chose strategies other than institutional regulation contributed to the rise of political and security challengers. These findings challenge conventional assumptions about the inability of weak states to regulate their religious spheres and shed new light on the complex relationship between weak states and Islam.

Over the last fifty years, gender quotas have transformed the composition of national legislatures worldwide. But a lack of systematic cross-national longitudinal data limits the questions researchers are able to ask about quotas. This article introduces a new dataset—QAROT (Quota Adoption and Reform Over Time)—the first global dataset on gender quota adoption, implementation, and reform over time. Theoretically, we clarify important issues in extant quota research. The dataset moves beyond traditional categorizations of quota policies with new measures of quota design, quota thresholds, placement mandates, sanctions for non-compliance, and quota effectiveness. We also create a single-variable measure of the presence of an effective quota to be used by comparative politics researchers to control for this powerful institutional feature.

Available evidence indicates that there is considerable variation among autocracies in the extent to which subnational officials are rewarded for economic growth. Why is economic performance used as a criterion for appointment in some autocracies but not in others? We argue that in more competitive—though still autocratic—regimes, the political imperatives of maintaining an electoral machine that can win semi-competitive elections leads regime leaders to abandon cadre policies that promote economic development. Using data on turnover among high-level economic bureaucrats in Russia’s 89 regions between 2001 and 2012, we find that performance-based appointments are more frequent in less competitive regions. These findings demonstrate one way that semi-competitive elections can actually undermine economic development under autocracy

The farmacias del pueblo in the Dominican Republic sell generic drugs to eligible consumers at bargain-basement prices. While their proponents portray them as models of public enterprise and welcome their efforts to bring essential medicines to poor people, their critics worry that they are used less to protect public health than to purchase political support—with perverse consequences for democracy and distribution. Are the farmacias an indispensable source of essential medicine or an inefficient source of political patronage? I study their location and utilization; find that they are both located in low-income communities and open to better-off buyers; and conclude that by combining the efficiency of spatial targeting with the popularity of universal access, they offer developing democracies a sustainable approach to social policy.

Why do some participatory institutions develop strong institutional designs, when most have limited powers? Existing literature emphasizes the importance of institutional design in shaping the impact of participatory institutions, yet falls short in accounting for the origins of design. Through an analysis of Brazil’s health councils, this article argues that bundling the creation of a participatory institution with substantive policy reform can 1) create opportunities to pass the laws and regulations needed for a strong design and 2) introduce incentives for otherwise reluctant stakeholders to support the participatory institution as an instrument to obtain their substantive policy goals. This article highlights an unexpected benefit of institutional conversion, demonstrating that shifting the base of stakeholder support can sometimes strengthen institutions rather than undermining them.

The advanced economies are experiencing a set of shared challenges in the transition to a new “knowledge economy” characterized by rapid technological innovation and associated with a heightened premium on higher education. Yet individual countries are charting rather different courses as they navigate this transition. This article examines divergent trajectories of change in three coordinated market economies—Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. It argues that differences in the organization of business and labor, and in the institutions that structure their interactions with each other and with the state, have produced different coalitional alignments and led these countries onto divergent paths toward the knowledge economy today.

In response to the threat posed by drug-trafficking organizations, developing countries are increasingly relying on the armed forces for their counter-drug strategies. Drawing on the literature on violence and state capacity, this article studies how the militarization of anti-drug efforts affects state capacity along two dimensions: public safety and fiscal extraction. It advances theoretical expectations for this relationship and evaluates them in the context of Mexico. Based on subnational-level analyses, it shows that the militarization of anti-drug efforts has decreased the state’s capacity to provide public order and extract fiscal resources: homicide and kidnapping rates have increased while tax collection has decreased. Given the wide-ranging consequences of diminished state capacity, the findings have implications not only for Latin America but also across the developing world.

This article argues that elite theories can contribute significantly to our understanding of democratization. Existing elite theories on the relationship between elite configurations and regime outcomes will be critically reviewed and then tested in two case studies, Ghana and Togo. While Ghana is one of Africa’s most democratic countries, Togo has remained an electoral autocracy. The empirical evidence is based on a unique data set that maps the interaction patterns between Members of Parliament (MPs) in each of the countries. Using social network analysis, the article shows that the elite interactions differ systematically between the countries. MPs in Ghana form a dense and strongly interconnected network that bridges ethnic and party cleavages. Moreover, MPs from different parties have developed a measure of trust in one another. In Togo, by contrast, there is much more suspicion between government and opposition, and much less cooperation.

While contentious acts in authoritarian systems have largely been examined in the context of democratization, little is known about the modes of contention that do not yield immediate democratic outcomes, yet push regimes to adapt and evolve in the long-term. This article theorizes about such practices through a comparative study of critical journalists in China and Russia. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation in the two countries, the article presents two distinct types of boundary-spanning activity: within-the-system resistance, carried out in partnership with the state, and extraneous or defiant contestation deployed in opposition to the system. The article further demonstrates that these two types of contestation practices feed into journalists’ broader conceptions of political transitions, rooted in recent historical experiences with alternative political models.

Scholarship on the rise of political parties mostly focuses on the electoral arena. From this perspective, the legislative arena is determined by party system properties. This article aims to show that the causal arrow points in the other direction as originally suggested by Duverger. Two mechanisms of legislative organization arguably allow for the ascendancy of political parties: control over the legislative agenda or powerful committees. A comparative analysis of thirty-six procedural reforms in the Swedish and French legislatures during the 1866–1958 period suggests that, all else being equal, a quest for procedural efficiency originating from the dynamics of legislative democracy led to the creation of powerful committees. Only if anti-system obstruction of legislation posed a threat to the survival of legislative democracy, individual legislators became willing to unilaterally surrender inherited powers to control the plenary agenda to party leaders. Since both the empowerment of committees and the centralization of agenda control occurred independent of the properties of party systems, parties are the product rather than the origin of legislative democracy.

Electoral coordination is central to the creation of national party systems under first-past-the-post rules, but there are instances where we see such coordination fail even at the constituency level. In this article, we argue that electoral coordination requires partisan control of patronage distribution by local bureaucracies. In electoral constituencies in which bureaucrats do not hold a monopoly over the distribution of patronage, we might see constituency-level electoral fragmentation. In constituencies in which the bureaucracy controls patronage, however, effective coordination yields Duvergerian equilibria. We formulate and test this argument through constituency- and precinct-level analysis of Pakistani elections and additional evidence from Indian elections.

When do oil-dependent governments spend oil rents in expanding political machines through patronage and clientelism, as rentier theories claim, or in providing better public services? Using regression analysis for panel data and two case studies of the Argentine provinces (1983–2013), this study shows that infrastructure can rise and patronage decline during oil booms. When rents are high and the oil sector creates new jobs, incumbents tend to increase capital investment. They cannot compete with oil salaries and use infrastructure to cope with the sector’s pressures for basic services. When rents decline in contexts of job destruction in the oil sector, and the rest of the private sector cannot absorb the layoffs, incumbents tend to increase patronage to contain social turmoil and secure core voters.

Does generalized trust lead to democratic transitions? Despite the voluminous literature on trust and democracy, very little examines the link between trust and democratic regime change. We theorize that generalized trust should lead to support for the status quo rather than support for regime change. In democracies, this means that citizens in effect support the democratic regime. However, in autocracies this status quo bias means that trusting individuals support the autocracy. We test this argument using data from the Asian Barometer Survey. Our simultaneous equation model shows that generalized trust has a negative impact on support for regime change regardless of regime type. This suggests that generalized trust—if anything—constitutes a headwind against democratic regime change rather than a facilitating factor.

This article reviews three books that seek to explain transitions away from undemocratic practices and why they rarely occur. Patronal Politics traces political developments since the collapse of communism in multiple countries in Eastern Europe to show that the loss of power by a particular clientelist network generally occurs only when its leader is unpopular and viewed as unlikely to remain in office. Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism relies more heavily on modernization theory to explain transitions away from clientelism. Meanwhile, The Political Logic of Poverty Relief examines the distinct impacts of clientelist and programmatic polices on welfare and electoral outcomes in Mexico. In examining these books, this review article argues that a thicker account of the microfoundations that lead individuals to accept undemocratic norms of behavior would strengthen our understanding of how political systems sustain clientelist practices. The analysis sheds light on the difficult path that can lead individuals and societies to substitute such practices with those that support relatively impartial interactions and programmatic policies.