This article analyzes the effects on violence of electing law-and-order candidates at the local level. It argues that law-and-order politicians embedded in the police will divert resources to favor their constituency, which in violence-prone areas could generate more murders. Using ballot names of council candidates in thousands of local elections in Brazil to accurately classify law-and-order candidates, it shows that the election of police law-and-order candidates causes more homicides. Moreover, georeferenced data on police activity and homicides show neglect in areas that did not support a winning police law-and-order candidate, despite these areas being home to the majority of individuals vulnerable to violence. This favoritism, however, is not present in places where preexisting local institutions make policing more transparent. Instead of persecution directed against minorities or the incapacity to battle criminal gangs, this research shows that surges in violence can be the result of typical forms of democratic representation.

Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these events. Studying South Africa’s Marikana massacre, we document how a new opposition party formed as a direct result of violence, quantify significant electoral losses for the incumbent, and show that those losses were driven by voters switching from the incumbent to the new party. Three lessons emerge. First, incumbents who preside over state violence may be held electorally accountable by voters. Second, such accountability seemingly depends on the existence of credible opposition parties that can serve as a vector for disaffected voters. Where such parties do not exist, violence may create political cleavages that facilitate the formalization of opposition movements. Third, immediate proximity to violence is correlated with holding incumbents accountable.

State repression and protest are common in modern authoritarian and hybrid regimes, yet individual responses to these events are not well understood. This article draws on unique panel data from the months spanning Zimbabwe’s 2018 election, which we view as a moment of uncertainty for most Zimbabwean citizens. Using a difference-in-difference estimator, we estimate change in individual protest intentions following exposure to repression and dissent and we assess three individual-level mechanisms hypothesized to drive responses. We find evidence that exposure to local repression and dissent are mobilizing among opposition supporters and nonpartisans. Analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that the effects of exposure to dissent may be driven by information updating, whereas relational and emotional mechanisms seem to drive backlash against repression, despite increased perceptions of risk. We find no evidence of counter-mobilization by ruling party supporters, and little effect of exposure to contentious events over social media.

Violence leaves significant social groups at a long-term disadvantage, including for generating income and accessing public services. In this article, we conduct a nationwide field experiment with local authorities in Colombia to evaluate how politicians respond to conflict victims in providing access to social services. We find that local officials are more likely to respond to requests for help from victims than from ordinary citizens and return friendlier and more helpful responses. Although politicians invest additional efforts to respond to conflict victims, we show that their responsiveness, affect, and helpfulness vary based on the ideological match between the party in power and the identity of the perpetrator of violence. Using interviews, we present evidence that elected officials respond to victims to signal their commitment to peace and to separate themselves from violent groups on their ideological side. These findings provide new insights into the dynamics of political representation in postconflict societies.

Why do some Indigenous communities experience assimilation while others obtain government protection for their long-standing institutions and cultures? I argue that historical experiences with state-led labor conscription play a key role. In the early twentieth century, Latin American governments conscripted unpaid Indigenous labor to build infrastructure. Community leaders threatened by this conscription were more likely to mobilize their communities to resist it. The mobilization of this collective action later empowered community leaders to achieve state protections for Indigenous institutions and cultures, or “accommodation.” I test this argument using a natural experiment where communities’ eligibility for labor conscription to build a 1920s Peruvian highway was as-if randomly assigned. I develop a measure of accommodation that considers both the existence and enforcement of laws protecting Indigenous institutions and cultures. I evaluate the mechanisms using data on Indigenous mobilization. The findings demonstrate how historical extraction shaped contemporary Indigenous–state relations.

How do states build their informational capacity? This article argues that distributive politics conditions how the state’s capacity develops. I study civil registration, where citizens comply with the state’s informational demands in exchange for documentary proof of identity, which may simultaneously facilitate access to public resources and exposure to taxation. Though the rich are particularly threatened by taxation, the narrow benefits of registration induce their compliance over that of the poor. I leverage a set of reforms in early postindependence Tanzania which provide quasi-random variation in citizens’ registration status and show that registration promotes access to narrow-based resources, rather than broad-based ones, while increasing tax payment. In turn, citizens’ decisions to comply reflect the economically stratified local incidence of these net benefits. The results suggest how nominally universal state-building schemes can have regressive effects on the state’s coverage.

Under what conditions did newly enfranchised women turn out to vote at levels approaching men? This question is important because if women’s turnout lagged behind men’s, politicians’ incentives to advocate for women’s interests could remain weak even after suffrage. I argue that women’s turnout approached parity with men’s in localities with strong incentives to vote and to mobilize among the general population. This is because women faced barriers to voting and were, therefore, more likely to vote and be mobilized under the most favorable circumstances. I then propose that electoral competition determines the strength of voting and mobilization incentives and, therefore, the gender turnout gap. Using sex-separated turnout data in Norway, I demonstrate that the gap narrows in high-turnout competitive districts in systems with single-member districts and in high-turnout within-district strongholds in proportional systems. I probe generalizability of my findings in New Zealand, Austria, and Sweden.

Why was the route to democracy in Scandinavia extraordinarily stable? This paper answers this question by studying Scandinavia’s eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century peaceful agrarian reforms, which contributed to auspicious state–society relations that made democracy progress relatively smoothly. Based on comparisons with contemporary France and Prussia and process-tracing evidence, the paper shows that Scandinavia achieved relatively extensive and peaceful agrarian reforms because of relatively high levels of meritocratic recruitment to the central administration and state control over local administration, which ensured impartial policymaking and implementation. These findings challenge prevailing theories of democratization, demonstrating that the Scandinavian countries represent an alternative, amicable path to democracy led by civil servants who attempt to transform their country socioeconomically. Thus, strong state-cum-weak society countries likely have better odds of achieving stable democracy than weak state-cum-weak society countries. However, building bureaucratic state administrations alongside autonomous political societies is probably a safer road to democracy.

Highlighting the strength of “partyism” in many democracies, recent scholarship pays keen attention to increasing hostility and distrust among citizens across party lines, known as affective polarization. By combining a conjoint analysis with decision-making games such as dictator and trust games, we design a novel survey experiment to systematically estimate and compare the strength of the partisan divide relative to other social divides across 25 European democracies. This design also allows us to investigate how the two components of affective polarization, in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, are moderated by the way parties interact with each other. We first find dominance of the partisan divide compared to other social divides that constitute traditional cleavages such as social class and religion. Second, we show that affective polarization in Europe is not primarily driven by out-group animus. Finally, we demonstrate that coalition partnership lessens affective polarization by reducing both in-group and out-group biases.

While existing work has demonstrated that campaign donations can buy access to benefits such as favorable legislation and preferential contracting, we highlight another use of campaign contributions: buying reductions in regulatory enforcement. Specifically, we argue that in return for campaign contributions, Colombian mayors who rely on donor-funding (compared with those who do not) choose not to enforce sanctions against illegal deforestation activities. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that deforestation is significantly higher in municipalities that elect donor-funded as opposed to self-funded politicians. Further analysis shows that only part of this effect can be explained by differences in contracting practices by donor-funded mayors. Instead, evidence of heterogeneity in the effects according to the presence of alternative formal and informal enforcement institutions, and analysis of fire clearance, support the interpretation that campaign contributions buy reductions in the enforcement of environmental regulations.

Research indicates that affective polarization pervades contemporary democracies worldwide. Although some studies identify party leaders as polarizing agents, affective polarization has been predominantly conceptualized as a product of in-/out-party feelings. This study compares levels of party affective polarization (PAP) and leader affective polarization (LAP) cross-nationally, using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Applying like–dislike scales and an identical index to both concepts, we reveal that while the two strongly correlate, LAP is systematically lower than PAP. The United States emerges as an exceptional case, being the only country where LAP significantly exceeds PAP. Drawing on regime input/output and institutions as theoretical building blocks, we explore cross-national variations and show that the relative strength of LAP vis-à-vis PAP is increased by presidential regime type, poor government performance, and low party system fragmentation. The findings of this study contribute to the thriving research on affective polarization and personalization of politics.

The starting point for many analyses of European state development is the historical fragmentation of territorial authority. The dominant bellicist explanation for state formation argues that this fragmentation was an unintended consequence of imperial collapse, and that warfare in the early modern era overcame fragmentation by winnowing out small polities and consolidating strong states. Using new data on papal conflict and religious institutions, I show instead that political fragmentation was the outcome of deliberate choices, that it is closely associated with papal conflict, and that political fragmentation persisted for longer than the bellicist explanations would predict. The medieval Catholic Church deliberately and effectively splintered political power in Europe by forming temporal alliances, funding proxy wars, launching crusades, and advancing ideology to ensure its autonomy and power. The roots of European state formation are thus more religious, older, and intentional than often assumed.

For many governments, enacting green policies is a priority, but such policies often impose on citizens substantial and uneven costs. How does the introduction of green policies affect voting? We study this question in the context of a major ban on polluting cars introduced in Milan, which was strongly opposed by the populist right party Lega. Using several inferential strategies, we show that owners of banned vehicles—who incurred a median loss of €3,750—were significantly more likely to vote for Lega in the subsequent elections. Our analysis indicates that this electoral change did not stem from a broader shift against environmentalism, but rather from disaffection with the policy’s uneven pocketbook implications. In line with this pattern, recipients of compensation from the local government were not more likely to switch to Lega. The findings highlight the central importance of distributive consequences in shaping the political ramifications of green policies.

The Algerian military’s response to the 2019–2020 Hirak protests was relatively peaceful. In contrast to its violent repression of protests in 1988, and subsequent coup and civil war in the 1990s, the military showed considerable restraint toward the Hirak. Leveraging a survey of 2,235 self-reported military personnel, I show that the military’s restraint emanated from protesters’ use of nonviolence and fraternization, as well as from a recognition that the military’s more repressive approach in the 1990s was a mistake. At the same time, a priming experiment suggests that the military’s willingness to repress increases when protesters threaten the military’s corporate interests, and when Russia, Algeria’s primary arms supplier, reiterates its support for the regime. Overall, the results show how protester tactics, international reactions, and political learning can condition the military’s repression or restraint during times of unrest.

The way social protest affects electoral outcomes remains a lacuna. This article helps fill this gap by examining how social protest against far right actors affects their electoral standing. The article utilizes a unique dataset of 4,745 local protest events to investigate how mobilization against the far right in Greece affected its electoral performance. The article finds that protest activity depressed the electoral results of the far right Golden Dawn by as much as 16%, after controlling for a number of important variables. The article identifies and specifies the patterns through which protests against the far right affect its electoral standing. Protests are effective when following the “tango” pattern—when there is close interaction of far right and anti-far right events. The timing of protest is also important and the article shows how the synchronization of protest and electoral cycles affects electoral outcomes. The article uses the findings to discuss the varying impact of protest across electoral cycles.

Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority—the right to make and enforce binding rules—occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and institutionalized the victor’s vision of sovereignty. Yet sovereign authority requires more than institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition of the governed. How does war shape imagined sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare in the United States, where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty erupted into the American Civil War. We exploit the grammatical shift in the “United States” from a plural to a singular noun as a measure of imagined sovereignty, drawing upon two large textual corpuses: newspapers (1800–99) and congressional speeches (1851–99). We demonstrate that war shapes imagined sovereignty, but for the North only. Our results further suggest that Northern Republicans played an important role as ideational entrepreneurs in bringing about this shift.

Can wars breed nationalism? We argue that civilians’ indirect exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that increase identification with their nation and ultimately strengthen support for nationalist parties. We test this argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after World War 1 (WW1). To measure localized war exposure, we machine-coded information on 7.5 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. Our empirical strategy leverages battlefield dynamics that cause plausibly exogenous variation in the county-level casualty fatality rate—the share of dead soldiers among all casualties. We find that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for right-wing nationalist parties, including the Nazi Party, was 2.6 percentage points higher in counties with above-median casualty fatality rates. Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we find that this effect was driven by civilians rather than veterans and areas with a preexisting tradition of collective war commemoration.

Gender quotas are increasingly being adopted by autocrats in part to legitimize their rule. Yet, even in autocracies, these quotas increase women’s political representation. It thus stands to reason that public support for gender quotas in autocracies might be shaped by this trade-off between advancing women’s rights and granting the regime legitimacy. All else equal, regime opponents should be less supportive of gender quotas in autocracies, wary of legitimizing the regime. We uncover evidence of this proposition in an analysis of region-wide Arab Barometer surveys and a survey experiment in Algeria. We also find that evaluations of this trade-off are conditioned by other demographics, with women, gender egalitarians, and Islamists remaining more consistent in their support for/opposition to gender quotas regardless of regime gains. Overall, our findings suggest that gender quotas in autocracies are viewed through a political lens, creating a potential backlash toward women’s empowerment.