Do the public in a rising authoritarian power overestimate their country’s reputation, power, and influence in the world? Excessive national overconfidence has both domestic and international consequences, but it has rarely been systematically studied. Using two studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and another conducted later, I show that the Chinese public widely and systematically overestimate China’s global reputation and soft power, even during a national crisis. Critically, informing Chinese citizens of actual international public opinion of China substantially corrects these perceptions. It also moderately alters their evaluations of China, its governing system, and their expectations for the country’s role in the world. These effects from simple information interventions are not fleeting, suggesting that overconfidence can be meaningfully corrected and triumphalism mitigated. The findings have both theoretical significance and important policy implications.

In the contemporary era, territorial conquest has been seen as illegitimate and has taken place in only limited ways. According to an influential narrative in scholarship and public debate, this “territorial integrity norm” is a product of the post-World War II international order and contrasts with the nineteenth century, when conquest was normalized and “might made right.” This essay argues, however, that nineteenth-century European international law imposed meaningful limitations on conquest, including “territorial inviolability.” These limitations were more effective in the colonized world than in Europe, primarily because national irredentism was not thought relevant outside Europe. Europeans’ denial of non-European sovereignty contrasted with their respect for European-established colonial boundaries, and they did not fight over colonial territory between 1815 and 1914. I demonstrate the strength of this “etiquette of thieves” by examining two events where territorial conflict between colonial powers was narrowly avoided: the Panjdeh (1885) and Fashoda (1898) incidents. Viewing territorial integrity as qualitatively changing, rather than absent at one time and present later, has important implications for discussions of how recent conquests, such as those of Russia in Ukraine, will affect the principle of territorial integrity. In particular, territorial integrity may be more likely to be altered in how it is applied than eroded altogether. A specific form of territorial integrity is an integral part of the post-World War II international order, but constraints on conquest as such need not be limited to that specific version of territorial integrity.

As authoritarianism has spread globally, government efforts to stifle civic space have increased dramatically. Among the most alarming tactics has been the spread of restrictive laws targeting NGOs. While such laws threaten the core objectives of many foreign donors, they have become especially common in aid-dependent nations. How do foreign donors react to this assault on their local and international implementing partners? On the one hand, democracy-promoting donors might push back, ramping up support for advocacy in defiance of draconian measures. Alternatively, when aspiring autocrats make it difficult to work with local partners, donors might back down, decreasing support for democracy promotion. Testing these arguments using dyadic data on aid flows, an original data set of NGO laws, and a variety of research designs, we find that the donors most committed to democracy promotion back down in the face of restrictive NGO laws, reducing democracy aid by 70 percent in the years after laws are enacted. Our findings suggest that donor behavior creates strong incentives for backsliding governments in aid-receiving countries to use legislation to crack down on civil society.

Scholarship on cross-border migration and welfare state politics has focused on native-born individuals’ attitudes. How does migration affect the redistribution preferences of migrants—key constituents in host and home countries? We argue that migration causes migrants to adopt more fiscally conservative attitudes, driven not only by economic gains but also by psychological shifts toward self-reliance and beliefs in the prospect of upward mobility. We present results from a randomized controlled trial that facilitated labor migration from India to the Middle East. The intervention prompted high rates of cross-border migration and significantly reduced support for taxation and redistribution among migrants. By contrast, left-behind family members did not become more fiscally conservative despite also experiencing economic gains. While the migrants became economically confident and self-reliant, their family members grew increasingly dependent on remittances. Our results demonstrate that globalization’s impacts on welfare-state preferences depend on the pathways by which it generates economic opportunity.