Despite their significant influence on the development trajectories of recipient nations, we know little about the lending strategies of international financial institutions (IFIs) dominated by authoritarian regimes. In this paper, we provide new evidence that autocratic IFIs are not merely neutral economic actors. Our findings suggest that these institutions provide financial support to authoritarian governments facing acute threats to their survival. We introduce an original data set tracking the lending behavior of eighteen autocratic IFIs across 143 recipient countries from 1967 to 2021. Our findings uncover that aid flows from autocratic IFIs increase precisely when authoritarian regimes are most vulnerable. By situating these insights within the broader aid allocation literature, we provide a fresh perspective on the political calculus of international development lending, with profound implications for understanding global power dynamics.

This article explores the impact of mobile phones on entertainment practices and electoral communication among pastoral communities following constitutional reform in Kenya in 2010. It examines the digital dissemination of music files among Samburu mobile herders, emphasizing the role of communication technology in shaping political identities and ideologies. Specifically, this analysis considers how the two main contenders for the governorship of Samburu County in the 2022 elections engaged with the content-exchange networks generated by the digital circulation of raid songs among pastoralists. The recording and dissemination of these repertoires via mobile phones fostered new patterns of interaction and entertainment, which in turn provided channels through which election songs could circulate in rural areas. By mobilizing these songs, candidates sought to project a more authentically pastoral identity, thereby appealing to rural voters. The analysis presented here unveils a consolidating form of rural populism grounded in pastoral political categories, institutional decentralization and the use of digital technologies. It situates mobile herding societies within larger global trends of digitally mediated politics and new forms of consensus building, shedding light on the changing foundations of Kenyan democracy.

The study of legal change at local levels in this forum opens new windows onto the legal landscape, especially because they explore ground-level legal change that reveals far more innovative and incremental shifts in law and legal understanding than is visible at higher altitudes.

We argue that transboundary pollution can simultaneously undermine domestic accountability processes and heighten international tensions. We examine this empirically in the context of South Korea, notorious for severe air pollution that partly originates from China. We first show that most media stories and popular public petitions on air pollution emphasize China’s responsibility. We then combine data on daily air quality with survey data (2015–2022) and use instrumental variable regressions to show that on bad air days, South Koreans’ assessments of their own government’s environmental efforts remain consistent but their opinions of China’s leadership worsen. We thus find causal evidence that transboundary pollution contributes to growing public hostility between China and Korea. The findings may also help explain why Korea ranks lowest among OECD countries on air pollution and climate change policies. The research note concludes with broader implications for studying transboundary environmental issues.

Why do some economic shocks have political consequences, upturning elections and ushering in radical candidates, while others are brushed off as structural change? We address this puzzle by looking to geographically concentrated industries, and how they relate to regional identity. While most often presented as a source of regional strength, we show that industrial hubs in the United States have accounted for more job losses than gains over the last twenty years. We then show how this matters through three original survey studies. Workers in geographically concentrated industries belong to denser, more deeply-rooted peer networks; these are associated with a stronger view that politicians are responsible for preventing layoffs. Those same individuals also perceive economic shocks of equal magnitude as more damaging to their region’s standing, compared to the rest of the country. Perceptions of lost regional standing, in turn, are associated with greater demand for populist leadership traits. Finally, we show how these individual attitudes translate into aggregate political behavior. Employment losses in industrial hubs are tied to greater support for Republican candidates, while equivalent losses in non-hubs show no analogous effect. Our account presents a competing picture to the dominant narrative of industrial hubs as founts of innovation and productivity. When threatened by structural forces, such hubs can turn instead into founts of political resentment.