Diversity's effect on violence is ambiguous. Some studies find that diverse areas experience more violence; others find the opposite. Yet conflict displaces and intimidates people, creating measurement challenges. We propose a novel indicator of diversity that circumvents these problems: the location of physical structures at disaggregated geographical levels. We introduce this solution in the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Our data reveal a curvilinear relationship between diversity and conflict-related deaths, with the steepest increase at low diversity, driven by an increase in violence when our proxy for the Catholic proportion of the population rises from 0 to 20 percent. These patterns are consistent with a theory of group threat through exposure.

Does increasing executive power necessarily decrease accountability? To answer this question, I develop a two-period signaling model comparing voter welfare in two separation-of-powers settings. In one, the executive works with a median legislator to change policy; in the other, the executive chooses between legislation or unilateral action. Both politicians may have preferences that diverge from the voter's, yet I find that increasing executive power may increase accountability and welfare, even in some cases when the legislator is more likely to share the voter's preferences than the executive. Unilateral power allows a congruent executive to overcome gridlock, implement the voter's preferred policy, and reveal information about the politicians’ types—which can outweigh the risks of a divergent executive wielding power for partisan ends.

Democracy relies on citizens who are politically knowledgeable and engaged. However, when a voter gains political knowledge regarding important issues, through television, town halls, or social media, she also learns that there are many other politically knowledgeable voters, highlighting the importance of social knowledge in political participation. Will a voter with concrete—as opposed to hypothetical—knowledge about other voters’ political knowledge have an increased incentive to participate? Or instead, will concrete social knowledge about other voters actually inhibit participation? In this article, we develop a novel experimental design that focuses on whether concrete knowledge about other voters’ political knowledge influences political participation. Our main result shows that concrete social knowledge decreases individual voters’ willingness to vote, and thereby reduces the probability democracy chooses the majority preferred alternative, i.e. the quality of democratic choice.

This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.

Does a universal basic income (UBI) affect voter turnout? This article argues that the introduction of an unconditional cash payment—where citizens receive money independent of employment status, age, or indigence—can have a turnout-enhancing effect. I evaluate the argument using the introduction of the Permanent Fund Dividend in Alaska. Differences-in-differences estimates covering November general elections from 1978 to 2000 provide compelling evidence that the Alaskan UBI has a significant positive effect on turnout. The results further suggest that the turnout increase was not a one-off effect but persists over a period of almost 20 years. Thus, a UBI has the potential to positively affect turnout among an entire electorate, adding to the discussion around potential welfare reforms in western democracies.

Economic and health crises have profound political consequences for public support for social policy, historically setting in motion a massive expansion of governmental programs. Is demand for social protection likely to increase among citizens exposed to risk in an era in which populist messages are prominent? We show that this depends critically on the precise targets that populists evoke as enemies of the people. We distinguish between two types of political rhetoric deployed by populist politicians in their claims to represent the authentic people—one opposing the authority of domestic elites, including technocrats, and one attacking foreigners. We examine the extent to which each rhetorical strategy reduces or enhances popular demand for social policies by randomly exposing Americans to these frames as part of a public opinion survey conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results show that the two messages have different consequences for support for redistribution among respondents exposed to risk: populist anti-foreign rhetoric that blames foreign countries for the onset of the pandemic increases demand for expansion of social protection compared to populist anti-elite rhetoric.

Polls asking respondents about their beliefs in conspiracy theories have become increasingly commonplace. However, researchers have expressed concern about the willingness of respondents to divulge beliefs in conspiracy theories due to the stigmatization of those ideas. We use an experimental design similar to a list experiment to decipher the effect of social desirability bias on survey responses to eight conspiratorial statements. Our study includes 8290 respondents across seven countries, allowing for the examination of social desirability bias across various political and cultural contexts. While the proportion of individuals expressing belief in each statement varies across countries, we observe identical treatment effects: respondents systematically underreport conspiracy beliefs. These findings suggest that conspiracy beliefs may be more prominent than current estimates suggest.

A successful democratic transition requires citizens to embrace a new set of political institutions. Citizens’ support is vital for these institutions to uphold the burgeoning constitutional and legal order. Courts, for example, often rely on citizens’ support and threat of electoral punishment against the government to enforce their rulings. In this article, I consider whether education under democracy can engender this support. Using regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, and difference-in-difference-in-differences designs, I find an additional year of schooling after the fall of the Berlin Wall has similar positive downstream effects on East Germans’ support across institutions. Since schooling similarly affects public support for judicial, legislative, and executive institutions, citizens are not necessarily inclined to electorally punish the other branches when they ignore a court's ruling. This potential inability of courts to constrain unlawful government behavior threatens the foundation of the separation of powers and the survival of democracy.

Why do high-income earners support higher levels of income redistribution in some countries than in others? I argue that differences in the social insurance design have consequences for fairness considerations and that this matters for preference formation. Flat-rate systems provide social benefits in equal amounts to everyone in need, while earnings-related systems provide benefits in relation to previous earnings. In the case of income loss, earnings-related systems maintain unfair income differences, while flat-rate systems equalize unfair income differences between the rich and the poor. Cross-national patterns reveal that support for redistribution among the rich is higher in income-maintaining welfare states. For a strict test of my fairness argument, I conduct a laboratory experiment and show that participants reduce inequality more if given endowment differences are maintained in the case of loss.

As international trade flourishes, Americans can choose from an increasing number of foreign products even at their local grocery stores, allowing consumers to directly experience the consequences of globalized trade in a simple and intuitive way that does not require much political expertise. Yet, most prior scholarship on political consumerism assumes that consumers are aware of the political and economic implications of their choices at the checkout lane. We move away from this assumption, focusing instead on more fundamental psychological predispositions such as ethnocentrism that may guide daily consumer choices. Using a discrete choice conjoint experiment, we show that Americans, on average, exhibit ethnocentric consumer preferences, with demand for products falling as they are produced in more culturally and ethnically distant places. Additionally, we show that this effect is more pronounced among those with higher levels of ethnocentrism. Our results provide evidence for a “naïve” form of political consumerism.

How does trade openness affect individuals’ social policy preferences in emerging markets? Drawing upon the theories of economic openness, risk, and social policy preference, we examine how trade openness and job sectors jointly shape preferences on social protection in China, the largest emerging market. Using the World Value Survey (WVS) Wave VI and archival macroeconomic indicators in 2012, we find that trade openness is associated with higher demands for government responsibility in social protection. We also find, compared with public-sector employees, private-sector employees exhibit lower levels of support to the role of government in social protection. The public–private divide in policy preferences, nevertheless, diminishes in regions with high levels of trade openness. This research provides new evidence to the risk-model of social policy preferences in the Chinese context. It also highlights the importance of considering the significant differences between public and private-sector employees in their social policy preferences.

When analyzing data, researchers are often less interested in the parameters of statistical models than in functions of these parameters such as predicted values. Here we show that Bayesian simulation with Markov-Chain Monte Carlo tools makes it easy to compute these quantities of interest with their uncertainty. We illustrate how to produce customary and relatively new quantities of interest such as variable importance ranking, posterior predictive data, difficult marginal effects, and model comparison statistics to allow researchers to report more informative results.

Political actors often interact spatially, and move around. However, with a few exceptions, existing political research has analyzed spatial dependence among actors with fixed geographic locations. Focusing on fixated geographic units prevents us from probing dependencies in spatial interaction between spatially dynamic actors, which are common in some areas of political science, such as sub-national conflict studies. In this note, we propose a method to account for spatial dependence in dyadic interactions between moving actors. Our method uses the spatiotemporal histories of dyadic interactions to project locations of future interactions—projected actor locations (PALs). PALs can, in turn, be used to model the likelihood of future dyadic interactions. In a replication and extension of a recent study of subnational conflict, we find that using PALs improves the predictive performance of the model and indicates that there is a clear relationship between actors’ past conflict locations and the likelihood of future conflicts.

In this research note, we examine how Hong Kong voters respond to police violence in the recent social movement. We use causal forests, a machine learning algorithm, to estimate the impact of tear gas usage specific to each constituency. Based on the 2019 District Council Election outcome, we find that there is heterogeneity in the effect of state coercion on the vote share of pro-democracy candidates, depending on many socioeconomic characteristics of the constituency. The results imply that economic concerns still matter in the struggle to obtain democracy: citizens who sense economic insecurity in social unrest show less disapproval of state violence.

Inequalities in voter participation between groups of the population pose a problem for democratic representation. We use administrative data on 6.7 million registered voters to show that a previously-ignored characteristic of voters—access to a personal automobile—creates large disparities in in-person voting rates. Lack of access to a car depresses election day voter turnout by substantively large amounts across a variety of fixed-effects models that account for other environmental and voter characteristics. Car access creates the largest hindrance to voting for those people who live farther from the polls. These effects do not appear for absentee voting, suggesting a simple policy solution to solve large disparities in political participation. This study contributes to the theoretic understanding of political participation as well as the impact of potential policy reforms to solve participatory gaps.

Prominent arguments hold that African states’ geography limits state capacity, impedes public service provision, and slows economic development. To test this argument, I collect comprehensive panel data on a proxy of local state capacity, travel times to national and regional capitals. These are computed on a yearly 5 × 5 km grid using time-varying data on roads and administrative units (1966–2016). I use these data to estimate the effect of changes in travel times to capitals on local education provision, infant mortality rates, and nightlight emissions. Within the same location, decreases in travel times to its capitals are robustly associated with improved development outcomes. The article advances the measurement of state capacity and contributes to understanding its effects on human welfare.