Social media platforms have an increasingly central influence on global politics. Media of unprecedented reach, they have the power to sway elections, exacerbate societal polarization, promote or provoke conflict at all levels, and jeopardize relations between states. But what of the people who govern and oversee these platforms? For although algorithms and automation may underpin how social media content influences politics, the policies, approaches, and international relations of social media companies are directed or conducted by corporate executives and their representatives, actors who receive limited critical attention in International Relations (IR) scholarship. Combining multiple data sources, including field interviews with Meta and Twitter staff on three continents, this reflection suggests an approach to studying social media companies and their relationships to global politics that moves beyond abstraction and aggregation. Examining these actors and their internal dynamics through an organizational lens can shed fresh light on the contingent spatial, temporal, and normative drivers and enactments of their influence across the international system.

Under what conditions are user-generated digital content platforms responsive to pressures from users, businesses, and states? I propose that digital platforms show different levels of responsiveness to users, businesses, and states over time. Early in a platform’s life, the platform is highly sensitive to the demands of users, who have an opportunity to directly shape the institutional characteristics of the platform through the threat of user revolt. The unique power of its users stems from the network logic that underpins the value of the platform. As a platform grows and the size and centrality of its network increase, it becomes more sensitive to pressures by businesses (through boycotts) and the state (through regulation). At the same time, the power of users lessens as collective action problems become more severe and exit threats become less credible. The threat of user revolts has a temporal significance: Unless users alter the institutional architecture of the platform and lock in pro-user institutional characteristics early, the threat of user revolts becomes less consequential as the platform grows. Comparative case studies of Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, and Reddit provide support for the theory.

Citizens’ resentment at losing out to the rest of society is commonly regarded as the foundation of the demand for the populist radical right (PRR). Yet whether this motive has an objective economic basis remains disputed. Relying on European Social Survey individual-level data from 23 elections across Western Europe, combined with Eurostat data, I demonstrate that the PRR polls better among social classes facing economic status loss. To do so, I leverage a novel positional measure of income. This approach allows me to gauge economic status loss as a distinct experience from worsening financial circumstances, which has been the initial focus of empirical research. Evidence that economic status loss is the economic engine of PRR support is corroborated by data on cultural stances and redistributive preferences. My study confirms the complementarity of cultural- and economic-based explanations of PRR voting and reveals one electoral consequence of rising economic inequalities.

Which autocratic elites are more likely to return to cabinet in a democracy? Elites’ incentives are at the core of the explanations of why, how, and when democratization happens, yet existing studies on elites’ post-democratization trajectory are mostly anecdotal, case-study–based, region-specific, or based on aggregate, slow-moving structural variables. This article offers a novel theory and systematic empirical evidence of autocratic revolving doors that explain which former autocratic elites are more likely to return to cabinet positions under democracy. Using a demand-and-supply logic of cabinet formation, I propose that the return of former autocratic elites to cabinet is explained both by the need for cabinet leaders with policy-making experience and to appease old autocratic elites and their interests. More specifically, the political experience and the characteristics of the position that political elites held under autocracy explains which of them are more likely to meet these objectives and return to cabinet in a democracy. These theoretical propositions receive support in a quantitative analysis using a novel measure of returning elites for 12,949 former autocratic elites from 68 new democracies between 1966 and 2020.

How does ideology affect relations between armed groups within a state? While existing research has underscored how ideological proximity can foster alliances among armed groups, this article posits that ideological proximity can also breed hostility among them. When organizations share foundational narratives, they gain access to each other’s ideational resources, which can, in turn, pose challenges to these groups’ cohesion and leadership status. These challenges manifest in the form of questioning the sincerity and authenticity of each other’s beliefs, thereby threatening the group’s survival, sometimes overshadowing the risks posed by their shared ideologically distant adversaries. Focusing on Iran’s Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), this article highlights its evolution as one of the first armed groups to transform Islam into a potent ideology before transitioning to Marxism and later reverting to Islamism. It examines how the organization’s ideological proximity with other Islamist and Marxist actors led to conflict and outbidding violence instead of cooperation. Drawing upon a trove of the MKO’s secret documents, this article reveals how a significant portion of the rhetoric and actions of armed groups is directed at outperforming their ideologically similar rivals, rather than confronting ideologically distant adversaries.

Modern India is a political creation. The citizens of the world’s most populous country speak 100 languages, practice eight major religions, and belong to over 700 tribal groups and thousands of castes. The challenge of democratically representing such a range of interests is compounded by deep material scarcity and striking economic and social inequality.

Latin America continues to provide a fertile hunting ground for students of comparative politics. There is plentiful variation between, within, and across countries and subsectors. Yet, there are also shared scope conditions, cultural and institutional commonalities, and region-wide interactions and demonstration effects. There are some areas where comparisons can be based on either the “most similar” or the “most different” system design, but most causal variables of real interest are imprecise, unstable, and mutually interactive. They often operate within discontinuous and unstable political systems that evade mechanistic modeling. Temporal discontinuities and compartmentalized sectors can be so prevalent that “kaleidoscopic” patterns may seem more typical than smoothly institutionalized regularities or predictable convergences.

This article engages with the burgeoning literature on the conceptualization of corruption, a literature animated by the view that failures in anticorruption practice—the limited progress made in tackling global corruption—are in part a consequence of the ways in which corruption is theorized by academics. In response, the article proposes and elaborates a four-dimensional definition of corruption with detailed subdefinitions and seeks to advance thinking in both academic and practitioner circles on how corruption can be most effectively identified in context. The article makes five distinct contributions to live debates in the conceptual literature and clarifies several ambiguities and disagreements that have arisen within it.

First, it presents a set of grounded subdefinitions that make explicit the scope of each dimension of the definition. Second, it recommends applying the four dimensions in a predetermined sequence, enabling uncertainties or gray areas in each dimension to be resolved and clarified by subsequent dimensions. Third, it addresses the much-contested “abuse” dimension, acknowledging not only the flexibility required to identify abuses in different political and social settings but also the need to limit the scope of abuse so that it is not wholly idiosyncratic or relative. Fourth, it incorporates systemic and institutional forms of corruption, which creates an important bridge between individual and institutional approaches to corruption. Finally, it offers a defense for integrating the notion of public interest into the definition, which not only provides additional clarity to the conceptualization but also does justice to the reasons we care about corruption in the first place.

As interstate cyberconflict intensifies, the intersection of national security, cybersecurity, and International Relations (IR) theory has emerged as a critical venue for scholarly inquiry. Yet due mainly to epistemological problems, IR theory has been limited in examining how it informs the maximization of strategic cyberpower and in testing key realist concepts and assumptions against cyberactualities, risking theoretical stagnation and conceptual infertility in the study of statecraft and cybersecurity. I seek to bridge these theory-testing and conceptual gaps by assessing offensive realism’s assumption about the scope of hegemonic expansion in cyberspace using the crucial case of the United States. I argue that offensive realism has meaningful explanatory and predictive power in cyberspace but sometimes lacks this power under conditions assumed by the theory, emphasizing the need to modify offensive realism’s understanding and scope conditions of hegemony. The US pursues global, not regional, cyberhegemony using offensive strategies to maximize its cyberpower for cybersecurity. Therefore, I critically examine defensive realism and cyber persistence theory as alternative structural perspectives on the pursuit of security in cyberspace and introduce a modified conceptual framework for hegemony to adapt offensive realism to cyber-realities. This conceptual innovation can potentially contribute to policy making and help to build a cyber-specific version of offensive realism.

Russia’s 2014 seizure of parts of Ukraine, notably the Crimean Peninsula, set in motion a flurry of legal activity. Ukraine’s “lawfare” strategy, which aims to fight Russia via international legal means, included explicit encouragement of Ukrainian investors to file disputes under the Ukraine-Russia Bilateral Investment Treaty. We consider the resulting Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) arbitrations, the first instances of ISDS in which state parties to the treaty are actively engaged in armed conflict. Although Ukrainian actors have consistently won at ISDS arbitrations, Ukraine moved to formally withdraw from the treaty a year after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022. Developments before and since the invasion point to the diverging interests between commercial actors and their home states, the weakness of ISDS as a tool during wartime, and a reconsideration of treaty-based commitments to international investor protections. We highlight the implications of these events for several literatures in international relations.