Support for democracy in the population is considered critical for the emergence and stability of democracy. Macro-determinants and retrospective experiences have been shown to affect the support for democracy at the individual level. We investigate whether and how the individual life horizon, in terms of the prospective length of life and age, affects individual attitudes toward democracy. Combining information from period life tables with individual survey response data spanning more than 260,000 observations from 93 countries over the period 1994–2014, we find evidence that the expected remaining years of life influence the attitudes toward a democratic political regime. The statistical identification decomposes the influence of age from the influence of the expected proximity to death. The evidence shows that support for democracy increases with age but declines with expected proximity to death, implying that increasing longevity might help fostering the support for democracy. Increasing age while keeping the remaining years of life fixed as well as increasing remaining years of life for a given age group both contribute to the support for democracy.

This paper employs a field experiment in single-party–ruled Vietnam to test whether providing a broad-based representative sample of firms the opportunity to comment on draft regulations increases their subsequent compliance. We find three main outcomes of this treatment. First, treated firms exhibited greater improvement in their views of government’s regulatory authority. Second, these firms were more likely to allow government-affiliated auditors to examine their factories. Third, treated firms demonstrated greater compliance on the factory floor. Access and compliance were not explained by the receipt of advance information about the regulation’s requirements, and none of the three outcomes required that firms offer substantive comments.

Multiparty governance requires compromise and this compromise can lead to electoral losses. I argue that coalition members are motivated to differentiate themselves from their cabinet partners to mitigate potential electoral losses resulting from voters perceiving them as not rigorously pursuing their core policy positions or not possessing strong policy stands. I test this argument with original data on the scrutiny of over 2,200 government bills gathered from three parliamentary democracies incorporating information on voter perceptions of partisan ideology and parties’ policy preferences as derived from their manifestos. I find that coalition partners that are perceived as more similar will amend one another’s legislative proposals more vigorously in an effort to differentiate in the eyes of the electorate—to protect their brand—and therefore provide evidence for “pure” vote-seeking behavior in the legislative review process. Furthermore, these original data provide answers to several open questions regarding the policy motivations of cabinet parties in legislative review and the role of committee chairs and external support parties on policy outcomes.

To document human rights, monitoring organizations establish a standard of accountability, or a baseline set of expectations that states ought to meet in order to be considered respectful of human rights. If the standard of accountability has meaningfully changed, then the categorized variables from human rights documents will mask real improvements. Cingranelli and Filippov question whether the standard of accountability is changing and whether data on mass killings are part of the same underlying conceptual process of repression as other abuses. These claims are used to justify alternative models, showing no improvement in human rights. However, by focusing on the coding process, the authors misunderstand that the standard of accountability is about how monitoring organizations produce documents in the first place and not how academics use published documents to create data. Simulations and latent variables that model time in a substantively meaningful way validate the conclusion that human rights are improving.

Elite cohesion is a fundamental pillar of authoritarian stability. High-level defections can signal weakness, embolden the opposition, and sometimes, lead to regime collapse. Using a dataset of 4,291 ruling party candidates in Russia, this paper develops and tests hypotheses about the integrity of elite coalitions under autocracy. Our theory predicts that ruling elites defect when there is greater uncertainty about the regime’s willingness to provide spoils. Regimes that share power with the opposition, limit access to spoils, and lack formal institutions see more defections. Co-opting the opposition assuages outside threats but leaves regime insiders disgruntled and prone to defection. Those with personal followings and business connections are the most likely to defect, since they can pursue their political goals independently of the regime. Taken together, our results highlight important tradeoffs among authoritarian survival strategies. Many of the steps autocrats take to repel challenges simultaneously heighten the risk of defections.

It has long been argued that elections amplify partisan predispositions. We take advantage of the timing of the cross-national post-election surveys included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems to explore the effects that elections have on individuals’ attachments to political parties. Within these surveys, under the assumption that the dates on which respondents are interviewed are assigned independent of factors known to affect partisanship, we are able to identify the causal effects of election salience on partisan attachments. We find strong evidence that election salience increases the probability of one having a party attachment, increases the strength of attachments, and heightens the relationship between partisanship and evaluations of political actors. Empirical explorations of our identifying assumption bolster its validity. Our results substantiate the causal role that elections play in activating partisanship.

Low levels of education are a powerful predictor of anti-immigration sentiment. However, there is little consensus on the interpretation of this correlation: is it causal or is it an artifact of selection bias? We address this question by exploiting six major compulsory schooling reforms in five Western European countries—Denmark, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden—that have recently experienced politically influential anti-immigration movements. On average, we find that compelling students to remain in secondary school for at least an additional year decreases anti-immigration attitudes later in life. Instrumental variable estimates demonstrate that, among such compliers, an additional year of secondary schooling substantially reduces the probability of opposing immigration, believing that immigration erodes a country’s quality of life, and feeling close to far-right anti-immigration parties. These results suggest that rising post-war educational attainment has mitigated the rise of anti-immigration movements. We discuss the mechanisms and implications for future research examining anti-immigration sentiment.

States use repression to enforce obedience, but repression—especially if it is violent, massive, and indiscriminate—often incites opposition. Why does repression have such disparate effects? We address this question by studying the political legacy of Stalin’s coercive agricultural policy and collective punishment campaign in Ukraine, which led to the death by starvation of over three million people in 1932–34. Using rich micro-level data on eight decades of local political behavior, we find that communities exposed to Stalin’s “terror by hunger” behaved more loyally toward Moscow when the regime could credibly threaten retribution in response to opposition. In times when this threat of retribution abated, the famine-ridden communities showed more opposition to Moscow, both short- and long-term. Thus, repression can both deter and inflame opposition, depending on the political opportunity structure in which post-repression behavior unfolds.

States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.

Young men often make up a large share of newly arriving immigrant populations. How this impacts attitudes is unclear: young men have the potential to make substantial economic contributions, meaning attitudes toward them may be more favorable. However, young men may be seen as security and cultural threats, exacerbating anti-immigrant attitudes. I conduct a conjoint experiment on a sample of 2,100 Germans, asking them to evaluate groups of immigrants with randomly varying shares of young men. The results show that groups of immigrants with a large share of young men receive substantially less support. Further tests reveal that respondents also perceive of these groups as likely to pose security and cultural threats; there is no evidence that young men are viewed as having high economic potential. These results have implications for the importance of economic, cultural, and security concerns in underpinning attitudes toward immigrants.

How have Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies affected Arab and Muslim American behavior? We provide evidence that the de facto effects of President Trump’s campaign rhetoric and vague policy positions extended beyond the direct effects of his executive orders. We present findings from three data sources—television news coverage, social media activity, and a survey—to evaluate whether Arab and Muslim Americans reduced their online visibility and retreated from public life. Our results provide evidence that they withdrew from public view: (1) Shared locations on Twitter dropped approximately 10 to 20% among users with Arabic-sounding names after major campaign and election events and (2) Muslim survey respondents reported increased public space avoidance.

Contact with the criminal legal system has been shown to reduce individuals’ political participation, but its effect on friends and family members is less clear. Do people who see loved ones arrested or incarcerated become mobilized to change the system, or do they withdraw from political life? I address this question using administrative data from one large county, identifying registered voters who live with someone facing misdemeanor charges. Court records and vote histories allow me to accurately measure proximate criminal justice exposure and voting for a broader sample of people than survey data would. Using case timing for arrests shortly before and shortly after the election allows me to avoid bias from omitted variables. I find evidence of a short-term demobilization effect for people who see household members convicted or jailed in the weeks before the election, but no evidence of a lasting turnout effect from these experiences.

When political polarization is high, it may be assumed that citizens will trust the government more when the chief executive shares their own political views. However, evidence is accumulating that important asymmetries may exist between liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans). We hypothesized that an asymmetry may exist when it comes to individuals’ willingness to trust the government when it is led by the “other side.” In an extensive analysis of several major datasets (including ANES and GSS) over a period of five decades, we find that in the United States, conservatives trust the government more than liberals when the president in office shares their own ideology. Furthermore, liberals are more willing to grant legitimacy to democratic governments led by conservatives than vice versa. A similar asymmetry applies to Republicans compared with Democrats. We discuss implications of this asymmetrical “president-in-power” effect for democratic functioning.

We examine the interaction between partisan affect and elite polarization in a behavioral voting model. Voting is determined by affect rather than rational choice. Parties are office-motivated; they choose policies to win elections. We show that parties bias their policies toward their partisans if voters exhibit ingroup responsiveness, i.e., they respond more strongly to their own party’s policy deviations than to policy deviations by the other party. Our results suggest that affective polarization is a driver of the growing elite polarization in American politics. Importantly, this observation does not assume any shifts in the voters’ bliss points and is therefore orthogonal to the controversy over whether the American electorate has become more polarized in ideology.