Intergroup attitudes and identity ties can shape foreign policy preferences. Anti-Muslim bias is particularly salient in the USA and the UK, but little work assesses whether this bias generalizes to other countries. We evaluate the extent of anti-Muslim bias in foreign policy attitudes through harmonized survey experiments in thirteen European countries (N=19,673). Experimental vignettes present factual reports of religious persecution by China, counter-stereotypically depicting Muslims as victims. We find evidence of anti-Muslim bias. Participants are less opposed to persecution and less likely to support intervention when Muslims, as opposed to other religious groups, are persecuted. However, this bias is not present in all countries. Exploratory analyses underscore that pre-existing intergroup attitudes and shared group identity moderate how group-based evaluations shape foreign policy attitudes. We provide extensive cross-national evidence that anti-Muslim bias is country-specific and that social identity ties and intergroup attitudes influence foreign policy preferences.

One of the most important global political developments is the current wave of autocratization. Most research identifies this as an executive-led process, while others highlight the role opposition actors play in resisting it. We combine this work into a common framework asking, how (anti-)democratic are party systems? Party-system literature emphasises and measures policy differences, while we conceptualise party systems’ democratic positions highlighting to what extent divergent regime preferences are prevalent across parties. To estimate this dimension, we introduce the Party-System Democracy Index (PSDI), capable of tracking regime preferences across party systems from 1970 to 2019 across 178 countries and 3,151 country-years. We implement well-established content, convergent, and construct validity tests to confirm the PSDI’s reliability. Finally, we also show that the PSDI is an important predictor for regime changes in either direction and that changes in the PSDI can signal a looming regime change. This work provides a new framework for studying regime changes and contributes to the renewal of the party-systems literature.

In many authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held in which the opposition can potentially defeat the incumbent. How do ordinary citizens perceive the integrity of elections in such regime environments? We argue that government supporters adopt the incumbent’s narrative to consider elections fair and legitimate. By contrast, opposition supporters regard elections in such systems as biased and not meaningful. We provide evidence from large cross-country public opinion data and the unexpected 2018 Turkish snap election announcement to examine long- and short-term patterns of perceived electoral integrity. We find that the partisan gap in perceived electoral integrity is more substantial under electoral authoritarianism than under democratic rule. The partisan gap grows in autocratizing political systems, and these perceptions are mostly stable in the short term, even at times of radically increased salience of electoral competition. Our study yields implications for the dynamics between elites and citizens in autocracies in which elections remain a critical source of regime legitimacy.

How does rising access to the Internet shape elections in low-income democracies? In a controversial, overturned election in Malawi, I show how online exposure can reduce incumbency advantages and improve election administration. Leveraging geocoded polling station returns and the expansion of 3G coverage in a difference-in-differences setting, I show that ruling party vote share and election irregularities decline in areas newly exposed to the Internet. This is robust to a series of specifications, including matching on pre-treatment characteristics and adjusting for polling station complexity. To examine mechanisms, I turn to interviews and focus group discussions with voters, party figures and election officials. These reveal that opposition groups used social media to campaign and organise, online platforms expanded the reach of civic education efforts, and election staff used WhatsApp to coordinate on polling day. The paper contributes to the literature on information technology, party strategy, and election administration in low-income settings.

How does polarized politics affect electoral accountability? In this paper, I investigate the impact of political polarization on two channels through which voters can sanction incumbents for poor policy outcomes: voting for the opposition and abstaining. Using presidential election results at the county level, I show that, under polarized environments, the number of voters punishing the incumbent party for poor economic performances decreases in both channels. Survey analyses confirm that as the perceived ideological distance between parties increases, partisans are less likely to (i) negatively evaluate the economy when their party holds the Presidency and (ii) among those who have a negative view of the economy, they are less likely to penalize their party for negative economic assessments. These results show that polarization affects economic evaluation and clouds the responsibility for economic conditions, decreasing voters’ willingness to sanction the incumbent party.

Bargaining scholars predict rapid power shifts cause preventive war. But cases with rapidly shifting power often remain peaceful. To explain the dogs that don’t bark, we introduce instant, repeated, costly militarization into Powell’s (1999) conventional-weapons power transition model. First, we rationalize preventive war during long, slow, complete-information power shifts. Second, we find that where past research into conventional shifts predicts war, a grand bargain backed by the decliner’s threat of war emerges as a second equilibrium. Because war and a grand bargain both prevent power from shifting, declining powers deploy them under the same conditions. Our grand bargain survives war-causing hazards, and some latent shifts. It occurs after incremental militarization causes repeated appeasement-like concessions, and when power shifts are instant, slow or fast, and perfectly observed; suggesting conventional shifts induce grand bargains under surprising conditions. The Great Game’s end fits our grand bargain, but that British elites seriously considered war.

During outbreaks of diseases like cholera, HIV/AIDS, H1N1, and Ebola, governments often impose international border restrictions (for example, quarantines, entry restrictions, and import restrictions) that disrupt the economy without stopping the spread of disease. During COVID-19, international travel restrictions were ubiquitous despite initial World Health Organization recommendations against such measures because of their limited public health benefit and the potential for imposing a range of harms. Why did governments adopt these measures? This article argues and finds evidence that governments use international border restrictions as security theatre: ‘measures that provide not security, but a sense of it’. Quantitative analysis of original data on states’ first border restrictions during the pandemic suggests that behaviour was not just driven by the risk of COVID-19 spread. Instead, nationalist governments, which are likely to be attracted to policies associating disease with foreigners, were more likely to impose border restrictions, did so more quickly, and adopted domestic measures more slowly. A case study of the US further illustrates the security theatre logic. The findings imply that overcoming or redirecting governments’ attraction to security theatre could promote international cooperation during global health emergencies.

During the coronavirus pandemic in the United Kingdom, media outlets shifted their focus from divisive political issues to more neutral topics like lifestyle, sports, and entertainment. This study explores how this change in media content relates to partisan divides in satisfaction with democracy. Using data from a representative survey of 201,144 individuals, we linked respondents’ perceptions of democratic performance to their daily media exposure. We did so by analysing 1.5 million tweets from British newspapers using a topic modelling algorithm to identify shifts in topic salience and sentiment using sentiment analysis. Our findings reveal a decline in partisan media exposure during the pandemic, associated with increased satisfaction with democracy at both individual and collective levels, and a narrowing of cross-party divides. These results contribute to discussions on affective polarization, the winner-loser gap in democratic evaluation, and media framing effects, highlighting the potential influence of depoliticized news coverage on democratic attitudes.

Which predispositions drive voters’ policy attitudes? This article tests the role of political values as a driver of attitudes relative to two commonly posited sources – partisanship and symbolic ideology. Past work has found correlations between values and issue attitudes, but these cross-sectional studies have limited causal purchases. I test the effects of traditionalist and egalitarian values on issue stances using six ANES and GSS panel surveys from 1992 to 2020. I find that values drive within-voter changes in policy attitudes under a variety of specifications. Additionally, values shape attitudes on emergent policies, which I test using the cases of welfare reform in the 1990s and transgender policies in the 2010s. In all models, values have as large or larger effects on attitudes as that of partisanship or ideology. I conclude that values are a core predisposition which voters employ to make sense of policy issues.

When the world’s leading human rights advocates violate international norms, how does this affect support for those norms around the world? Rather than diffusing norm breaking across borders, I argue that authoritarian states’ propaganda about liberal states’ violations may increase the salience of human rights norms in places where those norms are normally censored. Focusing on American racial discrimination, I find that the Chinese Communist Party publicizes American human rights violations on to its citizens for strategic political reasons. Through two survey experiments I show that while exposure to news about American discrimination does provide substantial propaganda benefits to the regime, it also makes Chinese respondents more supportive of minority rights and more critical of their own country’s respect for those rights. The study shows how prominent violations of international norms may be an underappreciated means of strengthening global public support for those norms.

How does China use development finance to gain influence in international organizations? Leveraging the exogenous rotation of ASEAN and African Union Chairmanship, I estimate the effect of regional leadership on Chinese commitments. Results suggest that Chinese projects are politically motivated only when the lending and recipient entities are linked to the Chinese and host governments. Governments that assume the Chair received seven times more commitments from Chinese government agencies relative to non-Chair years, a $90 million increase for the average project. By contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that Chinese banks act as agents of Beijing. Moreover, I find a consistent null relationship between temporary UN Security Council status and Chinese finance, unlike established findings about Western donors, suggesting that China is deliberately seeking regional influence. These results underscore the importance of considering the specific actors involved in China’s economic statecraft.