Does whataboutism work in global affairs? When states face international criticism, they often respond with whataboutism: accusing their critics of similar faults. Despite its prevalence in policy discussions, whataboutism remains an understudied influence strategy. This study investigates how states use whataboutism to shape American public opinion across various international issues. We find, using survey experiments, that whataboutism mitigates the negative impacts of criticism by reducing public approval of US positions and backing for punitive actions. Whataboutist critiques referencing similar, recent misdeeds have more power to shape opinions. However, the identity of the whataboutist state does not significantly affect effectiveness. US counter-messaging often fails to diminish the effects of whataboutism. These results show that whataboutism can be a potent rhetorical tool in international relations and that it warrants greater attention from international relations scholars.

Explanations for the successful expansion and consolidation of the European Union and its legal system have long emphasized the importance of domestic courts’ sending preliminary references to the Court of Justice. Key to many of these theoretical accounts is the claim that domestic courts are better equipped than the Court of Justice to compel national governments to comply with EU law. Integrating insights from the comparative judicial politics literature into the context of the EU's preliminary references system, we provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim by arguing that incorporating domestic courts into the EU legal process enhances public support for expansive judicial interpretations of EU law. We go on to argue, however, that this transfer of legitimacy depends on citizens’ views of the national and European courts. We support our argument with evidence from a preregistered survey experiment fielded in Germany.

Intense debate surrounds the effects of trade on voting, yet less attention has been paid to how fluctuations in the real exchange rate may influence elections. A moderately overvalued currency enhances consumers’ purchasing power, yet extreme overvaluation threatens exports and economic growth. We therefore expect exchange rates to have a conditional effect on elections: when a currency is undervalued, voters will punish incumbents for further depreciations; yet when it is highly overvalued, they may reward incumbents for depreciation. We empirically explore our argument in three steps. First, we examine up to 412 elections in up to 59 democratic countries and show that voters generally punish depreciation in the real exchange rate when the currency is undervalued. We also find that at extremely high levels of currency overvaluation, voters sometimes reward incumbents for depreciation. A currency peg, especially in the eurozone, appears to insulate incumbents from these effects. In a second step, we explore the microfoundations of the election results through survey experiments in three advanced industrialized and two emerging market nations with different monetary and exchange rate policies and institutions. Respondents in countries with undervalued to mildly overvalued currencies disapprove of currency depreciations, whereas those facing a very highly overvalued currency favor depreciation. Third, we examine the mechanism of political competition in exchange rate policymaking and demonstrate that sustained undervaluation is rare in countries with strong political competition. Democratic governments have electoral incentives to avoid using undervalued currencies as a means of shielding workers from import competition.

Despite populist backlash against globalization in advanced industrialized countries, developing countries have recently sought to liberalize trade. To shed light on this phenomenon, we investigate mass attitudes toward free trade in thirty-six African countries. Using two rounds of Afrobarometer data and original survey data from Ghana and Uganda, we find that individuals hold views that are consistent with their economic self-interest. As factor endowment models predict for a sample of skill-scarce countries, low-skilled individuals are more likely than high-skilled individuals to support free trade. Moreover, the strongest negative effects of skill occur for the most skill-scarce countries in the sample and are driven by individuals in the labor force. Our results are robust to measuring variables more precisely in original surveys and controlling for other factors thought to shape attitudes. The findings indicate that previous evidence against factor endowment models may have partially resulted from inadequate data from the developing world.

Despite the widespread assumption of terrorism's “terrifying” effect, there has been little systematic testing of the specific emotional microfoundations underlying public opinion about terrorism. While fear is one well-recognized emotional response to terror threats, in societies where terrorism is rare, anger may play a more pivotal role, with distinct consequences for citizens’ downstream political attitudes. To test the impact of these emotional mechanisms on public opinion in the wake of terrorism, I employ a multi-arm mechanism experiment (n = 5,499) in the United States that manipulates both exposure to news about different types of terror attacks and the encouraged emotional response. I supplement this experimental study with observational analyses of the emotional content of social media posts in the wake of sixteen real-world terror attacks in the United States. I find that not only is anger the dominant emotional response to terrorism across both studies, but also that punitive motivations and support for retaliation are both directly shaped by experimentally induced anger after exposure to news about terrorism. These findings illuminate strategic incentives shaping militants’ use of terror tactics, electoral constraints leaders face in formulating counterterror policy, and the emotional mechanisms fueling cycles of political violence.

Most autocracies restrict emigration yet still allow some citizens to exit. How do these regimes decide who can leave? We argue that many autocracies strategically target anti-regime actors for emigration, thereby crafting a more loyal population without the drawbacks of persistent co-optation or repression. However, this generates problematic incentives for citizens to join opposition activity to secure exit. In response, autocracies simultaneously punish dissidents for attempting to emigrate, screening out all but the most determined opponents. To test our theory, we examine an original data set coded from over 20,000 pages of declassified emigration applications from East Germany's state archives. In the first individual-level test of an autocracy's emigration decisions, we find that active opposition promoted emigration approval but also punishment for applying. Pensioners were also more likely to secure exit, and professionals were less likely. Our results shed light on global migration's political sources and an overlooked strategy of autocratic resilience.

In this article I explain a nexus between slavery and state formation in Africa, proceeding from initial demographic and institutional conditions to an external demand shift, individual state responses, and their collective systemic consequences. Historically, African rulers faced distinctive challenges: low population density prioritized control of people more than territory, and internal disintegration was often a greater threat than external conquest. A massive expansion in the demand for slaves offered African rulers increased opportunities to use external resources for “outside-in” state building. Many did so by creating highly militarized predatory slaving states. The collective consequence was heightened systemic insecurity. Variation in the timing of these developments reflected regional and historical variation in the expansion of the demand for slaves. Slaving states appeared first in West Africa, reflecting the late-seventeenth-century expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, before spreading to East Africa a century later, following the parallel later increase in the Indian Ocean slave trade. This “outside-in” path to state formation both parallels and contrasts with contemporary postcolonial state formation.

Almost all technology is dual use to some degree: it has both civilian and military applications. This feature creates a dilemma for cooperation. States can design arms control institutions to curtail costly competition over some military technology. But they also do not want to limit valuable civilian uses. How does the dual use nature of technology shape the prospects for cooperation? We argue that the duality of technology presents a challenge not by its very existence but rather through the ways it alters information constraints on the design of arms control institutions. We characterize variation in technology along two dual use dimensions: (1) the ease of distinguishing military from civilian uses; and (2) the degree of integration within military enterprises and the civilian economy. Distinguishability drives the level of monitoring needed to detect violations. When a weapon is indistinguishable from its civilian counterpart, states must improve detection though intelligence collection or intrusive inspections. Integration sharpens the costs of disclosing information to another state. For highly integrated technology, demonstrating compliance could expose information about other capabilities, increasing the security risks from espionage. Together, these dimensions generate expectations about the specific information problems states face as they try to devise agreements over various technologies. We introduce a new qualitative data set to assess both variables and their impact on cooperation across all modern armament technologies. The findings lend strong support for the theory. Efforts to control emerging technologies should consider how variation in the dual use attributes shapes this tension between detection and disclosure.

How do emerging technologies affect nuclear stability? In this paper, we use a quasi-experimental cyber-nuclear wargame with 580 players to explore three hypotheses about emerging technologies and nuclear stability: (1) technological uncertainty leads to preemption and escalation; (2) technological uncertainty leads to restraint; and (3) technological certainty leads to escalation through aggressive counterforce campaigns. The wargames suggest that uncertainty and fear about cyber vulnerabilities create no immediate incentives for preemptive nuclear use. The greater danger to strategic stability lies in how overconfidence in cyber exploits incentivizes more aggressive counterforce campaigns and, secondarily, how vulnerabilities encourage predelegation or automation. Both of these effects suggest worrisome relationships between cyber exploits and inadvertent nuclear use on one hand and cyber vulnerabilities and accidental nuclear use on the other hand. Together, these findings reveal the complicated relationship between pathways to escalation and strategic stability, highlighting the role that confidence and perhaps-misplaced certainty—versus uncertainty and fear—play in strategic stability.

A distinguishing feature of the modern state is the broad scope of social welfare provision. This remarkable expansion of public assistance was characterized by huge spatial and temporal disparities. What explains the uneven expansion in the reach of social welfare? We argue that social welfare expansion depends in part on the ability of the governed to compel the state to provide rewards in return for military service—and crucially, that marginalized groups faced greater barriers to obtaining those rewards. In colonial states, subjects faced a bargaining disadvantage relative to citizens living in the colony and were less likely to win concessions from the state for their wartime sacrifices. We test this argument using a difference-in-differences research design and a rich data set of local spending before and after World War I in colonial Algeria. Our results reveal that social welfare spending expanded less in communes where the French subject share of the population was greater. This paper contributes to the state-building literature by highlighting the differential ability of the governed to bargain with the state in the aftermath of conflict.

Prominent theories of state formation hold that states formed because of warfare and competition on the one hand, or the diffusion of organizational templates and practices through learning and emulation on the other. We propose that the two strands of theory can be linked to more accurately account for mechanisms of state formation. War, we argue, is an important source of social diffusion. War establishes contacts between political elites across borders, generates migratory flows, and establishes new economic networks. We examine the validity of the theory through a comparative case study of Nordic political units from the dawn of the Viking Age to the end of the High Middle Ages (CE 800–1300), finding that raids, settlements, and conquests by Norwegian and Danish rulers in England, Europe's most advanced kingdom, set in motion state formation processes in Norway and Denmark. In these cases, the winners emulated the losers.

Any act of battlefield violence results from a combination of organizational strategy and a combatant's personal motives. To measure the relative contribution of each, our research design leverages the predictable effect of ambient temperature on human aggression. Using fine-grained data collected by US forces during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, we test whether temperature and violence are linked for attacks that can be initiated by individual combatants, but not for those requiring organizational coordination. To distinguish alternative explanations involving temperature effects on target movements, we examine situations where targets are stationary. We find that when individual combatants have discretion over the initiation of violence, ambient temperature does shape battlefield outcomes. There is no such effect when organizational coordination is necessary. We also find that ambient temperature affects combat-age males’ endorsement of insurgent violence in a survey taken during the conflict in Iraq. Our findings caution against attributing strategic causes to violence and encourage research into how strategic and individual-level motivations interact in conflict.

Since the 1990s, the funding of multilateral development assistance has rapidly transformed. Donors increasingly constrain the discretion of international development organizations (IDOs) through earmarked funding, which limits the purposes for which a donor's funds can be used. The consequences of this development for IDOs’ operational performance are insufficiently understood. We hypothesize that increases in administrative burdens due to earmarked funding reduce the performance of IDO projects. The additional reporting required of IDOs by earmarked funds, while designed to enhance accountability, ultimately increases IDOs’ supervision costs and weakens their performance. We first test these hypotheses with data on project costs and performance of World Bank projects using both ordinary-least-squares and instrumental-variable analyses. We then probe the generalizability of those findings to other organizations by extending our analysis to four other IDOs: the African Development Bank (AfDB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Using data on the performance of 7,571 projects approved between 1990 and 2020, we find that earmarked funding undermines both cost-effectiveness and project performance across IDOs. Donors seeking value for money may consider allocating more money to core funds rather than to earmarked funds.

Charles Tilly's classical claim that “war made states” in early modern Europe remains controversial. The “bellicist” paradigm has attracted theoretical criticism both within and beyond its original domain of applicability. While several recent studies have analyzed the internal aspects of Tilly's theory, there have been very few systematic attempts to assess its logic with regard to the territorial expansion of states. In this paper, we test this key aspect of bellicist theory directly by aligning historical data on European state borders with conflict data, focusing on the period from 1490 through 1790. Proceeding at the systemic, state, and dyadic levels, our analysis confirms that warfare did in fact play a crucial role in the territorial expansion of European states before (and beyond) the French Revolution.

How do states distribute the burdens of collective defense? This paper develops a network theory of burden sharing. We focus on bilateral defense cooperation agreements (DCAs), which promote cooperation in a variety of defense, military, and security issue areas. Using a computational model, we show that DCA partners’ defense spending depends on the network structure of their agreements. In bilateral terms, DCAs increase defense spending by committing states to defense activities and allowing partners to reciprocally punish free riding. However, as a state's local network of defense partnerships grows more densely connected, with many transitive “friend of a friend” relations, DCAs have the countervailing effect of reducing defense spending. The more deeply integrated states are in bilateral defense networks, the less they spend on defense. We distinguish two potential mechanisms behind this effect—one based on efficiency improvements, the other on free riding. An empirical analysis using multilevel inferential network models points more to efficiency than to free riding. Defense networks reduce defense spending, and they do so by allowing countries to produce security more efficiently.

Why do states create weak international institutions? Frustrated with proliferating but disappointing international environmental institutions, scholars increasingly bemoan agreements which, rather than solving problems, appear to exist “for show.” This article offers an explanation of this phenomenon. I theorize a dynamic of deflective cooperation to explain the creation of compromise face-saving institutions. I argue that when international social pressure to create an institution clashes with enduring disagreements among states about the merits of creating it, states may adopt cooperative arrangements that are ill-designed to produce their purported practical effects. Rather than negotiation failures or empty gestures, I contend that face-saving institutions represent interstate efforts to manage intractable disagreement through suboptimal institutionalized cooperation. I formulate this argument inductively through a new multi-archival study of conventional weapons regulation during the Cold War, which resulted in the oft-maligned 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. A careful reconsideration of the negotiation process extends and nuances existing IR theorizing and retrieves its historical significance as a critical juncture and complex product of contesting diplomatic practices.

The development of parliamentary constraints on the executive was critical in Western European political history. Previous scholarship identifies external wars as a key factor, but with varying effects. Sometimes, willing monarchs granted parliamentary rights in return for revenues to fight wars. Yet at other times, war threats empowered rulers over other elites or caused states to fragment. We analyze a formal model to understand how external wars can either stimulate or undermine prospects for a contractual relationship between a ruler and elite actors. We recover the standard intuition that war threats make the ruler more willing to grant parliamentary rights in return for revenue. Our key insight is that war threats also affect the bargaining position of elites. A previously unrecognized tension yields our new findings: stronger outsider threats increase pressure either on elites to fund the ruler or on the ruler to accept constraints—but not both simultaneously. Elites with immobile wealth depend on the ruler for security. War threats undercut their credibility to refuse funding for an unconstrained ruler. By contrast, war threats make elites with mobile wealth and a viable exit option unwilling to fund a hopeless war effort. Only under circumscribed conditions do war threats align three conditions needed for parliament to arise in equilibrium: ruler willingness, elite credibility, and elite willingness. We apply our theory to posit strategic foundations for waves and reversals of historical European parliaments.

Scholars often assume that courts in authoritarian regimes cannot credibly protect foreign investors’ interests because these institutions lack judicial independence. In this article, we construct a novel data set on multinational corporations’ litigation activities in Chinese courts from 2002 to 2017. This supports the first systematic case-level analysis of foreign firms’ lawsuit outcomes in an authoritarian judiciary. We find that foreign companies frequently engage in litigation in authoritarian courts. Moreover, we theoretically and empirically distinguish between two types of government–business ties in terms of their effectiveness in incentivizing the host state to protect foreign investors’ interests. We argue that ad hoc, personal political connections deliver only trivial lawsuit success for multinational enterprises, while formal corporate partnerships with regime insiders can lead the state to structurally internalize foreign investors’ interests. In particular, we demonstrate that joint venture partnerships with state-owned enterprises help foreign firms obtain more substantial monetary compensation than other types of multinational enterprises. By contrast, the personal political connections of foreign firms’ board members do not foster meaningful judicial favoritism. These findings are robust to tests of alternative implications, matching procedures, and subsample robustness checks. This article advances our understanding of multinational corporations’ political risk in host countries, government–business relations, and authoritarian judicial institutions.

The World Bank, under the stewardship of the United States, stands out as the global leader among international development organizations. Does China's establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) undermine this status? Examining this question, we focus on the borrowing practices of a special set of countries: the founding members of the AIIB. These founders openly defied the public preference of the United States, arguably to create a potential rival to the World Bank. Using a new causal inference method, Pang, Liu, and Xu's Dynamic Multilevel Latent Factor Model—as well as several well-known estimation models as robustness checks—we document at least a temporary decrease in the number of World Bank infrastructure projects that the developing AIIB founders have entered into. This study presents the first systematic evidence that China's AIIB could unsettle the political influence the United States has enjoyed over developing countries through its leadership of the World Bank. An important set of countries may be parting ways with the World Bank and looking to a Chinese institution for leadership in the world of development.

What is the level of state capacity in developing countries today, and what have been its drivers over the past century? We construct a comprehensive new data set of tax and revenue collection for forty-six African polities from 1900 to 2015. Our data show that polities in Africa have been characterized by strong growth in fiscal capacity on average, but that substantial heterogeneity exists. The empirical analysis reveals that canonical state-building factors such as democratic institutions and interstate warfare have limited power to explain these divergent growth paths. On the other hand, accounting for the relationship between African polities and the international environment—through the availability of external finance and the legacy of colonialism—is key to understanding their differing investments in fiscal capacity. These insights add important nuances to established theories of state building. Not only can the availability of external finance deter investment in fiscal capacity, but it also moderates the efficacy of canonical state-building factors.