Despite the close ties between tax-generated revenue and government policies, little is known about how political institutions shape the structure of tax choices across income levels. We propose and test a model based on the selectorate perspective, which predicts that leader choices regarding taxing and spending are driven by their desire to maximize their survival prospects against domestic challengers. The empirical tests investigate the conditions under which income taxes are non-existent, flat, more regressive or more progressive, and the degree of heterogeneity in tax systems as a function of governance institutions. The empirical results strongly and robustly support the theoretical predictions while also shedding light on how tax structures implemented in large coalition systems reduce income inequality.

Current thinking on the origins and size of the welfare state often ignores household relations in which people may depend on others for income or have dependents themselves. The influence of “dependency status” on individuals’ political preferences is unknown. We report results from a laboratory experiment designed to estimate the effect of dependency on preferences for policies that insure against labor market risk. Results indicate that (1) willingness to vote in favor of a social insurance policy is highly responsive to unemployment risk, (2) symmetric, mutual dependence is unrelated to support for insurance, but (3) asymmetric dependence (being dependent on someone else) increases support for social insurance. We connect our lab results to observational survey data and find similar relationships.

Does globalization affect the demand-side of politics, and if so, how? This paper builds on new developments in trade theory to argue that globalization matters, but that its effects on individuals’ perceptions of labor market risk and policy preferences are more heterogenous than previous research has acknowledged. Globalization exposure increases risk perceptions and demands for social protection among low-skilled individuals, but decreases them among high-skilled individuals. This conditional effect is observationally distinct from classic trade models as well as arguments that deindustrialization or ideology predominantly drive such perceptions and preferences. Analyzing cross-national survey data from 16 European countries and focusing both on trade and offshoring, the empirical analyses support the prediction that exposure to globalization affects high- and low-skilled individuals differently, leading to variation in labor market risk perceptions and policy preferences.

The view that multiparty elections in changing authoritarian regimes should be held sooner rather than later has been increasingly under attack. Critics argue that, under conditions of low institutional development, multiparty elections may lead to violence and civil war, rather than to the peaceful allocation of authority that everyone desires. Starting from the premise that elections are strategically timed and endogenous in transitioning authoritarian regimes, that is, more likely to be held when violence is imminent, we show that for Africa, the continent with the lowest levels of political institutionalization, elections do not increase the probability of a civil war initiation. In fact, for the post-Cold War period, the holding of multiparty elections is actually associated with a substantial reduction in the probability of civil war onset. To account for this pattern, we develop an informational theory of elections held under conditions that prevail in the post-Cold War, when foreign powers are reluctant to provide direct support for dictators (or their opponents) and elections are more reflective of the true level of a leader’s strength. We argue that, under these conditions, elections may prevent the eruption of a civil war that is already imminent, through two mechanisms: they may deter a weak opposition from initiating a war they are likely to lose or they may induce a weak dictator to offer ways to share power with the opposition.

This paper analyzes a complete information model of preventive war where shifts in the distribution of power play out over an arbitrary number of time periods. This analysis leads to a sufficient condition that implies war under a broader set of conditions than previously shown in the literature. This sufficient condition leads to two substantive implications: (1) preventive war can be caused by relatively slow, but persistent shifts in the distribution of power; and (2) a power shift that causes war may do so only after some delay. These insights serve to connect the long-term shifts emphasized in Power Transition Theory with the commitment problem explanation for preventive war analyzed in bargaining models of war.

Private information and the commitment problem are central to the rationalist theory of war, but causal evidence is scarce, as rationalist explanations for war are difficult to test with observational data. I design laboratory experiments to isolate the effects of private information and the commitment problem on the risk of conflict. I find that the commitment problem sharply increases the incidence of conflict, but there is no significant difference in conflict incidence with or without private information in the shadow of shifting power. I also investigate the realism of the positive experimental results with a case study of Japan’s decisionmaking on the eve of the Pacific War. The permutation of formal, experimental and historical methods applies the strength of one method to compensate for the weakness of another. Convergent results from the different methods strengthen the causal inference.

Recent empirical work scrutinizes the ability of economic sanctions to destabilize targeted leaders. Limitations in data and modeling choices, however, may have inflated estimates of sanctions’ efficacy. I propose a unified theoretical model, incorporating the possibility that leaders targeted with threats and imposed sanctions differ in baseline risks from those who are not. I combine this hazards approach with an empirical strategy to account for differences in ex ante risks and improved data on leader failure. This approach uncovers a considerably more modest effect. Sanctions rarely destabilize their targets.

We develop a theory of how an authoritarian regime interactively uses information manipulation, such as propaganda or censorship, and policy improvement to maintain social stability. The government can depict the status quo policy more popularly supported than it actually is, while at the same time please citizens directly by enacting a costly reform. We show that the government’s ability of making policy concessions reduces its incentive to manipulate information and improves its credibility. Anticipating a higher chance of policy concessions and less information manipulation, citizens are more likely to believe the government-provided information and support the regime. Our model provides an explanation for the puzzling fact that reform coexists with selective information disclosure in authoritarian countries like China.

Media freedom has motivated substantial political activism, yet there are surprising gaps in the related academic literature, in part because of a lack of historic and consistent data. We introduce the newly expanded Global Media Freedom Dataset, which includes 196 countries from 1948 to 2012, and demonstrate how it can be used to test previous hypotheses and assumptions about the correlates of media freedom.

We examine a major source of heterogeneity across cases in the Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute Dataset, 1816–2001, and demonstrate that this variation across cases biases most analyses of conflict. Disputes are coded using two logics—the familiar state-to-state militarized action represents one case while the second relies on sponsor governments to protest state targeting of private citizens. We show that the latter introduces additional measurement bias and does not match well the original conceptualization of what constituted a dispute. The protest-dependent cases are caused by different processes, and omitting them from analyses provides truer estimates of the effects of most conflict predictors. We find that previous controls for heterogeneity in the dispute data—such as using fatal militarized interstate disputes only—substantially underestimates the dangerous effects of contiguity and the pacifying effects of regime similarity. We also show that governments are seldom willing to risk militarized conflict for private citizens during these unique cases. We provide a list of the protest-dependent cases for future conflict analyses.