We study the impact of compulsory voting in Brazil, where voting is mandatory from age 18 to 70 and voluntary for those aged 16, 17 and 70+. Using a survey sample of 8008 respondents, we document voter confusion about how the age criterion applies. Some people falsely believe that what matters is one's age in an election year rather than on Election Day. Next, we perform a regression discontinuity (RD) analysis of compulsory voting among young voters with register-based data from six Brazilian elections (2008–2018). We find that the effect of compulsory voting is seriously underestimated if we focus solely on the discontinuities prescribed by the law. Our findings carry important implications for studies adopting the RD design where knowledge of the cutoff is expected of the units of interest (like those about compulsory voting) and confirm that compulsory voting is a strong institutional arrangement that promotes greater electoral participation.

How does public diplomacy shape global public opinion? In this note, we theorize that positive public diplomacy that emphasizes aid and friendship works, while negative messages that criticize international rivals are ineffective. We conduct an experiment, to our knowledge the first of its kind, that randomly exposes Indian citizens to real Twitter messages from Chinese diplomats. We find that positive messages emphasizing aid and friendship improve perceptions of China, even in times of escalating violent conflict. However, messages from so-called “Wolf Warrior” diplomats that harshly criticize the United States are ineffective and can backfire in times of crisis. We argue public diplomacy can be a useful tool for global powers, but that domestic political pressures have pushed some diplomats, like China's Wolf Warriors, toward nationalist messages that do not appeal to foreign audiences.

Recent scholarship on affective polarization documents partisan animosity in people's everyday lives. But does partisan dislike go so far as to deny fundamental rights? We study this question through a moral dilemma that gained notoriety during the COVID-19 pandemic: triage decisions on the allocation of intensive medical care. Using a conjoint experiment in five countries we analyze the influence of patients’ partisanship next to commonly discussed factors determining access to intensive medical care. We find that while participants’ choices are consistent with a utilitarian heuristic, revealed partisanship influences decisions across most countries. Supporters of left or right political camps are more likely to withhold support from partisan opponents. Our findings offer comparative evidence on affective polarization in non-political contexts.

Prominent arguments hold that African states’ geography limits state capacity, impedes public service provision, and slows economic development. To test this argument, I collect comprehensive panel data on a proxy of local state capacity, travel times to national and regional capitals. These are computed on a yearly 5 × 5 km grid using time-varying data on roads and administrative units (1966–2016). I use these data to estimate the effect of changes in travel times to capitals on local education provision, infant mortality rates, and nightlight emissions. Within the same location, decreases in travel times to its capitals are robustly associated with improved development outcomes. The article advances the measurement of state capacity and contributes to understanding its effects on human welfare.

A pioneering study by Loewen et al. made use of the Canadian legislature's newly instituted lottery, which enabled non-cabinet Members of Parliament (MPs) to propose a bill or motion. Their study used this lottery in order to identify the causal effect of proposal power on incumbents' vote share in the next election. Analyzing the first two parliaments to use the lottery, Loewen et al. found that proposal power benefits incumbents, but only incumbents who belong to the governing party. Our study builds on these initial results by adding data from four subsequent parliaments. The pooled results no longer support the hypothesis that MPs—even those who belong to the governing party—benefit appreciably from proposal power. These updated findings resolve a theoretical puzzle noted by Loewen et al., as proposal power would not ordinarily be expected to confer electoral benefits in strong party systems, such as Canada's.

The “democratic advantage” in access to credit markets has been vigorously researched. Recent research has found that this “autocratic disadvantage” can be partly countered by other factors. However, this research agenda has largely ignored an increasingly important type of institution of direct importance for national fiscal policy, fiscal rules. This article argues that fiscal rules alleviate the “autocratic disadvantage” in sovereign bond market access. This argument is tested on a dataset on fiscal rules and sovereign bond issuing data covering 121 countries from 1990 to 2015. The results provide substantial evidence in favor of the argument, autocracies with fiscal rules face no disadvantage in bond market access and might even be more likely to issue new government bonds than democracies.

This note seeks to understand the extent of the disruptions to international relations caused by pandemics, focusing on one globally-endemic disease: malaria. We posit that longstanding diseases such as malaria have the potential to undermine the political ties of nation states, as well as the many benefits of these connections. Our argument is tested empirically using both directed-dyadic and monadic data, while incorporating methods that account for endogeneity and other relevant concerns. We find that the geographic malaria rates of a country not only serve to historically discourage foreign governments from establishing diplomatic outposts on a country's soil, but also lead to an aggregate decrease in the total diplomatic missions that a country receives. We then discuss the current implications of these findings.

Recent studies provide evidence that the absence of a no-confidence procedure in presidential systems is crucial for understanding why the allocation of portfolios does not follow the same pattern in both parliamentary and presidential democracies. In this study, I argue that distinctions within presidential systems must be used to explain the substantial variation in the allocation of portfolios to presidential parties. I theorize that when the president is more dependent upon the legislature to make and enact policies, the balance of power in presidential cabinets is more likely to reflect the balance of power in the legislature. In this case, the presidential cabinet can resemble the proportional cabinets usually formed in parliamentary systems. With new data from 20 presidential democracies worldwide spanning more than 70 years, the results support the expectation of a greater formateur's advantage when presidents have greater institutionally-granted powers to influence the policy agenda in the legislature.

Citizens that tend to experience political exclusion are often more supportive of direct and participatory forms of decision-making. We empirically verify two competing explanatory logics for such high support: the “anti-establishment” logic, which expects politically excluded citizens to unconditionally express more support than their fellow citizens for democratic innovations (DIs); and the “instrumental” logic, which expects politically excluded citizens to only express more support for DIs than other citizens when these innovations offer procedural control and favorable outcomes. Based on a conjoint analysis of Dutch citizens' preferences for participatory budgeting, we find no support for the anti-establishment logic and partial support for the instrumental logic. We show how measures of citizens' own feelings of exclusion help to explain the results.