What is the role of trade policy in military alliances? We analyze and test a game-theoretic model of economic and security cooperation in which allies hold different interests across the security and commercial aspects of the relationship. In equilibrium, allies with little market power who are valuable politically to larger states engage in sociallysuboptimal protectionism, as their allies’ threats of retaliation are incredible. Stable cooperation emerges in the form of unretaliated protection rather than mutually low trade barriers. We test the model’s implications against a dyadic data set of antidumping petitions from 1980 to 2013 and find that larger allies are more likely to tolerate protectionism by smaller allies by denying domestic petitions to retaliate against dumping measures by the latter.

Can emphasis on shared religion reduce out-group prejudice? To explore this question, we conducted a survey experiment on the effect of religious primes on Turkish citizens’ attitudes and behavior toward Syrian refugees in Istanbul and Gaziantep. We used a factorial design to compare the independent and interactive effects of primes emphasizing refugees’ Sunni or Muslim identity and a factual statement on the economic cost of the refugees. We find that religious primes increase respondents’ level of donations to a charity supporting Syrian refugees and certain attitudinal measures of support for the refugees. We also uncovered a differential impact among the Sunni and Muslim primes and found that the statement of economic cost removed the pro-refugee effect of religious primes.

Institutions have the power to limit a government’s policy options. Policy restrictions are often used as solutions to coordination failures or time inconsistency problems. However, policy constraints can have significant drawbacks and these disadvantages have, to date, been overlooked in the literature. When institutional constraints tie a government’s hands, citizens will have less incentive to become informed about politics and participate in collective decision-making. This is because policy restrictions lower the private returns of political information. A fiscal policy restriction, for example, may decrease redistribution by lowering a poorer voters’ acquisition of political information. We illustrate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations and find that in one in three cases these policy restrictions make poorer voters worse off.

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.

Studies of regime type and war show that democracies tend to win the wars they fight, but questions remain about why this is the case. A simple, if underappreciated, explanation for democratic success is that democracies fight alongside larger and more powerful coalitions. Coalition partners bring additional material capabilities and may also provide intangible benefits to the war effort, such as increased legitimacy or confidence. Democracies may also find it less costly to join coalitions, as democratic war aims may be easier to apportion among the victors without diluting the spoils. Evaluating our hypotheses in a sample of all wars (or all militarized disputes) during the period 1816–2000, we find that democracies fight alongside larger coalitions and that states fighting alongside larger coalitions are more likely to win major contests. Coalition size subsumes most (and in some specifications all) of the direct effect of regime type on victory.

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.

In the aftermath of financial crises, governments can use economic policy to minimize the risk of future recurrence. Yet not all do so. To explain this divergence in responses I develop a theory of economic policy choice after financial crises. I argue that past financial crises provide information to future governments about the political costs of financial crises. This subsequently informs the need to use economic policy to insure against such crises. Focusing on the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves after currency crises, I find that when past currency crises led to political changes future governments accumulate higher levels of reserves to prevent another crisis from occurring. This effect is stronger when political change occurred in situations where governments would not expect to be held accountable, and when reserve sales were shown to be effective in preventing political change. The theory and empirical results provide an answer as to why countries experiencing a similar form of financial crisis can, nevertheless, vary in their attempts to prevent future recurrence.

Previous studies identified several domestic factors that may influence a country’s level of structural coup-proofing, i.e., counterbalancing strategies that shall prevent internal groups from seizing power via a coup d’état. We suggest that a country’s level of counterbalancing is also affected by such policies in what we term countries’ “peer groups.” When deciding the appropriate level of counterbalancing, rulers may be affected by external information flows from a “peer group” with similar structural coup-risk characteristics (institutions) or a similar coup-risk experience (coup history). Using maximum likelihood spatial lag models and data in 1976–2005, we find that leaders learn from and emulate counterbalancing in other states, but rather only through an “experiential peer group.”

A method for predicting conflict zones in civil wars based on point process models is presented in this paper. Instead of testing the validity of specific theoretical conjectures about the determinants of violence in a causal framework, this paper builds on classic literature and a wide body of recent studies to predict conflict zones based on a series of geographic conditions. Using an innovative cross-validation design, the study shows that the quantitative research program on the micro-foundations of violence in civil conflict has crafted generalizable insights permitting out-of-sample predictions of conflict zones. The study region is delimited to ten countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that experienced full-blown insurgencies in the post-Cold War era.

As part of a general inquiry into mental mechanisms that operate outside conscious awareness, experimental psychology has recently established the presence and importance of “implicit attitudes.” The purpose of our paper is to compare the roles played by implicit and explicit prejudice in politics. Relying on two national surveys of the American electorate that included standard measures of implicit and explicit prejudice, we provide a systematic comparison of prejudice’s political effects: for the candidates Americans choose, the policies they favor, the assessments they make of government performance, and the racialized information they absorb. We find that implicit and explicit prejudice provide radically different pictures of racial politics in America.

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.

We examine a problem that is confronted frequently by political science researchers seeking to model longitudinal data: what to do when one suspects a lag between the realization of a regressor and its effect on the outcome variable, but one has no theoretical reason to suspect a particular lag length. We examine the theoretical challenges posed by atheoretic lags, review existing methods for atheoretic lag analysis—most notably distributed lag specifications—and their shortcomings, and present an alternative approach for atheoretic lag analysis based on Bayesian model averaging (BMA). We demonstrate the use and utility of our approach with two examples: the litigant signal model in American politics and modernization theory in political economy. Our examples show the increasing difficulty of analyzing models with atheoretic lags as the set of possible specifications increases, and demonstrate the effectiveness of BMA for the modal type of specification in time-series cross-sectional applications.

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to examine how different rules for re-selecting the leader of a group affects how that leader builds a winning coalition. Leaders play an inter-group game and then distribute winnings from that game within their group before standing for re-selection. The results of the experiment show that leaders of groups with large winning coalition systems rely heavily on distributing winnings through public goods, while leaders of groups with small winning coalition systems are more likely to target specific citizens with private goods. Furthermore, the experiment shows that supporters of small coalition leaders benefit from that support in future rounds by receiving more private goods than citizens that did not support the leader. Meanwhile, citizens that support a large coalition leader do not benefit from this support in future rounds. Therefore, small coalition leaders target individual citizens to maintain a coalition over time in a way not possible in a group with a large winning coalition. Finally, in the experiment, small coalition leaders increased their payoffs over time, suggesting that once power has been consolidated, small coalition leaders narrow their coalition.

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.

In this paper, we investigate the causes and consequences of institutional design choices in the liberalization of services trade and investment in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). We distinguish between a positive-list and a negative-list approach to services liberalization, and analyze PTAs signed by countries of the Asia-Pacific. We develop an information-based argument that explains why these different types induce path dependence in subsequent choices, and derive hypotheses that capture the “history” effect of choosing either institutional model. In doing so, we examine whether particular “modes of governance” diffuse through the growing network of trade agreements through the adoption of rules by third parties in their own PTAs. The empirical analysis tests these hypotheses using simulation-based dynamic network analysis methods. We find evidence of strong path dependence in the choice of liberalization approach, affecting the evolution of PTA networks in the Asia-Pacific and the diffusion of services liberalization in general. Such path dependence has long-term consequences for the institutional features of the international trade regime.

The possibility that citizens expose themselves to information in biased ways—so-called selective exposure—has acquired new importance as the media environment has evolved to provide more choices concerning what to watch and read. But evidence for the most prominent idea in selective exposure research—that citizens prefer attitude-consistent information—is notably mixed. Methodological challenges likely contribute to the inconclusive nature of findings, as researchers face trade-offs between the artificiality of lab environments and the difficult-to-disentangle confounds of observational analysis. We improve understanding of selective exposure in two ways. First, we consider how message aspects other than attitude-consistency affect exposure decisions. Second, we study selective exposure with an innovative field experiment conducted in the United States that addresses limitations of other approaches. Our results allow us to reach more confident conclusions about the prevalence of motivated selective exposure, and help to illuminate underpinnings of the oft-lamented tendency for campaign media to focus on candidate miscues rather than substantive policy differences.

Why do some declining industries receive more compensation through protectionist policies than others, even without actively engaging in lobbying? How does the political representation of industries affect their chances for protectionist relief? This paper argues that political parties seek to optimize electoral returns through the strategic allocation of distributive benefits generated by trade barriers. The inter-industry structure of protection is thus explained by the interaction between industries’ trade preferences and political characteristics. Using data on protection and subnational employment for US industries and district-level election outcomes in the 1990s, this paper finds that the concentration of industries in competitive constituencies not only increases their chances of receiving higher tariffs, but also magnifies the marginal effect of comparative disadvantage on tariff and nontariff protection.

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.

I exploit the unique institutional framework of Spanish local elections, where municipalities follow different electoral systems depending on their population size, as mandated by a national law. Using a regression discontinuity design, I compare turnout under closed list proportional representation and under an open list, plurality-at-large system where voters can vote for individual candidates from the same or different party-lists. I find that the open list system increases turnout by between 1 and 2 percentage points. The results suggest that open list systems, which introduce competition both across and within parties, are conducive to more voter turnout.

Researchers commonly employ multinomial logit (MNL) models to explain individual-level vote choice while treating “abstention” as the baseline category. Though many view abstainers as a homogeneous group, we argue that these respondents emerge from two distinct sources. Some nonvoters are likely to be “occasional voters” who abstained from a given election owing to temporary factors, such as a distaste for all candidates running in a particular election, poor weather conditions, or other temporary circumstances. On the other hand, many nonvoters are unlikely to vote regardless of the current political climate. This latter population of “routine nonvoters” is consistently disengaged from the political process in a way that is distinct from that of occasional voters. Including both sets of nonvoters within an MNL model can lead to faulty inferences. As a solution, we propose a baseline-inflated MNL estimator that models heterogeneous populations of nonvoters probabilistically, thus accounting for the presence of routine nonvoters within models of vote choice. We demonstrate the utility of this model using replications of existing political behavior research.