Although space colonization appears to belong to the world of science fiction, private corporations owned by Silicon Valley billionaires—and supported by the US state—have spent billions making it a reality. Analyses of space colonialism have sometimes viewed these projects as distinct from earthly histories of colonialism, instead locating them within traditions of libertarianism, neoliberalism, or techno-utopianism. By reconstructing technology elites’ political visions for celestial settlements within the literature on colonial-era corporations and property, this study argues that the idea of outer space as an empty frontier relies on the same logic of territorialization that was used to justify terrestrial colonialism and indigenous dispossession. It further traces how the idea of “engineering territory” has inspired wider Silicon Valley political exit projects such as cyberspace, seasteading, and network states, which, rather than creating spaces of anarchical freedom, are attempting to recreate the territorial state in new spaces.

Can autocratic policy generate incentives for the accumulation of social capital and political engagement? This question is important to understand stability in authoritarian regimes that increasingly rely on governance to build legitimacy and social support. While existing research shows that the incentives for societal interaction embedded in policies can yield new forms of social capital and political engagement in democratic regimes, the top-down nature of policy and the corrupt and information-poor context of policy implementation could undermine this mechanism in authoritarian regimes. We explore this question by examining the effect of the Moscow Housing Renovation Program, a massive urban renewal project, that required residents to organize to obtain new housing. Comparing a matched sample of 1,300 residents living in buildings included and excluded from the program, we find that interactions induced by the program led to changes in the level of social capital among residents in included buildings. We also find spillover effects on political engagement and collective action against pension reform.

Even as The Federalist is frequently read to illuminate the origins of the American constitutional order, it advances a powerful account of the political future to be created and encountered by the polity the Constitution would found. Central to this account is a proleptic mode of analysis used to anticipate probable political developments and future patterns of constitutional politics, depict their systemic consequences, and identify how those consequences would feed back into the political system. Publius’ proleptic analyses comprise a descriptive theory of constitutional development according to which success on the terms stipulated—namely, the realization of a stable and well-administered constitutional union—would both bolster the new national government and supply the conditions for the expansion of its authority. Together, The Federalist’s proleptic analyses and the developmental theory they comprise disclose a dynamic constitutional imagination characterized by the changeability of authority relations.

Under conditions of anarchy, the predominant assumption is that scarcity leads to conflict. I contrast traditional Inuit walrus hunt practices to Rousseau’s stag hunt to demonstrate how mainstream international relations has it wrong on three counts: (1) radical scarcity need not lead to conflict-prone outcomes, (2) the historical eighteenth-century context of the stag hunt does not prove a predisposition against cooperation, and (3) the conditions of anarchy are irreducible to cultural institutions or to material constraints alone. I leverage Latour’s “symmetrical anthropology” to demonstrate that ideas and things have an equal potential to structure the culture of anarchical relations and to build on the literature which has established that comparative cultural data can be used to theorize anarchy. Rethinking the logic of anarchy is especially important in the age of the Anthropocene, given the prospects for radical ecological change in the near future.

Emotions shape strategic conflict dynamics. However, the precise way in which strategic and emotional concerns interact to affect international cooperation and contention are not well understood. We propose a model of intergroup conflict under incomplete information in which agents are sensitive to psychological motivations in the form of anger. Agents become angry in response to worse-than-expected outcomes due to actions of other players. Aggression may be motivated by anger or by beliefs about preferences of members of the other group. Increasing one group’s sensitivity to anger makes that group more aggressive but reduces learning about preferences, which makes the other group less aggressive in response to bad outcomes. Thus, anger has competing effects on the likelihood of conflict. The results have important implications for understanding the complex role of anger in international relations and, more generally, the interplay between psychological and material aims in both fomenting and ameliorating conflict.

States in conflict often have divergent interpretations of the past. They blame each other for starting the conflict and view their own actions as justified retaliation, which makes them reluctant to cooperate. This phenomenon, while common in international relations, is not well understood by existing formal theories of cooperation. In the context of the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma framework, we show that strategies that demand atonement for past misdeeds are outperformed by strategies that do not. The latter are able to get out of retaliatory cycles and return to cooperation more quickly when there are divergent perceptions of the past. We conclude with a case study of Chinese and U.S. responses to the Tiananmen protests of 1989. China and the United States strongly disagree about the cause of the Tiananmen uprising and the legitimacy of the Chinese response, but nevertheless returned to cooperation after a limited period of mutual punishment.

How do international audiences perceive, and respond to, gender equality reforms in autocracies? For autocrats, the post-Cold War rewards associated with democracy create incentives to make reforms that will be viewed as democratic but not threaten their political survival. We theorize women’s rights as one such policy area, contrasting it with more politically costly reforms to increase electoral competition. A conjoint survey experiment with development and democracy promotion professionals demonstrates how autocracies enhance their reputations and prospects for foreign aid using this strategy. While increasing electoral competition significantly improves perceived democracy and support for aid, increasing women’s economic rights is also highly effective. Gender quotas exhibit a significant (though smaller) effect on perceived democracy. A follow-up survey of the public and elite interviews replicate and contextualize the findings. Relevant international elites espouse a broad, egalitarian conception of democracy, and autocrats accordingly enjoy considerable leeway in how to burnish their reputations.

This article presents a theory of lobbying by firms for trade liberalization, not through political contributions, but instead through contributions to the litigation process at the World Trade Organization (WTO). In this “litigation for sale” model, firms signal information about the strength and value of potential cases and the government selects cases based on firms’ signals. Firms play a key role in monitoring and seeking enforcement of international trade law by signaling information and providing a bureaucratic subsidy, which increases a state’s ability to pursue the removal of trade barriers and helps explain the high success rate for WTO complainants. The theory’s implications are consistent with in-depth interviews with 38 trade experts and are tested through an analysis of WTO dispute initiation.

How do citizens hold local politicians accountable? I argue that citizens, especially through neighborhood associations, can use bloc voting as a bottom-up, grassroots strategy to pressure politicians for public services. Politicians monitor polling station voting, and communities switch allegiance if politicians do not deliver. I measure the perceived and actual relationships between community characteristics, bloc voting, and water access—an essential resource prone to political manipulation. I analyze an original household survey and conjoint experiment merged with electoral data in rural Brazil, and qualitative interviews illustrate theoretical mechanisms. Bloc voting is more likely in communities with high trust and participation, and bloc voting improves water access for association members. However, this strategy is only worthwhile for communities that can demonstrate their vote at their polling station. In contrast to top-down explanations of bloc voting, I highlight the interaction of collective action and electoral institutions for accountability and public service provision.

Democratic governments produce more policies than they can effectively implement. Yet, this gap between the number of policies requiring implementation and the administrative capacities available to do so is not the same in all democracies but varies across countries and sectors. We argue that this variation depends on the coupling of the sectoral bureaucracies in charge of policy formulation and those in charge of policy implementation. We consider these patterns of vertical policy-process integration an important feature of bureaucratic quality. The more the policymaking level is involved in policy implementation (top-down integration) and the easier the policy-implementing level finds it to feed its concerns into policymaking (bottom-up integration), the smaller the so-called “burden-capacity gap.” We demonstrate this effect through an empirical analysis in 21 OECD countries over a period of more than 40 years in the areas of social and environmental policies.

The article provides experimental evidence of the effect of candidate-citizen town-hall meetings on voters’ political behavior. The intervention took place prior to the March 2011 elections in Benin and involved 150 randomly selected villages. In the treatment group, candidates held town-hall meetings where voters deliberated over their electoral platforms. The control group was exposed to the standard campaign—that is, one-way communication of the candidate’s platform by himself or his local broker. We find that town-hall meetings led to a more informed citizenry and higher electoral participation, which diverged little along socioeconomic lines. We also observe a lower effectiveness of vote-buying attempts where town halls took place. This is consistent with town-hall deliberation promoting what we call more “ethical” voters.

Are women disadvantaged whilst accessing justice? I chart, for the first time, the full trajectory of accessing justice in India using an original dataset of roughly half a million crime reports, subsequently merged with court files. I demonstrate that particular complaints can be hindered when passing through nodes of the criminal justice system, and illustrate a pattern of “multi-stage” discrimination. In particular, I show that women's complaints are more likely to be delayed and dismissed at the police station and courthouse compared to men. Suspects that female complainants accuse of crime are less likely to be convicted and more likely to be acquitted, an imbalance that persists even when accounting for cases of violence against women (VAW). The application of machine learning to complaints reveals—contrary to claims by policymakers and judges—that VAW, including the extortive crime of dowry, are not “petty quarrels,” but may involve starvation, poisoning, and marital rape. In an attempt to make a causal claim about the impact of complainant gender on verdicts, I utilize topical inverse regression matching, a method that leverages high-dimensional text data. I show that those who suffer from cumulative disadvantage in society may face challenges across sequential stages of seeking restitution or punitive justice through formal state institutions.

Women remain underrepresented in cabinets, especially in high-prestige, “masculine” portfolios. Still, a growing number of states have appointed women to the finance ministry—a powerful position typically reserved for men. Drawing on the “glass cliff” phenomenon, we examine the relationship between financial crises and women’s ascension to, and survival in, this post. With an original dataset on appointments to finance ministries worldwide (1972–2017), we show that women are more likely to first come to power during a banking crisis. These results also hold for currency and inflation crises and even when accounting for the political and economic conditions that might otherwise explain this relationship. Subsequent examination of almost 3,000 finance ministers’ tenures shows that, once in office, crises shorten men’s (but not women’s) time in the post. Together, these results suggest that women can sometimes seize on crises as opportunities to access traditionally male-dominated positions.

Why do some, but not all oil-rich states provide generous welfare to their populations? Building on a case study of Oman in the 1960s and 1970s, we argue that anti-systemic subversive threats motivate ruling elites in oil states to use welfare as a tool of mass co-optation. We use the generalized synthetic control method and difference-in-difference regressions for a global quantitative test of our argument, assessing the effect of different types of subversion on a range of long-term welfare outcomes in oil-rich and oil-poor states. We demonstrate that the positive effect of subversion appears limited to center-seeking subversive threats in oil-rich countries. The paper addresses a key puzzle in the literature on resource-rich states, which makes contradictory predictions about the impact of resource rents on welfare provision.

Enacting stringent climate policy has proven politically challenging, not least because of concentrated losses in fossil fuel-producing communities. “Just transition” strategies have been proposed to mitigate this distributional challenge. Yet, little is known about how such strategies affect voting behavior. Using a mixed-methods approach, we exploit a local climate policy in Spain—a “Just Transition Agreement” (JTA) to phase out coalmining, support affected workers, and invest in affected municipalities—which was negotiated by the incumbent Socialist Party (PSOE) government with affected unions and businesses shortly before a national election. A difference-in-differences study shows that PSOE’s vote share in coalmining municipalities increased at the 2019 election relative to similar municipalities, implying that the JTA was electorally successful. Further statistical tests and elite interviews suggest that this electoral boost was driven by unions’ support of the JTA. Our findings have implications for how parties can craft popular climate policy.

Can nativist attitudes condition support for LGBT+ rights? The sustained advance in pro-LGBT+ attitudes in the West often contrasts with the greening of anti-immigrant sentiment propagated by nativist supply-side actors. We argue that these parallel trends are causally connected, theorizing that exposure to sexually conservative ethnic out-groups can provoke an instrumental increase in LGBT+ inclusion, particularly among those hostile toward immigration. Leveraging experiments in Britain and Spain, we provide causal evidence that citizens strategically liberalize their levels of support for LGBT+ rights when opponents of these measures are from the ethnic out-group. In a context where sexuality-based liberalism is nationalized, increasing tolerance toward LGBT+ citizens is driven by a desire among nativist citizens to socially disidentify from those out-groups perceived as inimical to these nationalized norms. Our analyses provide a critical interpretation of positive trends in LGBT+ tolerance with instrumental liberalism masking lower rates of genuine shifts in LGBT+ inclusion.

How do ordinary people choose survival strategies during intense, surprising political violence? Why do some flee violence, while others fight back, adapt, or hide? Individual decision-making during violence has vast political consequences, but remains poorly understood. I develop a decision-making theory focused on individual appraisals of how controllable and predictable violent environments are. I apply my theory, situational appraisal theory, to explain the choices of Indian Sikhs during the 1980s–1990s Punjab crisis and 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms. In original interviews plus qualitative and machine learning analysis of 509 oral histories, I show that control and predictability appraisals influence strategy selection. People who perceive “low” control over threats often avoid threats rather than approach them. People who perceive “low” predictability in threat evolution prefer more-disruptive strategies over moderate, risk-monitoring options. Appraisals explain behavior variation even after accounting for individual demographics and conflict characteristics, and also account for survival strategy changes over time.

Without formal avenues for claims-making or political participation, refugees must find their own means of securing services from state and non-state providers. This article asks why some refugee communities are more effective than others in mitigating community problems. I present a framework for understanding how refugees’ social networks shape the constraints and capabilities for collective action. I analyze a field experiment where I organized community meetings with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, randomly assigning the recruitment method for meetings to introduce exogenous variation in network structure. During meetings, participants were tasked with resolving collective action problems. I examine the dynamics of subsequent group discussion. Results show that although densely networked refugee groups exhibit more cooperation, they suffer from a resource diversity disadvantage. Group diversity facilitates access to resources that may help refugee communities confront community problems. The novel experimental design allows for separately identifying group-level and individual-level mechanisms.

Extensive research investigates the impact of descriptive representation on women’s political participation; yet, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. This article develops a novel theory of descriptive representation, arguing that women politicians mobilize women’s political participation by recruiting women as grassroots party activists. Evidence from a citizen survey and the natural experiment of gender quotas in India confirm that women politicians are more likely to recruit women party activists, and citizens report greater contact with them in reserved constituencies during elections. Furthermore, with women party activists at the helm, electoral campaigns are more likely to contact women, and activist contact is positively associated with political knowledge and participation. Evidence from representative surveys of politicians and party activists and fieldwork in campaigns, further support the theory. The findings highlight the pivotal role of women’s party activism in shaping women’s political behavior, especially in contexts with pervasive clientelism and persistent gender unequal norms.