How do external threats affect leaders' incentives to repress? We argue that external threats both increase and decrease state repression, but through different causal pathways. Directly, external threats provide leaders with political cover to use repression against political opponents. Indirectly, threats incentivize leaders to augment state capacity, which decreases the likelihood of state repression. To test this argument, we develop a new latent measure of external threat using a Bayesian measurement model. We use mediation analysis to examine the direct and indirect effects of external threats on repression in developing countries from 1980 to 2016. We find that external threats increase government repression directly, but indirectly decrease repression through stronger state capacity. Our findings have implications for how international factors connect to domestic politics to help explain state repression. In addition, our new measure of external threat will help scholars study the consequences of the international threat environment.

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.

This paper empirically tests bellicist theories of state building in the East Asian context, paying attention to the interplay between external threats and internal challenges and their implications for these states’ extractive power. How much variation in state building in the region can be attributed to war and war preparation as a result of both external threats and internal challenges? In particular, it provides more fine-grained analysis on the different types of internal challenges and their impact on state capacity building. The article argues that in the East Asia region, both external threats and internal challenges are crucial to explaining the variation in state capacity across the region. However, we also find that different types of internal challenges have different effects. Particularly, communist insurgencies seem to have both an immediate and long-term positive effect in compelling the state to respond with more extraction to engage in state-building efforts.