In the final empirical chapter, I push beyond Senegal to look broadly across West Africa to assess the generalizability of my findings. Senegal is not the only West African state to display remarkable subnational variation in exposure to precolonial statehood nor to have recently undertaken decentralization reforms. I extend my coding of precolonial kingdoms to the subregion and match it to data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Afrobarometer public opinion surveys to test the theory's generalizability. I find that areas of West Africa that were exposed to precolonial states have seen bigger gains in locally delivered public goods and that Afrobarometer respondents in these areas are more positive about their local governments and democratic practice than their counterparts in historically acephalous zones. While my theory is built around the specific legacies of precolonial statehood, the chapter's second half move beyond Africa to show the broader analytic leverage of the theory’s twin mechanisms of shared social identification and social network ties for Comparative Politics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of scope conditions for the argument.

Pavone analyzes how our evolving understanding of case-based causal inference via process-tracing should alter how we select cases for comparative inquiry. The chapter explicates perhaps the most influential and widely used means to conduct qualitative research involving two or more cases: Mill’s methods of agreement and difference. It then argues that the traditional use of Millian methods of case selection can lead us to treat cases as static units to be synchronically compared rather than as social processes unfolding over time. As a result, Millian methods risk prematurely rejecting and otherwise overlooking (1) ordered causal processes, (2) paced causal processes, and (3) equifinality, or the presence of multiple pathways that produce the same outcome. To address these issues, the chapter develops a set of recommendations to ensure the alignment of Millian methods of case selection with within-case sequential analysis.

In the final empirical chapter, I push beyond Senegal to look broadly across West Africa to assess the generalizability of my findings. Senegal is not the only West African state to display remarkable subnational variation in exposure to precolonial statehood nor to have recently undertaken decentralization reforms. I extend my coding of precolonial kingdoms to the subregion and match it to data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Afrobarometer public opinion surveys to test the theory's generalizability. I find that areas of West Africa that were exposed to precolonial states have seen bigger gains in locally delivered public goods and that Afrobarometer respondents in these areas are more positive about their local governments and democratic practice than their counterparts in historically acephalous zones. While my theory is built around the specific legacies of precolonial statehood, the chapter's second half move beyond Africa to show the broader analytic leverage of the theory’s twin mechanisms of shared social identification and social network ties for Comparative Politics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of scope conditions for the argument.

Chapter 2 presents our core concepts, develops our theoretical logic, and derives hypotheses for empirical testing. The chapter defines our key terms and discusses the scope conditions on our theory. We then elaborate on what kinds of information are considered sensitive in our framework and describe the kinds of problems that can arise when such information is necessary for understanding compliance-related questions. We next expand on the necessary features of IOs’ confidentiality systems, providing concrete examples. The chapter concludes by developing our two core empirical expectations about the effect of confidentiality systems on the frequency of disclosures of sensitive information and on international cooperation.

In this chapter, we show how changing budgets influence the mix of intervention strategies. A non-intuitive implication of our argument is that lack of funds may prompt a liberal intervener to switch to a less democratic intervention strategy. The logic is that money allows a liberal intervener a luxury of sorts: of being able to improve electoral conditions (and so make it harder for the favored government to win) while offsetting any disadvantages with massive aid, for their favored ticket. The case of Greece, in which the United States sponsored a change in electoral rules (in an undemocratic direction) in 1951–1952 conforms to this logic.Our discussion of coups provides scope condition for our argument, by showing how polarization and competitors influence the choice of electoral interventions over coups. We show that high polarization causes outsiders to prefer coups over elections. In that sense, we echo Dahl's central insight, about the conditions enabling democracy to exist. We also show that superpower competition heightens the risk of coups. The reason is that competing in elections becomes costly. The high prevalence of coups during the Cold War complies to this logic.