While presidents frequently create new policies through unilateral power, empirical scholarship generally focuses on executive orders and overlooks other categories of directives. We introduce data on more than 50,000 unilateral directives issued between 1877 and 2020 and use machine learning techniques to characterize their substantive importance and issue areas. Our measures reveal significant increases in unilateral activity over time, driven largely by increases in foreign affairs and through the substitution of memoranda for executive orders. We use our measures to formally evaluate the historical development of the unilateral presidency and reassess theoretical claims about public opinion and unilateral power. Our research provides new evidence about variation in the use of presidential authority and opens new avenues for empirical inquiry.

Voters use salient issues to inform their vote choice. Using 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES) data, we analyze how short-, medium-, and long-term issues informed the vote for president in the 2020 election, which witnessed record-setting participation. To explain the dynamics of presidential vote choice, we employ a voter typology advanced by Key (1966). Specifically, compared to standpatters, who in 2020 registered the same major party vote as in 2016, we find that new voters in 2020 and voters switching their preferences from 2016 cast their ballots in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. In the end, President Donald Trump was denied reelection by new voters and vote switchers principally because certain issues had a notable effect in moving their presidential preferences in the Democratic direction.

Existing literature examines the effectiveness of civilian oversight in reducing police misconduct. However, little-to-no quantitative research explores possible adverse consequences of this accountability mechanism. Utilizing time series analysis of administrative data on aggregate monthly civilian complaints and police behavior in the largest American city, this article offers evidence of racial inequality in police response to civilian complaints. For White civilians, complaint against the police abates subsequent police stops. For Black civilians, complaint is associated with subsequent intensification of police stops. This intensification only follows complaints against White officers, is conditional upon officer knowledge of the complaint, is confined to stops involving greater officer discretion to perform the stop, and is only observed in police precincts with large Black populations.

We study the problem of how citizens should punish or reward a leader's choices during international crises. Audiences should impose costs rooted in citizens’ preferences over policy outcomes, but that need not mean that these costs directly reflect the citizens’ preferences over actions. Instead, rewards and punishments are valued for their equilibrium consequences. To understand how citizens’ policy preferences shape electoral accountability, we characterize the retention strategies that maximize citizen welfare. In the optimal strategy, citizens always punish leaders who initiate crises and then back down. This is a robust finding, and true even though the citizens have no intrinsic preferences for policy consistency. Whether they punish leaders for backing down rather than going to war, on the other hand, depends on the status quo and on the costs of war. Importantly, these strategies of rewarding and punishing leaders need not have any immediate connection to voter's ex ante preferences over war and peace, even if preferences over policy outcomes ultimately motivate citizen behavior. This has important implications for interpreting empirical and experimental results related to audience costs.

We study how an intervention combining youth intergroup contact and sports affects intergroup relations in the context of an active conflict. We first conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of one-year program exposure in Israel. To track effects of a multiyear exposure, we then use machine-learning techniques to fuse the RCT with the observational data gathered on multiyear participants. This analytical approach can help overcome frequent limitations of RCTs, such as modest sample sizes and short observation periods. Our evidence cannot affirm a one-year effect on outgroup regard and ingroup regulation, although we estimate benefits of multiyear exposure among Jewish-Israeli youth, particularly boys. We discuss implications for interventions in contexts of active conflict and group status asymmetry.

Under closed-list proportional representation, a party's electoral list determines the order in which legislative seats are allocated to candidates. When candidates differ in their ability, parties face a trade-off between competence and incentives. Ranking candidates in decreasing order of competence ensures that elected politicians are most competent. Yet, party lists create incentives for candidates that may lead parties not to place their best candidates at the top of the list. We examine this trade-off in a game-theoretical model in which parties rank their candidates on a list, candidates choose their campaign effort, and the election is a team contest for multiple prizes. We analyze how the candidates’ objectives, voters’ attention and media coverage, incumbency, the number of parties competing in the election, and the electoral environment influence how parties rank candidates.

Moving past the conventional focus on ministerial portfolios, this paper investigates how coalition governments allocate and share ministerial responsibility for individual policy issues. Sharing responsibility induces coalescing parties to collaborate on policy issues, which addresses the problem of ministerial autonomy. Consequently, I argue that incumbent parties in coalition governments share ministerial responsibility for contentious and salient policy issues. This claim is corroborated based on a newly elicited dataset of over 30,000 ministerial policy responsibilities from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The findings have important implications for scholarship on coalition governments, as they demonstrate that incumbent parties can use the design of ministerial portfolios itself to insulate a coalition compromise from partisan deviations.

Did the 2008 United States presidential election produce stronger future mobilization for Blacks than non-Blacks? First-time voting influences long-term political behavior, but do minority voters see the most powerful effects when the formative election is tied to their group's political empowerment? I test this hypothesis in the context of the election of the first Black president in United States history, using voting eligibility discontinuities to identify the effect of voting in 2008 on future voting for Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites. Voting in 2008 caused a greater increase in the likelihood of voting in 2010 for Blacks than for other new voters, but there is no evidence of a sustained mobilizing advantage in subsequent elections. Furthermore, 2008 was not a unique formative voting experience for new Black voters, but rather produced similar effects on future voting as other presidential elections. These results signal that group political empowerment does not drive habitual voting.

We experimentally explore the role of institutions imposing collective sanctions in sustaining cooperation. In our experiment, players only observe noisy signals about individual contributions in finitely repeated public goods game with imperfect monitoring, while total output is perfectly observed as it is often the case in collective action problems in society. We consider sanctioning mechanism that allows agents to commit to collective punishment in case the level of cooperation among members of society falls short of a target. We find that cooperation is higher with collective punishment compared to both no punishment or punishment targeting individuals. Importantly, our results indicate that it is the combination of making a commitment to be punished and the collective nature of punishment which induces cooperation. Our findings show that punishing a group collectively for misbehavior of some of its members induces cooperation when individuals participate in setting up the sanctioning institution. The study contributes to the literature on institutional legitimacy and how to ensure good government performance when dealing with collective action problems, and, by considering commitment, improves enforcement methods criticized for their detrimental effects on some societal groups.

To what degree and why are traditional institutions persistent? Following up the literature on the long-term effects of precolonial institutions in Africa, we investigate whether and where today's traditional institutions mirror their precolonial predecessors. We do so by linking data on contemporary traditional institutions of African ethnic groups with Murdock's historical Ethnographic Atlas. We find a robust association between past and present levels of institutional complexity, differentiating between institutions’ political centralization and functional differentiation. However, this persistence originates almost exclusively from former British colonies governed with more reliance on precolonial institutions than other colonies, in particular French ones. These findings contribute to research on the development and effects of traditional institutions, highlighting the need to account for varying persistence of traditional institutions.

Survey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach causal inference. This may account for conflicting findings in published research.

Here, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design situated in Romania, where students who pass a national baccalaureate exam are uniquely qualified to enter university. We find that university attendance causes more liberal party preferences along the cultural dimension of party politics—though not along the economic or left-right dimensions of party conflict.

How do international crises unfold? We conceptualize international relations as a strategic chess game between adversaries and develop a systematic way to measure pieces, moves, and gambits accurately and consistently over a hundred years of history. We introduce a new ontology and dataset of international events called ICBe based on a very high-quality corpus of narratives from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. We demonstrate that ICBe has higher coverage, recall, and precision than existing state of the art datasets and conduct two detailed case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Crimea-Donbas Crisis (2014). We further introduce two new event visualizations (event iconography and crisis maps), an automated benchmark for measuring event recall using natural language processing (synthetic narratives), and an ontology reconstruction task for objectively measuring event precision. We make the data, supplementary appendix, replication material, and visualizations of every historical episode available at a companion website crisisevents.org.

Polls from the Middle East/North Africa show high support for democracy. However, the veracity of this support has been called into question. This study uses a conjoint analysis to show that citizens support democratic institutions, as well as favoring an effective welfare state and a state religion. The results demonstrate that support for elected governance is not contingent on the state's providing economic benefits; citizens are more likely to favor participatory government at each level of economic outcome. Interest in incorporating religion in the state, however, is contingent on the political and economic profile described; the contingent effects suggest interest in Islamic governance is, at least partly, instrumental. Although pro-democracy public opinion alone does not secure democratization, it creates fertile ground for future democratization movements.

This paper proposes a framework of immigrant acceptance that accounts for both group-level and individual-level characteristics and conducts a novel test of the cultural threat hypothesis. Immigrants’ individual traits are conceptualized as secondary to their identity-based claims. The empirical strategy leverages a set of survey experiments conducted in the extreme rentier state of Qatar, where naturalization poses tangible negative financial consequences for citizens by expanding the pool of government welfare beneficiaries. Findings demonstrate that citizens are willing to share citizenship with a narrow ethnic in-group while individual cultural and economic attributes are lower-order determinants influencing economically vulnerable citizens. Importantly, answers to direct survey measures are at odds with these findings, demonstrating their susceptibility to social desirability bias.

Liberalization is a perennial topic in politics and political science. We first review a broad scholarly debate, showing that the mainstream theories make rival and contradictory claims regarding the role of political parties in (de)liberalization reforms. We then develop a framework of conditional partisan influence, arguing that and under what conditions parties matter. We test our (and rival) propositions with a new dataset on (de)liberalization reforms in 23 democracies since 1973 covering several policy areas. Methodologically, we argue that existing quantitative studies are problematic: They rely on time-series cross-section models using country-year observations; but governments do not change annually, so that the number of observations is artificially inflated, resulting in incorrect estimates. We propose mixed-effects models instead, with country-year observations nested in cabinets, which are nested in countries and years. The results show under what conditions parties matter for (de)liberalization. More generally, the paper argues that mixed-effects models should become the new standard for studying partisan influences.

Discussions of terrorism assume actual or threatened violence, but the term is regularly used to delegitimize rivals' nonviolent actions. Yet do ordinary citizens accept descriptions of nonviolence as terrorism? Using a preregistered survey-experiment in Israel, a salient conflictual context with diverse repertoires of contention, we find that audiences rate adversary nonviolence close to terrorism, consider it illegitimate, and justify its forceful repression. These perceptions vary by the action's threatened harm, its salience, and respondents' ideology. Explicitly labeling nonviolence as terrorism, moreover, particularly sways middle-of-the-road centrists. These relationships replicate in a lower-salience conflict, albeit with milder absolute judgments, indicating generalizability. Hence, popular perceptions of terrorism are more fluid and manipulable than assumed, potentially undermining the positive effects associated with nonviolent campaigns.

Despite the substantial body of research on compulsory voting's (CV) relationship with turnout, much remains unknown about the role of different types of CV rules, their enforcement, and their ability to prevent the secular turnout decline observed around the world. Moreover, existing studies that leverage changes to CV laws are limited to a single country. We assemble rich new data on voter turnout and electoral legislation that, we believe, include the most accurate and extensive cross-national measure of CV to date. We test three theoretically derived hypotheses: that CV enforcement matters for participation; that enforcement's effect is conditioned by state capacity; and that, only when CV is enforced, will it mitigate voter turnout's post-1970 tendency to decline. We find support for each. We also find that the nature of sanctions for non-voting is irrelevant for participation.

Coercive institutions' internal structures remain poorly understood. Bureaucratic reorganizations within security institutions cause significant variation in their behavior, however. Intra-agency reforms interact with officers' careerist incentives to cause changes in coercive capacity or repression. In this paper, I test the effects of intra-agency reforms on surveillance capacity. I exploit a rare source of exogenous variation in the structure of the secret police in communist Poland. Difference-in-differences models find that when security headquarters were duplicated through an administrative reform, the proliferation of higher-level posts within the service caused a large and statistically significant increase in the number of informants it employed. Intra-agency reform substantially altered the agency's coercive capacity. Previously overlooked dynamics within coercive institutions have important effects on authoritarian repression.

What allows autocratic political elites to coordinate with each other and check dictators? Earlier work assumes that elite coordination becomes easier as dictators share more power. I argue that, even when power-sharing is pervasive, a lack of cohesiveness can rob regime members of their influence over dictators. Conflicting interests can leave seemingly powerful elites unable to agree on when or how to challenge the dictator. I develop a measure of elite collective action based on this framework. It documents not only how much power elites have, but also the obstacles they would need to resolve to work together. In doing so, it better describes the relationship between autocrats and their ruling coalition, and its added nuance allows it to recover findings that current measures miss. By paying closer attention to the cohesion of autocratic elites, this paper explains why some dictators can rule tyrannically without retribution, and why weaker elites can still constrain powerful autocrats.

Citizens often support politicians who vote against their parties in parliament. They view rebels as offering better representation, appreciate expressive acts, take rebellion as a signal of standing up for constituents, or see rebels as defending their moral convictions. Each explanation has different implications for representation, but they have not yet been tested systematically against one another. We implement survey experiments on nationally representative samples in the UK, Germany, France, and Italy to assess whether voters treat rebellion as a cue for better representation or infer positive character traits implying a valence advantage. Policy congruence does not drive voters’ preference for rebels. However, voters do associate positive traits with rebel MPs, even if they do not feel better represented by them.