We argue that a country's international security context influences individual bias against female leaders and propose three mechanisms: by increasing individual demand for defense, by shaping individual ideological orientations, and by increasing society's level of militarization. Using survey data of more than 200,000 individuals in 84 countries, we show the more hostile the country's security environment, the more individuals are likely to agree that men make better political leaders than do women. We also find support for some of our proposed mechanisms and that the effect of security environments is greater for men than women. Our study presents the first cross-national evidence that the country's international security environment correlates with bias against women leaders.

To learn about the effects of corporate campaign contributions, we study the potential influence of the insurance industry in US state politics. The insurance industry is one of the biggest players in state politics, and we have collected new data on objective measures of the industry's performance in each state over time. We exploit within-state changes in campaign finance regulations which can significantly restrict the ability of corporate contributors to give money and potentially influence elected officials. Across a range of outcomes and campaign finance reforms, we find little evidence that the ability to make corporate campaign contributions benefits the insurance industry in a state. Some results suggest that the ability to make campaign contributions may benefit the insurance industry in states with elected insurance commissioners, but overall, campaign contributions appear to have a little distortionary effect even in a setting where we would most expect to find it.

Authoritarian leaders around the world often fight against corruption in an effort to win public support. Conventional wisdom holds that this strategy works because leaders can signal their benevolent intentions by removing corrupt officials. We argue that fighting against corruption can undermine regime support. By revealing scandals of corrupt officials, corruption investigations can alter citizens' beliefs about public officials and lead to disenchantment about political institutions. We test this argument by examining how China's current anti-corruption campaign has changed citizens' public support for the government and the Communist Party. We analyze the results of two original surveys conducted before and during the campaign, and employ a difference-in-differences strategy to show that corruption investigations, at the margin, suppress respondents' support for the central government and party. We also examine our respondents' prior and posterior beliefs, and the results support our updating mechanism.

Judicial nominations, particularly those to the Supreme Court, have been a salient topic in recent presidential and senate elections. However, there has been little research to determine whether judicial nominations motivate political behavior. Across three studies we demonstrate the important role judicial nominations play in influencing political behavior. In Study 1, we analyze the extent to which voters perceive judicial nominations as an important electoral issue. We find that Republicans—and especially strong Republicans—are more likely to perceive judicial nominations as important. In Study 2, we analyze how congruence with an incumbent Senator's judicial confirmation votes influences voters’ decision to vote for the incumbent. We find that congruence with a Senator's judicial confirmation votes is a strong predictor of vote choice. Finally, in Study 3, we analyze data from an original conjoint experiment aimed at simulating a Senate primary election where voters must select among co-partisans. We find that Republican subjects are more likely to select a primary candidate who prioritizes confirming conservative Supreme Court nominees. Among Democratic subjects, however, we find that Democratic candidates who prioritize the Court might actually suffer negative electoral consequences. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance of judicial nominations as an electoral issue.

Ethnic voting is an important phenomenon in the political lives of numerous countries. In the present paper, we propose a theory explaining why ethnic voting is more prevalent in certain localities than in others and provide evidence for it. We argue that local ethnic geography affects ethnic voting by making voters of ethnicity that finds itself in the minority fear intimidation by their ethnic majority neighbors. We provide empirical evidence for our claim using the data from round 4 of the Afrobarometer survey in Ghana to measure the voters’ beliefs that they are likely to face intimidation during electoral campaigns. Using geocoded data from rounds three and four of the Afrobarometer, as well as data from the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, we find no evidence for local public goods provision as an alternative mechanism.

This paper sheds new light on the drivers of civil service reform in US states. We first demonstrate theoretically that divided government is a key trigger of civil service reform, providing nuanced predictions for specific configurations of divided government. We then show empirical evidence for these predictions using data from the second half of the 20th century: states tended to introduce these reforms under divided government, and in particular when legislative chambers (rather than legislature and governor) were divided.

Where do armed conflicts occur? In applied studies, we may take ad hoc approaches to answer this question. In some regression studies, for instance, a single conflict event can cause an entire province to be classified as a conflict zone. In this paper, I fill this void of knowledge by developing a machine learning method that is less dependent on the areal-unit assumptions and can flexibly estimate conflict zones. I apply the method to a conflict event dataset and create a new dataset of conflict zones. A replication of Daskin and Pringle (2018, Nature 553, 328–332) with the new dataset indicates that the effect of civil war on mammal populations is much smaller than the original estimate.

Electoral reforms affect legislative outcomes by influencing incumbent legislators’ behavior, new entrants’ behavior, and the probability that incumbents are replaced with new entrants. Empirical work on electoral reforms and polarization has focused on new entrants’ behavior. We employ a simple decision theoretic framework with partial incumbent policy persistence and spatial voting to examine the three channels jointly. We show that a reform designed to encourage ideological moderation produces larger effects on polarization when the reform is implemented than when it is removed. The key insight is that implementing a moderation-inducing reform generates a set of challengers who are more likely to defeat incumbents while the incumbents are more likely to win reelection when the reform is removed. We then empirically examine how elections and legislative polarization respond to unlimited PAC contributions in state legislatures. Examining incumbents’ decisions to stand for reelection, the electoral performance of incumbents who do run, and partisan polarization, we find empirical support for our predictions.

The literature on autocracies has argued that repression of protest is either a result of the political environment in which protest occurs, or depends on particular characteristics of the protest events themselves. We argue that the interaction of both matters. Authoritarian regimes vary in how they legitimize their rule, and they should be particularly thin-skinned if protesters challenge the basis of their legitimacy. Using event-level data on mass mobilization in autocracies between 2003 and 2015, we use text classification methods to extract protest issues from newspaper reports. Our analysis shows that dictators are more likely to repress protest against incumbents when they claim legitimacy based on the person of the leader. Overall, our study shows that protest issues are not universal in triggering repression; rather, they need to be considered together with the political context in which they are raised.

What is the effect of violence on political mobilization? Taking the repression-mobilization nexus debate as a starting point, we study the effects of police interventions on political participation, focusing on the Spanish police crackdown on Catalonia's independence referendum on 1 October 2017. We analyze the effect of police actions on turnout using detailed aggregate data, as well as a survey conducted a few days after the referendum. The two empirical approaches show that police interventions had both deterrent and inverse spatial spillover effects. Although police raids had a local negative impact on turnout, they induced positive spillover effects in the surrounding areas. Our findings also indicate heterogeneity in the spatial dynamics, with police actions encouraging people to go to vote in nearby areas, but also mobilizing residents in neighboring areas to participate, especially those individuals with fewer incentives to turn out to vote.

Firms in the USA rely on highly skilled immigrants, particularly in the science and engineering sectors. Yet, the recent politics of immigration marks a substantial change to US immigration policy. We implement a conjoint experiment that isolates the causal effect of nativist, anti-immigrant, pronouncements on where skilled potential-migrants choose to immigrate to. While these policies have a significantly negative effect on the destination choices of Chilean and UK student subjects, they have little effect on the choices of Indian and Chinese student subjects. These results are confirmed through an unobtrusive test of subjects’ general immigration destination preferences. Moreover, there is some evidence that the negative effect of these nativist policies are particularly salient for those who self-identify with the Left.

Research on presidential power delineates between a modern era of relative autonomy and an earlier period of congressional dominance. What drove this change? Unlike prior arguments about presidential entrepreneurship and the rise of the United States as a global power, we attribute the emergence of the modern presidency partially to an institutional change—the adoption of direct election of senators that culminated in the 17th Amendment. With direct election, senators were selected by individual voters rather than state legislators. These senators answered to a new principal—the general public—that was (in the aggregate) less informed and less interested in foreign policy. As a result, senators had less incentive to constrain presidential foreign policy preferences. We find evidence for this shift in the relationship between the piecemeal adoption of direct election and senate votes to delegate foreign policy authority to the executive. The implication is that the direct election of senators played an underappreciated role in the emergence of the modern presidency.

People are commonly expected not to waste their vote on parties with small probabilities of being elected. Yet, many end up voting for underdogs. We argue that voters gauge the popular support for their preferred party from their social networks. When social networks function as echo chambers, a feature observed in real-life networks, voters overestimate underdogs’ chances of winning. We conduct voting experiments in which some treatment groups receive signals from a simulated network. We compare the effect of networks with a high degree of homogeneity against random networks. We find that homophilic networks increase the level of support for underdogs, which provides evidence to back up anecdotal claims that echo chambers foster the development of fringe parties.

Previous study demonstrates that partisans perceive in-party news outlets as fair, and out-party news outlets as unfair. However, much of this study relies on one-shot designs. We create an ecologically valid design that randomly assigns participants to news feeds within a week-long online news portal where the balance of in-party and out-party news outlets has been manipulated. We find that sustained exposure to a feed that features out-party news media attenuates Democrats' beliefs that Fox News is unfair, but the same is not true for Republican's perceptions of MSNBC's fairness. Unexpectedly, repeated exposure to in-party news did increase Republicans' beliefs that Fox News is unfair. This study updates our understanding of partisan news effects in a fragmented online news environment.

I present a novel measure of partisan alignment between firms and employees. This measure is constructed using data matching 1,691,790 US federal campaign contribution filings of 85,109 individuals to the donations of 874 Political Action Committees (PACs) of publicly listed US companies between 2003 and 2016. The alignment measure shows that employee and employer contributions are highly correlated. Furthermore, firm- and occupation-level factors are significantly associated with firm–employee alignment. Uniquely, these new data can be easily linked to external data on industries, firms, and occupations and consequently allow for in-depth analysis of precisely how companies can influence employees’ politics.