The Journal of Politics

Scholars have argued that leaders pay domestic audience costs for backing down from a prior position. We challenge this argument theoretically and methodologically. We argue that scholars have erred by measuring “costs” exclusively through disapproval of a leader’s handling of the situation when general job approval more accurately reflects audience cost theory. This distinction matters because Americans often have strong existing opinions of the president, such that situational disapproval does not damage general approval. We also argue that the use of hypothetical leaders compounds this problem. We test these assertions using two experiments. Our primary design examines approval for both a hypothetical president, as is common in the literature, and the then-sitting president, President Obama. Our secondary design allows us to alter the president’s partisanship. The results strongly support our theory, suggesting scholars have missed an important piece of the puzzle by focusing on situational approval for hypothetical leaders.

Ex post review is a common feature of policy-making institutions. We consider an environment in which an expert agent makes a policy recommendation, which can then be accepted or rejected by an overseer whose policy goals differ from those of the agent. The theory suggests that both behavior and optimal institutional design are sensitive to several factors, including actors’ preference alignment, the importance of the policy decision, and the uncertainty about the correct policy choice. We characterize the types of situations in which ex post review creates incentives for the agent to make pathological policy choices. In these situations, ex post review can reduce accountability of the agent to overseer wishes and ultimately provide incentives to set aside review entirely. The theory also offers testable predictions about policy recommendations and the overseer’s acceptance or rejection of these recommendations.

We argue that leaders employ one of two strategies to govern subnational regions. These governance strategies, in turn, condition how leaders appoint and manage the regional executives to whom they delegate authority. In the co-optation strategy, leaders advance local welfare by appointing locally embedded regional executives, who are drawn from the local population and enjoy relatively long tenures. In the suppression strategy, leaders ensure that regional executives suppress local threats to the regime by minimizing local embeddedness, which entails appointing nonnative executives and shuffling them frequently. The regional governance strategy that a leader employs, we argue, depends on the region’s ex ante level of regime support. We test the theory with original data from the Republic of Congo and Kenya, encompassing 250 regional executives across three presidents. Although incumbent governments in Congo and Kenya confront different local threats, our findings highlight how similarly they manage the trade-offs of local embeddedness.

Growing evidence suggests that pocketbook considerations influence voting behavior in the United States and other developed countries and that incumbents can use targeted government benefits to win voter support. It remains unclear whether the general relationship between government spending and incumbent support also holds for means-tested welfare programs, however. I contribute to this empirical literature by taking advantage of the decade-long rollout of the American Food Stamp Program. The staggered timing of local program implementation allows me to credibly estimate the causal effect of this new benefit on election outcomes. Overall, I find that Democrats—at the center of the program’s enacting coalition—gained votes when the program was implemented locally, apparently through mobilization of new supporters rather than the conversion of political opponents.

Recent literature suggests that integrated communities invest more in public goods by overcoming political polarization that plagues segregated cities. However, investment in public education is not likely to follow the same pattern as other public goods because of the historical legacy with segregation and public education. To test this, I have collected data on the 11,000 plus school districts in the United States from 1995 to 2011. Using multilevel models with a state-school district nested design, I find that White-Black segregation leads to more investment in public education while White-Hispanic segregation, as well as segregation by income, has no effect. To help establish causality, I use the overturning of court desegregation orders as an exogenous shock to school segregation as a natural experiment. This result is robust across a broad array of alternative specifications. The results imply that segregation is still shaping public education.

We investigate how the structure of the international bargaining process affects the resolution of crises. Despite the vast diversity in bargaining protocols, we find that there is a remarkably simple structure to how crises may end. Specifically, for any equilibrium outcome of a complex negotiation process, there is a take-it-or-leave-it offer that has precisely the same risk of war and distribution of benefits. In this sense, every equilibrium outcome of a crisis bargaining game is equivalent to the outcome of an offer in the ultimatum game. Consequently, if a state could select the bargaining protocol, it would choose an ultimatum or another protocol with the same result. According to our model, if states are behaving optimally, then we should observe no relationship between the bargaining protocol and the risk of war or distribution of benefits. An empirical analysis of ultimata in international crises supports this claim.

In studies of voting behavior, racial resentment has consistently been associated with decreased support for black candidates. In this article we bring together a unique collection of observational data and survey experiments to show how, in the certain contexts, exactly the opposite occurs: racially resentful voters prefer to vote for a black candidate over a white competitor. Higher levels of racial resentment do not imply an unyielding opposition to black candidates because such voters respond to partisan and ideological cues about the preferences of black candidates. Because the traditional measure of racial resentment captures more than just racial animus, some black candidates—most notably, Republicans with an individualist message—benefit electorally from higher levels of racial resentment in the electorate. These results highlight the importance of campaign context in shaping how voters respond to racial, partisan, and ideological cues.

Reversing course from a long tradition of studying racial antipathy, I argue that racial sympathy, defined as white distress over black misfortune, shapes public opinion among a nontrivial subset of white Americans. Using an original measure—the racial sympathy index—I find that sympathy motivates support for policies perceived to benefit, as well as opposition to policies perceived to harm, African Americans. Racial sympathy is distinct from a more general sympathy, as it does not shape opinion related to other groups. The concept is foremost a racial attitude; as evidence of this, I find that sympathy is activated when a policy draws attention to its black beneficiaries. In probing this effect, I find that even exposure to negative stereotypes of blacks does not extinguish the influence of sympathy. The consistent results across multiple national studies suggest that racial sympathy represents a distinct dimension of American racial attitudes.

A famous proponent of solitude and self-reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson rejected the conformity of Jacksonian mobs and mass parties for solitary nature walks, and so has long been read as an antipolitical figure. Recent scholars have reinterpreted Emersonian self-reliance to include extralegal boycotts of slave-made goods and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act. This essay takes these accounts a step further, arguing that Emerson saw that some forms of extralegal cooperative action were compatible with self-reliance. Specifically, self-reliance requires contemplating and then acting on personal moral rules. As Northern crowds rallied to rescue and harbor fugitive slaves, Emerson saw that joining an abolitionist crowd allowed unconventional debate and intellectual self-reliance and created a space to act on one’s personal principles, encouraging active self-reliance. Union enlistment similarly let free Blacks and antislavery Northerners enact their principles and achieve a measure of self-reliance. Paradoxically, self-reliance can sometimes be achieved through common action.

How do newly enfranchised groups achieve representation of shared interests? I theorize that while suffrage expansion has the potential to sway electoral tides in favor of the newly enfranchised, such effects are conditional on the strength of a social movement that seeks to represent the group. A social movement defines the group’s shared interests and creates a mobilized pool of voters who can take electoral action to foster common goals. In testing this argument, I use evidence from the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States. I employ a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the heterogeneity in the proportion of women across counties to estimate preferences of women voters and show that these preferences vary with the strength of the suffrage movement. These findings highlight that de jure inclusion of a previously disenfranchised group may not be sufficient to secure de facto representation of the group’s shared interests.

I study a bargaining model of war in which states contest two issues and the state receiving offers has private information about her value for each issue. When the offerer starts sufficiently uncertain about the receiver’s favorite issue, he makes a balanced offer (evenly distributed across both issues) that is less efficient than an offer concentrated on the receiver’s most valuable issue would have been but avoids guessing the receiver’s favorite issue. I then allow players to resolve this uncertainty through costless diplomacy. The receiver uses diplomacy to truthfully reveal her favorite issue leading to a Pareto-improving offer concentrated on that issue. However, diplomacy has a dark side: when it causes the offer to switch from a balanced offer to a concentrated offer, it induces an equilibrium that (weakly) carries a larger risk of war because concentrated offers confront risk over the receiver’s relative value between issues. The results track Sino-American and Sino-Soviet precrisis diplomacy.

When do politicians in developing democracies prioritize meritocratic recruitment over patronage hiring for public sector jobs? I distinguish between low- and high-skilled positions and argue that the former are valuable for sustaining party machines, while manipulating the latter can undermine state performance. Accordingly, politicians will interfere to ensure their copartisans are hired to low-skilled jobs but select bureaucrats for high-skilled positions based on meritocratic criteria. I test my argument using novel bureaucrat-level data from Ghana (n=17,942) and leverage a change in the governing party to investigate hiring patterns. The results suggest that partisan bias is confined to low-ranked jobs. The findings shed light on the mixed effects of electoral competition on patronage identified in prior studies: competition may dissuade politicians from interfering in recruitment to high-ranked positions but encourage them to hire partisans for low-ranked positions.

What leads elites to break their democratic commitments? How do the partisan loyalties and democratic values of citizens influence these choices? This article formally analyzes incumbent abuse in democracies, the most common modern initiator of democratic breakdown. If an incumbent attempts to consolidate power, the opposition can try to rally protest but can also cry wolf without incumbent abuse. In a democratic equilibrium, incumbents avoid abuse, the opposition calls for protest if and only if abuse occurs, and citizens protest in sufficient numbers to deter elites. Results show that non-winner-take-all institutions, high media accuracy, low partisanship, and citizen support for democracy typically promote democratic survival. However, under some conditions, higher democracy support can threaten democracy. Model extensions allow incumbents to pursue democratic erosion instead of full breakdown, promote “fake news,” and strategically inflame partisanship. The article explores several implications for democratic survival and incumbent strategies for subverting it.

While congressional committee members sometimes hold hearings to collect and transmit specialized information to the floor, they also use hearings as venues to send political messages by framing an issue or a party to the public which I refer to as “grandstanding.” However, we lack clear understanding of when they strategically engage in grandstanding. I argue that when committee members have limited legislative power they resort to making grandstanding speeches in hearings to please their target audience. Using 12,820 House committee hearing transcripts from the 105th to 114th Congresses and employing a crowd-sourced supervised learning method, I measure a “grandstanding score” for each statement that committee members make. Findings suggest that grandstanding efforts are made more commonly among minority members under a unified government, by nonchair members of powerful committees, and in committees with jurisdiction over policies where the president wields primary power, such as foreign affairs and national security.

When citizens ask questions, how does their government answer? Requests for government information confront officials with incentives both for and against disclosure. We argue that officials seek to manage political risks in ways that favor requests from government-aligned regions. We study responsiveness in the context of Mexico’s access-to-information law, using publicly available data from several hundred thousand information requests filed with Mexican federal government agencies between 2003 and 2015. Our empirical strategy makes comparisons only among requests sent to similar agencies on similar topics at similar times, while accounting for the complexity, sophistication, and sensitivity of individual requests. We find that requests filed from locales with higher governing-party vote shares receive more favorable responses, across multiple indicators of the nature and timing of responses. Further, we find bias only for requests on publicly relevant topics, providing evidence in favor of a mechanism of mitigating political risks over one of rewarding supporters with greater access to benefits.

The commercial peace theory maintains that trade fosters peace because trade makes conflict more costly. However, focusing on dyadic trade or overall trade integration, previous studies provide an inaccurate picture of the material incentives that states face in the event of military conflict. Some, but not all, third parties create economic costs for combatants. In this article, I develop the idea of Extended Dependence. I argue that trade with a potential target’s allies promotes peace because those states may reduce trade with the challenger following military intervention, punish it by imposing economic sanctions, or undermine its ability to access alternative markets. Empirical analyses that cover 1951–2010 strongly support my arguments. Trade dependence on the prospective target or on the target’s nonaggression-pact partners, however, does not yield a similar effect. This article advances our understanding of how economic linkages and security institutions can work together to diminish interstate conflict.

Candidates often tout their private sector experience when running for public office. But do businessperson politicians actually govern differently? This paper argues that given their preferences and managerial expertise, businesspeople in office adopt policies favorable to the business community and improve government efficiency. To test these claims, I collect data on over 33,000 Russian mayors and legislators and investigate policy outcomes using detailed municipal budgets and over a million procurement contracts. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that businessperson politicians increase expenditures on roads and transport, while leaving health and education spending untouched. Prioritizing economic over social infrastructure brings immediate benefits to firms, while holding back long-term accumulation of human capital. Businesspeople also do not reduce budget deficits, but rather adopt less competitive methods for selecting contractors, particularly in corruption-ripe construction. In all, businessperson politicians do more to make government run for business, rather than like a business.

During election campaigns, parties attack each other’s nonideological traits such as competence and integrity. However, it is unclear to what extent valence attacks reduce voter support for the target party. Drawing from theories on left-right personality and associated cognitive flexibility, we argue that valence attacks harm the electoral performance of leftist but not rightist parties. The relative openness of leftist voters makes them more willing to accept negative information about their party and act on it. In contrast, the relative closedness of rightist voters makes them less likely to reconsider their political preferences in the face of negative information. We find robust evidence for our argument at the aggregate and individual levels, using original data on media coverage of party campaigns in 10 European countries. We also provide experimental evidence in support of our argument. The findings have important implications for research on nonideological rhetoric in party competition.

Political science has long debated the significance of protest during a democratic transition, but attention has been largely confined to its impact on elite support for democracy. Contributing to scholarship on the attitudinal consequences of mobilization, we examine how protest shaped popular perceptions of democracy during the post-Mubarak transition in Egypt. We do this by matching wave 2 of the Arab Barometer survey with georeferenced protest events reported in Arabic-language newspapers. Our results show that Egyptians came to hold less favorable attitudes to democracy following sustained protest in their district. We find that this relationship was principally driven by longer-lasting, static street protests that targeted public space. Qualitative case details illustrate how such tactics could disrupt everyday life and affect livelihoods. These findings highlight one way in which popular support for democracy can be eroded during a transition.

While there is disagreement as to the severity of the digital disinformation problem, scholars and practitioners have largely coalesced around the idea that a new system of safeguards is needed to prevent its spread. By minimizing the role of citizens in managing their own communities, however, I argue that these gatekeeping approaches are undemocratic. To develop a more democratic alternative, I draw from the work of Harold D. Lasswell and John Dewey to argue that we should study the organization of digital publics. For citizens to engage in democratic inquiry, publics must be organized so that they can (1) easily identify their common interests and (2) regularly encounter variety. I then analyze Facebook, showing how the News Feed and Facebook Groups together create a platform on which propagandists can effectively target and manipulate specific publics. I conclude by turning to Reddit to suggest alternative forms of organizing digital publics more democratically.

How does immigration influence local redistributive spending? This is a salient question in Europe, where local governments exercise discretion over social policy. Although prevailing accounts predict that anti-immigrant sentiment will fuel cuts in social spending, this perspective overlooks institutional variation in foreign voting rights. Building on the literature on democracy and redistribution, this article argues that an immigration-induced “race to the bottom” in local social expenditure will be conditional on the political status granted to foreign residents. Where foreign residents possess voting rights, incumbents gain incentives to leverage redistributive transfers to mobilize immigrant votes, offsetting downward pressure on social spending. To test the argument, the analysis draws on municipal-level panel data from nine European countries and implements a difference-in-differences design within two recent cases of franchise extension. The results indicate that the extension of local voting rights is sufficient to reverse downward bias in social spending within diversifying localities.

For elections to produce accountable government, citizens must reward politicians who deliver benefits. Yet there is relatively limited causal evidence of changes in public opinion in direct response to specific government programs. This question is examined in Tanzania, which has implemented large health programs targeting diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. Tanzania’s 2010–11 antimalaria campaign took place concurrently with a national household survey. Exploiting discontinuities based on interview dates to estimate the effect of these programs on the popularity of local politicians, this article shows that a bed net distribution campaign resulted in large, statistically significant improvements in approval of political leaders, especially in malaria endemic areas. Effects were largest shortly after program implementation but persisted for up to six months. These findings suggest that citizens update their evaluation of politicians in response to programs, especially those that address important problems, and that the effects decay over time, but not completely.

Common political economy models point to rationalist motives for engaging in conflict but say little about how income shocks translate into collective violence in some cases but not in others. Grievance models, in contrast, focus on structural origins of shared frustration but offer less insight into when the deprived decide to challenge the status quo. Addressing these lacunae, we develop a theoretical model of civil conflict that predicts income loss to trigger violent mobilization primarily when the shock can be linked to preexisting collective grievances. The conditional argument is supported by results of a comprehensive global statistical analysis of conflict involvement among ethnic groups. Consistent with theory, we find that this relationship is most powerful among recently downgraded groups, especially in the context of agricultural dependence and low local level of development, whereas political downgrading in the absence of adverse economic changes exerts less influence on ethnic conflict risk.

As economic inequality increases, so does the importance of understanding affluent perspectives on the problem. We examine whether affluent Americans are more likely than others to hold individuals responsible for relative success in life and whether such beliefs are associated with their economic policy attitudes. We conducted a novel survey that oversampled the top 5% of the US income and wealth distributions. We elicited views about dispositional (intelligence, hard work) and situational (family, luck) causes of success as well as explanations for why success-linked traits vary (people’s choices, environments, genes). Affluent Americans were more likely than others to emphasize dispositional reasons for getting ahead, and the top 1% were unique in emphasizing both choices and genes as causes of those traits. This individualization of economic outcomes was more strongly associated with economic conservatism among the affluent than others, suggesting it may play a role in justifying their greater conservatism.

Informal institutions govern property rights and disputes when formal systems are weak. Effective informal institutions should help people reach and maintain bargains, minimizing violence. Can outside organizations engineer persistent institutional change? Will this strengthen property rights and investment? We experimentally evaluate a United Nations and civil society mass education campaign to promote alternative dispute resolution practices and norms in rural Liberia, where violent land disputes are common. Prior work showed a drop in violence and unresolved disputes within one year. We return after three years to test for sustained impacts and mechanisms. Treated communities report large, persistent drops in violent disputes and a slight shift toward nonviolent norms. Treated residents also report larger farms, although overall effects on property rights and investment are mixed. Politically connected residents report more secure property rights, while those with fewer connections feel less secure. Sustained institutional engineering is feasible, but politics shapes distributional outcomes.

While elite polarization in US politics has been well established, there has been substantial debate about whether US mass opinion has polarized in recent decades. Amnon Cavari and Guy Freedman suggest the apparent polarization of the US public may in part be an artifact of declining survey response rates. Cavari and Freedman argue that declining response rates may have led to only the most politicized—and therefore polarized—respondents being willing to give their opinions. We argue that, while the mechanism posited is plausible, other theoretical models of nonresponse predict no change in nonresponse bias or even declining nonresponse bias, depending on the cause of increased nonresponse. We show that the results of Cavari and Freedman’s analysis are spuriously driven by each variable’s correlation with time. After accounting for the time correlation, there is no evidence that nonresponse bias has inflated estimates of mass polarization.

A number of explanations have been advanced for why soldiers commit acts of sexual violence in wartime, yet we have little understanding of why some rebels refrain from sexual violence. We examine the systematic absence of sexual violence by certain rebel groups, using original data on rebel leader selection practices coupled with data on sexual violence from the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict project. We find strong quantitative support for our claim that leader selection processes hold significant consequences for engagement in sexual violence: rebels who choose leaders via an electoral process are less likely to engage in sexual violence in wartime. Moreover, we find that the degree of electoral inclusiveness significantly affects whether rebels commit sexual violence. Rebel groups that hold elections with civilian participation are significantly less likely to use sexual violence than groups whose leader elections occur only among group members or top-level rebel officials.

Scholars have long acknowledged that legislators strategically employ procedure to advance policy preferences. But evidence for this view is confined to the lawmaking process, omitting an essential function of elected representatives: oversight of executive policy making. We argue that ex post procedural oversight is also driven by policy disagreement. We demonstrate this by analyzing congressional participation in US Environmental Protection Agency rulemaking from 2007 to 2017. Using the content of public comments and commenters’ political contributions, our study is the first to locate the spatial position of rulemaking proposals. We find that the more ideologically distant the agency proposal, the more likely a request for documents, additional hearings, or more time for public participation. Moreover, these requests are likely to parallel substantive criticisms and be concentrated among members with experienced staff. These findings imply that—beyond setting the baseline rules of bureaucratic policy making—well-resourced elected officials leverage procedure during policy implementation.

To what extent do the material stakes of specific policies motivate political participation by affected interests? We address this question by examining physician participation in the annual process governing revisions to Medicare fee schedules. This setting permits us to identify the relevant universe of affected actors and to construct a novel measure of the annual financial consequences of proposed policy changes that varies idiosyncratically at the individual level. Employing text analysis to identify who participates in the notice-and-comment process between proposed and final rules, we find that while few providers comment, the odds of participation vary dramatically as a function of a rule’s impact, with anticipated losses motivating comments substantially more than gains. This relationship persists in both individually tailored and mass comments and is largely independent of the behavior of physician specialty societies. Evidence of the effect of these stakes on campaign contribution behavior is more modest.

How do trade wars affect voting for the president’s party? President Trump’s aggressive tariffs on China, despite his largely rural electoral support base, provide a unique opportunity to analyze the relationship between international trade policy and domestic support. If trade-related considerations were ever decisive to American voters, the stark decrease in soy prices, a direct effect of Trump-initiated tariffs immediately preceding the 2018 midterm election, serves as a critical test for studying their effect. This article shows a robust inverse relationship between county-level soybean production and the change in Republican vote share between the 2016 and 2018 congressional elections.