Ruling Class
Elections Without Constraints? The Appeal of Electoral Autocracy Across the World
Anja Neundorf et al.
British Journal of Political Science, December 2025
Abstract:
What democratic institutions and practices do citizens prioritize, and how responsive are their preferences to competing concerns such as economic and physical security? We explore this through a conjoint experiment with over 35,000 respondents across thirty-two countries — spanning democracies and autocracies — who evaluate hypothetical countries varying in democratic features, cultural characteristics, economic prosperity, and physical security. Our findings reveal that citizens consistently prioritize free and fair elections, highlighting their salience as a core democratic value. However, executive constraints appear less central to citizens’ preferences, especially when set against the promise of economic prosperity. These patterns hold across a wide range of national and individual contexts. The results suggest that while elections remain symbolically and substantively important, many citizens are responsive to appeals that frame strong, unconstrained leadership as a pathway to economic prosperity — an emphasis often seen in electoral authoritarian regimes.
Re-examining the effects of Western sanctions on democracy and human rights in the 21st century
Anton Peez
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do economic sanctions negatively affect democracy and human rights in targeted countries? Although often intended to improve these outcomes, their record of doing so has historically been mixed at best. Most canonical studies cover the 1980s-1990s, but sanctions practice has since undergone major innovations following debates on humanitarian harm. Given this move toward ‘targeted’ sanctions, it stands to reason that sanctions may today be achieving their intended purposes. I take up policy and methodological innovations to re-examine the effects of Western sanctions seeking to improve democracy and human rights from 1990 to 2021. I find that negative effects persist, offering an important update to the empirical literature. Beyond this contribution, I present a template for replicating and extending country-year research in international relations (IR).
External threats and democratisation: Burma 1988 and South Korea 1987
Joonbum Bae
Review of International Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does the international security environment influence whether and how military regimes democratise? This paper argues that for militaries in power, sustained external threats facilitate democratisation by credibly assuring the armed forces of continuing influence after leaving office. The credibility of this assurance stems from the military’s monopoly on the provision of national security and the reliance of all parties on the armed forces for the country’s defence. Militaries, confident of their continued influence after returning to the barracks, are more likely to cede power to democratisers when facing prolonged threats from abroad. Utilising a comparative case study of ruling militaries in Burma and South Korea, this paper tests four implications of the theory for how crises over democracy unfold between governing militaries and the opposition in contrasting security environments. It finds support for each of the implications.
Income, Democracy, and Growth: Reconciling Evidence and Theory
Matteo Cervellati, Gerrit Meyerheim & Uwe Sunde
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The relation between income and democracy remains debated, empirically and theoretically. We propose a broader perspective that goes beyond a uni-directional and monocausal interpretation of the income-democracy nexus by focusing on the neglected role of the transition from economic stagnation to sustained growth. We illustrate our argument with an integrated model of long-run growth and democratisation that delivers two general insights. First, rather than higher income levels per se, it is the onset of sustained growth that increases the likelihood of democratisation. Intuitively, the faster accumulation of productive factors, such as human capital, reduces conflicts of interest and hence the elite’s resistance to democracy. Second, the economic consequences of democracy are amplified when democratisation occurs after the transition to growth. We explore the validity of these novel predictions by revisiting influential empirical studies and exploiting variation in the timing of the transition to sustained growth. Our evidence is consistent with the theoretical predictions, shedding new light on the interpretation of earlier mixed findings.
State-Building and Rebellion in the Run-Up to the French Revolution
Michael Albertus & Victor Gay
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Early modern European powers were beset by episodic unrest as they sought to consolidate their authority and build empires. We examine how growing state communication networks and the penetration of society impacted unrest by combining original and detailed parish-level data from pre-Revolutionary France on the expansion of the horse-post relay network with rebellion in this period. Using a staggered difference-in-differences framework, we find that new horse-post relays are associated with more local rebellion. We argue that the main mechanisms are the material consequences of state centralization. New horse-post relays are linked with more rebellion against state agents and associates -- the military, police, tax collectors, and the judiciary -- that conscripted civilians, enforced taxes and laws, and increasingly monopolized roads. Pre-existing state and administrative fragmentation also mediated this relationship. Our findings have implications for the scholarly understanding of the co-evolution of states and order.
Land titling and political alternation: Seeds of Mexico's drug war
Luis Sanchez & Vassilis Sarantides
Economica, January 2026, Pages 86-112
Abstract:
The Mexican drug war has escalated dramatically since 2007, yet its roots lie in municipal turf wars of the 1990s and early 2000s involving the main drug-trafficking organizations operating in the country. We trace these turf wars to two concurrent shocks: the weakening of the PRI's long-standing dominance in local offices, and PROCEDE, the programme that converted PRI-dominated communal ejidos into individually titled parcels. By transforming untitled land into marketable property, PROCEDE made rural parcels far easier to acquire or extort. At the same time, opposition victories at municipal and state levels dismantled PRI-brokered protection networks, leaving incumbent cartels exposed. Together, marketable land and vanishing political cover created fertile ground for rival organizations to invade and clash. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we show that municipalities exposed to both shocks -- the PROCEDE rollout and opposition victories -- experienced a rise in organized-crime deaths during 1995–2006. The surge is strongest when an opposition mayor is elected in the same year that the governorship also turns against the PRI, signalling the collapse of protective networks. Cartel-presence data also reveal that these municipalities attract both first-time entrants and multiple rivals, confirming that violence stems from competition over newly contestable territories.
How Mexican judicial reforms may have fueled crime: Arrest trends and trust erosion
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes & Marilyn Ibarra-Caton
Criminology & Public Policy, forthcoming
Background: Mexico rolled out state-led criminal justice reforms between 2000 and 2017 to modernize procedures and improve rule of law. Whether these changes reduced violent crime -- especially in cartel-affected areas — remains uncertain.
Materials & Methods: We build a municipality–year panel (2000–2017) from death certificates (homicides) and administrative records (arrests). Because states adopted reforms at different times, we use difference-in-differences estimators designed for staggered adoption and heterogeneous treatment effects, with rich fixed effects and controls. To probe mechanisms, we analyze nationally representative survey measures of crime reporting, institutional trust, and perceived police/prosecutorial integrity.
Results: Reform implementation is associated with a ~25% increase in homicide rates. Over the same horizon, arrest rates fall by >50%. As homicides are less prone to underreporting than other crimes, the homicide increase is unlikely to be a reporting artifact. Survey evidence shows reduced crime reporting, declining trust in institutions, and more negative views of police and prosecutors; effects are strongest in cartel-affected regions.
Network Structure and Military Control in North Korea: A Topic Modeling Analysis on North Korean Dictators’ Speech to the Military
Insoo Kim, Kieun Sung & Sunhong Kim
Armed Forces & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates the rationale behind North Korean dictators’ use of seemingly contradictory forms of military control — influence and domination — to solidify regime stability during periods of power transition. In this analysis, North Korean dictators are assumed to navigate their decision-making within the constraints of existing institutional structures. Unlike Kim Jong-Il (KJI), who could capitalize on the established “old boy network” comprised of his predecessor’s military protégés, Kim Jong-un (KJU) was compelled to replace this entrenched nepotism with bureaucratic regulations to consolidate his control over the military. Then, this study hypothesizes that dictators’ use of praise or threats toward the military reflects shifts in the network structure in which they are embedded. By tracing the career trajectories of 184 North Korean generals who held 55 key command and staff positions in the Korean People’s Army (KPA) from 1989 to 2023, this study examined how variations in loyalty norms and resulting network structures shaped the dictators’ speech to the military. Results from a structural topic modeling analysis show that KJI was more likely to speak on complimentary topics, while KJU was more likely to speak on reprimanding topics when addressing the KPA. These findings underscore how shifts in the military leadership network decide the distinct military control strategies employed by dictators.
Bad Democracy Traps
Gabriele Gratton, Barton Lee & Hasin Yousaf
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study how political culture interacts with a democracy’s ability to pursue ambitious policy agendas. We conceptualise a political culture as voters’ possibly misspecified beliefs about the quality of their democracy’s political class and institutions. Within a standard model of political agency, political culture drives both voters’ and politicians’ choices. In a cultural equilibrium, reality constrains culture to be consistent with long-term observations of political and economic outcomes. Negative cultures can trap democracy and positive cultures allow democracy to outperform with respect to its true qualities. We confirm the empirical relevance of our selection mechanism in an online survey experiment.
Political competition and Chinese official data
Chia-Yu Tsai
Public Choice, December 2025, Pages 537-562
Abstract:
This paper examines how political competition is related to the integrity of official economic data in China’s county-level governance, focusing on two types of data distortion: data opacity, which involves withholding information, and data inflation, which involves exaggerating reported figures. The study distinguishes between intra-jurisdiction competition, captured by the number of public positions held by a county leader, and inter-jurisdiction competition, measured by the number of counties within the same prefecture. To address endogeneity, I use a two-stage least squares (2SLS) model with instruments based on historical figures or administrative structure. The results suggest that when a county leader holds one additional public position -- a proxy for lower intra-jurisdiction competition -- the probability of data concealment increases by 20 percentage points. In contrast, adding five peer counties within a prefecture -- reflecting greater inter-jurisdiction competition -- reduces the marginal effect of economic performance on concealment by 4 percentage points. However, greater inter-jurisdiction competition is also associated with inflated GDP figures, overstated by 10.2% to 17.5% relative to satellite-based estimates. These findings suggest a tradeoff: while political competition may reduce opacity, it also creates incentives for strategic exaggeration, highlighting the complex consequences of political incentives for data integrity in authoritarian regimes.