The world is experiencing the increasingly destabilizing effects of climate change, but we currently know little about its effects on the quality of democracy. We argue that compounding climate shocks create conditions under which democratic resilience diminishes. The accelerated frequency and severity of climate-induced natural disasters and weather shocks, and their devastating economic and social consequences, have increased the likelihood and frequency of civil and political unrest, especially in contexts where climate-induced disasters compound and the government is unable to address citizen grievances. The necessity to respond to more frequent civil unrest and political instability increases the likelihood that governments rely on repressive measures that reduce democratic resilience. To test this argument, we explore whether compounded experiences with climate shocks increase the likelihood of a country experiencing a decline in democratic resilience. We find that the compounded effects of climate change significantly reduce the quality of democracy within the country, and that this is driven by increased instability and repressive measures in response. These findings have important implications for the future of democratic governance in a world increasingly confronted with the negative effects of climate change.
Why do people join domestic violent extremist organizations? This paper examines an understudied reason: organizational outreach. I study how the inflow of new members to the Oath Keepers, America’s largest paramilitary organization, is affected when the group’s leadership employs three tactics: showcasing their ideological zeal through armed standoffs with the government, membership discounts, and sports sponsorships. Using a variant of the synthetic control method, I find that standoffs increase new memberships by 150 percent, discounts increase new memberships by over 60 percent, and sports sponsorships decrease new memberships. Membership is less responsive in counties with higher income inequality, but is more responsive in politically conservative counties. The findings provide new insights into ways extremist groups attract potential recruits.
The rapid spread of information and communication technologies across and within borders has been an important feature of the contemporary era, with the Internet at its core. Until recently, the widespread belief was that the Internet would be beneficial for the spread and resilience of democracy. This common wisdom has become increasingly contested, as political actors in democracies and autocracies alike have learned to use the Internet to maneuver information to enhance government popularity and suppress or delegitimate the opposition. We argue that open information access can be weaponized to reduce democratic resilience when duly elected leaders with anti-pluralist aspirations harness them to increase political polarization. We test the empirical implications of our theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines a large-N quantitative comparative analysis of democratic backsliding in 97 democracies after the Cold War with a typical case study of democratic resilience in India to trace the underlying causal mechanisms of the theory. Together, the findings indicate that with growing access to the Internet has come the increased likelihood of democratic backsliding, especially when anti-pluralist parties use it to increase polarization and executive power.
We examine, in the context of international relations, the hypothesis from social psychology that punishment for defiance is more likely for in-group than out-group members. The United States publicly opposed the founding of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and pressured countries not to join the Chinese-led institution. Nevertheless, 57 countries became founding members of this new development bank, which is viewed as a potential competitor of the U.S.-led World Bank. To test whether the United States punished in-group rather than out-group countries for their defiance, we consider a unique dataset on the voting behavior of the World Bank’s U.S. executive director on new project proposals. We find that the United States is more likely to oppose or abstain from supporting new projects only for AIIB founding members that are closer to the United States, with no punishment for the more distant founders. Considering that almost all proposals are approved regardless of U.S. support, the punishment appears merely gestural, making it even more surprising that the United States imposes it so judiciously. We suspect the action serves as a signal of discontent specifically direct toward in-group countries.
Promissory representation is the idea that a significant part of representation consists of parties making promises to voters during election campaigns and keeping those promises if they hold enough power to do so after elections. In countries that are highly exposed to globalization, governing parties face significant challenges to fulfilling the promises they made to voters. At the same time, voters punish governing parties that fail to keep their campaign promises. This presents parties with the dilemma that while voters expect them to make ambitious promises during election campaigns, their capacity to deliver on those promises is undermined by the constraints of globalization. In response to this dilemma, parties rely on strategic ambiguity to avoid retrospective sanctioning by voters in future elections. Ambiguous campaign statements are reconcilable with a broad range of subsequent government policies and are therefore unlikely to be perceived as broken promises by voters. We analyze the use and effects of strategic ambiguity in a mixed-methods design consisting of a survey experiment and an observational study of 293 election platforms by 44 parties in six countries between 1970-2019. The findings shed new light on the widespread use of ambiguity in contemporary politics with important implications for democratic representation in a globalized world.
Authoritarian states are often vulnerable to naming and shaming for their human rights abuses. This paper shows that China uses its economic clout to influence United Nations (UN) member states overseeing its human rights reviews, shielding itself from severe criticisms within the UN system. I argue that paying for lenient reviews is possible, but its effectiveness depends on the extent to which reviewing states prioritize economic benefits over normative principles. Using text-based coding of over 90,000 UN Universal Periodic Review reports, I demonstrate that countries with strong economic ties to China through Chinese overseas development projects tend to offer more lenient reviews of China’s human rights record. This effect, however, is conditional: it is pronounced in “middle” countries whose stance on human rights norms is neither too aligned with nor too distant from China's. Another “distant” group, which is furthest from China’s human rights vision, is resistant to providing lenient reviews in return for economic favors. Contrary to the conventional belief that human rights monitoring mechanisms are deeply politicized, I find that the peer-review monitoring system does have normative resilience: that commitments to democratic values and human rights matter. There is a nuanced interplay between economic interests and norms in states’ interactions: authoritarian great powers using economic incentives in exchange for favorable human rights reviews do not always succeed in doing so.
China’s leadership, under Xi Jinping, has initiated a significant strategic shift toward a "fortress economy" designed to bolster national self-sufficiency and resilience against external shocks, and ultimately allow the nation to withstand “extreme situations” including protracted armed conflict. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of China’s fortress economy policy, tracing its roots from early warnings about international instability to its formalization in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan and subsequent policy actions. By examining official speeches, policy documents, and strategic initiatives, the paper explains how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is operationalizing this strategy through key domains such as food security, energy independence, and critical supply-chain resilience. The analysis highlights the CCP’s perception of an increasingly hostile international environment, prompting a paradigm shift that prioritizes national security and economic self-reliance. This research contributes to understanding China’s strategic intentions and provides a foundation for further exploration of the implications of China’s fortress economy on global economic and geopolitical dynamics.
Illiberal regimes have become central players in international organizations. In this working paper, we provide a unified framework for understanding their effects. We start by outlining the theoretical foundations of this work, focusing first on why regime type matters for international cooperation. We then show how differing memberships and decision-making processes within international organizations affect the influence illiberal regimes can wield, the activities they undertake, and the impact that they have on domestic political outcomes.
The international election monitoring regime has become considerably more complex in the 21st century. Although the number of organizations engaged in high-quality election monitoring has plateaued, the number of low-quality monitors—commonly known as zombie monitors—hascontinued to grow. Low-quality election monitors threaten democracy because they validate flawed elections and undermine the legitimacy of the international election monitoring regime. This article argues that international politics have played a crucial role in the diffusion of low-quality electionmonitors. It hypothesizes that ties with autocratic powers that promote low-quality observers and membership in authoritarian regional organizations significantly increase the likelihood that a country will host low-quality monitors at its elections. To test the hypotheses, the article draws on original data on international election observation between 2000 and 2020 that identifies the most comprehensive set of groups of election monitors to date. A statistical analysis of the dataset supports the argument.
In this paper, we argue that the consequences of democratic backsliding are not limited to the domestic sphere. Instead, we posit that democratic erosion generates strong incentives for leaders to engage in hostile foreign policy behavior toward other states. We estimate a series of models using event data from 2005–2018 to test our hypothesis. Our results consistently support our argument, even after using estimators that account for potential endogeneity issues. Leaders of backsliding democracies are more likely to behave in an aggressive way toward other countries. Our confidence in these results is strengthened by multiple robustness checks, all of which point to the same conclusion. This paper demonstrates that backsliding states are more likely than full democracies to engage in aggressive actions toward other states, which has important academic and policy implications for understanding the international ramifications of democratic erosion.
