Two-way fixed effects (TWFE) models are widely used in political science to establish causality, but recent methodological discussions highlight their limitations under heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) and violations of the parallel trends (PT) assumption. This growing literature has introduced numerous new estimators and procedures, causing confusion among researchers about the reliability of existing results and best practices. To address these concerns, we replicated and reanalyzed 49 studies from leading journals that employ TWFE models for causal inference using observational panel data with binary treatments. Using six HTE-robust estimators, diagnostic tests, and sensitivity analyses, we find: (i) HTE-robust estimators yield qualitatively similar but highly variable results; (ii) while a few studies show clear signs of PT violations, many lack evidence to support this assumption; and (iii) many studies are underpowered when accounting for HTE and potential PT violations. We emphasize the importance of strong research designs and rigorous validation of key identifying assumptions.

Authoritarian survival theories maintain that dictators distribute rents to elites who can control the masses. Yet, it is unclear how dictators choose beneficiary elites. We argue that elites centrally placed in their locality’s family network enjoy greater influence on other community members and, thus, are more likely to be co-opted through distribution. We test this argument by compiling a novel dataset of Paraguayan family networks that we link to families who illegally benefited from public land grants from 1954 to 2007. Using a difference-in-differences in reverse design, we find that local families with higher network centrality were more likely to receive these grants during the 1954–88 dictatorship. We also show more affiliations with the ruling Colorado Party and incidents of repression—indicators of social control—in localities with more central families before 1989. Our work shows that family ties can serve to build authoritarian ruling coalitions.

State legislatures are critical policymaking bodies, yet recent studies suggest that elections rarely hold state legislators accountable for their representation and voters generally know little about legislative politics. Would state legislatures function differently if voters had access to more information about legislative politics? Leveraging the haphazard overlap of newspaper markets and legislative districts, I construct and validate a measure of legislative press coverage in all 49 partisan state legislatures for the years 2000–2022 that is plausibly uncorrelated with other district-level variables. Drawing on this large-scale dataset, this article traces the impact of press coverage on state legislative voters, elections, and, ultimately, representation. I find that robust local press coverage substantially augments down-ballot voter engagement, the electoral return to ideological moderation, and the incumbency advantage. Once in office, I further document that state legislators who receive stronger press coverage work more for their constituencies and diverge less from their district’s median voter. Overall, these results suggest that state legislators would be more moderate, representative, and productive were local press coverage strengthened.

Contrary to the conventional view that minority regimes are vulnerable to breakdown, many of these regimes exhibit remarkable durability. From 1900 to 2015, minority autocracies that exclude a single majority ethnic group (e.g., regimes in Bahrain, Syria, and Apartheid South Africa) remained in power twice as long as other autocracies. This article argues that this durability is rooted in their unique ethno-political configuration, which enables them to foster a largely unconditional loyalty due to the ruling minority’s fear of being subjected to majoritarian rule. Such loyalty endows them with an exceptional capacity to withstand major challenges by fostering in-group demobilization and policing, pro-regime countermobilization, and coethnic elite loyalty. This article employs a multi-method approach, using a novel dataset of minority regimes and a case study of Bahrain based on original interviews. The findings highlight the conditions under which ethnic group loyalty can play a central role in autocratic survival.

Seminal theories in political science argue that military service is a critical driver of minority integration. However, a major obstacle bedeviling the study of military service is self-selection: individuals who are better integrated may be more likely to join the military in the first place. We address the selection problem by examining the effects of military conscription during the Vietnam War using an instrumental variables approach. Conscription during 1970–72 was decided on the basis of national draft lotteries that assigned draft numbers based on an individual’s date of birth. Using the draft lottery instrument, we find no evidence of a causal effect of military service on a range of integration outcomes from the 2000 decennial census. At least for the Vietnam era, the link between service and long-term integration is largely driven by self-selection, which points to important scope conditions for the integrationist view.

Affective polarization has emerged as an important construct in the literature on partisanship. However, most efforts to measure it have relied on simple preexisting indices, potentially missing the complexity of affective polarization. In this article, we address these concerns by reconceptualizing and deriving a new measure of affective polarization. Drawing on the notion of political sectarianism and other lines of research in political behavior and social psychology, we develop and validate a novel multidimensional measure of affective polarization consisting of three parts: othering, aversion, and moralization. Our analyses yield a valid and reliable nine-item measure with three subdimensions. These subdimensions and the full scale broadly correlate with various measures of political identity, anti-democratic elite action, and political violence. Importantly, we find that the subdimensions have different patterns of correlation with key criterion variables, suggesting that othering, aversion, and moralization are distinct components of affective polarization.

Powered by Marxist ideology, Revolutionary Socialist (RS) armed groups launched formidable challenges against incumbent regimes during the historical era of the Cold War. As both transformational and transnational actors, they were optimally positioned to execute a revolutionary war doctrine that called for a highly integrated political and military organization that could weave a dense web of interactions with civilian populations. Civil wars featuring RS rebels tended to be robust insurgencies, that is, irregular wars that lasted longer and produced more battlefield fatalities compared to other civil wars. However, this superior capacity failed to translate into a higher rate of victories—hence, a “Marxist Paradox.” By posing a credible threat, RS rebellions engendered equally powerful regime counter-mobilizations. We show how ideology shaped armed conflict in a particular world-historical time and point to implications for the current state of civil conflict.

Gender quotas are used to elect most of the world’s legislatures. Still, critics contend that quotas are undemocratic, eroding institutional legitimacy. We examine whether quotas diminish citizens’ faith in political decisions and decision-making processes. Using survey experiments in 12 democracies with over 17,000 respondents, we compare the legitimacy-conferring effects of both quota-elected and non-quota elected local legislative councils relative to all-male councils. Citizens strongly prefer gender balance, even when it is achieved through quotas. Though we observe a quota penalty, wherein citizens prefer gender balance attained without a quota relative to quota-elected institutions, this penalty is often small and insignificant, especially in countries with higher-threshold quotas. Quota debates are thus better framed around the most relevant counterfactual: the comparison is not between women’s descriptive representation with and without quotas, but between men’s political dominance and women’s inclusion.

Regardless of method, political scientists often seek to develop arguments that can be generalized to a population of cases. But is this the only way to think about how cases speak to one another? We advocate for a new way to think about how qualitative research produces broadly applicable insights: translation. Much like linguistic translation, the goal of translation in political science is to develop ideas that are intelligible in a different context, even as the context will change how an idea or political practice is interpreted or enacted. Translation offers at least three benefits. It allows us to (1) rethink how we form and deploy concepts; (2) rethink what a generalizable argument is by carrying parts of an argument, instead of entire causal chains to other cases; and (3) rethink how we conceptualize knowledge accumulation to include an abductive process where generating theory is the primary goal.

Comparative scholarship suggests authoritarian candidates often rely on backing from the wealthy. The wealthy are also said to play an important role in American campaign finance. Studies of Donald Trump, however, found that he drew significant support from white Americans with less education and privilege. We evaluate wealthy and non-wealthy Americans’ financial support for Trump, compared to other candidates, by constructing a comprehensive dataset of property values matched to contributions and voter files. We find Trump underperformed among wealthy Republican donors while mobilizing new non-wealthy donors. Trump also diversified the donorate, especially by education. That is, Trump built an unusual coalition of wealthy and non-wealthy donors. Our results support an alternative, “plutopopulist” model of Trump’s financial base. This study demonstrates the importance of studying both non-wealthy and wealthy Americans, the group who give the most but whose individual behavior has been studied the least.

A decisive voter’s exact ideological preferences can be hard to predict, even for seasoned candidates. We develop a novel theory of electoral competition where candidates are evaluated on ideological and nonideological dimensions. The key feature of our theory is that an electorate’s partisan leaning serves as a signal of the median voter’s ideological position where extreme leanings are more informative about voters than centrist leanings. We show that this leads to an endogenous sorting of districts between “extreme” and “centrist” and that an increase in the importance of candidate competence for voters increases polarization—but only in extreme districts. We evaluate our theory using data from mayoral elections in Brazil’s 95 largest municipalities and exploit COVID-19 as a shock to the salience of candidate competence. We show that COVID-19 increases the salience of competence in these elections, leading to increased political polarization, which is concentrated in cities with extreme partisan leanings.

One of the persistent obstacles to trade liberalization is a government’s inability to commit and deliver compensation to trade losers. We argue that constitutional structures interact with the geographic profiles of industries to shape a government’s ability to commit to a compensation contract, defined as an interbranch contract whereby an executive branch promises compensation in exchange for legislative support for ratification. Our theory predicts that parliamentary systems are more likely to liberalize and compensate geographically concentrated industries because party leaders enforce a contract with a smaller number of legislators. Presidential systems are more likely to liberalize and compensate geographically diffused industries because legislature enforces a contract with a larger number of legislators. Using novel product-level data on agricultural trade liberalization and remote-sensed cropland in 38 democracies, we find evidence consistent with our argument. Qualitative studies of the sugar industry and interviews with policymakers provide further evidence.

This paper uses the gradual expansion of the European railway network to investigate how this key technological driver of modernization affected ethnic separatism between 1816 and 1945. Combining new historical data on ethnic settlement areas, conflict, and railway construction, we test how railroads affected separatist conflict and successful secession as well as independence claims among peripheral ethnic groups. Difference-in-differences, event study, and instrumental variable models show that, on average, railway-based modernization increased separatist mobilization and secession. These effects concentrate in countries with small core groups, weak state capacity, and low levels of economic development as well as in large ethnic minority regions. Exploring causal mechanisms, we show how railway networks can facilitate mobilization by increasing the internal connectivity of ethnic regions and hamper it by boosting state reach. Overall, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the effects of European modernization on nation building.

While Supreme Court nominations have become increasingly high-salience political events, we know little about their prioritization relative to other issues by core constituency groups. We examine how individual donors and the mass public prioritize nominations, as well as factors they believe presidents should consider when selecting judges. To do so, we constructed original questions for a survey of over 7,000 validated donors and a comparison general population sample. We find donors are substantially more likely to prioritize nominations than their general public co-partisans, particularly Republican donors. Further analysis suggests the prioritization gap is consistent with theories that donors are motivated to move policy toward the ideological extremes. Analyzing policy positions, the largest donor-public difference occurs for diversity in appointments, but for all positions we find smaller differences than for prioritization. Overall, the findings highlight donors’ policy priorities may diverge from those of the public even more than policy positions do.

How can governments in racially divided societies protect vulnerable populations from political violence after large-scale internal conflict? When the dominant majority is bent on perpetuating its power and privileges in the racial hierarchy, benevolence by government interveners is unlikely to curb oppressive violence against subordinate groups. There is thus no alternative to using military coercion to crush insurgents and their civilian supporters. However, failing to maintain this coercive apparatus can exacerbate violence over the long term by triggering racialized revenge dynamics, particularly in communities that were occupied by troops of the subordinate minority. To substantiate these claims, we show that different parts of the postbellum American South experienced uneven spikes in white supremacist violence following the end of federal military occupation in the 1870s: counties that had previously been occupied by Black troops witnessed higher incidences of anti-Black violence than other areas. This effect persisted for many decades, contributing to the dismal climate of violence that prevailed during the nadir of American race relations.

Democratic theorists hold that voting contributes to some political good: individual and collective autonomy, equality, justice, pluralism, stability, better policies, and many others. But elections are common under authoritarianism, and empirical research finds that holding elections can stabilize authoritarian regimes. This creates what we term the democrat’s dilemma, where citizens who vote in authoritarian elections may bolster the regimes they wish to unseat, even when they cast a vote for the opposition. We identify three major ways of thinking about the democratic value of electoral participation—justice-based, epistemic, and proceduralist approaches—and use them to examine the complex moral considerations that confront voters in authoritarian regimes. We contend that authoritarian elections’ residual democratic value can justify voting, even when doing so could further entrench the autocrat. Our argument also implies that the democratic principles that justify voting in authoritarian elections oblige citizens to choose the most democratic alternative.

In contrast to the expansive work on how community policing affects citizens’ attitudes toward police, existing research says little about how community policing affects officers’ attitudes toward citizens. We examine officer-facing outcomes using an experiment in the Philippines, in which a random subset of a province’s 705 officers were assigned to intensive community policing activities for seven months. Treatment officers saw improved understanding of citizen concerns, but did not develop greater empathy or trust toward civilians, nor an increased sense of accountability for citizen-facing misconduct. We build from the experiment to develop an inductive theory of bureaucrat-citizen contact, relying on qualitative observations and exploratory analyses of heterogeneous effects. We propose that contact with citizens is only likely to improve attitudes among frontline bureaucrats who are not ex-ante embedded in their communities. Moreover, contact may have negative effects when it reveals threats to bureaucrats’ personal safety.

While an abundance of scholarly work investigates how economic shocks influence the political behavior of affected individuals, we know much less about their collective effects. Exploiting the sudden onset of a plant disease epidemic in Puglia, Italy—where the plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa devastated centuries-old olive groves—we explore the collective effects of economic shocks. By combining quantitative difference-in-differences analysis of municipal data with a novel case selection strategy for qualitative fieldwork, we document the hardship caused by the outbreak, and estimate a 2.2-percentage-point increase in far-right vote share. We show that preexisting public service deprivation moderates the shock’s political consequences through a community narrative of state neglect. These findings highlight that preexisting community conditions shape the political consequences of economic shocks, and that plant disease epidemics—which are becoming more prevalent due to climate change—have important political effects.

Do insurgents help or hinder survival of the targets of genocide? A common view in political science holds that insurgents’ presence attracts state violence against civilians. In contrast to this, I use multiple archival collections on WWI and WWII military personnel, Holocaust victims’ records, and testimonies of survivors and rescuers to show that insurgent presence in fact decreased local numbers of Holocaust victims. To ensure that the relationship is causal, I use an instrumental variable exploiting the exogenous number of WWI military deaths, which increased insurgent enlistment in WWII. Case studies of mechanisms reveal that individual insurgents helped the Jews mainly out of “moral” motivations, by using tactics they had developed to fight the incumbent. By zooming out of times of increased counterinsurgency and studying the specific needs of genocide targets, this article nuances existing literature and points to an overlooked source of variation in genocide survival.