The rise of the knowledge economy draws workers towards concentrated skill clusters and creates political conflicts between urban high-opportunity areas and rural and suburban areas of lower dynamism. We advance the existing literature with a dynamic perspective by studying the political consequences of a structural pull into destinations that are typically more progressive than the places of origin. We create an innovative, multidimensional ‘opportunity map’ at the NUTS-3 level in Germany and merge this novel index with individual-level panel data to assess the political implications of residential relocation. Our findings consistently show that moving to opportunity results in stronger political integration, more left-leaning self-identification, and lower support for far-right parties. This article therefore underscores the role of structural change and internal migration in shaping political polarization: while economically motivated relocations to opportunity-rich destinations create significant progressive potential in knowledge hubs, the ongoing pull into thriving areas exacerbates resentments in low-opportunity places.

Education is thought to be an essential tool for building social cohesion in an ethnically diverse society. This paper evaluates the effect of exposure to a more diverse student body on trust, tolerance, and patriotism in one country where the government has made explicit efforts to use schooling to foster social cohesion: Kenya. In the wake of electoral violence in the 2007 elections, Kenya’s government expanded the number of ‘national schools’, schools with required regional diversity quotas, from 18 to 103. We leverage the policy change to compare 984 secondary students in schools that differ in their use of a diversity quota. We measure friendship with outgroup members, trust, tolerance, and national identity. Our findings indicate that national school students are more likely to have inter-ethnic friendships and are associated with a higher prioritization of civic national identity over subnational identities. We find that diverse friendships act as a mediating factor for increased trust and tolerance.

Debates about the nature of a deepening educational divide in politics tend to focus on education as an individual-level characteristic, whether as a marker of skill endowment, an experience instilling certain values, or the consequence of self-selection based on earlier socialization. We instead look at how education (both level and field) relates to political outcome variables as a feature of social networks. We take cleavage-theoretical perspectives on the educational divide one step further by treating individuals not as atomistic entities but as embedded in social structure. Using original surveys from Germany, the UK, and Switzerland, we show that educational divides are diminished in the presence of countervailing networks. Looking at vote preference and indicators of social closure like group identity, this study suggests that segregated social networks contribute to stabilizing contemporary cleavage structures, even as the mass social and political organizations that shaped twentieth century cleavage politics have declined.

How does the introduction of mayoral re-election shape organized crime’s efforts to collude with local officials? While re-election can provide voters with a critical mechanism to hold elected officials accountable, I show that the positive benefits of re-election do not extend to high-crime areas. Where organized crime is powerful and deeply entrenched in local illicit economies, re-election can provide groups opportunities to collude more closely with mayors, engaging in more electoral violence to deter challengers and benefiting from access to state protection. Exploiting variation in the introduction of mayoral re-election in Mexico using a difference-in-differences design and a novel dataset on violence against local politicians, I show that criminal groups disproportionately killed rival candidates in places where incumbents could run for re-election, maintaining the status quo and keeping incumbents in power. Further, re-electable mayors in high-crime areas were more likely be found to engage in corruption following the introduction of re-election. This letter highlights the unintended consequences of institutional reforms in high-crime areas, emphasizing the need for tailored guardrails by policy makers to reduce these collateral effects.

Globalization’s emphasis on the knowledge economy gradually shifted universities’ objectives away from fostering social cohesion towards developing market skills. What kind of citizenship has emerged from this process? Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, I study the political economy legacy of the largest ever market-oriented transformation in higher education – the Bologna Process – for European millennials. I find evidence for a ‘neoliberal hypothesis’: the reform substantially increased the perceived importance of achieving status and wealth. By contrast, I find no evidence for a ‘humanist hypothesis’: The reform did not change the perceived importance of global equality and environmental issues. Ironically, the Bologna Process heightened the perceived importance of status and wealth without delivering long-run gains in income and employment. My findings dispute that universities indoctrinate students into left-wing politics, and suggest that market-friendly institutional change constructs the ‘student customer’.

Interest in the influence of subjective perceptions of social groups on political behaviour is increasing. While most extant work has focused on voters’ social identities and their related, expressive considerations about the social bases of parties, this article directs attention to two other considerations that may also influence the vote: voters’ evaluations of social groups, as suggested by reference group theory, and their instrumental considerations about the extent to which parties work to advance the interests of specific groups. Using both an observational (N = 2,065) and a preregistered experimental study (N = 7,090) about voter evaluations of social classes and the extent to which parties are seen as fighting for them in Denmark, the study shows how these considerations influence party choice over and above the influence of identity-based considerations. Thereby, the study is the first to show experimental evidence for the effect of group evaluations on vote choice.

We study bias in judicial authorities’ efforts to rehabilitate and reintegrate immigrant offenders into society. Our empirical strategy leverages a distinctive feature of the German criminal code: the optional application of rehabilitative juvenile criminal law or punitive general criminal law for eighteen- to twenty-year-old offenders, based on a subjective assessment of offenders’ psychological ‘maturity’ by judges. Drawing on complete records of 792,000 court hearings between 2009 and 2018, we show that immigrant offenders are about ten percentage points less likely to be sentenced under juvenile law compared to natives convicted for the same crime. The immigrant–native gap in rehabilitative justice correlates with anti-immigrant sentiment across space and has spiked in recent years, suggesting a link between the salience of group-based identities and judicial decision-making. Our findings raise concerns about equal legal treatment and highlight that biases in the application of rehabilitative justice may contribute to higher recidivism rates among immigrant offenders.

Do employment opportunities for women reduce intimate partner violence (IPV)? We address this question using harmonized field experiments in Egypt and Tunisia. In Egypt, we evaluate a public works program that disproportionately benefited women; in Tunisia, the program we evaluate benefited men and women equally. Consistent with a household bargaining model in which men perpetrate IPV to maintain dominance over their spouses, we find that the Egyptian program exacerbated IPV and heightened psychological distress, even among eligible women who were not randomly selected to participate, while the Tunisian program did not. Also consistent with this model, the Egyptian program increased women’s control over spending – a measure of bargaining power – while the Tunisian program did not. We rule out several alternative explanations for these results. Finally, we show that the Egyptian program’s adverse effects on IPV persisted over time, but did not spill over onto women in the community writ large.

‘Democratic innovations’, which enhance citizen participation in decision-making processes, have been proposed to address challenges faced by many democracies. Only recently has research studied these innovations’ legitimacy among the public, which is of importance if innovations are to be viable remedies for democracy’s problems. This paper advances this literature with survey experiments conducted in Ghana. Ghanaians ascribe higher legitimacy to citizen deliberative bodies (mini-publics), open participatory processes, and citizen-elite deliberation processes relative to the status quo. These processes generate more legitimacy among those who do not favor the process outcome. Ghanaians were most favorable towards citizen-elite deliberation, viewing it as more fair, democratic, and likely to ameliorate partisan tensions. I suggest that this is because citizen-elite deliberation is most consistent with Ghanaian understandings of democratic accountability. This highlights the importance of context in shaping democratic reforms’ legitimacy, with implications for theory and reform design.

Drone strikes are a fixture of US counter-terrorism policy, often advertised as ‘surgical’ alternatives to ground operations. Drone strikes’ effects, however, are less precise than proponents suggest. Using data from over 12 billion call detail records from Yemen between 2010 and 2012, we show that the US drone campaign significantly disrupted civilian lives in previously-unmeasured ways. Strikes cause large increases in civilian mobility away from affected areas and create immediate, durable displacement: mobility among nearby individuals increases 24 percent on strike days, and average distance from the strike region increases steadily for over a month afterward, signifying prolonged displacement for thousands of individuals. Strikes are disruptive regardless of whether they kill civilians, though effects are larger after civilian casualties. Our findings suggest that even carefully targeted drone campaigns generate collateral disruption that has not been weighed in public debate or policy decisions about the costs and benefits of drone warfare.

Scholarly interest in whether ordinary people are willing to freely express their views on political matters has been piqued in recent times, owing in part to concerns about the consequences of political polarization. For instance, new evidence suggests a massive increase over the last several decades in self-censorship by both the American and German people. This article expands existing research on reluctance to speak out, with a focus on using US survey data on the stark and changing inter-racial and generational differences in perceived political freedom, and by documenting factors not related to self-censorship (such as individual-level polarization, gender, social class, etc.). I conclude with some speculation about the consequences of the loss of perceived freedom of speech for the quality of democracy.

How do citizens evaluate lesbian and gay (LG) party leaders? While recent scholarship has provided a window into how individuals evaluate openly gay legislative candidates, few studies have examined voter evaluations of LG individuals in executive positions, where voters may have different expectations of political leaders. This study assesses public perceptions of LG party leaders, with a focus on leader deservingness, competency, and electoral viability. Results from a conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom indicate that LG leaders receive lower leadership evaluations than straight leaders on all dimensions. Additionally, we find that gay women and men face similar penalties. This finding holds regardless of the leader’s level of legislative experience. Thus, LG party leaders face a significant disadvantage compared to their straight counterparts when seeking the top position within their party.

Voters and politicians often blame tallying irregularities on fraud, undermining perceptions of democratic and electoral credibility. Yet such irregularities also result from capacity failures and human error. We introduce several methods to assess competing causes of tallying irregularities leveraging the quasi-random administration of polling stations. Using these methods, we revisit the case of the 2019 Malawian presidential election which was famously canceled by the High Court due to widespread result-sheet edits and accusations of fraud. Contrary to the dominant consensus, we do not find evidence that edits were motivated by fraud or that they benefited the incumbent. Instead, we show that edits increased in proportion to the complexity of filling in result-sheets, suggesting a dominant role for human error. In addition to reinterpreting a historically important election, we also make the case that policy efforts to improve electoral credibility could productively be reallocated towards electoral administration rather than anti-fraud measures.

Can a scandal in one political sphere tarnish – or unexpectedly polish – the reputation of leaders in another? This study investigates the impact of political scandals in multilevel political systems and explores three possibilities: contagion, where trust erodes across all political levels; containment, where evaluations are limited to the specific institutions involved; and contrast, where actors at other levels appear more trustworthy in comparison. We present the first experimental test of vertical contagion, containment, and contrast effects following real-world scandals in UK and Scottish politics: Partygate and Campervangate. We find weak evidence of contagion in the Scottish-level ‘Campervangate’ scandal, although trust reductions were small and often not significant. However, the ‘Partygate’ scandal reveals a distinct contrast effect: trust decreased in UK political actors but increased at the Scottish level. These results suggest that scandals in multilevel polities can influence evaluations of ‘innocent’ political actors, with troubling consequences for democratic accountability mechanisms.

How do women’s pre-election experiences influence their behavior in government? We examine women’s participation in rebel groups as a form of masculine socialization and theorize that former rebel women elected in the national legislature will continue to defy gender norms by being more active than their other women colleagues and more frequently discussing topics that are male-dominated and relate to their wartime experience. Using novel datasets of parliamentary speeches and rebel ties of elected MPs in Uganda and Zimbabwe, we find that women ex-rebels make more legislative speeches, including speeches on topics related to wartime experience. We find mixed evidence for speeches on ‘hard’ topics. These findings contribute to theoretical debates on women’s political representation, gender and conflict, and legislative politics.

Research on the dissent–repression nexus assumes that repression of non-violent protesters undermines popular support for the regime. We challenge this assumption, arguing that coercion does not automatically generate legitimacy costs as bystanders’ pre-existing beliefs about targeted socio-political groups condition how repression is evaluated. While we expect bystanders to disapprove of and sanction repression of liked protester groups, we hypothesize that they will approve of and perhaps even credit the regime for repressing groups they do not sympathize with. We probe these hypotheses in a pre-registered survey experiment (with 3,569 Russian respondents), in which we pre-evaluate respondents’ beliefs about different socio-political groups in Russia and vary the participating group and the government’s response in a realistic protest vignette. The results corroborate our hypotheses and even show that the Russian president’s approval ratings are largely unaffected by regime coercion, indicating that autocrats have much more leeway in using repression than usually thought.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, subnational regions have become increasingly polarized with regard to anti-immigration attitudes. However, the reasons behind geographical changes over time are unclear. We argue that regional labor market risks are a key and overlooked factor driving residential choices and subsequent attitudinal change. We rely on georeferenced panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) in combination with rich regional labor market data from the German microcensus. Our findings confirm that prospects of economic risk reduction drive moving decisions and subsequently reduce anti-immigration sentiment, especially among workers with transferable skills. This has decisive macro-level implications: regions receiving a large share of risk-reducing movers over time show lower levels of anti-immigration sentiment. Our contribution implies that economic motivations matter for residential choices beyond cultural sorting, individual attitudes adjust to the conditions of destination, and geographical patterns are mostly driven by booming regions becoming ever more liberal.

As private actors turn to international courts (ICs), we argue that judges can adopt pro-individual rights agendas to promote their own legitimacy. By leveling the odds for disempowered individuals and spotlighting their rights claims, ICs rebut charges that they are playthings of the powerful and cultivate support networks in civil society. We assess our theory by scrutinizing the first IC with private access: the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Established as an economic court and alleged to conceal a pro-business bias, we leverage original data demonstrating that the ECJ publicizes itself as protector of individuals and matches words with deeds. The ECJ ‘levels’, favoring individuals’ rights claims over claims raised by businesses boasting better legal teams. The ECJ then ‘spotlights’ pro-individual rights rulings via press releases that lawyers amplify in law journals. These findings challenge claims that ICs build legitimacy by stealth and the ‘haves’ come out ahead in litigation.

Do governing elites who engage in undemocratic practices face accountability? We investigate whether American state legislators who publicly acted against the 2020 presidential election outcome sustained meaningful sanctions in response. We theorize that repercussions for undemocratic activities are selective – conspicuous, highly visible efforts to undermine democratic institutions face the strongest ramifications from voters, other politicians, and parties. In contrast, less prominent actions elicit weaker responses. Our empirical analyses employ novel data on state legislators’ anti-election actions and a weighting method for covariate balance to estimate the magnitude of punishments for undemocratic behavior. The results indicate heterogeneity, with the strongest consequences targeting legislators who appeared at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, and weaker penalties for lawmakers who engaged in other forms of antagonism towards democracy. We conclude that focusing sanctions on conspicuous acts against democratic institutions could leave less apparent – but still detrimental – efforts to undermine elections unchecked, ultimately weakening democratic health.

In the global waste trade, importers buy containers of waste and scrap to meet demand for raw materials, especially in the Global South. But post-processing leftovers generate localized negative externalities. I use the waste trade as a setting to establish that low-capacity states can and do use tariffs as a tool in their environmental policy repertoire. Product-level tariffs can serve as Pigouvian ’sin’ taxes that incentivize private market actors to limit transactions and/or increase state revenue, both channels that can result in improved environmental outcomes. For evidence, I leverage the ‘China garbage shock’: in 2017 China banned imports of twenty-six waste products (HS six-digit), which disrupted economic–environmental trade-offs in other, newly competitive markets awash in diverted imports. Using novel data on 179 traded waste products and product-level tariffs (1996–2020), I demonstrate that those that received the shock raised tariffs in ways consistent with environmental protection.