This dissertation investigates policies implemented by governments in emigration states to incorporate their diasporas into the homeland political community. While some governments enact expansive policies that enable their diasporas to easily acquire citizenship, vote overseas, and access the policymaking process, others try to insulate homeland politics from diaspora influence. I refer to these three interlocking policies as diaspora political incorporation policies because they define the diaspora's relationship to the homeland political community. To explain variation in diaspora political incorporation policies, I pair data on global trends in citizenship, external voting rights, and diaspora representation with analysis of policy variation in Armenia, Croatia, and Serbia. These three countries have among the world's largest emigrant populations relative to domestic population. Moreover, they grappled with devastating wars and steep economic decline in the 1990s. Nevertheless, diaspora political incorporation policies sharply varied across these three cases as well as within each case over time.

While most scholars emphasize the homeland government's need for economic aid or foreign policy support from the diaspora, I argue that diaspora political incorporation policies are firmly anchored in electoral competition. Homeland politicians support expansive diaspora incorporation policies when said policies increase their parties' electoral resources, and reject them when their opponents benefit. The challenge for policymakers, who have limited knowledge of the diaspora's political contours, is to gauge the political impact of an expanded electorate and citizenry prior to enacting reforms. Lacking reliable data on diaspora political orientations, Armenian, Croatian, and Serbian politicians' perceptions of the diaspora as a political force were instead shaped by the manner of diaspora involvement in homeland affairs during communism's collapse. Two factors were particularly important: 1) whether the diaspora supported the anticommunist opposition in the homeland or competed independently, and 2) whether the diaspora's support was concentrated in one homeland party or was diffuse.

This dissertation develops three novel approaches to conceptualize and quantify aspects of

political extremism. My main chapters, which are three standalone papers, specifically examine voters' movement toward more extreme parties and issue positions. A majority of the dissertation focuses on measuring far right extremism due to its prevalence in contemporary democracies. However, Chapter 4 also measures far left radicalization.

More broadly, the dissertation is motivated by the discrepancy between publicly expressed

and privately held extreme political views. This gap is overlooked in the study of democracies, although it has important implications for measuring and understanding the diffusion of extreme beliefs in democratic electorates.

The first chapter (Chapter 2) addresses this gap between public and private preferences

directly, through the original concept of contingent extremism. I posit that there are two

broad categories of far right extremists. The first, who I call staunch loyalists, will cast

far right votes whenever they are given the opportunity to so. The second, who I call

contingent extremists, will only cast a vote when they believe enough other citizens are

already doing so. Their support is contingent on perceived party popularity. To empirically

test this concept, I eld survey experiments in Germany (n=1,991), France (n=1,770) and

Hungary (n=1,015), and measure respondents' willingness to identify as far right supporters

when randomly assigned to more or less `favorable' polling information about the party.

Contingent extremism is captured through the difference in rates of far right identification

in these treatments. To examine geographic variation in contingent extremism, I then match

respondents to their electoral districts, and find that contingent extremists live in districts

where the far right has weak electoral support. I use this to derive a local party performance

threshold|roughly one-fifth of vote share|at which they begin to support the party openly.

Next, I turn to measuring the gap between the publicly and privately stated positions of far

right parties. I posit that far right parties are incentivized to present a more mainstream

ideological profile in public communications than they do in private ones. Until recently,

information about their private campaign appeals was difficult to obtain, so scholars could

not address this gap. In the last year, social media data transparency initiatives have made

it possible to explore the microtargeted appeals parties use to mobilize voters online. The

second chapter (Chapter 3) details why this new data source is so critical to advancing comparativists' knowledge of far right political strategy. I demonstrate a range of computational tools that can be used to parse the content of ads data, including an unsupervised scaling model of document positions, structural topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. Using these methods, I evaluate the content of more than 68,000 political campaign ads across 11 European countries and 79 political parties, and provide novel insight into the private political campaigns of the far right.

Next, I turn to a chapter on measuring polarization, since polarization plays an important

role in the radicalization of democratic electorates. This third chapter (Chapter 4) details

a supervised machine learning approach to detect polarization in social media discourse following high salience news events. I operationalize polarization as an increase in the share

of extreme political discourse within a partisan network. My approach is a significant deviation from the current literature, which relies on social network analysis to model network structures and draw inferences about polarization. I argue that a machine learning approach is a necessary supplement, because it evaluates what people actually say about politics. I find that everyday discourse on social media is moderately diverse, but following major news events, political discourse becomes more extreme and partisan. The chapter demonstrates the potential of a supervised learning approach to better understand who is susceptible to polarization and when. Moreover, it offers a path forward for comparative studies of polarization.

Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the implications of my findings for extremist politics in democracies and offers future avenues for research. I conclude that far right political views are more common in the electorate than most experts would suggest, in part due to the gap

between the public and private expression of extreme viewpoints.

How do weak states build state capacity in the face of resistance from powerful local elites? This dissertation explores the historical struggle of weak states to mobilize resources, including (a) information, (b) human capital, and (c) fiscal revenues, due to the opposition of local landowning elites. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rulers adopted new goals beyond waging war. The diffusion of political economic thought promoted the idea that state power was tied to long-term economic development, which required more efficient forms of resource mobilization and public goods provision to create wealth that could be taxed. However, state intervention in the economy threatened the power and privileges of local elites, who sought to shelter their private resources and monopoly on local rent-seeking from the central state.

In response, weak states experimented with local democratization to align local elites' interests with central state-building goals. By introducing institutions of local self-government, states incentivized elites to participate in state-building through representation in local assemblies, creating a new formula of "no representation, without taxation." I argue that local self-government served as an alternative state-building model to parliamentarization or bureaucratization that allowed rulers to overcome elite resistance and enhance state capacity through local participation. Focusing on the case of the zemstvo reform in the Russian Empire in historical comparative perspective, I demonstrate how local assemblies increased state capacity, highlighting the extractive origins of democratic institutions, and offering new insights into the local foundations of state-building and democratization in weak states around the globe.

This dissertation examines why citizens in autocratic contexts engage in robust forms of citizen contacting. Citizen contacting is a foundational democratic practice, yet several authoritarian regimes, including Russia, have been heavily adopting institutions that facilitate direct citizen contact with the state. Analysis from the state’s perspective reveals the many reputational, informational, and administrative benefits these types of institutions can provide. However, such analysis does not explain why citizens engage with these institutions, which for them may be perceived as political window-dressing or a highly risky enterprise in identifying oneself and one’s criticism directly to state officials. Despite these concerns, citizens in Russia are increasingly engaging in this practice, through both the state’s extensive citizen appeal and e-government systems. Through data collection from state-issued sources and an original survey, I explore the citizen’s perspective on what motivates them to interact with the state. Ultimately, I argue that the prevailing models through which Russian citizens view these systems are a Resource-based Approach and an Approach of Everyday Resistance. What my findings demonstrate is that citizens in authoritarian regimes view contacting channels as vehicles through which one can apply one’s personal resources to improve one’s own welfare and more safely exercise and express their own political voice to the state and regime.

This dissertation asks why some non-democratic regimes give political opponents significant leeway to organize, while others enforce strict limits on such activities. I examine this question with reference to two in-depth case studies from post-Soviet Eurasia: Georgia under President Eduard Shevardnadze and Kazakhstan under President Nursultan Nazarbayev. While a non-democratic regime was in place in both countries, opposition was highly tolerated in Georgia, but not allowed in Kazakhstan.

I argue that these divergent policies can be traced to variation in the predominant source and pattern of state corruption in each country. In Georgia, the primary source of rulers' illegal income was society itself, which created incentives for the government to tolerate political opposition. In this pattern of corruption, illegal income flowed into the state from society in the form of bribes, and then upward within the state. Private citizens made informal payments to state officials, who in turn were required to channel a percentage of the proceeds to their superiors and to political rulers. This pattern created a state that was dependent on society. Consequently, the elites were constrained: the government was more likely to tolerate political opposition in an effort to continue amassing private profits. In contrast, in Kazakhstan, political leaders faced a dramatically different set of incentives. Rulers embezzled natural resource wealth, which were outside of citizens' control. As a result, government officials could pursue unpopular policies--including aggressive repression against opposition groups--without jeopardizing the flow of illicit profits.

These findings contribute to the growing literatures explaining variation among non-democratic regimes and the sustainability of non-democratic rule. By tracing this cross-national variation to differences in state corruption, this study moves beyond the literature's current focus on how authoritarian rulers spend resource wealth to sustain authoritarianism. Rather, I emphasize how the variation in the sources of illegal wealth--and its profound effect on the autonomy of state elites vis-à-vis society--influences the regime.

This dissertation proposes a new framework from which to study political regime transitions, arguing from a basis in counterfactual reasoning that it is necessary to shift the focus from ex-post coding based on transition outcomes to ex-ante coding of cases with the potential for regime transition. Straddling the literatures on transitions, democratization, authoritarianism, founding elections, and power-sharing, I investigate the inner workings of a rarely studied transitional period, assessing the types of institutions that countries form during the foundational, yet often chaotic, moments of a regime transition.

I systematically characterize a number of paths that countries embark on in the period between regimes and, in so doing, identify a new unit of analysis that I term “transitional groups”: unelected, interim groups formed during potential regime transitions with the stated intent of holding elections and transferring power to a popularly legitimate government. I assemble a novel dataset that describes the existence of transitional groups over the period 1989 to 2010.

I then conduct statistical analysis on this data to analyze how transitional groups affect the extent and direction of regime change. I argue that, while the introduction of transitional groups can often accelerate the pace of democratization, in some circumstances—particularly, when power is either too consolidated in a few actors or too dispersed among many—the introduction of transitional groups can actually make democratization harder. My dissertation provides insights into transitional or foundational events and highlights how formalized transitional groups vary tremendously across space and time.