In the face of contemporary democratic backsliding, are labor unions the “bulwark of democracy” that some have claimed? We decompose this into two analytically distinct phases: prevention and resistance. We argue that unions’ traditional structural, associational, and social power has declined to the point where their preventive influence is quite weak. As structural and associational power has declined, institutional power is vulnerable, even where union membership remains high. Empirically, we show that union density and coverage are uncorrelated with antidemocratic party vote shares across the OECD. In looking at resistance, we examine 11 episodes of twenty-first century democratic backsliding. In none of those cases were existing labor unions key players in resisting democratic erosion. In some instances, major unions were willing to capitulate to or even collaborate with increasingly undemocratic governments. Unions are not currently a reliable bulwark against backsliding, although they can and should be important parts of broader pro-democracy coalitions.
The electoral rise of right-wing populism has reshaped domestic political competition across Western democracies. Democratic governments have simultaneously developed bilateral arrangements to control migration, often involving authoritarian partners with questionable legal and human rights practices. In this paper, I present a novel dataset on the emergence of these agreements across five continents and over the last thirty years. I then develop a theory of foreign policy co-optation that explains when and why governments appropriate flexible foreign policy instruments central to the narrative of the opposition to reduce their electoral threat. I show that bilateral security Cooperation Arrangements on Migration (CAMs) are most likely to emerge when incumbent governments are challenged by right-wing populist parties, especially from left-of-center governments. The findings suggest that right-wing populist pressure paradoxically enables executives to manage electoral opposition through foreign policy, highlighting the need to revisit assumptions about the domestic sources of international cooperation and migration policy.
The study of information control has matured into a crucial subfield at the intersection of political science, communication, and computational social science. The literature has made important strides in theorizing information control and has increasingly relied on diverse methodological approaches, including experiments, text-as-data methods, and the analysis of large-scale digital trace data, often supported by advances in machine learning and AI. We now understand that censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and repression should be seen as producing integrated systems of control that should be studied as such. Despite this progress, there are open questions. The field has yet to reach a definitive understanding of the long-term effects of information control—on public opinion, those who produce information, or overall regime stability. We also need to understand why certain individuals or groups are more resistant to state narratives—and how alternative sources of information manage to break through in tightly controlled environments. Technological advance also continues to reshape the information environment, requiring the field to keep pace with new forms of digital adaptation, from algorithmic content moderation to synthetic media.
Many applied economic studies aim to estimate strategic behavior through reaction curves. Examples include two-sided conflicts, or economic trade wars, and algorithmic pricing between firms. Analysis is usually performed at a prespecified time interval, such as days, weeks, months, or years, using a vector autoregression (VAR). Yet sides may respond within a day to one action, but wait a month after another. If data is recorded in arbitrary time intervals, then the researcher may mistake waiting to act for inaction. We analytically show that VAR analyses do not recover true reaction curves if the timing of reaction is not accurately recorded. This misspecification can cause the sign of the VAR coefficient to reverse and misspecified standard errors leading to erroneous inference. We discuss an alternative structural approach rooted in game theory to estimate reaction curves and investigate its usefulness in a Monte Carlo simulation.
China’s rise is widely viewed as a destabilizing force in East Asia, prompting concerns of heightened military competition or even an arms race. This paper challenges such assumptions by reexamining traditional security threats through the lens of realist theory. Drawing on offensive and defensive realism, it argues that China’s capabilities and revisionist intentions—while significant—do not warrant the level of alarm often portrayed. Regional capability balances, geographic buffers, and the high costs of territorial aggression constrain China’s ability to project traditional military power. Moreover, China’s increasing reliance on gray-zone tactics and geoeconomic tools suggests a strategic shift away from direct military confrontation. Empirical analysis reveals that East Asian states’ military responses remain moderate, especially when compared globally. Taken together, this study offers a more calibrated understanding of East Asia’s evolving security landscape.
Global democracy faces escalating threats, both among long-standing and newer “third wave” democratic systems. The extent and causes of democratic backsliding have been subjects of considerable analysis and debate. However, there is still relatively limited discussion of the conditions in which democracy might be resilient to such challenges. This paper addresses this analytical gap by examining four crucial dimensions of democratic resilience: factors that help insulate democracy from backsliding; whether there are ways to respond to illiberal leaders; what factors contribute to democratic resilience if such a leader does gain power; and whether democracies can “bounce back” after authoritarians have been ousted from power.
Multiple large bodies of scholarship engage with questions directly concerned with political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses. Yet, efforts to collect data on these variables are fraught with challenges, and many extant empirical findings rely on data (particularly news report based events) suspected of or known to be biased in aggregate. We explore the use of anonymous, online surveying to detect otherwise unobserved activity. We run anonymous, online surveys in Bangladesh and Pakistan in the run up to, during and in the period following recent contentious 2024 elections in both countries and, separately, in the immediate aftermath of Bangladesh’s 2024 Student–People’s Uprising and expulsion of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. To assess the efficacy of the surveys, we partnered with professional journalists working on both countries to verify the authenticity of reported incidents. Results confirm their effectiveness in uncovering many instances of political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses otherwise likely to be missed or excluded from major news media reporting and ultimately major datasets derived from it. Yet, they also suggest that anonymous online survey responses and leading event datasets effectively complement, rather than substitute for, one another. Such surveys can be deployed rapidly to communicate with some of the most difficult to reach populations globally about the most sensitive political issues of interest to social scientists and policy professionals.
How do democratic backsliders—states that retain aspects of democracy yet have become increasingly illiberal—behave in international institutions? Pressured between needing to preserve democratic legitimacy while minimizing external scrutiny of domestic illiberalism, these states engage in selective contestation: they continue to endorse the liberal international order (LIO), while systematically opposing its more intrusive institutions, particularly those promoting human rights and democratization. Using original data on voting and sponsorship patterns in the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (2006–23), we find backsliders align with autocracies, and against advanced Western democracies, on particularly sensitive and intrusive issues. These dynamics are confirmed by voting patterns in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Text analysis of Universal Periodic Review reports reveals that backsliders’ rhetoric is converging to that of other backsliders and autocracies over time. These patterns indicate backsliders are reshaping the international landscape—leaving the West isolated and undermining core facets of the LIO.
Why does public support for mano dura policies, once implemented, either sustain or erode? This study examines the Philippine war on drugs. Using municipal-level vote shares from the 2019 elections—three years into Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency—we measure support for mano dura by analyzing votes for senatorial candidates who backed or opposed the drug war. Pairing this data with municipal-level crime and violence reports from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project (ACLED) and police blotters, we construct a panel of candidate-municipality observations and employ fixed effects for candidates and municipalities to identify the effects of targeted crimes and state violence on public support. We find that increases in targeted crimes, particularly drug-related offenses, bolster public support for mano dura, while state violence, especially by police, erodes it. These findings reveal a fragile balance between public safety concerns and the costs of repressive governance.
Some economies are “black holes” where reliable data is scarce due to government control, low capacity, or conflict. Despite these challenges, researchers have found ways to gather useful information. This paper draws on the literature on North Korea to review six key methods: satellite imagery, reports from aid agencies, trade data, prices, refugee surveys, and official documents. These sources are imperfect, and require close attention to research design and measurement error. Nonetheless, they demonstrate that it is possible to extract information from economic black holes and to draw meaningful insights about them.
