How do moral beliefs influence favorability to collective violence? In this article, I argue that, first, moral beliefs are influential depending on their salience, as harm avoidance is a common moral concern. The more accessible moral beliefs in decision-making, the more they restrain harmful behavior. Second, moral beliefs are influential depending on their content. Group-oriented moral beliefs can overturn the harm avoidance principle and motivate individuals to favor collective violence. Analysis is based on a representative survey in Mexico City and focuses on a proximate form of collective violence, locally called lynching. Findings support both logics of moral influence. Experimentally induced moral salience reduces favorability to lynching, and group-oriented moral beliefs are related to more favorability. Against existing theories that downplay the relevance of morality and present it as cheap talk, these findings demonstrate how moral beliefs can both restrain and motivate collective violence.

IMF interventions are often associated with rising political discontent in countries where the Fund intervenes. Studies examining this relationship, however, face the challenge of disentangling the impact of the IMF from the impact of the crisis that triggered the intervention. To address this challenge, we conduct survey experiments in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain and directly assess how voters evaluate the costs and benefits of an IMF intervention. We find that voters believe that the crisis will more likely be solved when the IMF intervenes, but they are also critical of the corresponding loss of national sovereignty. Because the former consideration, on average, dominates their assessment, IMF interventions increase the support of voters for unpopular economic policies. Nonetheless, cross-country differences suggest that continued public support for intervention hinges on the IMF's ability to deliver on its promise to help resolve the crisis.

We provide a mixed-methods, comparative analysis of the development of the urban-rural electoral cleavage in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States from the early 20th century to the present. Using aggregate election results, electoral district boundary files, and electoral district population measures, we construct a new comparable dataset of district election results and urbanity for the lower house of the legislature in each country. We use this dataset to measure the importance of the urban-rural divide for election outcomes across countries and time. We find that the cleavage has widened over time in each country, each arrived at its current urban-rural divide via a distinct developmental trajectory, which we interpret with reference to secondary literature. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings for theories of both the causes and consequences of urban-rural divides and discuss the implications of our work for the comparative study of urban-rural cleavages.

This article evaluates how territorial autonomy affects ethnic mobilization and conflict during regime transitions. Previous research has highlighted its conflict-inducing role during prominent transition contexts. Alternatively, it has shown its pacifying role in the "average" case, without distinguishing transition periods from stable contexts. Addressing these gaps, we argue that the de-escalatory consequences of autonomy depend on critical stabilizing factors which are themselves "muted" during transitions. We test our expectations in a cross-national analysis, covering all regime transitions between 1946 and 2017. We also revisit the 1989 transition from Communism, focusing on the role of "inherited" autonomy in the post-communist successor states. This enables us to address concerns whereby autonomy is offered to ward off transitions or whereby transitions are themselves induced by mobilization. Our findings indicate that during transitions, territorial autonomy increases the likelihood of ethnic mobilization, government concessions in response, and violent escalation where these are not forthcoming.

Although central bank independence is a core tenet of monetary policy-making, it remains politically contested: In many emerging markets, populist governments are in frequent public conflict with the central bank. At other times, the same governments profess to respect the monetary authority's independence. We model this conflict drawing on the crisis bargaining literature. Our model predicts that populist politicians will often bring a nominally independent central bank to heel without having to change its legal status. To provide evidence, we build a new data set of public pressure on central banks by classifying over 9000 analyst reports using machine learning. We find that populist politicians are more likely than non-populists to exert public pressure on the central bank, unless checked by financial markets, and also more likely to obtain interest rate concessions. Our findings underscore that does not equal central bank independence in the face of populist pressures.

One of the most important decisions coalition partners make when forming a government is the division of ministries. Ministerial portfolios provide the party in charge with considerable informational and agenda-setting advantages, which parties can use to shape policies according to their preferences. Oversight mechanisms in parliaments play a central role in mitigating ministerial policy discretion, allowing coalition partners to control each other even though power has been delegated to individual ministers. However, we know relatively little about how such mechanisms influence the agenda-setting and gatekeeping powers of ministers and how much influence minister parties have on policy output relative to the government as a whole in different institutional settings. We fill this gap by analyzing original data on over 2000 social and economic policy reform measures adopted in nine Western European countries over 20 years, based on a coding of more than 1200 country reports issued by the and the . We find that parliaments with strong oversight powers constrain the agenda-setting capacity of minister parties but have limited impact on their gatekeeping capacity. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of policy-making and democratic accountability.

An influential explanation for the persistent political underrepresentation of minorities in elected office is that minority candidates are discriminated against by voters of the dominant ethnic group. We argue, however, for the need to distinguish between two forms of discrimination: ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility. We measure the impact of each by using an extensive data set drawn from Swiss elections, where voters can cast both positive and negative preference votes for candidates. Our results show that immigrant-origin candidates with non-Swiss names incur an electoral disadvantage because they receive more negative preference votes than candidates with typically Swiss names. But we also find that minority candidates face a second disadvantage: voters discriminate in favor of majority candidates by allocating them more positive preference votes. These two forms of electoral discrimination are critically related to a candidate's party, whereas the impact of the specific outgroup to which a minority candidate belongs is less pronounced than expected.

The last decades have seen the emergence of a divide pitting the new left against the far right in advanced democracies. We study how this universalism-particularism divide is crystallizing into a full-blown cleavage, complete with structural, political identity elements. So far, little research exists on the identities that voters themselves perceive as relevant for drawing in- and out-group boundaries along this divide. Based on an original survey from Switzerland, a paradigmatic case of electoral realignment, we show that voters' "objective" socio-demographic characteristics relate to distinctive, primarily culturally connoted identities. We then inquire into the degree to which these group identities have been politicized, that is, whether they divide new left and far right voters. Our results strongly suggest that the universalism-particularism "cleavage" not only bundles issues, but shapes how people think about who they are and where they stand in a group conflict that meshes economics and culture.

While recent studies find a strong association between the share of women in elected office and lower levels of corruption, we know less about if women in executive office cause reductions in corruption levels, and if such effects last over time. This study suggests that women mayors reduce corruption levels, but that the beneficial effect may be weakened over time. Using both regression discontinuity and first difference designs with newly collected data on French municipal elections combined with corruption risk data on close to all municipal contracts awarded between 2005 and 2016, we show that women mayors reduce corruption risks. However, newly elected women mayors drive the results, while gender differences are negligible in municipalities where women mayors are re elected. Our results can be interpreted as providing support for marginalization theories, but also suggest that the women that adapt to corrupt networks survive in office.

The framing of issues is part of the tool kit used by lobbyists in modern policy making, yet the ways in which framing works to affect lobbying success across issues remain underexplored. Analyzing a new dataset of lobbying in the news on 50 policy issues in five European countries, we demonstrate that it is not individual but collective framing that matters: Emphasis frames that enjoy collective backing from lobbying camps of like-minded advocates affect an advocate's success, rather than frames being voiced by individual advocates. Crucially, it matters for advocacy success whether the advocate's camp frames its policy goals on an issue in unity with "one voice" and whether the actor's camp wins the contest of framing the issue vis-à-vis the opposing camp. Our results emphasize the need to consider the collective mechanisms behind the power of framing and have implications for future research on framing as an advocacy tool.

What kind of economic development curtails clientelistic politics? Most of the literature addressing this relationship focuses narrowly on vote buying, resulting in theories that emphasize the importance of declining poverty rates and a growing middle class. This article employs a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and an expert survey to engage in a first-ever, more comprehensive comparative study of within-country variation of clientelistic politics. I find a pattern that poorly matches these dominant theories: Clientelism is perceived to be less intense in rural, poverty-prone Java, while scores are high in relatively wealthy yet state-dependent provincial capitals. On the basis of these findings, I develop an alternative perspective on the relationship between economic development and clientelism. Emphasizing the importance of societal constraints, I argue that the concentration of control over economic activities fosters clientelism because it stifles the public sphere and inhibits effective scrutiny and disciplining of politico-business elites.

"Why is it so difficult for a liberal-democratic state to regulate immigration? Although control of a territory is part and parcel of the definition of state sovereignty, labor-importing countries have found it increasingly difficult to regulate the flow of noncitizens across their borders. This article seeks to address the difficulties of regulating immigration by focusing on the policy-making process and the interaction of politics and markets in France, one of the principal countries of immigration."