Political machines traditionally rely on targeted rewards to encourage supporters to vote. Yet meta-analyses of experiments and observational studies find little to no effect of these selective incentives on turnout, creating a puzzle: are machines irrational, or are empirical methods misleading scholars? Kenneth Greene tackles this puzzle in a BJPS article by arguing that common measurement choices obscure the true impact of turnout buying.
Javier Osorio and Susan Brewer-Osorio investigate why criminal organizations sometimes step in to govern local communities. They challenge explanations that treat criminal governance as merely a top-down imposition, proposing instead that both bottom-up demand for help and top-down incentives to provide coercion shape how and when criminals govern.
Scholars often argue that incentives to cultivate a personal vote weaken party unity, because legislators respond to local electoral pressures rather than party leadership. Lucia Motolinia Carballo tests a countervailing idea: when parties control ballot access and the resources candidates need to build personal votes, they can use those levers to reward loyalty—so giving legislators the chance to be reelected may actually increase party discipline.
This article asks whether politician gender changes how voters judge political scandal, testing whether people discount or disbelieve scandals that contradict gender stereotypes. Using a survey experiment in Mexico that varied scandal type and the politician’s gender, the authors report that respondents were more favorable toward female politicians accused of stereotype-incongruent behaviors, and that people high in benevolent sexism were especially likely to discount stereotype-incongruent scandals. The piece aims to clarify the role of gender stereotypes in judgments about politicians’ fitness for office.
The authors ask when organized criminal groups respond to opportunities in licit commodity markets with violence. Their central contribution is to link rapid increases in a good’s share of global export value to incentives for criminal expansion, and to assemble evidence at both subnational and cross-national levels to test that mechanism. The paper uses avocado exports in Mexico as a detailed case and then combines international datasets to examine whether agricultural export booms correspond with higher homicide where organized crime exists.
The choices party leaders make about forming electoral coalitions shape the alternatives voters face. Existing knowledge is limited about the tradeoffs coalitions impose on potential partners, how coalitions change the strategic responses of competing parties, and their net effect on election outcomes.
Many developing countries increasingly deploy the military for domestic policing (constabularization) even though prior research suggests this approach can be counterproductive. This study asks whether visual features of armed actors—such as weapons, uniforms, gender, and skin tone—shape public views of law enforcement across several dimensions: perceived effectiveness, respect for civil liberties, proclivity for corruption, and acceptance of militarization in one’s neighborhood.
Political scientists increasingly use supervised machine learning to code multiple labels from the same texts. The current practice of training separate supervised models for each label ignores relationships among labels and is likely to under-perform as a result.
Social and political violence in Mexico makes business interests more receptive to social welfare spending. This paper presents survey experiment results from Mexican business owners and operators showing increased support for anti-poverty measures tied to institutional weakness, while decreasing preference for tax cuts.
Fiscal decentralization promises more efficient local service delivery by shifting revenue and spending to municipal governments, but it can also create attractive rents that organized crime seeks to capture. This study tests whether greater local spending (LS) makes violence from organized crime (OCV) worse as criminal groups fight for access to municipal resources.
A fresh comparison of employer and worker wage records reveals widespread underreporting by formal firms, with better compliance among larger employers.
Elite Competition and State Capacity Development: Theory and Evidence from Post-Revolutionary Mexico
Local human rights organizations (LHROs) play a central role as intermediaries for citizens and advocates for police and justice reform. Public trust is essential for LHROs to be effective. This study asks whether crime reduces that trust—creating a “rights trap” that undermines LHRO legitimacy and prompts government retrenchment—or increases it, producing a “rights amplifier” that strengthens rights observance.
New evidence suggests that electoral fraud persists in Mexican elections despite the country's democratic progress.