Social Networks

This paper asks how patron–client ties among officials affect information flows inside bureaucratic hierarchies. The authors argue that lower-level officials with patronage ties to higher-level leaders undertake informal information campaigns—sending signals of diligence and defending themselves—to compete for favors. Drawing on newly assembled Chinese sources, including a corpus of internal emails between city patrons and county clients and original data on county governments’ public replies to citizen complaints, the study compares communication patterns between client and non-client counties. The contribution is a descriptive account showing greater upward communication from client counties without detectable differences in public-facing complaint responses.

This paper draws a sharp distinction between political control of a bureaucracy and its technical capacity. The central argument is that in politically controlled bureaucracies, stronger technical capacity can facilitate corruption: capable bureaucrats use their skills to shield favored firms from competition through complex strategies that reduce the risk of detection.

Bold question: Do phones change political attitudes in isolated communities?

The authors ask which states condemned Russia at the UN and which imposed sanctions after the 2022 invasion, and whether regime type or trade relationships better predict those behaviors. Using an “opportunity and willingness” framing, the study compares democratic versus nondemocratic states’ propensity to issue substantive or symbolic condemnation and examines whether countries’ positions in international trade networks — including trade in fuels and dual‑use goods — predict who imposed sanctions. The paper reports results from multinomial logit models that use commodity trade data to distinguish fuels, dual‑use goods, and aggregate trade and evaluates whether close preexisting trade ties to Russia explain condemnation or sanctions.

India faces a persistent gender gap in political participation. This study links that gap to the structure of women's political networks in patriarchal settings and evaluates whether expanding those networks changes women's political behavior.

This study asks whether starting to cohabit with a partner changes individual voter turnout and uses a large administrative dataset to compare turnout before and after couples move in together. The authors' central contribution is an empirical comparison that leverages timing: households that begin cohabiting just before an election are compared to those that begin just after, allowing assessment of turnout changes associated with taking up shared residence.

This article asks how unrest spreads by testing a framework that separates (1) the networks that carry information, (2) whether news of repression changes participation, and (3) the role of organizers. The authors apply this framework to the English Swing riots of 1830–31 and use spatiotemporal variation specific to that historical episode to identify patterns of diffusion. Their contribution is an empirically grounded account of which kinds of ties mattered for riot diffusion and the role of local organizers in that process.

Early settlement locations in the host country profoundly shape immigrants' political integration.

Political scientists grapple with studying hard-to-reach groups like undocumented migrants and activists.

This study investigates how social fractionalization influences politicians' incentives to provide public goods, rather than focusing on community-level factors. The argument is that fragmented social networks, evidenced by intermarriage patterns among 20 million individuals across 15,000 Philippine villages, reduce the risk of elite capture and increase both public goods provision and electoral competition.

This study investigates how legislative collaboration influences community funding.

This research explores how gender moderates the political influence of social disagreement and expertise.

Racial disparities exist in how groups perceive police and courts. This article explores why, arguing that vicarious experiences play a key role.