Adam E. Casey asks whether foreign sponsorship actually prolonged authoritarian 'client' regimes in the postwar era (1946–2010), and whether different patrons—Western powers versus the Soviet Union—had different effects on regime survival.
Civilian protests can push conflicts toward peace — but not always. This study asks how different types of wartime civilian protest shape violence and the prospects for conflict resolution, and develops a framework to explain why some protests escalate rather than de-escalate violence.
This letter asks whether a "state-first" approach—where a strong state promotes democratic development—holds up when the concept of state strength is disaggregated. Using new Varieties of Democracy data covering 1789–2015, the authors specify eight versions of the state-first argument and test them across the modern democratic era. Their central contribution is to separate bureaucratic quality from broader measures of state capacity and to evaluate their distinct associations with democratic survival and deepening.
Direct political control over firms has diminished due to regulation, yet political connections persist. This study explores an alternative channel: electoral cycles influencing corporate appointments.
Restrictive laws targeting nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have proliferated globally. The central claim is that governments learn to restrict NGOs primarily by copying regional legislative examples, not by reacting to NGO growth or to domestic nonarmed bottom-up threats.
This article introduces a new maximum likelihood estimator for analyzing durations in continuous time war of attrition games, where players compete over a prize with incomplete information about each other's strength.
This paper introduces a novel approach to measuring mental representations of geography by asking survey respondents to draw their own local communities on maps. Using Canada as a case study, we demonstrate that these maps accurately reflect the places individuals think about regularly and reliably capture consistent geographic knowledge over time.
Civil conflicts vary dramatically in how quickly they reach the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)—some arrive within days, others take years or never appear. This study addresses the neglected question of what determines the Council’s agenda‑setting speed.
Relational event models (REMs) blend survival analysis with network model terms, a combination that undermines conventional goodness-of-fit diagnostics. Standard methods therefore cannot reliably determine whether a REM is specified well enough to avoid biased parameter estimates.