Does party system polarization mobilize voters? Polarization is increasingly shaping democratic competition across Europe. While often perceived to be negative, polarization can be an effective remedy against voter disengagement. This paper investigates two distinct, but often conflated...

Does citizen belief in the non-instrumental principles of the political regime, such as strongman leadership, patriotism, or attachment to a charismatic leader, collectively known as normative support, help stabilize authoritarian regimes? While a large literature recognizes that authoritarian...

Governments across the Global South have begun introducing biometric IDs (eIDs) in an attempt to improve citizen-state legibility. While such initiatives can improve government efficiency, they also raise important questions about citizen privacy, especially for groups with a history of mistrust...

Mass mobilization (MM) is an important driver of political change. While some citizens organize in favor of more democratic institutions, others take to the streets to support an authoritarian status quo. This article introduces measures of pro-democratic and pro-autocratic MM using expert...

Why do voters support executive aggrandizement? One possible answer is that they do so because they think this will ease their preferred leader’s hand in putting their partisan vision into action, provided that the leader will continue winning elections. We study this phenomenon through a...

Does local exposure to refugees increase right-wing support? This paper studies a case uniquely suited to address this question: the allocation of refugees to the rural hinterlands of eastern Germany during the European refugee crisis. Similar to non-urban regions elsewhere, the area has had...

We propose a distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary autocratic ruling strategies and develop novel theoretical propositions on the legacy that these strategies leave on citizens’ political attitudes once the autocratic regime broke down. Using data of 1.3 million survey respondents...

Do citizens view state and traditional authorities as substitutes or complements? Past work has been divided on this question. Some scholars point to competition between attitudes toward these entities, suggesting substitution, whereas others highlight positive correlations, suggesting...

Are representatives in authoritarian legislatures encouraged to take positions on salient issues? More generally, why do some autocracies allow public debate on hot topics at all? Understanding the dynamics of public legislative debate is important for the roles authoritarian legislatures are...

The relation between religious organizations and political authority is notoriously tense. Max Weber argued that this is because both compete over the same resource: human commitment. This article revisits Weber’s hypothesis. Specifically, we explore two psychological mechanisms through which...