This paper examines China’s efforts to accelerate its economic rise using technology extractors, defined as policies that condition foreign market access on technology transfers to domestic firms. I argue weak enforcement capacity and China’s position in global value chains (GVCs) constrain...

Calls for an independent European security policy have increased following the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan and the AUKUS submarine deal, but does the EU currently have the forces it needs to deal with a short-term security emergency on its own? Given the importance of...

Scholarship on the long-term effects of state repression predominantly focuses on trust toward the government and pays little attention to interpersonal trust. This work has also privileged only one type of state repression — extracommunal violence in which outside actors targets a community....

The conflict in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands and forced more than half of the country’s population to flee their homes. We constructed and analyzed comparable datasets of public messages and images from three popular social media platforms to study how Syrian users represent the...

This paper presents a brief introduction to Cyber-IR@MIT—a dynamic, interactive knowledge and networking system focused on the evolving, diverse, and complex interconnections of cyberspace and international relations. The goal is to highlight key theoretical, substantive, empirical and...

This paper is a tour of mostly public opinion evidence about how COVID affected the experience of voters as they cast ballots in 2020. Topics covered include turnout, reasons for not voting, precautions observed in polling places, and the confidence voters felt about whether the layout of voting...

When people are confronting violence, what determines the strategies they choose in pursuit of safety? Why do some people flee violence, while others try to fight back, adapt, or hide? Individual choices during conflict have real political consequences—from violence escalation to migration...

How can we elicit truthful responses in surveys? Political scientists are often concerned about systematic survey misreporting on sensitive topics, known as social desirability bias (SDB). Conjoint analysis has become a popular tool to address this concern, despite the lack of systematic...

Efforts to increase citizen engagement in local governance, particularly in low socio-economic contexts, are frequently ineffective because citizens believe their voices and actions will not be respected by relevant authorities. We conduct two studies with over 2,200 citizens in rural Tanzania...

Political scientists frequently use qualitative evidence to support or evaluate the empirical applicability of formal models. Despite this widespread practice in international relations and comparative politics, neither the qualitative methods literature nor research on empirically evaluating...