Many believe that weaker legal constraints make unilateral action easier to reverse than legislation. Yet in some cases, unilateralism survives a successor's determined opposition. I argue that legislative persistence and unilateral transience may arise not only from differences in legal status but also from a selection effect: unilateralism and subsequent rescission can both stem from weak underlying policy-demanding groups. But if unilateralism itself alters the landscape of group power through policy feedback effects, it can survive a purportedly opposed new president. An example is the Trump Administration's failure to depart from the Obama Justice Department's lax stance on cannabis. Weak constituents’ policy demands may thus need to rely on a sympathetic president's unilateral action to begin a feedback loop, subsequently softening opposition. This paper therefore identifies unilateral action as a key tool for shifting policy in an enduring way, explaining its success or failure in terms of interest group power.

Economic sanctions are a policy tool that great powers frequently use to interfere with domestic politics of another state. Regime change has been a primary goal of economic sanctions over the past decades. This article studies the relationship between leader-contingent sanctions—sanctions that are designed to impede the flow of revenue to a specific leader—and violent political conflict in target countries. I build a theoretical model to illuminate two mechanisms by which leader-contingent sanctions destabilize a regime—the Depletion Mechanism and the Instigation Mechanism. The Depletion Mechanism works when sanctions mechanically deplete the government's resources so that it becomes unable to buy off domestic opposition even by making the largest possible offer. The Instigation Mechanism implies that as sanctions decrease the benefit of negotiated settlement relative to war, the government may strategically choose to repress rather than buy off the opposition even when it is able to do so. Leader-contingent sanctions lead to bargaining failure by rewarding the opposition for revolt while reducing the government's ability and willingness to appease the opposition.

The recognition heuristic assumes that people make inferences based on the output of recognition memory. While much work has been devoted to establishing the recognition heuristic as a viable description of how people make inferences, more work is needed to fully integrate research on the recognition heuristic with research from the broader cognitive psychology literature. In this article, we outline four challenges that should be met for this integration to take place, and close with a call to address these four challenges collectively, rather than piecemeal.

Does increasing executive power necessarily decrease accountability? To answer this question, I develop a two-period signaling model comparing voter welfare in two separation-of-powers settings. In one, the executive works with a median legislator to change policy; in the other, the executive chooses between legislation or unilateral action. Both politicians may have preferences that diverge from the voter's, yet I find that increasing executive power may increase accountability and welfare, even in some cases when the legislator is more likely to share the voter's preferences than the executive. Unilateral power allows a congruent executive to overcome gridlock, implement the voter's preferred policy, and reveal information about the politicians’ types—which can outweigh the risks of a divergent executive wielding power for partisan ends.

How does the Rule of Four affect Supreme Court decisions? We show two effects of changing a “hearing pivot” justice who is decisive for case selection. First, a court with more extreme hearing pivots will hear cases with more moderate precedents. For example, as the conservative hearing pivot becomes more extreme, the court hears a broader range of cases with liberal status quo precedents. Second, more extreme hearing pivots shrink dispositional majorities and lead to more polarized rulings. If the median justice becomes more extreme without changing the hearing pivots, then rulings are more extreme. The effect on the range of cases heard, however, is smaller than that from changing hearing pivots. Finally, we show that case selection can also depend on non-median, non-hearing-pivot justices. Replacing an extreme justice with someone even more extreme can lead to a smaller set of heard cases, as final rulings can shift away from the binding hearing pivot, making status quo precedents more appealing.

I analyze a model in which an incumbent ruler designs a rule for propaganda disclosure that reveals information about her competence to her allies and opponents. A message that increases beliefs about the incumbent's competence is considered as propaganda. I show that for propaganda to be persuasive, it must be limited in frequency. I also demonstrate how various features of the environment affect the frequency of propaganda. Propaganda increases in frequency as the incumbent's allies become more dependent on her and as her opponents become weaker. Further, there is a non-monotonic relationship between the strength of the conflict of interest between both her allies and her opponents and the frequency of propaganda. As conflict increases, the frequency of propaganda decreases up to a threshold beyond which increased conflict is associated with more frequent propaganda.

During the political process, the electorate needs to determine the competence of the government by both observing its policy decisions and acquiring information from the media. However, media reports are often criticized for not being independent and truthful. This paper discusses whether the public can determine the quality of a government from media reports. In other words, are media outlets more likely to act as watchdogs or just as “yes men” to the government? This paper argues that, because of reputational concerns, the media usually avoid criticizing the government. The media only report truthfully when the expected competence of the government is sufficiently low and the probability for the voter to learn from other information sources is sufficiently high. Otherwise, media outlets—especially low-quality outlets—will pander to the government in their reporting. Policy bias or media capture is not required for the yes-man problem to prevail.