Developing countries are often thought to be particularly exposed to the constraints of global markets. Facing scrutiny from foreign investors, why do developing-country governments enter international bond markets, especially when they can access cheaper finance from international financial institutions? I argue that borrowing governments' perception of market constraints depends on global liquidity. When bond markets are highly liquid, investors become more risk acceptant and governments perceive the political costs of borrowing to be lower, especially compared to the conditionality of concessional loans. I use data on the timing of bond issues and three case studies—Ethiopia, Ghana, and Kenya—to demonstrate that choices to issue debt were shaped by global liquidity. These findings nuance debates about how markets constrain governments, emphasizing that market constraints are conditional on systemic factors, including, global liquidity.

Human trafficking affects millions of people globally, disproportionately harming women, girls and marginalized groups. Yet one of the main sources of data on global trafficking, the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Reports, is susceptible to biases because report rankings are tied to political outcomes. The literature on human rights measurements has established two potential sources of bias. The first is the changing standards of accountability, where more information and increased budgets change the standard to which countries are held over time. The second is political biases in reports, which are amended to comply with the interests of the reporting agency. This letter examines whether either of these biases influence the TIP Reports. In contrast to other country-level human rights indicators, the State Department issues both narratives and rankings, which incentivizes attempts to influence the rankings based on political interests. The study uses a supervised machine-learning algorithm to examine how narratives are translated into rankings, to determine whether rankings are biased, and to disentangle whether bias stems from changing standards or political interests. The authors find that the TIP Report rankings are more influenced by political biases than changing standards.

Across myriad literatures, it is widely held that expanding economic grievances induce violence, protest, or other forms of backlash. In Latin America, where economic liberalization deepened the downturn of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s (and 1990s), reform has been tightly associated with protest and mobilization. At the same time, liberal economic reforms have proven to be remarkably durable, even where long-promised benefits are hard to discern. This article makes the case that economically liberal reforms, despite inducing or deepening severe and sustained economic downturns, have actually undermined political protest. Previous work confirming the conventional wisdom foundered on two main methodological problems. First, selection into economic reform was a consequence of the very economic pain and macroeconomic imbalances it also served to induce. Secondly, because of this, these key (macro)economic characteristics are both pre- and post-treatment. Utilizing a marginal structural model approach to assess the impact of economic liberalization on protest outcomes net of this selection process, and the prior history of treatment, the study finds that painful reform reduces political protest even as it heightens grievances. This depoliticizing dynamic helps to explain the surprising durability of liberal reforms in Latin America.

How does an individual's criminal record shape interactions with the state and society? This article presents evidence from a nationwide field experiment in the United States, which shows that prospective applicants with criminal records are about 5 percentage points less likely to receive information from college admission offices. However, this bias does not extend to race: there is no difference in response rates to Black and White applicants. The authors further show that bias is all but absent in public bureaucracies, as discrimination against formerly incarcerated applicants is driven by private schools. Examining why bias is stronger for private colleges, the study demonstrates that the private–public difference persists even after accounting for college selectivity, socio-economic composition and school finances. Moving beyond the measurement of bias, an intervention designed to reduce discrimination is evaluated: whether an email from an advocate mitigates bias associated with a criminal record. No evidence is found that advocate endorsements decrease bureaucratic bias.

Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures, risk incidence and risk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existing indicators, these measures require panel data, which the authors harmonize for twenty-one democracies. The study finds that large losses affect all income and education levels, making the welfare state valuable to a broad cross-section of citizens. It also finds that taxes and transfers greatly reduce the prevalence of such losses, though to varying degrees across countries and over time. Finally, it disaggregates the measures to identify specific ‘triggers’ of large losses, and finds that these triggers are associated with risks on which welfare states focus, such as unemployment and sickness.

The interest group literature has long struggled with how to empirically approach the normative idea of a non-biased group system. While most previous attempts have focused on the descriptive representation of different types of groups, this article argues that substantive representation of citizens' attitudes is closer to the democratic principle of equal effective participation. It develops a methodological approach that captures substantive representation with respect to agenda priorities and policies by surveying interest groups on how much time they spend on lobbying in different policy areas, and in which direction they lobby on salient policy issues. The responses are compared with opinion data to estimate the level of political (in)equality. The findings from the case of Sweden – where relatively high levels of equality would be expected, but striking levels of inequality based on socio-economic status are instead found – highlight the perseverance of what Schattschneider once called the upper-class bias of the pressure system.

Irregular migrants tend to live in dense urban settings. Cities therefore formulate various policies in support of irregular migrants. Given the US phenomenon of sanctuary cities, the study of these policies has been rather US-centric so far. This letter examines urban policies in support of irregular migrants in Europe's 95 largest cities. Only 27 per cent of European cities formulate these types of policies. We discovered two relevant policy categories: status and services. Only five cities formulate policies that aim to award irregular migrants with a (more) secure status, and 24 cities formulate policies that facilitate access to city services. Our mixed-methods analysis suggests that status policies take advantage of policy-making discretion whereas service policies hinge on the availability of local resources. Yet, there are no simple explanations for the observed policy diversity that is the product of place-based policy-making.

This article provides an overview of the literature on the relationship between terrorism and migration. It discusses whether and how (1) migration may be a cause of terrorism, (2) terrorism may influence natives' attitudes towards immigration and their electoral preferences and (3) terrorism may lead to more restrictive migration policies and how these in turn may serve as effective counter-terrorism tools. A review of the empirical literature on the migration–terrorism nexus indicates that (1) there is little evidence that more migration unconditionally leads to more terrorist activity, especially in Western countries, (2) terrorism has electoral and political (but sometimes short-lived) ramifications, for example, as terrorism promotes anti-immigrant resentment and (3) the effectiveness of stricter migration policies in deterring terrorism is rather limited, while terrorist attacks lead to more restrictive migration policies.

Two states in a dispute refuse to back down. One ties its own hands to strengthen its stand and gain advantage; the other tries to untie the tied hands to preempt disadvantage. Tying hands is a well-studied strategy, but it tells only part of the story, and the response strategy of untying hands remains unexplored. Can a state untie the tied hands of its opponent to give freedom back to its opponent—the freedom to concede? I identify three strategies of untying hands: counterthreat, reassurance, and normative framing. I show experimentally that these strategies can reduce the public costs of backing down and the perceived reputational damage from backing down. Tied hands and audience costs are not static and immutable, but dynamic and malleable by the other side.

How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of career paths and generalizes based on the duration, quality and breadth of an individual's experience in politics. The analysis draws on a novel data set of around 2,000 leaders from 1950 to 2017 and uses a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate PolEx. The article illustrates how the new measure can be used comparatively to assess whether democracies select more experienced leaders. The authors find that while on average they do, the difference with non-democracies has declined dramatically since the early 2000s. Future research may leverage PolEx to investigate the role of prior political experience in, for example, policy making and crisis management.

In order to explain differences in political interest, two strands of literature point to the relevance of either dispositional or situational factors. I remedy this and show how political interest is shaped by the interplay between personality differences and the political environment. Specifically, I demonstrate that people with a stable motivation for engaging with new ideas are more interested in politics when exposed to new political events, e.g. during election campaigns and when unexpected events unfold. The results have implications for our understanding of political inequalities in democratic engagement and shed light on how citizens' interest in politics can be relatively stable over time as well as responsive to the political environment in predictable ways.

Previous studies have stressed the role of a child's family environment for future political participation. This field of research has, however, overlooked that children within the same family have different experiences depending on their birth order. First-borns spend their first years of life without having to compete over their parents' attention and resources, while their younger siblings are born into potential rivalry. We examine differences in turnout depending on birth order, using unique population-wide individual level register data from Sweden and Norway that enables precise within-family estimates. We consistently find that higher birth order entails lower turnout, and that the turnout differential with respect to birth order is stronger when turnout is lower. The link between birth order and turnout holds when we use data from four other, non-Nordic countries. This birth order effect appears to be partly mediated by socio-economic position and attitudinal predispositions.

This book review examines the theory of populism advanced by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in Cultural Backlash. The authors offer a distinct explanation of the rise of authoritarian populism in advanced democracies. As societies become more liberal over time, older, more conservative cohorts feel under threat of losing majority status and allegedly turn towards authoritarian-populist parties that promise to stop the tide of liberalism. However, this theory of populism finds little empirical support. In contrast to what the authors argue, there is no polarization of attitudes between younger and older cohorts, and younger cohorts are more likely to vote for authoritarian-populist parties. To substantiate this claim, I replicate many of the analyses in Cultural Backlash and add additional ones with the newest wave of the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. I conclude by observing that while the cultural backlash theory of populism does not hold, this does not invalidate cultural approaches more generally.

When authoritarian regimes liberalize, are there observable patterns in the ordering of reforms, and are these patterns distinct for cases that transition to democracy? While the prevailing literature tends to focus on exogenous ‘determinants’ of democracy, this letter describes the endogenous dynamics of liberalization itself. Using pairwise domination analysis, it assesses the institutional order of reforms during 371 episodes of liberalization in autocracies between 1900 and 2019. Based on twenty-four indicators of democratic institutions and practices, our findings reveal (1) a clear pattern of reform during liberalization episodes, (2) with strong similarities across outcomes, but also that (3) reforms to the administration of elections tend to develop comparatively earlier in episodes of liberalization that produce a democratic transition.

What shapes attitudes towards procedural rules that constrain executive power? This letter argues that procedural values are contextual: A function of who is in power. Supporters of those in power prefer fewer procedural constraints, while opposition supporters prefer greater. This study reports the results of a unique test using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. Respondents were asked, in both pre- and post-election waves, if they thought it should be ‘easier or harder for the president to keep documents secret from the public’. The panel design makes it possible to track individual changes following the shift in political context. The results show evidence of a partisan ‘flip’ in attitudes following the election, with Republicans becoming less likely – and Democrats more likely – to prefer additional constraints on presidential secrecy. However, this partisan ‘flip’ is present only among higher political knowledge respondents.

This letter provides firm-level evidence that policy makers tailor trade policy to suit selected firms. It argues that firms with higher levels of specific assets find it more costly to reorganize production, and are hurt more by international competition. In response, policy makers grant more trade protection to firms with fixed assets. Since protectionism is costly, firms compete for it, which creates diffusion dynamics in which the protection granted to one firm affects the protection granted to others. This claim is tested utilizing the special role antidumping duties (ADDs) play in international trade, and combining petitions for ADDs with financial data on the firms filing them in a unique dataset. Using spatial autoregressive models, the authors find that firms with specific assets are granted more protection. However, diffusion dynamics differ within and between groups of firms producing the same good. This suggests that firms can partly shape their own level of trade protection.

This comment discusses the impact of social media rule enforcement protocols on research on online data sources. It argues that the conclusions of the article ‘Do Islamic State's Deadly Attacks Disengage, Deter, or Mobilize Supporters?’ concerning the recruitment effects of deadly attacks cannot be assumed to hold when considering the timing of Twitter account suspensions. It highlights four ways in which suspensions can confound evidence of demobilization despite the introduction of control variables and fixed-effects model specifications. All change the composition of the sample in four non-random ways. First, suspending connected Islamic State accounts may result in follower loss. Secondly, Twitter suspension procedures may be tied to account characteristics, such as follower accrual rates. Thirdly, suspended accounts that re-emerge introduce replication bias. Fourthly, account closure may reflect user movement to other platforms in response to changing security environments following deadly attacks. In conclusion, caution is advised when platform-introduced variation risks altering the sample composition in non-random ways.