Research

The physical costs of war – who fights and experiences casualties – are borne unequally in the United States. However, little is known about how informing individuals about this disparity affects preferences about how to address it. We introduce a framework of “policy corrections” that differentially allocates the costs associated with providing public goods to socioeconomic groups. A formal model then presents competing perspectives, e.g., in-group versus altruistic, on how citizens would prefer these policies. A survey experiment tests how informing Americans that low-income communities disproportionately bear the physical costs of U.S. wars affects their support for each policy correction. Our empirical results reveal heightened support for increased military recruitment among the wealthiest half of Americans (a direct correction), but unchanged preferences for increasing taxes on this group (an indirect correction). Textual analysis of open-ended responses suggests that treated respondents’ preferences for policy corrections are motivated by notions of fairness. Our results suggest that war casualties transcend in-group socioeconomic calculus, leading even individuals who benefit from the disparity to support redressing the unequal costs associated with the provision of defense.

In recent years, leaders in a number of nations have undermined their public sector’s capacity to deliver on its core goals. To understand this interference, it is necessary to examine the formal and informal organizational dynamics at play within bureaucracies. Considering a widely-applicable generalized organization, a formal model outlines how a leader may augment the career incentives of supervisors and lower-level workers, which shifts the alignment of policy with an organization’s central mission. While hierarchy may amplify disruption, organizational culture can coalesce as a norm facilitating resistance to extreme shifts, thereby stabilizing long-term mission-compliance. Yet, should disruption lead to an exodus of mission-driven employees, durable reversals of an organization’s capacity to fulfill its aims may ensue. The model highlights three trajectories disrupted organizations follow: temporary reversal, erosion, and resistance. Implications are considered for public sector institutions and international organizations as well as for the study of bureaucratic and state capacities.

Non-uniform compliance with public policy by citizens can undermine the effectiveness of government, particularly during crises. Mitigation policies intended to combat the novel coronavirus offer a real-world measure of citizen compliance, allowing us to examine the determinants of asymmetrical responsiveness. Analyzing county-level cellphone data, we leverage staggered roll-out to estimate the causal effect of stay-at-home orders on mobility using a difference-in-differences strategy. We find movement is significantly curtailed, and examination of descriptive heterogeneous effects suggests the key roles that partisanship and trust play in producing irregular compliance. We find that Republican-leaning counties comply less than Democratic-leaning ones, which we argue underlines the importance of trust in science and acceptance of large-scale government policies for compliance. However, this partisan compliance gap shrinks when directives are given by Republican leaders, suggesting citizens are more trusting of co-partisan leaders. Furthermore, we find that higher levels of social trust increase compliance; yet these gains attenuate or intensify depending upon community-level partisan sentiments. Our study provides a real-world, behavioral measure that demonstrates the influence of partisanship, social trust, and their interaction on citizen welfare. Finally, we argue that our results speak to how trust in government may impact successful containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scholars have decried the erosion of democratic norms. However, what is meant by this term is often unclear, as it is widely conflated with general democratic principles. This article provides a theoretical and empirical foundation for the study of democratic norms. Drawing on the behavioral psychology literature, I define democratic norms in terms of injunctive beliefs about appropriate political behavior that are enforced by social punishment and serve to establish descriptive expectations. A formal model provides a precise definition of democratic norms. It also illustrates how norms can alter a key driver of democratic backsliding: citizens who prioritize personal interests over democracy. Social pressure is shown to shift this calculus back in favor of democracy, most notably among citizens with weak democratic commitments. Next, survey experiments test the theory, revealing support for financially-incentivized measures of democratic norms and providing behavioral evidence confirming citizens’ willingness to enforce democratic norms.

Does war always make the state? Bellicist theory posits that external conflict promotes state development, yet it often overlooks the complexities involved in financing the state. This study presents a formal model to examine how external conflict reshapes bargaining over fiscal control between a central state and peripheral elite. We find an inverted U-shaped relationship between pressures related to war and the state’s fiscal control. Low to moderate war pressure enhances state fiscal control by strengthening the state’s bargaining power. Excessive pressure, however, undermines state control. The result is driven by the degree of alignment of the state’s and elites’ interests. Elites are reluctant to invest in probable losing causes, conditioned by their insulation from conflict. We also uncover the conditions under which capacity gains are sustained long-term or when states fall into a “capacity trap,” where those with very low initial fiscal control forfeit future revenues to finance ongoing conflict. We test the predictions with historical cross-country fiscal revenue data from Europe and a case study of the Ottoman Empire, and find supporting evidence. These findings refine bellicist theory by highlighting the contingent effects of conflict on state development and the interplay between elite bargaining and war.

Political executives often adhere to informal traditions established by their predecessors. Yet, without legal backing, elites have incentives to violate norms for political gain. Under what conditions do constraining executive norms persist and when are they abandoned? We address this question by using an infinite horizon formal model to analyze the maintenance of executive norms. We identify intra-party accountability and variation in patience among actors within the same party as significant for norm maintenance. We also detail how expectations about the expected behavior of out-of-power parties shape the willingness to violate norms while in office. The insights from the model enable us to classify a number of executive norms according to their fragility and to examine the trajectory of one norm in-depth: the two-term tradition of the American presidency. Our findings shed light on how informal institutions regulate executive behavior and advance our understanding of institutional stability and erosion.

Studies of democratic backsliding suggest that political elites can, but often fail to, serve as “democratic gatekeepers'” – by punishing autocratic colleagues to protect democracy. While a substantial literature examines voters’ preferences for democracy and reactions to democratic violations (by elites), we know less about elites’ preferences for democratic gatekeeping in contemporary democracies. We develop a theory of “democratic gatekeeping” among political elites in democracies, and test implications of this in a pre-registered survey targeting around 10,000  national and local elected representatives and party officials in Norway, widely considered a stable, consolidated democracy. Using a variety of experimental approaches, we uncover the revealed preferences for gatekeeping among Norwegian political elites exposed to anti-democratic party colleagues and anti-democratic political parties as potential coalition partners.

Do moral norms constrain anti-system behavior by political elites? Recent episodes of democratic backsliding, corruption, and political violence in established democracies underscore the importance of understanding the social and electoral basis of elite misconduct. This paper examines the role of moral norms in shaping public responses to such behavior. Although moral norms are frequently invoked as constraints on political conduct, their conceptualization, measurement, and causal influence remain understudied. We introduce a “second-order” approach to measuring moral norms that captures individuals’ beliefs about what others consider morally acceptable. We also test the norms’ causal impact on public perceptions. Using a large-scale survey experiment in the United States, financial incentives are used to elicit expectations about prevailing norms related to political violence, corruption, and anti-democratic actions. By experimentally manipulating perceived moral norms, we identify their causal effects on key attitudinal outcomes, including support for co-partisan politicians who engage in anti-system behavior. Our findings offer new insight into how moral norms shape political accountability and the boundaries of acceptable elite conduct.

I present a legislative and electoral model that examines how crises impact the efficacy of democratic institutions. The model demonstrates that crises may undermine legislative checks-and-balances by incentivizing veto-players to support policy that goes against their preferences. As a result, an agenda-setter is provided with greater license to implement their preferred policy. Yet, eased legislative passage may either benefit citizen welfare or come at the cost of decreasing the likelihood that the optimal policy will be enacted in response to a crisis. Despite undermining policy fit, crises may improve the selection of politicians through elections. Crises can reveal a politician’s willingness to compromise and, thus, allow citizens to remove obstinate politicians. Hence, crises produce a trade-off between improved account- ability via better electoral selection and potentially undermining policy fit. Overall, I find that crises hold significant consequences for democratic institutions, and I consider the implications of the model for several recent crises.

Formal models of political competition encounter ongoing skepticism due to the empirical inaccessibility of their most intriguing predictions: strategic convergence renders out-of-equilibrium match-ups nearly inexistent in real elections. This study is the first to comprehensively test spatial competition theory using candidate-choice conjoint experiments with over 20,000 responses from a representative U.S. sample. By randomizing candidate positions across four policy domains, we observed the full range of strategic interactions, including extreme match-ups and multidimensional configurations that equilibrium behavior suppresses in reality. We estimate the empirical best-response function of candidates given voter behavior and assess the core assumptions of formal models of political competition. Although the most common preference orderings are single-peaked, substantial heterogeneity exists across domains: tax policy produces near-uniform vote shares with multiple equilibria, while immigration yields strong directional preferences and unique equilibria. Voters demonstrate strong preference consistency, supporting candidates closest to their ideal points and turning out when there are large policy differences among candidates. Valence advantages significantly disrupt convergence, and multidimensional competition generates structured patterns that align with chaos predictions. Our results reveal conditional support for the median voter theorem, clarify when and why convergence occurs, and demonstrate how experimental designs can overcome the limitations of observational data, thereby bridging the gap between theoretical predictions and empirical realities.

What role do moral norms play in shaping public support for the use of military force in international politics? Prominent work in international relations discusses moral norms as a factor shaping perceptions about war and peace. Yet, there is little experimental work on whether moral norms actually cause support for war. This study conceptualizes moral norms as individuals’ second-order beliefs about the normative acceptability of war in their reference group(s). We then conduct a pre-registered survey experiment in the US population to elicit and manipulate these norms, to gauge their causal effect on support for interstate military action in different contexts. We find that citizens’ support for war is significantly affected by shifts in second-order beliefs (moral norms), and that these shifts are conditional on national and international reference groups. This advances our understanding how moral norms operate in the international arena and underline their causal role in shaping public opinion on the use of force.

Institutional reforms often reshape political behavior by revising formal rules, but their success depends on informal factors that broker their impact. In high-capacity states, laws that grant officials greater discretion can enhance policy outcomes by allowing them to exploit informational advantages. However, in the aftermath of high-profile bureaucratic failures or corruption scandals, declining public trust may inhibit officials’ willingness, or ability, to exercise discretion effectively. We argue that the effectiveness of increased bureaucratic discretion depends on public trust in government institutions. We develop a formal model that captures the interaction between bureaucratic capacity, public trust, and discretion in shaping the quality of government output. Empirically, we test this framework in the context of public procurement, where bureaucrats exercise discretion in soliciting bids and evaluating contracts. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design based on the phased implementation of an EU directive across 33 European countries, we show that the benefits of discretion depend critically on both institutional capacity and public trust, thus clarifying the conditions for effective governance.

Observational evidence suggests that social trust, i.e., trust in others, and the closely related concept of social capital play a critical role in compliance with government policy, particularly in regards to public responsiveness to measures intended to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. We use a survey experiment to causally estimate the impact of altering social trust on compliance with a range of policies intended to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing an instrumental variable approach, we are able to alter reported social trust, but find null effects in regards to compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures. We speculate on several explanations for this finding.