ABSTRACT When accused of corruption, politicians often employ strategies to defuse blame, yet little is known about how voters respond to these defenses. This study investigates whether public denials by politicians accused of corruption influence electoral accountability and how positive and negative partisanship shape voter reactions. Using a 2019 online survey experiment conducted in Brazil, we find that denials significantly improve the accused politician's public image and electoral prospects, particularly among partisan respondents. Notably, negative partisans are especially responsive to these defense strategies. These findings shed light on the significant role political elites play in shaping public reactions to corruption, offering new insights into the dynamics of electoral accountability and democratic governance.

ABSTRACT In their timely and provocative book, Macedo and Lee present a compelling analysis of the COVID‐19 era, arguing that the American response was not merely a public health challenge but a profound political failure. They contend that the crisis exposed a dangerous erosion of deliberative democratic norms, fueled by an overreliance on executive power under conditions of intense fear and uncertainty. By blending normative political theory with an empirical analysis of U.S. crisis decision‐making, the authors offer a novel and critical perspective on pandemic governance.

ABSTRACT This article integrates insights from comparative political economy and public policy studies into the populism scholarship to analyze how populist governments (PoGos) transform economies, with important implications for the regulatory state. While previous research shows that populists centralize power and pursue illiberal policies, approaches can vary across policy domains. Investigating Poland's Law and Justice (PiS) government (2015–23), this article reveals how PoGos manage sectoral conflicts within the growth coalition of businesses and voters. The findings reveal that PoGos tailor governance modes based on the intensity of sectoral conflicts. In the financial policy domain, where conflict was low, PiS centralized governance to nationalize the financial system. Conversely, in the migration policy domain, with high tension, PiS facilitated decentralized governance to liberalize migration. The findings demonstrate that PoGos employ diverse governance strategies across policy domains, underscoring the importance of a cross‐sectoral lens in assessing their impact on the regulatory state. The study offers broader implications for understanding how governments reconfigure growth coalitions to reshape economies.

ABSTRACT Public engagement often encounters significant barriers and challenges. Digital platforms are increasingly employed to nudge citizens toward behaviors that serve the public interest. This study examines whether and how design features of digital platforms shape citizens' engagement in pro‐environmental behaviors. Drawing on a conjoint experiment conducted in China, we find that design elements such as gamification, visual feedback, rewards, frequent information disclosure, social comparison, and accessibility significantly increase citizens' willingness to engage in low‐carbon behaviors and strengthen their preference for digital platforms. Perceived ease of use and the perceived likelihood of achieving policy goals appear to be key mechanisms driving these effects. Furthermore, citizens' policy knowledge and behavior, as well as their policy beliefs and positions, act as important scope conditions. These findings suggest that optimizing the design of digital platforms can enhance public engagement in voluntary pro‐environmental action.

ABSTRACT While research suggests that bureaucratic performance is critically contingent on employee selection procedures, few studies examine the perceived legitimacy of different recruitment regimes in the eyes of citizens. This study investigates how perceived bureaucratic legitimacy is shaped by the principles guiding the selection process (merit‐based vs. political recruitment) and by its outcome in terms of descriptive representation. We suggest that both meritocratic recruitment and descriptive representation significantly enhance bureaucratic legitimacy, yet that the legitimizing effect of meritocratic recruitment is particularly important in contexts with low quality of government. Citizens in contexts permeated by favoritism, corruption, and low political trust are more vigilant against political recruitment and place less importance on gender balance. Using a unique survey experiment fielded across 27 European countries, we find support for these propositions. Our findings have implications for understanding perceived trade‐offs between bureaucratic autonomy and accountability, and perceptions of bureaucratic legitimacy.

ABSTRACT Most explanations of the territorial unevenness of state capacity in the contemporary non‐Western world focus on domestic factors. While international causes may have been crucial in shaping state capacity in Europe in earlier centuries, the logic goes, they are of less relevance for developing countries in the postwar era. This article nuances this picture, by arguing that international factors continue to matter for state‐building. Using the geographic location of state institutions as a measure of state capacity, it finds that the spatial distribution of coercive institutions follows a U‐shaped pattern: High capacity in the capital, lower in the middle, and then increasing again as one approach a state border. The results thus suggest a need to reconsider accounts that downplay the role of international pressures in shaping state‐building after 1945, as well as highlighting the importance of distinguishing between different types of state power.

ABSTRACT Why do collaborative governance reforms so often falter in non‐Western states with deep administrative traditions? This article argues that while managerial practice is relevant, the primary cause of these shortcomings lies in macro‐level institutional constraints that powerfully shape network outcomes. Through a qualitative case study of Indonesia's mandated State Safety Program (SSP), we trace the network's observed meso‐level pathologies—a weak ad hoc hub and fragmentation—to their macro‐level institutional origins. Our analysis identifies three primary constraining forces: path dependency stemming from macro‐policy, the historical legacy of a siloed state, and friction from entrenched bureaucratic logics. The primary contribution of this research is to advance institutional theory by specifying a clear multi‐level causal mechanism linking macro‐level state institutional constraints to the network's meso‐level structure and its micro‐level procedural dysfunctions. We conclude that for collaborative governance to be effective, reform efforts must shift from improving micro‐level behaviors to strategically targeting the fundamental institutional “rules of the game”.

ABSTRACT This article presents a case study of Mexico City's social housing policy to expand our understanding of administrative burdens as a mechanism of political control over access to services and benefits. Faced with excessive and unclear waiting times for obtaining social housing via the city's social housing institute, citizens affiliate with social organizations that promise a reduction of those burdens in exchange for participation in collective protests and political proselytism to both sway and pressure local authorities and politicians to grant funding for housing projects and speed up construction permits. Vulnerable citizens in need of housing are captured in a political economy of administrative burdens conditioned by resource shortages in the formal bureaucracy and political leverage over the reduction of burdens. Understanding how political patronage may become engrained in policy implementation is relevant for the Global South but also for other contexts where concerns are growing over the weaponization of the state for political gain.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how institutional mechanisms shape gender disparities in judicial promotion within a career‐based civil‐law system, where judges advance through merit‐based hierarchies punctuated by discretionary appointments to higher courts. By design, civil‐law judiciaries are typically governed by bureaucratic, merit‐based promotion procedures. Yet even in such systems, women remain underrepresented in senior judicial positions. We develop a model to distinguish between two mechanisms— promotion aversion and sex discrimination—and derive empirically testable implications. Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset covering the full careers of nearly 7000 Spanish judges from 2005 to 2023, we combine survival models, matched mixed‐effects regressions, and data on voluntary specialization exams to analyze career advancement. Our results show that promotion aversion and sex discrimination operate at different stages of judicial careers: women who apply for promotion are highly qualified and successful in early‐career moves, but face structural barriers in later discretionary appointments. These findings challenge assumptions about the neutrality of bureaucratic promotion systems and underscore the role of institutional discretion in reproducing inequality. The paper contributes to comparative studies of career public servants and the governance of judicial hierarchies.