How does chronic terrorism affect support for democracy in fragile states? While most research examines isolated attacks in stable democracies, little is known about persistent violence in insecure, weakly institutionalised contexts. This paper addresses that gap by analysing Africa, where terrorism is widespread and democratic transitions remain incomplete. Using Afrobarometer survey data matched with terrorism events, we employ an entropy balancing strategy within an unexpected-event-during-survey (UESD) design to estimate causal effects. We find that terrorism consistently undermines democratic support – especially in countries with stronger liberal institutions and lower development. Younger and older citizens are particularly susceptible to attitudinal shifts. These findings highlight how terrorism’s political impact hinges not just on exposure, but also on broader structural vulnerabilities shaped by institutions, development, and demography. The study advances theories of authoritarian reflex and threat perception, offering new insights into sustaining democracy amid chronic insecurity.

A large literature in psychology and economics suggests that enrolment into groups shapes conflict behavior, even if the groups lack a salient identity. Our experimental design systematically modifies group formation and prize sharing rules to explain behavioral differences between conflicts among individuals and intergroup feuds. Apart from rather high levels of conflict expenditure in all treatments, we find no specific evidence for outgroup hostility. Group formation induces conditional cooperation within the groups. The prize distribution rules have a strong aggregate impact. Proportional prize sharing in winning groups fosters expenditure while egalitarian prize-sharing – a staple of such experiments – induces the predicted free-rider effects. Overall, our results support inequality aversion rather than parochial altruism as an explanation for differences in expenditures between individual and group conflicts.

Studies on the impacts of communication technologies on civil conflict often focus on the presence of cell phone networks and draw mixed conclusions. Meanwhile, communication technologies have been advancing and the nature of telecommunication has changed. I argue that the richness of information exchange marked by the introduction of 3G mobile technologies provides an opportunity to push the debate forward, by leading to an increase in the violence of insurgent groups in a high-intensity episode. I focus on Afghanistan as a tough test for my argument. Analysing the effect of introducing 3G network in existing 2G network areas using matched wake analysis and spatial models, I find that the introduction of 3G is associated with an increase in the number of violent events, IED attacks, and coordinated multiple attacks perpetrated by Afghan insurgents. The results are robust to different sizes of spatial units, placebo tests, and less likely to suffer from reporting bias.

Based on an extension of selectorate theory, we characterize three structural conditions that make a coup likely: winning coalition size near the size that yields minimum utility to its members (so small or intermediate-sized coalitions), low economic productivity, and a leader relatively new to office. Policy misallocation exacerbates the risk of a coup. The theory and evidence show two mechanisms that increase the risk of coup: policy under-provision and over-provision. Leaders whose policy provisions are commensurate with expectations experience fewer coups. One anticipatory response of leaders to a heightened coup risk is to change the government’s institutions. High coup risks increase the likelihood of institution change whether a coup actually occurs or not. The threat of an under-provision coup tends to result in an expansion of the winning coalition size (democratization), while an elevated risk of an over-provision coup typically results in a contraction in coalition size whether a coup actually occurs or not.

How do dictators successfully counterbalance (fragment their coercive apparatus) despite the significant risk of military retaliation? Drawing on recent insights that the timing of coup-proofing is essential to its success, I argue that dictators are more likely to increase counterbalancing efforts in the aftermath of failed coups. I test this proposition in a difference-in-differences framework, using novel data on coups and counterbalancing, and find a statistically significant effect of coup failure. I substantiate my analysis with two illustrative examples from Sierra Leone and Turkey that probe the plausibility of my theorized mechanism. My findings contribute to the growing literature on the effects of failed coups by opening up the discussion on their long-term structural consequences for the dictator’s security apparatus.

How do international endorsements of separatist movements by foreign powers impact popular views toward secession? Much literature on secessionist movements focuses on subnational bargaining between the government and separatist groups. However, these models often neglect international audiences, who offer endorsement and other forms of support for separatist groups. This paper demonstrates that when foreign powers take positions on secessionist activities, these actions can affect popular support for such movements. In a survey experiment conducted before Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we examine Ukrainians’ attitudes toward the Russian-backed separatist movement in the Donbas region. We randomize hypothetical scenarios in which foreign powers endorse secession and measure changes in public attitudes in both the parent state and the occupied territories under separatist control. Our results show that even in conflict-affected settings where attitudes have presumably hardened, international endorsements can influence popular support for secessionist movements.

The United States gives substantial aid to the militaries of autocratic governments that abuse human rights. US officials claim this aid is necessary to manage security threats, but others argue the United States should prioritize aid for governments that reflect democratic values. How do these competing concerns shape Americans’ attitudes toward military aid? Through an experiment implemented on four surveys, I document a strong preference for aiding democracies that respect human rights, and this preference is robust to the presence of terrorism threats. However, internationalist Americans become especially less likely to prioritize democratic values when terrorist threats exist. Descriptive survey questions reinforce this pattern by showing how internationalists who support military aid the most are conflicted proponents of prioritizing democratic values in US foreign policy. The article extends research on attitudes toward foreign aid and illustrates an important limitation to the influence of democratic values on Americans’ foreign policy preferences.

Uncertainty about other states’ willingness to cooperate often impedes collective action. Many multilateral agreements address this by incorporating Minimum Participation Rules (MPRs), which are provision-point mechanisms that specify the minimum coalition size required for a treaty to enter into force. Public and institutional choice theories suggest that such mechanisms lower barriers to participation by reducing coordination problems and limiting opportunities for freeriding. To test this assumption, we introduce a survival estimator to evaluate how the inclusion and design of MPRs impact treaty ratification across diverse issue areas. Drawing on data from agreements deposited with the United Nations Secretary-General, this study offers the first systematic analysis of MPRs in multilateral treaty cooperation. We find that threshold provisions accelerate ratification, even in contexts where incentives to freeride are unlikely to be significant.

This paper revisits the well-known volunteer’s dilemma on the production of a public good when a single participant is sufficient for the task. We propose a cost-sharing model with a volunteering cost that decreases exponentially in the number of volunteers. We show that, at the unique mixed-strategy equilibrium, the probability of production may increase in the number of players for sufficiently low volunteering costs. This provides an alternative account of the fit of the model with some political-military conflict situations: A larger group does erode the individual incentive to volunteer but in an offsetting way that favors the production of the public good. A second result is that the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium may be more socially efficient than the pure-strategy Nash equilibrium for some parameter values, which is a major reversal with respect to the standard dilemma and many other coordination games.

Ethnic riots tend to occur in the same places over time. We study whether this serial correlation exists because ethnic riots tend to be self-perpetuating or because both past and future riots are caused by the same underlying factors that persist through time. To answer this question, we leverage the fact that the timing of major Hindu festivals in India is exogenously determined by the lunar calendar and that when a major Hindu festival happens to fall on a Friday—the principal day Muslims attend mosque—the likelihood of a Hindu-Muslim riot increases significantly. Using this instrument, we find that the well-documented serial correlation in Hindu-Muslim riots disappears entirely (T = 1950–2006). This suggests that the observed recurrence of riots is not driven by the riots themselves, but by underlying conditions that remain unaddressed. Once these confounding factors are accounted for, we find no “additional” effect of past riots on future riots.