In weak-state settings, clientelism is an attractive political strategy, yet normatively fraught, thereby constituting a “legal grey area”. This study examines two key features of commonplace clientelism that may govern whether and to what extent citizens deem it punishable by the law. We posit a “particularism penalty” – more exclusive targeting criteria increase citizens’ desired punishment, and an “outgroup actor penalty” - preferred punishment is greater for political opponents.

Contemporary protectionist policies in the U.S. are often initiated by the executive branch but enforced unevenly across firms. We argue that such uneven enforcement arises because legislators—with both institutional capacity and local motivation—shield connected firms from executive protectionist measures. We test this claim using the Trump administration’s Buy American Act (BAA), which penalized firms reliant on foreign, especially Chinese, suppliers. Combining firm-level data on federal contracts, supply chains, and campaign contributions, we analyze 1,958 firms (2015–2019).

Measuring regime support in closed autocracies is notoriously challenging due to preference falsification, state censorship, and pervasive propaganda. We introduce a novel behavioral measure of regime loyalty based on subtle expressions of allegiance in soldier obituaries published in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. Our empirical analysis draws on a large-scale dataset of over one million scanned pages from roughly 160,000 newspaper issues across 260 unique local news outlets.

In many parts of the world, judges are reassigned or transferred frequently. We argue that transfers undermine court productivity and cause judges to prioritize easier and recently filed cases. We test these propositions using big data from the courts of first instance in India, in which there are more than 40 million cases pending, and a research design that leverages transfers due to judge retirements at precisely age 60. The data suggest that judge transfers are frequent, occurring once every 10 months.

This paper examines how social group boundaries are renegotiated in response to demographic change in Western societies, focusing on immigration from culturally diverse backgrounds. Using Spain as a case, we explore how both Spanish natives (the majority group, Spaniards with two Spanish-born parents) and Latin American immigrants—who share linguistic and cultural affinities with natives—react to the perceived growth of Moroccans, a more culturally distant immigrant group.

Public policies are expected to vary across regime types. However, the association between regime type and policy remains inconclusive. Efforts to solve this inconclusiveness by further differentiating across types of authoritarian regimes have been insufficient. Focusing on the theoretical mechanisms behind the expected associations between regime type and policy, I propose a novel framework to analyse policymaking and outcomes across regimes.

Do place-based interventions that raise visibility and economic activity affect far-right voting? We study the Tour de France (TdF) as a case of brief but highly visible exposure that combines economic activity with symbolic recognition. Using variation in the annual TdF route between 2002 and 2022, we show that exposed municipalities experience declines in far-right support of 0.03–0.04 standard deviations. The effect exceeds 0.1 standard deviations in recent elections and is strongest in poorer areas and in towns with high prior far-right support.

When are public comments characterized by high information quality more likely to occur in bureaucratic policymaking? We answer this question using a text-as-data approach applied to an original dataset covering more than 20,000 comments across 1,037 policy acts issued by the European Commission. We construct four measures capturing our multi-dimensional concept of information quality of comments. Our argument emphasizes the interplay between the demand and supply of information provision and highlights the critical role of institutional factors in explaining comments’ information quality.