The forthcoming article “Competitive diplomacy in bargaining and war” by Joseph J. Ruggiero is summarized by the author below.

Diplomacy can advance state interests; however, if each side of a zero-sum dispute can use diplomacy to improve its terms of peace, these efforts are fundamentally competitive. This paper introduces the concept of competitive diplomacy to crisis bargaining, which is defined by three core properties: (1) it is costly, (2) it does not enhance a country’s war payoffs, and (3) it can improve a country’s payoff from cooperation. Competitive diplomacy as such becomes a channel through which characteristics of a potential war can affect the quality of peace, makes cooperation less efficient, and affects a country’s propensity to fight. How does the incentive to compete in diplomacy affect the prospects of cooperation?  Which settings fare well at averting conflict while simultaneously preserving the largest gains from peace?

To answer these questions, I develop a game-theoretic model of war that captures the core trade-off between internalizing the gains from cooperation and exerting costly effort to reach preferable peace deals. There are two key ingredients of the model that establish novel results. First, while existing models treat proposers as either predetermined or randomly recognized by exogenous probability, my approach treats agenda-setting power as endogenous to a country’s performance in pre-bargaining competition. Second, this paper allows periodic outcomes to persist into the future at varying rates, which affects a country’s incentive to cooperate and their willingness to compete.

The analysis reveals new insights. First, I find that costly wars endogenously create costly peace. Even if wars never occur on the path of play, greater costs of war imply a larger surplus from cooperation. As the surplus expands, agenda-setting power becomes more valuable, creating a stronger incentive to engage in competitive diplomacy. The model also identifies when war is more efficient than cooperation. After a division of the pie is reached, through war or cooperation, it persists until an opportunity to renegotiate arises. Countries are then driven to fight efficient wars by two forces: the (exogenous) differential persistence of outcomes and the (endogenous) equilibrium effort in competitive diplomacy. The logic is analogous to that of “ripping off the bandage.”

I then extend the model to examine how frictions to cooperation affect the incentives for diplomatic competition and conflict, finding that states may risk delay in attempt to free ride on their adversary’s efforts in obtaining peace. As a result, frictions simultaneously protect against the erosion of the bargaining surplus caused by competitive diplomacy. Likewise, the model suggests that the Pareto optimal level of competition counterintuitively maximizes the probability of delay when peace deals are reliable. Reliable peace deals that avert efficient wars therefore create a trade-off between welfare and timely settlement.

The model predicts that there will not be an association between competitive diplomatic efforts and cooperative gains in equilibrium across cases. The analysis also highlights that changes to the international environment, as opposed to specific characteristics of a bilateral relationship, can give rise to war. Further, the extension to consider settlement frictions has implications on how peace mediators should approach conflict resolution in contemporary crisis situations: the model suggests that reducing frictions to cooperation—while reducing delay—can actually make both sides worse off.

About the Author: Joseph J. Ruggiero is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Their research “Competitive diplomacy in bargaining and war” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Balancing bossism: State expansion in the face of elite capture” by Anna F. Callis and Christopher L. Carter is summarized by the author(s) below.

Central governments often rely on local elites to implement policies in distant regions. While this can extend state influence, it can also lead to a single elite (a political boss) dominating local politics and obstructing state initiatives. Our research examines how weak states can counter this challenge through balancing—creating new local positions with distinct appointment rules that offset the power of local bosses. We analyze turn-of-the-20th-century Peru, where local bosses often captured justices of the peace, key positions of local authority, to create and reinforce their monopoly on local power. We leverage a natural experiment in population-based appointment rules to show that—in areas with a justice of the peace—the Peruvian government introduced lieutenant governors, who operated under different appointment criteria and were thus autonomous from local bosses. We show that this balancing strategy allowed the central state to implement policies that bosses frequently opposed, including an important education census.

The implications of elite capture for state capacity extend far beyond historical Latin America. In peripheral areas across the Global South today, figures such as mining companies, warlords, drug gangs, and political brokers exert considerable control, often shaping state capacity to serve their interests. Our findings suggest that instead of directly confronting powerful elites—an option that may be infeasible for weak states—governments can strategically reconfigure local authority to foster competition among elites. This approach presents a potentially viable strategy for policymakers seeking to implement reforms in regions where entrenched interests have long resisted state intervention.

About the Author(s): Anna F. Callis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Law at Lafayette College and Christopher L. Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and John L. Nau III Assistant Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. Their research “Balancing bossism: State expansion in the face of elite capture” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “States, cities, and border control: Do sub-state collectives have a right to protect vulnerable people on the move?” by Kim Angell is summarized by the author below.

“A standard argument in favor of a state’s right to control its borders appeals to the value of collective self-determination. The idea, roughly, is that a state’s members have a morally significant interest in freely determining the values, goals, and practices that apply within their territory. Outsiders may bring unwanted changes, either by taxing the state’s resources or by introducing different values, goals, and practices. Collective self-determination, therefore, typically requires rights of border control. However, the state’s right to control its borders is not absolute. Outsiders have a significant interest in the protection of basic human rights, and each state must do its share in extending such protection to vulnerable people on the move. But as long as the state has fulfilled its ‘fair share’ (whatever that may be), it may exercise discretionary border control beyond that. Or so the standard argument from self-determination goes.

This paper challenges the self-determination argument on its own terms. The key idea is that what is valuable for state collectives might also be valuable for substate collectives. If we are to consistently value collective self-determination, we must look beyond the state level and consider whether substate collectives—such as cities—may also have relevant interests in immigration policy.

In many cases, cities have expressed strong solidarity with vulnerable people on the move, declaring their willingness to protect additional vulnerable immigrants—above and beyond those protected by the state. The paper discusses various examples of this, both from Europe (e.g., the Solidarity Cities network) and North America (e.g., the sanctuary city movement). If cities have such relevant goals and are capable of self-determination, they have a valid claim to protect additional vulnerable people on the move. This holds regardless of whether those people are UN Convention refugees, asylum seekers, unauthorized immigrants, or individuals with various liminal legal statuses.

A city’s claim to protect additional vulnerable people on the move must, of course, be balanced against the state’s claim to close its borders. After all, if self-determination matters, it must matter on both sides. Yet, as the paper demonstrates, this balancing process will inevitably result in a moral right for the city to protect an additional quota of vulnerable people on the move. While the exact size of this quota will vary from case to case, it will never be empty.

This result is quite surprising, given that the value of self-determination has traditionally been used to defend strong rights of border control for states. A key message of this paper, then, is that one of the most central arguments in the debate on immigration and border control must be reassessed.”

About the Author: Kim Angell is a Research Programme Manager at The Norwegian Nobel Institute. Their research “States, cities, and border control: Do sub-state collectives have a right to protect vulnerable people on the move?” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Unpacking the role of in-group bias in US public opinion on human rights violations” by Rebecca Cordell is summarized by the author below.

Americans are more likely to oppose human rights abuses perpetrated by a political out-group. Simply changing the perpetrator’s political party—from an in-group to an out-group—can determine whether individuals oppose their government’s human rights violations.

To understand what shapes public responses to domestic human rights violations, I conducted a national conjoint survey experiment with 3,200 US respondents. Participants evaluated different physical integrity rights abuse scenarios (including arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearances) according to their disapproval and willingness to mobilize against the abuse.

For each violation, I varied the perpetrator and elite cue giver’s party affiliation and the target’s race, religion, and citizenship, as well as other contextual factors. To identify the effect of in-group bias, I compared how respondents reacted to abuses when they shared identities with these actors versus when they did not. Examining the relative influence of different identity characteristics is important, as an individual (bystander observing the violation) may have multiple connections to the actors in abuses at the same time.

Results show the perpetrator’s identity plays a key role in shaping respondents’ choices. Individuals are more likely to oppose abuses when the perpetrator is from the opposing political party. These patterns held across different political leaders, from US governors to presidents, and applied to both Democrat and Republican supporters. However, there are limits to partisan loyalty. In-group perpetrators are less likely to get away with targeting their supporters’ racial in-group or when bystanders share many identities with targets and elite cue givers.

Why does the perpetrator’s party identity matter so much? In U.S. politics, party loyalty dominates public attitudes on a range of topics, and people tend to see political leaders as the ones responsible for protecting rights. This hierarchy of blame can trigger strong in-group defenses to protect the group’s moral reputation, and punitive out-group demands for accountability. This powerful focus on the perpetrator can overshadow concern for the victim and make it harder for political elites to shift public opinion on abuses.

These findings have serious implications for policymakers and human rights groups. In democracies, human rights depend on public accountability, and public opinion can play a crucial role in shaping government behavior. While Americans are more likely to oppose abuses by political opponents, they may be inclined to excuse or overlook violations committed by their own side. This can reduce the political costs of repression and make it easier for governments to evade accountability.

About the Author: Rebecca Cordell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Their research “Unpacking the role of in-group bias in US public opinion on human rights violations” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “The logic of secret alliances” by Peter Bils and Bradley C. Smith is summarized by the author(s) below.

A primary goal of military alliances is to deter aggression from enemies. Traditionally, alliances are understood to achieve this goal by serving as a costly signal of members’ commitment to fight alongside one another against a shared enemy. By observing allies engage in costly action such as policy coordination or the provision of military equipment, enemies infer that only states seriously committed to each other’s defense would bear these costs. Through this logic, alliances alter the calculus of deterrence and reduce an enemy’s incentive to attack.

In light of this signaling logic, secret alliances stand out as odd. For the signaling mechanism to operate, it is self-evident that an alliance, and the costs imposed by it, must be visible to adversaries. This presents a puzzle: if a primary goal of alliances is to deter enemies through signaling, then why would allies keep their commitments to one another secret?

In this paper, we argue that secret alliances are an attractive option when the alliance may act as a signal of members’ alignment. In our theory, alliances play two roles. First, they aggregate capabilities, allowing members to better resist aggression from a shared enemy. Second, and importantly for our argument, the presence of an alliance may endogenously reveal information about the constellation of interests in the international system. Consequently, a new alliance can indicate that a state previously thought to be friendly is, in reality, an adversary. We argue that if there is significant uncertainty about the alignment of states’ interests then the second effect dominates and secret alliances emerge.

To develop this argument, we analyze a formal model in which states may enter into secret or public alliance agreements. We find that if there is uncertainty about the alignment of interests then secret alliances occur in equilibrium. We also find that secret alliances have general effects on deterrence, undermining the deterrent value of concurrent public alliances.

Our theory explains variation in the prevalence of secret alliances over time. Prior to World War I secret alliances were the norm. However, by the Cold War era they are virtually non-existent.  Our model points to the emergence of two phenomena after World War II to explain this pattern. First, the movement of the international system from a multipolar to bipolar environment reduced uncertainty about states’ alignments. Second, the advent of nuclear weapons significantly increased the deterrent value of alliances, further mitigating the need for states to maintain secrecy about their alignments.

About the Author(s): Peter Bils is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Economics at Vanderbilt University and Bradley C. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Their research “The logic of secret alliances” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Complementarity in alliances: How strategic compatibility and hierarchy promote efficient cooperation in international security” by J. Andrés Gannon is summarized by the author below.

How can defense alliances effectively harness the benefits of collective action when faced with significant coordination challenges and the risks of opportunism? This study investigates the conditions under which states can overcome these inherent difficulties to achieve efficient cooperation in international security. I argue that alliances characterized by high strategic compatibility and a hierarchical structure are better equipped to minimize opportunism and coordination costs. This, in turn, facilitates an efficient distribution of defense capabilities among member states, fostering complementarity and a functional division of labor rather than promoting redundant military investments.

To assess this theoretical framework, I develop a novel network-level measure of the division of labor within alliances. This measure is applied to an extensive dataset of national military capabilities spanning from 1970 to 2014. The empirical analysis also incorporates improved measures of strategic compatibility—defined as the extent to which states concur on the nature of the international threat environment—and hierarchy, understood as an asymmetric distribution of influence over security decisions within the alliance.

The findings indicate a robust positive association: alliances with high strategic compatibility and greater hierarchy exhibit a significantly higher division of labor. This suggests that shared security interests and centralized decision-making structures within an alliance are crucial factors that mitigate the inherent costs of collective action, enabling a more rational and efficient allocation of defense responsibilities.

This research offers several contributions to the understanding of international security. It clarifies the interaction between alliance structures and armament policies, demonstrating that the distribution of military capabilities within an alliance is shaped by the alignment of security interests and the nature of its decision-making framework. Furthermore, it introduces complementarity as a distinct mechanism through which alliances can enhance the efficiency of defense spending and collective security outcomes. Finally, the study challenges the conventional view of states as undifferentiated “like-units” in the international system by providing evidence of functional differentiation emerging from cooperative security arrangements. These insights underscore the importance of alliance design in promoting efficient and effective international security cooperation.

About the Author: J. Andrés Gannon is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and a Faculty Affiliate at the Data Science Institute. Their research “Complementarity in alliances: How strategic compatibility and hierarchy promote efficient cooperation in international security” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Brook no compromise: How to negotiate a united front” by Elaine Yao is summarized by the author below.

Coordination is a central challenge in politics. To pass legislative agendas, maintain authoritarian control, or respond to financial crises, political parties, ruling elites, and international organizations must first overcome internal disagreements over the correct path to take. However, the process by which organizations settle these disagreements – and the reasons they sometimes fail – is often hard to observe and poorly understood, particularly in settings where institutional rules and procedures do not impose clear structure on the coordination process.

This paper uses a dynamic game-theoretic model to explore how coordination occurs in such environments. The game centers on each side’s uncertainty over their counterpart’s willingness to compromise: would they accept a second-best outcome, or prefer to stick with the status quo if their favorite outcome is unavailable? The model captures a stylized setting in which players must choose when to “play hardball” – to make an irreversible commitment that removes an option from consideration. Such actions are both costly and risky: if miscalibrated, they can lock players into a mutually unfavorable status quo.

What the paper shows, however, is that hardball tactics also serve an informational function. Uncompromising actors reveal themselves by acting early, allowing more flexible actors to learn about their opponent’s type over time. The quality of this screening process – how fast and beneficial it is – is a crucial factor shaping coordination outcomes. Broadly speaking, faster screening reduces both uncertainty in coordination outcomes and avoidable miscoordination; noisier or less beneficial screening has the opposite effect.

One particularly interesting result is that when players are extremely different – in their capacity to play hardball, their prior beliefs about one another’s obstinacy, or their valuations of the status quo and potential reforms – both players have an incentive to stall longer. Preemptive incentives are strongest when players are on relatively equal footing, creating the highest incidence of avoidable miscoordination.

The model contributes to a growing literature on coordination under uncertainty, offering a tractable framework for analyzing how endogenous information acquisition and exogenous shocks (e.g., leaks of players’ willingness to compromise) affect timing, credibility, and welfare. It also helps explain real-world puzzles—such as failed legislative coalitions or fractured insurgencies—where actors appear to act too soon or too cautiously despite having shared interests. In doing so, the model shifts attention away from preference divergence or institutional design and toward the strategic logic of learning and commitment under informational frictions.

About the Author: Elaine Yao is a Ph.D candidate in Politics at Princeton University and an incoming assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Their research “Brook no compromise: How to negotiate a united front” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Strategic litigation as a challenge for deliberative democracy” by Svenja Ahlhaus is summarized by the author below.

Strategic litigation is a growing public concern, but remains understudied in democratic theory. In strategic litigation, collectives go to court with a political agenda that goes beyond their specific case. Especially climate litigation and religious-conservative litigation are at the center of public attention in recent years. How should we assess the legitimacy of strategic litigation? From the perspective of democratic theory, it seems insufficient to argue that the legitimacy of the use of legal contestation either depends on a prior normative judgment about the substantive goal (e.g. strategic litigation is legitimate if it is “progressive”) or the social status of the plaintiffs (e.g. strategic litigation is legitimate if it is used by minorities/marginalized groups).

In “Strategic Litigation as a Challenge for Deliberative Democracy”, forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, I propose a new two-step framework for evaluating strategic litigation from the perspective of deliberative democracy.  

First, I argue that we should understand strategic litigation as a collaborative and mobilizing use of the institution of legal contestation, meaning that we should analyze which social groups, in what way, are mobilized by strategic litigation. I describe a pattern of differentiated mobilization that characterizes the social effects of strategic litigation. Second, an assessment of the legitimacy of strategic litigation should ask whether strategic litigation empowers or disempowers citizens in the long run. Here, I build on Cristina Lafont’s idea of “blind deference” to define as disempowering those political practices in which citizens lack control over decision-makers and a sense of alignment with policy-decisions. Ultimately, the legitimacy of strategic litigation depends on whether it requires or avoids blind deference over time.

The advantage of my deliberative framework is that it includes the social effects of strategic litigation in its normative analysis. I show how strategic litigation is a form of political participation whose details are accessible for the legal community but remain opaque to the majority of citizens. Lacking legal knowledge to follow these cases, ordinary citizens are mainly activated by compelling narratives crafted around strategic litigation by professional legal organizations. This pattern of mobilization, which characterizes politically “progressive” and “regressive” cases, has ambivalent potential. It can contribute to empowering citizens in three ways: by providing an opportunity to shift public attention (agenda-setting); for forming and strengthening social groups (group-strengthening); and for highlighting institutional dysfunctions which make strategic litigation necessary (context-disclosing).

However, this pattern of mobilization can also be used to disempower citizens. As citizens are often only aware of the public narrative created around strategic lawsuits, there can be mismatches between a litigation collective’s public narrative and their actual agenda (agenda-masking), litigation collectives can simulate broad public support for their case (group-simulating), and they can make misleading claims about the institutional context and about potential effects of their case (context-distorting). For deliberative democrats, the main challenge of strategic litigation is that it mobilizes citizens in a way that makes it difficult for them to distinguish empowering from disempowering uses, meaning that they cannot easily fulfill their role of holding litigation collectives to account.

About the Author: Svenja Ahlhaus is an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at University of Münster. Their research “Strategic litigation as a challenge for deliberative democracy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Global competition, local unions, and political representation: Disentangling mechanisms” by Michael Becher and Daniel Stegmueller is summarized by the author(s) below.

How does democracy function in the face of increased globalization? Our article examines the response of elected policymakers in the United States to the steep rise in import competition from China after 1990. It provides evidence that this economic shock altered how legislators in Congress voted on key economic issues. On average, legislators in districts hit by the shock were less likely to vote for bills targeted towards the less fortunate. We find that this change is to a significant degree due to the shock weakening labor unions. Altogether, the evidence suggests that unions constitute an important mechanism that links global competition to democratic representation.

While prior research has examined the effects of import competition on elections and legislative votes, it paid relatively little attention to disentangling mechanisms in general and the role of labor unions in particular. Building on the theory that unions can serve as a countervailing power that enhances the representation of non-elite workers in the political process but whose strength is susceptible to economic shocks, we draw on recent advances in the statistical analysis of mechanisms and roll-call data from the House of Representatives matched to district characteristics to assess the relevance of the union mechanism. It is well known that analyzing mechanisms is difficult. Intuitively, scholars face a double threat of confounding. One threat is about the treatment variable (here: import exposure). Another is about the mediator variable (here: union density). As we cannot randomize import competition and union density, we turn to a novel instrumental variable approach for causal mediation. Following research on international trade and labor unions, we employ separate instrumental variables for the treatment on trade shocks and the moderator variable on unions. We combine them in a semiparametric instrumental variable approach, which enables us to relax identification assumptions required in the standard regression approach for unpacking causal mechanisms.

We find that import competition in the 1990s did substantively reduce district-level unionization in the 2000s. In turn, by weakening unions, import competition reduced legislators’ support for compensation policies helping trade losers (e.g., extending unemployment benefits, job training, trade adjustment assistance). Through weaker unions, import competition also increased legislative support for additional trade liberalization. A central quantity of interest for our investigation is the relative magnitude of the union mechanism. How much of the effect of the economic shock on legislative votes is due to changes in union strength? Our decomposition suggests that about half of the effect of import exposure on declining legislative support for compensation works though the mechanism of weaker unions. On trade policy, unions account for approximately one third of the total effect in the direction of less opposition to further trade liberalization.

Our results underscore that, by undermining unions, import competition reduced democracy’s willingness to compensate and support workers and regions adversely affected by trade (at least in the US). It thus eroded a central component of the post-war  “embedded liberalism” growth model, which combined free trade with domestic compensation underwritten by domestic institutions.

About the Author(s): Michael Becher is a Professor in political science at IE University and Daniel Stegmueller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. Their research “Global competition, local unions, and political representation: Disentangling mechanisms” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Shifting power, interstate war, and domestic politics” by Scott Wolford and Yuji Masumura is summarized by the author(s) below.

National leaders are rarely punished for winning wars, yet that seems to be precisely what happened after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese war. Public dissastisfaction with the Treaty of Portsmouth boiled over into violence and the fall of the government, leaders’ remonstrations that they’d won a significant preventive victory not withstanding. Why?

We answer this question with a game-theoretic model in which shifting power undermines foreign states’ commitments to the status quo, yet domestic leaders can’t credibly communicate the true scale of averted shifts after preventive war. Publics prefer war only for large prospective power shifts, but preventive war renders the true size of averted shifts unobservable, incentivizing leaders to lie ex post to avoid political punishment. When publics are ex ante skeptical over shift size and war outcomes are middling, the probabilities of war and political punishment, as well as public skepticism over averted shifts and the chances of erroneous punishment, all increase in war outcomes. Public strategies of punishing military failures are particularly unsuccessful at discouraging undesirable preventive wars, yet the same conditions that encourage preventive war undermine its political benefits.

We use intra-elite debates in prominent Japanese newspapers before and after the war to show that (a) there was prewar skepticism over the true scale of the looming power shfit in Russia’s favor and (b) the government’s claims that matters would’ve been worse without war were honest yet couldn’t convince a skeptical domestic audience.

About the Author(s): Scott Wolford is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and Co-Director of the Correlates of War Project and Yuji Masumura is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research “Shifting power, interstate war, and domestic politics” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.