The forthcoming article “Fiscal legibility and state development: Theory and evidence from colonial Mexico” by Francisco Garfias and Emily A. Sellars is summarized by the author(s) below.

What enables political centralization and state development? In this article, we focus on the role of fiscal legibility: the ability of central authorities to independently observe, measure, and assess local populations, wealth, and activities for taxation and control.

Our theory highlights an interdependence between fiscal legibility and the consolidation of authority under a central ruler. In areas with low fiscal legibility, central rulers often resort to indirect rule, ceding autonomy to local elites to govern on behalf of the center. Though sometimes advantageous for central authorities, indirect rule requires giving up revenue and control to powerful elites. As fiscal legibility improves, central authorities can better monitor local intermediaries, making political centralization—the replacement of autonomous intermediaries with direct agents of the state—more attractive.

Under more centralized arrangements, rulers have an incentive to invest in improving legibility through efforts like conducting censuses or establishing tax offices to better monitor agents in the periphery, efforts that have little immediate benefit under indirect forms of rule. Because of this interdependence between centralization and fiscal legibility, a sudden increase in state informational capacity can lead to longer-term divergence in state development.

To assess these ideas empirically, we examine the consequences of a sudden improvement in fiscal legibility in colonial Mexico: the discovery of the patio process to refine silver in the 1550s. This new technology relied on mercury to extract silver in a known ratio. The Spanish Crown was able to exploit its monopoly over the distribution of this key input to track fluctuations in local silver production, drastically improving the center’s ability to monitor economic conditions in silver-producing areas.

Using a differences-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that this sudden increase in fiscal legibility led to an acceleration in political centralization. Mining areas affected by the legibility shock experienced a faster transition from the administration of territory via encomiendas, a form of indirect rule, to corregimientos, a more direct form of rule through which intermediaries directly collected taxes and were hired and fired by the center. We then examine the longer-term implications of this legibility shock. We show that affected areas received greater state investment in informational capacity through the placement of post offices, further altering the trajectory of state development.

Our theory highlights the important connection between endogenous and exogenous sources of fiscal legibility, with important implications for longer-term divergence in state development. Where states lack information about the periphery, central authorities have little incentive to either centralize power or to invest to improve fiscal legibility. A single shock that raises fiscal legibility encourages both centralization and additional investment in informational capacity with far-reaching consequences for state development. The features of our empirical context allow us to provide quasi-experimental evidence on the connection between fiscal legibility and political centralization, a relationship that is typically endogenous and self-reinforcing.

About the Author(s): Francisco Garfias is an Associate Professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego and Emily A. Sellars is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Their research “Fiscal legibility and state development: Theory and evidence from colonial Mexico” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “When politicians behave badly: Political, democratic, and social consequences of political incivility” by Troels Bøggild and Carsten Jensen is summarized by the author(s) below.

Many citizens today believe that politics has an “incivility problem.” In the United States, 69% consider the government uncivil, and two-thirds think the problem is worsening. This perception is, at least in part, grounded in reality: uncivil exchanges between politicians, such as personal insults and interruptions, have become increasingly common and are widely broadcasted through traditional and social media.

Scholars, pundits, and politicians have expressed concerns that this rise in political incivility could harm the fundamental health of democracies. Incivility might not only diminish public trust in politicians but also have broader consequences for citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and their compliance with policies. As such, incivility can decrease both specific support for political actors and diffuse support for the political system and its capacity for problem solving.

The scientific literature has not provided clear insights into the consequences of increasing political incivility. Previous research has suggested a link between politicians’ incivility and public trust, but empirical results have been mixed. Our recent study addresses this lacuna on three levels. Theoretically, we argue that political incivility adversely affects not just citizens’ trust in politicians but also broader satisfaction with the democratic system and policy compliance. We integrate insights from social and political psychology into the literature on political incivility to develop our expectations.

Methodologically, we test our framework with a three-stage setup that overcomes the limitations of traditional survey experiments while maintaining strong causal identification. In the first stage, we develop and validate a scale to measure citizens’ perceptions of political incivility, showing that these perceptions reliably track real-world changes in elite rhetoric. In the second stage, we embed this scale in a multi-wave panel survey with over 6,000 Danish respondents, using generalized difference-in-differences models to estimate how citizens respond to changes in political incivility. In the third stage, we exploit a natural experiment during the COVID-19 crisis, which led to a “rally ’round the flag” effect and a sudden decrease in political incivility. This provided a unique opportunity to test whether this rally effect could be attributed to the drop in incivility.

Empirically, our study reports three consistent findings. First, we find that political incivility negatively affects trust in politicians. Second, we find that political incivility depresses citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and willingness to comply with COVID-19 restrictions. Third, we consistently find that these negative effects are driven by incivility rather than conflict on substantial issues.

Our study offers both methodological and substantive lessons. Methodologically, it provides an integrated approach to studying the effects of elite rhetoric on broader systemic attitudes and policy compliance. We discuss how criticism of survey experimental approaches can be addressed through complementary research designs. Substantively, our findings highlight discernible, negative democratic and social consequences of uncivil behavior between politicians. Importantly, our results show that citizens can distinguish between issue-related conflict and uncivil personal interactions, implying that it is possible to maintain high public trust, satisfaction in a democracy, and policy compliance with fierce political competition, as long as it remains issue-based and civil.

About the Author(s): Troels Bøggild is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University and Carsten Jensen is the director of Platform for Inequality Research at Aarhus University (PIREAU) and editor of Socio-Economic Review. Their research “When politicians behave badly: Political, democratic, and social consequences of political incivility“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Banking bad? A global field experiment on risk, reward, and regulation” by Michael G. Findley, Daniel L. Nielson, and J. C. Sharman is summarized by the author(s) below.

Do banks follow rules mandating that they police the global financial system to screen out dirty money? In seeking to find out, we formed a variety of shell companies, and through them made solicitations to all the world’s internationally connected banks for corporate bank accounts. 

Some of our shell companies posed a high corruption risk, some a high risk of terrorist financing, others suggested tax evasion, while still others were innocuous. Global and national rules state that banks are meant to apply a “risk-based approach” in differentiating between their corporate customers, applying more scrutiny to high- than low-risk approaches. After making thousands of email solicitations, however, we found that these rules don’t work: in practice, banks only marginally differentiated—if they differentiated at all—between high- and low-risk corporate customers in the rate at which they engaged, offered their services, or properly identified shell companies owners. We test three models against these results. 

A standard rational utility model suggests that banks weigh risk and reward in responding to customers. This perspective doesn’t explain why banks were insensitive to risk, however, nor why banks were just as insensitive to variations in the amount of money offered across different solicitations. A behavioral economics perspective is consistent with some of the results, but in some cases would predict larger substantive effect sizes than we observed. Banks’ lack of responsiveness to both risk and reward may be consistent with an institutionalist view that banks as organizations fall into habits and routines, standard operating procedures or “organizational scripts.” 

Finally, we argue that in judging the ethics of field experiments, researchers should focus on enhancing the public good and the merits of “studying up” in holding rich and powerful actors to account.

About the Author(s): Michael G. Findley is the Erwin Centennial Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, Daniel L. Nielson is a Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and J. C. Sharman is the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. Their research “Banking bad? A global field experiment on risk, reward, and regulation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “From powerholders to stakeholders: State-building with elite compensation in early medieval China” by Joy Chen, Erik H. Wang, and Xiaoming Zhang is summarized by the author(s) below.

Our article investigates a central question in the political economy of development: how do rulers resolve resistance to state-building from local powerholders who stand to lose from such efforts? This question is particularly important in settings where a central government maintains fragile political order and local powerholders retain considerable economic prowess, social prestige, and some coercive means to undermine the building of the state in their turfs. 

We theorize an important yet often overlooked strategy: compensating the local powerholders via a nascent bureaucracy. Besides offsetting the loss of economic rents, offices in the bureaucracy also serve the purposes of 1) mitigating the credible commitment problem for the ruler and 2) aligning the interests of the local powerholders and the ruler. 

Empirically, we exploit a major state-building Reform in the Northern Wei Dynasty of China (386 – 534 CE), which challenged the interests of aristocrats who exercised local autonomy. We built a unique dataset from textual and archaeological sources, such as dynastic archival records and excavated epitaphs and monuments. At its core are geocoded career histories of around 2,600 elites alongside the geographic distribution of fortified castles across northern China. Aristocrats in regions with (without) fortified castles serve as the treatment (control) group in our research.  

The state-building Reform of 485-486 CE sought to increase state penetration in the society and control local population directly. Both historical evidence and our own analyses suggest that the Reform succeeded in expanding central authority at the expense of the aristocrats in regions with fortified castles, who we operationalize as local powerholders with vested interest in the status quo.  

The puzzle becomes: why didn’t these powerful reform “losers” resist or undermine the Reform? Our difference-in-differences (DiD) estimates reveal that following the Reform, there is a sustained spike in the number of aristocrats from regions with such castles recruited into the bureaucracy as compensation in exchange for their acceptance of state penetration. Various auxiliary analyses all point to the strategic nature of this deal. 

We further unpack the mechanisms of bureaucratic compensation: credible commitment and interest realignment. Individual-level analyses of career histories indicate that those local powerholders, compensated with higher-ranked and more prestigious offices post-Reform, were also more likely to take the kind of positions in the bureaucracy that could help them expand networks of allies. This arrangement effectively made them too powerful for the ruler to renege on the deal. The bureaucracy, therefore, enabled the ruler to deliberately tie her own hands when compensating these powerholders.  

Equally important, the data suggests that the ruler compensated the aristocrats from castle areas with senior offices in the national government rather than in regional governments. When these aristocrats did serve in regional governments, they were positioned away from their hometowns. These arrangements, among others, reflect a conscious effort to transform the erstwhile local powerholders into national stakeholders of the political regime.  

Our findings contribute to the literature on state capacity, by demonstrating a non-violent pathway to state-building, and to the literature on political economy of reform, by highlighting bureaucracy as a compensation device. The strategy documented here also differs from typical “cooptation,” where local elites would remain localized after receiving nominal titles from the government. Bureaucratic compensation fully uproots and integrates the erstwhile powerholders into the upper echelon of political power, turning them into national stakeholders who support broader policies or reform that increase the regime’s rents. Our article also sheds light on a major puzzle of historical political economy, the so-called “First Great Divergence,” where similar “barbarian” invasions at similar times led to fragmentation in Europe but further state consolidation in China.

About the Author(s): Joy Chen is an assistant professor at the School of Economics, Renmin University of China, Erik H. Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University (NYU), and Xiaoming Zhang is an assistant professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University. Their research “From powerholders to stakeholders: State-building with elite compensation in early medieval China” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Race, legislative speech, and symbolic representation in Congress” by Arjun Vishwanath is summarized by the author below.

Most blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in America are represented by white members of Congress; in light of this, it is important to understand whether these groups are well represented by white MCs. A variety of studies have tested whether white legislators are more likely to vote in line with minority groups’ interests as they become more populous, but these studies do not point to a firm conclusion in any direction. By contrast, little work has examined whether white legislators are more likely to symbolically represent racial minority groups if they have more minority constituents.

This article addresses the question of whether white legislators are symbolically responsive—that is, if a minority group is more prevalent in the district, does its representative speak more about that racial group or evoke symbols particular to that group on the floor of Congress or in her electronic newsletters? I use supervised machine learning algorithms to detect the symbolic content of over thirteen million sentences with respect to blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The content identified by the model typically takes the form of group mentions (e.g., “Asian”, “Colombian”, “Hmong”, “AAPI”) or symbolic references to terms relevant to the group (e.g., “Rosa Parks”, “Selma”, “Cinco de Mayo”).

I find that white legislators are more likely to engage in symbolic speech of blacks, Hispanics, or Asians if the member hails from a district with more citizens of the respective group. This is true of both Democratic and Republican legislators, although Democratic legislators are more responsive to black group size in their symbolic speech about blacks than Republican legislators are.

While we observe differences across legislators—that is, a white MC from a 25% Hispanic district symbolically invokes Hispanics to a larger degree than another white MC from a 5% Hispanic district (controlling for legislator party and the ideology of the district)—I find that legislators do not actually adapt to constituency changes over time. I test this by looking at sudden changes to the district composition following redistricting. That is, if an MC’s district changed from 10% Hispanic to 15% Hispanic after redistricting, that MC does not increase her symbolic speech of Hispanics.

At first glance, it may seem obvious that white legislators will be symbolically responsive to minority group size. However, I replicate past work showing that legislators are no more likely to vote in line with minorities’ preferences in Congress if they have more minority constituents. Thus, we see white legislators with strongly conservative voting records in places like Texas who nonetheless speak about and engage regularly with their Hispanic constituencies.

This naturally raises the question of whether symbolic representation is meaningful, or whether legislators merely speak hollow words while betraying their constituents’ interests in policymaking. Although symbolic representation should not be taken as a substitute for substantive representation, the article concludes in discussing the ways in which symbolic representation might matter to citizens.

About the Author: Arjun Vishwanath is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Vanderbilt University in the Center for Effective Lawmaking and the Department of Political Science. Their research “Race, legislative speech, and symbolic representation in Congress” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Informational lobbying and commercial diplomacy” by Calvin Thrall is summarized by the author below.

Foreign affairs are primarily managed at the bilateral, state-to-state level. Further, while leaders themselves get involved in important relationships, bilateral diplomacy is typically delegated to the foreign policy bureaucracy: diplomats serving in the state’s foreign embassies. Diplomats are responsible for managing bilateral relationships across a wide range of issue areas—from commercial policy, to immigration, to scientific cooperation, among others—and they are given substantial discretion over their allocation of time and effort across issue areas. Yet we know little about how diplomats decide which issues to prioritize. What determines the content of diplomacy, across bilateral relationships and time?

I argue that the policy issues that diplomats prioritize are affected by their sources of information about their host state. In order to gauge the most pressing issues in a bilateral relationship, diplomats must first collect intelligence on what is happening in the host state. Due to resource and personnel constraints, diplomats typically rely on various organizations in the host state—business associations, human rights NGOs, expatriate groups, etc—to supply much of their intelligence. I argue that these host state organizations are akin to interest groups engaging in informational lobbying: by providing diplomats with intelligence about an issue of relevance to them, these groups subsidize diplomatic effort in that issue area and increase the likelihood that the embassy dedicates more time to their preferred issue. When diplomats receive more information about a specific issue area, they are more likely to allocate greater attention to that issue.

I evaluate this argument in the context of the expansion of one type of influential interest group: American Chambers of Commerce (AmChams), which are composed of U.S. firms operating abroad in a particular country (e.g. AmCham China, AmCham France). They advocate for pro-business policies in areas such as taxation, investment, and trade. AmChams proliferated widely in the post-WWII period, and provided substantial information to U.S. diplomats about commercial issues in the states where they opened. If my theory is correct, diplomats should shift their attention towards commercial issues once an AmCham begins operating in their host state.

How to measure diplomatic attention at the country-year level, since diplomatic activity is classified? I use modern natural language processing techniques to extract information about diplomatic activity from nearly 1,500 oral history interviews with former U.S. diplomats (conducted by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training), allowing me to determine how much different embassies focused on commercial issues over time. I show that, when a new AmCham opens, diplomats in that host state go on to pay greater attention to commercial issues relative to states without AmChams. Further, leveraging the fact that U.S. diplomats rotate to new embassies every three years, I show that individual diplomats spend more time on commercial issues when they are rotated to a state with an active AmCham.

These results highlight an underappreciated channel of foreign policy influence: lobbying by interest groups that occurs “beyond the water’s edge.” Future research should study the effects of this type of lobbying—in particular, that of “bilateral lobbies” such as AmChams—on broader foreign policy phenomena.

About the Author: Calvin Thrall is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Their research “Informational lobbying and commercial diplomacy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “The politics of rejection: Explaining Chinese import refusals” by Sung Eun Kim, Rebecca L. Perlman, and Grace Zeng is summarized by the author(s) below.

Governments have long been known to use health and safety standards as an underhand way of impeding imports while feigning an open trading posture. This paper examines a less explored explanation for such regulatory barriers. We show that in the same way that product standards can be used as a subtle form of protectionism, so too can they be used as a means of punishing or coercing one’s trading partners. Indeed, we theorize that some of the same characteristics that make health and safety standards attractive to governments as a form of protectionism – particularly the ambiguity surrounding their intent – also make these measures attractive as a way to retaliate against foreign nations. 
 
In order to evaluate our theory, we collect and translate original data from 2011-2019 on China’s use of import refusals. An import refusal is the rejection of an import at the border, supposedly because the product in question fails to meet domestic health, safety, or environmental rules. Combining our data on import refusals with data on political tensions involving military actors, we demonstrate that during the period under study, China has systematically increased its bilateral use of import refusals in the wake of foreign policy squabbles. This has allowed China to exert political pressure on trading partners with which it is at odds, while maintaining plausible deniability about its actions. 
 
Our research contributes to the broader literature on the source of regulatory barriers to trade and the extent to which political tensions harm economic relations. More narrowly, our findings offer insight into China’s use of economic coercion, a topic that has been of growing interest both to political science scholars and to policymakers. While there have been numerous anecdotes suggesting that China has, at times, used import refusals as a form of political retribution, to date there has been a lack of evidence demonstrating a systematic relationship between instances of import refusals and those of heightened conflict. Our findings provide the first evidence of a consistent and measurable connection between China’s rejection of imports and the existence of political tensions.  

About the Author(s): Sung Eun Kim is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University, Rebecca L. Perlman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and Grace Zeng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Their research “The politics of rejection: Explaining Chinese import refusals” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Encouraging loyalty and defection: The impact of campaigns on tactical voting in Britain” by Lucas Núñez is summarized by the author below.

In multi-party elections using winner-take-all electoral systems, voters often face strong incentives to cast a tactical (or strategic) vote: a vote for a less-preferred party but with higher chances of winning. Tactical voting has received widespread attention in the voting behavior literature, predominantly focusing on measuring its extent. In recent United Kingdom General Elections, about a third of voters face such incentives, and between a third and half of them cast a tactical vote. While some correlates of tactical behavior are known, they are typically non-actionable; that is, not factors over which electoral participants have agency during the course of an electoral campaign. As such, our understanding of tactical/strategic voting behavior remains limited by a mostly passive view of electoral participants.  

In this article I focus on one such actionable factor: parties’ direct outreach to voters. Using panel data for three separate UK General Elections, I estimate how contact by the different parties influences voters’ decision to cast a tactical vote, an effect separate and distinct from any changes in preferences that may simultaneously occur. That is, rather than measuring traditional conversion/persuasion effects, I measure the impact of parties’ outreach voters’ decision to remain loyal to or defect from their most preferred party.  

I show that contact by a voter’s most preferred party encourages loyalty to the most preferred party, thus reducing tactical voting by about 4 percentage points. On the other hand, contact by a voter’s best alternative party (a less-liked party with higher chances of winning) encourages defection from the most preferred party, thus increasing tactical voting by about 5 percentage points. Additionally, in partial counterfactual estimates, I show that had parties not conducted any direct voter outreach, tactical voting overall would have decreased by about 2 percentage points.  

These effects of campaigns on tactical voting stand in contrast to those in the persuasion literature in the United States, which typically finds null or minimal effects. However, there are important differences in context: the US is a two-party system with few cross-pressured voters; the UK, on the other hand, is a multi-party system with a significant number of cross-pressured voters and voters facing strong tactical incentives. My findings show that campaigns matter in the latter circumstances.  

On the practical side, my findings suggest that candidates’ communications highlighting tactical/strategic situations in their constituencies, as parties in the UK often do, are a valuable strategy. On the normative side, the increase in tactical behavior could enhance voters’ political efficacy and help them elect a “less bad” government in the short term. In the long term, however, the overall tactical behavior encouraged by parties’ campaigns could prevent minority views from maturing into viable alternatives due to tactical defections.

About the Author: Lucas Núñez is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Their research “Encouraging loyalty and defection: The impact of campaigns on tactical voting in Britain” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Trains, trade, and transformation: A spatial Rogowski theory of America’s 19th-century protectionism” by Kenneth Scheve and Theo Serlin is summarized by the author(s) below.

Do the groups that benefit from economic change become more powerful and get to implement their preferred policies? Many theories in political economy assume so, but the empirical record isn’t so straightforward. In the US in the late 19th Century, falling transportation costs integrated agriculture into the global economy, but the exporters were politically marginalized; the country elected Republican politicians who implemented high tariffs. This phenomenon occurred at the local as well as the national level. Using voting records and a measure of protectionist sentiment estimated from newspapers, we show that places in the agricultural hinterland that gained transportation connections became more protectionist. 

We argue that geographic mobility conditions political responses to economic change. Building on recent developments in urban and international economics, we combine a majoritarian model of policy with a spatial trade model. Internal transportation improvements reduce the cost of accessing the global economy, and cause the exporting sector—agriculture in this period—to expand. Economic development induces both internal and international migration, which alters the composition of the electorate. In the period we study, the migration of laborers into agricultural regions diluted the power of landowners. In our model, the high rate of migration between regions, and the relative sizes and factor intensities of the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, generates the prediction that laborers, regardless of location, should have aligned with the manufacturing sector which supported tariffs. The net result of these changes was an increase in the basis of support for protectionism. 

We take the model to county-level data on economic and political outcomes over the period 1880-1900. Our empirical strategy examines how counties responded to distant changes in the transportation network that reduced the cost of accessing the global economy. We find these transportation cost reductions did benefit the agricultural sector—agricultural output and the value of farms both increased—but led to large population increases that reduced the share of farmers in the population. Politically, expanding trade access was associated with a shift away from the Democratic Party—which advocated for low tariffs—and towards protectionism. 

Including economic geography in a model of politics generates predictions about what policies agents want and how economic change alters policy outcomes that differ from traditional political economy models. Our theory assumes a high rate of geographic mobility, which was a feature of 19th century America. Modeling and estimating barriers to geographic mobility should provide insights into the relationship between economic and political change across different contexts.

About the Author(s): Kenneth Scheve is the Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University and serves as Dean of Social Science for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Theo Serlin is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. Their research “Trains, trade, and transformation: A spatial Rogowski theory of America’s 19th-century protectionism“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “Austerity, economic vulnerability, and populism” by Leonardo Baccini and Thomas Sattler is summarized by the author(s) below.

Fiscal austerity – spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the public deficit –hurt economically vulnerable voters, e.g. low-skilled workers. We show that these vulnerable voters turn towards populist parties when their government implements austerity.  

Our analysis covers the period from 1991 onwards and examines election results in electoral districts across Western European countries. Vulnerable voters are workers with a low level of education, those in the manufacturing sector, and those with routine jobs. These voters are exposed to the greatest risk to lose their jobs because of globalization or automation. A standard austerity package increases vote shares of populist parties between 3 and 5 percentage points in districts with many low education / manufacturing / routine job workers. The same package has no effect on populist vote shares in districts with fewer vulnerable voters.  

The results have several important implications. First, governments matter. Policies implemented by governments have a variety of ways to moderate the adverse effects of economic transformations, e.g. through redistribution. However, if policies fail to do so or if they enhance the unequal distributional consequences of globalization and automation even further, populist parties can exploit the growing anti-globalization sentiment among dissatisfied voters. Second, austerity matters. Governments may be able to build a pro-austerity coalition and a majority of voters may not object against or even approve of austerity. Still, the political consequences of austerity measures are unavoidable: Many vulnerable voters turn away from traditional parties transforming politics for a long time to come. Third, vulnerability matters. Voters hold very diverse attitudes about fiscal policy that seem most strongly affected by their ideological views. But when it comes to cast a ballot, voters’ material interests, i.e. the effect of austerity on their welfare, is a defining factor to understand their political preferences and behavior. 

About the Author(s): Leonardo Baccini is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and an associate member in the Department of Economics at McGill University and Thomas Sattler is a Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Their research “Austerity, economic vulnerability, and populism” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.