Research

Why do some authoritarian leaders conclude Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) with strong commitments, while others opt for shallower agreements? This study argues that variation in PTA depth among autocratic regimes can be explained by leader tenure. Autocrats who have governed longer, having consolidated political authority, are better positioned to use international economic agreements to enhance regime stability. Deep PTAs offer a visible, credible signal of responsible governance and commitment to national welfare, helping leaders strengthen domestic support. Long-serving leaders also possess greater personal authority, institutional knowledge, and bureaucratic coordination capacity, lowering the costs of negotiating and implementing complex agreements. Drawing on dyadic PTA data from 1960 to 2014 and leader tenure from the Archigos dataset, we employ Tobit regression models. The results indicate that autocrats with longer tenure are more likely to sign deeper PTAs, underscoring the importance of leader tenure in shaping international economic commitments under authoritarian rule.

Recently, the world has witnessed increased participation from nondemocratic countries in international cultural institutions, such as UNESCO’s International Assistance (IA) program. This study poses the question of why several authoritarian countries request IA programs more frequently than others do. In addition to economic and international factors, we argue that differences in domestic institutions within autocracies influence the decision-making of such states in requesting IA programs because these programs can be a useful tool for several incumbent regimes to generate public support or maintain their status. We implement negative binomial regressions for 131 authoritarian countries between 1979 and 2014 and demonstrate that politically competitive regimes are more likely to request IA programs than non-competitive ones. The findings suggest that authoritarian regimes with competitive political institutions are likely to utilize the programs of cultural international regimes.

Populist leaders in democracies-elected leaders who claim to represent a unified "people'' against a corrupt elite-have become a prominent force in undermining international cooperation. Yet populist foreign policy is not uniformly confrontational: some populists reduce cooperation, while others maintain or strengthen ties. This paper argues that populist leadership reduces international cooperation, but that this effect is conditioned by what I call "domestic populist demand'': the extent to which a public holds anti-elite, people-centric attitudes, distrusting elites and demanding unmediated popular sovereignty. Using a global dataset from 1979 to 2020, I show that only empowered populist leaders-those combining populist ideology with high domestic populist demand-exhibit a reduction in international cooperation. Populist leaders facing weak domestic demand, by contrast, behave much like conventional non-populist leaders, sustaining cooperative ties despite their ideological predispositions; the same holds for non-populist leaders who govern high-demand publics. The paper contributes a conditional theory of populist foreign policy that explains when and why populists pursue confrontation.

Provocation—deliberate, first-move actions short of war intended to elicit a response from a target—can produce diverse domestic political consequences. Yet, prior research has largely focused on the effects of provocation on the target state, leaving domestic responses underexplored. We examine how provocation influences leader approval in the initiating country and whether these effects vary across contexts. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, we manipulate both leader characteristics (dovish versus hawkish) and target attributes (military strength and economic importance), while distinguishing provocations that elicit domestic backlash from those that do not. Our findings indicate that provocation generally reduces leader approval, but these effects are highly context-dependent: dovish leaders incur smaller penalties, whereas provocations against economically important or militarily strong targets generate larger declines in support. These results underscore that domestic evaluations of assertive foreign policy are shaped by leader traits, target characteristics, and audience dispositions, highlighting the importance of context in understanding the domestic politics of provocation.