Research

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 global politics. 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 this effect is conditioned by what I call ``domestic populist demand'': the public support for populist policies that renders confrontational foreign policy politically credible and rewarding to domestic audiences rather than electorally costly. Using a global leader-year 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 they act on their ideological commitments.

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.

Why do some authoritarian leaders conclude Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) with strong commitments, while others opt for shallower agreements? This study argues that the variation in PTA depth among autocratic regimes can be explained by leader tenure. Autocrats who have governed for longer periods, having already consolidated political authority, are better positioned to leverage international economic agreements to enhance regime stability. Deep PTAs provide a visible and credible signal of responsible governance and commitment to national economic welfare, enabling leaders to strengthen domestic support and preempt potential political challenges. In addition, long-serving leaders possess greater personal authority, institutional knowledge, and bureaucratic coordination capacity, reducing the political and administrative costs of negotiating and implementing complex agreements. Drawing on dyadic PTA data from 1960 to 2014 and leader tenure data from the Archigos dataset, we employ Tobit regression models to test our argument. The findings indicate that autocrats with longer tenure are significantly more likely to sign deeper PTAs with stronger commitments. These results underscore the importance of leader characteristics—particularly tenure—in shaping the design and depth of international economic agreements under authoritarian rule.

Do leaders' individual attributes shape which partners a state aligns with? Theories of alliance formation explain cooperation through structural forces and, more recently, domestic institutions, but have largely overlooked the individual leader. We ask whether a leader's pre-office experience of living abroad makes their state more likely to form a defense pact with the host, and whether the answer depends on the host's regime. We argue that a sojourn binds a future leader to the host through two channels, dependence and affinity, and that the host's regime type governs how strongly the bond forms. The mechanism is discretion: a democracy admits foreigners by default, so no one chooses the sojourner and the sojourner owes no one, whereas an autocracy hosts at its discretion and can therefore both cultivate a promising elite and obligate them. The cosmopolitan expectation is thus inverted - it is autocratic hosts that bind future leaders. Matching the Cosmopolitan Leaders Dataset to ATOP defense pacts in an undirected pair-year design (1816-2014) and estimating within-pair linear probability models, we find that a sojourn raises the probability of a new pact, that the effect is concentrated on autocratic hosts and vanishes for democratic ones, and that it is strongest for exile and weakest for study abroad. The paper brings the individual leader into a theory of alliance formation and gives the study of authoritarian influence a microfoundation: the cultivation of foreign elites.

Populist leaders are widely thought to erode international cooperation by casting it as a scheme of corrupt elites against "the people." Why, and when, do a leader's populist claims move public opinion on foreign policy? I argue that populist rhetoric does not persuade publics at large; it activates a disposition that is already there. When a leader retreats from an international commitment, citizens weigh what the move costs - whether it makes the country look weak and unreliable, and whether it is a belligerent step that courts needless escalation. A populist justification supplies a ready answer, recasting the same act as principled resistance rather than irresponsible defiance. Yet that reading is accepted only by citizens whose anti-elite, people-centric attitudes make it congruent: where those attitudes are present, populist rhetoric raises support for non-cooperation and blunts the will to punish the leader; where they are absent, the same words leave opinion unmoved. I test this with a pre-registered survey experiment on public opinion toward a U.S. alliance commitment. The argument recasts populist communication as conditional activation rather than mass persuasion: populists can mobilize the predisposed but cannot manufacture support where the disposition is absent, so the reach of populist foreign-policy rhetoric is bounded by the attitudes a public already holds.

Why does international cooperation between democracies decline when one comes under populist leadership? Existing accounts of populist foreign policy are predominantly monadic, explaining what populist leaders do but not why their democratic partners preemptively retreat. This paper develops a dyadic theory of credibility decay. Democratic cooperation rests on the shared expectation that domestic accountability institutions bind future leaders to present commitments. Populist accession disrupts this signal through two simultaneous pathways: audience cost decay, as populists erode the mechanisms through which leaders are punished for reneging, and normative dissonance, as anti-pluralist framing signals divergent understandings of what cooperation entails. Together, these pathways imply that the effect of populist leadership on partner non-cooperation is conditional on domestic populist demand: partner retreat concentrates in dyads where populists face high domestic populist demand. The theory predicts that empowered populists are the most likely targets of partner non-cooperation—an empirical signature monadic accounts cannot generate. Using a directed dyad-year design covering democratic dyads from 1979 to 2020 alongside complementary survey-experimental evidence, the paper isolates partner responses from populist behavior, bridges the democratic credibility and backsliding literatures, and recovers the systematic dyadic costs of populism that monadic accounts overlook.

Populist leaders who claim to speak for "the people" against corrupt elites at home face, upon taking office, an international stage governed by diplomatic restraint and the norms of international society. Do populists import their domestic rhetoric onto this stage, or conform to its norms? I study this as an empirical question about how populist leadership reshapes the rhetoric of international cooperation along three dimensions: its content, or what cooperation is said to be about; its process, or how cooperation is said to work; and its discourse, or in whose name cooperation is legitimated. Drawing on the UN General Debate Corpus (1946–2020) and original populist-leader coding, I use text-as-data methods to measure the rhetoric of cooperation along each dimension, and estimate how it responds to populist leadership through within-country leader transitions with two-way fixed effects. This paper contributes to the populist foreign policy literature by scaling an insight previously established only in small-N qualitative work to the full population of postwar leaders, and by providing the first estimate of populist leadership's effect on how states publicly justify international cooperation within international organizations.