Conventional wisdom holds that colonial trading relations were a one-way street: trade policy coerced colonies to export raw materials to the metropole and in turn purchase large quantities of manufactured goods from the empire’s industrial centers, thus hamstringing local industries. We argue...

Migrants are politically marginalized in cities of the developing world, participating in destination-area elections less than local-born residents. We theorize three reasons for this shortfall: migrant’s socio-economic links to origin regions; bureaucratic obstacles to enrollment that...

I exploit the sudden and dramatic jolt that Osama Bin Laden's capture gave to Barack Obama's 2012 re-election prospects to gauge the relationship between presidential prospects and stock market valuation changes. Using campaign contributions as an indicator of political support, I find that...

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken...

Water is essential for human life, yet even democratically elected governments fail to provide it to all citizens. Why? We theorize that for water access to materialize, bureaucratic hurdles and politician inertia need to be jointly overcome. We further posit that identity politics moderates...

Why do states choose multilateralism? We develop three theories that could explain this choice: a principal-agent model in which states trade some control over the policy for greater burden sharing; a normative logic of appropriateness; and hegemonic self-binding in which powerful states seek to...

Why do governments choose multilateralism? We examine a principal-agent model in which states trade some control over the policy for greater burden sharing. The theory generates observable hypotheses regarding the reasons for and the patterns of support and opposition to multilateralism. To...

Estimating the mechanisms that connect explanatory variables with the explained variable, also known as "mediation analysis," is central to a variety of social-science fields, especially psychology, and increasingly to fields like epidemiology. Recent work on the statistical methodology behind...