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In autocratic-leaning countries, the level of genuine public support for ruling parties and reasons driving it are often unclear. While such parties often rely on violence, electoral manipulation, and corruption to help maintain power, maintaining legitimate popularity is the ideal. Parties that emerged from national liberation struggles and other extraordinary events are thought to have developed strong branding and organizational structures. This paper tests the determinants of ruling party identification among Zimbabweans through seven geo-coded rounds of Afrobarometer data. First, genuine ruling party support is estimated to be exaggerated in public opinion surveys, but not insignificant. The ruling party's base of support is centered in rural areas that experienced the greatest concentration of guerrilla activity during the liberation war. Respondents from the liberation generation are also more likely to support the ruling party, and view the party as tied to nationalism. The liberation war generated and solidified ruling party stronghold areas through democratic advantages such as nationalistic branding and robust party organization structures as well as autocratic tools such as the capture of traditional leaders, politicization of the military, and the use of violence against dissidents.

Despite the economic, social, and humanitarian costs of border closures, more than 1000 new international border closures were introduced in response to the 2020–2021 pandemic by nearly every country in the world. The objective of this study was to examine whether these border closures reduced the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Prior to 2020, the impacts of border closures on disease spread were largely unknown, and their use as a pandemic policy was advised against by international organizations. We tested whether they were helpful in reducing spread by using matching techniques on our hand-coded COVID Border Accountability Project (COBAP) Team database of international closures, converted to a time-series cross-sectional data format. We controlled for national-level internal movement restrictions (domestic lockdowns) using the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) time-series data. We found no evidence in favor of international border closures, whereas we found a strong association between national-level lockdowns and a reduced spread of SARS-CoV-2 cases. More research must be done to evaluate the byproduct effects of closures versus lockdowns as well as the efficacy of other preventative measures introduced at international borders.

This article assesses two next-level questions in the study of democratic backsliding: democratic
resilience and political polarization. It first advances a set of methodological decision
points to improve clarity in contemporary debates surrounding democratic backsliding
measurement and the possibility of identifying moments of democratic recovery. It
then moves to a theoretical and empirical assessment of pathways by which democratic
backsliding takes place, under what conditions, which specific actors are involved, and
what opportunities exist for democratic recovery given sources of resilience and strategies
of resistance. The authors examine the role of political polarization in backsliding and
highlight the combined importance of political agency and institutional levers for regime
outcomes. The authors argue that regime outcomes are not predetermined by antecedent
conditions, and particularly not by the level of development.