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Ruling elites commonly concede institutional reforms such as expanding the franchise. In existing models, sharing power in this manner enables ruling elites to credibly commit to perpetual redistribution. In 'Power Sharing with Weak Institutions,' Powell (2024) explains why the commitment problem runs deeper: When institutions are weak, elites are likely to block the implementation of promised institutional concessions. I provide new insights into three foundational premises of Powell (2024) and related models. First, I identify a necessary condition for a common result: Ruling elites always minimize permanent power-sharing concessions vis-à-vis temporary concessions, subject to preventing revolt. However, unless reforming institutions is somehow costly, these two tools are perfect substitutes. Second, I discuss how to conceptualize institutional strength within this class of models. Third, in weak institutional environments, I suggest how scholars can model credible commitments to share power or democratize.

Dictators confront a guardianship dilemma: military agents are needed to defeat mass outsider movements, but these agents can overthrow the ruler from within. In existing theories, rulers prioritize coup-proofing measures unless they anticipate strong outsider threats. Then dictators prioritize military competence. I reframe the guardianship dilemma around the central idea that militaries can choose between dual disloyalty options. In addition to staging a coup, militaries can defect by not fending off popular uprisings or rebellions. Dictators fear competent militaries not primarily because of their coup threat but instead because they often survive intact following a regime transition. Low motivation for competent militaries to save the ruler undermines their rationale of guarding against outsider threats, even if they pose a low coup threat. Consequently, rulers prioritize competence under narrow circumstances. Only radically oriented outsider movements that pose an existential threat to all regime elites induce loyalty from a competent military.

AbstractDictators face a power‐sharing dilemma: Broadening elite incorporation mitigates prospects for outsider rebellions (by either elites excluded from power or the masses), but it raises the risk of insider coups. This article rethinks the theoretical foundations of the power‐sharing dilemma and its consequences. My findings contrast with and provide conditionalities for a "conventional threat logic," which argues that large outsider threats compel dictators to create broader‐based regimes, despite raising coup risk. Instead, I analyze a game‐theoretic model to explain why the magnitude of the elite outsider threat ambiguously affects power‐sharing incentives. Dictators with weak coup‐proofing institutions or who face deeply entrenched elites take the opposite actions predicted by the conventional logic. An additional outsider threat from the masses can either exacerbate or eliminate the power‐sharing dilemma with elites, depending on elite affinity toward mass rule. Examining the elite‐mass interaction also generates new implications for how mass threats affect the likelihood of coups and regime overthrow.

AbstractHow did political institutions emerge and evolve under colonial rule? This article studies a key colonial actor and establishes core democratic contradictions in European settler colonies. Although European settlers' strong organizational position enabled them to demand representative political institutions, the first hypothesis qualifies their impulse for electoral representation by positing the importance of a metropole with a representative tradition. Analyzing new data on colonial legislatures in 144 colonies between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries shows that only British settler colonies—emanating from a metropole with representative institutions—systematically exhibited early elected legislative representation. The second hypothesis highlights a core democratic contradiction in colonies that established early representative institutions. Applying class-based democratization theories predicts perverse institutional evolution—resisted enfranchisement and contestation backsliding—because sizable European settler minorities usually composed an entrenched landed class. Evidence on voting restrictions and on legislature disbandment from Africa, the British Caribbean, and the US South supports these implications and rejects the Dahlian path from competitive oligarchy to full democracy.

AbstractWhat explains differential rates of ethnic violence in postcolonial Africa? I argue that ethnic groups organized as a precolonial state (PCS) exacerbated interethnic tensions in their postcolonial country. Insecure leaders in these countries traded off between inclusive coalitions that risked insider coups and excluding other ethnic groups at the possible expense of outsider rebellions. My main hypotheses posit that PCS groups should associate with coups because their historically rooted advantages often enabled accessing power at the center, whereas other ethnic groups in their countries—given strategic incentives for ethnopolitical exclusion—should fight civil wars more frequently than ethnic groups in countries without a PCS group. Analyzing originally compiled data on precolonial African states provides statistical evidence for these implications about civil wars and coups between independence and 2013 across various model specifications. Strikingly, through 1989, thirty of thirty-two ethnic group-level major civil war onsets occurred in countries with a PCS group.

A large body of scholarship suggests that economic grievances play an important role in civil wars. But what specific economic activities trigger such grievances, and why would governments not take proactive steps to limit economic grievances in order to stabilize their regimes? This article argues that specific economic activities—those that undermine a producer's ability to exit the formal economy—cause governments to make taxation decisions that, despite the costliness of fighting, increase the likelihood of civil war. An inability for producers to exit the formal economy also undermines regional autonomy deals by encouraging governments to grab short-term rents despite the risk of triggering civil war. After deriving this "redistributive grievance" mechanism by analyzing an infinite-horizon bargaining model with endogenous labor supply and economic production, I address a specific empirical source of such redistributive grievances: oil-rich regions fight separatist civil wars relatively frequently. Capital-intense, geographically concentrated, and immobile oil production corresponds with conditions in the formal model that predict redistributive grievances and war. Moreover, I argue that applying the redistributive grievances mechanism to understanding the oil-separatism relationship also highlights shortcomings of alternative "greed"-based explanations.

AbstractA broad literature on how oil wealth affects civil war onset argues that oil production engenders violent contests to capture a valuable prize from vulnerable governments. By contrast, research linking oil wealth to durable authoritarian regimes argues that oil-rich governments deter societal challenges by strategically allocating enormous revenues to enhance military capacity and to provide patronage. This article presents a unified formal model that evaluates how these competing mechanisms affect overall incentives for center-seeking civil wars. The model yields two key implications. First, large oil-generated revenues strengthen the government and exert an overall effect that decreases center-seeking civil war propensity. Second, oil revenues are less effective at preventing center-seeking civil war relative to other revenue sources, which distinguishes overall and relative effects. Revised statistical results test overall rather than relative effects by omitting the conventional but posttreatment covariate of income per capita, and demonstrate a consistent negative association between oil wealth and center-seeking civil war onset.

What novel leverage for understanding the social world do set-theoretic comparative methods (STCM) offer? I have argued that although important methodological ideas underlie this method, many STCM techniques converge with existing quantitative tools of statistical modeling. Unfortunately, STCM scholars have often obscured this crucial point by instead emphasizing stark differences from quantitative tools. Here, I further develop two key arguments about these convergences by addressing the astute commentaries offered by Thiem et al. and Schneider: (a) Regarding necessary and sufficient conditions, STCM's procedures for incorporating cases from a 2 × 2 table may yield erroneous conclusions that can easily be avoided by using more conventional techniques. (b) Regarding causal complexity, STCM and statistical interaction terms often provide the same information. These arguments demonstrate that STCM scholars have yet to establish distinctive advantages of their methods over statistical modeling. Furthermore, alternative qualitative tools offer considerably more promise than does STCM.

Proponents of set-theoretic comparative methods (STCM) sharply differentiate their approach from quantitative analysis—unlike many researchers who focus on integrating qualitative and quantitative methods. This article engages these opposing views by demonstrating shared foundations between STCM and quantitative techniques. First, it shows how the quantitative practice of analyzing cases that exhibit variation on both the explanatory conditions and the outcome—for example, all four cells of a 2 × 2 table—guards against misleading conclusions about necessary/sufficient conditions. Hence, conventional statistical ideas about association are relevant for STCM. Second, STCM's tools for analyzing causal complexity share important features with regression interaction terms. Third, scrutinizing these shared foundations suggests how stronger theoretical and empirical standards for causal inference with deterministic hypotheses can be established. Focusing on shared foundations and recognizing that STCM does not genuinely break new inferential ground facilitate new opportunities for strengthening comparative research tools, rather than unproductively overemphasizing differences from mainstream methods.