Existing research shows that rebel groups develop strategies to mitigate principal-agent problems and align the preferences of rank and file fighters with those of leaders, and that these strategies influence conflict processes. Yet, systematic cross-national data on how groups regulate fighters, foster cohesion, and punish disobedience remain absent. To address this gap, we introduce the Rebel Internal Governance (RIG) Dataset, which codes original, time-variant information on 14 internal institutions and practices of 166 rebel groups across 57 countries between 1990 and 2012. By capturing both written and de facto regulatory frameworks, judicial procedures, and disciplinary practices used to regulate fighter behavior, the dataset provides new leverage to examine how internal governance or its absence shapes rebels’ violent behavior and relations with civilian populations. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset through an empirical application to wartime rape, reassessing the argument that weak discipline or efforts to foster cohesion precipitate rebel-perpetrated sexual violence. By leveraging groups’ internal governance practices as a more direct proxy of cohesion and discipline, we bring new evidence to this debate. The RIG advances research on rebel governance by adding a new dimension: how groups govern their own members, alongside how they govern civilians.

This study investigates the impact of remittances on the shadow economy and how domestic institutions, particularly property rights, moderate this relationship. We employed a quantitative research method using panel data from developing countries from 1990 to 2018. We adopted both fixed-effects and instrumental variable approaches to address possible endogeneity concerns between remittances and the shadow economy. The results demonstrate that remittances are positively associated with the shadow economy’s size. However, this positive effect is weaker in countries with strong property rights institutions. These findings remain robust across alternative measures of key variables and estimation techniques. The results suggest that foreign income in the form of remittances is an important determinant of the shadow economy in recipient countries. We believe that exploring the relationship between foreign sources of income and the decisions of economic actors to enter specific sectors warrants further investigation.

How can transitional regimes from military rule resolve the dilemma between retaining administrative expertise and excluding former authoritarian elites? I argue that targeted purges, rather than wholesale retention or exclusion, can resolve this dilemma by breaking the symbiotic patronage ties between political and military elites. By severing the military’s supply of coercion and protection, targeted purges force political actors to compete through civilian channels while preserving expertise. I test this argument using South Korea’s 1993 military elite purge with two novel datasets—legislator background and promulgated acts (1989–1997). Descriptive and difference-in-differences analyses show that the share of military elites affiliated with the authoritarian past among legislators declined sharply after the purge, and that civil rights and labor acts increased significantly relative to control domains. These findings suggest that targeted purges are not merely instruments of authoritarian control, but can serve as a conditional mechanism for demilitarization in new democracies.

International criminal law holds commanders responsible for how they respond when their fighters commit war crimes, yet international courts prosecute few rebel groups. For most groups, the consequences of failing command responsibility standards may instead come from foreign governments and their publics. We argue that foreign publics evaluate a rebel group not only by whether its fighters harm civilians but also by its self-accountability, that is, how it responds when they do. Three features of that response are informative, namely whether the group sanctions the offending fighter, how formally, and how severely. We test this argument in a preregistered U.S. survey experiment with six conditions: a baseline without civilian harm, a baseline in which a fighter kills a civilian and the group does nothing, and a 2×2 design crossing the formality of adjudication with the severity of punishment. We find that punishing the offending fighter recovers part of the favor a group loses with the U.S. public after a fighter kills a civilian. Doing so through a formal tribunal fares better than a commander’s discretion and imprisonment better than execution, largely because a commander’s summary execution is rated almost as low as doing nothing. Respondents’ judgments rest partly on inferences about the group’s benevolence, state-like capacity, and norm compliance. The effects extend to policy choices surrounding terrorist designation but not to other policy preferences. Our findings suggest that international audiences hold rebels to the standards of accountability expected of states, which makes rebel self-accountability a potential source of legitimacy abroad.

Is a strong rule of law—including constraints on government and property rights protections—necessary for attracting FDI? The conventional answer is yes, yet the correlation between rule of law and FDI stock is essentially non-existent in autocracies. We explain this pattern using expected leader turnover and leader preferences. When expected leader turnover is high, as in democracies, investors demand stronger rule of law to protect against future uncertainty. When expected leader turnover is low, as in stable autocracies, strong rule of law is just one path to FDI. Autocracies with weak rule of law can also attract FDI if the dictator is credibly pro-investment, such as through their personal preferences and political coalitions. We test our argument using two analyses of Peru under Alberto Fujimori. First, we use Synthetic Difference-in-Differences to estimate that Fujimori’s self-coup increased FDI stock by 107% to 159%. Then, we use qualitative evidence to evaluate the mechanism behind the increase, concluding that the self-coup allowed Fujimori to implement policy changes that stronger rule of law would have prevented. Autocracies possess multiple pathways to attract investment, and whether the rule of law matters depends on the dictator’s policy preferences and core supporters.

What is the impact of remittances on the size of shadow economy under authoritarian regimes? The shadow economy encompasses all legitimate economic transactions that are not officially recorded by national authorities, typically for monetary or regulatory reasons. While research suggests that remittances increase the size of the shadow economy in less developed countries, we argue that the effect of remittances in authoritarian regimes differ according to the institutional context. Specifically, we contend that remittances tend to expand the shadow economy in authoritarian regimes overall and that this effect is significantly attenuated in electoral authoritarian regimes. As remittances flow into autocratic states, recipients become less dependent on the public goods and services provided by the government, weakening their ties to the regime. However, in electoral authoritarian regimes, leaders face stronger incentives to provide public goods to maintain the support of larger winning coalitions, reducing individuals’ incentives to participate in the informal sector. Using cross-national time-series data, we demonstrate that, while remittances contribute to the expansion of the shadow economy in authoritarian regimes, authoritarian electoral institutions mitigate this positive effect. Our findings highlight the significance of institutional variation in shaping the economic consequences of transnational financial flows in nondemocratic contexts.

How do foreign publics evaluate authoritarian regimes’ domestic purges during international disputes? Autocracies are often seen as opaque bargaining partners whose intentions are hard to read. I argue that elite purges give foreign observers credible information about those intentions. Because leaders purge to manage domestic rivals rather than to persuade outsiders, purges are not staged for foreign audiences, and when the purged official is tied to a known policy position, the removal reveals both the leader’s foreign policy intent and the leader’s control over policy. A preregistered survey experiment with 2,106 U.S. adults shows that after a purge, foreign publics expect the regime’s behavior to align with the position of the newly installed negotiator. This information does not come from the purge’s costs, but from what the purge reveals. Foreign publics pierce the black box of authoritarian regimes by reading who wins domestic power struggles, not what those struggles cost.

Why do dictators with coercive capabilities distribute scarce resources to appease civilians? Although scholars have found that coercive repression as an immediate response to protests reduces dictators’ short-term survival costs, we know little about dictators’ long-term responses after facing mass mobilization. This article addresses this question with respect to dictators’ personalization levels. Using a stacked difference-in-differences approach with panel data covering 1990 to 2010, I find that dictators with moderate personalization increase club goods distribution in the three years following protests. Conversely, weakly and strongly personalized dictators maintain their original distribution strategies. This analysis yields new insights into the dynamic nature of protest responses and demonstrates that the relationship between civilian discontent and appeasement follows a non-linear pattern contingent on regime power personalization.

We examine patterns of global security norms, trace the roots of changes in domestic and international political conditions, and conduct a quantitative test of these changes. We argue that the personalization of domestic politics erodes global security norms. By concentrating power domestically, sometimes through military purges or by mobilizing nationalist rhetoric, populist regimes, both democracies and autocracies, are likely to reject global collective security agendas. Using data on United Nations Security Council votes, we show the connection between the personalization of domestic politics and the erosion of collective security norms. We also anchor our discussion in the case of the conflicts initiated by Russia and the recent Iran War. Our paper contributes to the norms literature by showing how domestic politics drives changes in global security norms. The implication is that personalization may be linked to long, unwinnable wars not countered by the collective security of the international community.

Why do governance-oriented rebel groups victimize civilians while building state-like institutions? Existing theories treat governance and violence as substitutes for securing civilian compliance, yet many rebels pursue both simultaneously. To address this puzzle, we advance a theory that disaggregates rebel institutions by purpose and target, distinguishing between internal institutions that regulate fighters and external institutions that regulate civilians. Drawing on insights from the literatures on civil war and authoritarian politics, we theorize how different combinations of internal and external governance shape civilian victimization by constraining, or failing to constrain, two pathways to harm: leader-authorized strategic violence and leader-disavowed opportunistic violence by rank-and-file combatants. To test the observable implications of this theory, we introduce a novel dataset on rebel internal governance and pair it with existing data on civilian-facing governance institutions and civilian victimization. Using a research design that exploits the unexpected death of rebel leaders to address endogeneity concerns, we analyze 166 rebel organizations operating in 57 countries between 1990 and 2012. We corroborate these findings with granular subnational evidence from the PKK insurgency. Across levels of analysis, we find that governance institutions reduce civilian victimization only when they jointly regulate both fighters and civilians. Internal or external institutions alone fail to produce systematic reductions in civilian harm. A complementary analysis of public claims and denials of attacks across MENA rebel organizations further supports our theoretical distinction between leader-authorized and leader-disavowed violence: internal institutions are associated with claiming attacks while external institutions are associated with denying them. These findings show that rebel governance can coexist with, enable, or constrain violence depending on whom institutions are designed to control, refining theories of rebel governance and offering a more nuanced account of civilian life under armed group rule.