Polihot

WP 78/2 pp. 377-418 2026-04-01 Original Rightful Challengers: How Chinese Criminal Defense Lawyers Encourage Judge-Prosecutor Disagreement Yue Hou, Jieun Kim Abstract abstract: In autocracies, courts are often perceived as tools of the autocrats, with lawyers viewed as lacking influence. The authors reassess these assumptions by examining criminal defense lawyers as "rightful challengers" within China's legal system. Analyzing an original data set of drug cases in Chinese criminal courts from 2014 through 2018, the authors find that when a lawyer is present, judges are three times more likely to reject prosecutors' arguments and twice as likely to deviate from prosecutors' sentencing recommendations. The deviation on average results in sentences that are shorter than the prosecutor's recommendation—shorter by more than two months in addition to the already shorter sentences judges give compared to prosecutors' recommendations. These findings suggest that lawyers can exert a substantial impact on judicial decisions by encouraging judge-prosecutor disagreement, particularly in cases that are less politically sensitive. Original interviews and close examination of lawyers' arguments reveal that the quality of defense is crucial for understanding lawyers' effectiveness in influencing court decisions. These results highlight how seemingly powerless societal actors, such as lawyers, can act as rightful challengers to powerful state actors within authoritarian regimes.

WP 78/2 pp. 207-250 2026-04-01 Original Reshuffles or Dismissals? The Logic of Elite Management and Autocratic Survival Alexander Baturo, Roman-Gabriel Olar Abstract abstract: Co-optation and repression are central to understanding authoritarian power sharing, but how autocrats implement these strategies with individual elites remains underexplored. The article proposes a theoretical framework conceptualizing dictators as managers of their ruling coalitions who routinely appoint, dismiss, promote, demote, shuffle, or reappoint elites for a mixture of strategic, nonstrategic, or even mundane reasons. The authors argue that autocrats have agency in choosing between dismissals and reshuffles as general elite management strategies. In the process, they alter the information environment and elite incentives with consequences for their own survival. Although dismissals as a general policy reduce elites' power, they also increase intraregime conflict and uncertainty and tend to have adverse effects on ruler survival. In contrast, reshuffles prevent elite coordination but ensure that elites have a stake in regime continuity. These arguments are tested using novel measures of dismissals and reshuffles in autocratic regimes and communist politburos while also considering the mechanisms and alternative explanations driving the results. The findings suggest that autocratic survival relies more on mundane and nonviolent elite management than seen in the predominantly conflictual accounts of authoritarian politics.

JOP 88/2 pp. 760-771 2026-04-01 Original Preposterous Fake News, the Breach of Democratic Trust, and Intellectual Humility Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Federica Liveriero Abstract What normative relationship should citizens and political representatives establish with people voicing preposterous fake news, defying basic epistemic rules? To answer this pressing matter, we defend the view that the spread of preposterous fake information is best accounted for by an expressivist explanation, according to which agents have practical, rather than genuinely epistemic, reasons to share preposterous fake news as expressive of their commitment toward a specific narrative about social reality. Then, we investigate the worrying effects of these dynamics on the democratic fabric and on mutual trust among citizens. The pars construens of our argument consists of a strategy for mending the breach of democratic trust based on the virtue of reasonableness. We argue that to restore minimal trust between citizens and government, reasonable citizens ought to embrace intellectual humility, therefore approaching disagreement while showing respect for others, dispensing with a superior and dismissive attitude toward agents holding unreasonable beliefs.

JOP 88/2 pp. 839-853 2026-04-01 Original Observable Bounds of Rationality and Credibility in International Relations Andrew Kenealy, Trent Ollerenshaw, So Jin Lee Abstract In crisis bargaining scenarios, resolved states send costly signals to demonstrate a willingness to fight. Yet, public signals of resolve are issued by specific leaders, who operate with cognitive limitations in challenging decision environments. Drawing upon theories of behavioral economics, we develop a series of observable indicators plausibly connected to leader ability and difficulty of decision environment that we expect shape perceived signaler credibility. Effects, we argue, are due to perceived variation in the signaler’s uncertainty over the future costs at stake. We find that almost all indicators shape threat credibility and find suggestive support for the proposed mechanism. By bridging behavioral economics and foundational scholarship on costly signaling in international relations (IR) in novel ways, this registered report shows how individual and environmental decision restrictions set the bounds of observable leader rationality and, in turn, shape credibility in IR.

JOP 88/2 pp. 666-680 2026-04-01 Original Military Power and Ideological Appeals of Religious Extremists Luwei Ying Abstract The proliferation of terrorist propaganda threatens societies worldwide. Yet, we know little about violent extremists’ strategy in disseminating their ideologies. This article studies the ideological appeals of jihadi groups, among the most prominent contemporary conflict movements, and shows how these groups navigate between religious and secular narratives in response to the fluctuations in their military power. Weaker groups must prioritize their core believers and foreground a more radical religious ideal, while stronger groups seek broader support from more moderate individuals and thus pitch themselves more secularly. I illustrate this dynamic with an original database of 87 magazines published regularly by 35 jihadi groups from 1984 to 2019. Furthermore, I leverage approximately six million tweets from 21,000 ISIS-related accounts in 2015 to examine the jihadists’ mobilization efforts regarding different audiences. Overall, I demonstrate that violent groups put more emphasis on their ideological brand when they are militarily weaker.

WP 78/2 pp. 251-292 2026-04-01 Original Making or Breaking Citizens? Criminal Organizations and State-Society Relations Kaitlyn Chriswell Abstract abstract: When do groups of citizens organize to resist criminal group presence, and what form does their resistance take? Criminal groups operate across the globe, imposing a variety of costs on local communities. Confronted with these conditions, citizens can either accommodate or contest; when they contest, they choose either to engage or to avoid the state. This article leverages variation in three municipalities across Mexico to illustrate how and why communities react differently to the presence of criminal organizations. While the degree of criminal competition and the strength of preexisting civil society drive whether groups of citizens contest, the degree of local state autonomy from criminal groups shapes the form—state centered or nonstate—that contestation takes. Organized crime is broadly considered an impediment to functioning democracy, but this article demonstrates that its presence can also push citizens in some cases to organize and engage with the state in ways that bolster democracy.

JOP 88/2 pp. 805-825 2026-04-01 Original Loss Framing in Territorial Disputes Andi Zhou, Hein Goemans, Michael Weintraub Abstract （原文未提供摘要） 中文 领土争端中的损失框架 Andi Zhou, Hein Goemans, Michael Weintraub 摘要 原文未提供摘要 关键词 领土争端、损失框架、前景理论、损失厌恶、国际谈判 DOI: 10.1086/735452

JOP 88/2 pp. 698-715 2026-04-01 Original Keep Winning with WinRed? Online Fundraising Platform as the Party’s Public Good Seo-young Silvia Kim, Zhao Li

JOP 88/2 pp. 572-585 2026-04-01 Original Intraparty Competition, Geographic Responsiveness, and Incumbent Deselection in Closed-List Proportional Representation Jochen Rehmert Abstract Closed-list proportional representation is considered to produce politicians engaged in programmatic, party-oriented behavior. Personal vote-seeking and geographic responsiveness, however, are attributed to open-list or plurality systems. In this article, I argue that the focus on interparty competition masks incentives for geographic responsiveness generated by intraparty competition for nominations. Specifically, parties’ candidate selection methods that rely on locally minded delegates introduce incentives for incumbents to engage in localized responsiveness. Using survey experiments with party delegates in Germany and an original and novel dataset based on (historical) nomination protocols of the German Green party in combination with geo-referenced legislative behavior, I show that geographically responsive incumbents are preferred by delegates in survey experiments, rewarded with higher ranks and vote margins in the observational data, and that this is mainly limited to men who face greater competition. My findings shed new light on the interplay of electoral and selectoral incentives for behavior.

JOP 88/2 pp. 867-881 2026-04-01 Original Incivility Does Not Exist: An Experimental Assessment on the Drivers of Incivility Perceptions and Their Effects on Candidate Evaluations