Christina J. Schneider

The world is increasingly experiencing the destabilizing effects of climate change, yet we know surprisingly little about how these dynamics affect the quality and resilience of democratic governance. We argue that climate shocks, through their growing frequency and tendency to compound, trigger cascading economic and social disruptions that place sustained pressure on democratic institutions. When repeated climate-induced disasters overwhelm governments’ capacity to address citizen grievances, civil and political unrest becomes more likely. In democratic settings, these pressures increase the likelihood that governments respond to instability through repressive measures, such as prolonged states of emergency and restrictions on participation, which incrementally erode democratic resilience. To evaluate this argument, we examine whether democracies exposed to more frequent climate shocks are more likely to experience declines in democratic governance than otherwise similar democracies facing fewer shocks. Our findings support this expectation and underscore the growing risks climate change poses to democratic resilience in an era of accelerating environmental disruption.

Despite their significant influence on the development trajectories of recipient nations, we know little about the lending strategies of international financial institutions (IFIs) dominated by authoritarian regimes. In this paper, we provide new evidence that autocratic IFIs are not merely neutral economic actors. Our findings suggest that these institutions provide financial support to authoritarian governments facing acute threats to their survival. We introduce an original data set tracking the lending behavior of eighteen autocratic IFIs across 143 recipient countries from 1967 to 2021. Our findings uncover that aid flows from autocratic IFIs increase precisely when authoritarian regimes are most vulnerable. By situating these insights within the broader aid allocation literature, we provide a fresh perspective on the political calculus of international development lending, with profound implications for understanding global power dynamics.

In the post–Cold War era, many authoritarian regimes engaged in strategic liberalization in response to international norms promoted by Western powers. As US support for democracy and human rights recedes, will this retreat prompt a global rollback of liberal reforms? While pessimistic accounts predict a return to overt repression, we argue that liberal norm adaptation within autocracies is likely to prove more resilient. We highlight two sources of continuity. First, autocrats’ domestic control strategies create incentives to retain certain liberal practices—such as elections, gender reforms, or limited media openness—that bolster legitimacy, co-opt dissent, and help manage opposition. Second, reforms anchored in treaties, international organizations, and domestic bureaucracies have generated expectations and mobilizational platforms, making wholesale reversals politically costly and prone to backlash. Our analysis illustrates how reforms, even when adopted instrumentally, have become sufficiently embedded in domestic politics to persist in the absence of strong external enforcement.

A large and growing number of international organizations (IOs) are made up and governed by illiberal or outright authoritarian regimes. Many of these authoritarian IOs (AIOs) formally adopt good governance mandates, linking goals like democracy promotion, anti-corruption policies and human rights to their broader mission. Why do some AIOs adopt good governance mandates that appear to conflict with the norms and standards these regimes apply at home? We argue that AIOs adopt good governance mandates when they face substantial pressure from inside or outside the IO to adopt them. Central to our argument is that not all aspects of good governance are inherently or equally threatening to autocratic regimes. They pursue strategies that minimize the threat by externalizing policy outside the membership and strategically defining the goals to avoid or enact. This allows autocratic governments to uptake good governance talk but lessen any deep commitment to the norms and sometimes even to use them strategically to project their own power outside of the organization. Using data on 48 regional IOs with primarily autocratic membership between 1945 and 2015, we demonstrate that AIOs facing pressure from external good governance promoters will adopt good governance mandates but strategically shape those mandates in their favor if they can form bargaining coalitions with like-minded governments. The findings have sobering implications for the future of good governance promotion through IOs.

We analyse how Euroscepticism affects the bargaining success of governments in European Union (EU) legislative negotiations. We argue that pro-European governments who face Euroscepticism at home are more successful in the EU. Pro-European governments can use the threat of Euroscepticism to bargain for better outcomes in the Council’s informal negotiating environment, with the goal of mitigating electoral losses to Eurosceptic challengers. We test the empirical implications of our theory using the extended DEU data set on legislative negotiations from 1998-2019. The estimations of a multi-level mixed effects regression model provide support for our theory, showing that pro-European governments facing Eurosceptic publics achieve EU policies closer to their preferred outcomes.

How can governments implement foreign economic policies that are popular among political elites but unpopular among their voters? Studying international financial rescues, we argue that governments strategically frame policies in an attempt to minimize their expected political costs, which increases their ability to implement those policies successfully. We theorize that framing strategies allow governments to offer financial bailouts, and we test the resulting hypotheses using an integrative mixed‐methods approach. We trace the underlying causal mechanism of our argument with a typical case study of the U.S. bailout of Mexico during the 1995 peso crisis, test whether a credible threat of migration increases the likelihood of bailouts using an original data set of bailouts by 36 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries to 108 crisis countries over a span of 40 years and analyze a central assumption of our theory with a survey experiment on over 3,000 U.S. residents.