In communities across Latin America, basic order is provided by local criminal organizations. Existing studies establish that criminal governance is widespread, persistent, and consequential, shaping not only the lives of those governed but macro-level political, social, and economic outcomes. Yet systematic assessments of its prevalence and characteristics are lacking. We leverage novel, representative survey data and a compendium of qualitative sources to provide country-level estimates of the extent of criminal governance. Across Latin America, 13% of respondents—representing 80 million people—report some form of criminal governance; this likely underestimates the true number, we argue. We also analyze the correlates of criminal governance. Counterintuitively, it is associated with positive perceptions of state governance and higher income relative to presence of non-governing gangs. These results persist when we employ objective measures of local state presence. Untangling the causal relationships behind these correlations is a central challenge for future research. Under review. [Working paper]

Under what conditions do rebels succeed in establishing functional governance institutions in contested areas? Canonical theories of rebel governance and state formation insist that coercive control of territory is a necessary precondition for the development of insurgent institutions. Yet this claim is belied both by the empirical record and classical guerrilla warfare doctrines. We argue that a lack of consolidated territorial control need not preclude rebel governance, and develop a new theory that posits that low state governance responsiveness helps insurgents overcome the challenges associated with establishing institutions in contested areas. Low state responsiveness increases popular demand for insurgent institutions, decreases the costs associated with governing, and enables insurgents to collude with civilians in hiding their institutions. Process-tracing evidence from Ireland, South Africa, and Algeria illustrates our propositions, and further demonstrates that insurgents can actively undermine the state’s responsiveness to facilitate institutional infiltration. Our findings shed new light on the determinants of rebel governance and state formation trajectories, and suggest that scholars may need to do away with the assumption that territorial control is the only path towards statehood. Under review. [Paper available upon request]

Do presidents and prime ministers who undermine their own democratic institutions signal their attacks in advance, with hostile rhetoric in the preceding campaign? Or are campaign messages uninformative about a candidate’s subsequent actions vis-a-vis democratic institutions? In the first empirical test of its kind, we coded hundreds of campaign speeches by candidates in democracies around the globe. We evaluate the sentiment of their rhetoric when they discuss a set of core democratic institutions: the media, courts, legislatures, bureaucracies, and elections. We also gathered information about these same politicians’ subsequent actions toward these institutions — whether, once in office, they undermined them or left them intact. Our key finding is that the level of political polarization conditions the relationship between words and actions. Only in polarized settings do rhetorical barbs against potential democratic targets predict attacks on those targets. Under review. [Paper available upon request]

What explains the geography and timing of contestation in civil war? We propose a new theory of opportunistic rebel tactics. We argue that rebel violence is often driven by mid-level commanders, who react to opportunities in which the local balance of power tilts in their favor. These opportunities are defined by two factors: 1) local fluctuations in repressive state capacity and 2) whether insurgents expect that civilian communities will comply with or defy rebel incursions. We evaluate this argument on data from the Colombian civil war. Leveraging exogenous variation in local state capacity caused by landslide-induced road closures, we find that short-term negative shocks to repressive capacity increase the likelihood of insurgent-state clashes. However, this effect does not hold when local communities harbor strongly anti-insurgent attitudes, suggesting that state capacity and civilian preferences jointly shape rebel strategy and that popular opposition can substitute for state strength. Under review. [Paper available upon request]