Politicians and candidates for political office are increasingly subject to threats, harassment and physical violence. Does anticipated exposure to violence affect political ambition? Leveraging an original survey fielded with US citizens (n = 4582), I document that concerns about exposure to violence are salient, that Americans on average overestimate the risk of exposure relative to a scholarly benchmark, and that overestimation is particularly pronounced among women, queer, and nonwhite citizens. I then estimate the causal effect of providing corrective aggregate information about the risk of facing violence in office. Downward-correcting aggregate information has a small positive effect on individual political ambition, and a large positive effect on support for the political ambitions of a hypothetical peer. The increase in support for peer ambition is nearly twice as large for female compared to male peers. My results highlight concerns about exposure to violence as an important obstacle to diverse representation.

New democracies often inherit state institutions and key bureaucratic personnel from past autocratic regimes. How does this legacy influence democratic development? This paper studies the effect of personnel replacement among police leadership in the state of Prussia on political life in the Weimar Republic, drawing on original career data on police officers as well as electoral records. Exploiting variation in the timing of replacement in a staggered difference-in-differences design, I show that sidelining bureaucrats associated with the autocratic regime reduced mobilization effort and electoral success of anti-democratic actors, and lowered the risk of political violence. Qualitative evidence details how autocratic police leaders leveraged their authority to facilitate violent, antidemocratic mobilization. My paper highlights the importance of bureaucratic reform in shaping trajectories of democratization.

Economic sanctions are a critical tool of international diplomacy. Existing scholarship shows that citizens in democratic sender states value sanctions which are effective in producing policy concessions. However, citizens also seek to limit the adverse humanitarian consequences of sanction imposition. How do citizens trade off between these objectives? We develop a theory of sanctions preferences where citizens (i) value policy concessions, (ii) hold humanitarian motivations, and (iii) hold beliefs about how policy change occurs in autocracies. We argue that citizens are conditional humanitarians – humanitarian concerns dominate effectiveness considerations only if policy concessions are unlikely. Results from a preregistered willingness to pay experiment examining the preferences of German citizens on sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine confirm the predictions of our theory.

This paper investigates how information about candidate affluence shapes voters’ decision-making at the ballot box. Challenging existing arguments that voters prefer affluent to low-income candidates on competence grounds, I argue that voters use information on affluence to infer candidate self-interest and evaluate the credibility of candidates’ policy promises on redistribution. I hypothesize that populist voters are particularly likely to rely on perceived self-interest as a heuristic for credibility. Evidence from a candidate-choice conjoint experiment lends partial support to my argument. While voters dislike affluent candidates for office across the board, populist voters are particularly reluctant to support wealthy pro-redistribution candidates. My findings help explain why widespread public support for greater redistribution need not translate into election victories for left parties.