Donghyun Danny Choi

Opposition victories after periods of democratic erosion are commonly portrayed as turning points that can help restore democracy. This essay argues that this optimism is often misplaced. An analysis of more than 40 elections in Africa since 1990 in which an opposition candidate defeated an autocratizing incumbent reveals that democracy stagnated or declined in half these cases. The authors attribute this pattern to two mutually reinforcing mechanisms inherited from the previous era of democratic erosion. First, new leaders inherit a landscape of weakened institutions — pliant legislatures, politicized courts, and captured state agencies — which are far easier to exploit for their own political consolidation than to rebuild. Second, years of repression teach opposition elites which legal and coercive strategies are most effective for ensuring political survival. This “opposition learning” encourages them to use, rather than dismantle, these authoritarian instruments once they are in power. Through detailed case studies of recent opposition victories in Malawi and Zambia, the authors illustrate how these dynamics operate in practice. Despite celebrated electoral turnovers, these new governments began to repurpose the tools of their predecessors, engaging in judicial manipulation, selective prosecutions, and the cooptation of state power. This combination of institutional inheritance and learned repression often transforms a celebrated alternation of power into a “smarter autocracy,” illustrating why electoral turnover by itself is seldom sufficient to guarantee democratic recovery.

Overcoming America's deep partisan polarization poses a unique challenge: Americans must be able to sharply disagree on who should govern while agreeing on more fundamental democratic principles. We study one model of depolarization — reciprocal group reflection — inspired by marital counseling and implemented by a non-partisan non-governmental organization, Braver Angels. We randomly assigned undergraduates at four universities either to participate in a Braver Angels workshop or simply to complete three rounds of surveys. The workshops substantially reduced polarization according to explicit and implicit measures. They also increased participants' willingness to donate to programs aimed at depolarizing political conversations. These effects are consistent across partisan groups, though some dissipate over time. Using qualitative data, and building on contact and deliberative theories, we argue that depolarization is especially effective when it includes both informational and emotional components, such that citizens who are moved to empathize with outgroup members become more likely to internalize new information about them.

When are politicians willing to liberalize abortion laws? While restricted access to legal abortion affects millions of women around the world, there is relatively little understanding of the factors shaping the views of politicians who craft or uphold such restrictive laws. This study examines the impact of a public health framing commonly employed by activists to persuade politicians to reform abortion laws. We provide evidence that politicians' preferences toward abortion reforms are shaped by the intersection of gender and wealth. Drawing on a survey experiment conducted among more than 600 politicians in Zambia, we show that only women politicians from less wealthy backgrounds are more likely to support policy liberalization after being exposed to a public health framing. These findings underscore how economic inequalities can affect the substantive representation of women's interests and provide a baseline for further research on the use of framing strategies in other developing country contexts.

Why do native Europeans discriminate against Muslim immigrants? Can shared ideas between natives and immigrants reduce discrimination? We hypothesize that natives' bias against Muslim immigrants is shaped by the belief that Muslims hold conservative attitudes about women's rights and this ideational basis for discrimination is more pronounced among native women. We test this hypothesis in a large-scale field experiment conducted in 25 cities across Germany, during which 3,797 unknowing bystanders were exposed to brief social encounters with confederates who revealed their ideas regarding gender roles. We find significant discrimination against Muslim women, but this discrimination is eliminated when Muslim women signal that they hold progressive gender attitudes. Through an implicit association test and a followup survey among German adults, we further confirm the centrality of ideational stereotypes in structuring opposition to Muslims. Our findings have important implications for reducing conflict between native–immigrant communities in an era of increased cross-border migration.

High temperatures have been linked to aggression and different forms of conflict in humans. We consider whether exposure to heat waves increases discriminatory behavior toward outgroups. Using data from two large-scale field experiments in Germany, we find a direct causal effect of exposure to heat shocks on discrimination in helping behavior. As temperature rises, German natives faced with a choice to provide help to strangers in every-day interactions help Muslim immigrants less than they do other German natives, while help rates toward natives are unaffected by temperature. This finding suggests that there may be a physiological basis for discriminatory behavior toward outgroups.

Can endorsements persuade voters to transcend politicized identity cleavages to support candidates from other groups? We argue that the persuasive power of cleavage-bridging endorsements depends on the ability of politicians to elicit ingroup trust on behalf of out-group candidates. The activation of in-group trust increases the likelihood of voting for out-group candidates by changing both instrumental and affective assessments about the nature of the voter-candidate relationship. To assess these claims, we provide evidence from Kenya, where simulated radio news segments experimentally manipulated the ethnic relationship among voters, endorsers, and candidates. We find that voters who hear endorsements from in-group politicians are significantly more likely to vote for out-group candidates and view them as trustworthy. We further find that the trust premium transferred from in-group endorsers to out-group candidates leads voters to regard them as nondiscriminatory representatives who care about their well-being.

How does a researcher's identity shape the design, implementation, and interpretation of field experiments? This piece draws on the collective experiences of five researchers who have conducted field experiments across diverse settings to reflect on the practical and ethical implications of insider and outsider positionality. The authors provide recommendations for navigating these dynamics while maintaining research integrity.

Understanding sources of judicial bias is essential for establishing due process. To date, theories of judicial decision making are rooted in ranked societies with majority–minority group cleavages, leaving unanswered which groups are more prone to express bias and whether it is motivated by in-group favoritism or out-group hostility. We examine judicial bias in Kenya, a diverse society that features a more complex ethnic landscape. While research in comparative and African politics emphasizes instrumental motivations underpinning ethnic identity, we examine the psychological, implicit biases driving judicial outcomes. Using data from Kenyan criminal appeals and the conditional random assignment of judges to cases, we show that judges are 3 to 5 percentage points more likely to grant coethnic appeals than non-coethnic appeals. To understand mechanisms, we use word embeddings to analyze the sentiment of written judgments. Judges use more trust-related terms writing for coethnics, suggesting that in-group favoritism motivates coethnic bias in this context.

Party switching among legislative candidates has important implications for accountability and representation in democratizing countries. We argue that party switching is influenced by campaign costs tied to the clientelistic politics that persist in many such countries. Candidates who are expected to personally pay for their campaigns, including handouts for voters, will seek to affiliate with parties that can lower those costs through personal inducements and organizational support. Campaign costs also drive candidate selection among party leaders, as they seek to recruit candidates who can finance their own campaigns. We corroborate these expectations with an original survey and embedded choice experiment conducted among parliamentary candidates in Zambia. The conjoint analysis shows that candidates prefer larger parties that offer particularistic benefits. The survey further reveals that parties select for business owners as candidates — the very candidates most likely to defect from one party to another.

Many western liberal democracies have witnessed increased discrimination against immigrants and opposition to multiculturalism. Prior research identifies ethno-linguistic differences between immigrant and native populations as the key source of such bias. Linguistic assimilation has therefore been proposed as an important mechanism to reduce discrimination and mitigate conflict between natives and immigrants. Using large-scale field experiments conducted in 30 cities across Germany — a country with a high influx of immigrants and refugees — we empirically test whether linguistic assimilation reduces discrimination against Muslim immigrants in everyday social interactions. We find that it does not; Muslim immigrants are no less likely to be discriminated against even if they appear to be linguistically assimilated. However, we also find that ethno-linguistic differences alone do not cause bias among natives in a country with a large immigrant population and state policies that encourage multiculturalism.

Ingroup bias and outgroup prejudice are pervasive features of human behavior, motivating various forms of discrimination and conflict. In an era of increased cross-border migration, these tendencies exacerbate intergroup conflict between native populations and immigrant groups, raising the question of how conflict can be overcome. We address this question through a large-scale field intervention conducted in 28 cities across three German states, designed to measure assistance provided to immigrants during everyday social interactions. This randomized trial found that cultural integration signaled through shared social norms mitigates — but does not eliminate — bias against immigrants driven by perceptions of religious differences. Our results suggest that eliminating or suppressing ascriptive (e.g., ethnic) differences is not a necessary path to conflict reduction in multicultural societies; rather, achieving a shared understanding of civic behavior can form the basis of cooperation.

Scholars have increasingly turned to fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to conduct small- and medium-N studies, arguing that it combines the most desired elements of variable-oriented and case-oriented research. This piece demonstrates, however, that fsQCA is an extraordinarily sensitive method whose results are worryingly susceptible to minor parametric and model specification changes. We make two specific claims. First, the causal conditions identified by fsQCA as being sufficient for an outcome to occur are highly contingent upon the values of several key parameters selected by the user. Second, fsQCA results are subject to marked confirmation bias. Given its tendency toward finding complex connections between variables, the method is highly likely to identify as sufficient for an outcome causal combinations containing even randomly generated variables. To support these arguments, we replicate three studies utilizing fsQCA and conduct sensitivity analyses and Monte Carlo simulations to assess the impact of small changes in parameter values and the method's built-in confirmation bias on the overall conclusions about sufficient conditions.