We build on the concept of attention costs in international affairs: When the agenda of powerful states is crowded, other states can get away with behavior the powerful state would otherwise sanction. Our example focuses on the United States as a liberal power promoting democratic elections. We use a game to demonstrate that greater attention costs by the “supervising” liberal power result in more cheating by foreign incumbents. We utilize the US domestic election cycle to predict variation in attention costs. Because they need to focus on reelection, American policymakers have less effort to devote to other policy objectives. We show that this is the case with a novel measure of attention to elections abroad. Finally, we construct an index of bias to show that presidential elections in the US are associated with more biased elections abroad. We conclude by noting that international pressure may keep cheating incumbents in check.

Populist discourse—which tends to benefit anti-systemic parties—has been on the rise in the world’s democratic states. Powerful non-democratic states have both the means and the incentive to spread such discourse to democratic states. We clarify the incentives illiberal states have to produce such communication, and delineate how this type of political communication fuses traditional state-to-state propaganda with election interventions. We draw on the case of Kremlin-sponsored communication on the issue of refugees in Germany to illustrate the mechanisms through which the discourse operates in target countries. We create a corpus of over a million news stories to identify the prevalence of illiberal discourse and its timing relative to Germany’s elections. We show that the Kremlin intervened in the 2017 federal elections by promoting refugee stories over and above the rate at which German outlets did. We create a corpus of over a million news stories to identify the prevalence of illiberal discourse and its timing relative to Germany’s elections. We show that the Kremlin intervened in the 2017 federal elections by promoting refugee stories over and above the rate at which German outlets did. We discuss the broader implications for the use of directed political communication as a form of election intervention.

Existing datasets of economic sanctions rely primarily on secondary sources and do not tend to take full advantage of government documents related to economic coercion. Such data may miss sanctions, and do not capture important details in how coercive measures are threatened, imposed and removed. The latter processes often have much to do with the domestic politics in sender countries. Understanding these processes may be necessary in order to fully account for sanctions’ effectiveness. We present a natural language processing (NLP) approach to retrieving sanctions-related government documents. We apply our method to the case of US sanctions. The United States is the world’s pre-eminent user of sanctions. Our method can be applied to other cases. We collect all sanctions events originating in the office of the US president, and all congressional sanctions, for 1988–2016. Our approach has three advantages: (1) by design, it captures all sanctions-related documents; (2) the resulting data are disaggregated by imposing branch of government; (3) the data include the original language of the measures. These features directly shed light on interbranch delegation, domestic (partisan) conflict, and policy priorities. We show that our data record more episodes than most existing sanctions’ data, and have features that other datasets lack. The availability of the original text opens up new avenues for research and analysis.

What drives the supply of crime news? While prior research focuses on the news media, we study a crucial upstream gatekeeper of information: the police. We argue that the police act as strategic bureaucrats who increase the disclosure of out-group cues (ethnicity, nationality) when immigration is salient to signal competence and transparency to the public. To test this, we use LLMs to annotate a novel dataset of about one million press releases published by local police stations across Germany between 2014 and 2024. Using a regression discontinuity in time design, we demonstrate an increase in out-group cues in police communications (1) following a nationwide shock to immigration salience (the 2015/16 Cologne New Year’s Eve assaults), and (2) in the days before regional elections in which immigration is a salient campaign issue. Our findings demonstrate how bureaucratic discretion shapes the supply of politically charged information.

Why do country leaders assume greater salience to outsiders in some – but not other, cases in international relations? The election interventions literature has argued that when the policy positions of candidates running in elections grow further apart, outsiders are more likely to back the candidates they find most congruent, by using direct support of a candidate (via promises of aid, for example) or by calibrating support for democratic processes in a country to make the victory of the preferred candidate more likely. We build on this research agenda to argue that policy polarization in a country will increase the salience of individual leaders to outside actors: it now literally makes a difference who will be in power. Noticing – and supporting leaders – becomes important. We test our argument about leader salience by scraping speeches made on the floor of U.S. Congress. We show that policy divergence between the positions of candidates running in elections abroad gets them more personal recognition in Congress. We also show that leader mentions contain words that are associated with an interest in helping foreign leaders get elected. Our method and measure can help advance research on the importance of individuals in politics more broadly.

Prior scholarship on the role of the U.S. Congress in sanctions policy making has highlighted how sanctions legislating is shaped by domestic political pressures. We move beyond a focus on interest groups, public opinion, and electoral incentives while investigating an important but underappreciated dimension of sanctions legislation – whether and how legislation grants the executive branch discretion regarding its implementation. We explain how deterrence objectives, treaty commitments, signaling concerns, and the uncertainties and trade-offs associated with different issues influence the degree and type of flexibility provided to the executive branch in sanctions legislation. We test hypotheses derived from this argument with evidence from a novel data set, created directly from the complete corpus of U.S. government documents dealing with sanctions from 1988-2016. Our analysis also has important implications for research on the effectiveness of sanctions, high- lighting the importance of taking into account underappreciated legislative design features when evaluating the success or failure of this commonly used policy tool.

Though centralized enforcement of global human rights standards is weak, powerful states can act unilaterally to punish rights violations. We focus on the role of the United States, deriving insights about how the incentives and constraints for human rights (HR) sanctions vary across the legislative and executive branches. Employing a new fine-grained dataset of U.S. economic coercion based on automated analysis of government documents, we marshal descriptive evidence, analysis of text, and multivariate models to explore patterns of HR sanctioning by Congress and the President. We find that although both branches are sensitive to strategic foreign policy interests, overall, Congress is more systematic in its approach toward human rights, orienting its measures around principles and norms, rather than particular countries. We further find that Congress makes frequent reference to global human rights treaties in its sanction-related legislation, and that its enforcement patterns are shaped by target countries’ treaty commitments.