Research

Publications

▸ Allison Carnegie, Richard Clark, and Lisa Fan. 2026. “Multilateral Messaging: International Organizations, Populism, and Social Media.” Review of International Organizations.

International organizations (IOs) face unprecedented attacks on their legitimacy and authority from hostile domestic publics. Yet modern communication channels like social media allow IOs to interface directly with the public, offering a potential opportunity to enhance their reputations. We investigate the communication strategies IOs adopt to shore up public support in the wake of populist challenges and whether such messages are effective. We argue that IO efforts to highlight their ties to ordinary people increase engagement and political support from public audiences. To test our hypothesis, we use novel Twitter (now X) data from 2012-2022 paired with an original survey experiment of U.S. citizens that manipulates whether IOs are portrayed as technocratic or populist-friendly organizations. Our findings suggest that rhetorical style shapes which dimensions of IO support are mobilized: populist appeals generate political and distributive support, while technocratic appeals reinforce perceptions of competence. Our results highlight IOs’ agency in the social media age and suggest that they possess informational tools to blunt populist opposition.

Under Review

▸ “Weaponizing Women’s Voices: Hypocrisy Claims and the Erosion of Women’s Rights in Autocracies” with Stephanie Char Revise and Resubmit

Authoritarian regimes routinely restrict women’s rights while claiming to champion them. How do regime subordinates navigate public backlash when the government undermines the very rights it claims to advance? We identify hypocrisy claims – accusations that the opposition themselves violate standards they profess to uphold – as one rhetorical strategy. We theorize that regime subordinates intensify hypocrisy claims following rollbacks in women’s rights, with regime women drawing on their gendered authority to deliver these claims. Using natural language processing on speeches from the Turkish Grand National Assembly (2015–2023), we find hypocrisy claims significantly increased after Turkey’s 2021 Istanbul Convention withdrawal and 2016 Marriage Bill, with no comparable increase following controversial rhetoric or crises unrelated to women’s rights. Regime women disproportionately drive this shift compared to their male counterparts. These findings reveal how hypocrisy claims operate after the rollback of women’s rights, with regime women’s voices at the forefront of this response.

▸ “Gendered Pathways to Party Loyalty: Network Exclusion and Public Signaling in Turkey.” Honorable Mention, Empirical Study of Gender Research Network 2024.

In regimes that demand party loyalty, why do gendered differences in loyalty emerge? Allegiance to the ruling party is essential in dominant-party autocracies, yet the primary networks through which loyalty is conveyed remain dominated by men. I argue that gendered network exclusion incentivizes women’s reliance on public signals of loyalty, particularly where the ruling party monopolizes access to office. Using parliamentary speeches and 3.5 million social media posts from members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (2018–2023), I find that dominant-party women consistently outpace their men co-partisans in declaring party loyalty. Women are not inherently more loyal than men, with the gender gap reversing in opposition parties. These dynamics further constrain women’s advocacy, as dominant-party women prioritize women’s general welfare over divisive family law reforms that challenge gender hierarchies. Findings reveal how network exclusion shapes loyalty signaling, shedding light on the bounds of women’s representation under authoritarian rule.

▸ “Gendered Expressions of Loyalty: How Women Play the Sycophant Card.”

Where loyalty drives political survival, why do women praise autocrats more than men? Extensive research demonstrates the centrality of loyalty for women’s political advancement, yet how women rhetorically signal this loyalty remains underexplored. I argue that sycophantic appeals offer a gendered pathway to power in conservative authoritarian contexts. Excessive praise enables women to exhibit loyalty while conforming to feminine ideals of warmth and deference, mitigating backlash where their political presence challenges traditional gender expectations. Using natural language processing on speeches from Turkey’s Grand National Assembly from 2015 to 2023, I find that women in the ruling party are more likely than men to profess loyalty to autocrats and employ gender-congruent praise emphasizing compassion. This strategy yields tangible rewards, with women who adopt such praise securing better list positions and reelection. These findings reveal how gender shapes expressions of loyalty and their political returns, illuminating gendered pathways to power under authoritarianism.

▸ “Echoes of Erosion: Communicating Foreign Democratic Backsliding in Autocratizing Regimes” with Tony Zirui Yang and Eddy S. F. Yeung

Political communication plays an important role in shaping democratic norms and resilience. However, little is known about how politicians communicate democratic erosion abroad to reorient domestic discourse about democracy. We argue that in countries experiencing autocratization, elites have strategic incentives to contest narratives of foreign democratic erosion by framing their rivals as democratic threats. Empirically, we draw on a large corpus of social media data to analyze how politicians in three autocratizing regimes—Hungary, Poland, and Türkiye—communicated the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, a globally salient episode of democratic erosion. Across three countries, we uncover strikingly similar communication patterns: opposition elites extensively used US backsliding to warn against domestic illiberalism, whereas ruling party elites framed the event as a security threat and countercharged the opposition as endangering democracy. Our findings highlight how contestation of issue ownership over democracy shapes whether foreign backsliding bolsters or undermines domestic democratic resilience.

Working Papers

▸ “The Public Opinion Consequences of Voter Uncertainties about Democratic Outcomes” with Eddy S. F. Yeung, Jonathan A. Chu, and Scott Williamson

Despite widespread support for democracy, anti-democratic politicians are often not punished—and pro-democratic politicians not rewarded—at the ballot box. Why? To explain this puzzle, we foreground the role of voter uncertainty and decompose it into two theoretical forms. First is intention uncertainty: whether or not the political candidate’s proposed policy intends to undermine or consolidate democracy. Second is implementation uncertainty: whether the candidate, if elected, can implement the policy as promised. We subject our theory to experimentation, randomizing both types of uncertainty and measuring their downstream effects on voter support across ten countries worldwide. The results suggest that intention uncertainty powerfully explains voters’ inability to punish or reward anti- and pro-democratic candidates, while implementation uncertainty can also contribute to voters’ leniency toward anti-democratic candidates. Our findings offer microfoundational insights into the rise and fall of anti- and pro-democratic politicians across the world, contributing to our understanding of democratic backsliding and defense through the lens of mass–elite interactions.

▸ “Claiming Democracy: Strategic Variation in Democratic Rhetoric across Global Autocracies” with Humeyra Biricik, Eddy S. F. Yeung, and Scott Williamson Winner of 2026 PSA Autocracy and Regime Change Specialist Group Best Paper Award

A key legitimation strategy for autocrats is to claim that they govern democratically. However, we know little about how and when they deploy democratic rhetoric in pursuit of this goal. Using a novel corpus of speeches from 51 regimes from 1999 to 2024, we employ supervised machine learning and transformer-based language models to measure rhetorical appeals to democracy by autocratic leaders. Our results suggest that autocrats strategically emphasize different aspects of democracy to align their rhetoric with the institutional framework of their regimes. Autocrats are more likely to invoke conventional, procedural understandings of democracy where their institutions more credibly support such claims, while those with weaker institutions resort to more authoritarian conceptions of democracy. We further show that democratic claims shift in response to different types of challenges, with autocrats more likely to invoke procedural democratic claims under political pressure. These findings suggest that democratic rhetoric is not just a blunt instrument of authoritarian propaganda, but instead reflects strategic attempts to leverage competing understandings of democracy to justify autocratic rule.

▸ “How Autocrats Speak: Introducing a Global Dataset of Authoritarian Communication” with Humeyra Biricik, Eddy S. F. Yeung, and Scott Williamson

How do authoritarian leaders speak? Political communication is central to authoritarian rule, with consequences for public opinion, elite behavior, and regime stability. Yet, existing datasets focus on specific regions or time periods, limiting comparative research on authoritarian communication. This paper introduces a novel dataset of 50,872 texts collected from 77 authoritarian leaders across 60 countries from 1994 to 2024. Our approach integrates web scraping, archival research, and advanced natural language processing methods to systematically collect and process text data. Our corpus includes granular speech and statement-level data including original and machine-translated text, speakers, sentiment scores, and temporal markers. We validate the accuracy of our dataset against existing corpora, and apply our corpus to generate novel insights into the study of comparative politics and international relations. In an era when autocrats increasingly rely on information control, our dataset offers essential tools for understanding the rhetorical toolkit of modern authoritarianism.

▸ “What is Free and Fair? Evidence on Perceptions of Election Quality from Ten Countries” with Eddy S. F. Yeung, Jonathan A. Chu, Bardia Rahmani, and Scott Williamson

People weigh electoral quality more heavily than any other factor when considering whether a country is democratic or not. However, we know relatively little about how people evaluate whether an election meets democratic standards. Drawing on a conjoint experiment implemented in ten countries, we study which kinds of electoral violations are most likely to be perceived as serious and the contexts in which they are most likely to trigger opposition. Results indicate that violations affecting voting are perceived as most damaging to electoral quality, whereas violations that restrict candidate competition or distort information are viewed as less problematic. In addition, we show evidence that violations do not consistently provoke stronger reactions when targeting the opposition specifically, and that respondents update about the seriousness of violations based on electoral outcomes. The results suggest that people in different contexts hold relatively similar views about what determines electoral quality, and they highlight vulnerabilities that may allow authoritarian political leaders to use elections to bolster claims of democratic legitimacy.

▸ “Who’s to Blame: Elite Self-Criticism and the Politics of Blame” with Eddy S. F. Yeung and Scott Williamson

Why do regime subordinates proactively accept blame for poor outcomes when doing so is costly? We argue that self-criticism allows regime subordinates to acknowledge public grievances while containing blame below the highest levels of leadership. Empirically, we examine more than 1.8 million social media posts from members of Turkey’s 27th Grand National Assembly (2018–2023), using a two-stage large language model to identify and classify blame attribution. Our results demonstrate that regime subordinates are significantly more likely to engage in self-criticism than opposition members, who primarily direct blame toward the incumbent regime. Self-criticism is most prevalent when failures are highly visible and occur in domains where citizens expect governments to protect public welfare. It is also temporally bounded, peaking roughly 45 days after crisis onset before declining toward pre-crisis levels. Our findings show that regime subordinates are not merely recipients of blame but active participants in allocating responsibility, including by publicly assigning blame to themselves.

▸ “Informational Autonomy: AI and the Changing Role of International Organizations” with Allison Carnegie and Seowoo Chung

A foundational role of international organizations is to solve problems of information. They gather and circulate data, monitor compliance, verify behavior, and reduce uncertainty in ways that help states cooperate. Artificial intelligence would seem to make them much better at this, as it allows IOs to collect information from open sources, process large quantities of data, and identify violations more quickly and independently. We argue, however, that as AI improves monitoring, it also increases the informational autonomy of international organizations, reducing their reliance on member states for tasks that anchored the principal-agent structure of global governance. The result is a dynamic in which organizations become more autonomous in an era in which they are being criticized for over-reach. Combining new data with qualitative evidence, we show that international organizations are increasingly producing information independently of member states, particularly in domains where AI has the greatest potential to substitute for state-provided information. These changes reshape a foundational source of member-state control over international organizations, with important implications for authority, legitimacy, and compliance in global governance.

▸ “Peer Pressure: Interstate Criticism and Treaty Ratification” with Stephanie Char

How effective is interstate advocacy at promoting formal commitments to human rights? We argue that iterative peer pressure from states strengthens government commitments to human rights by enhancing dedicated bureaucratic capacity to human rights reforms and privileging human rights advocates within bureaucratic deliberations. We test this theory using data from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the United Nations Human Rights Council, leveraging over 57,000 UPR recommendations from 2008 to 2017. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that recommendations demanding ratification significantly increase the probability of ratification within four years of review, with effects amplifying in successive UPR cycles. Qualitative evidence from expert interviews, paired case comparisons, and cross-agency references in UPR documentation offer support for our proposed bureaucratic mechanism. These findings speak to longstanding debates over the efficacy of multilateral human rights advocacy, the determinants of treaty ratification, and the bureaucratic politics of human rights reform.

Works in Progress

▸ “Detection without Enforcement: Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of Global Governance” with Allison Carnegie and Seowoo Chung

▸ “The Politics of Antipolitics” with Eddy S. F. Yeung and Scott Williamson

▸ “Public Understandings of Democracy” with Anja Neundorf, Aykut Öztürk, Souleymane Yameogo, and Scott Williamson

Other Selected Writings

▸ “How Autocrats Avoid Angering Their Pro-Democratic Publics” with Scott Williamson, Jonathan A. Chu, and Eddy S. F. Yeung. Policy Brief Series on the Authoritarian Eco-System, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, 2026.