How do plants’ sales and input-sourcing respond to aggregate shocks? Using novel administrative data, we show that COVID-19 induced lockdown in March 2020 led to domestic trade collapse across regions in India.  Well after the movement restrictions were lifted, trade continues to suffer while GDP recovers as plants switch from inter-regional sales and input-sourcing to intra-region. Plants more dependent on inter-region sales (inputs) lead this regional realignment. Additionally, products with a higher pre-pandemic scope to expand into the home market witness greater realignment, accounting for 7.6 percent of the sales growth in the last quarter of 2020.

According to conventional state–society scholarship, kinship-based institutions undermine state building. I argue that kinship networks, when geographically dispersed, cross-cut local cleavages and allow elites to internalize the gains to others from regions far from their own. Dispersed kinship networks, therefore, align the incentives of self-interested elites in favor of state building. I evaluate my argument by examining elite preferences during a state-building reform in 11th century China. I map politicians’ kinship networks using their tomb epitaphs and collect data on their political allegiances from archival materials. Statistical analysis and narrative evidence demonstrate that dispersed kinship networks align elites’ family interests with state interests and incentivize elites to support building a strong central state. My findings highlight the importance of elite social structure in facilitating state development and help understand state building in China – a useful, yet understudied, counterpoint to the Euro-centric literature.

The essay begins with a discussion of the movements, texts, and figures—notably Herbert Marcuse—both central to the intellectual development of Angela Y. Davis and most representative of Davis’s political thought. It frames Davis’s body of work as a form of fugitive theory and practice whose nineteenth-century intellectual roots provide a unique vista only partially mined by contemporary theorists frequently associated with fugitive thought. It turns next to an examination of three concepts foundational to the work of Davis: abolitionism, democracy, and freedom. Davis’s analyses of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass are vital to elucidating these notions. The chapter argues that the understanding of abolitionism Davis marshals mediates her articulations of democracy and freedom in late modernity. Inclusion of Davis’s views on resistance and liberation reinforces this reading. Davis does not claim to invent all or even most of the categories and terms integral to her thought. It is the way she integrates older and new concepts into a defined political system concerned with actors and institutional arrangements that distinguishes her. Deciphering how Davis arrives at her core tripartite ideals challenges us to refashion facile, sanitized origin narratives of the contours of African American political thought.

Democracy in today's world is synonymous with representative systems. Yet the majority of representative democracies institutionalizes mechanisms of "direct" democracy: referendums, plebiscites, citizens' initiatives, or recalls. The persistence of these institutions suggests that giving citizens the ultimate say in some matters of national public policy adds to the legitimacy of representative systems. Some recent referendum results -- the Brexit vote in the UK and the disapproval of peace accords in Colombia -- have signaled for many the risks of direct democracy. In this paper I first explore arguments in favor of limited direct agency for voters suggested by earlier theorists of representative government. I then explore the strategic reasons why real-world political leaders sometimes decide to delegate important decisions to voters. In some instances, though probably rarely, politicians decide to hold referendums for reasons that theorists would approve of.

Why does the public support or oppose military alliances? Although public backing for promises to defend other countries shapes the credibility of alliance commitments by democracies, we know little about the foundations of public opinion towards alliances. In particular, existing survey evidence cannot determine whether alliance attitudes are the top-down result of elite cues, or a bottom-up result of individual concerns and perceptions of alliance obligations and partners. In this article, I identify three potential determinants of public opinion towards alliances: elite cues, individual considerations, and alliance characteristics. I then use two conjoint survey experiments to assess the relative importance of these factors for public attitudes towards forming and maintaining international alliances.