In contemporary Latin America roughly one-third of all democratically-elected leaders are prosecuted by their successors for corruption after leaving office. Drawing on a simple reciprocity game, we argue that upending impunity depends more on the predecessors’ capacity for retaliation than on conventional rule of law considerations, or on the successors’ desire to use the law opportunistically to weed out future political competitors. We then exploit an original dataset on extended post-tenure fates to show that presidential prosecutions in Latin America correlate with two types of political shocks: irregular presidential exits and the election of political outsiders. Such relationships remain robust whether the successor is from an opposition party, the courts enjoy independence, or previous leaders were especially corrupt. To explore whether the correlates of selective accountability that we uncover are causal, we instrument for domestic political shocks with an index of international commodity prices and U.S. interest rates.

This chapter documents the party-group alignment of the NRA and the GOP, detailing the constellation of factors that collectively facilitated this alignment. Building directly on chapters 3 and 4, it shows how the NRA’s cultivation of a group social identity and ideology laid a foundation for its eventual incorporation into the Republican coalition. The chapter also highlights the institutional conditions that catalyzed this process, including the changing incentives of both the NRA and GOP politicians. Finally, the chapter explores the intensification of the NRA’s relationship with the Republican Party over the past few decades, including its relationship with Donald Trump, and reflects on what the NRA case tells us about the nature of party coalitions.

Partisans --- voters who feel closer to one party over the other --- rarely vote for opposition party candidates. In contrast to existing work, I argue that two critical constituency-level factors jointly shape a partisan's likelihood of voting for a candidate from the other party when desirous of more public infrastructure. The first is partisan geography: partisans have an incentive to vote for a similar or better opposition politician when they live side by side with her supporters in a community (i.e., partisan nonsegregated areas)  because politicians cannot exclude them from the provided benefits. Second, voters only have an incentive to cross party lines in competitive electoral districts because their vote can be pivotal in selecting and sanctioning an opposition politician. In other electoral settings, partisans have few incentives to vote for opponents because they either do not expect to benefit from the goods they will provide or believe that their vote is not essential (or both). I find support for my hypothesis and proposed explanation using data from a conjoint experiment alongside survey responses of citizens (N=2,020) located in a stratified, representative sample of electoral districts in Ghana.

The author argues that the Great Migration changed how Democratic Party elites interacted with Black communities in northern cities. In particular the author argues that (1) Black Americans moved out of the South into the North, (2) that this migration changed Black citizens ability to participate in politics, and (3) this change in participation led Democratic Party leaders to conclude that Black Americans could help the Democratic Party achieve their electoral goals.