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How does exposure to criminal violence shape attitudes towards justice and the rule of law? Citizens care about crime prevention and procedural legality, yet they also value punishing perpetrators for the harm they have done. We argue that anger induced by exposure to criminal violence increases the demand for retribution and harsh punishments, even at the expense of the rule of law. We test this theory using one observational and two experimental studies from an original survey of 1,200 individuals in Western Mexico, a region affected by organized criminal violence and vigilantism. First, we first show that exposure to violence is correlated with increased anger and support for punitive justice, including vigilante actions. Second, across our two experiments, we show that citizens are more supportive of harsh punishments and place less value on their legality in response to morally outrageous crimes. Third, we find that the innocence of the victim, rather than the severity of the crime, is what triggers outrage and punitiveness. This suggests that citizens may support extreme levels of violence as long as they perceive that its targets are criminals. Finally, we show that outrageous forms of violence against civilians can lead individuals to prioritize harsh punishment regardless of its legality. When criminal actors target perceived innocents with common crimes like extortion, there is greater support for harsh, vigilante action. These patterns provide a bottom-up explanation for harsh justice.

Understanding how economic incentives affect illegal drug production is essential for crafting policies in response to the international drug trade. Policymakers typically face a choice between two strategies: targeting criminal groups via law enforcement, and offering producers incentives to engage in alternate activities. Yet, little is known about how the returns to alternate legal activities affect drug supply. We contribute to this literature by examining how shocks to legal commodity prices affect the drug trade in Mexico. Our analysis exploits exogenous movements in the Mexican maize price stemming from weather conditions in US maize‐growing regions, as well as exports of other major maize producers. Using data on over 2200 municipios spanning 1990–2010, we show that lower prices differentially increased the cultivation of both marijuana and opium poppies in municipios more climatically suited to growing maize. We also find impacts on downstream drug‐trade outcomes, including drug cartel operations and killings perpetrated by these groups. Our findings demonstrate that maize price changes contributed to the burgeoning drug trade in Mexico, and point to the violent consequences of an expanding drug sector.

During the 2016 election, Donald Trump castigated unauthorized immigrants as “murderers and rapists.” During his presidency, he continued the use of this rhetoric, explicitly linking unauthorized migrants to threatening narratives. Here, we consider three questions: Did Donald Trump and his immigration positions serve as an “anxiety trigger” for Latina/os? Are individuals with contextually stigmatized attributes especially sensitive to Trump and his policy proposals? Is Spanish language itself, an attribute negatively stigmatized in the context of the immigration issue, sufficient to increase deportation anxiety? Utilizing survey experiments of Latina/os, we demonstrate that exposure to a Trump immigration cue is sufficient to increase anxiety about deportation. We also demonstrate that stigmatized attributes predict anxiety, but do not moderate the effect of the Trump cue. Lastly, we provide evidence that survey language affects anxiety among Latina/os. In Studies 1 ( n = 736) and 2 ( n = 1,040), we show that exposure to information about Trump’s immigration agenda significantly increases reports about deportation anxiety. In Study 3 ( n = 1,734), we show that the Trump exposure condition induces heightened anxiety but that Latina/o attributes (language proficiency and use, immigration status, assessed phenotype) and identity strength have an independent effect on deportation anxiety. In Study 4 ( n = 775), we randomized bilingual respondents into Spanish or English language survey protocols and found that comparable bilinguals exposed to Spanish language report higher levels of anxiety compared to English-language survey takers.

This article asks why some Indian districts experience chronic Maoist violence while others do not. The answer helps to explain India’s Maoist civil war, which is the product of the accumulation of violence in a few districts, as well as to generate a new hypothesis about the causes of civil war more generally. The authors argue that, other things equal, the emergence of subaltern-led parties at the critical juncture before armed organizations enter crowds them out: the stronger the presence of subaltern-led political parties in a district at this juncture, the lower the likelihood of experiencing chronic armed violence subsequently. They develop their argument through field research and test its main prediction using an original, district-level data set on subaltern incorporation and Maoist violence in India between 1967 and 2008. The article contributes a new, party-based explanation to the literatures on both civil war and Maoist violence in India. It also introduces new district-level data on the Maoist movement and on the incorporation of subaltern ethnic groups by political parties in India.

We show that current levels of democracy in Africa are linked to the nature of its independence movements. Using different measures of political regimes and historical data on anticolonial movements, we find that countries that experienced rural insurgencies tend to have autocratic regimes, while those that faced urban protests tend to have more democratic institutions. The association between the type of independence movement and democracy is statistically significant for the post‐Cold War period and robust to a number of potential confounding factors and sensitivity checks. We provide evidence for causality in this relationship by using an instrumental variables approach and a difference‐in‐differences design with fixed effects. Furthermore, we adjudicate between two potential mechanisms and find support for a behavioral path dependence hypothesis. Urban protests enabled participants to develop norms of peaceful political behavior, which provided cultural bases for liberal democracy. In contrast, armed rebellions generated behavioral patterns that perpetuated political exclusion and the use of violence as a form of political dissent.

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