As authoritarianism has spread around the world, government efforts to stifle civic space have increased dramatically. Among the most alarming tactics has been the spread of restrictive laws targeting non-governmental organizations (NGOs). While such laws threaten the core objectives of many foreign donors, they have become especially common in aid-dependent nations. How do foreign donors react to this assault on their local and international development partners? Do their responses hinge on their commitment to promoting democracy? On one hand, democracy-focused donors might push back, ramping up support for advocacy in defiance of draconian measures. Alternatively, when restrictions make it difficult to work with local partners, donors might back down to aspiring autocrats by decreasing support for advocacy. Testing these arguments using dyadic data on aid flows, an original dataset of NGOs laws, and a variety of research designs, we find that the donors most committed to democracy promotion back down in the face of restrictive NGO laws, reducing support for advocacy work by over 70%. Our findings suggest that donor behavior creates strong incentives for governments in aid-receiving countries to use legal measures to crackdown on civil society.

NGOs are a core component of a robust civil society and operate in a wide variety of sectors, ranging from service delivery to political advocacy. However, research has yet to systematically investigate whether the impact of government repression varies across NGO activities. We hypothesize that advocacy NGOs are more affected by repression than those in service delivery. Surveying 176 employees from 106 NGOs in Cambodia, we employ a conjoint experiment to examine how the level of repression affects a task crucial to NGOs’ survival: obtaining funding via grant applications. We find that while increases in the severity of repression has a stronger deterrent effect for advocacy NGOs, repression has a large deterrent effect on service NGOs as well. Interviews and text analysis of open-ended questions suggest that local officials target both advocacy and service delivery NGOs, but for different reasons. Our findings speak to the spread of authoritarianism and the challenges NGOs face in countries with closing civic spaces.

Does opposition participation in authoritarian institutions matter for governance? I theorize that in spite of the legal and extra-legal constraints imposed on opposition parties in autocratic regimes, opposition politicians' participation in political institutions can improve governance by constraining corrupt, self-dealing, and exclusionary behaviors of ruling party politicians. To test my hypothesis, I draw on an original dataset of over 16,000 contracts for commune infrastructure projects implemented by local government in Cambodia. Using a novel close-elections regression discontinuity design, I estimate the effect of a single additional opposition-held seat on corruption in local procurement, holding the degree of local political competition constant. In partial support of my hypothesis, I find that an additional opposition-held seat in the commune council corresponds to significant increases in the number of bidders in public procurement, reflective of increased competition, however I find no corresponding decrease in contract prices. To probe my findings, I draw on over two dozen interviews with commune councilors from the opposition party in Cambodia that shed light on how the opposition politicians manage to perform oversight in practice. Together, the findings suggest that opposition representation has important, if limited, effects on authoritarian governance, even where the prospects for an outright opposition victory remain low.  

Economic sanctions have become a crucial statecraft tool for policymakers who seek to coerce or punish other states in the international system. However, the economic and humanitarian consequences of sanctions are borne not only by states but also by local actors such as non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations, and the citizens which they serve. Such is especially true in the case of aid withdrawal, a particularly prevalent form of sanctions instrument: over 75% of the sanctions imposed between 1989 and 2016 by the EU, US, or the UN included an aid sanction component. Despite the ubiquity of aid withdrawal as a sanctions tool, we have little understanding of how the burden of aid withdrawal is shared by local implementing partners on which the US relies for aid delivery. Using the synthetic control method, we analyze aggregate differences in US foreign assistance to local implementation partners in both sanctioned and non-sanctioned aid recipient countries for the years 2002-2020. We find that the imposition of aid sanctions produces an immediate, drastic, and lasting decrease in US funding to local public sector institutions with little immediate change in aid flows for local NGOs. The results suggest that aid sanctions are an effective tool for pressuring the public sector without spillover effects for the local NGO community.

Opposition parties in all contexts find their influence circumscribed by the procedural reality of majority rule. But in the authoritarian context, constraints on oppositions to be particularly strong, as de facto restrictions and repression further constrict opposition representatives' room to maneuver. In the face of both ordinary and extraordinary constraints, are there any avenues by which elected opposition officials can shape decisions over the allocation of scarce resources and the provision of goods and services in autocracy? Drawing from the literature on parliamentary oppositions in democracy, I propose several potential pathways by which opposition representatives can attempt to influence outcomes. I argue that in the face of de facto and de jure constraints on their procedural power, opposition representatives' ability to influence governance derives from their power to observe and extract information from state institutions paired with their ability to credibly threaten of exposure of poor governance. Using rich qualitative and survey data from elected local politicians in Cambodia, I demonstrate how opposition actors in autocracies intentionally make use of their limited power in a similar manner as democratic oppositions: by overseeing and criticizing the party in power.

When and how do authoritarian regimes encourage low- and mid-level opposition cadres to defect and join the ruling party? While literature on authoritarian control often considers coercion and co-optation as substitutes, we argue that these tools can sometimes exist as complements, with coercion helping to create conditions conducive to promote cooptation of opposition actors. By tightening coercive control and restricting political space, autocrats can encourage defections by opposition figures and civil society, even where higher-level opposition leaders are committed to resisting cooptation on principle. Regimes can employ a bottom-up approach that deprives the opposition of human resources and creates a sense of hopelessness among opposition elites and supporters. Such a process of opposition suffocation introduces the potential for what we call defection cascades to quickly snowball. In this way, coercion and cooptation can serve as mutually reinforcing tools to secure and stabilize authoritarian regimes, especially during periods of uncertainty. To test our theory, we draw on two new datasets of opposition defections in Cambodia between 2013 and 2024, as well as qualitative interviews with local opposition officials. Examining the timing of publicized defections and the positions and backgrounds of defectors, we demonstrate the existence of defection cascades following high-profile instances of ramped-up repression. We also examine the geographic distribution of defections of local level officials during this period to show how a bottom-up pattern of cooptation successfully crippled the opposition in the late 2010s.

Scholars have long conceptualized politicians' motivation to run for office as a function of the potential benefits of attaining office and the probability that their candidacy is successful, minus the costs associated with candidacy. In hegemonic authoritarian regimes, affiliation with a ruling party is the only sure path to attaining both policy influence and the personal perks of office, while affiliation with the opposition not only presents a lower probability of winning office, but also poses unique costs to the candidate. As the candidate calculus is currently conceptualized, no rational politician in an authoritarian regime should ever affiliate with an opposition party. Nonetheless, opposition party candidates abound. In authoritarian Cambodia's recent tightly-controlled local elections, opposition parties successfully recruited over 40,000

candidates, who risked harassment and repression to compete for a position that, even if attained, would be quite unlikely to confer any of the conventional perks of office. What motivates candidates in authoritarian regimes to compete under the opposition banner, and how do opposition parties convince potential candidates that running is worth the risk? Combining novel survey data of 900 elected local officials in Cambodia with in-depth interviews of opposition party activists, this paper presents evidence for a newly-theorized calculus of candidacy in the authoritarian context.

Pairing original data on over 100,000 candidates for local and subnational office in Cambodia across two decades with an original survey experiment on elected politician's desire for hire office, I examine the dynamics of political ambition and promotion in an authoritarian regime.