As authoritarianism has spread globally, government efforts to stifle civic space have increased dramatically. Among the most alarming tactics has been the spread of restrictive laws targeting 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 implementing partners? On the one hand, democracy-promoting donors might push back, ramping up support for advocacy in defiance of draconian measures. Alternatively, when aspiring autocrats make it difficult to work with local partners, donors might back down, decreasing support for democracy promotion. Testing these arguments using dyadic data on aid flows, an original data set of NGO 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 democracy aid by 70 percent in the years after laws are enacted. Our findings suggest that donor behavior creates strong incentives for backsliding governments in aid-receiving countries to use legislation to crack down on civil society.

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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.

[pdf][replication]

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.  

How do electoral authoritarian regimes manage the threat posed by the political opposition? We define and explore an important and understudied approach: encouraging defections from the opposition to the ruling party. While literature on authoritarian control often considers repression and cooptation as supplementary tools, we argue that opposition defections reveal the extent to which they can instead be mutually reinforcing. By ramping up repression, autocrats can influence the calculus of remaining loyal to the opposition. Meanwhile, publicized defections can reinforce the power of the regime's coercive capacity, further encouraging additional defections. In this way, opposition defection constitutes the product of the use of these tools in tandem and represents a more complex phenomenon than previously appreciated. To explore these dynamics empirically, we draw on original data on opposition defections in Cambodia at multiple levels. We provide evidence that a wave of defections that occurred between 2017 and 2025 were the product of a deliberate strategy by the ruling party; that they occurred in the context of a significant ramp-up in repression, which facilitated their success; and that initial defections were pivotal to securing more.

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.

 In 2001, the Cambodian government embarked on a series of ambitious decentralization reforms establishing democratically-elected, multi-party councils across the country’s over 1,600 communes. While regarded skeptically by contemporary observers, the reforms have transformed the nature of local governance in Cambodia. Drawing on extensive new qualitative and quantitative evidence, I take stock of Cambodia's commune council at twenty years. I argue that while decentralization has largely delivered on its promises to deepen development, with commune councilors today serving an important role as the state's frontline providers of governance, progress on deepening democracy is less impressive. However, I contend that decentralization has nonetheless engendered meaningful local political contestation amid extensive constraints, and in doing so has transformed the scale and methods of multi-party politics in Cambodia.

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.

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.