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We hypothesise that the Habsburg Empire with its well-respected administration increased citizens' trust in local public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone Habsburg border have shared common formal institutions for a century now. We use a border specification and a two-dimensional geographic regression discontinuity design to identify from individuals living within a restricted band around the former border. We find that historical Habsburg affiliation increases current trust and reduces corruption in courts and police. Falsification tests of spuriously moved borders, geographic and pre-existing differences and interpersonal trust corroborate a genuine Habsburg effect.

We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt to and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 85 topic areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future—and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.

We review the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the lowest state court. As a way to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of various measures, we further analyze trends in judicial polarization within the US federal courts. Our analysis shows substantial gaps in the ideology of judges appointed by Republican Presidents versus those appointed by Democrats. Similar to trends in Congressional polarization, the increasing gap is mostly driven by a rightward movement by judges appointed by Republicans. We conclude by noting important avenues for future research in the study of the ideology of judges.

When is it possible for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a symmetric information model where a sender chooses a signal to reveal to a receiver, who then takes a noncontractible action that affects the welfare of both players. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a signal that strictly benefits the sender. We characterize sender-optimal signals. We examine comparative statics with respect to the alignment of the sender's and the receiver's preferences. Finally, we apply our results to persuasion by litigators, lobbyists, and salespeople.

How does the trial function? What are the tools, in terms of legal principle, scientific knowledge, social norms, and political practice, which underpin this most important decision-making process? This collection of nine essays by an international group of scholars explores these crucial questions. Focusing both on English criminal, military, and parliamentary trials, and upon national and international trials for war crimes, this book illuminates the diverse forces that have shaped trials during the modern era. The contributors approach their subject from a variety of perspectives - legal history, social history, political history, sociology, and international law. With an appreciation and understanding of the relevant legal procedures, they address wider issues of psychology, gender, bureaucracy, and international relations within the adjudicative setting. Their inter-disciplinary approach imparts to this book a breadth not usually seen in studies of the courtroom. Scholars and students of modern British history, political science, and international law, as well as legal history, will find these essays stimulating and informative. Judicial tribunals in England and Europe, 1200-1700: The trial in history, vol. I, edited by Dr Maureen Mulholland and Professor Brian Pullan, is also published by Manchester University Press.

Over the past two decades, the Chinese domestic security apparatus has expanded dramatically. “Stability maintenance” operations have become a top priority for local Chinese authorities. We argue that this trend goes back to the early 1990s, when central Party authorities adopted new governance models that differed dramatically from those of the 1980s. They increased the bureaucratic rank of public security chiefs within the Party apparatus, expanded the reach of the Party political-legal apparatus into a broader range of governance issues, and altered cadre evaluation standards to increase the sensitivity of local authorities to social unrest. We show that the origin of these changes lies in a policy response to the developments of 1989–1991, namely the Tiananmen democracy movement and the collapse of communist political systems in Eastern Europe. Over the past twenty years, these practices have developed into an extensive stability maintenance apparatus, whereby local governance is increasingly oriented around the need to respond to social unrest, whether through concession or repression. Chinese authorities now appear to be rethinking these developments, but the direction of reform remains unclear. 在过去的 20 多年中, 中国的国内维稳体系经历了大幅的扩展, 维护社会稳定成为地方政府工作的重中之重。我们提出这一趋势源于 90 年代初期党中央采取的一系列有别于 80 年代的治理模式。这一模式提高了公安部门领导在整个官僚体系中的地位, 扩大了党的政法系统对一系列治理领域的影响, 以及将社会稳定纳入到了地方干部考核体制中。我们认为这些变化是政府对 1989 至 1991 年间的事件--即天安门民主运动和东欧共产党政权的倒台--的政策回应。经过 20 多年的发展, 这些政策已经促成了一个庞大的维稳体系。在这一体系中, 地方治理的重心日益围绕着如何应对社会抗争进行, 或是妥协或是镇压。中国政府正在重新考量这一体系, 但改革的方向尚不明朗。

Although scholarly consensus suggests that dissent causes repression, the behaviors are endogenous: governments and dissidents act in expectation of each other’s behavior. Empirical studies have not accounted well for this endogeneity. We argue that preventive aspects of repression meaningfully affect the relationship between observed dissent and repression. When governments use preventive repression, the best response to dissent that does occur is unclear; observed dissent does not meaningfully predict responsive repression. By contrast, governments that do not engage in ex ante repression will be more likely to do it ex post. We follow U.S. voting scholarship and propose a new instrument to model the endogeneity: rainfall. We couple rainfall data in African provinces and U.S. states with data on dissent and repression and find that dissent fails to have a significant effect on responsive repression in states that engage in preventive repression.

Under what conditions does state expansion into limited statehood areas improve perceptions of state authority? Although previous work emphasizes identity or institutional sources of state legitimacy, I argue that relationships between state agents and citizens drive positive attitude formation, because these relationships provide information and facilitate social bonds. Moreover, when state agents and citizens share demographic characteristics, perceptional effects may improve. Finally, citizens finding procedural interactions between state agents and citizens unfair may adopt negative views about the state. I test these three propositions by randomizing household visits by male or female police officers in rural Liberia. These visits facilitated relationship building, leading to improved perceptions of police; shared demographic characteristics between police and citizens did not strengthen this effect. Perceptions of unfairness in the randomization led to negative opinions about police. The results imply that relationship building between state agents and citizens is an important part of state building.

Judges generally begin their interpretive task by looking for the ordinary meaning of the language of the law. And they often end there — out of respect for the notice function of the law or deference to the presumed intent of the lawmaker. Most everyone agrees on the primacy of the ordinary meaning rule. Yet scholars roundly bemoan the indeterminacy of the communicative content of the language of the law. And they pivot quickly to other grounds for interpretation. We agree with the diagnosis of important scholars in this field — from Richard Fallon and Cass Sunstein to Will Baude and Stephen Sachs — but reject their proposed cures. Instead of setting aside the threshold question of ordinary meaning, we seek to take it seriously. We do so through theories and methods developed in the scholarly field designed for the study of language: linguistics. We identify theoretical and operational deficiencies in our law's attempts to credit the ordinary meaning of the law and present linguistic theories and tools to assess it more reliably. Our framework examines iconic problems of ordinary meaning — from the famous \"no vehicles in the park\" hypothetical to two Supreme Court cases (United States v. Muscarello and Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd.) and a Seventh Circuit opinion by Judge Richard Posner (in United States v. Costello). We show that the law's conception of ordinary meaning implicates empirical questions about language usage. And we present linguistic tools from a field known as corpus linguistics that can help to answer these empirical questions. When we speak of ordinary meaning we are asking an empirical question — about the sense of a word or phrase that is most likely implicated in a given linguistic context. Linguists have developed computer-aided means of answering such questions. We propose to import those methods into the law's methodology of statutory interpretation. And we consider and respond to criticisms of their use by lawyers and judges.

The existence of an effective legal system is assumed throughout economic analysis, and yet there has been little study of the economics of legal markets themselves. Research to date has focused narrowly on the economics of markets for lawyers. In this review, I distinguish legal markets from the market for lawyers and show how excessive regulation of our legal markets—by lawyers themselves—distorts economic activity and growth. It does so primarily by inhibiting investment in the legal and regulatory technologies needed to respond to the transformation of the economy wrought by globalization, digitization, aspirations for inclusion, and the coming of artificial intelligence.