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For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a principal-agent problem: Officers can shirk from the autocrat's demands. To solve this problem, autocrats strategically post officers to different areas based on an area's importance to the election and the expected loyalty of an individual officer, which is a function of the officer's expected benefits from the president winning reelection. Using a data set of 8,000 local security appointments within Kenya in the 1990s, one of the first of its kind for any autocracy, I find that the president's coethnic officers were sent to, and the opposition's coethnic officers were kept away from, swing areas. This article demonstrates how state institutions from a country's previous authoritarian regime can persist despite the introduction of multi-party elections and thus prevent full democratization.

Though the defense ministry has been a bastion of male power, a growing number of states have appointed women to this portfolio. What explains men's dominance over these positions? Which factors predict women's appointments? With comprehensive cross-national data from the post–Cold War era, we develop and test three sets of hypotheses concerning women's access to the defense ministry. We show that women remain excluded when the portfolio's remit reinforces traditional beliefs about the masculinity of the position, particularly in states that are engaged in fatal disputes, governed by military dictators, and large military spenders. By contrast, female defense ministers emerge when expectations about women's role in politics have changed—that is, in states with female chief executives and parliamentarians. Women are also first appointed to the post when its meaning diverges from traditional conceptions of the portfolio, particularly in countries concerned with peacekeeping and in former military states with left-wing governments.

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly.

Scholarship on separation of powers assumes executives are constrained by legislative approval when placing agents in top policy-making positions. But presidents frequently fill vacancies in agency leadership with unconfirmed, temporary officials or leave them empty entirely. I develop a novel dataset of vacancies across 15 executive departments from 1977 to 2016 and reevaluate the conventional perspective that appointment power operates only through formal channels. I argue that presidents’ nomination strategies include leaving positions empty and making interim appointments, and this choice reflects presidents’ priorities and the character of vacant positions. The evidence indicates that interim appointees are more likely when positions have a substantial capacity to act on presidential expansion priorities and suggest that presidents can capitalize on their first-mover advantage to evade Senate confirmation. The results further suggest that separation of powers models may need to consider how deliberate inaction and sidestepping of formal powers influence political control and policy-making strategies.

This study examines one of the most significant administrative offices in the Abbasid Caliphate during the Seljuk period—the office of the ḥijābah (Chamberlain). During this time, the position rose in prominence to the extent that the ḥājib (Chamberlain) became the caliph’s adviser in all major affairs. Moreover, the number of ḥujjāb within the Abbasid state increased in accordance with the various places in which they served and the domains over which they exercised supervision. In this study, we shed light on those ḥujjāb whose duties were directly connected to the caliphal palace, such as the ḥājib (Chamberlain) al-ḥujjāb and the ḥujjāb al-abwāb, who were responsible for the gates of the caliphal residence. These officials played an important and influential role in the course of political, administrative, and security affairs in Iraq during the Seljuk period. The Abbasid caliph found in some of those who assumed this office the ability to bear the responsibility entrusted to them—namely, overseeing the protection of the gates of the caliphal palace and regulating those who entered through them. This competence was a factor in their appointment to the office and in the length of their tenure. As for the causes of dismissal from the position, there were numerous reasons. Among them was the appointment of unqualified individuals due to competition for the office, which led to disruptions in state affairs. Some resorted to bribery and the extortion of people; in other cases, dismissal was motivated by promotion to a higher office, or by inclination toward a particular sect. Thus, the reasons for appointment and dismissal in the office of the ḥijābah (Chamberlain) during this period were manifold and varied.

Women have traditionally been underrepresented among government ministers, and when included in cabinets have largely been relegated to “feminine” and low-prestige policy areas. Recently, however, some countries have witnessed changes in the number, gender, and/or prestige of women’s appointments. What accounts for this variation in women’s access to ministerial power? To answer this question, we posit three competing theoretical explanations: political institutions, social indicators of gender equality, and broader trends in women’s political recruitment. To test these hypotheses, we compile an original dataset of 117 countries and construct a new measure—the Gender Power Score—which differentially weights cabinet positions based on women’s numbers and the gender and prestige of the ministries to which they are assigned. Using a finite mixture model to evaluate competing hypotheses, we find that political variables—rather than social factors—have the strongest impact on gender parity in cabinets.

Drawing on the political theory of judicial decision making, our paper proposes a new and parsimonious ex ante litigation risk measure: federal judge ideology. We find that judge ideology complements existing measures of litigation risk based on industry membership and firm characteristics. Firms in liberal circuits (the third quartile in ideology) are 33.5% more likely to be sued in securities class action lawsuits than those in conservative circuits (the first quartile in ideology). This result is stronger after the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the Tellabs case. We next show that the effect of judge ideology on litigation risk is greater for firms with more sophisticated shareholders and with higher expected litigation costs. Furthermore, judicial appointments affect litigation risk and the value of firms in the circuit, highlighting the economic consequences of political appointments of judges. Finally, using our new measure, we document that litigation risk deters managers from providing long-term earnings guidance, a result that existing measures of litigation risk cannot show.