How much does legislative behavior change as countries transition between different types of political regimes? While autocratic-politics scholarship emphasize how legislators in autocracies face constraints that are fundamentally different from those in democracies, historical accounts of legislative development suggest important continuities in how politics operates even following profound regime changes. We employ novel data on all speeches in Zambia's National Assembly (1924-2024) to analyze how electoral incentives influence legislators' criticism of the government under Zambia's various political regimes during the past century. We show that aggregate levels of criticism of the government increased sharply following independence and universal suffrage, but have since been relatively stable. Elected legislators have consistently been less deferential to the executive than appointed legislators have been. Across both autocratic and more democratic eras, electoral competitiveness correlates with more deference to the executive from ruling-party legislators and more criticism from opposition legislators.

British colonial legislative councils were dominated by the alliance between official European administrators and the local European settlers. As a first sign of London's dwindling commitment to colonialism, limited direct African representation and the enfranchisement of some African voters were achieved in the years following the Second World War. Did this (limited) inclusion of Africans influence debates about the interests of the African populations on the still-European dominated legislative floor? We investigate this question using a novel dataset of legislative speech in the Legislative Council of Northern Rhodesia. We empirically study discriminatory attitudes in legislative speech after two reforms: (1) the introduction of direct African representation in 1948 and (2) the use of ethnically-mixed constituencies for some legislative seats in the 1959 and 1962 elections. We find that African representatives brought salience to and opposed the oppressive structures of colonialism. We trace a growing tension in the legislative discourse between European members. Furthermore, our findings suggest that European settlers were more inclined to make economic concessions rather than political ones, although also arguments for economic discrimination persisted. However, we find that Europeans elected from ethnically diverse constituencies tended to exhibit less discriminatory behavior and were more likely to avoid discussions about the political system.

Awarded the David Olson Award 2025

To what extent is retrospective economic voting a feature in African politics? The study of electoral behavior in Africa has traditionally centered around ethnicity and brokers. Recent contributions nuance the impact of these informational-shortcuts, highlighting the presence of also more performance-based assessments for political support. Contributing to this debate, we argue that agricultural productivity is one economic condition influencing voter behavior. Local agriculture is observable to voters despite the often opaque informational environments in African countries, it is economically relevant to many of the continents farming-intensive economies, and it is politically relevant, with multiple policies in place to stimulate agricultural output and food security. We employ a satellite derived measure of vegetation quality and combine this with both polling station electoral results in Zambia and Afrobarometer survey responses. We show, first, that ruling party control of the constituency seat is associated with subsequent improvement in vegetation quality, second, that local changes in vegetation quality influence ruling party support at polling stations, and third, that changes in vegetation quality influence survey-respondent assessments of Presidential performance. This latter result generalize to 33 countries in Africa. Our study contribute to further nuancing the factors influencing electoral behavior in Africa's emerging democracies.

How does autocratic regime type influence scientific production? While history is full of notable examples of dictators cracking down on institutions of higher learning, we know little about the general patterns linking autocracy to scientific research. We propose what we call a ``security-tradeoff" argument to explain variation in scientific production across regime types; dictators must trade potential gains from science off against security concerns relating to free academies. We proceed to test implications of this argument in different datasets combining information on political regimes, global data on universities, and more than 20 million scientific publications from the Web of Science. Using a synthetic diff-in-diff framework, we find that autocracy depresses scientific output at the country level, and that this varies across disciplines. We also test implications at the subnational levels, employing geolocated publication data from more than 600 000 research institutions.

We provide the first study of worker mobilization on local variation in poor relief generosity in Norwegian municipalities between 1900 and 1922. A period marked with industrialization but before the advent of the major welfare state programs. Poor relief remained the primary way for workers and old to receive aid during periods of joblessness or old-age. The poor relief system was highly decentralized, meaning that national legislation rarely reflected conditions on the ground. Contrary to existing class-based theories of working class mobilization, we argue worker mobilization was fundamental to explaining poor relief generosity in this period. Using original geo-coded micro data on XX Norwegian municipalities, we find strong effects of worker mobilization in the form of strikes on poor relief generosity. Our results are strengthened by a set of placebo-models. We discuss our findings in relation to the literature on welfare state development and class-theories of worker mobilization.