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Working papers

• Liberalization–closure cycles in authoritarian regimes: Evidence from contemporary Ethiopia
  W Ayenew, A Kotsadam, JF Tellez
  
  Abstract

  Leadership transitions in authoritarian regimes often follow a liberalization–closure cycle: brief periods of civic opening and inclusion that give way to repression and exclusion. We show that these cycles reshape mass politics through two mechanisms. First, changes in civic space alter the risks and rewards of participation, mobilizing citizens when space opens and demobilizing them when it closes. Second, leadership turnover signals shifts in the relative status of ethnic groups, producing winners who mobilize and losers who demobilize. A further implication is that pro-regime mass organizations, which often rely on coercion and identitarian membership, are especially vulnerable: they weaken when openings reduce coercive pressure and leadership turnover delegitimizes them. We test these arguments with rare, long-running panel data on women’s political engagement under authoritarian rule in Ethiopia (2016–2021), capturing both ordinary citizens and members of regime-linked mass organizations. Our results show how leadership transitions redistribute mass participation in authoritarian systems.

• Two dilemmas in the politics of ethnic federalism: Experimental evidence from Ethiopia
  B Davis, D Dow, J Springman, JF Tellez
  
  Abstract

  Ethnic federalism, a system that devolves power to subnational states drawn along ethnic lines, is a widely debated approach to managing ethnic conflict. While scholars have studied its macro-level consequences, little is known about micro-level preferences within these countries. We examine two key dilemmas of ethnic federalism: (1) the “minorities within minorities dilemma”, where many ethnic group members live outside their designated state, and (2) the ``devolution dilemma,’’ which concerns which powers should be held by the central versus state governments. Using survey experiments among Ethiopian university students, we find no average effect of changing power distributions on support for ethnic federalism, but substantial heterogeneity: politically and ethnically intolerant respondents respond strongly to devolving state power. We further find security policy is the primary concern in debates over devolution, followed by cultural policies. Our findings highlight the importance of micro-level perspectives in understanding the stability of ethnofederal systems and the political consequences of their reform.

• Interstate Competition and Transnational Threats: How Networks of Nonstate Actors Increase Conflict between States
  B Kinne, JF Tellez, A Stewart, I Iliev, B Derr, S Murthy, P Bernhard
  
  Abstract

  cholars and policymakers alike now view competition between states as the primary threat to international security. Yet, the nontraditional threats that previously defined the global security landscape, such as terrorism and civil war, continue to flourish. Recent interstate conflicts have featured nonstate armed groups as central actors, and governments rely on these groups to extend their interests. This paper examines how government support for foreign nonstate actors affects interstate competition. We conceptualize state-nonstate ties as transnational networks comprised of cooperative relationships between governments and foreign terrorist organizations, rebel groups, militias, and civilian groups. We argue that these transnational networks exacerbate interstate tensions in two ways. First, they increase a state’s capacity relative to adversaries, which emboldens the government, increases its bargaining leverage, and leads to increased aggression toward other states. Second, they increase a government’s liability for the actions of sponsored groups, which leads to unintended confrontations and retaliatory actions by affected targets. To measure interstate competition, we use high-resolution event data on verbal and material conflict between governments. We incorporate these data into network models that allow transnational ties and interstate conflict to co-evolve, such that states form ties to nonstate actors in response to interstate conflict, and those ties in turn influence conflict probability. We find that both the size and structure of governments’ respective transnational networks are associated with an increase in verbal and material conflict. Further, this association is particularly strong for states that lack conventional military strength. These findings suggest that cooperation between governments and nonstate actors is integrally connected to interstate competition.

• Ties that bind: the influence of wartime social networks on ex-combatant reintegration
  JF Tellez, M Villamizar-Chaparro
  
  Abstract

  During armed conflicts, combatants forge deep ties with peers and leaders that often persist post-war. There is a growing consensus that these ties are a negative influence on ex-combatants, facilitating a return to arms or pulling former fighters into organized crime. We present suggestive evidence that this view may be overly pessimistic. We collect rare survey and qualitative interview data from demobilized fighters going through an economic reintegration program in Colombia. We find no evidence that ex-combatants who are actively attempting reintegration are influenced by wartime ties and some evidence that they information from former fighters. Our results speak to the potential for ex-combatants to vary in their personal investment in demobilization and how state policies can structure ex-combatant decision-making.

• Fostering civic engagement in polarized, autocratic regimes: Evidence from a field experiment in Ethiopia
  S Adamu, D Dow, F Hailu, M Mengsteab, J Springman, JF Tellez
  
  Abstract

  Scholars and practitioners have made a sustained effort to increase citizen participation in public life, based on the premise that greater participation enhances government responsiveness and builds social capital. Most of this work has been conducted in stable, democratic societies and focuses on outcomes related to political participation, such as voting. However, in autocratic settings characterized by conflict, such efforts must contend with risks that new engagement will take a sectarian form or channel participation into political institutions seen as illegitimate or repressive. Using a pre-registered field experiment in Ethiopia, we test an intervention designed to increase youth participation with civil society organizations in an electoral autocracy characterized by extreme polarization. Four months post-treatment, we observed increases in both self-reported and behavioral measures of civic participation without increasing polarization. However, some of this engagement was mobilized toward sectarian causes. Importantly, the intervention worked through new and existing social ties, showing that social networks are a powerful tool for youth engagement.

• The media and polarization over historical memory
  L Balcells, JF Tellez, F Villamil
  
  Abstract

  Historical memory issues are highly polarized in Spain, and people’s views on how to memorialize the past are resistant to persuasion. Surprisingly, our replication muddies whether these attitudes are uniquely hard to shift

Peer-reviewed

• Economic subversion in civil wars: Evidence from the Colombian armed conflict
  H Liu, A Stewart, JF Tellez
  International Studies Quarterly (2025)
  Abstract

  Rebel groups, often too weak to defeat the state in direct combat, adopt strategies to erode its capacity and resolve. One important class of such tactics—what we call economic subversion—is attacks that disrupt economic activity and impose large costs on the state, elites, and civilians. We conceptualize economic subversion as an umbrella class of rebel tactics that disrupt “business as usual,” regardless of whether economic harm is the primary motive. This approach helps connect related concepts in the literature, including looting, sabotage, and other tactics. We further theorize that the economic value of a locale should incentivize rebel subversion, while state fortification efforts should deter it, and test our concept using historical data from the Colombian armed conflict. On the incentive side, we show that rebels are more likely to engage in economic subversion in municipalities important to internal trade, especially during formal negotiations with the state. On the deterrent side, we find mixed, inconclusive evidence via a difference-in-difference design that a large-scale policing effort failed to deter rebel subversion. These findings highlight the substantial leeway rebels have to inflict painful economic costs on the state.

• Who should benefit from group-based quotas? Experimental evidence from Brazil
  A Joseph, N Sediqe, JF Tellez
  Journal of Politics in Latin America (2025)
  Abstract

  Group-based quotas and affirmative action policies are common in many parts of the world. A large literature has focused on public debates over the perceived fairness of these policies. Yet in highly diverse countries, debates often centre on which groups should benefit and how to establish who counts as a member of those groups. We know comparatively little about these kinds of debates. In this article, we present new experimental evidence on public preferences over targeted race quotas in Brazil, a country where racial identity is famously ambiguous and where substantial controversy over the use of race quotas in university admissions remains. Placing respondents from an online convenience sample in the role of deciding whom to admit as part of a university race quota, the results indicate (1) that while economic class dominates other considerations in quota targeting, racial factors still matter; (2) the public places a large premium on indicators of merit; and (3) that these preferences are largely homogeneous across racial groups and resistant to priming.

• Social Cohesion, Economic Security, and Forced Displacement in the Long-Run
  JF Tellez, L Balcells
  Journal of Conflict Resolution (2024)
  Abstract

  Millions of people around the world are internally displaced. And yet – compared to other forms of wartime victimization – scholars know relatively little about the long-run consequences of displacement for victims. This gap in the literature is problematic since displacement is distinct from other forms of victimization, and because IDPs face unique challenges in post-conflict transitions. This study contributes to the literature on the effects of displacement in three ways. First, the study brings to bear a unique sample of households in Colombia that is largely homogeneous along key confounders – mostly poor, rural, and conflict-afflicted – yet varies in their exposure to displacement. Next, the study draws on a rich set of covariates and outcomes to provide plausible estimates on the long-run effects of internal displacement. The study finds that a decade or more after displacement, victims experience substantial negative welfare deficits yet exhibit higher levels of social cohesion than their counterparts. Finally, combining a prediction framework with key stakeholder interviews, the study explores variation in outcomes among victims, particularly why some can return home and seek reparations while others are not. The results reveal a wide assortment of consequences resulting from displacement and should help inform policy-making bearing on support for internally displaced people.

• The Wars of Others: The Effect of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Spanish Nationalism
  L Balcells, JF Tellez, F Villamil
  The Journal of Politics (2024)
  Abstract

  Wars can produce drastic changes in the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the countries involved in the fighting. Yet such conflicts also have important security and economic implications for uninvolved, third-party states. How do the wars of others shape domestic public attitudes? We explore this question by analyzing the effect of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on Spanish nationalism. Exploiting a natural experiment in Spain, we show that the Russian invasion caused a general increase in the salience of Spanish national identification, but not at the expense of regional or substate national identities. We also find an activation effect on electoral participation and increased support for taxation. Our study illuminates pathways through which international conflicts can affect domestic politics in third-party states.

• Forced displacement, social cohesion, and the state: Evidence from eight new studies
  E Myers, A Sacks, JF Tellez, E Wibbels
  World Development (2024)
  Abstract

  Millions of people around the world are forcibly displaced. One consequence of displacement is that it brings large numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons into contact with members of ‘host’ communities with whom they might otherwise have little opportunity to interact. Such contact has the capacity to transform social and economic life among both host communities and forcibly displaced persons, yet we have relatively scant evidence of how communities change in response to displacement. In this Special Issue Introductory Essay, we provide an overview of forced displacement as a phenomenon and review the state of knowledge on displacement and social cohesion. We then synthesize findings from nine new studies included in this issue, which bring forth new evidence from over 30 countries across the globe. We conclude with implications for policy and development efforts.

• State Absence, Vengeance, and the Logic of Vigilantism in Guatemala
  DA Dow, G Levy, D Romero, JF Tellez
  Comparative Political Studies (2023)
  Abstract

  Across the world, citizens sidestep the state to punish offenses on their own. Such vigilantism can help communities provide order, yet it raises concerns about public accountability and the rights of the accused. While prior research has identified the structural correlates of vigilantism, an open question is in which cases citizens prefer vigilantism over conventional policing. To make sense of these preferences, we draw on two logics of punishment: state substitution and retribution. Using survey data from a conjoint experiment presented to over 9000 households across Guatemala, we find that preferences for vigilantism depend on how transgressive the crime is as well as how unlikely it is to be prosecuted by the state. Victim and perpetrator gender, as well as crime severity and profession of the perpetrator, affect whether people endorse vigilante punishment. These results ultimately raise concerns about the viability of “informal” forms of policing.

• Taking dyads seriously
  S Minhas, C Dorff, MB Gallop, M Foster, H Liu, JF Tellez, MD Ward
  Political Science Research and Methods (2021)
  Abstract

  International relations scholarship concerns dyads, yet standard modeling approaches fail to adequately capture the data generating process behind dyadic events and processes. As a result, they suffer from biased coefficients and poorly calibrated standard errors. We show how a regression-based approach, the Additive and Multiplicative Effects (AME) model, can be used to account for the inherent dependencies in dyadic data and glean substantive insights in the interrelations between actors. First, we conduct a simulation to highlight how the model captures dependencies and show that accounting for these processes improves our ability to conduct inference on dyadic data. Second, we compare the AME model to approaches used in three prominent studies from recent international relations scholarship. For each study, we find that compared to AME, the modeling approach used performs notably worse at capturing the data generating process. Further, conventional methods misstate the effect of key variables and the uncertainty in these effects. Finally, AME outperforms standard approaches in terms of out-of-sample fit. In sum, our work shows the consequences of failing to take the dependencies inherent to dyadic data seriously. Most importantly, by better modeling the data generating process underlying political phenomena, the AME framework improves scholars’ ability to conduct inferential analyses on dyadic data.

• Land, Opportunism, and Displacement in Civil Wars: Evidence from Colombia
  JF Tellez
  American Political Science Review (2021)
  Abstract

  It is common for combatants to deliberately force civilians to flee their homes, resulting in incalculable loss for millions around the world. Existing accounts suggest combatants displace civilians whom they suspect are loyal to their opponents. And yet violence is also frequently motivated by local actors taking advantage of war to pursue private interests unrelated to wartime loyalties. However, little evidence exists of these dynamics with respect to displacement. Drawing on theories of opportunistic violence, I test an account in which surges in demand for land create incentives for elites to prey on peasants for their land. Combining new municipal and survey data from the Colombian armed conflict, I find evidence that the expansion of a land-intensive industry—African palm oil—precipitated opportunistic displacement by elites and paramilitary allies. The results demonstrate how elites can take advantage of war to engage in private accumulation and have implications for transitional justice policy.

• Peace without Impunity: Worldview in the Settlement of Civil Wars
  JF Tellez
  The Journal of Politics (2021)
  Abstract

  Peace processes can bring to the fore a host of normative and practical questions that produce heated public disagreement. These disagreements can generate political obstacles to the successful negotiation and implementation of settlements. Here, I argue that public dissatisfaction with peace processes is in part rooted in core, fundamental differences in worldview, which have been found to inform how citizens form preferences over a wide array of security-related policy issues. Drawing on an original survey fielded at the height of the Colombian peace process, I show that the core values that guide people’s everyday lives have implications for how they think about and behave during peace processes. Results from a conjoint experiment indicate that individuals with more fixed, or “authoritarian,” worldviews hold strong preferences for more punitive agreements than individuals who score low on these qualities. These same individuals were also more likely than their counterparts to abstain from the 2016 peace referendum, although surprisingly not more likely to vote against than in favor. The study sheds light on the microfoundations of public barriers to conflict termination and suggests that core, fundamental differences underlie public discord on the merits of conflict negotiations.

• Who wants peace? predicting civilian preferences in conflict negotiations
  AM Montoya, JF Tellez
  Journal of Politics in Latin America (2020)
  Abstract

  Efforts to end civil wars via negotiations often generate sharp divisions in public opinion. A large, quantitative literature has found evidence for numerous variables serving as potential drivers of public support of and opposition to conflict negotiations. Yet the formation of policy preferences is a complex process, and while many factors might make small contributions to an individual’s conflict termination preferences, we lack a sense of which factors matter most or how to adjudicate among competing explanations. In this article, we leverage a large amount of nationally representative survey data from Colombia (2004–2015) and use machine learning tools to systematically explore which variables are the strongest predictors of public support for negotiations with Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). We find that certain aspects of conflict exposure, individual values bearing on justice and punishment, and belief in the efficacy of the state are among the strongest predictors of negotiation preferences, while many conventionally important variables in the literature have little predictive power. The results have implications for scholars seeking to understand broad drivers of (dis)satisfaction with negotiations and shed light on the polarising Colombian peace process.

• Repression and dissent in contemporary Catalonia
  L Balcells, S Dorsey, JF Tellez
  British Journal of Political Science (2020)
  Abstract

  An extensive literature in political science and sociology has analyzed how state repression shapes attempts by social movements to pursue political objectives. Less studied, however, is the effect that state repression of activists has on the broader public. Understanding public responses to repression is important, as both states and social movements take action with an eye toward (de)mobilizing broader constituencies. This letter analyzes this dynamic in the context of contemporary Catalonia, where the Spanish state cracked down on efforts by Catalan activists to hold a public referendum on independence. Matching poll respondents in the months before and after the crackdown in late 2017, the study finds that repression increased public sympathy for independence for a short period, and heightened animosity towards actors perceived to be associated or complicit with the Spanish state. The findings speak to the potential for state repression of nonviolent movements to create windows of opportunity for broader mobilization.

• Local Order, Policing, and Bribes: Evidence from India
  JF Tellez, E Wibbels, A Krishna
  World Politics (2020)
  Abstract

  Day-to-day policing represents a fundamental interface between citizens and states. Yet even in the most capable states, local policing varies enormously from one community to the next. The authors seek to understand this variation and in doing so make three contributions: First, they conceptualize communities and individuals as networks more or less capable of demanding high-quality policing. Second, they present original survey data and semistructured interviews on local policing from over one hundred sixty slums, eight thousand households, and one hundred seventy informal neighborhood leaders in India that contribute to the nascent empirical work on comparative policing and order. Third, they find evidence that well-connected individuals and densely connected neighborhoods express greater confidence in and satisfaction with local policing. Critically, these differences do not appear to be a function of a lower propensity for local conflict but rather of an increased capacity to leverage neighborhood leaders to mediate relations with the police. The combination of analytics and empirics in this article provides insight into the conditions under which individuals and communities experience the police as expropriators of rents or neutral providers of order.

• Hierarchy and the Provision of Order in International Politics
  K Beardsley, H Liu, PJ Mucha, DA Siegel, JF Tellez
  The Journal of Politics (2020)
  Abstract

  The anarchic international system is actually heavily structured: communities of states join together for common benefit; strong states form hierarchical relationships with weak states to enforce order and achieve preferred outcomes. Breaking from prior research, we conceptualize structures such as community and hierarchy as properties of networks of states’ interactions that can capture unobserved constraints in state behavior, constraints that may reduce conflict. We offer two claims. One, common membership in trade communities pacifies to the extent that breaking trade ties would entail high switching costs: thus, we expect heavy arms trade, more than most types of commercial trade, to reduce intracommunity conflict. Two, this is driven by hierarchical communities in which strong states can use high switching costs as leverage to constrain conflict between weaker states in the community. We find empirical support for these claims using a time-dependent multilayer network model and a new measure of hierarchy based on network centrality.

• Peace agreement design and public support for peace: Evidence from Colombia
  JF Tellez
  Journal of Peace Research (2019)
  Abstract

  Conflict negotiations are often met with backlash in the public sphere. A substantial literature has explored why civilians support or oppose peace agreements in general. Yet, the terms underlying peace agreements are often absent in this literature, even though (a) settlement negotiators must craft agreement provisions covering a host of issues that are complex, multidimensional, and vary across conflicts, and (b) civilian support is likely to vary depending on what peace agreements look like. As a result, we know much less about how settlement design molds overall public response, which settlement provisions are more or less controversial, or what citizens prioritize in conflict termination. In this article, I identify four key types of peace agreement provisions and derive expectations for how they might shape civilian attitudes toward conflict termination. Using novel conjoint experiments fielded during the Colombian peace process, I find evidence that citizens evaluate agreements based primarily on how provisions mete out justice to out-group combatants, and further that transitional justice provisions produced sharp divisions among urban voters in the 2016 referendum. Additional analysis suggests that material, distributive concerns were particularly salient for rural citizens. The results have implications for understanding the challenge of generating public buy-in for conflict termination and sheds light on the polarizing Colombian peace process.

• The rise of the Islamic State and changing patterns of cooperation in the Middle East
  JF Tellez, J Roberts
  International Interactions (2019)
  Abstract

  Interstate relations are highly interdependent: a change in relations between a pair of states can impact the relationship each of those states has with third parties, as well as relations among those third party states. This is particularly salient in cases where emerging security threats have the potential to destabilize existing patterns of interstate behavior. While the interdependent nature of states’ strategic responses to varied security challenges is often discussed and theorized in the international relations (IR) literature, it is less frequently modeled empirically. We present an approach for analyzing state relations that takes into account higher-order dependencies in the position of states within a network. We apply the approach to a unique context: diplomatic relations between Middle East and North African (MENA) states during a period in which the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) becomes a significant destabilizing force in the region. We find that the emergence of ISIL dramatically reshaped the region’s politics, improving relations among the region’s major powers while worsening relations for the states facing territorial threats from the group.

• Worlds Apart: Conflict Exposure and Preferences for Peace
  JF Tellez
  Journal of Conflict Resolution (2019)
  Abstract

  Life on the frontlines of a civil war is markedly different from life in safe(r) areas. How does this drastic difference in lived experience shape civilian attitudes toward war and peace? Contrary to theories that link conflict exposure to intransigence, I argue that under certain conditions, exposure increases support for both peace as an outcome and the granting of concessions to armed actors who render settlement more likely. I use various model specifications and matching methodology on survey data from the Colombian peace process, finding strong evidence that civilians in conflict zones exhibit greater support for the peace process overall and are more willing to grant political concessions to armed groups. Mixed evidence further suggests that exposed civilians are less willing to reintegrate with demobilized fighters. The study has theoretical implications for accounts of conflict exposure and helps explain regional variation in the failed referendum vote in Colombia.

Other writing

Book chapters, reports, blogs…

• Entre el plomo y la pluma: apoyo ciudadano a las negociaciones de paz 2004-2015
  AM Montoya, JF Téllez
  Paz y opinion publica en Colombia (2024)

• Social Cohesion and Forced Displacement : A Synthesis of New Research.
  

  World Bank (2023)

• The Effect of Social Ties on Engagement & Cohesion: Evidence from Ethiopian University Students
  

  USAID (2023)

• Las guerras de los otros: ¿cómo nos afectan políticamente?
  

  El Diario (2023)

• El impacto de la deportacion.
  

  Revista Actualidad Politica (2022)

• Biden wants to halt deportations. Here’s what happens when migrants are sent back.
  

  The Monkey Cage at the Washington Post (2021)

• 4 things the Biden administration should pay attention to with the border crisis
  

  The Brookings Institution (2021)

• Encuesta a deportados: Solo quieren volver a huir del país. Plaza Pública’.
  

  Plaza Pública’ (2021)

• Five years after Colombia’s peace deal, the FARC is no longer on U.S. terrorist group lists
  

  The Monkey Cage at the Washington Post (2021)

• Freedom House’s scarlet letter: Assessment power through transnational pressure
  J Roberts, JF Tellez
  The power of global performance indicators (2020)

• Indonesia’s Generasi Program Long-term Impact Evaluation Report
  

  World Bank (2018)

• Mid-Term Performance Evaluation of the Land and Rural Development Program
  

  USAID (2017)