State Development
Revise and resubmit, International Organization PDF
Many influential theories of state development assume that political fragmentation enables subjects to exit across competing rulers, thereby disciplining extraction, yet direct evidence that fragmentation shapes how subjects resist remains scarce. I show this in Tokugawa Japan (1615–1868), where nearly 300 feudal domains operated under the central Tokugawa shogunate, generating sharp variation in villages’ exposure to governance conflict. In a difference-in-differences design, the shogunate’s conversion of domains to direct rule placed a shogunal appeals route within reach of surrounding villages and raised the probability of nearby mass exit by 4 percentage points with no rise in direct confrontation; a grid-year panel confirms the pattern. Among revolting villages, greater exposure to governance conflict tilted resistance toward exit over confrontation. Domains more exposed to governance conflict levied lower taxes, especially where neighboring domains could absorb migrants. The findings microfound a premise that load-bears across the Great Divergence literature, fiscal-federalism arguments, and the cartel theory of the territorial state system.
Work in progress
When no third party can enforce bargains between armed rulers, families become instruments of statecraft. I study how warring houses in Sengoku Japan (1467–1615) engineered kinship—political marriage, adoption, and hostage exchange—to assemble and discipline coalitions, asking whether these ties created political order or instead reorganized coercion: securing peace among coalition insiders while redirecting violence toward outsiders and, under power asymmetry, channeling weaker houses into absorption by stronger, previously tied lineages. I construct an original dataset linking over 600 documented kinship ties among more than 200 warlord clans to conflict records and territorial control across a 149-year panel, tracing how the type and direction of a tie reflected the balance of power between its parties and what followed for conflict, succession, and territorial stability.
Information Operations
Under review PDF
Generative AI lets influence operations fabricate apparent widespread support cheaply. I develop a theoretical framework for online forums involving politically restricted information to isolate a tradeoff between authenticity and accuracy that generative AI exacerbates. Citizens collectively choose verification, then decide among anonymous posting, verified posting, and silence. When attackers can flood anonymous forums, citizens adopt the least verification that deters them. Because greater access raises knowledge and exposure, verification exposes better-informed sources to greater punishment risk and, unlike in canonical screening models, excludes the best-informed, hence most strongly motivated to contribute, first. Citizens value collective accuracy, but individual contributions remain externalities; private exposure risk therefore makes the forum more authentic but less informative, allowing the influence operation to deplete collective knowledge without deployment or deception. Detection and per-post costs reduce reliance on identity verification. Evaluations of epistemic security should track both the fakes excluded and the composition of who remains.
Interstate Conflict
Work in progress
Coercive diplomacy rests on twin promises: a threat of punishment if the target resists, and an assurance of restraint if it concedes. Crisis bargaining theory and empirical work alike have concentrated on the credibility of threats, yet resistance born of doubting the threat and resistance born of doubting the assurance are observationally equivalent, so coercion failure is mechanically attributed to weak threats. We develop a crisis bargaining model that asks why a coercer who genuinely intends to honor a concession can fail to convince the target of it, and examine how the instruments that make threats credible—military capability, mobilization, reputation—interact with the credibility of the corresponding assurances, with implications for why stronger states so often fail to coerce weaker opponents.