Overview and Contribution:

The rule of law (RoL) is an important component of democracy, key to protecting individual rights and ensuring that representatives follow the same rules as those being represented. As countries become more democratic, one would expect corresponding increases in the rule of law.

In “Fabricated Justice,” Beatriz Magaloni and Esteban Salmón show how these expectations must be seriously qualified. Beginning in 2008, Mexico gradually implemented RoL reforms. Thereafter, citizens witnessed some important gains in due process and individual rights, in particular, a dramatic decline in torture. However, these changes coincided with rising insecurity, violence, and popular demands for retribution against criminals. Owing to these pressures — as well as their own desire to work with fewer constraints — police and prosecutors found ways to circumvent the new reforms, particularly by planting evidence (drugs and weapons) on suspects, a serious RoL violation. 

However laudable its reforms, Mexican authorities failed to equip justice system officials with the tools and capacities to properly fight crime. Facing similar social and professional pressures as they had prior to the reforms, fabricated evidence struck them as a reasonable adaptation to new procedures. 

Marshalling an impressive array of quantitative and qualitative data, Magaloni and Salmón show how these legal changes can be said to have led to changes in police tactics and in the categories of arrests made. Interviews with police and prosecutors make clear just how much RoL reforms have left justice system officials feeling impotent and compelled to “fabricate justice.”

Mexico’s (Staggered) Legal Changes:

Prior to 2008, Mexico’s legal system was an “inquisitorial” one inherited from Spanish colonial rule. This meant that judges largely based their rulings on an often-secretive case file assembled by police and prosecutors. Case files contained confessions frequently obtained by torture, which Mexico’s Supreme Court upheld on multiple occasions. After 2008, however, Mexico adopted an “adversarial” system with greater procedural oversight of detention and the early stages of investigation (when torture was more likely), stricter standards on the use of force and collection of evidence, and so on.

Importantly, Mexico’s RoL constitutional amendment set an 8-year period to fully implement the reforms. This led to a high degree of variation in when individual states adopted the reforms, as well as whether they adopted all of the reforms at once or in a piecemeal fashion. From a statistical point of view, this created a “quasi-experimental” scenario in which outcomes (e.g., whether prisoners reported being tortured) in “treated” states or municipalities (i.e., those that reformed) could be compared with “control” units that had not yet reformed. This helps ensure that other differences between states and municipalities (e.g., levels of economic development or state capacity) do not bias the results.

Quantitative and Qualitative Findings:

Magaloni and Salmón first draw on a 2021 survey of 60,000 prisoners conducted by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography. The authors document (1) a substantial decline in reports of torture after 2014 (when many states and municipalities implemented the RoL reforms), (2) a rise in drug and weapons convictions by 2016 (likely the product of evidence fabrication), and (3) a decline in homicide convictions (because [a] homicide confessions could no longer be elicited through torture and [b] corpses are difficult to fabricate). These findings are largely borne out when the authors conduct their “difference in differences” analysis using the aforementioned geographical and temporal variation. As the authors show, declines in torture are likely driven by greater judicial oversight of cases, a key goal of the 2008 reforms.
 

Image

Fig. 1. Torture and objects (drugs and weapons).

Image

Fig. 4. Event study plots with imputation estimator: torture, objects, judicial oversight, and drug trafficking.
 

To show that these quantitative findings have some basis in the beliefs of criminal justice actors, the authors conducted extensive fieldwork across Mexico. This included interviewing over 100 police officers and prosecutors, observing the activities of investigative agencies for 18 months, and following dozens of cases from arrest to hearing. This generated some remarkably honest reflections about how arrests are systematically based on false accusations and the planting of evidence on suspects. 

Interviews with police reveal a widespread belief that the RoL reforms profoundly disrupted their work. To be sure, some of these “disruptions” simply concern how police can no longer torture suspects. For example, “With arrests, we used to investigate, we could pressure them, get information. Now we are just transporters. We catch them and deliver them. That’s all” (p.10, italics added). 

Another important aspect of these changes concerns just how much time it takes to complete arrest paperwork to meet new legal requirements. This highlights officers’ limited capacity to perform since the reforms were implemented. Many reported simply not making arrests, while others bluntly admitted:

Before, we pressured the person. Now we pressure the paperwork…chain of custody has to be perfect. If it’s not, the judge will throw it out. So…[w]e fix it. Sometimes that means planting what’s missing, sometimes writing what didn’t happen (p.10). 

Meanwhile, some prosecutors expressed nostalgia for the days when their authority was less constrained and, for example, they could raid homes without warrants. Prosecutors spoke openly about the strains on police capacity and the corresponding need for fabricated evidence: “If the police officers really investigated properly, they could get the criminals for what they actually did. They’ve just been instructed to take them out of circulation no matter what” (p.12). 

Finally, the authors show that evidence fabrication is consistent with the strong desire for retribution held by ordinary Mexicans. There is a widespread perception that the new criminal justice system is too lenient, a source of impunity for criminals. Accordingly, cases that prosecutors deem especially likely to anger the public are classified as “relevant,” compelling prosecutors to resolve them at all costs, especially by encouraging officers to plant evidence. Prosecutors who don’t accept these cases may be demoted or fired. In sum, Magaloni and Salmón deepen our understanding of just how difficult it is to democratize in places where criminal justice systems are poorly resourced and where citizens demand a specific kind of retributive justice that often sidesteps individual rights.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.
 

Introduction and Contribution:

Most people move for economic or personal reasons, such as attending college, starting a new job, or being closer to family. Accordingly, residential moves are often beneficial for movers: they can improve life satisfaction, offer movers new economic opportunities, and increase long-term earnings. However, what is often little acknowledged is that moving can generate significant political costs: movers may have to learn about the political issues salient in their new place of residence while simultaneously facing the daunting task of settling into a new place of residence. It is because of these challenges that moving can change the extent to which someone engages in politics.

In “The local costs of moving,” Hans Lueders proposes that to understand how moving affects political engagement, we need to distinguish between national and local engagement. Studying political engagement among movers in Germany, he finds that German movers remain similarly engaged in national politics but become considerably less engaged in local politics. Lueders argues that national engagement is unlikely to change much after a move because the political context remains the same. Intuitively, the same political candidates run for national office no matter where one lives, and the country’s most pressing political issues remain the same as well. By contrast, the political context changes significantly when it comes to local engagement: living in a new place means that movers have less political knowledge (e.g., of local political candidates or salient issues), limited social networks to facilitate local engagement, and a weaker sense of civic duty to engage. Lueders finds no evidence that movers adopt new norms or political ideas — mainly because Germans tend to move to places that are socially and politically similar.

Lueders draws our attention to how moving — and the disengagement it generates — can undermine local democratic accountability. Indeed, when movers cannot communicate their preferences to local leaders, what follows is “representational inequality” between movers and “stayers.” That domestic migration can add or remove 5-10% of a county’s population over a decade, thus has serious consequences for the quality of democracy.

Importantly, Lueders broadens the geographic scope of research on political engagement. Social science research on moving has been heavily informed by data from the US, where “strict voter registration requirements…have been described as more costly than the act of voting itself.” Indeed, the US’s unique — and uniquely burdensome — voting regime has been shown to weaken both local and national engagement for movers. Lueders’s research suggests that these findings do not travel beyond the US. In Germany and much of the Western democratic world, movers are legally required to register their new address with local authorities, and are then automatically added to the electoral rolls. This removes a key barrier to political engagement, at least at the national level. American readers may rightfully ask which interests are advanced or undermined by the current status quo.

Engagement Before and After Moving:

Lueders introduces two competing accounts of how moving affects political engagement. On the first account, moving imposes serious epistemological and social costs: movers must learn new information about politics, form new social networks, and come to see themselves as members of a new community. Not only does all of this take time, but movers usually prioritize more urgent personal matters — e.g., finding housing or childcare — such that politics takes a back seat. 

Weakened social ties mean that movers interact less often with people who could inform them about local issues, candidates, or initiatives — which are hard enough for longtime residents to grasp. Members of social networks also enforce norms of participation on each other; movers who lack social ties will thus be more content to abstain from voting or volunteering for campaigns. It could be inferred from this account that the further away one moves, the less engaged one will be with one's new home: candidates and issues seem even more novel, while social networks become even more fractured.

A second account highlights how the context of a new place can change engagement, as movers are exposed to new political ideas or norms around participation. This may be because movers are persuaded to approach politics differently, or for more instrumental reasons (e.g., if one’s preferred party already wins by large margins in the new place, engagement will seem less pressing). The contextual account assumes that moving entails a big change in one’s political environment.

Methods and Findings:

Lueders uses German household panel data collected between 1984 and 2020, which totals over 500,000 “respondent-year observations.” By comparing how engagement varies over time between movers and stayers, he can home in on the changes in engagement caused by moving itself, accounting for any baseline differences caused by the kinds of people who choose to move or stay. National engagement is measured by self-reported levels of national political interest, whether respondents voted in the last national election, and whether they plan to vote in the upcoming one. Local engagement is measured by self-reported attachments to one’s place of residence, how frequently they participate in local political and citizen initiatives, and their frequency of volunteering in local associations and organizations. 

Lueders’ findings are consistent with the first account, in which local engagement declines due to lower-quality information and weaker social ties. He finds no evidence that Germans’ levels of national engagement change, regardless of the distance of one’s move.

Image

Figure 2. Changes in engagement around moves of varying distances. This figure explores whether movers’ engagement in national (top panel) and local engagement (bottom panel) changes around moves of varying distance. Each coefficient reflects the estimated change in engagement among movers compared to the baseline (all stayers plus movers six or more years before a move). Vertical bars are 95% confidence intervals. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (Goebel et al., 2019).
 

By contrast, the V-shaped patterns in the lower panel show that local engagement changes significantly, declining in the lead-up (around five years) before a move, reaching its lowest point in the year of a move, and then slowly returning to pre-move levels in subsequent years, but without fully recovering. Importantly, engagement declines with distance, as the most local moves (i.e., within the same town or county) leave engagement largely unchanged.
 

Image

Figure 1. Changes in engagement before and after a move. This figure explores whether movers’ engagement in national (top panel) and local engagement (bottom panel) changes around a move. Each coefficient reflects the extent to which movers depart from the overall trend in engagement in a particular year before or after their move. Vertical bars are 95% confidence intervals. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (Goebel et al., 2019).
 

Against the “contextual” account, Lueders finds that the majority of German moves occur over short distances, which makes it unlikely that contexts differ dramatically. And indeed, most of the places to which Germans move are sociopolitically similar (to where they left) in terms of levels of turnout and federal election outcomes.
 

Image

Figure 3. Most moves occur over short distances. This figure uses data on all cross-county moves in Germany in 2015 to compute various metrics of the distance of such moves. Left panel: distribution of the distance between origin and destination counties. Center panel: share of all moves from a particular county that go to neighboring counties. Right panel: share of all moves from a particular county that lead movers to other counties in the same state. Own calculations using data from FDZ der Statistischen Amter des Bundes und der Lander (2019). The vertical dashed line indicates the median move (left) or median county (center and right).

Image

Figure 4. Movers tend to move between politically similar environments. This figure reports the distribution of the change in environments that movers experience upon a move (dark blue). This distribution is contrasted with the distribution of change in environments one would expect when simply considering population totals between county pairs (grey). The vertical lines indicate the medians for the actual (dashed line) and benchmark (dotted line) distributions, respectively.
 

Ultimately, “The local costs of moving” underscores how highly individual life events can undermine the quality of collective governance.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer

What’s the most exciting finding from your research, and why does it matter for democracy and development?

In the mid-1990s, I worked in the U.S. government at the State Department and the National Security Council, focusing on Russia and European security. One of the major issues at the time was whether NATO should expand to include countries in Central and Eastern Europe. I later wrote a book on that decision, which was published in 1999.

One of the most important things I found was that NATO enlargement didn’t come from a single formal decision by the president and his cabinet. Instead, it developed gradually, driven by individuals who believed strongly in the policy and worked to move it forward over time. It was a much more incremental and contested process than people often assumed.

What was especially significant was that policymakers saw NATO enlargement as a way to promote democracy and strengthen the rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe. By offering countries the prospect of membership, they hoped to encourage democratic reforms and political stability. I think NATO enlargement had a profound impact on democratic development in the region, and my research helped explain how and why that policy came about.

What have been some of the most challenging aspects of conducting research in this field, and how did you overcome them?

Much of my work sits at the intersection of political science and history, and one of the biggest challenges is studying relatively recent events, where records are often incomplete. When you study earlier historical periods, you have access to archives and official records, but when you study more recent foreign policy decisions, much of that material is still classified.

Because of that, I’ve relied heavily on interviews with policymakers and officials. Interviews are incredibly valuable, but they also have limitations. People remember events differently, and often present events in a light that best reflects their own role or perspective, which is why it’s important to interview multiple people and compare their accounts to develop a more accurate understanding of what happened.

I’ve also used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain declassified documents, although that process can take many years. Some requests I filed for my 1999 book didn’t produce results until I was working on later books in 2003 and even 2008. But over time, those documents helped confirm and strengthen my understanding of how key decisions were made. Doing this kind of research requires patience, but it’s essential if you want to understand how foreign policy actually develops.

How has the field changed since you started, and what gives you hope?

The field has changed quite a bit since I finished my PhD in 1990. One major shift was that after the Cold War ended, there was less emphasis on area studies and regional expertise. When I was trained, people were expected to combine theoretical work with deep knowledge of particular regions, which is now less common. 

What gives me hope is the current generation of students. Many students today are highly capable of integrating knowledge of politics and history with technological expertise. Especially at places like Stanford, students have the opportunity to combine social science knowledge with new technologies. I think that combination will shape the future of the field.

What gaps still exist in your research, and what projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a project with Michael McFaul and Elizabeth Economy on great power competition, focusing on how major powers try to influence the foreign policy orientation of smaller states. It’s an important issue, especially given the current international environment.

I’ve also continued working on NATO enlargement and its long-term consequences. When I published my book on NATO expansion in 1999, I didn’t expect that these issues would still be so central decades later. But NATO enlargement continues to shape relations between Russia, Europe, and the United States, particularly in light of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Hence, understanding how those earlier decisions connect to current events remains a major focus of my work.

What advice would you give to students interested in this field?

Students should focus on topics that genuinely interest them. You can’t predict what will be important five or ten years from now. Choosing a topic solely because you think it will be important in the future isn’t a good strategy if you’re not truly interested in it. Instead, study subjects that motivate you and that you feel compelled to understand. Unexpected events can suddenly make your area of interest highly relevant. Passion and curiosity are essential for meaningful research.

What book would you recommend to students interested in international relations?

I recommend Robert Jervis’s Perception and Misperception in International Politics, published in 1976. Jervis was one of the most brilliant scholars in international relations and had a major influence on the field.

His book explores how leaders interpret and misinterpret the world, and how those perceptions shape international relations. It combines insights from politics, psychology, and history, and helps explain why cooperation between states is often difficult. It’s an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to understand the role of leadership and perception in international politics.

2. U.S. Security Partnerships Can Make Arab States Targets

Yom highlighted a paradox shaping the strategic environment of Arab states: the closer their security ties with the United States, the more vulnerable they may become in a regional confrontation.

“For the most part,” Yom explained, “the intensity of Iranian counterstrikes and retaliation on Arab states covaries with the degree of their relationship with the United States.”

States hosting American military bases or deeply integrated into U.S. security strategy are more likely to find themselves on the frontlines of Iranian retaliation.

“The more of a client state they are, the more troops they host, the deeper their foreign policies are tied to the demands of American grand strategy — then the more likely they are going to be struck.”

This dynamic creates a fundamental strategic dilemma.

For decades, small and medium-sized states in the region have relied on alliances with Washington to enhance their security. The current conflict illustrates how those same alliances can also increase their exposure to regional escalation.

3. Arab Governments Are Trying to Avoid Being Seen as Participants in the War

Arab governments today face a difficult balancing act: responding to Iranian attacks while avoiding the perception that they are fighting alongside the United States and Israel. Many Arab governments must navigate public opinion that is deeply skeptical of Israel and wary of Western military intervention in the region.

As Sallam put it, these governments are trying to avoid creating “the impression that they are fighting alongside the United States and Israel in this war.”

The result is a diplomatic tightrope: condemning attacks on their territory without being drawn into the broader conflict.

4. A Regional War Threatens the Gulf’s Economic Transformation Projects

A fourth major takeaway concerns the economic stakes of regional stability.

Blaydes emphasized that wars can have far-reaching political economy consequences. Major conflicts reshape investment patterns, redirect state resources toward security priorities, and increase global perceptions of risk.

When governments must divert resources toward defense spending and crisis management, economic diversification plans can quickly lose momentum.

For Gulf regimes that have tied their political projects to visions of economic modernization, prolonged regional instability therefore represents a serious political challenge.

“Suddenly, when you have a conflict that disrupts the flow of investments, tourism, and even trading routes in places like the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea,” Sallam observed, “this shakes the foundations of these projects.”

5. The War Is Occurring Amid Deep Divisions Among Regional Powers

The discussion highlighted that the war with Iran is unfolding against the backdrop of a significant regional rift.

According to Sallam, one emerging divide involves different visions for managing instability in fragile states. Some regional actors — including the UAE and Israel — have tacitly or directly promoted fragmentation of political authority in places like Sudan, Yemen, and Gaza.

Others, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, have tended to favor more traditional models of centralized authoritarian stability.

These competing strategic preferences have already clashed in multiple regional conflicts, most recently in Sudan and Yemen.

Thus, Iran’s potential neutralization as a regional power player as a result of the war, Sallam noted, will not necessarily result in regional stability. It will simply intensify these rivalries among the remaining powers.

6. War Strengthens Authoritarian Politics and Weakens the Prospect for Reform and Development

The panel highlighted the negative ramifications of regional conflict for reform and development.

“The constant violence is not productive for the promotion of democracy, development, or the rule of law,” Blaydes noted. “Having a constant stream of weapons, conflict, violence, post-conflict reconciliation, [and] regional rivalries…undermines all three.”

“Anytime a regional conflict breaks out,” Yom argued, “it’s always bad for democratic struggle on the home front.”

The war, according to Sallam, could result in outcomes that would be “catastrophic not only for the people and society of Iran, but also the people and societies of the region at large.”

A full recording of the March 3 panel can be viewed below: