Since the late 1990s, an increasing number of countries have turned to “illiberal democracy,” a regime that maintains “free but unfair” elections while systematically undermining the rule of law. In this paper, we argue that modern illiberal democracies cause detrimental effects on research. Using both national and international bibliometric data, we compare researchers exposed to illiberal policies in Hungary with their peers in other Central European countries prior to and after the first re-election of Viktor Orbán in 2010. We find that Hungarian researchers increasingly shift their publication efforts toward national-language journals with lower quality and are more likely to leave the country altogether. We show that political pressure is a key driver of these effects: researchers experience radically different patterns in terms of research outcomes depending on their political alignment. Researchers perceived as political opponents are more negatively impacted in both their publication output and in collaboration networks, decreasing them both by about a quarter of the pre-shock value per year. Yet, they are more likely to publicly criticize the regime. Finally, researchers working on topics related to gender issues are also more affected and experience a decrease of 10% of their total publications and of 30% of their publications in top journals. 

Can party behaviour explain why gender equality policies fail to increase women’s political representation? Using data from seven municipal elections, we show that Brazilian political parties undermine gender quotas and funding requirements by strategically placing female candidates in races where they expect weak performance while reserving “sure” races for men. Despite national-level compliance requirements, weak enforcement at the municipal level enables this strategic distribution across localities based on electoral competitiveness. In municipalities that are historically electoral strongholds, the share of female candidates increased more after quota implementation than in competitive municipalities, driven by a larger increase among non-dominant parties. Conversely, dominant parties reduced all-male candidate lists 23.5% less than their counterparts in competitive races. We document a sharp increase in token female candidacies after the adoption of gender quotas, reduced by the introduction of campaign funding requirements. Our results point to the importance of factoring electoral competition and party responses when designing gender equality policies.

The 2018 China Initiative by the Trump administration complicated procedures and reduced funding for US-China research collaborations. Using Scopus data, we analyze its impact on Chinese research. We find that the China Initiative significantly lowered the average quality of both the publications and the co-authors of Chinese researchers with prior US collaborations compared to Chinese researchers with prior European collaborations. Thus, we estimate that the China Initiative reduced yearly citations for affected Chinese researchers by 6 percent. The effect was stronger for high-productivity Chinese researchers in US-dominated fields, especially when their US co-authors played a leading role.