Do perceived foreign policy failures shape assessments of a country’s leadership in the eyes of international observers? We explore the consequences of foreign policy failures using global reactions to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some argue that a poorly executed withdrawal heightened concerns about America’s soft power and image abroad. Others believe that the negative consequences of the withdrawal were exaggerated. To adjudicate between these claims, we compile public opinion surveys across 24 countries containing over 17,000 respondents. Analyzing perceptions of US leadership before and after the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021, we find that the Afghanistan withdrawal had a substantive negative impact on global perceptions of US leadership. However, we observe no corresponding evidence that the attractiveness of great powers is ‘zero-sum’: decreases in favorability towards the United States were not paralleled by increases in the perceived attractiveness of alternatives to US leadership like Russia and China.

How does tax regressivity at the top affect public support for taxation? In this article, we run an information provision experiment in the United States with a quota-representative sample of around 4,000 people and randomly present respondents with factual information about total tax rates by income group. We find that informing respondents that the superrich pay lower total tax rates than other people not only increases support for raising taxes on the rich but also lowers support for taxing the middle class. Our results highlight an important hidden cost of tax regressivity at the top: if left unaddressed, it risks undermining public support for broad-based taxation.

What democratic institutions and practices do citizens prioritize, and how responsive are their preferences to competing concerns such as economic and physical security? We explore this through a conjoint experiment with over 35,000 respondents across thirty-two countries – spanning democracies and autocracies – who evaluate hypothetical countries varying in democratic features, cultural characteristics, economic prosperity, and physical security. Our findings reveal that citizens consistently prioritize free and fair elections, highlighting their salience as a core democratic value. However, executive constraints appear less central to citizens’ preferences, especially when set against the promise of economic prosperity. These patterns hold across a wide range of national and individual contexts. The results suggest that while elections remain symbolically and substantively important, many citizens are responsive to appeals that frame strong, unconstrained leadership as a pathway to economic prosperity – an emphasis often seen in electoral authoritarian regimes.