The United States spends roughly $3.8 trillion on healthcare each year, or 18% of GDP. Even while delivering less access to health insurance coverage and lower quality of care relative to other advanced economies, America cannot sustain current rates of health spending growth. The biggest line item in the US healthcare budget is inpatient and outpatient care, a large portion of which – and the only spending category that has not yet been thoroughly scrutinized – is payments to physicians for their services. The reasons behind exorbitant spending on doctors’ fees is surprisingly understudied given its fiscal impact. In this thesis, I argue that high US health spending is driven in part by the involvement of doctors, and interest groups representing them, in medical services pricing policy at the federal level. The United States’ political and healthcare systems are unique among its peer countries. This thesis leverages a comparison between the United States and Japan to contextualize the processes the US government uses to determine health prices and explain the reasons they evolved as they did. All prices for medical services in the US are tied, directly or indirectly, to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, a list of services and accompanying prices maintained by the US government and shaped from its inception by medical interest groups. The key arena for these price-setting activities is a committee of doctors, the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC), convened by America’s largest physician interest group, the American Medical Association (AMA). The RUC steers prices by making price change recommendations – almost always increases – to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) based on a review process fraught with bias and imprecise science. CMS has historically accepted 87.5% of these changes, making them the basis for how physician services are reimbursed nationally. This annual process is little known, yet it is a key driver of high health spending in the United States. Investigating the experience of Japan, a fellow advanced postindustrial democracy, yields insights into the relationship between government and doctors’ interest groups in a country that spends less than half as much as the US on healthcare per capital while enjoying high quality outcomes. Like the US, Japan uses both a fee schedule system and a committee comprised of private interests where doctors are heavily represented to assist in the pricing update process. However, Japan’s government retains control. From start to finish, a team of bureaucrats maintains decision authority and relies on both robust national surveys and the input of a government-convened committee of private interests across the health sector to decide on appropriate price changes for physician services. In the price updating process, Japan has three capabilities the United States lacks which I make recommendations for emulating in the American context: robust and reliable health services utilization and pricing information; transparency, with the public begetting accountability for pricing decisions; and a well-resourced and empowered bureaucracy firmly in charge. With physician services price setting, like in many other realms of American policymaking, self-serving interest group involvement and a disempowered bureaucracy are key challenges that must be overcome in order to fundamentally alter America’s current path toward an unsustainably large – and ever increasing – healthcare bill the country can no longer afford.

Oman saw 50 years of rapid economic development under the autocratic rule of Sultan Qaboos bin Said. The state’s simultaneous advancement and authoritarian resilience puzzled proponents of modernization theory. Even when the Arab Spring triggered waves of protests, the so-called benevolent dictator appeared unshakable. In this work, I identify challenges to authoritarianism and sources of state strength in Oman between 2000 and 2019. First, where did pressures for democratic reforms originate and how did they manifest? Analyzing recent protests, I find that educational cleavages are more relevant for understanding dissent today than the ethno-sectarian divides that historically mobilized critics of the regime. Second, how has state spending related to democratic pressures and authoritarian stability? Evaluating state responses to unrest, I conclude that the Sultanate has relied on oil rents to reward key protest groups. In response to new demands from educated citizens, the state has also made symbolic reforms and increasingly relied on repression. As higher education expands and oil rents falter, democratic demands may reemerge and force the state to either pursue democratization or forgo its benevolence.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) finds itself at a crossroads. Four of its member states have initiated withdrawal proceedings since 2015, and many of its preliminary and formal investigations seem to be at an impasse. This project asks an old question, “will more states withdraw from the ICC?” but seeks a new type of answer. Collected here is an exhaustive record of interactions between the ICC and its African and Asia-Pacific member states from 2015 to 2020, possibly the first of its kind. Also presented is a new system for evaluating and scoring ICC-member state interactions, called the ICC Cooperation Score (ICS), as well as a series of statistical tests identifying which characteristics of states are associated with greater support for, and cooperation with, the ICC. Though state interactions with the ICC are the products of a complex set of factors, identifying patterns in member state behavior is possible, and these patterns have important implications for the ICC’s future.

The refugee and asylum policies of developing world countries have long been overlooked in academic and policy circles. This represents a critical gap in the literature, as developing countries host 84% of the world’s refugees. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, hosts 26% of the global refugee population. Some African countries welcome refugees and facilitate their safety and prosperity by offering them liberal freedoms. Others seek to prevent the entry of refugees or limit their freedom with draconian policies. How do African countries formulate asylum policies and how do they respond when borders are threatened or crossed by refugees? Uganda is an empirical outlier which can offer insight into this understudied area. Uganda hosts over 1 million refugees, which the country supports with policies that are perceived to be the most progressive in the world. The limited literature on the determinants of asylum policy in the developing world fail to explain Uganda’s policy response. This thesis argues that this failure stems from an inadequate engagement with the nature and political priorities of the host state’s governing regime. Host governments formulate asylum policies with a view towards both domestic and international political considerations. How much or how little governing regimes provide for refugees is influenced by the possibilities afforded by the state’s domestic political environment. For Museveni, progressive refugee governance fits into a broader foreign policy strategy of image management with the West, reinforcing his reputation as a guarantor of regional stability and deflecting scrutiny of his authoritarian domestic policies. Evaluating the relationship between regime type and asylum policy is one way to examine how policy outcomes vary across different domestic political environments. Analysis of this relationship reveals that autocrats comprise some 93% of asylum policy liberalizers in Sub-Saharan Africa since the Cold War. In particular, personalist autocrats – those autocrats who have “personalized” power and most closely resemble the stereotype of unconstrained dictatorial rule – account for 60% of liberalizers. This trend supports the idea that progressive refugee governance has strategic value for African autocrats, deflecting international scrutiny into repressive domestic policies, indicating a commitment to international norms, and highlighting a state’s stability relative to regional neighbors. This thesis posits that liberalization of national asylum policy came to serve as a signaling device of these desirable characteristics in the Cold War’s aftermath as liberalizing pressure was applied to African dictators.

Secure Communities is a national immigration enforcement program that allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to gain access to the fingerprints of all suspects booked at local jails. Upon receiving the fingerprints, ICE can request that the jail hold a suspect until they can be transferred into ICE’s custody. From 2009 to the present day, Secure Communities has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and has garnered criticism for threatening to compromise the relationship between local law enforcement and the communities they serve. This thesis provides one of the first empirical examinations of the effects of the program on individuals’ trust in local law enforcement. I use millions of calls for service before and after the implementation of Secure Communities in Seattle, Washington as a proxy for residents’ trust in local law enforcement. Using this call for service data, I employ a difference-indifferences design to estimate the causal relationship between the implementation of the program and trust in local law enforcement. In particular, I examine whether we observe a decrease in calls for service in higher-density Hispanic areas compared to lower-density Hispanic areas postimplementation. Contrary to expectations, I find no significant effect of the programs’ implementation on rates of calls for service, in general, or on domestic violence calls, in particular. In light of these findings, I remark on the possibility that Seattle’s sanctuary policies may have provided a buffer against the potential negative consequences of Secure Community’s implementation on Hispanic residents’ trust in local law enforcement.

Despite its reputation for the toughest anti-money laundering (AML) enforcement in the world, the United States remains the leading jurisdiction for the incorporation of anonymous shell companies used in grand corruption schemes. States like Delaware and Nevada have become notorious secrecy jurisdictions, frequently used by criminals and kleptocrats for money laundering. This thesis investigates why some U.S. states and not others have become the most secretive incorporation jurisdictions in the world. By employing the metrics from corporate secrecy scholars and NGOs and never-before-collected cross-sectional data on U.S. state incorporation fee revenue, this work reveals the correlates of U.S. state corporate secrecy. Moreover, through an interest group analysis of the corporate policymaking of two states (Delaware and Nevada) it posits a causal logic behind corporate secrecy in the most secretive U.S. states. It highlights how pro-secrecy interests in the United States have gained control over incorporation policymaking in Delaware and Nevada.

This thesis examines the meaning of “news” in the age of new media. Contemporary scholarship across communication studies, political science and computer science draws attention to numerous problems impacting the state of media today: disinformation, political polarization, and declining public trust describe just a few of these conversations. At the foundation of all of these conversations lies a deceptively simple question: what does “media” mean today in the first place? To answer this question, my thesis traces the changing meaning of news in the age of new media through the story of the Cable News Network (CNN). As the first international 24-hour cable news network, CNN embodies many elements of new media. In my thesis, CNN provides a window into 1) the rapid technological, cultural and institutional developments that were foundational to emergence of new media and 2) the changing meaning of journalism in the era of new media. To contextualize the emergence of new media, I examine the technological innovation of satellite technology; the cultural shift that increased public desire for news; and the institutional changes in the news industry marked by the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) deregulations. I then identify the changing meaning of news in the age of new media. I find that news in the new media era is best described as a paradox that allows for far more and yet remarkably less: innovations in new media opens new frontiers for journalism, but the incredibly fast pace of change amplifies existing problems in media. News was able to develop more types of stories, but less stories focused on news. News expanded audiences internationally, but the nonstop newscycle disrupted viewer trust in media. News diversified content options, while saturated competition siloed viewers. My story of CNN from 1980 to the late 20th Century presents a narrative that contextualizes the changing meaning of news in the age of new media. Clarity on what “media” means will provide a foundation for contemporary scholarship that focuses on the causes and solutions to the problems in the state of media today.

Community policing has been a widely accepted police reform ideal in the United States since the 1980s—but in most American police departments, it has never really taken root. Today, even notoriously aggressive, racist, and invasive police departments, like that of Ferguson, Missouri, claim to practice community policing while engaging in practices indistinguishable from its opposite. Still, community policing, when implemented well, promises enormous benefits, including improved police-community relationships, increased state legitimacy, decreased reliance on the criminal justice system, and safer and more cohesive communities. This thesis uses qualitative interviews and observations to compare community policing in Denver, Colorado and Dublin, Ireland, which treats community policing as a specialization, with its own training, promotion schemes, and units within each police station. This qualitative study suggests that: 1) community policing is fundamentally an ethos of trust and respect for the community, and its successful implementation will look different in different contexts, 2) the Dublin model of specialized community policing units working in a specific patch is more effective toward the goals of community policing than Denver’s less structured, more response-oriented model, 3) merely adding community policing to a non-community police force is not sufficient to reap the benefits of community policing, and 4) applying the label of community policing to a reform effort without making more fundamental changes undermines the goals of community policing and police reform.

Many tribal lands across the western United States (US) are rich in wind and solar energy resources. Tribal nations’ harnessing of their lands’ wind and solar potential presents opportunities for community and economic development. However, the American Federalist system curbs tribes’ right to self-determination in the context of renewable energy. In the Federalist system, tribal nations are legally subject to the US federal government’s authority but exempt from states’ authority because of tribal sovereignty. As a result, the literature has focused on the federal influence on tribal energy endeavors. This paper spotlights the role of states: I examine how state energy policy influences tribal wind and solar development. Though independent, tribes are affected by state energy policies as each state governs its electricity grid and market. In my thesis, I complete a case study of tribal wind and solar energy development in the context of Montana’s and California’s state energy policies. These two case studies vary greatly in the degree to which each state forwards a clean energy transition through regulation and market incentives, also known as the “aggressiveness” of the state’s energy policy. Through interviews, policy review, and surveying documentation of tribal energy projects, I examine how each state’s renewable portfolio policies, net energy metering, interconnection regulations, tax incentives, and grant and loan programs have impacted tribal wind and solar efforts. As a result, I prove that tribes in states with more aggressive renewable energy policies have greater resources and opportunities to enter the renewable energy market. More critically, I find that tribal circumstances are often neglected in state policies, and consequently many state energy programs and incentives are out of tribal entities’ reach. Moving forward, states must work to consider tribal circumstances and ensure tribal inclusion in all state energy policies to ensure equitable access to the nation’s growing renewable energy market.

China’s engagement in Africa is a hotly debated subject today. Policymakers in Washington D.C. increasingly see China’s actions as predatory and with the intention of domination over the continent. In Beijing, on the other hand, Xi Jinping frequently tout’s ‘win-win’, ‘no political strings attached’ cooperation. Drawing on publicly available data and 33 interviews with 29 individuals from a variety of backgrounds, this thesis seeks to analyze China’s actions in Ghana to shed light on the motivations for and the effects of China’s engagement in Africa. This thesis concludes that the Chinese government has both economic motivations and political objectives for its engagement with Ghana, and it utilizes a variety of strategies across different sectors to advance those economic and political interests. As for the effects of China’s increased engagement in Ghana, country-level generalized data indicates win-win outcomes for both countries. But closer analysis suggests that across different sectors, China’s engagement with Ghanaian elites has resulted in close financial relationships that threaten Ghana’s ability to conduct policy without undue influence from the Chinese central government. China’s engagement also has worrying implications for Ghana’s environment, local industry, and media and information and communication technology (ICT) freedom. But Ghanaian leaders, civil society organizations, and citizens also have exhibited significant agency in shaping the terms of the bilateral China-Ghana relationship.

For the past few years, scholars, politicians, and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have been ringing alarm bells about the rise of anti-institutional populism in Europe bringing about the fall of the bulwark institutions of the liberal international order. Although there is a lot of literature on the antagonistic relationship between populist parties and the European Union (EU), there is little on how these parties view the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), another bastion of the internationalist post-war order. Seeking to close this gap, thesis asks the following question: what are the attitudes of populist parties in the EU towards NATO membership and why? Interestingly, a majority of EU populist parties support NATO membership. This work uses party platforms and secondary sources to examine this counterintuitive variation in populist party stances on NATO membership. It assesses domestic and international explanations of this variation and concludes that the latter have more explanatory power than the former. Specifically, this thesis posits that domestic party competition does not parallel party stances on NATO membership, while numerous international positions do. Foreign policy positions related to support for NATO membership include not being Euroskeptic and holding a positive view of the United States, while those that are correlated with opposition to NATO membership are a negative view of the United States and opposition to EU membership. A party’s view of Russia, its support of EU membership, and Euroskepticism are inconsequential. Furthermore, this thesis argues that there is no such thing as a “populist foreign policy,” at least in the realm of NATO- related affairs, since populist parties have a diverse range of stances on these matters. As such, it stresses that EU populist parties should not be treated as a homogenous group and notes that while we can take some comfort in knowing that NATO is not threatened by populism to the same extent that the EU is, we should not rest easy: the unpredictability and influence of these parties means that if they make severing ties with NATO their core issue, they may get their way.

Global surveys are critical to conducting global health research on a variety of topics, which are directly responsible for shaping national health policies and informing monitoring and evaluation programs internationally. In recent years, various organizations including the United Nations and Gates Foundation have called attention to gender gaps in knowledge for key public health data. Although, we now have a strong understanding of where gender data is completely missing, we have a ways to go to understand how existing data may hold gender biases. In this thesis we assess how questionnaire formation can carry gender biases that may impact data collected and in turn future analyses. First, we studied gender-nonspecific questionnaires to understand the forms of gender bias and domains of interest targeted. Second, we studied the evolution of a gender-specific questionnaire over time to track changes in the focus of men’s and women’s versions of the survey. We utilized the results from both case studies to develop a series of general guidelines for future questionnaire design to minimize the amount of gender bias.

From the first protests of the Velvet Revolution in November 1989 to the present day, leaders of the Czech and Slovak Republics have invoked historical memory in their political messaging. The recent success of populist parties in Europe has provoked a great deal of scholarship, and prompted questions about the history of populism across the continent, including the Czech and Slovak Republics. This study asks the question: How have politicians used historical memory and populist rhetoric in the Czech and Slovak Republics after the fall of communism? Through archival research and interviews, buttressed by existing literature, this work examines Czech and Slovak politics in the first half of their post-communist life to date: from 1990 to 2004. This thesis concludes that during this period, Czech and Slovak politicians used different rhetorical strategies in accordance with the most pressing political challenges they each faced. Historical memory was a resource that all politicians drew upon, but historical memory was utilized in populist rhetorical structures only when the political challenge in question was one which required politicians to divide, or distinguish between, two groups said to hold different ideologies. Examples include the 1990-1992 Czech political debate over the communist regime’s legacy, and the 1992 and 1994 campaigns of Slovak Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar. In contrast, populist rhetoric was not employed when the challenge at hand was one which required politicians to build accord in service of pursuing a shared ideal future, namely that of European Union membership. This paper concludes by exploring future avenues for research on this and related topics.

Between 1890 and 1910, the eleven states of the old Confederacy each passed a series of disenfranchising reforms that would deny blacks and poor whites in the South their right to vote for the next 75 years. Recently, some political scientists have sought to characterize the South of this time period not just as a democracy for whites only, but rather as a set of subnational authoritarian enclaves within the democratic United States. This subnational authoritarian thesis of Southern politics immerses itself in the larger historical debate over the extent to which disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South was either class motivated or race motivated. This thesis attempts to inform that debate by assessing the effects of Southern disenfranchisement on government support for black and white public education between 1891 and 1919. Previous work on the effects of disenfranchisement in the South has shown that it suppressed both black and white political participation. However, the work on the policy effects of disenfranchisement fails to test whether disenfranchisement led to less favorable policy outcomes for poor whites like it did for blacks. This project seeks to fill this hole in the literature by comparing student/teacher ratios in black and white schools in Kentucky to student/teacher ratios in black and white schools in a sample of 4 disenfranchising states. The incorporation of Kentucky as a case of a Southern ‘border state’ that never enacted disenfranchisement represents a new approach to the study of the effects of disenfranchisement in the South. I find that disenfranchisement had no discernible impact on student/teacher ratios in black or white schools, but explain why and how it still likely impacted government support for public education overall.

This year-long project explores the nuances of the Philippine National AIDS/STI Prevention and Control Program (NASPCP) within the context of a decentralized health system. The Philippines, unlike the rest of its Southeast Asian counterparts, has experienced a rapid increase of HIV cases within the last decade. This rising epidemic has mainly been isolated within marginalized and underserved populations such female sex workers (FSWs), males who have sex with males (MSMs), and people who use intravenous drugs (PWID). Nevertheless, the 140 percent increase in cases have also reflected a demographic shift to the young adult cohort, with a serious potential for the epidemic to spill over in the general population. In order to understand the gaps and barriers of the NASPCP in a different perspective, this study employed a mixed methods approach that involved qualitative research coding and a qualitative case study on three specific cities in Metro Manila with high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. This study incorporated the framework of decentralized local decision spaces to better understand the perspectives of those involved in HIV/AIDS care, research, and advocacy. Data analysis revealed the following main themes: (1) tension between national policy and local implementation; (2) local heterogeneity of HIV responses; (3) narrow decision spaces for regional and local public health stakeholders; and (4) interference of national and local politics on the proper flow of resources and information. Overall, the politicization of health and the extent at which the Philippine HIV healthcare system is truly devolved can constrain the comprehensive objectives of the NASPCP. HIV/AIDS is a serious public health and development problem for this developing nation. This study offers specific technical suggestions and research recommendations for those in the field to move forward. This study proposes that when working within HIV/AIDS program implementation and delivery of care, it is necessary to fix certain mechanisms of this decentralized system and seriously consider the role of politics in health. 


In 2017, Venezuela appeared to be on the brink of democratic transition. After former president Hugo Chavez’s death and amid a crippling humanitarian crisis, Venezuela’s quasi-authoritarian regime lost in the country’s 2015 parliamentary elections. According to studies on rapid transitions out of autocracy, the electoral defeat, combined with deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and prolonged social unrest in 2016 and 2017, should have resulted in democratic transition. Today, however, Venezuela remains under the regime’s control and continues to sink deeper into authoritarianism. This thesis argues that the Venezuelan regime’s political survival was the result of two strategies for authoritarian consolidation that began developing once Chavez came to power in 1999. The first was a military strategy focused on maintaining the Armed Forces’ loyalty and protecting against popular mobilization. The second was a bottom-up strategy centered on a series of communal governance structures that later evolved into mechanisms for social control. The gradual development of these consolidation strategies over the years is what ultimately allowed the Venezuelan regime to thwart democratic transition in 2017.

Despite the introduction of Seguro Popular, a universal form of health insurance, in the early 2000s, indigenous women in Mexico continue to exhibit disparately poor maternal health outcomes relative to non-indigenous women. This difference has typically been attributed to factors including poverty, rurality, and lack of care adherence, but little work has addressed the role of prenatal care quality in explaining this trend. Similarly, though Seguro Popular has assisted in equalizing the proportion of indigenous and non-indigenous women who receive prenatal care, few studies have compared the substantive quality of care provided to these two groups. Using data from ENADID 2014, this study characterizes the relationship between indigenous status, insurance affiliation, and prenatal care quality, focusing specifically on the state of Oaxaca. After developing an index of prenatal care quality consistent with both international norms and local patient care preferences, I demonstrate significantly worse prenatal care quality among indigenous women across every measure of quality. Even after controls for socioeconomic marginalization, linear and logistic regression models of prenatal care demonstrate that indigenous women received 0.642 fewer prenatal visits (p < 0.05), exhibited reduced odds of receiving prenatal care in the first trimester (OR 0.5929, p < 0.05), received 0.3515 fewer interventions over the course of pregnancy (out of a checklist of 11 essential procedures, p < 0.05), had reduced odds of receiving prenatal care from a doctor (OR 0.3969, p < 0.01), received poorer information quality of care (0.2284 points fewer on a 3-point scale, p < 0.05), and received poorer interpersonal quality of care (0.3791 points fewer on a 3-point scale, p < 0.01). Regression models stratified by indigenous status suggest that these indigenous status- based inequalities are concentrated among Seguro Popular affiliates. The signifiant correlation between indigenous status and poor care quality, independent of socioeconomic marginalization, suggests insufficient cross-cultural communication and implicit discrimination as potential sources of this quality difference. In addition to demonstrating continued indigenous care access inequality in Oaxaca even after the implementation of Seguro Popular, these results suggest discrepancies in access to quality prenatal care as a possible explanation of Mexico’s indigenous maternal health disparities.

Acute malnutrition directly accounts for over 2 million deaths of children under five each year. However, its interaction with other nutritional disorders and the efficacy of the World Health Organization’s criteria for its diagnosis and are not well understood. I conduct a secondary analysis of two clinical trials in southern Malawi to examine the effects of chronic malnutrition and the rates of growth of anthropometric measures for patients in acute malnutrition treatment programs. The results show that chronically malnourished children presented for treatment with low baseline measurements and demographic makers of food insecurity. These children had worse clinical outcomes than non-chronically malnourished children, but they experienced more height gain over the treatment course. Children with severe acute malnutrition grew at a faster rate than children with moderate acute malnutrition and ratios between growth rates of the two diagnostic measures were similar in these populations. These findings indicate that chronically malnourished children should be targeted for increased attention in screening and supplemental feeding programs for acute malnutrition, and that therapeutic feeding can counteract the growth faltering caused by chronic malnutrition. Findings do not provide evidence that either diagnostic marker for malnutrition is superior based on growth rate.

Over the past decade, Greece has undergone two simultaneous crises. The first is economic, triggered by the global financial crisis of 2008. Since then, gross domestic product has shriveled by a quarter, and the average Greek has become forty percent poorer. The second crisis is related to immigration: Greece has, over the past decade, become the favored point of entry for most illegal migrants seeking to reach Europe, resulting in an ongoing demographic shift in a previously homogenous country. It is in this climate of political and social upheaval that the Golden Dawn, a far-right, neo-Nazi political party, has risen to national prominence, becoming the country’s third most-popular party in the 2015 elections. In this thesis, I seek to determine whether either or both of these crises have influenced Golden Dawn’s sudden electoral success. I argue that, although the economic crisis laid a foundation for the party’s rise, Golden Dawn’s success is not simply a function of its ability to garner support from the country’s most economically disadvantaged. Instead, the party has found success by campaigning on a platform that promises the return of Greek society to its pre-crisis status quo, both economically and demographically. Specifically, the Golden Dawn shapes itself as a response to the cultural threat imposed by both the economic and immigration crises, as both have induced feelings of status loss among the Greek electorate.

In academia and in popular discourse, leaks have long been associated with transparency, while their potential as a source for disinformation has gone largely unexamined. The turmoil of the 2016 U.S. presidential election cast doubt on this association by demonstrating the potentially disorienting impact of leaked emails on political knowledge. Nonetheless, the dynamics of this disruption remain little understood. Through an online experiment, I find that individuals perceive leaked emails as generally more credible than other forms of anonymously sourced political information. I contextualize this finding within the general understanding that leaks are just as pliable to the spread of doubt and misinformation as they are to the cause of transparency. Looking ahead, disclosures similar to the 2016 leaks are likely to figure prominently in American politics, particularly in the context of future elections. Whether these future leaks are committed in the name of transparency or disinformation, their impact on democratic practice will ultimately be determined by the reaction of their audience — journalists, politicians, and voters — who must decide whether or to what extent their contents can be trusted.