Response to Inken von Borzyskowski’s Review of Rules and Allies: Foreign Election Interventions

Dov Levin's work on partisan interventions (cited by Borzyskowski) added for the first time the element of large-N data analysis, offering regression results on the effects of great power support on the electoral fortunes of candidates. Michael Tomz and Jessica Weeks show that Americans, like the Lebanese and Ukrainians, are divided along party lines on what to think about foreign meddling (“Public Opinion and Foreign Electoral Intervention,” forthcoming in the American Political Science Review). [...]the future conversation is likely to oscillate between its inception in public opinion case-study data (often featuring survey experiments) and observational analyses of large-N cross-country outcomes such as margin of victory. [...]our goal was to provide a novel dataset of intent to make a difference (via some identifiable action), which would then help us and others further study whether interventions, in fact, had the intended effects.