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Deliver the Vote! Micromotives and Macrobehavior in Electoral Fraud
Ashlea Rundlett & Milan Svolik
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most election fraud is not conducted centrally by incumbents but rather locally by a machinery consisting of a multitude of political operatives. How does an incumbent ensure that his agents deliver fraud when needed and as much as is needed? We address this and related puzzles in the political organization of election fraud by studying the perverse consequences of two distinct incentive conflicts: the principal-agent problem between an incumbent and his local agents, and the collective action problem among the agents. Using the global game methodology, we show that these incentive conflicts result in a herd dynamic among the agents that tends to either oversupply or undersupply fraud, rarely delivering the amount of fraud that would be optimal from the incumbent's point of view. This equilibrium dynamic explains when and why electoral fraud fails to deliver incumbent victories, why incumbents who enjoy genuine popularity often engage in seemingly unnecessary fraud, and it predicts that the extent of fraud should be increasing in both the incumbent's genuine support and reported results across precincts. A statistical analysis of anomalies in precinct-level results from the 2011-12 Russian legislative and presidential elections supports our key claims.
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Julia Bader & Ursula Daxecker
Journal of Peace Research, November 2015, Pages 774-790
Abstract:
Critiques of China's 'oil diplomacy' center on its alleged disregard for transparency and human rights, yet such claims ignore that the problematic relationship between resource extraction and human rights precedes Chinese market entry. This article explores whether human rights implications are more serious for states exporting oil to China compared to another major oil importer, the United States. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we argue that oil export dependence on the USA affects human rights more negatively than dependence on China because of differences related to the timing of market entry. The United States established stable relationships with oil supplier states decades ago, creating dependencies that are sufficiently long-term for the implications of the resource curse to take hold, and taking place before human rights became part of the US foreign policy agenda. In comparison, China's late entry into global oil markets in the early 1990s meant that market access often required the provision of generous loan packages, which may help counteract the detrimental effects of oil dependence. Our empirical analysis examines the impact of oil export dependence on China versus the USA on human rights in supplier states for the 1992-2010 period. Results show that oil producing states dependent on exports to the USA exhibit lower human rights performance than those exporting to China. We also demonstrate that lower human rights performance for US exporters stems from long-term trends rather than short-term fluctuations in oil export dependence.
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International Terrorism and the Political Survival of Leaders
Johann Park & Valentina Bali
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines whether transnational terrorist attacks impact the political survival of leaders. We argue that external security threats, such as those from transnational terrorist incidents, can undermine incumbent target governments by exposing foreign policy failures and damaging society's general well-being. Yet, terrorism may not destabilize democratic governments as a result of citizens rallying around their elected leaders in threatening times. Focusing on Archigos' survival leadership data and International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events' terrorism data for the 1968-2004 period, we find that autocrats who experience higher instances of transnational terrorist attacks are more likely to exit power. Democrats, however, are relatively secure to the destabilizing influence of transnational terrorism.
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Threats to Territorial Integrity, National Mass Schooling, and Linguistic Commonality
Keith Darden & Harris Mylonas
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why are some countries more linguistically homogeneous than others? We posit that the international environment in which a state develops partially determines the extent of its linguistic commonality and national cohesion. Specifically, the presence of an external threat of territorial conquest or externally supported secession leads governing elites to have stronger incentives to pursue nation-building strategies to generate national cohesion, often leading to the cultivation of a common national language through mass schooling. Comparing cases with similar levels of initial linguistic heterogeneity, state capacity, and development, but in different international environments, we find that states that did not face external threats to their territorial integrity were more likely to outsource education and other tools for constructing identity to missionaries or other groups, or not to invest in assimilation at all, leading to higher ethnic heterogeneity. States developing in high threat environments were more likely to invest in nation-building strategies to homogenize their populations.
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The Unintended Consequences of Internet Diffusion: Evidence from Malaysia
Luke Miner
Journal of Public Economics, December 2015, Pages 66-78
Abstract:
Can the introduction of the Internet undermine incumbent power in a semi-authoritarian regime? I examine this question using evidence from Malaysia, where the incumbent coalition lost its 40-year monopoly on power in 2008. I develop a novel methodology for measuring Internet penetration, matching IP addresses with physical locations, and apply it to the 2004 to 2008 period in Malaysia. Using distance to the backbone to instrument for endogenous Internet penetration, I find that Internet exposure accounts for 6.6 points, nearly half the swing against the incumbent party in 2008. I find limited evidence of increased turnover, and no evidence of an effect on turnout.
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Improving Electoral Integrity with Information and Communications Technology
Michael Callen et al.
Journal of Experimental Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Irregularities plague elections in developing democracies. The international community spends hundreds of millions of dollars on election observation, with little robust evidence that it consistently improves electoral integrity. We conducted a randomized control trial to measure the effect of an intervention to detect and deter electoral irregularities employing a nation-wide sample of polling stations in Uganda using scalable information and communications technology (ICT). In treatment stations, researchers delivered letters to polling officials stating that tallies would be photographed using smartphones and compared against official results. Compared to stations with no letters, the letters increased the frequency of posted tallies by polling center managers in compliance with the law; decreased the number of sequential digits found on tallies - a fraud indicator; and decreased the vote share for the incumbent president in some specifications. Our results demonstrate that a cost-effective citizen and ICT intervention can improve electoral integrity in emerging democracies.
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The conditioning effect of protest history on the emulation of nonviolent conflict
Alex Braithwaite, Jessica Maves Braithwaite & Jeffrey Kucik
Journal of Peace Research, November 2015, Pages 697-711
Abstract:
Violent domestic conflicts spread between countries via spillover effects and the desire to emulate events abroad. Herein, we extend this emulation logic to the potential for the contagion of nonviolent conflicts. The spread of predominantly nonviolent pro-democracy mobilizations across the globe in the mid-to-late 1980s, the wave of protests in former Soviet states during the Color revolutions in the 2000s, and the eruption of nonviolent movements across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring in the early 2010s each suggest that the observation of collective action abroad encourages a desire to emulate among potential challengers to domestic autocrats. However, the need to emulate varies. Potential challengers with a recent history of protest at home are less dependent (than are those without similar experience) upon foreign exemplars to mobilize the participants and generate the resources required to make emulation practicable. By contrast, where the domestic experience of protest is absent, opposition movements are more reliant upon emulation of foreign exemplars. We test the implications of this logic using a series of multivariate logistic regression analyses. Our tests employ data on nonviolent civil resistance mobilizations that occurred across the global population of autocratic states between 1946 and 2006. These tests, along with post-estimation analysis, provide evidence consistent with our conditional logic of emulation.
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Too good to be true? United Nations peacebuilding and the democratization of war-torn states
Janina Isabel Steinert & Sonja Grimm
Conflict Management and Peace Science, November 2015, Pages 513-535
Abstract:
This article examines the effectiveness of UN peacebuilding missions in democratizing war-torn states, emphasizing those missions that include democracy promotion components in their mandates. Based on a multinominal logistic regression, we reveal that democratization is significantly more likely if a UN peacebuilding mission is deployed. Furthermore, regimes categorized as more liberal at the outset have an increased risk of revealing antidemocratization trends over the post-war period. Oil wealth impedes democratization and clear victory of one conflict party makes regime transitions more likely, yet in both directions. Descriptive statistics suggest that an increase in the mission's capacities may be conducive to democratization.
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Aid Is Not Oil: Donor Utility, Heterogeneous Aid, and the Aid-Democratization Relationship
Sarah Blodgett Bermeo
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent articles conclude that foreign aid, like other nontax resources, inhibits political change in authoritarian regimes. This article challenges both the negative political effects of aid and the similarity of aid to other resources. It develops a model incorporating changing donor preferences and the heterogeneity of foreign aid. Consistent with the model's predictions, an empirical test for the period 1973-2010 shows that, on average, the negative relationship between aid and the likelihood of democratic change is confined to the Cold War period. However, in the post-Cold War period, nondemocratic recipients of particular strategic importance can still use aid to thwart change. The relationship between oil revenue and democratic change does not follow the same pattern over time or across recipients. This supports the conclusion that aid has different properties than other, fungible, resources.
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Does foreign aid harm political institutions?
Sam Jones & Finn Tarp
Journal of Development Economics, January 2016, Pages 266-281
Abstract:
The notion that foreign aid harms the institutions of recipient governments remains prevalent. We combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship. Long run cross-section and alternative dynamic panel estimators show a small positive net effect of total aid on political institutions. Distinguishing between types of aid according to their frequency domain and stated objectives, we find this aggregate net effect is driven primarily by the positive contribution of more stable inflows of 'governance aid'. We conclude the data do not support the view that aid has had a systematic negative effect on political institutions.
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What We Can Learn From the Early History of Sovereign Debt
David Stasavage
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many people believe that the early development of sovereign debt depended on institutions, but there are two very different ways of presenting this narrative and two very different conclusions one might draw for sovereign debt today. According to the first, this was an impartial story involving executive constraints, shared governance, increased monitoring, and increased transparency - in other words things that sound unambiguously good. According to the second narrative this was a story of distributive politics. States had the best access to credit when institutions gave government creditors privileged access to decision making while restricting the influence of those who paid the taxes to reimburse debts. This was a situation where institutions fostered commitment, but at a cost, and sometimes they may not even have been welfare enhancing. In this paper I present evidence from seven centuries of European history, and I suggest that available data support the distributive politics interpretation. I then draw implications for how we think about the politics of sovereign debt today.
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Extremism in revolutionary movements
Mehdi Shadmehr
Games and Economic Behavior, November 2015, Pages 97-121
Abstract:
A revolutionary entrepreneur strategically chooses the revolutionary agenda to maximize the likelihood of revolution. Citizens have different preferences and can contribute varying degrees of support. We show: (1) Extremists exert a disproportionate influence over the revolutionary agenda; (2) Depending on the structure of repression, more severe repression can moderate or radicalize the revolutionary agenda. Specifically, increases in the "minimum punishment" (marginal cost of revolutionary effort at its minimum) radicalize the revolutionary agenda. This presents the elite with a tradeoff between extreme but unlikely revolutions and moderate but likely ones. (3) Competition between revolutionary entrepreneurs can radicalize the revolutionary agenda.