For the people
Seeing Like an Autocrat: Liberal Social Engineering in an Illiberal State
Calvert Jones
Perspectives on Politics, March 2015, Pages 24-41
Abstract:
Recent studies of autocratic liberalization adopt a rationalist approach in which autocrats’ motives and styles of reasoning are imputed or deduced. By contrast, I investigate these empirically. I focus on liberal social engineering in the Persian Gulf, where authoritarian state efforts to shape citizen hearts and minds conform incongruously to liberal ideals of character. To explain this important but under-studied variant on autocratic liberalization, I present evidence from rare palace ethnography in the United Arab Emirates, including analysis of the jokes and stories ruling elites tell behind closed doors and regular interviews with a ruling monarch. I find that autocrats’ deeply personal experiences in the West as young men and women supplied them with stylized ideas about how modern, productive peoples ought to act and how their own cultures underperform. The evidence also reveals that such experiences can influence autocrats, even years later, leading them to trust in Western-style liberal social engineering as the way forward, despite the risks. Ethnographic findings challenge the contemporary scholarly stereotype of the autocrat as a super-rational being narrowly focused on political survival, illustrating how memory and emotion can also serve as important influences over reasoning and can drive liberal change.
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Islam and Democracy at the Fringes of Europe: The Role of Useful Historical Legacies
Arolda Elbasani
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article analyzes how the Muslim majority has engaged with, and contributed to parallel processes of democratization and European integration in post-Communist Albania. The assessment of Muslims' choices focuses on the Central organization, the Albanian Muslim Community, which is recognized by the state as the only authority in charge of all the administrative and spiritual issues pertinent to the community of Sunni believers, and serves as the main hub of respective religious activities in the country. The analysis of democratization, and Muslims' respective choices, are divided into two different periods, namely democratic transition (1990–1998) and democratic consolidation (1998–2013), each facing democratizing actors, including Muslim groups, with different challenges and issues. We argue that the existence of a useful pool of arguments from the past, the so-called Albanian tradition, has enabled Muslims to contravene controversial foreign influences and recast Islam in line with the democratic and European ideals of the Albanian post-communist polity. This set of historical legacies and arguments explain Muslims' similar positioning toward democracy throughout different stages marked by different institutional restrictions and state policies.
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On the endogeneity of political preferences: Evidence from individual experience with democracy
Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln & Matthias Schündeln
Science, 6 March 2015, Pages 1145-1148
Abstract:
Democracies depend on the support of the general population, but little is known about the determinants of this support. We investigated whether support for democracy increases with the length of time spent under the system and whether preferences are thus affected by the political system. Relying on 380,000 individual-level observations from 104 countries over the years 1994 to 2013, and exploiting individual-level variation within a country and a given year in the length of time spent under democracy, we find evidence that political preferences are endogenous. For new democracies, our findings imply that popular support needs time to develop. For example, the effect of around 8.5 more years of democratic experience corresponds to the difference in support for democracy between primary and secondary education.
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Democratization Under the Threat of Revolution: Evidence From the Great Reform Act of 1832
Toke Aidt & Raphaël Franck
Econometrica, March 2015, Pages 505–547
Abstract:
We examine the link between the threat of violence and democratization in the context of the Great Reform Act passed by the British Parliament in 1832. We geo-reference the so-called Swing riots, which occurred between the 1830 and 1831 parliamentary elections, and compute the number of these riots that happened within a 10 km radius of the 244 English constituencies. Our empirical analysis relates this constituency-specific measure of the threat perceptions held by the 344,000 voters in the Unreformed Parliament to the share of seats won in each constituency by pro-reform politicians in 1831. We find that the Swing riots induced voters to vote for pro-reform politicians after experiencing first-hand the violence of the riots.
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Making Democracy Work: Culture, Social Capital and Elections in China
Gerard Padró i Miquel et al.
NBER Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
This paper aims to show that culture is an important determinant of the effectiveness of formal democratic institutions, such as elections. We collect new data to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations and the history of electoral reforms in Chinese villages. We use the presence of village temples to proxy for culture, or more specifically, for social (civic) capital and show that their presence greatly enhances the increase in public goods due to the introduction of elections. These results support the view that social capital complements democratic institutions such as elections.
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Explaining the Oil Advantage: Effects of Natural Resource Wealth on Incumbent Reelection in Iran
Paasha Mahdavi
World Politics, April 2015, Pages 226-267
Abstract:
Why does natural resource wealth prolong incumbency? Using evidence from parliamentary elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the author shows that natural resource revenues boost incumbent reelection rates because they are used to provide public or private goods to constituents, which incentivizes voters to reelect incumbents over challengers. To test this hypothesis, the author employs originally assembled data on five parliamentary elections in Iran (1992–2008) in longitudinal hierarchical regression analyses at the district and province levels. By leveraging Iran's mixed-member electoral system, he shows that the resource-incumbency mechanism works primarily in single-member districts with little evidence of an incumbency advantage for politicians in resource-rich multimember districts. Building on the rentier theory of natural resource wealth, the results suggest that voting for the incumbent is attributable to patronage and public goods distribution. The findings offer new insights into the understudied context of Iranian legislative elections, illustrate the mechanisms driving the relationship between resource wealth and incumbency advantage at the subnational level in a nondemocratic setting, and highlight the mediating effects of electoral institutions on the resource-incumbency relationship.
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Transnational Women's Activism and the Global Diffusion of Gender Quotas
Melanie Hughes, Mona Lena Krook & Pamela Paxton
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The rapid global spread of quotas for women constitutes one of the most significant political developments of the last thirty years. It transformed the composition of legislatures worldwide. Yet we lack a solid understanding of the forces driving quota diffusion. In this article, we consider how global pressure from the international women's movement affects national gender quota adoption. In the first quantitative analysis of this question on a global scale, we use event history techniques to examine global, transnational, and national influences on quota adoption in 149 countries between 1989 and 2008. Contributing to work on international norm diffusion, we find a crucial role for women's activism, but uncover a negative interaction between increased global pressures and domestic ties to women's transnational organizing. We suggest global pressure to adopt quotas may be weakened by the diverse agendas of women's activist organizations, by perceived threats to male elites posed by women's agitation, or both.
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Repression by Proxy: How Military Purges and Insurgency Impact the Delegation of Coercion
Kristine Eck
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do regimes delegate authority over a territory to nonstate militias, in effect voluntarily sacrificing their monopoly over the use of violence? This article argues that two factors increase the probability of states delegating control to a proxy militia, namely, military purges and armed conflict. Military purges disrupt intelligence-gathering structures and the organizational capacity of the military. To counteract this disruption, military leaders subcontract the task of control and repression to allied militias that have the local intelligence skills necessary to manage the civilian population. This argument is conditioned by whether the state faces an armed insurgency in a given region since intelligence, control, and repression are needed most where the state is being challenged. This hypothesis is tested on unique data for all subnational regions within Myanmar during the period 1962 to 2010 and finds that proxy militias are more likely to be raised in conflict areas after military purges.
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How Is Power Shared in Africa?
Patrick Francois, Ilia Rainer & Francesco Trebbi
Econometrica, March 2015, Pages 465–503
Abstract:
Is African politics characterized by concentrated power in the hands of a narrow group (ethnically determined) that then fluctuates from one extreme to another via frequent coups? Employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence, we show that African ruling coalitions are surprisingly large and that political power is allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups. This holds true even restricting the analysis to the subsample of the most powerful ministerial posts. We argue that the likelihood of revolutions from outsiders and coup threats from insiders are major forces explaining allocations within these regimes. Alternative allocation mechanisms are explored. Counterfactual experiments that shed light on the role of Western policies in affecting African national coalitions and leadership group premia are performed.
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Ethno-Regional Favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa
Pelle Ahlerup & Ann-Sofie Isaksson
Kyklos, May 2015, Pages 143–152
Abstract:
Studies of political favouritism in Africa often treat ethnic and regional favouritism as interchangeable concepts. The present paper distinguishes between the two and investigates their relative influence in Sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on whether individuals perceive their ethnic group to be unfairly treated by government, we assess the importance of being a co-ethnic of the country president, of living in the president's region of origin and of the regional share of president co-ethnics. Empirical findings drawing on detailed individual level survey data covering more than 19 000 respondents across 15 African countries suggest that ethnic and regional favouritism are not the same, but rather have independent effects.
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Henry Thomson
Studies in Comparative International Development, March 2015, Pages 73-97
Abstract:
Canonical works and recent studies posit that authoritarian repression, like that targeting Social Democrats during the “Second Founding” of the German Empire, depends on structural factors such as landholding inequality. However, at this juncture, the role of these variables was more complex than that in the “grand sweep” of German history. Liberal support for the 1878 Antisocialist Law was the result of an interaction between the strategy of the government and structures in society at large. Public outcry surrounding an assassination attempt on the Kaiser was provoked by the Chancellor through the press, and utilized as a political instrument by calling new elections. Liberals contesting districts with high landholding inequality came under conservative pressure led by landed aristocrats, and were forced to take up stances supporting repression. This first step in the “Second Founding” of the Empire marked an important move away from liberal governance which precluded democratic reform in Imperial Germany.
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Income and democracy: The modernization hypothesis re-visited via alternative non-linear models
Suzanna-Maria Paleologou
Empirical Economics, March 2015, Pages 909-921
Abstract:
This paper introduces a new approach to examine the relationship between income and democracy by employing panel count data models to explicitly allow for the fact that the primary indices of democracy are non-negative integers with upper bounds. We find evidence that though income and democracy are positively related the magnitude of the coefficient is extremely small implying that there is no evidence of a causal effect, and thus there is no support for the modernization hypothesis. Moreover, once we control for income endogeneity, the relationship between income and democracy turns to be insignificant or even negative.
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Media freedom and gender equality: A cross-national instrumental variable quantile analysis
Aniruddha Mitra, James Bang & Arnab Biswas
Applied Economics, Spring 2015, Pages 2278-2292
Abstract:
We investigate the impact of media freedom on gender equality in education for a sample of 63 countries taken over the period 1995–2004. Our analysis is motivated by the idea that the impact of media freedom on gender equality may differ over the conditional distribution of the response variable. Using instrumental variable quantile regression to control for endogeneity in per capita income, we find that greater freedom of the media improves gender equality only in the 0.25 and 0.50 quantiles of the conditional distribution. Countries with the greatest disparities in gender outcomes experience no significant impact of media freedom.
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Dara Kay Cohen & Ragnhild Nordås
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Existing research maintains that governments delegate extreme, gratuitous, or excessively brutal violence to militias. However, analyzing all militias in armed conflicts from 1989 to 2009, we find that this argument does not account for the observed patterns of sexual violence, a form of violence that should be especially likely to be delegated by governments. Instead, we find that states commit sexual violence as a complement to — rather than a substitute for — violence perpetrated by militias. Rather than the logic of delegation, we argue that two characteristics of militia groups increase the probability of perpetrating sexual violence. First, we find that militias that have recruited children are associated with higher levels of sexual violence. This lends support to a socialization hypothesis, in which sexual violence may be used as a tool for building group cohesion. Second, we find that militias that were trained by states are associated with higher levels of sexual violence, which provides evidence for sexual violence as a “practice” of armed groups. These two complementary results suggest that militia-perpetrated sexual violence follows a different logic and is neither the result of delegation nor, perhaps, indiscipline.
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Elites and Corruption: A Theory of Endogenous Reform and a Test Using British Data
Mircea Popa
World Politics, April 2015, Pages 313-352
Abstract:
Eighteenth-century Britain displayed patterns of corruption similar to those of developing countries today. Reforms enacted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eliminated many of these patterns. This article develops a theoretical argument that seeks to explain why the British elite enacted anticorruption reforms and provides evidence using a new data set of members of the House of Commons. The author argues that the shock that pushed the British elite from preferring the old corrupt regime to preferring the reformed one was an increase in government spending and a corresponding increase in the costs of tolerating corruption. Features unique to Britain allowed the reformist outcome to emerge and illuminate why such an outcome is difficult to achieve in general.
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James Piazza
Terrorism and Political Violence, forthcoming
Abstract:
While some scholars have theorized that repression reduces terrorism because it raises the costs of participating in terrorist activity by dissidents, others argue that repression stimulates terrorism by either closing off nonviolent avenues for expressing dissent or by provoking or sharpening grievances within a population. This study investigates these contradictory sets of expectations by considering whether or not different specific types of repression yield different effects on patterns of terrorism in 149 countries for the period 1981 to 2006. By assessing the impact of nine specific types of repression on domestic terrorism, the study produces some interesting findings: while, as expected, forms of repression that close off nonviolent avenues of dissent and boost group grievances increase the amount of domestic terrorism a country faces, types of repression that raise the costs of terrorist activity have no discernible suppressing effect on terrorism.