In charge
Institutional Corruption and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan
Michael Callen & James Long
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the relationship between political networks, weak institutions, and election fraud during the 2010 parliamentary election in Afghanistan combining: (i) data on political connections between candidates and election officials; (ii) a nationwide controlled evaluation of a novel monitoring technology; and (iii) direct measurements of aggregation fraud. We find considerable evidence of aggregation fraud in favor of connected candidates and that the announcement of a new monitoring technology reduced theft of election materials by about 60 percent and vote counts for connected candidates by about 25 percent. The results have implications for electoral competition and are potentially actionable for policymakers.
----------------------
Acquiring the Habit of Changing Governments Through Elections
Adam Przeworski
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Changing governments through elections is a rare and a recent practice. Yielding office the first time is foreboding because it entails the risk that the gesture would not be reciprocated, but the habit develops rapidly once the first step is taken. This article provides evidence for these assertions by examining about 3,000 elections in the world since 1788.
----------------------
Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Civic Legacies of the Islamic Waqf
Timur Kuran
Duke University Working Paper, June 2014
Abstract:
In the pre-modern Middle East the closest thing to an autonomous private organization was the Islamic waqf. This non-state institution inhibited political participation, collective action, and rule of law, among other indicators of democratization. It did so through several mechanisms. Its activities were essentially set by its founder, which limited its capacity to meet political challenges. Being designed to provide a service on its own, it could not participate in lasting political coalitions. The waqf's beneficiaries had no say in evaluating or selecting its officers, and they had trouble forming a political community. Thus, for all the resources it controlled, the Islamic waqf contributed minimally to building civil society. As a core element of Islam's classical institutional complex, it perpetuated authoritarian rule by keeping the state largely unrestrained. Therein lies a key reason for the slow pace of the Middle East's democratization process.
----------------------
Is Small Really Beautiful?: The Microstate Mistake
Jan Erk & Wouter Veenendaal
Journal of Democracy, July 2014, Pages 135-148
Abstract:
Over the past decade and a half, a number of political scientists have claimed that the world's microstates - meaning the dozen or so tiny countries with fewer than a hundred-thousand citizens each - are remarkably likely to be democracies. There is only one thing wrong with the story of the "microdemocratic miracle": It is not true. In fact, small states are not likely to be liberal democracies. The mistaken notion that they are can be traced to a simple flaw in methodology: All the studies purporting to uncover a link between small state size and democracy are based on Freedom House (FH) findings that overemphasize the more formal aspects of democracy while failing to capture the informal but real power relations and pathways of influence that are common in microstates and frequently lead to de facto deviations from democracy.
----------------------
Do Constitutional Rights Make a Difference?
Adam Chilton & Mila Versteeg
University of Chicago Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, we know little about whether any constitutional rights actually improve rights in practice. We test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that "organizational" rights increase de facto rights protection, because they create organizations with the incentives and means to protect the underlying right. By contrast, individual rights are unlikely to make a difference. To test our theory, we use a recently developed identification strategy that mitigates selection bias by incorporating previously unobserved information on countries' preferences for constitutional rights into the research design. Specifically, we use data on constitutional rights adoption since 1946 to calculate countries' yearly constitutional ideal point, and then match on the probability that a country will protect a specific right in its constitution. Our results suggest that only organizational rights are associated with increased de facto rights protection.
----------------------
Amanda Lea Robinson
World Politics, October 2014, Pages 709-746
Abstract:
Communal conflicts, civil wars, and state collapse have led many to portray the notion of African nation-states as an oxymoron. Some scholars of African politics - often referred to as second-generation modernization theorists - have argued that strong ethnic attachments across the continent resulted from rapid economic and political modernization, the very forces credited with reducing parochial ties and consolidating European nations in classic modernization theory. Others have argued that national consolidation in Africa is particularly unlikely due to high degrees of ethnic diversity, colonial rule that exacerbated that diversity, and the partition of cultural groups. Despite the ubiquity of these arguments, there has been very little comparative empirical research on territorial nationalism in Africa. Using individual-level data from sixteen countries, combined with a novel compilation of ethnic group and state characteristics, the author evaluates the observable implications of these long-respected theoretical traditions within a multilevel framework. She finds that attachment to the nation, relative to one's ethnic group, increases with education, urbanization, and formal employment at the individual level, and with economic development at the state level - patterns more consistent with classic modernization theory than with second-generation modernization theory. Thus, if modernization in Africa does indeed intensify ethnic attachment, the impact is overwhelmed by the concurrent increase in panethnic territorial nationalism. Similarly, the results show that ethnic diversity and the partition of ethnic groups by "artificial" state borders increase, rather than decrease, the degree to which individuals identify nationally. Taken together, these results reject pessimistic expectations of African exceptionalism and instead suggest that the emergence of widespread national identification within African states is not only possible but even increasingly likely with greater economic development.
----------------------
Timothy Frye
Columbia University Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
Language, ethnicity, and policy orientation toward Europe are key cleavages in Ukrainian politics, but there is much debate about their relative importance. To isolate the impact of candidate ethnicity, candidate native language, and candidate policy orientation on a hypothetical vote choice, I conducted a survey experiment of 1000 residents of Ukraine in June 2014 that manipulated three features of a fictional candidate running for parliament: 1) ethnicity as revealed by either a Russian or Ukrainian name 2) native language of Russian or Ukrainian and 3) support for closer economic ties with Russia or with Europe. The results reveal little difference in the average response to these 8 fictitious candidates despite the candidate's different ethnicities, native language, and economic policy orientations. This seeming homogeneity masks vast differences in the responses of self-reported native speakers of Russian and Ukrainian. Analyzing the responses among Ukrainian and among Russian speakers yields considerable differences in the responses to the different candidates. Perhaps most striking is that among both native speakers of Russian and native speakers of Ukrainian a candidate's economic policy orientation toward Europe or Russia appears to be a more important determinant of vote choice than a candidate's language or ethnicity. That policy retains its importance for voters despite the intense politicization of both ethnicity and language and ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine suggests that vote choice in Ukraine has not been reduced to an ethnic or linguistic census.
----------------------
The impact of individual wealth on posterior political power
Martín Rossi
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
I exploit a unique historical event to explore the causal relationship between individual wealth and posterior political power. Shortly after the founding of Buenos Aires, plots of land in the outskirts of the city were randomly assigned to all heads of household that participated in the expedition. Using this random allocation of land as a source of exogenous variation in individuals' wealth, I find that wealth causes political power. I also explore possible mechanisms and find support for the hypothesis that wealth signals (or improves) ability.
----------------------
Freedom of foreign movement, economic opportunities abroad, and protest in non-democratic regimes
Colin Barry et al.
Journal of Peace Research, September 2014, Pages 574-588
Abstract:
Allowing or restricting foreign movement is a crucial policy choice for leaders. We argue that freedom of foreign movement reduces the level of civil unrest under non-democratic regimes, but only in some circumstances. Our argument relies on the trade-offs inherent in exit and voice as distinct strategies for dealing with a corrupt and oppressive state. By permitting exit and thereby lowering its relative costs, authoritarians can make protest and other modes of expressing dissatisfaction less attractive for potential troublemakers. Liberalizing foreign movement can thus function as a safety valve for releasing domestic pressure. But the degree to which allowing emigration is an effective regime strategy is shaped by the economic opportunities offered by countries receiving immigrants. We find that freedom of foreign movement and the existence of economic opportunities abroad reduce civil unrest in non-democratic states. However, at high levels of unemployment in the developed world, greater freedom of foreign movement actually increases protest.
----------------------
Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China
Jidong Chen, Jennifer Pan & Yiqing Xu
MIT Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
Scholars have established that authoritarian regimes exhibit responsiveness to citizens, but our knowledge of why autocrats respond remains limited. We theorize that responsiveness may stem from rules of the institutionalized party regime, citizen engagement, and a strategy of preferential treatment of a narrow group of supporters. We test the implications of our theory using an online experiment among 2,103 Chinese counties. At baseline, we find that approximately one third of county level governments are responsive to citizen demands expressed online. Threats of collective action and threats of tattling to upper levels of government cause county governments to be considerably more responsive. However, while threats of collective action cause local officials to be more publicly responsive, threats of tattling do not have this effect. We also find that identifying as loyal, long-standing members of the Communist Party does not increase responsiveness.
----------------------
Oil Discoveries, Shifting Power, and Civil Conflict
Curtis Bell & Scott Wolford
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can the discovery of petroleum resources increase the risk of civil conflict even before their exploitation? We argue that it can, but only in poorer states where oil revenues threaten to alter the balance of power between regimes and their opponents, rendering bargains in the present obsolete in the future. We develop our claims via a game-theoretic model of bargaining between a government and a rebel group, where decisions over war and peace occur in the shadow of increasing oil wealth that both increases national wealth and shifts relative power in the government's favor. To test the model's main hypothesis, we leverage data on newly discovered oil deposits as an indicator of the state's expected future power resources. Our argument has important implications for the literature on credible commitments, power shifts, and violent conflict.
----------------------
Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa
Hanne Fjelde & Kristine Höglund
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political violence remains a pervasive feature of electoral dynamics in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, even where multiparty elections have become the dominant mode of regulating access to political power. With cross-national data on electoral violence in Sub-Saharan African elections between 1990 and 2010, this article develops and tests a theory that links the use of violent electoral tactics to the high stakes put in place by majoritarian electoral institutions. It is found that electoral violence is more likely in countries that employ majoritarian voting rules and elect fewer legislators from each district. Majoritarian institutions are, as predicted by theory, particularly likely to provoke violence where large ethno-political groups are excluded from power and significant economic inequalities exist.
----------------------
Elections and the Timing of Terrorist Attacks
Deniz Aksoy
Journal of Politics, October 2014, Pages 899-913
Abstract:
This article studies the relationship between elections and domestic terrorism in democracies. Do approaching elections lead to an increase in the volume of terrorist activity? Extant theory suggests that terrorist groups strategically plan their attacks around elections. I argue that approaching elections are not always affiliated with an increase in the volume of terrorist activity. Electoral permissiveness, an important feature of democratic electoral systems, influences the extent to which periods close to elections are periods of heightened terrorist activity. Approaching elections lead to an increase in the volume of attacks in democracies with low electoral permissiveness but not in others. I test my argument with data from Western European democracies between 1950 and 2004. Using statistical models that include country fixed effects, I show that approaching elections are affiliated with an increase of the volume of attacks in democracies with the least permissive electoral systems, but not in democracies with permissive electoral systems.
----------------------
Trial by Fire: A Natural Disaster's Impact on Support for the Authorities in Rural Russia
Egor Lazarev et al.
World Politics, October 2014, Pages 641-668
Abstract:
This article aims to explore the microfoundations of political support under a nondemocratic regime by investigating the impact of a natural disaster on attitudes toward the government. The research exploits the enormous wildfires that occurred in rural Russia during the summer of 2010 as a natural experiment. The authors test the effects of fires with a survey of almost eight hundred respondents in seventy randomly selected villages. The study finds that in the burned villages there is higher support for the government at all levels. Most counterintuitively, the rise of support for authorities cannot be fully explained by the generous governmental aid. The authors interpret the results by the demonstration effect of the government's performance.
----------------------
The (small) blessing of foreign aid: Further evidence on aid's impact on democracy
Yener Altunbaş & John Thornton
Applied Economics, Fall 2014, Pages 3922-3930
Abstract:
In an empirical contribution to the literature of foreign aid, we estimate the impact of foreign aid on democracy in a panel of 93 developing economies during 1971-2010. We find that foreign aid promotes democracy, with the result robust to different estimation methodologies and control variables and to instrumenting for foreign aid.
----------------------
External territorial threat, state capacity, and civil war
Douglas Gibler & Steven Miller
Journal of Peace Research, September 2014, Pages 634-646
Abstract:
We argue that the regional threat environment a state faces plays a consequential role in its political development and the likelihood of experiencing future intrastate wars. Challenges to a state's territorial integrity lead governments to increase their military personnel, and the resources that support these increases most often come willingly from a public that seeks security. Territorial threats are unlike other types of threats because they challenge individual lives and livelihoods, which both connects the average citizen with the state and allows for easier government extraction of necessary resources. Thus, external territorial threats increase state capacity by unifying the state and by increasing the repressive power of the central government. We identify territorial threats as both latent and realized claims against state territories and find that the presence of an external threat to territory leads to an increase in the capacity of central governments to connect and extract from its citizens, as well as the capacity to repress potential regime dissidents. We also find that the presence of a claim against a state's territory from a neighbor corresponds with a substantial decrease in the likelihood of intrastate conflict at both high and low levels of intensity. The effect of territorial threat is observed even in the short term after a territorial threat has been resolved. Our tests, using standard models of state capacity and insurgency models of conflict on a sample of all states from 1946 to 2007, are robust to multiple model specifications.
----------------------
Diffusion of Diaspora Enfranchisement Norms: A Multinational Study
Anca Turcu & R. Urbatsch
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
States have increasingly granted voting rights to their citizens overseas. Traditional accounts of franchise extension suggest that governments' motivations are either political (new voters are expected to support the incumbent government) or, in the case of citizens abroad, materialist (a fortified link to migrants encourages remittance flows). Although these factors doubtless matter, they overlook the tendency for liberal norms to diffuse through the international system, as competition with and learning from neighbors motivate the adoption of relevant policies and institutions. We use large-N cross-national hazard models to examine whether a similar pattern holds for diaspora enfranchisement and find that neighbors' recent enactment of overseas voting nearly doubles the chance that a country will enfranchise its own diaspora. This suggests a role for international norms in determining national voting policies.
----------------------
Governing Art Districts: State Control and Cultural Production in Contemporary China
Yue Zhang
China Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Contemporary Chinese artists have long been marginalized in China as their ideas conflict with the mainstream political ideology. In Beijing, artists often live on the fringe of society in "artist villages," where they almost always face the threat of being displaced owing to political decisions or urban renewal. However, in the past decade, the Chinese government began to foster the growth of contemporary Chinese arts and designated underground artist villages as art districts. This article explores the profound change in the political decisions about the art community. It argues that, despite the pluralization of Chinese society and the inroads of globalization, the government maintains control over the art community through a series of innovative mechanisms. These mechanisms create a globalization firewall, which facilitates the Chinese state in global image-building and simultaneously mitigates the impact of global forces on domestic governance. The article illuminates how the authoritarian state has adopted more sophisticated methods of governance in response to the challenges of a more sophisticated society.
----------------------
Manufacturing Dissent: Modernization and the Onset of Major Nonviolent Resistance Campaigns
Charles Butcher & Isak Svensson
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
A growing research field examines the conditions under which major nonviolent resistance campaigns - that is, popular nonviolent uprisings for regime or territorial change - are successful. Why these campaigns emerge in the first place is less well understood. We argue that extensive social networks that are economically interdependent with the state make strategic nonviolence more feasible. These networks are larger and more powerful in states whose economies rely upon organized labor. Global quantitative analysis of the onset of violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1960 to 2006 (NAVCO), and major protest events in Africa from 1990 to 2009 (SCAD) shows that the likelihood of nonviolent conflict onset increases with the proportion of manufacturing to gross domestic product. This study points to a link between modernization and social conflict, a link that has been often hypothesized, but, hitherto, unsupported by empirical studies.
----------------------
The Political Resource Curse: An Empirical Re-evaluation
David Wiens, Paul Poast & William Roberts Clark
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies' likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies' chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon previous studies, estimating a dynamic logit model using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816 to 2006. We find that an increase in resource dependence decreases an autocracy's likelihood of being democratic over both the short term and long term but has no appreciable effect on democracies' likelihood of persisting.
----------------------
Factories for Votes? How Authoritarian Leaders Gain Popular Support Using Targeted Industrial Policy
Ji Yeon Hong & Sunkyoung Park
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explores the link between industrial policy and electoral outcomes under dictatorship. Using a difference-in-differences analysis of county-level panel data from 1971-88 in South Korea, it examines whether the industrial policy implemented by an authoritarian government affects constituents' electoral decisions. It finds that counties receiving economic benefits through the construction of industrial complexes cast more votes for the incumbent party in subsequent elections. The effects are larger in elections immediately after the appointment of an industrial complex or at the beginning of its construction compared to elections held after the completion of construction. Furthermore, the study tests and rejects reverse causality and migration effects as possible alternative mechanisms for the changes in electoral outcomes. Finally, to understand a unique feature of authoritarian elections, it tests whether industrial complexes affect electoral fraud. Using a genetic matching methodology, it finds that places with new industrial complexes are less likely to experience electoral fraud.
----------------------
Claims to legitimacy count: Why sanctions fail to instigate democratisation in authoritarian regimes
Julia Grauvogel & Christian Von Soest
European Journal of Political Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
International sanctions are one of the most commonly used tools to instigate democratisation in the post-Cold War era. However, despite long-term sanction pressure by the European Union, the United States and/or the United Nations, non-democratic rule has proven to be extremely persistent. Which domestic and international factors account for the regimes' ability to resist external pressure? Based on a new global dataset on sanctions from 1990 to 2011, the results of a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) provide new insights for the research on sanctions and on authoritarian regimes. Most significantly, sanctions strengthen authoritarian rule if the regime manages to incorporate their existence into its legitimation strategy. Such an unintended 'rally-round-the-flag' effect occurs where sanctions are imposed on regimes that possess strong claims to legitimacy and have only limited economic and societal linkages to the sender of sanctions.
----------------------
Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars
Laia Balcells & Stathis Kalyvas
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do "technologies of rebellion" impact a war's severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last significantly longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts generate greater civilian victimization and tend to be won by incumbents, while conventional ones are more likely to end in rebel victories. Substantively, these findings help us make sense of how civil wars are changing: they are becoming shorter, deadlier on the battlefield, and more challenging for existing governments - but also more likely to end with some kind of settlement between governments and armed opposition. Theoretically, our findings support the idea of taking into account technologies of rebellion (capturing characteristics of conflicts that tend to be visible mostly at the micro level) when studying macro-level patterns of conflicts such as the severity, duration, and outcomes of civil wars; they also point to the specific contribution of irregular war to both state building and social change.
----------------------
Instruments of Political Control: National Oil Companies, Oil Prices, and Petroleum Subsidies
Andrew Cheon, Maureen Lackner & Johannes Urpelainen
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Global petroleum subsidies peaked at US$520 billion in the summer of 2008 and reached US$212 billion in 2011, carrying high fiscal and environmental costs. Why do some countries spend so much money to subsidize petroleum consumption? Previous studies suggest that oil-rich autocracies lacking institutional capacity are the main culprits. However, they cannot explain why oil importers with capable bureaucracies, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Malaysia, subsidized petroleum products. We argue that governments in countries with national oil companies (NOCs) use petroleum subsidies to cushion the effects of increasing oil prices. Empirically, we examine the relationship between oil prices and domestic gasoline prices in 175 countries, 2002-2009. An NOC halves the effect of oil price increases on the domestic gasoline price. This effect is strongly associated with the institutional design of NOCs, as increased autonomy shields them from political interference by the government.