Off with the head
Should I Stay or Should I Go? Leaders, Exile, and the Dilemmas of International Justice
Daniel Krcmaric
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In recent years, several oppressive leaders have been arrested and extradited to international courts. What are the consequences of this global justice cascade? I address this question by examining patterns of exile. I show that the justice cascade has a differential effect on leaders based on their culpability (whether they presided over atrocity crimes). In the past, culpable and nonculpable leaders went into exile at virtually identical rates. Today, however, culpable leaders are about six times less likely to flee abroad because exile no longer guarantees a safe retirement. These findings raise stark implications for existing research that debates whether international justice deters atrocities or prolongs conflicts. My results about exiled leaders, I explain, imply that the justice cascade should deter atrocities and prolong conflicts. Thus, instead of debating whether international justice is helpful or harmful, future scholarship should carefully consider the trade‐offs it creates.
Deals with the Devil? Conflict Amnesties, Civil War, and Sustainable Peace
Geoff Dancy
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do legal amnesties for combatants help end civil wars? International policy experts often take it for granted that amnesties promote negotiated settlements with rebels. However, a large number of amnesties are followed by continued fighting or a return to the battlefield. What, then, are the factors that make amnesties effective or ineffective? In this article I use a disaggregated data set of all amnesties enacted in the context of internal war since 1946 to evaluate a bargaining theory of amnesties and peace. Testing hypotheses about conflict patterns using models that account for selection, I find that (1) only amnesties passed following conflict termination help resolve civil wars, (2) amnesties are more effective when they are embedded in peace agreements, and (3) amnesties that grant immunity for serious rights violations have no observable pacifying effects. These policy-relevant findings represent a new breakthrough in an ossified “peace versus justice” debate pitting security specialists against global human rights advocates.
Getting a Hand By Cutting Them Off: How Uncertainty over Political Corruption Affects Violence
Paul Zachary & William Spaniel
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Criminal violence differs from other conflicts because illegal cartels primarily use violence to eliminate rivals rather than overthrow the state. However, politicians’ ability to influence cartel behavior remains unclear. This article argues that politicians alter the use of violence by setting their jurisdiction’s police enforcement levels, but that cartels can bribe politicians to look the other way. Because cartels are uncertain about politicians’ corruptibility, not every bribe is successful. Following an election, cartels must invest resources into learning politicians’ level of corruption. Cartels only increase their level of violence after successfully bribing political leaders, which implies that local violence levels should increase the longer parties remain in office. The study formalizes this argument and tests its implications using data on homicides and political tenure from Mexico. The results link incumbency to violence and suggest Mexico experiences an additional 948 homicides for each year of increased political tenure after holding an election.
Making Business Personal: Corruption, Anti-corruption, and Elite Networks in Post-Mao China
John Osburg
Current Anthropology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This essay examines the unintended consequences of governance and economic reform efforts in post-Mao China through ethnographic examination of state audits, market reforms, and the recent anti-corruption campaign. I trace the evolution of elite networks composed of businesspeople and state officials that emerged from China’s economic reforms, and I argue that these networks constitute the social basis of “corruption” in post-Mao China. For the first few decades of the reform period (1978-present), these networks were forged through gendered forms of entertaining and gift exchange. However, as the first generation of post-Mao nouveau riche has given rise to the second generation, this once rather permeable field of alliance building is becoming increasingly closed to the non-elite. By examining the formation and ethos of these networks, I demonstrate how logics of quantification and commensurability associated with capitalism often render particularistic ties rooted in kinship, affect, and pleasure all the more powerful and important to elite actors. My analysis serves to illustrate, more broadly, how systems designed with the purported aim of fostering accountability, efficiency, or fair competition can generate the opposite effects.
Creating Democratic Citizens: Political Effects of the Internet in China
Narisong Huhe, Min Tang & Jie Chen
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores the perplexing role of the Internet in authoritarian settings. We disentangle the political impact of the Internet along two distinct dimensions, indirect effects and direct effects. While the direct effects of the exposure to the Internet shape political attitudes in a manifest and immediate way, the indirect effects shape various political outcomes via instilling fundamental democratic orientations among citizens. In authoritarian societies such as China, we argue the indirect effects of the Internet as a value changer tend to be potent, transformative, and persistent. But the direct effects of the Internet as a mere alternative messenger are likely to be markedly contingent. Relying on the newly developed method of causal mediation analysis and applying the method to data from a recent survey conducted in Beijing, we find strong empirical evidence to support our argument about the two-dimensional impacts of the Internet in authoritarian countries.
Social Signals and Participation in the Tunisian Revolution
David Doherty & Peter Schraeder
Journal of Politics, April 2018, Pages 675-691
Abstract:
Revolutionary protests can spread surprisingly rapidly. Social contagion may play a key role in this process: people who observe others participating may be more likely to do so themselves, thus reinforcing the proparticipation signal. We leverage data from two surveys to assess the relationship between exposure to proparticipatory social signals and individual-level participation in the Tunisian revolution. We benchmark these effects to those associated with individual-level characteristics, including those tied to political and economic grievances. We find robust evidence of the importance of social signals: those who reported having friends who participated and those who lived in neighborhoods where others participated in the protests were substantially more likely to participate, even after controlling for an array of individual-level and contextual confounds. We find scant support for the expectation that participants and nonparticipants were distinguished by their commitment to democracy or by economic grievances.
Education and propaganda: Tradeoffs to public education provision in nondemocracies
Patrick Testa
Journal of Public Economics, April 2018, Pages 66-81
Abstract:
Nondemocratic regimes face a tradeoff when investing in public education. Education promotes human capital acquisition, expanding the tax base. Yet it also enhances political sophistication and participation, at a cost to nondemocratic regimes. To relax this tradeoff, a regime can disseminate propaganda through its education system. I show that even Bayesian citizens can be influenced by propaganda. By deterring political opposition, propaganda can induce nondemocracies to invest in education when they otherwise would not, improving social welfare. When propaganda is too strong, however, it can generate a backlash. Using cross-country and survey data, I find evidence consistent with the predictions.
Restraining the Huddled Masses: Migration Policy and Autocratic Survival
Michael Miller & Margaret Peters
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
What determines citizens’ freedom to exit autocracies? How does this influence global patterns of migration and democratization? Although control over citizen movement has long been central to autocratic power, modern autocracies vary considerably in how much they restrict emigration. This article shows that autocrats strategically choose emigration policy by balancing several motives. Increasing emigration can stabilize regimes by selecting a more loyal population and attracting greater investment, trade and remittances, but exposing their citizens to democracy abroad is potentially dangerous. Using a half-century of bilateral migration data, the study calculates the level and destinations of expected emigration given exogenous geographic and socioeconomic characteristics. It finds that when citizens disproportionately emigrate to democracies, countries are more likely to democratize - and that autocrats restrict emigration freedom in response. In contrast, a larger expected flow of economic emigration predicts autocratic survival and freer emigration policy. These results have important implications for autocratic politics, democratic diffusion and the political sources of migration.
Sticks, Stones, and Broken Bones: Protest Violence and the State
Heather Sullivan
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
From armed-building occupations to fisticuffs between protesters and police at otherwise peaceful demonstrations, protest violence is an essential part of the politics of protest. In this article, I argue that state capacity is central to understanding why some protests are violent. In particular, this article explores two facets of state capacity - coercive capacity and state authority - arguing that where the state is treated as a relevant authority, the likelihood that protesters will employ violent tactics decreases. Using original data on Mexican protest events, I demonstrate that higher levels of state authority reduce violent protest but that increased coercive capacity, especially where state authority is weak, is associated with a greater likelihood of protest violence. This article contributes to our understanding of the influence of state capacity on protest violence and suggests that attentiveness to subnational variations in state capacity can help us better understand the violence.
Conflict, Climate and Cells: A Disaggregated Analysis
Mariaflavia Harari & Eliana La Ferrara
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We conduct a disaggregated empirical analysis of civil conflict at the subnational level in Africa over 1997-2011 using a new gridded dataset. We construct an original measure of agriculture-relevant weather shocks exploiting within-year variation in weather and in crop growing season, and spatial variation in crop cover. Temporal and spatial spillovers in conflict are addressed through spatial econometric techniques. Negative shocks occurring during the growing season of local crops affect conflict incidence persistently, and local conflict spills over to neighboring cells. We use our estimates to trace the dynamic response to shocks and predict how future warming may affect violence.
Should They Stay or Should They Go? Climate Migrants and Local Conflicts
Valentina Bosetti, Cristina Cattaneo & Giovanni Peri
NBER Working Paper, March 2018
Abstract:
There is extensive evidence that higher temperature increases the probability of local conflict. There is also some evidence that emigration represents an important margin of adaptation to climatic change. In this paper we analyse whether migration influences the link between warming and conflicts by either attenuating the effects in countries of origin and/or by spreading them to countries of destination. We find that in countries where emigration propensity, as measured by past diaspora, was higher, increases in temperature had a smaller effect on conflict probability, consistent with emigration functioning as "escape valve" for local tensions. We find no evidence that climate-induced migration increased the probability of conflict in receiving countries.
Perpetrating Violence Increases Identification With Violent Groups: Survey Evidence From Former Combatants
Rebecca Littman
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Heightened group identification motivates individuals to perpetrate violence, but can perpetrating violence - in and of itself - increase identification with violent groups? I test this idea using archival surveys of ex-combatants. In Liberia, where many combatants joined their violent group willingly, the data show a positive association between perpetrating violence and identification with one’s violent group (Study 1). These results hold even when controlling for potentially confounding variables such as being abducted into the group versus joining willingly, length of time in the group, and personally experiencing violence. Study 2 replicates and extends this finding with data from ex-combatants in Uganda who were abducted into their group, using a natural experiment in which some abductees were forced to perpetrate violence whereas other abductees were not. These findings support a cycle of violence in which perpetrating violence increases identification with violent groups and heightened identification increases future violent behavior.
Fighting your friends? A study of intra-party violence in sub-Saharan Africa
Bryce Reeder & Merete Bech Seeberg
Democratization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article focuses on a less visible and less studied type of political violence, namely violence that occurs within political parties. We use new, district-level data to compare the temporal and spatial dynamics of intra-party violence to those of general election violence across selected sub-Saharan African countries, including both democracies and autocracies, from 1998 to 2016. Relying on cross-national and sub-national analyses, we show that intra-party violence follows a unique pattern. First, unlike general election violence, intra-party violence peaks prior to election day as it is often sparked by individual parties’ candidate nomination processes. Second, low levels of competitiveness - typically theorized to reduce the risk of election violence - increase the risk of intra-party violence on the sub-national level. Thus, dominant party elections do not necessarily see less election-related violence than hotly contested elections. Rather, violence may be pushed from election day to intra-party competitions. If we neglect the study of violence within political parties, we thus risk underestimating the threat of election violence and misdiagnosing its causes.
Feudalism, Collaboration and Path Dependence in England’s Political Development
Gabriel Leon
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article presents a formal model of path dependence inspired by England’s history. The introduction of feudalism after the Norman Conquest - the critical juncture - created a large elite that rebelled frequently. The king fought these revolts with the help of collaborators he recruited from the masses. In compensation, he made these collaborators members of the elite. This was a cost-effective form of compensation: rents were only partly rival, and so new elite members only partially diluted the rents received by the king. The dilution from adding new members decreased as the elite grew in size, generating positive feedback and path dependence. This mechanism can account for the extension of rights in England in the early stages of its journey towards democracy.
Mass Mobilization and the Durability of New Democracies
Mohammad Ali Kadivar
American Sociological Review, April 2018, Pages 390-417
Abstract:
The “elitist approach” to democratization contends that “democratic regimes that last have seldom, if ever, been instituted by mass popular actors” (Huntington 1984:212). This article subjects this observation to empirical scrutiny using statistical analyses of new democracies over the past half-century and a case study. Contrary to the elitist approach, I argue that new democracies growing out of mass mobilization are more likely to survive than are new democracies that were born amid quiescence. Survival analysis of 112 young democracies in 80 different countries based on original data shows that the longer the mobilization, the more likely the ensuing democracy is to survive. I use a case study of South Africa to investigate the mechanisms. I argue that sustained unarmed uprisings have generated the longest-lasting new democracies - largely because they are forced to develop an organizational structure, which provides a leadership cadre for the new regime, forges links between the government and society, and strengthens checks on the power of the post-transition government.
Repression and refuge: Why only some politically excluded ethnic groups rebel
Stefan Lindemann & Andreas Wimmer
Journal of Peace Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article asks why ethnic exclusion from executive-level state power leads to armed conflict in some cases but not in others. To resolve this puzzle, it focuses on the possible role of five additional, qualitatively coded factors that have been considered by either grievance or opportunity theories of civil war but for which quantitative data are not readily available. To assess the combined relevance of these factors, the authors use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to explore the diverging conflict trajectories of 58 ‘most similar’ ethnic groups. These groups have a uniformly high conflict propensity because they are politically excluded, situated in poor countries, live geographically concentrated, and comprise substantial parts of the population; yet, only 25 of them actually experienced violent conflict. The results show that the resentment created by ethno-political exclusion translates into violent conflict if the state reacts against initial protests and mobilization with indiscriminate violence, and if there is a refuge area either within or outside the country that allows regime opponents to organize armed resistance. Moreover, a more processual analysis of conflict dynamics reveals that the conditions conducive to ethnic rebellion appear in a particular temporal sequence with a clear and universal escalation pattern.
The Fate of Former Authoritarian Elites Under Democracy
Michael Albertus
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do some former authoritarian elites return to power after democratization through reelection or reappointment to political office, or by assuming board positions in state-owned or major private enterprises, whereas others do not and still others face punishment? This article investigates this question using an original data set on constitutional origins and the fate of the upper echelon of outgoing authoritarian elites across Latin America from 1900 to 2015. I find that authoritarian elites from outgoing regimes that impose a holdover constitution that sticks through democratization are more likely to regain political or economic power - especially through national positions where the potential payoffs are largest - and less likely to face severe or nominal punishment. I also find a positive role for political capital among former elites. These results are robust to alternative explanations of authoritarian elites’ fate and using instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity. The findings have important implications for democratic consolidation and quality.
Self-Enforcing Power Sharing in Weak States
Philip Roessler & David Ohls
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Power sharing, in which elites from rival societal groups agree to share control of the central government, is a key source of domestic peace, enabling states to escape devastating cycles of exclusion and civil war. Yet the conditions giving rise to inclusive governance are not well understood. In contrast to existing scholarship that emphasizes the importance of external third-party mediation or strong formal institutions, we point to the structural roots of power sharing in which political inclusion stems from the distribution of societal power and the balance of threat capabilities it produces. Only when both the ruling group and a given rival group possess strong mobilizational capabilities, such that each could credibly threaten to recapture state power if excluded from the central government, does self-enforcing power sharing emerge. A strong rival induces the ruler to commit to power sharing and to reluctantly accept coup risk over civil war risk. The ruling group's own threat capabilities, in turn, constrain rivals from trying to convert their share of power into absolute power. Supported by extensive quantitative and qualitative evidence with particular reference to weak states in sub-Saharan Africa, we shed light on the conditions under which the distribution of violence within a state underwrites a peaceful and productive equilibrium. In doing so, we rethink how scholars approach the study of civil war. Rather than conceiving of it in terms of effective resistance, we model civil war as a contest for state power shaped by groups’ capabilities to project force in the capital.