Authoritarian streak
Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda
Bei Qin, David Strömberg & Yanhui Wu
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017, Pages 117-140
Abstract:
In this paper, we document basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo -- the most prominent Chinese microblogging platform -- during the 2009-2013 period. Our primary finding is that a shockingly large number of posts on highly sensitive topics were published and circulated on social media. For instance, we find millions of posts discussing protests, and these posts are informative in predicting the occurrence of specific events. We find an even larger number of posts with explicit corruption allegations, and that these posts predict future corruption charges of specific individuals. Our findings challenge a popular view that an authoritarian regime would relentlessly censor or even ban social media. Instead, the interaction of an authoritarian government with social media seems more complex.
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Foreign aid, democracy, and gender quota laws
Amanda Edgell
Democratization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do so many developing countries have gender quota policies? This article argues that foreign aid programmes influence developing countries to adopt policies aimed at fulfilling international norms regarding gender equality. This relationship is driven by two causal mechanisms. On the one hand, countries may use gender quotas as a signal to improve their standing in the international hierarchy, possibly as an end unto itself, but more likely as a means towards ensuring future aid flows. On the other, countries may adopt gender quotas as a result of successful foreign aid interventions specifically designed to promote women’s empowerment. I test these two causal mechanisms using data on foreign aid commitments to 173 non-OECD countries from 1974 to 2012. The results suggest that while programmes targeting women’s empowerment may have some influence on quota adoption, developing countries dependent on United States foreign aid are also likely to use gender quotas as signalling devices rather than as a result of ongoing liberalization efforts.
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Census Enumeration and Group Conflict: A Global Analysis of the Consequences of Counting
Evan Lieberman & Prerna Singh
World Politics, January 2017, Pages 1-53
Abstract:
Does the enumeration of ethnic, racial, and/or religious categories on national household censuses increase the likelihood of conflict? The authors propose a theory of intergroup relations that emphasizes the conflictual effects of institutionalizing boundaries between social identity groups. The article investigates the relationship between counting and various forms of conflict with an original, global data set that classifies the type of enumeration used in more than one thousand census questionnaires in more than 150 countries spanning more than two centuries. Through a series of cross-national statistical analyses, the authors find a robust association between enumeration of ethnic cleavages on the census and various forms of competition and conflict, including violent ethnic civil war. The plausibility of the theory is further demonstrated through case study analysis of religious conflict in India.
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Network assemblage of regime stability and resilience: Comparing Europe and China
Hilton Root
Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article demonstrates that the network structures of historical regimes influence the way information is spread, which in turn circumscribe the behaviors of the different groups that make up the system. It advances two central claims. The first is a methodological one showing that patterns of long-term historical change are best studied at the system level, rather than by a traditional equilibrium framework grounded in models of individual behavior. Then, an empirical claim is established by comparisons of China's hub-and-spoke hypernetwork with Europe's multi-hub hypernetwork to show that their different patterns of interconnectivity forged their respective capacities to weather intermittent socioeconomic transitions.
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1807: Economic shocks, conflict and the slave trade
James Fenske & Namrata Kala
Journal of Development Economics, May 2017, Pages 66–76
Abstract:
A large fraction of modern global conflicts have occurred in Africa, resulting in a disproportionate number of fatalities compared to other regions. Many of Africa's conflicts have deep historical roots. In this paper, we contribute to understanding the determinants of historical African conflict by studying an important historical source of conflict: suppression of the slave trade after 1807. We use geo-coded data on African conflicts to uncover a discontinuous increase in conflict after 1807 in areas affected by the slave trade, indicating that suppression increased the incidence of conflict between Africans. In West Africa, the slave trade declined. This empowered interests that rivaled existing authorities, and political leaders resorted to violence in order to maintain their influence. In West-Central and South-East Africa, slave exports increased after 1807 and were produced through violence.
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Cooperation and Authoritarian Values: An Experimental Study in China
Björn Vollan et al.
European Economic Review, April 2017, Pages 90–105
Abstract:
Using samples of both students and workers in China and comparing democratic decision making (i.e. being able to choose one's rules) to non-democratic decision making (i.e. exogenously imposed rule), we show that Chinese participants cooperate the most in a public goods game under the stylized authoritarian environment. This finding may be surprising in light of previous evidence for a “democracy premium” but is in line with authoritarian norms which are prominent in China. We further show that there is a systematic association between participants’ values and their relative contribution decisions in exogenous and endogenous implementation of the rule. Our major finding is that those subjects that place greater value on accepting authority are responsible for greater levels of cooperation under top-down governance. Our findings provide evidence that the effectiveness of a political institution depends on its congruence with individual values and societal norms.
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Ethnic Inequality and National Pride
Subhasish Ray
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines patterns in individual attachments towards the nation-state in multiethnic countries. Specifically, we examine the effect of between-ethnic-group political and economic inequality on these attachments. Pairing attitudinal data from the sixth and most recent wave of the World Values Survey, administered between 2010 and 2012, with ethnicity measures from the Ethnic Power Relations dataset, we show that between-ethnic-group political inequality significantly weakens national pride and identity, but between-ethnic-group economic inequality does not have a similar effect. Our findings provide robust support for the view that ethnic-group separatism in divided societies is motivated, not by the quest for economic power, but by considerations of lost status and dignity that can only be recovered through ownership in state institutions. Hence, the binding constraint on national integration in these settings is political, not economic, inequality.
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Medieval Representative Assemblies: Collective Action and Antecedents of Western Prosperity
Alexander William Salter & Andrew Young
Texas Tech University Working Paper, February 2017
Abstract:
Medieval monarchs in Western Europe responded to financial and military pressures by instituting representative assemblies. Three estates (classes; orders) were represented in these assemblies: clergy, nobility, and burghers. In the late medieval and early modern periods, some states tended towards absolutism (e.g., France); others towards constitutional monarchy (e.g., England). The German historian Otto Hintze conjectured that territorially based assemblies were more likely to resist monarchical encroachments on their political authority than estate-based assemblies. We argue that Hintze’s conjecture can be made intelligible by a comparative institutional analysis emphasizing political bargaining and the costs of special versus common interests. Having established that territorially based assemblies provided a stronger check on absolutism than their estate-based counterparts, we then provide historical case studies of how France and England instituted, respectively, estate-based and territorially based assemblies.
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Implicit Attitudes Towards an Authoritarian Regime
Rory Truex & Daniel Tavana
Princeton Working Paper, January 2017
Abstract:
This study measures Egyptian citizens’ attitudes towards President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi using a Single Category Implicit Association Test (SCIAT). Roughly 58% of respondents hold positive implicit attitudes towards Sisi, which suggests a deeper reservoir of popular support than is conventionally assumed. The data also allows for an investigation of attitude dissociation, whereby individuals hold distinct implicit and explicit attitudes towards a target object. Government employees and Copts are more likely to hold positive explicit attitudes towards Sisi but negative or neutral implicit attitudes. Students appear to systematically engage in inverse dissociation -- they voice criticism towards Sisi despite holding more positive implicit attitudes. These findings are interpretable using the Associative-Propositional Evaluation model. The paper closes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the implicit approach relative to other sensitive question techniques.