In their hands
The Co-optation of Dissent in Hybrid States: Post-Soviet Graffiti in Moscow
Alexis Lerner
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hybrid leaders seek job security. To stay in power, it may be intuitive that they respond to dissent with a heavy hand. However, these leaders are subject to accountability and concerned with legitimacy and therefore must consider the optics of their decisions. By co-opting a previously independent avenue of communication and its leadership, the state eliminates challengers, curates its public image through trusted social leaders, and reinforces control without resorting to repressive methods that may backfire. Based on a decade of fieldwork, data collection, and expert interviews, I evidence the co-optation of dissent via thematic, spatial, and material shifts in political public art, crafted between the 2012 and 2018 Russian presidential elections. As it consolidated power during this time, the Putin administration co-opted critical graffiti artists and flooded out those unwilling to cooperate, replacing subversive and anonymous anti-regime graffiti with Kremlin-curated murals, particularly in the city center.
Country size and the survival of authoritarian monarchies: Developing a new argument
Marlene Jugl
Democratization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article combines the literature on authoritarian regime survival with that on small states to propose a new explanation for the survival and breakdown of authoritarian monarchies. To develop the conjecture that monarchy tends to survive in small countries into a theoretically and empirically sound argument, I follow the process of iterative induction. I first inspect all authoritarian monarchies between 1946 and 2018 and find that countries with monarchic survival have a significantly smaller population size than countries where monarchy broke down. Second, I develop a theoretical explanation for this relation: the feeling of vulnerability, the social proximity, and institutional centralization, which are all typically ascribed to small countries, facilitate the stability of monarchic regimes. I conceptualize this stability with Gerschewski’s model of three pillars of authoritarian stability, co-optation, repression and legitimation; and I argue that smallness enhances each of these three via several channels. Third, to illustrate the plausibility of this explanation I compare two most likely historical cases of monarchies with diverging outcomes: Jordan and Egypt. Fourth, I inspect deviant cases, particularly Bhutan, Maldives and Tonga, to refine and finalize the argument. The main finding is that smallness prevented the violent breakdown of monarchic regimes since 1946.
Urban Concentration and Civil War
Dani Nedal, Megan Stewart & Michael Weintraub
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
The explosion of cities and megacities has increased scholars’ and policy markers’ attention to the effects such changes might have on conflict: increasingly, urban environments may alter the nature of warfare but not necessarily the incidence of intrastate war. We argue that high levels of urban concentration — the concentration of populations in one or relatively few urban centers — increases both the likelihood of civil wars and their intensity. Urban concentration limits the ability of the state to project power across space, exacerbating grievances in rural areas, easing rebel control of territory, and enhancing their military strength. At the same time, cities become high-value loci of contestation even as urban warfare constrains conventional state military strength. The result is more symmetrical fighting producing more battle deaths. Cross-national regressions show that urban concentration exerts a crucial effect on the likelihood, nature, and intensity of intrastate warfare.
No Easy Way Out: The Effect of Military Coups on State Repression
Jean Lachapelle
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Military coups are often advocated as solutions for ending state-sponsored atrocities. Yet, we know little about coups' precise consequences. This article estimates the effect of coups on state repression by exploiting the element of chance in whether an attempted coup succeeds or fails. Contrary to popular views of coups as remedies against repressive autocrats, I find no evidence that coups have a pacifying effect on state repression. Rather, coups appear to make matters worse, even when targeting leaders that commit large-scale human rights violations. This article contributes to studies of political violence, authoritarianism, and civil-military relations, by resolving a longstanding "good coup vs. bad coup" debate. It also advances literature on coups and their consequences through an innovative empirical design that leverages exogenous variation in coup outcomes, combined with an extreme bounds analysis, overcoming conventional challenges of causal inference using observational data.
Dangerous Contenders: Election Monitors, Islamic Opposition Parties, and Terrorism
Kerim Can Kavakli & Patrick Kuhn
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do international observers decide whether to criticize or condone electoral fraud in a country? We argue that this decision depends on the identity of the victims of electoral fraud. A monitoring organization is more likely to overlook fraud committed against groups that are deemed dangerous by its sponsor. Based on this insight, we hypothesize that in the post-Cold War era election monitors are more tolerant of fraud against Islamic challengers, especially when Islamic movements are perceived as a threat to political stability. In support of our hypothesis, we find that outside monitors are more likely to endorse an election in countries with an Islamic opposition party and an ongoing Islamist terrorist campaign. Furthermore, we find that the effect is driven by Western monitoring organizations and becomes stronger after the September 11 attacks. Our findings provide a simple yet powerful insight: the calculus of outside observers depends not only on who they wish to see in power, but also who they want to keep from power.
Who Runs China? A Story Told by Machine Learning
Xian Gu et al.
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, August 2019
Abstract:
China’s politician selection process has been obscure and rarely discussed. This paper uses machine learning approaches to bring economic performance, political patronage and career path into one picture in understanding the provincial level politicians’ selection decision of China. Through mapping out the dynamic politician networks from 1995 to 2015, we find network communities are strongly determined by hometown ties. The predictions using machine learning algorithms including shrinkage and tree-based methods affirm the importance of economic performance, expand the conventional understanding of political patronage with the concept and measurements of social network, and point out the critical impact of career path, with largely reduced testing errors.
The Effect of Civil Society Organizations and Democratization Aid on Civil War Onset
Jessica Maves Braithwaite & Amanda Abigail Licht
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
A growing literature identifies both situations where aid promotes peace and those where aid encourages violence. Specifically, research shows lower probability of conflict onset in democratizing states receiving high levels of democracy assistance. However, theorizing has overlooked important actors who have agency in spending such aid: civil society organizations (CSOs). We posit that the status of civil society within recipient states conditions the effect of democracy aid inflows on conflict probability. Using an instrumental variables approach to account for endogeneity between aid allocation and conflict propensity, we find that democracy aid is destabilizing when directed to environments where CSOs are weak and poorly connected to the regime and thus are less willing and able to seek change through peaceful means. When civil society is stronger and more institutionalized, however, larger democracy aid flows pose less threat.
The Impact of Food Prices on Conflict Revisited
Jasmien De Winne & Gert Peersman
Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies that examine the impact of food prices on conflict usually assume that (all) changes in international food prices are exogenous shocks for individual countries or local areas. By isolating strictly exogenous shifts in global food commodity prices, we show that this assumption could seriously distort estimations of the impact on conflict in African regions. Specifically, we show that increases in food prices that are caused by harvest shocks outside Africa raise conflict significantly, whereas a “naive” regression of conflict on international food prices uncovers an inverse relationship. We also find that higher food prices lead to more conflict in regions with more agricultural production. Again, we document that failing to account for exogenous price changes exhibits a considerable bias in the impact. In addition, we show that the conventional approach to evaluate such effects; that is, estimations that include time fixed effects, ignores an important positive baseline effect that is common for all regions.
Austerity and anarchy: Budget cuts and social unrest in Europe, 1919–2008
Jacopo Ponticelli & Hans-Joachim Voth
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? Using cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to 2008, we examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. We find a positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. Expenditure cuts are particularly potent in fueling protests; tax rises have only small effects. To isolate the effect of policy decisions on social unrest we exploit variation in neighboring countries’ past fiscal policies.
The impact of a failed coup d’état on happiness, life satisfaction, and trust: The case of the plot in Turkey on July 15, 2016
Ali Akkemik et al.
Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of the failed coup d’état attempt in Turkey on 15 July 2016 on people’s happiness, life satisfaction, and trust and finds that the plot had a significant negative effect on all three variables. This paper is the first to show that coups d’état can have a significant adverse effect on people’s well-being, as in the case of terrorist attacks.
Human Rights on the March: Repression, Oppression, and Protest in Latin America
James Franklin
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines the impact of human rights protests on human rights abuses in seven Latin American countries — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. I find that protests focused broadly on human rights are associated with significant declines in human rights abuses, controlling for important factors from previous studies. Furthermore, I argue that it is important to distinguish political repression (abuses that target political activists) from coercive state oppression, which has nonpolitical targets. These two types of abuses respond to different factors, but broadly focused human rights protests are found to decrease both types of abuses. I argue further that a strong human rights movement, indicated by frequent human rights protests, discourages the police abuses associated with oppression by raising the likelihood of accountability for such abuses, including by improving the likelihood of reforms to the criminal justice system.
Educated dictators attract more foreign direct investment
Abel François, Sophie Panel & Laurent Weill
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since political risk is greater in dictatorships than in democracies, this paper investigates the hypothesis that foreign investors scrutinize public information on dictators to assess this risk. It checks whether foreign investors use five relevant dictators’ characteristics: age, political experience, education level, education in economics, and prior experience in business. The study is performed on a sample of 100 dictatorial countries from 1973 to 2008. We find that educated dictators are more attractive to foreign investors. We obtain strong evidence that greater educational attainment of the leader is associated with higher FDI. We also find evidence that the leader having tertiary education in economics and prior experience in business is associated with greater FDI. By contrast, the leader's age, and political experience have no relationship with FDI.