Monopoly on Violence
Sore Losers: Does Terrorism and Approval of Terrorism Increase in Democracies When Election Losers Refuse to Accept Election Results?
James Piazza
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
A necessary component of peaceful democratic rule is the willingness of election losers to accept election defeats. When politicians and parties acknowledge defeat in democratic elections, they reinforce the peaceful transition of power that sustains political order. When election losers in democracies reject election results, the public’s confidence in democratic institutions is weakened, grievances and polarization abound, and the potential for violent mobilization grows. In this environment, terrorist activity is more likely. I test this proposition using cross-national time series panel data and within-country public opinion data for a wide set of democracies. I find that democracies experience significantly more domestic terrorist casualties when election losers reject election results. Moreover, I find that public willingness to tolerate and justify terrorism as a tactic increases in democratic countries where election losers reject election results.
What Makes Anticorruption Punishment Popular? Individual-Level Evidence from China
Lily Tsai, Minh Trinh & Shiyao Liu
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does punishment of corruption help to build public support in authoritarian regimes? We outline two primary mechanisms. Instrumentally, the ability to pursue anticorruption initiatives to the end signals government capacity. Deontologically, anticorruption punishment signals moral commitments. Through a novel experiment design for mediation analysis embedded in a series of conjoint experiments conducted in China, we find individual-level evidence to support both mechanisms. Specifically, we find that Chinese citizens positively view local government officials who punish their corrupt subordinates and that this positive view arises out of the perception that these officials are both competent in their jobs and morally committed to citizens’ value. The preference for anticorruption punishment is substantial compared to other sources of public support in authoritarian regimes — economic performance, welfare provision, and institutions for political participation — suggesting that it could become a popular strategy among autocrats.
AI-tocracy
Martin Beraja et al.
NBER Working Paper, November 2021
Abstract:
Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat’s power; and (ii) the autocrat’s demand for the technology stimulates further innovation in applications beyond those benefiting it directly. We test for such a mutually reinforcing relationship in the context of facial recognition AI in China. To do so, we gather comprehensive data on AI firms and government procurement contracts, as well as on social unrest across China during the last decade. We first show that autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial recognition AI, and increased AI procurement suppresses subsequent unrest. We then show that AI innovation benefits from autocrats’ suppression of unrest: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results suggest the possibility of sustained AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation.
Chinese Development Lending & the Amplification Effect
Gregory Caskey
George Mason University Working Paper, November 2021
Abstract:
Over the last few decades, China has emerged as a major player in foreign aid and development lending. While a large empirical literature exists on the effects of foreign aid upon recipient countries’ political institutions, less has been written on this with respect to China’s role as an official lender and source of foreign aid in the developing world. Since Chinese lending differs significantly from conventional lending activities engaged in by multilateral institutions and OECD creditor governments, how much of what we know about the effects of foreign aid on political institutions applies to the Chinese case? This paper investigates the “amplification effect” hypothesis — that aid amplifies recipients’ existing set of political institutions — with respect to Chinese development flows. Employing different estimators upon panel data for 104 countries between 2002 and 2017 that have been recipients of Chinese development flows, the paper’s findings support the amplification effect hypothesis as applied to the Chinese case, as the average sampled democracy becomes more democratic in consequence, and the average sampled autocracy becomes more authoritarian. However, the amplification effect exhibits a greater magnitude in autocratic recipients of Chinese development flows, as autocracies become more autocratic relative to democracies becoming more democratic. Various channels through which these effects take place are explored.
How Do Individual Politicians Affect Privatization? Evidence from China
Hong Ru & Kunru Zou
Review of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the role of local politicians’ patronage connections to top political leaders (i.e., the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China) in privatization outcomes. We find that connected local politicians are more likely to sell state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to corrupt buyers at substantially discounted prices. The SOEs purchased by corrupt buyers engage in significantly more fraudulent and corrupt activities following privatization and thus perform worse. For identification, we use the mandatory retirement ages of Central Committee members in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. When local politicians lose their connections because Central Committee members step down after reaching mandatory retirement ages, we find a 14.4 percentage point drop in the likelihood of choosing corrupt buyers and a 90.13% drop in price discounts for privatization sales. Consequently, the privatized SOEs experience jumps in efficiency gains after the age cut-offs for mandatory retirement.
Did the Independence of Judges Reduce Legal Development in England, 1600–1800?
Peter Murrell
Journal of Law and Economics, August 2021, Pages 539–565
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom confers iconic status on the clause of England’s Act of Settlement (1701) mandating secure tenure for judges. This paper uses new databases of judges’ biographies and citations to estimate how the move to secure tenure affected the number of citations to judges’ decisions, a measure of the quality of decisions. Several strategies facilitate identification of the effect of secure tenure. A court-year panel permits use of a difference-in-differences framework. Controls capture judges’ human capital and amount of litigation. Historical evidence, tests of sensitivity to omitted-variable bias, and instrumental variables estimates support the findings on the effects of tenure arrangements derived from ordinary least squares estimates. Secure tenure had a strong deleterious effect on associate judges’ decisions and a smaller positive effect on chief judges’ decisions. The effect of all judges having secure tenure is negative, large, and statistically significant. The act had an effect opposite of that universally assumed.
Does Charisma Affect Survival in Office for Leaders Who Take Power via Military Coup?
Tyson Roberts & Lisa Mueller
Studies in Comparative International Development, December 2021, Pages 485–510
Abstract:
There is ample research on the incidence of coups d’état but less on their aftermath. Why do some national leaders who seize power via military coup stay in power longer than others once they unseat their predecessors? This study tests whether facial attractiveness — which we argue is a testable proxy for personal charisma — helps explain variation in coup-installed leader survival. We draw on multiple data sources of coups worldwide from 1950 to 2010, as well as original attractiveness data coded from survey responses. We find that more attractive coup-installed leaders retain power longer than their less attractive counterparts after successfully ousting the incumbent. The attractiveness advantage is particularly strong for leaders in the first 5 years of their tenure, those who seized power from a dictatorship as opposed to a democracy, and those who rule without parties in the legislature. We argue that leaders who take power through a military coup lack both traditional and rational-legal authority; for such cases, facial attractiveness may signal charismatic authority sufficient to survive the institutional vacuum following an unconstitutional ascent to power.
Leader Tenure, Genocide, and Politicide During Civil War
Gary Uzonyi
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do some governments engage in genocide or politicide during civil war while others do not? I argue that leader tenure influences bargaining possibilities between the regime and rebels. Rebels face less uncertainty about a longer-tenured leader’s willingness to commit to concessions to end the conflict with terms that better the rebels’ position. This narrows the longer-tenured leader’s ability to credibly offer the rebels concessions. Facing a constrained bargaining environment, longer-tenured leaders become more likely to turn to atrocity in an effort to fully defeat the opposition group and its supporters. Statistical analysis of all genocide and politicide in civil war since 1946 supports this claim. Evidence from Milosevic’s atrocities in Kosovo help illustrate the mechanisms.
Oil Price Shocks and Conflict Escalation: Onshore versus Offshore
Jørgen Juel Andersen, Frode Martin Nordvik & Andrea Tesei
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
We reconsider the relationship between oil and conflict, focusing on the location of oil resources. In a panel of 132 countries over the period 1962-2009, we show that oil windfalls escalate conflict in onshore-rich countries, while they de-escalate conflict in offshore-rich countries. We use a model to illustrate how these opposite effects can be explained by a fighting capacity mechanism, whereby the government can use offshore oil income to increase its fighting capacity, while onshore oil may be looted by oppositional groups to finance a rebellion. We provide empirical evidence supporting this interpretation: we find that oil price windfalls increase both the number and strength of active rebel groups in onshore-rich countries, while they strengthen the government in offshore-rich ones.
Greed, grievance, or graduates? Why do men rebel?
Brandon Ives & Jori Breslawski
Journal of Peace Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Education is widely known for its positive effect on conventional politics and nonviolent protest as well as its suppressive effect on violence. However, recent studies have connected education to violence through its effect on relative deprivation and frustration–aggression mechanisms. We address these divergent findings by presenting a theory of the conditional effect that education has on violence. To do so, we build on literature addressing education’s positive association with political participation, such as voting and protests, and question how this relationship translates to contexts in which conventional and nonviolent channels are unlikely to be effective – specifically, in cases of politically excluded ethnic groups. We argue that education increases ethnic group members’ resources and desire to address grievances. Yet, because the ethnic group is politically excluded, opportunities for conventional politics and nonviolent protest are limited. Educated ethnic group members are limited in political options, and are thus more likely to address their grievances through the support of rebel groups, increasing the probability of violence. Violence then occurs in localities where members of a politically excluded ethnic group are located and where those members have higher levels of education. Using geo-spatial data and statistical analysis, we demonstrate that education has divergent effects on violence in areas populated by politically excluded versus politically included ethnic groups in Africa and Central America. Areas with highly educated politically excluded ethnic group members are the most likely to experience violent events.
Property Rights Freedom and Innovation: Eponymous Skills in Women's Gymnastics
Franklin Mixon & Richard Cebula
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research uses the collapse of Soviet-style communism in 1991 as a de facto experimental framework within which to examine the impact of prospective benefits on the motivation of athletes to succeed in the Olympic Games. Prior to the collapse, successful Soviet Bloc Olympians were provided extraordinary living conditions and lifestyles. These rewards evaporated with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, subsequently resulting in relatively poorer Olympic performances of Soviet Bloc athletes. The current study extends earlier work by investigating the impact of appropriability on the supply of innovation by examining the frequency of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics before and during the transition to a new market-based economic order. Our central hypothesis is that following the dissolution the communist governments of the Soviet Bloc and its satellites, the supply of innovation in the form of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics from these countries has fallen. Frequency distributions of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics both prior to and after the dissolution of the aforementioned communist regimes support this hypothesis, as do results from goodness-of-fit tests and stochastic dominance analysis of joint probability distributions.