Popular Rule
Media's Role in the Making of a Democrat: Evidence from East Germany
Tim Friehe, Helge Müller & Florian Neumeier
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper explores the causal influence of media content on voting behavior. We exploit a natural experiment involving access to West German TV within the German Democratic Republic. Focusing on federal and state election outcomes in the post-reunification decade (i.e., a time at which TV content was harmonized), we find that municipalities that had access to Western TV broadcasts before reunification have lower vote shares for left-wing and right-wing extremist parties. With regard to potential channels, we provide evidence based on survey data that GDR citizens with access to West German TV were less loyal to the socialist regime, less hostile toward foreigners, and exhibited higher levels of social capital. Our findings thus support the notion that access to free media influences political attitudes and facilitates the consolidation of democracy.
Pandemics Change Cities: Municipal Spending and Voter Extremism in Germany, 1918-1933
Kristian Blickle
Federal Reserve Working Paper, June 2020
Abstract:
This paper uses several historical data-sets from Germany to show that influenza mortality in 1918-1920 was correlated with (i) lower per-capita spending, especially on services consumed by the young, in the following decade and (ii) the share of votes received by extremist parties in 1932 and 1933. These results are robust when controlling for demographics, population changes, city-level wages, city-level exposure to hyperinflation in 1923, and regional unemployment, and when instrumenting influenza mortality.
Deprivation in the Midst of Plenty: Citizen Polarization and Political Protest
John Griffin, Chad Kiewiet de Jonge & Vania Ximena Velasco-Guachalla
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article elaborates relative deprivation theory to a societal level to argue that political unrest is rooted in the polarization of citizens' grievance judgments, rather than the mean level of societal grievance. Using data from twelve cross-national survey projects, it examines the relationship between citizen polarization and political protest in eighty-four democracies and semi-democracies from 1977 to 2010. The study finds that countries with more polarized citizens are more likely to experience nonviolent protest. Protests are most likely in countries where average citizen grievances are low but citizens are polarized, which is consistent with the elaborated theoretical expectations of relative deprivation theory.
The Effects of Television News Propaganda: Experimental Evidence from China
Jennifer Pan, Zijie Shao & Yiqing Xu
Stanford Working Paper, April 2020
Abstract:
More than half of the world's population live under authoritarian rule, where propaganda is deployed to manipulate attitudes and behaviors at scale. Television remains one of the most powerful forms of propaganda because audiences continue to regard television as an authoritative source of information. We create videos that realistically resemble Chinese state news propaganda and experimentally assess their effects on the policy preferences of the Chinese public. We find that propaganda moves respondents to adopt policy positions espoused in the video up to 48 hours after exposure and appears to work through persuasion. In contrast to prior research, effects do not vary based on individual predispositions or characteristics, which may be due to the content and format of propaganda.
Winning Hearts and Minds in Civil Wars: Governance, Leadership Change, and Support for Violent Groups in Iraq
Christoph Mikulaschek, Saurabh Pant & Beza Tesfaye
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The “hearts and minds” model of combating rebellions holds that civilians are less likely to support violent opposition groups if the government provides public services and security. Building on this model, we argue that a political event that raises popular expectations of future public service and security provision increases support for the government and decreases sympathy for violent opposition groups. To test this argument, we leverage a unique research design opportunity that stems from the unforeseen announcement of the resignation of Iraq's divisive prime minister in August 2014 while an original survey was being administered across the country. We show that the leadership transition led Iraq's displeased Sunni Arab minority to shift support from the violent opposition to the government. In line with our argument, this realignment was due to rising optimism among Sunni Arabs that the new government would provide services and public goods — specifically security, electricity, and jobs.
The political agenda effect and state centralization
Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson & Ragnar Torvik
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We provide a potential explanation, based on the “political agenda effect”, for the absence of, and unwillingness to create, centralized power in the hands of a national state. State centralization induces citizens of different backgrounds, interests, regions or ethnicities to coordinate their demands in the direction of more general-interest public goods, and away from parochial transfers. This political agenda effect raises the effectiveness of citizen demands and induces them to increase their investments in conflict capacity. In the absence of state centralization, citizens do not necessarily band together because of another force, the escalation effect, which refers to the fact that elites from different regions will join forces in response to the citizens doing so. Such escalation might hurt the citizen groups that have already solved their collective action problem (though it will benefit others). Anticipating the interplay of the political agenda and escalation effects, under some parameter configurations, political elites strategically opt for a non-centralized state. We show how the model generates non-monotonic comparative statics in response to the increase in the value or effectiveness of public goods (so that centralized states and public good provision may be absent precisely when they are more beneficial for society). We also suggest how the formation of a social democratic party may sometimes induce state centralization (by removing the commitment value of a non-centralized state), and how elites may sometimes prefer partial state centralization.
State First? A Disaggregation and Empirical Interrogation
David Andersen & Jonathan Doucette
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This letter is the first to systematically scrutinize the multifaceted claim that a strong state promotes democratic development. It analyzes new Varieties of Democracy data from 1789 to 2015 to specify and examine eight different versions of this ‘state-first’ argument in analyses that span the entire era of modern democracy. The authors document that high levels of bureaucratic quality at the time of the first democratic transition and during democratic spells are positively associated with democratic survival and deepening. By contrast, state capacity has no robust effects on democratic survival or deepening and does not condition the impact of bureaucratic quality. These findings underline the importance of particular features of a strong state as well as the importance of a disaggregated approach. They imply that democratic development is better aided by strengthening the impartiality of bureaucratic organizations than by building capacity for territorial control.
The Language of Legacies: The Politics of Evoking Dead Leaders
Caitlin Andrews-Lee & Amy Liu
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
How can leaders recover public trust and approval when government performance is low? We argue politicians use speeches evoking images of deceased predecessors to reactivate support temporarily. This distracts supporters from the poor performance and arouses empathy and nostalgia among them, causing them to perceive the current leader more favorably. We test this argument by scraping for all speeches by Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. We identify all instances when she referenced Juan Perón — the charismatic founder of the Justice Party. We find that as Kirchner’s approval rating decreases, the number of Perón references increases. To identify the causal mechanism and to ensure that endogeneity is not a concern, we employ text analysis and a natural experiment — courtesy of LAPOP. The results provide robust evidence that leaders reference their dead predecessors to evoke positive feelings. However, while doing so can improve public opinion, the effects manifest only in the short term and among supporters.
The role of collective action for the emergence and consolidation of democracy
Paolo Li Donni & Maria Marino
Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The role of citizens' collective action for the emergence and consolidation of democracy is generally analysed within bottom-up theories. However, top-down theories show that elites might impede or promote both democracy and collective action through a set of strategies which are often unobserved and vary over time. Democratic persistence and change require then to be assessed in a dynamic framework which considers both citizens and elites' strategies. For such reason, on a large sample of countries in the period 1971–2014, we jointly estimate the probability of collective action and democracy using a Structural Dynamic Model. This allows us to account for the dynamic nature of the two political phenomena under investigation by controlling for their persistence, for initial conditions and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. We find that collective action matters for the emergence of democracy but not for its consolidation which seems to be related to more structural economic factors.
Leader Age, Death, and Political Liberalization in Dictatorships
Sarah Hummel
Journal of Politics, July 2020, Pages 981-995
Abstract:
This article examines how expectations about the likelihood of a dictator’s death affect the strategic calculations of regime insiders and potential challengers. On the one hand, would-be reformers are better positioned to plan and execute post-death challenges as dictators age. On the other hand, regime insiders anticipate these challenges and try to proactively solve the problem of political succession. The circumstances surrounding leader death determine which of these competing effects dominates. Accordingly, leader death is more liberalizing as leaders age in personalist regimes compared to nonpersonalist regimes, and in countries with high levels of economic development compared to those with low levels of development. Furthermore, preemptive actions in personalist dictatorships, such as coup attempts and irregular removals, are more likely as leaders age and their death becomes imminent.