Popular Sovereignty
Overestimation of the Level of Democracy Among Citizens in Nondemocracies
Eddy Yeung
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Overestimation of the level of democracy is prevalent among citizens in nondemocracies. Despite such prevalence, no research to date has systematically documented this phenomenon and examined its determinants. Yet given the renewed interest in the role of legitimacy in authoritarian survival, studying whether and why this phenomenon arises is important to our understanding of authoritarian resilience. I argue that, even in the absence of democratic institutions in nondemocracies, autocrats exercise media control in order to boost their democratic legitimacy. This façade of democracy, in turn, benefits their survival. Combining media freedom data with individual survey response data that include over 30,000 observations from 22 nondemocracies, I find that overestimation of the level of democracy is greater in countries with stronger media control. But highly educated citizens overestimate less. These findings shed light on media control as a strategy for authoritarian survival, and have important implications for modernization theory.
The Opening Dilemma: Why Democracies Cannot Found Themselves
Richard Bensel
Studies in American Political Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Democratic states often claim that their authority rests upon the “will of the people” as expressed through representative institutions. However, there is an irresolvable conundrum that undermines that claim: the “opening dilemma” that invariably attends the founding of democratic states during which those representative institutions are created. While familiar to democratic theorists, the “opening dilemma” has many hitherto unexplored dimensions, among them its actual occurrence in democratic politics. Using the 1869 Illinois Constitutional Convention as a case study, the article demonstrates why individual preferences cannot effect a founding without the intervention of arbitrary and thus undemocratic authority. The conclusion suggests why the opening dilemma might become a serious threat to American democracy if the nation were to attempt to convene a new constitutional convention.
Making sense of populist hyperreality in the post-truth age: Evidence from Volodymyr Zelensky’s voters
Kostiantyn Yanchenko
Mass Communication and Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
Building upon the literature on new information environments, this article explores how citizens make sense of hyperreal politics. To that end, it turns to the particularly illustrative case of Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 presidential campaign, characterized by the complex fusion of fact and fiction, unclear truth statements, and prevalence of populist narratives. In 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the article examines how Zelensky’s voters and viewers of the Servant of the People — a television comedy series featuring Zelensky in the role of the Ukrainian President — interpreted the populist hyperreality of the series, navigated between various mediated representations of Zelensky, and evaluated him and his fictional counterpart after the former became the President of Ukraine in reality. The findings show that the populist hyperreality of the series affected not only its viewers’ desire to vote for Zelensky, but also their overall perception of Ukrainian politics by highlighting some of its aspects and ignoring others. The obtained data also suggest that for most interviewees, there was no strict demarcation between the images of Holoborodko, Zelensky-actor and Zelensky-politician. The study points to the need to reassess our understanding of deliberative democracy and informed citizenship in the new information environments.
The wise, the politician, and the strongman: Types of national leaders and quality of governance
Julieta Peveri
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper assesses how national leaders’ quality of governance varies with their career and education. Using a sample of 1,000 rulers between 1931 and 2010, I identify three types of leaders: military leaders, academics, and politicians. Military leaders are associated with an overall negative performance, while politicians who have held important offices before taking power tend to perform well. Academics have on average non-significant effects. These results are partially driven by differences in policy decisions and in leadership styles. Military leaders spend less in health and education, are more likely to establish a personalistic regime, to disrespect the constitution, and to move towards a non-electoral regime, while the reverse holds for politicians. Additionally, this paper highlights the weakness of using educational attainment as a proxy for politicians’ quality, and of growth as a measure of national leaders’ performance.
Are the supporters of socialism the losers of capitalism? Conformism in East Germany and transition success
Max Deter & Martin Lange
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The empirical literature is inconclusive about whether a country’s democratization has a long-lasting impact on former supporters or opponents of the bygone regime. With newly available individual-level data of former residents of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), we analyze how supporters and opponents of the socialist system performed within the market-based democracy after reunification. Protesters, who helped to overthrow the socialist regime in the Peaceful Revolution, show higher life satisfaction and better labor market outcomes in the new politico-economic system. Former members of the ruling socialist party and employees in state-supervised sectors become substantially less satisfied. These results do not seem to be driven by differential reactions in the post-transition period, but rather by the removal of discriminatory practices in the GDR. Additional results indicate that conformism in the GDR also explains political preferences over the almost three decades after the reunification of Germany.
The Impact of Domestic Surveillance on Political Imprisonment: Evidence from the German Democratic Republic
Christoph Steinert
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does domestic surveillance affect the frequency of political imprisonments in autocratic states? In contrast to conventional wisdom, I argue that surveillance reduces the frequency of political imprisonments in power-maximizing autocracies. Surveillance decreases uncertainty about the correct targets of repression, allowing for more selective detentions and shifts to silent instruments of repression. To investigate these claims, I draw on a unique county-level dataset of political imprisonment in the German Democratic Republic between 1984 and 1988. I proxy the number of monitored individuals with newly collected county-level data on surveillance operations. I use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, random effects, and instrumental variable models to investigate the impact of surveillance on political imprisonment. I find that higher shares of spies per monitored individual were associated with a reduction of political imprisonment. Further, increasing levels of spy infiltration were linked to a systematic shift to silent instruments of repression.
Persecution and Migrant Self-Selection: Evidence from the Collapse of the Communist Bloc
Ran Abramitzky, Travis Baseler & Isabelle Sin
NBER Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
How does persecution affect who migrates? We analyze migrants’ self-selection out of the USSR and its satellite states before and after the collapse of Communism using census microdata from the three largest destination countries: Germany, Israel, and the United States. We find that migrants arriving before and around the time of the collapse (who were more likely to have moved because of persecution) were more educated and had better labor market outcomes in the destination than those arriving later. This change is not fully explained by the removal of emigration restrictions in the Communist Bloc. Instead, we show that this pattern is consistent with more positive self-selection of migrants who are motivated by persecution. When the highly educated disproportionately forgo migrating to enjoy the amenities of their home country, persecution can induce them to leave.
What Motivates Leaders to Invest in Nation-Building?
Paola Giuliano, Bryony Reich & Alessandro Riboni
NBER Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
Why do some leaders invest in significant nation-building policies and others do not? Why does nation-building occur at certain junctures in time and not others? In our research, we investigate what motivates leaders to nation build. We argue that threats to their regime motivate rulers to invest in significant nation-building and that the type of threats that provoke nation-building have largely materialized since the 19th century.
The political economy of Solon’s law against neutrality in civil wars
Soeren Schwuchow & George Tridimas
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 594 BCE, the Athenian lawgiver Solon, called upon to resolve a deepening social crisis, introduced a new constitution and mandated that in civil conflicts, no citizen is to remain apathetic and must take sides. Because the law seemed to support strife, it presents a puzzle. The paper offers a political economy rationale for Solon’s law against neutrality, modeling social conflict as a rent-seeking competition. We divide society into three groups, a hereditary aristocracy, which monopolized power before the Solonian constitution, a rival wealth-based commercial elite, called the new Solonian elite, and the poor, who are enfranchised only partly. We then identify the conditions under which the third group is better off by allying with one of the other groups, protecting the Solonian constitution. In our framework, Solon’s ban on neutrality is an attempt to change the payoffs from violent redistributions of rents, so that conflict is avoided. Accordingly, the ban should not only impede excessive rent seeking, but also prevent the exclusion of any social group.
Population displacement and urban conflict: Global evidence from more than 3300 flood events
David Castells-Quintana, Maria del Pilar Lopez-Uribe & Thomas McDermott
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we study the effect of displacement of population into cities on urban conflict in developing countries. To do so, we construct a novel measure of exposure to floods, using data on more than 3300 flood events worldwide, as an exogenous source of population displacement. We combine this with city level observations of thousands of urban social disorder events over the period 1985–2015. Exposure to floods is found to be associated with higher intensity of urban social disorder. Our evidence suggests that the effects of floods on urban disorder occur in part through the displacement of population into large cities. Exploring the information on urban disorder events in more detail, we find that the association between city growth and urban disorder is strongest for events related to public service provision, prices and wages.
Military Conscription and Nonviolent Resistance
Matthew Cebul & Sharan Grewal
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Nonviolent campaigns against repressive regimes often turn on the military’s decision to either defend the ruler or make common cause with the ruled. Yet surprisingly little scholarship investigates opposition expectations for the military’s likely response to mass protest. We theorize that some determinants of the military’s willingness to repress are more observable to activists than others. In particular, we identify conscription as a highly salient indicator that soldiers will refuse to fire on protesters and hypothesize that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to materialize against regimes with conscripted armies than those with volunteer forces. We substantiate this theory with two sources of evidence: (1) a survey experiment conducted during the 2019 Algerian Revolution and (2) a cross-national analysis of the positive association between conscription and nonviolent campaign onset from 1945 to 2013.
Personalization of Power and Mass Uprisings in Dictatorships
John Chin, Wonjun Song & Joseph Wright
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most major nonviolent civil resistance campaigns target autocratic regimes. Yet, most dictators are toppled by their close supporters, not civilian protesters. Building on theories of strategic interactions between leaders, security agents, and protesters, we make three core claims: first, protesters are relatively less likely to mount a major nonviolent uprising against dictatorships with personalized security forces; secondly, personalized security forces are more likely to repress realized protest; and, thirdly, security force personalization shapes the prospects for success of mass uprisings in promoting democratic transitions. We leverage new data on security force personalization — a proxy for loyal security agents — and major nonviolent protest campaigns to test these expectations. Our theory explains why many dictatorships rarely face mass protest mobilization and why uprisings that are met with violent force often fail in bringing about new democracies.