Power structure
Who Democratizes? Western-educated Leaders and Regime Transitions
Thomas Gift & Daniel Krcmaric
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many theories attempt to explain why some countries democratize and others do not. Existing accounts, however, focus almost exclusively on structural factors and ignore individual leaders. In this article, we argue that leaders educated at Western universities are more likely to democratize than other leaders because Western education socializes leaders to prefer democracy and creates transnational linkages that alter the strategic calculus of democratization. Utilizing an original data set on the specific colleges and universities world leaders attended, we show that Western-educated leaders significantly and substantively improve a country’s democratization prospects.
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Dirty Hands: Government Torture and Terrorism
Ursula Daxecker
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Existing research suggests that the use of harsh repression can exacerbate the incidence and duration of terrorism. Micro- and macro-level analyses have shown that coercive government responses to terrorism can radicalize sympathizers, increase recruitment, and undermine community support for counterterrorism policies, leading to backlash and increased terrorist activity. Focusing on torture techniques, this article aims to establish mechanisms implicit in the backlash hypothesis. These arguments imply that information about government transgressions is available to potential group sympathizers, but have not examined whether and how variation in the visibility of different torture techniques affects the likelihood of backlash. Scarring torture, a technique that is both more visible and less plausibly deniable than other forms of torture, is expected to produce higher volumes of terrorism. Using disaggregated data on allegations of torture from the Ill-Treatment and Torture project for 1995 to 2005, the analysis shows that scarring torture is consistently associated with increases in terrorism, whereas stealth torture has no statistically discernable effect on terrorism.
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Todd Eisenstadt, Carl LeVan & Tofigh Maboudi
American Political Science Review, August 2015, Pages 592-612
Abstract:
Under what circumstances do new constitutions promote democracy? Between 1974 and 2011, the level of democracy increased in 62 countries following the adoption of a new constitution, but decreased or stayed the same in 70 others. Using data covering all 138 new constitutions in 118 countries during that period, we explain this divergence through empirical tests showing that overall increased participation during the process of making the constitution positively impacts postpromulgation levels of democracy. Then, after disaggregating constitution-making into three stages (drafting, debating, and ratification) we find compelling evidence through robust statistical tests that the degree of citizen participation in the drafting stage has a much greater impact on the resulting regime. This lends support to some core principles of “deliberative” theories of democracy. We conclude that constitutional reformers should focus more on generating public “buy in” at the front end of the constitution-making process, rather than concentrating on ratification and referendums at the “back end” that are unlikely to correct for an “original sin” of limited citizen deliberation during drafting.
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IMF Programs and the Risk of a Coup d’état
Brett Casper
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Leaders use the distribution of economic rents to maintain the political support of regime elites. When countries join International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs, they are often required to implement a variety of free market-inspired reforms — such as privatization, reductions in government spending, and the restructuring of financial institutions — as a condition for receiving program funds. These types of reforms can diminish a leader’s capacity to redistribute wealth, which ultimately increases the risk of a coup. More specifically, when a leader begins the implementation of an IMF arrangement, the leader’s action provides public information about the leader’s weakened ability to redistribute wealth in the future. Thus, the act of implementing an IMF program provides each individual elite with information about his or her expected value of rents in the future, and this information gives elites who stand to be harmed by a reform an incentive to launch a coup.
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Informally Governing Information: How Criminal Rivalry Leads to Violence against the Press in Mexico
Bradley Holland & Viridiana Rios
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
A well-functioning press is crucial for sustaining a healthy democracy. While attacks on journalists occur regularly in many developing countries, previous work has largely ignored where and why journalists are attacked. Focusing on violence by criminal organizations (COs) in Mexico, we offer the first systematic, micro-level analysis of the conditions under which journalists are more likely to be violently targeted. Contrary to popular belief, our evidence reveals that the presence of large, profitable COs does not necessarily lead to fatal attacks against the press. Rather, the likelihood of journalists being killed only increases when rival criminal groups inhabit territories. Rivalry inhibits COs’ ability to control information leaks to the press, instead creating incentives for such leaks to be used as weapons to intensify official enforcement operations against rivals. Without the capacity to informally govern press content, rival criminals affected by such press coverage are more likely to target journalists.
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Language, Religion, and Ethnic Civil War
Nils-Christian Bormann, Lars-Erik Cederman & Manuel Vogt
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are certain ethnic cleavages more conflict-prone than others? While only few scholars focus on the contents of ethnicity, most of those who do argue that political violence is more likely to occur along religious divisions than linguistic ones. We challenge this claim by analyzing the path from linguistic differences to ethnic civil war along three theoretical steps: (1) the perception of grievances by group members, (2) rebel mobilization, and (3) government accommodation of rebel demands. Our argument is tested with a new data set of ethnic cleavages that records multiple linguistic and religious segments for ethnic groups from 1946 to 2009. Adopting a relational perspective, we assess ethnic differences between potential challengers and the politically dominant group in each country. Our findings indicate that intrastate conflict is more likely within linguistic dyads than among religious ones. Moreover, we find no support for the thesis that Muslim groups are particularly conflict-prone.
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Lisa Hultman & Dursun Peksen
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the frequent use of economic and military-specific sanctions against countries affected by civil conflicts, little is known about the possible impact that these coercive tools have on conflict dynamics. This article examines how threats and imposition of international sanctions affect the intensity of civil conflict violence. We formulate and test two competing views on the possible effect of economic and military-specific sanctions on conflict dynamics by combining data on fatalities in battle-related violence in all internal armed conflicts in Africa from 1989 to 2005 with data on economic sanctions and arms embargoes. The results indicate that threats of economic sanction and arms embargo are likely to increase the intensity of conflict violence. Similarly, imposed economic sanctions are likely to contribute to the escalation of conflict violence. Imposed arms embargoes, on the other hand, are likely to reduce conflict violence. We conclude that international sanctions appear to be counterproductive policy tools in mitigating the human cost of civil conflicts unless they are in the form of imposed arms embargoes attempting to limit the military capacity of the warring parties.
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The Political Economy of Liberal Democracy
Sharun Mukand & Dani Rodrik
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
We distinguish between three sets of rights – property rights, political rights, and civil rights – and provide a taxonomy of political regimes. The distinctive nature of liberal democracy is that it protects civil rights (equality before the law for minorities) in addition to the other two. Democratic transitions are typically the product of a settlement between the elite (who care mostly about property rights) and the majority (who care mostly about political rights). Such settlements rarely produce liberal democracy, as the minority has neither the resources nor the numbers to make a contribution at the bargaining table. We develop a formal model to sharpen the contrast between electoral and liberal democracies and highlight circumstances under which liberal democracy can emerge. We discuss informally the difference between social mobilizations sparked by industrialization and decolonization. Since the latter revolve around identity cleavages rather than class cleavages, they are less conducive to liberal politics.
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Political Succession: A Model of Coups, Revolution, Purges, and Everyday Politics
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
In addition to everyday political threats, leaders risk removal from office through coups and mass movements such as rebellion. Further, all leaders face threats from shocks such as downturns in their health, their country’s economy, or their government’s revenue. By integrating these risks into the selectorate theory, we characterize the conditions under which each threat is pertinent and the countermoves (purges, democratization, expansion of public goods, and expansion of private benefits) that best enable the leader to survive in office. The model identifies new insights into the nature of assassins; the relative risk of different types of leader removal as a function of the extant institutions of government; and the endogenous factors driving better or worse public policy and decisions to democratize or become more autocratic. Importantly, the results highlight how an increase in the risk of deposition via one means intensifies other removal risks.
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No Taxation of Elites, No Representation: State Capacity and the Origins of Representation
Deborah Boucoyannis
Politics & Society, September 2015, Pages 303-332
Abstract:
Does state weakness lead to representation via taxation? A distinguished body of scholarship assumes that fiscal need forced weak(ened) states to grant rights and build institutions. The logic is traced to pre-modern Europe. However, the literature has misunderstood the link between state strength and the origins of representation. Representation emerged where the state was already strong. In pre-modern Europe, representation originally was a legal obligation, not a right. It became the organizing principle of central institutions where rulers could oblige communities to send representatives authorized to commit to decisions taken at the center. Representation thus presupposed strong state capacity, especially to tax. The revision amends our understanding of the historical paradigms guiding the literature, as well as the application of these paradigms to policies in the developing world. It suggests that societal demands for accountability and better governance (the assumed aims of representation) are more likely to emerge in response to taxation already effectively applied.
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Predicting Revolt: Fragility Indexes and the Level of Violence and Instability in the Arab Spring
Kevin Neil Buterbaugh, Costel Calin & Theresa Marchant-Shapiro
Terrorism and Political Violence, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article is one of the first to systematically assess the ability of state fragility measures to predict violent protests and adverse regime changes in countries. We focus on the Arab Spring as an example of a situation that such measures ought to predict. Through a variety of analyses, we find that none of the measures are predictive. We then create a simple model using the literature of protest and revolts to predict both the level of violence and the extent of regime change in the Arab Spring countries. This simpler model does a better job of predicting the level of involvement in the Arab Spring than any of the complex State Fragility Indexes. Thus, the goal of this article is not to explain the causes of the Arab Spring, but to add to the discussion of the predictive value of measures of instability.
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Resource Windfalls, Political Regimes, and Political Stability
Francesco Caselli & Andrea Tesei
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study theoretically and empirically whether natural resource windfalls affect political regimes. We show that windfalls have no effect on democracies, while they have heterogeneous political consequences in autocracies: in deeply entrenched autocracies the effect of windfalls is virtually nil, while in moderately entrenched autocracies windfalls significantly exacerbate the autocratic nature of the political system. To frame the empirical work we present a simple model in which political incumbents choose the degree of political contestability and potential challengers decide whether or not to try to unseat the incumbents. The model uncovers a mechanism for the asymmetric impact of resource windfalls on democracies and autocracies, as well as the the differential impact within autocracies.
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Lincoln's Gamble: Fear of Intervention and the Onset of the American Civil War
Paul Poast
Security Studies, Summer 2015, Pages 502-527
Abstract:
Few studies consider how civil war onset can be influenced by third parties and by the belligerents’ perceptions of third party actions. I show that the American Civil War, a war largely ignored by civil war scholars, sheds insights into how anticipation of third party intervention influences the decision-making process within the target state and how the possibility of third party intervention can influence the onset and escalation of civil war. The American Civil War is an especially interesting case for exploring the role of third parties in civil war initiation since, unlike most cases considered by the existing civil war literature, the American Civil War is an instance of nonintervention: the third parties (the European powers in this case) mattered despite staying out of the conflict. Specifically, I argue that fear of foreign recognition (particularly by the British) played an underappreciated (if not the decisive) role in the earliest stages of the American Civil War by influencing Lincoln's decision to authorize the first major battle of the war at Manassas Junction, Virginia.
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How Free Media Protects Energy Infrastructure?
Oleg Polivin
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Modern warfare is often indirect: rebel groups are normally too weak to fight the state’s army in an open conflict, while the main problem of the government is to find the hideout of the rebels or identify their supporters. In this paper, I argue that if communication channels like free media are missing, rebel groups choose to attack the energy infrastructure. Empirical evidence reveals that countries with freer media experience less attacks against their energy infrastructure.
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Ethnopolitical demography and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa
Andy Baker, James Scarritt & Shaheen Mozaffar
Democratization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ethnic fragmentation is largely presumed to be bad for democracy. However, many African countries belie this claim, as democracy has recently sprouted in several of its multiethnic states. We argue that African countries that have demographic patterns where the largest ethnopolitical group is at least a near-majority and is simultaneously divided into nested subgroups produce Africa's most democratic multiethnic societies. This large-divided-group pattern, which has gone largely unnoticed by previous scholars, facilitates transitions to democracy from authoritarian rule. The large group's size foments the broad-based multiethnic social agitation needed to pose a genuine threat to a ruling autocrat, while its internal divisions reassure minorities that they will not suffer permanent exclusion via ethnic dominance under an eventual democracy. We support our claim with cross-national quantitative evidence on ethnic fragmentation and regime type.
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Demography and Democracy: A Global, District-level Analysis of Electoral Contestation
John Gerring et al.
American Political Science Review, August 2015, Pages 574-591
Abstract:
According to the classical perspective, polity size and democracy are inversely related. In this article, we argue that there is an important exception that manifests itself at the district level in settings where multiparty competition is allowed. Specifically, we find that larger districts encourage greater contestation. This results from a little-noticed mechanical effect as well as from several features of constituencies that are affected by size and have direct repercussions for contestation. To demonstrate this thesis we assembled a unique dataset, the Multi-level Election Archive (MLEA), which unites electoral contests across a variety of districts (national, regional, and local) and elective offices from the eighteenth century to the present, including a total of 88 countries, 2,344 elections, 79,658 districts, and more than 400,000 contests. With this evidence we were able to conduct a broad array of statistical tests, some global and others focused on particular countries or election types, all of which support our general argument.
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Daniel Oto-Peralías
Kyklos, August 2015, Pages 412–442
Abstract:
This article investigates whether political violence has long-term effects on attitudes toward political participation. This is an interesting topic because public engagement and social capital play a crucial role in shaping the economy and democracy. We exploit a recent survey on the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War to shed light on this question. Our findings indicate that being a member of a family that suffered violence during the Civil War is related to a higher interest, knowledge and engagement in politics. These results stand in stark contrast to the common expectation that political violence leads to lower public engagement, while they are consistent with other studies focusing on the short-term consequences of civil conflicts. Therefore, the legacy of political violence, far from creating political apathy, may be the higher involvement of citizens in politics.
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Responding to Catastrophe: Repression Dynamics Following Rapid-onset Natural Disasters
Reed Wood & Thorin Wright
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Natural disasters often cause significant human suffering. They may also provide incentives for states to escalate repression against their citizens. We argue that state authorities escalate repression in the wake of natural disasters because the combination of increased grievances and declining state control produced by disasters creates windows of opportunity for dissident mobilization and challenges to state authority. We also investigate the impact of the post-disaster humanitarian aid on this relationship. Specifically, we argue that inflows of aid in the immediate aftermath of disasters are likely to dampen the impact of disasters on repression. However, we expect that this effect is greater when aid flows to more democratic states. We examine these interrelated hypotheses using cross-national data on immediate-onset natural disasters and state violations of physical integrity rights between 1977 and 2009 as well as newly collected foreign aid data disaggregated by sector. The results provide support for both our general argument and the corollary hypotheses.
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Haifeng Huang
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the prevalence of anti-government rumors in authoritarian countries, little is currently known about their effects on citizens’ attitudes toward the government, and whether the authorities can effectively combat rumors. With an experimental procedure embedded in two surveys about Chinese internet users’ information exposure, this study finds that rumors decrease citizens’ trust in the government and support of the regime. Moreover, individuals from diverse socio-economic and political backgrounds are similarly susceptible to thinly evidenced rumors. Rebuttals generally reduce people’s belief in the specific content of rumors, but often do not recover political trust unless the government brings forth solid and vivid evidence to back its refutation or win the endorsement of public figures broadly perceived to be independent. But because such high-quality and strong rebuttals are hard to come by, rumors will erode political support in an authoritarian state. These findings have rich implications for studies of rumors and misinformation in general, and authoritarian information politics in particular.
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Negotiating with Rebels: The Effect of Rebel Service Provision on Conflict Negotiations
Lindsay Heger & Danielle Jung
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
When rebels provide social services, do they have more leverage negotiating the terms of a peace deal? The literature suggests service-providing groups may, on average, have a wider base of support and a more centralized organizational structure. We argue that these features deter potential spoilers from breaking away from the organization during negotiation processes. This, in turn, makes governments more willing to enter negotiations since the threat from spoilers is smaller. Thus, compared to nonproviders, service-providing rebels are more likely to engage in negotiations and these processes are likely to be more stable. This article analyzes these propositions by gathering service provision data on nearly 400 rebel groups and their involvement in and behavior during peace talks. It also serves as an introduction to a larger project about the implications of rebel service provision on conflict outcomes.
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On Education and Democratic Preferences
Alberto Chong & Mark Gradstein
Economics & Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We make the point that preferences for democracy are positively correlated with level of education. This correlation is robust even after controlling for a range of personal characteristics, including country of residence, income, age, or using different definitions of preferences for democracy or using instrumental variables. Interestingly, the results hold across countries with different level of democracy. We use data from World Values Surveys and show that our results are consistent with a simple theoretical model in which education makes political accountability easier.
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Dependence Networks and the Diffusion of Domestic Political Institutions
Jay Goodliffe & Darren Hawkins
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
How and to what extent do states influence the level of democracy and autocracy in other states? We argue that states exist internationally in dependence networks with each other and that those networks provide pathways for influence on a state’s domestic institutions. For any given state, a dependence network is a set of partner states with whom it regularly engages in exchanges of valued goods, where those exchanges would be costly to break. We find that an index of three such networks – trade, security and shared international organization membership – significantly influences the domestic political institutions in a given state. These changes are substantively large in the long run, similar in size to regional and global levels of democracy. State capabilities figure heavily in our network measures, thus emphasizing the role of power in the diffusion of domestic political institutions. We also find that network-influenced change works both ways: states can become more autocratic or more democratic.
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Does Information Lead to Emulation? Spatial Dependence in Anti-Government Violence
Blake Garcia & Cameron Wimpy
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines whether acts of anti-government violence exhibit spatial dependence across state boundaries. In other words, to what extent can acts of anti-government violence in one country be attributed to violence in neighboring countries? Past research, which has largely focused on civil war or large-scale conflict contagion, finds that geographically proximate states are more likely to experience the cross-boundary diffusion of conflict due to action emulation. However, this assumes that actors are fully aware of conflicts occurring in neighboring countries. To address this, the article argues that the proliferation of communication technology increases access to information about events in neighboring states, thereby allowing emulation to occur and subsequently conditioning the potential for violence to spread. It tests this expectation by modeling the effects of a unique spatial connectivity matrix that incorporates both state contiguity and access to communication technology. An analysis of all acts of anti-government violence in 44 African countries from 2000 to 2011 supports the argument.
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Disruptive Democratization: Contentious Events and Liberalizing Outcomes Globally, 1990–2004
Mohammad Ali Kadivar & Neal Caren
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does contentious collective action matter? Whereas most social movement literature has addressed this question in the US context for policy change outcomes, this paper takes a different approach by bringing the question to a global context and examines democratization as a structural outcome. Accordingly, we test several hypotheses about the ephemeral, positive, and negative influences of contentious collective action on the democratization process in a given country, as well as the cross-border effect of the contention. To go beyond the limitations of previous studies, this paper uses a monthly time-series, cross-national model to examine potential liberalizing or deliberalizing effects of protest activities. Using data from 103 non-democratic countries from 1990 to 2004, we find that protests and riots increase the probability that a country will liberalize in a given month. We find that while contentious events in other countries do not directly increase the risk of liberalization, external contentious events, especially those that lead to political liberalization, increase the count of contentious events, thus indirectly boosting liberalization. We find no evidence that protest significantly increases the chances of deliberalization. Together, our findings show a key role for non-elite political actors to influence political liberalization.
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Donor Fragmentation, Aid Shocks, and Violent Political Conflict
Raynee Gutting & Martin Steinwand
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent debates have focused on the negative role of the proliferation of foreign aid facilities and donor fragmentation for development outcomes and recipient country institutions. This article investigates an overlooked positive side effect of donor proliferation. With an increasing number of donors, exposure to negative aid shocks decreases, as well as the impact of such shocks on violent political conflict. Using data on 106 recipient countries for the years 1970 to 2008 and employing event history and mediation analysis, we find strong evidence that fragmentation significantly reduces the risk for political destabilization associated with aid shocks.