Regime Change
Guns, Butter, and Human Rights: The Congressional Politics of U.S. Aid to Egypt
Lars Berger
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In February 2011, the dramatic ouster of Hosni Mubarak threw into the spotlight the U.S. policy of granting generous and unconditional aid to the Egyptian regime at a time when the strategic rationale for such aid had become less obvious and calls for inserting human rights considerations into foreign aid allocations more prominent. Focusing on an unprecedented set of roll call votes taken in the U.S. House of Representatives during the years 2004 to 2007, this article offers the first quantitative assessment of the determinants of Congressional support for U.S. economic and military aid for Egypt. It challenges conventional wisdom on the limited role of campaign contributions in Congressional decision making by highlighting the central role of defense lobby contributions in maintaining the Congressional coalition that shielded Egypt's prerevolutionary regime from increased U.S. pressure in the years leading up to its eventual demise.
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Testing Islam's Political Advantage: Evidence from Indonesia
Thomas Pepinsky, William Liddle & Saiful Mujani
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Across the Muslim world, Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to win votes and popular support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in explaining these parties' popular support. We argue that Islamic party platforms function as informational shortcuts to Muslim voters, and only confer a political advantage when voters are uncertain about parties' economic policies. Using a series of experiments embedded in an original nationwide survey in Indonesia, we find that Islamic parties are systematically more popular than otherwise identical non-Islamic parties only under cases of economic policy uncertainty. When respondents know economic policy platforms, Islamic parties never have an advantage over non-Islamic parties. Our findings demonstrate that Islam's political advantage is real, but critically circumscribed by parties' economic platforms and voters' knowledge of them.
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Political model of social evolution
Daron Acemoglu, Georgy Egorov & Konstantin Sonin
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 27 December 2011, Pages 21292-21296
Abstract:
Almost all democratic societies evolved socially and politically out of authoritarian and nondemocratic regimes. These changes not only altered the allocation of economic resources in society but also the structure of political power. In this paper, we develop a framework for studying the dynamics of political and social change. The society consists of agents that care about current and future social arrangements and economic allocations; allocation of political power determines who has the capacity to implement changes in economic allocations and future allocations of power. The set of available social rules and allocations at any point in time is stochastic. We show that political and social change may happen without any stochastic shocks or as a result of a shock destabilizing an otherwise stable social arrangement. Crucially, the process of social change is contingent (and history-dependent): the timing and sequence of stochastic events determine the long-run equilibrium social arrangements. For example, the extent of democratization may depend on how early uncertainty about the set of feasible reforms in the future is resolved.
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Globalization, Economic Freedom, and Human Rights
Axel Dreher, Martin Gassebner & Lars-H. R. Siemers
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using the KOF Index of Globalization and two indices of economic freedom, the authors empirically analyze whether globalization and economic liberalization affect governments' respect for human rights in a panel of 106 countries over the 1981-2004 period. According to their results, physical integrity rights significantly and robustly increase with globalization and economic freedom, while empowerment rights are not robustly affected. Due to the lack of consensus about the appropriate level of empowerment rights as compared to the outright rejection of any violation of physical integrity rights, the global community is presumably less effective in promoting empowerment rights.
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Fabrice Murtin & Romain Wacziarg
NBER Working Paper, September 2011
Abstract:
Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with rising levels of democracy. We find that primary schooling, and to a weaker extent per capita income levels, are strong determinants of the quality of political institutions. We find little evidence of causality running the other way, from democracy to income or education.
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An evolutionary dynamic of revolutions
Nicolas Olsson-Yaouzis
Public Choice, June 2012, Pages 497-515
Abstract:
It has been argued that rational choice theory is unable to explain the occurrence of social revolutions. This paper argues that if social revolutions are modeled in an evolutionary setting it is possible to predict when revolutions occur. It is shown that revolutions are expected to occur when regimes lose their determination to punish revolutionary activity early and severely. In the process of constructing the model some results about public good provision are generalized.
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Comparing the spread of capitalism and democracy
Peter Leeson, Russell Sobel & Andrea Dean
Economics Letters, January 2012, Pages 139-141
Abstract:
We apply Leeson and Dean's (2009) method for studying democratic dominoes to capitalist spillovers to compare the rates at which capitalism and democracy spread between countries. We find that capitalism and democracy spread at approximately the same modest rate.
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Riding the Wave: World Trade and Factor-Based Models of Democratization
John Ahlquist & Erik Wibbels
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies of "waves" of regime change, in which large numbers of countries experience similar political transitions at roughly similar periods of time, though once popular, have fallen from favor. Replacing the "third wave" arguments are several competing models relating domestic social structure - specifically, the distribution of income and factor ownership - to regime type. If any of these distributive models of regime type is correct, then global trade has an important explanatory role to play. Under factor-based models, changes in the world trading system will have systematic effects on regime dynamics. Trade openness determines labor's factor income and ultimately its political power. As world trade expands and contracts, countries with similar labor endowments should experience similar regime pressures at the same time. We propose a novel empirical specification that addresses the endogeneity and data-quality problems plaguing previous efforts to examine these arguments. We investigate the conditional impact of the global trading system on democratic transitions across 130 years and all of the states in the international system. Our findings cast doubt on the utility of factor-based models of democratization, despite their importance in fueling renewed interest in the topic.
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Time under Autocratic Rule and Economic Growth
Art Carden & Harvey James
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate how the length of time a country's regime was autocratic between 1920 and 2000 is correlated with economic growth and per capita income. We find that the longer a country was within an autocracy, the lower is the country's economic performance, even after controlling for other factors. We also find the length of time a country is not autocratic is positively related to growth and income. We claim this evidence is consistent with the thesis that one reason why some countries have had difficulty adjusting to life after autocracy is that the human and social capital necessary to make markets "work" eroded under autocratic regimes and take time to develop afterward.
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Toward a theory of leadership and state building
Roger Myerson
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 27 December 2011, Pages 21297-21301
Abstract:
We present a theory of the state based on political leadership and reputational equilibria. A political leader first needs a reputation for reliably rewarding loyal supporters. Reputational expectations between political leaders and their supporters become the fundamental political laws on which the enforcement of all other constitutional laws may be based. Successful democratic development requires a plentiful supply of leaders who have good reputations for using public funds responsibly to serve the public at large and not just giving jobs to their active supporters. It is argued that decentralized democracy may be the best way to improve the chances for successful democracy.
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Shadi Gholizadeh & Derek Hook
Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, March/April 2012, Pages 174-186
Abstract:
This article examines the discursive construction of the 1978-1979 social movement that ultimately became the Iranian Revolution, as constructed through the discourse of the charismatic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. This article illustrates that Khomeini was able to strategically co-opt the Shiite symbolism of the Battle of Karbala to bring together the most unlikely of bedfellows to unite in one common opposition movement. We first provide a summary of the socio-political events that contextualised Khomeini's discourse and then examine two commemorative declarations given by Khomeini in the key months before the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime. We will illustrate, via a discourse-historical analysis, that the two primary narratives prominent in Khomeini's discourse are as follows: (i) the continuation of the Battle of Karbala and (ii) the idea of a foreign conspiracy and a dangerous foreign other. We will also describe various discursive strategies that rendered Khomeini's discourse purposefully vague enough to appeal to Iran's fragmented opposition. Although the conspiratorial appeal of Khomeini's speeches has been discussed in the literature, we seek to show that it is the co-opting of a national myth in an all-encompassing language that drives the mass appeal of the discourse. The methods described in this study can be utilised by social and community psychologists seeking to understand how political actors discursively construct history in such a way as to serve their political ends.
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Do pro-market economic reforms drive human rights violations? An empirical assessment, 1981-2006
Indra de Soysa & Krishna Chaitanya Vadlammanati
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Liberals argue that economic policy reforms will benefit most in terms of better access to goods, less inflation and better economic opportunities. Critics of market reforms, among them Marxists, critical theorists, skeptics of globalization as well as a large portion of the NGO community, see the majority as losers from such reform, expecting resistance that would lead to political repression. They suggest that free-market policy reforms are analogous to "swallowing the bitter pill." We make use of the change in the Index of Economic Freedom as a measure of market liberalizing reforms, employing data from a panel of 117 countries for the period from 1981-2006. Our results show a strong positive association between reforms towards more free markets with regard to governments' respect for human rights, controlling for a host of relevant factors, including the possibility of endogeneity. The results are robust in relation to sample size, alternative data and methods, and a sample of only developing countries; and they are substantively quite large. Our results support those who argue that freer markets generate better economic conditions and higher levels of social harmony and peace, and it seems as if getting there is less problematic than people generally think - in fact, halfhearted measures and backsliding that prolong crises could be more dangerous to human rights.
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The Perils of Unearned Foreign Income: Aid, Remittances, and Government Survival
Faisal Ahmed
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Given their political incentives, governments in more autocratic polities can strategically channel unearned government and household income in the form of foreign aid and remittances to finance patronage, which extends their tenure in political office. I substantiate this claim with duration models of government turnover for a sample of 97 countries between 1975 and 2004. Unearned foreign income received in more autocratic countries reduces the likelihood of government turnover, regime collapse, and outbreaks of major political discontent. To allay potential concerns with endogeneity, I harness a natural experiment of oil price-driven aid and remittance flows to poor, non-oil producing Muslim autocracies. The instrumental variables results confirm the baseline finding that authoritarian governments can harness unearned foreign income to prolong their rule. Finally, I provide evidence of the underlying causal mechanisms that governments in autocracies use aid and remittances inflows to reduce their expenditures on welfare goods to fund patronage.
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James Fearon
Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2011, Pages 1661-1708
Abstract:
If democracy is to have the good effects said to justify it, it must be self-enforcing in that incumbents choose to hold regular, competitive elections and comply with the results. I consider models of electoral accountability that allow rulers a choice of whether to hold elections and citizens whether to rebel. When individuals observe diverse signals of government performance, coordination to pose a credible threat of protest if the ruler "shirks" is problematic. The convention of an electoral calendar and known rules can provide a public signal for coordinating rebellion if elections are suspended or blatantly rigged, while the elections themselves aggregate private observations of performance. Two threats to this solution to political moral hazard are considered. First, a ruling faction that controls the army may prefer to fight after losing an election, and ex post transfers may not be credible. A party system in which today's losers may win in the future can restore self-enforcing democracy, though at the cost of weaker electoral control. Second, subtle electoral fraud can undermine the threat of coordinated opposition that maintains elections. I show that when there are organizations in society that can observe and announce a signal of the extent of popular discontent, the incumbent may prefer to commit to fair elections over an "accountable autocratic" equilibrium in which public goods are provided but costly rebellions periodically occur.
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Rule of law and the size of government
Randall Holcombe & Cortney Rodet
Journal of Institutional Economics, March 2012, Pages 49-69
Abstract:
If those with political power benefit from corrupt institutions, rulers might not adopt the rule of law so the ruling class can command a larger share of a smaller pie. An empirical analysis reveals that the size of government is larger in those countries that enforce the rule of law. If government expenditures provide some measure of the ability of the ruling class to command resources, this suggests that those with political power could benefit from imposing a fairer and more objective legal structure. Another conjecture is that those in power maintain corrupt governments to pay off their supporters and enhance their ability to remain in power. However, the rule of law is also positively associated with political stability, so better enforcement of the rule of law also enhances the ability of incumbent governments to remain in power.
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Yury Bosin
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies find that US democracy assistance has helped build new democratic regimes across the globe. Nearly two decades of democracy assistance in the former Soviet Union (FSU), however, appear to have had a negligible impact on democracy in the region. This research uses a time-series cross-sectional statistical analysis to establish that US democracy assistance efforts in the FSU have failed to enhance democracy in the region. The incentives that FSU leaders had to misrepresent their commitment to democracy and the United States' understandable misperception of these leaders' actions help to explain this failure.
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Endogenous constitutions: Politics and politicians matter, economic outcomes don't
Bernd Hayo & Stefan Voigt
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study changes in the form of government as an example of endogenously determined constitutions. For a sample of 202 countries over the period 1950-2006, we find that most changes are relatively small and roughly equally likely to be either in the direction of more parliamentarian or more presidential systems. Based on a fixed effects ordered logit panel data model estimated over the period 1951-2000 for 146 countries, we find that such changes in the constitution can be explained by characteristics of the political system, internal and external political conflicts, and political leaders, whereas economic and socio-demographic variables do not matter.
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Carly Elizabeth Schall
Sociological Inquiry, February 2012, Pages 123-144
Abstract:
The development of supranational (European) social rights, and therefore social citizenship, is undermined by strong, direct relationships between citizens and national welfare states. Social policies contribute to national identities because they entail direct relationships between states and citizens. In well-developed European welfare states strong relationships between citizens and their member-states are expected. This may prevent the development of a similar relationship at the European level. The U.S. provides a comparison case, wherein a successful transference of citizenship identity from a lower to higher level has occurred, partly as a result of the building of national-level social citizenship, at least for certain classes of people. Revolutionary War Pensions provide an example of how social policy influences national identity. The lack of EU-level social policy precludes the possibility of this type of identity formation. Finally, the interplay of social citizenship and democracy in both cases is explored. T.H. Marshall's work regarding citizenship as the basis for democracy is used to understand how the inability to create a common social policy in the EU is harmful to democracy.
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Which Dictators Produce Quality of Government?
Nicholas Charron & Victor Lapuente
Studies in Comparative International Development, December 2011, Pages 397-423
Abstract:
This study deals with the effects of authoritarian regimes on state capacity or the quality of government (QoG): do some types of dictatorship (military, monarchy, and civilian) perform better than others? More importantly, which are the mechanisms through which different authoritarian rulers produce better government? The article argues theoretically, first, that single-party regimes are more responsive to citizens' demands than other types of authoritarian rule because they have a structured mechanism to channel citizens' "voices" (the single party). As a consequence, they will provide QoG following societal demands, which are low in low-income countries and high in high-income ones. Second, the effect of the other relevant authoritarian types - monarchies and military regimes - is exclusively conditional on rulers' self-interests. We predict that with short-sighted rulers, monarchies and military regimes will tend to under-provide QoG. In contrast, when monarchs and military rulers have long-term horizons, these types of authoritarian regimes will have a positive effect on QoG. Employing a sample of over 70 authoritarian countries from 1983 to 2003, we find empirical support for these interactive effects. In single-party autocracies, the higher (lower) the average income, the higher (the lower) the QoG; while albeit weaker support than the first finding, in monarchies in particular, the longer (shorter) the government's time horizon, the higher (the lower) the QoG.
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Shades of blue: Confidence in the police in the world
Liqun Cao, Yung-Lien Lai & Ruohui Zhao
Journal of Criminal Justice, January-February 2012, Pages 40-49
Purpose: The present study tests the hypothesis that regime nature as a structural characteristic explains variations in public confidence in the police.
Methods: Combining five sources of data from 50 nations with 69,309 respondents, the current article extends the extant research by using hierarchical logistic regression analyses with ample sample sizes at both levels to test the hypothesis with a series of control variables.
Findings: In addition to the largely consistent findings from the individual-level predictors, the results show that that there is a U-shaper convex curvilinear relationship between the levels of democracy and confidence in the police. Residents in long-term stable authoritarian regimes as well as in long-term stable democracies display elevated levels of confidence in the police, whereas short-term or unstable authoritarian nations and nations in democratic transition have the lowest level of confidence in the police. Besides, confidence in the police is higher among citizens in nations with more government efficiency and is lower among residents of countries with higher homicide rates.
Conclusion: Regime nature is important in understanding confidence in the police. In addition, governments should make more efforts to promote their efficiency in order to win citizens' support and they are expected to reduce homicide rates.
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Dependence Networks and the International Criminal Court
Jay Goodliffe et al.
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explores why governments commit to human rights enforcement by joining the International Criminal Court (ICC). Compared with other international institutions, the ICC has substantial authority and autonomy. Since governments traditionally guard their sovereignty carefully, it is puzzling that the ICC was not only established, but established so rapidly. Looking beyond traditional explanations for joining international institutions, this study identifies a new causal factor: a country's dependence network, which consists of the set of other states that control resources the country values. This study captures different dimensions of what states value through trade relations, security alliances, and shared memberships in international organizations. Using event history analysis on monthly data from 1998 to 2004, we find that dependence networks strongly affect whether and when a state signs and ratifies the ICC. Some types of ratification costs also influence state commitment, but many conventional explanations of state commitment receive little empirical support.
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One man, one vote, one time? A model of democratization in the Middle East
Lisa Blaydes & James Lo
Journal of Theoretical Politics, January 2012, Pages 110-146
Abstract:
The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate into a full-fledged 'fourth wave' of democratization? We argue that questions about the commitment of Islamic political opposition to democracy beyond a country's first free election may hinder Middle Eastern democratization. We extend Przeworski's canonical model of political liberalization as described in Democracy and the Market (1991) and find that transition to democracy is only possible under two conditions. First, uncertainty regarding the preferences of key elite actors is a necessary condition for democratic transition. Second, the repressive capacity of the state must lie above a minimum threshold. Given these conditions, democracy can occur when two types of political actors meet - regime liberalizers who prefer democracy to a narrowed dictatorship, and civil society elite who honor democratic principles. While a series of influential studies have argued that authoritarian elites block democratic transition because of their fear of the economic redistributive preferences of the median voter, this study suggests that regime liberalizers in the Middle East suspect political openings could become a vehicle for Islamists to seize power through free elections only to deny the median voter another chance to express their will.