Simple Regimes
Networks of coercion: Military ties and civilian leadership challenges in China
Tyler Jost & Daniel Mattingly
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Civilian-led coups are one of the most common routes to losing power in autocracies. How do authoritarian leaders secure themselves from civilian leadership challenges? We argue that autocrats differentiate civilian rivals in part by their social ties to the military. To reduce the threat of coups, leaders buy off civilians with strong military ties by promoting them to lower-tier institutions -- but isolate these same civilians by denying them promotion to higher-tier institutions that afford opportunities to challenge the leader. We introduce an original data set of over 117,000 postings of 34,140 Chinese military officers and map ties between the entire civilian and military elite between 1927 and 2014. We find that civilian leaders with strong ties to the military improve prospects for promotion to the Central Committee, but degrade the likelihood of promotion to the apex Politburo Standing Committee, particularly for civilians outside the leader's social network.
Call Me By Your Name: The Impacts of American Human Rights Violations in Authoritarian States
Jamie Gruffydd-Jones
British Journal of Political Science, March 2025
Abstract:
When the world’s leading human rights advocates violate international norms, how does this affect support for those norms around the world? Rather than diffusing norm breaking across borders, I argue that authoritarian states’ propaganda about liberal states’ violations may increase the salience of human rights norms in places where those norms are normally censored. Focusing on American racial discrimination, I find that the Chinese Communist Party publicizes American human rights violations on to its citizens for strategic political reasons. Through two survey experiments I show that while exposure to news about American discrimination does provide substantial propaganda benefits to the regime, it also makes Chinese respondents more supportive of minority rights and more critical of their own country’s respect for those rights. The study shows how prominent violations of international norms may be an underappreciated means of strengthening global public support for those norms.
Corruption and extremism
Attila Gáspár et al.
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper shows that corruption generates extremism, but mainly on the opposition side. While corruption hurts all citizens, only voters on the minority side may desire to switch to a more extreme representative when they perceive a more corrupt political system. In our model, campaigning on a corruption scandal against the incumbent gives a higher winning probability for the opposition politician but simultaneously reduces expected future rents from office. As extremist politicians normally are less likely to win against a moderate opponent, they have a stronger incentive to take a stand against corruption. Given that the side of the political minority has a lower chance of having their representative elected to office, they face a smaller opportunity cost of voting for extremists. Our main result is that minorities are more likely to react to corruption with more extremism. We provide causal evidence for this novel asymmetric prediction from Indonesia and Brazil.
Ideology and Revolution in Civil Wars: The “Marxist Paradox”
Laia Balcells & Stathis Kalyvas
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Powered by Marxist ideology, Revolutionary Socialist (RS) armed groups launched formidable challenges against incumbent regimes during the historical era of the Cold War. As both transformational and transnational actors, they were optimally positioned to execute a revolutionary war doctrine that called for a highly integrated political and military organization that could weave a dense web of interactions with civilian populations. Civil wars featuring RS rebels tended to be robust insurgencies, that is, irregular wars that lasted longer and produced more battlefield fatalities compared to other civil wars. However, this superior capacity failed to translate into a higher rate of victories—hence, a “Marxist Paradox.” By posing a credible threat, RS rebellions engendered equally powerful regime counter-mobilizations. We show how ideology shaped armed conflict in a particular world-historical time and point to implications for the current state of civil conflict.
The Written Word and the Development of the State in China and Europe
Cheng Cheng, David Stasavage & Yuhua Wang
NYU Working Paper, May 2025
Abstract:
State formation depends not only on demand-side factors, such as military competition, but also on the supply of ideas and techniques in a society. Using prefecture-level data from China’s Tang (618–906 CE) and Northern Song (960–1127 CE) dynasties, we demonstrate how woodblock printing, developed by Buddhists in competition with Taoists and Confucians, broadened access to the written word. This development facilitated the expansion of the Imperial Examination system and the construction of a more centralized state bureaucracy. In contrast, the Catholic Church’s religious monopoly in Medieval Western Europe curtailed incentives for developing similar technologies, narrowing the talent pool for bureaucratic state-building. This divergence highlights the importance of examining how social actors outside the state can sometimes drive technological innovations critical to state formation.
Gulags, crime, and elite violence: Origins and consequences of the Russian mafia
Jakub Lonsky
Journal of Public Economics, June 2025
Abstract:
This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). Using a unique web scraped dataset containing detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders, I first show that the Russian mafia originated in the Soviet Gulag, and could be found near the camps’ initial locations throughout the 1990s Russia. Then, using an instrumental variable approach that exploits the proximity of the Russian mafia to the camps, I show that Russian communities with mafia presence in the 1990s experienced a dramatic rise in crime driven by elite violence which erupted shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The surge in violence was indiscriminate with respect to the victim type. Furthermore, the effect of mafia presence on elite violence was smaller in places where either all or none of the vory were ethnic Russians, suggesting some degree of ethnic conflict within the criminal organization itself.
The Forsaken Road: Reassessing Living Standards Following the Cuban Revolution and the American Embargo
João Pedro Bastos, Vincent Geloso & Jamie Bologna Pavlik
Texas Tech University Working Paper, April 2025
Abstract:
We investigate the causal effects of the 1959 Cuban Revolution on income using a synthetic control approach. We employ a novel dataset with revised GDP estimates that do not rely on the regime's self-reported statistics. We also analyze GDP estimates net of aid coming from the Soviet Union. Our identification strategy allows us to separate the direct effects of the revolution from the diplomatic events that ensued. By overcoming concerns that Cuban GDP statistics are inflated either by the regime's direct manipulation or by Soviet aid, we identify a large decline in Cuban GDP per-capita relative to its counterfactual. The decline is larger when accounting for Soviet aid. The embargo only accounts for a minor share of Cuba's under-performance relative to the counterfactual. Our results hold after being subjected to multiple robustness checks and lead to the conclusion that the Revolution was the main driver of the inferior economic path Cuba has followed since 1959.
The Reign of the Saints: Origins of the Rule of Law
Tegan Truitt
George Mason University Working Paper, February 2025
Abstract:
Why would political elites submit themselves to the legal jurisdiction of courts who lack the capacity to coercively enforce their judgments? I answer this question by theorizing the demand side of canon law. In the 11th century, noble families were driven to intermarry by a change in ecclesiastical incest law. The resulting blurring of alliance boundaries made direct negotiation of conflict riskier, and drove nobles to seek impartial third-party governance. Clerical elites were increasingly well-positioned to supply this governance. The church attained political supremacy without a monopoly on violence by satisfying the growing secular demand for law.
The Precolonial Origins of African Nationalism
Vladimir Chlouba
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
What explains the degree of national attachment expressed by contemporary Africans? Using historical data on early African statehood and survey responses from across the continent, I show that national identification among contemporary Africans was jointly shaped by the socialization efforts of precolonial rulers and the form of colonial rule employed by European administrators. In areas where precolonial rulers socialized their subjects to a common identity and colonial bureaucrats subsequently ruled through ethnic intermediaries, ethnic allegiance still trumps national identity because ethnic institutions continue to mediate the relationship between local communities and the state. In contrast, where policies of direct rule displaced precolonial rulers and formerly centralized groups lost political autonomy, the legacy of early statehood frequently produced the opposite outcome: interethnic cohesion. Departing from classical explanations that emphasize (post)colonial experiences, the findings advance our understanding of contemporary African nationalism.
Labor intensity, market structure, and the effect of economic activities on civil conflict
Benjamin Crost, Joseph Felter & Yoko Yamasaki
Journal of Development Economics, May 2025
Abstract:
Some types of economic activities exacerbate civil conflict while others mitigate it, but there is little systematic evidence on how characteristics of an activity determine its effect on conflict. We provide such evidence by analyzing how movements in the prices of 26 agricultural commodities, comprising 84 percent of total agricultural output, affect conflict in the Philippines. We find that increases in the value of labor-intensive commodities lead to larger reductions (or smaller increases) in conflict, consistent with an opportunity cost mechanism. Increases in the value of commodities produced by a small number of large farms lead to larger increases (or smaller reductions) in conflict, consistent with the hypothesis that concentrated markets are more easily taxed by armed groups. Our approach allows us to quantify the trade-off between different characteristics of an economic activity, providing guidelines on the types of activities a conflict-sensitive development strategy can safely promote.