Spreading Some Democracy
Arms Technology and the Coercive Imbalance Outside Western Europe
Jacob Gerner Hariri & Asger Mose Wingender
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many scholars consider the bargaining power between ruler and society to be one of the most important determinants of a country’s political regime and institutions. The relative bargaining power is shaped by arms technology and societal modernization: arms tend to strengthen rulers, and modernization tends to strengthen society. We document that rulers outside of Western Europe were strengthened by advanced arms technology at a time when societies were weakly modernized and political demands limited. We dub this ’the coercive imbalance’ and argue that it has shaped the state-society bargain outside Western Europe since at least 1850. We show that the coercive imbalance arose because arms diffuse faster than civilian technology. We then use OLS, system GMM, and 2SLS to document that the adoption of advanced arms technology at an early stage of societal modernization is strongly associated with limited democracy, poor bureaucracy, and corruption.
International Rewards for Gender Equality Reforms in Autocracies
Sarah Sunn Bush, Daniela Donno & Pär Zetterberg
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do international audiences perceive, and respond to, gender equality reforms in autocracies? For autocrats, the post-Cold War rewards associated with democracy create incentives to make reforms that will be viewed as democratic but not threaten their political survival. We theorize women’s rights as one such policy area, contrasting it with more politically costly reforms to increase electoral competition. A conjoint survey experiment with development and democracy promotion professionals demonstrates how autocracies enhance their reputations and prospects for foreign aid using this strategy. While increasing electoral competition significantly improves perceived democracy and support for aid, increasing women’s economic rights is also highly effective. Gender quotas exhibit a significant (though smaller) effect on perceived democracy. A follow-up survey of the public and elite interviews replicate and contextualize the findings. Relevant international elites espouse a broad, egalitarian conception of democracy, and autocrats accordingly enjoy considerable leeway in how to burnish their reputations.
The Urban Origins of Rebellion
Gary Uzonyi & Ore Koren
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
The emphasis in recent decades on weak state capacity as an explanation of civil war detracts from an important fact: some of the deadliest and most protracted rebellions since WWII arose not where the state was weak, but rather in areas of significant state power. This study challenges the predominance-of-peripheral-conflict paradigm by disentangling rebel formation from civil war onset and emphasizing the urban origins of numerous rebel groups. Quantitative analyses show that three group types -- military-, social interest-, and political party-based groups -- are far more likely to form in large cities, especially the capital, and far less likely to form in the rural countryside. Case studies then illustrate the constraints and opportunities nascent rebel groups of each type face. This study advances the field’s understanding of a surprisingly large number of violent rebellions that current mainstream approaches and the emphasis on weak states and conflict opportunities cannot effectively explain.
Less Human Than Human: Threat, Language, and Relative Dehumanization
Shane Singh & Jaroslav Tir
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A government's decision to communicate in a native tongue rather than a commonly used and understood but non-native language can prompt perception through an ethnically-tinted lens. While native-language communication is commonplace and typically benign, we argue that conveying a threat posed by an outgroup in a native tongue can trigger dehumanizing attitudes. We conducted a pre-registered survey experiment focusing on attitudes toward Muslim and Chinese people in India to test our expectations. In our two-stage design, we randomly assigned respondents to a survey language (Hindi or English) and, after that, to threat-provoking or control conditions. While Muslims and China are associated with recent violence against India, the government has routinely portrayed only the former as threatening. Likely due to this divergence, Hindi language assignment alone triggers Muslim dehumanization. Indians' more innocuous views of Chinese are responsive to exogenously-induced threat, particularly when conveyed in Hindi.
Reducing Prejudice and Support for Religious Nationalism Through Conversations on WhatsApp
Rajeshwari Majumdar
NYU Working Paper, September 2023
Abstract:
Can a series of online conversations with a marginalized outgroup member improve majority group members’ attitudes about that outgroup? While the intergroup contact literature provides (mixed) insights about the effects of extended interactions between groups, less is known about how relatively short and casual interactions may play out in highly polarized settings. In an experiment in India, I bring together Hindus and Muslims for five days of conversations on WhatsApp, a popular messaging platform, to investigate the extent to which chatting with a Muslim about randomly assigned discussion prompts affects Hindus’ perceptions of Muslims and approval for mainstream religious nationalist statements. I find that intergroup conversations greatly reduce prejudice against Muslims and approval for religious nationalist statements at least two to three weeks post-conversation. Intergroup conversations about non-political issues are especially effective at reducing prejudice, while conversations about politics substantially decrease support for religious nationalism. I further show how political conversations and non-political conversations affect attitudes through distinct mechanisms.
Repression, backlash, and the duration of protests in Africa
Jacob Lewis & Brandon Ives
Journal of Peace Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates the relationship between recent repression of protest and the duration of future protests. A rich scholarship examines how repression impacts dissent, highlighting dissent dimensions such as the number of future events and violent escalation. Less examined is another dimension of dissent -- protest duration. We hypothesize that recent repression of protests is pivotal for longer duration of future protest events. Our expectation stems from a participant type mechanism. Recent repression of protest may generate more societal grievances but also increase protesting risks. A simultaneous jump in grievances and risks may increase the number of people protesting who are also risk-acceptant and willing to protest for longer durations. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project data and hierarchal negative binomial models are used to estimate the association between recent repression of protest and subsequent protest duration. Compared to having none of the most recent three protests repressed, a protest in a location where the last three protests were repressed has a substantively longer duration. The results are consistent with the participant type mechanism and existing literature on repression’s heterogeneous effects on individuals.
Shocking resilience? Effects of extreme events on constitutional compliance
Abishek Choutagunta, Jerg Gutmann & Stefan Voigt
Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is often argued that governments take advantage of extreme events to expand their power to the detriment of the political opposition and citizens at large. Violations of constitutional constraints are a clear indication of such opportunistic behaviour. We study whether natural disasters, conflicts and other extreme events systematically diminish governments' compliance with constitutional constraints. Our results indicate that governments are most likely to overstep their competences or disregard their responsibilities during civil conflicts, at the onset of international sanctions or following successful coups d’état. Interestingly, Cold War interventions by the United States that installed or supported a political leader led to a decrease in constitutional compliance in the target country, whereas Soviet interventions had no such effect. In contrast, banking crises and natural disasters, which threaten societies at large, but not necessarily the political elite, do not cause a significant decline in constitutional compliance.
Communism and patricide: Collectivization and domestic violence in 1960s China
Shuo Chen, Yaohui Peng & Danli Wang
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of collectivization on patricide in China during the Cultural Revolution. From 1955 to 1957, nearly 96 per cent of farmers were organized into communes. Consequently, fathers lost control over family wealth. We propose that this shift decreased fathers’ bargaining power over their adult sons, which might increase family conflicts. On the basis of a novel dataset, we find that the speed of collectivization significantly increased patricide, and the result is robust by employing ruggedness to instrumenting for the speed of collectivization. Our study extends the literature on intra-household bargaining from couples to intergenerational relationships.
Rethinking International Order in Early Modern Europe: Evidence from Courtly Ceremonial
Quentin Bruneau
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Once the object of consensus, every aspect of the traditional account of early modern Europe as an anarchic system of sovereign states is now debated -- from the existence of sovereign states to the notion of anarchy, and even the European limits of that system. In the context of these disagreements, I develop a new account of international order in early modern Europe grounded in the perceptions of historical actors. I first argue that this can be achieved by studying the tools that practitioners relied on to describe and organize political authority in the world. I subsequently delve into a common, though seldom-studied, tool developed by a group of practitioners known as masters of ceremonies: courtly ceremonial (or ius praecedentiae). I make three substantive claims. First, the political authorities identified in manuals on courtly ceremonial were primarily crowns and republics, but in the later eighteenth century, all eventually came to be described as “states.” Second, all political authorities stood in a hierarchy determined by a specific set of criteria I identify, but new criteria -- power and sovereignty -- emerged over the course of the eighteenth century. Third, the scope of international order was not self-evident, and it certainly did not have clear “European” limits in the eyes of masters of ceremonies; non-European political authorities could easily be integrated into their orders of precedence. Ultimately, I suggest that IR scholars should reconsider why they study early modern Europe and how they study international orders.
A theory of the city-state: The rise and decline of the rule of law in Medieval Italy
Ennio Piano
Kyklos, forthcoming
Abstract:
We leverage theoretical insights from political economy to study several aspects of the institutional development of the Italian city-states during the High Middle Ages (1000–1350). A society's regime type depends on its domestic balance of power. When the ruled can credibly threaten to punish a rogue ruler, the rule of law prevails. If the ruler can easily overpower the ruled, despotism results instead. The transition from one regime to the other results when exogenous shocks and endogenous dynamics disturb the prevailing balance of power. This framework accounts for the rise and eventual decline of rule of law regimes in the towns of central and northern Italy between the 10th and 14th centuries.
Law, human capital, and the emergence of free city-states in medieval Italy
Marianna Belloc, Francesco Drago & Roberto Galbiati European
European Journal of Law and Economics, October 2023, Pages 199–223
Abstract:
This paper considers how the foundation of the first universities in Italy affected the emergence of free city-states (the communes) in the period 1000–1300 CE. Exploiting a panel dataset of 121 cities, we show that the time variant distance of the sample cities to their closest university is inversely correlated with the probability of their transition to communal institutions. Our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the medieval universities provided the useful juridical knowledge and skills for building legal capacity and developing communal institutions.
Rebel Group Substitutes and Peace Agreement Amnesties
Matthew Hauenstein
Journal of Politics, October 2023, Pages 1487-1500
Abstract:
Why do governments grant amnesties to former rebels after civil wars? Scholars argue that governments use amnesties during negotiations to signal commitment to peace or prevent spoiling by rebel leaders. However, other reforms are stronger signals of commitment than amnesties, and rebel leaders are almost never prosecuted following comprehensive peace agreements, with or without amnesty. Thus, amnesties do not prevent leaders from undermining the peace. Instead, I argue that amnesties protect rank and file rebels from postwar prosecution. When there are multiple competing rebel groups, rebel foot soldiers can use the threat of exit to force their leaders to negotiate amnesties and ensure they are implemented. Using data on peace agreement provisions and implementation, coupled with a new measure of similar rebel groups, I show that governments are more likely to grant amnesties when faced with multiple similar rebel groups. Finally, I find that implementing amnesties prevents war recurrence when there are substitute groups but does nothing without them.