Stated well
Being There Is Half the Battle: Group Inclusion, Constitution-Writing, and Democracy
Todd Eisenstadt & Tofigh Maboudi
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using an original data set assessing the effect of the 195 new constitutions worldwide over the past 40 years on levels of democracy, this article argues that when popular participation and group inclusion are both considered, inclusion is what matters. After showing that group inclusion generates more improvements in levels of democracy than mere participation in our data set of implemented constitutions, we address some of the prominent cases of constitution-writing failure that occur when individual participation is valued more highly than group inclusion. The article shows that even after unprecedented waves of popular participation through social media feedback (Egypt and Iceland) and focus groups and workshops (Chile), participation alone cannot generate constitutions that improve levels of democracy, or, sometimes, even the very promulgation of new constitutions. Indeed, using these cases as illustrations, we show how participation without inclusion is doomed to failure. We then show that high inclusion cases, even if they involve low participation (such as Tunisia 2014 and Colombia 1991), do generate democracy improvements.
What Were the Consequences of Decolonization?
Alexander Lee & Jack Paine
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extensive research suggests that European rule negatively affected political and economic development in their colonies. But did outcomes improve after colonial rule ended? Studying post–World War II independence cases, we statistically examine consequences of postwar decolonization — which includes both colonial autonomy and independence — for democracy, internal conflict, government revenue growth, and economic growth using two-way fixed-effects models. We find that democracy levels increased sharply as colonies gained internal autonomy in the period immediately before their independence. However, conflict, revenue growth, and economic growth did not systematically differ before and after independence. Accounting for varieties of colonial institutions or for endogenous independence timing produces similar results. Except for democratic gains, the overall findings — juxtaposed with existing research — suggest that, although European colonial empires created deleterious long-term effects, decolonization exhibited less pronounced political consequences than sometimes thought.
Social Mobility and Democratic Attitudes: Evidence From Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa
Christian Houle & Michael Miller
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does intergenerational social mobility affect support for democracy? Although a large literature examines how personal income and inequality influence regime change and democratic attitudes, there has been little work on social mobility. We employ individual level data from the Afrobarometer and Latinobarometer, covering 33 democracies and nondemocracies, to provide the first analysis of how personal experiences of intergenerational mobility influence support for democracy. We find that mobility predicts democratic attitudes, even controlling for education and current economic situation. We also show that the effect does not run through preferences for redistribution. We instead propose two alternative mechanisms. First, individuals living in democracies credit (or blame) the regime when they experience mobility. Second, upward mobility transforms a range of values, such as personal autonomy and trust, that render individuals more supportive of democracy. Our results present a warning for democracies facing steadily declining social mobility, including the United States.
Fuel Subsidies Limit Democratization: Evidence from a Global Sample, 1990–2014
Matthew Fails
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Oil wealth tends to impede democracy, but scholars disagree about both why and under what conditions. This note helps answer these questions by evaluating the field's foundational theory of the rentier state, which claims that oil wealth finances generous societal benefits that reduce citizens’ demands for representation and hinder the emergence of democratic regimes. I create a new measure of such benefits, focusing specifically on the size of domestic gasoline subsidies in dollars per capita. I then use a global sample from 1990 through 2014 to demonstrate that greater spending on these subsidies significantly reduces the likelihood of a transition toward democracy. The impact on democratization is as consequential in practical terms as are large increases in the rate of economic growth. Moreover, including the measure of fuel subsidies helps account for the autocratic effect of oil income. I conclude by highlighting how this fuel subsidy data can shed light on a number of other political economy questions.
Redistributive Political Transitions: Minority Rule and Liberation Wars in Colonial Africa
Jack Paine
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do class divisions and fear of redistribution impede political transitions? This article argues that tensions over economic redistribution in European settler colonies caused resisted enfranchisement and liberation wars in colonial Africa. It offers three main contributions. First, it identifies key scope conditions for redistributive transition models: in African settler colonies, the European elite monopolized the best agricultural land and could only secure their economic advantages by repressing majority rule — also incentivizing liberation wars. Second, it exploits a novel research design to assess redistributive theories. Statistical evidence from Africa during the decolonization era demonstrates that larger European settler population shares covary with smaller franchises and with more frequent colonial liberation wars. To account for the endogeneity of European settlement, the article introduces an instrument that measures climatic and other land suitability factors that affected where Europeans could settle. Third, it explains divergent decolonization paths.
Group inequality and the severity of civil conflict
John Huber & Laura Mayoral
Journal of Economic Growth, March 2019, Pages 1–41
Abstract:
Civil conflicts, which have been much more prevalent than inter-state conflicts over the last fifty years, vary enormously in their intensity, with some causing millions of deaths and some far fewer. The central goal of this paper is to test an argument from previous theoretical research that high inequality within an ethnic group can make inter-ethnic conflict more violent because such inequality decreases the opportunity cost to poor group members of fighting, and also decreases the opportunity cost to rich group members of funding the conflict. To test this argument, we create a new data set that uses individual-level surveys to measure inequality within ethnic groups. The analysis using these data provide strong evidence for the importance of within-group inequality, and thus underscores the value of focusing on the capacity of groups to fight if one wishes to limit the destruction of civil conflicts.
Do voters dislike liberalizing reforms? New evidence using data on satisfaction with democracy
Niclas Berggren & Christian Bjørnskov
Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. Using panel data from 30 European countries in the period 1993–2015, we test the hypothesis that such reforms have led to voter dissatisfaction with democracy, since, it is argued, they have been undertaken in a non-transparent way, often during crises, and they have entailed detrimental consequences. The reform measures are constructed as distinct changes in four policy/institutional areas: government size, the rule of law, market openness, and regulation. Our results indicate that while reforms of government size are not robustly related to satisfaction with democracy, reforms of the other three kinds are – and in a way that runs counter to anti-liberalization claims. Reforms that reduce economic freedom are generally related to satisfaction with democracy in a negative way, while reforms that increase economic freedom are associated positively with satisfaction with democracy.
Domestic Demand for Human Rights: Free Speech and the Freedom-Security Trade-Off
Nick Dietrich & Charles Crabtree
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do citizens support violations of their own rights? We know a good deal about why governments sometimes restrict access to information and political participation through censorship, repression, or forced disappearances. But we know little about why citizens sometimes support these government encroachments on their own freedoms. We test one conventional explanation for this phenomenon — that individuals trade freedom for security — by conducting a survey experiment that examines public support for limits on freedom of speech. Our results suggest that external threats do, in fact, increase the willingness of citizens to accept curtailments of their right to free speech. They provide strong evidence that citizens respond to risk with an increased desire for security, even when that security comes at the expense of their individual freedoms. This finding suggests a research agenda examining the interactions between governance and threat perception, including how states manipulate demand for human rights in practice, how citizens evaluate threats to security in the context of conflicting information, and how fluctuating demand for rights influences the dissent-repression nexus.
Why Remittances Are a Political Blessing and Not a Curse
David Bearce & Seungbin Park
Studies in Comparative International Development, March 2019, Pages 164–184
Abstract:
This paper reconsiders the proposition that remittances act as a political curse by reducing the poor’s demand for economic redistribution. With a newer democratization model focused on the demand for income protection from the rising groups in society, remittances may instead function as a political blessing. Since remittances increase income not only for the middle-class citizens that receive most of them, but also for the merchant and working classes that do not receive them per the multiplier effect, remittances should increase the demand for political rights to protect the economic assets of these societal groups. Using an error correction model with both country and year fixed effects, it reports a significant positive relationship between the change in democracy and net remittance inflows as a share of GDP using three different operational measures for democracy. It also reports results consistent with the underlying causal argument, showing how remittances increase national income and societal economic freedom.
History and Ethnic Conflict: Does Precolonial Centralization Matter?
Subhasish Ray
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does the trajectory of precolonial political institutions affect contemporary ethnic conflict? I argue that ethnic groups that were governed by centralized political institutions in the precolonial period are more likely to be associated with armed conflict in the present, but that colonial state-building strategies mediate this relationship. Ethnic groups that experienced precolonial centralization were likely to be underrecruited to the top ranks of colonial security forces prior to independence. This, in turn, increased the chances that those groups would be excluded from the first postindependence regime and hence become involved in armed conflict against the state in the long run. Conversely, colonial security forces tended to overrecruit ethnic groups that did not experience precolonial centralization. This made those groups more likely to become part of the first postindependence regime and less likely to enter into armed conflict against the state in the long run. I provide robust evidence for this pathway by using a self-collected dataset on ethnic groups in ex-British colonies. The findings underscore how contemporary ethnic conflict is embedded in longer-term historical state-building processes in hitherto unappreciated ways.
Natural Resource Exploitation and Sexual Violence by Rebel Groups
Beth Elise Whitaker, James Igoe Walsh & Justin Conrad
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Sexual violence in wartime is not inevitable, and its prevalence varies substantially among armed groups and over time. This study investigates how the financing of rebel organizations influences their incentives and capacities to restrain sexual violence. We argue that the degree to which rebels rely on outsiders to profit from natural resources influences the frequency with which they commit acts of sexual violence. Rebel movements that extort producers of natural resources are less reliant on the local population and more willing to risk alienating them by engaging in sexual violence. By contrast, smuggling of natural resources requires active cooperation with a broad network of criminals and civilians outside of the rebel organization’s control. The need to sustain such cooperation provides rebels with an incentive to curtail widespread sexual violence. Using a new data set that codes rebel groups’ natural resource exploitation strategies, we find empirical support for our expectations.
Diversionary Rebel Violence in Territorial Civil War
Helge Holtermann
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Much of the violence carried out by rebels seeking secession or territorial autonomy occurs within the area under dispute. Still, territory-seeking rebels sometimes attack civilians in other parts of the country. By developing a diversionary theory of violence, this article helps explain why and when they do so. Rebels in territorial disputes aim to keep the government's forces out of their claimed homeland. Attacking civilians outside of the disputed area may help achieve this aim because it pushes the government to disperse its forces and commit resources to protection. Incentives for such diversionary violence are likely to prove particularly high during military offensives, when the government seeks to concentrate its forces in the contested area. I first assess the theory through a quantitative analysis of territorial conflicts worldwide between 1989 and 2015. Second, I conduct a case study of the Sri Lankan Eelam Wars, combining process-tracing and a quantitative test using new events data. I find that rebels do tend to escalate violence outside their claimed territory during government offensives and that diversion is an important causal mechanism.
Performative State-Formation in the Early American Republic
Isaac Ariail Reed
American Sociological Review, April 2019, Pages 334-367
Abstract:
How do proto-state organizations achieve an initial accumulation of power, such that they are in a position to grow (or shrink) as an organization, maintain their prestige (or lose it), and be viewed, by elite and populace, as something real and consequential that can be argued about, supported, or attacked? This article argues that state-formation has a performative dimension, in which the publicity of acts of violence, coercion, and negotiation made by agents of the proto-state, and the variable interpretation of these acts, are paramount to the state’s success (or failure) and developing character. In the model developed here, agents of a would-be state act in response to emergencies, and when public interpretations of those actions assign their character and effectiveness to “the state,” the state is performed into being. In particular, public performance solves, in part, agency problems obtaining between state rulers and their staff and elite allies. The formation of the federal government in the early American republic (1783 to 1801), whose success is insufficiently accounted for by extant theory, provides an opportunity to develop a model of the performative dimension of state-formation.