Previous studies have established traditional causes of communal conflicts. Conversely, this study established a link between democratic processes and communal conflicts in Nigeria. Through a ...three-component model focusing on various democratic processes, several democratic flaws were identified as root causes of communal conflicts. Specifically, we found a misalignment of democratic equity principles among warring communities, which surfaced because of differences in community hierarchies, structures, and personalities. A biased distribution of democratic dividends, unequal access to competent electoral staff, and extreme bias towards opposing communities in electoral/political institutions were observed. Moreover, some aggressive- frustrated residents were easily provoked because of a lack of confidence in democratic institutions and processes. It is therefore essential to focus on fairness in democratic processes to reduce tension in areas of communal conflict.
This article develops a defence of functionalist theory of state authority, albeit one that incorporates some non-functionalist features. One way to resolve the boundary problem on functionalist ...accounts is to show that duties to comply with political institutions are directed towards other subjects of the relevant state. If individuals owe compliance towards other subjects, rather than the state itself, then special relations between a given individual and other subjects can be relied on to show why individuals have duties concerning particular states. I will argue that functionalist accounts can resolve the boundary problem by appealing to relationships of reciprocity in the way just sketched. Some citizen has a duty to comply with the particular state in which they reside, because they have a duty grounded in reciprocity directed towards other citizens to comply with institutions that provide morally required goods. By incorporating this feature of fair-play accounts-namely, by grounding particular obligations to comply in duties of reciprocity-the resulting functionalist/fair-play hybrid can resolve the boundary problem while preserving a commitment to the claim that the state's provision of morally required goods is essential in explaining its authority.
Major crises can act as critical junctures or reinforce the political status quo, depending on how citizens view the performance of central institutions. We use an interrupted time series to study ...the political effect of the enforcement of a strict confinement policy in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Specifically, we take advantage of a unique representative web‐based survey that was fielded in March and April 2020 in Western Europe to compare the political support of those who took the survey right before and right after the start of the lockdown in their country. We find that lockdowns have increased vote intentions for the party of the Prime Minister/President, trust in government and satisfaction with democracy. Furthermore, we find that, while rallying individuals around current leaders and institutions, they have had no effect on traditional left–right attitudes.
This article revisits prominent frameworks for understanding traditional political institutions which make pessimistic assessments about their compatibility with democracy. Traditional political ...institutions are often assumed to be unaccountable because they are led by undemocratic leaders who are not subject to electoral sanctioning. However, drawing on new information from the TradGov Group dataset, an expert survey on the contemporary practices of more than 1,400 ethnic groups that currently have traditional political institutions, we show that these institutions contain their own distinct mechanisms of accountability. In a majority of cases, decision-making is consensual and leaders must account for their actions in various ways. We challenge the electoral accountability framework for understanding the quality of traditional leaders’ performance, instead arguing that traditional political institutions can be compatible with democracy and even accountable to their citizens insofar as they adopt inclusive decision-making processes and their leaders have strong nonelectoral connections to the communities they represent.
Despite signs of declining press trust in many western countries, we know little about trends in press trust across the world. Based on comparative survey data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and ...European Values Study (EVS), this study looks into national levels of trust in the press and identifies factors that drive differences across societies and individuals as well as over time. Findings indicate that the widely noted decline in media trust is not a universal trend; it is true for only about half of the studied countries, with the United States experiencing the largest and most dramatic drop in trust in the press. Political trust has emerged as key factor for our understanding of trust in the press. We found robust evidence for what we called the trust nexus—the idea that trust in the news media is strongly linked to the way publics look at political institutions. The link between press trust and political trust was considerably stronger in politically polarized societies. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the relation between press trust and political trust is becoming stronger over time. We reason that the strong connection between media and political trust may be driven by a growing public sentiment against elite groups.
We hypothesize that natural resource revenues may deteriorate contract enforcement if political institutions are weak. As poor contract enforcement leads to low financial development, resource ...revenues may hinder financial development in countries with poor political institutions, but not in countries with comparatively better political institutions. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis based on within-country variation in our sample covering the period 1970–2005 and 133 countries. Our results are robust to the use of additional control variables, different samples, and alternative measures of financial development and political institutions.
The empirical literature that examines cross-national patterns of state repression seeks to discover a set of political, economic, and social conditions that are consistently associated with ...government violations of human rights. Null hypothesis significance testing is the most common way of examining the relationship between repression and concepts of interest, but we argue that it is inadequate for this goal, and has produced potentially misleading results. To remedy this deficiency in the literature we use cross-validation and random forests to determine the predictive power of measures of concepts the literature identifies as important causes of repression. We find that few of these measures are able to substantially improve the predictive power of statistical models of repression. Further, the most studied concept in the literature, democratic political institutions, predicts certain kinds of repression much more accurately than others. We argue that this is due to conceptual and operational overlap between democracy and certain kinds of state repression. Finally, we argue that the impressive performance of certain features of domestic legal systems, as well as some economic and demographic factors, justifies a stronger focus on these concepts in future studies of repression.
State capacity is a core concept in political science research, and it is widely recognized that state institutions exert considerable influence on outcomes such as economic development, civil ...conflict, democratic consolidation, and international security. Yet researchers across these fields of inquiry face common problems involved in conceptualizing and measuring state capacity. In this article, we examine these conceptual issues, identify three core dimensions of state capacity, and develop the expectation that they are mutually supporting and interlinked. We then use Bayesian latent variable analysis to estimate state capacity at the conjunction of indicators related to these dimensions. We find strong interrelationships between the three dimensions and produce a new, general-purpose measure of state capacity with demonstrated validity for use in a wide range of empirical inquiries. It is hoped that this project will provide effective guidance and tools for researchers studying the causes and consequences of state capacity.
A key finding in the literature on authoritarian regimes is that leaders frequently rely on ruling parties to stay in power, but the field lacks systematic ways to measure autocratic party strength. ...As a result, it is not clear how often ruling parties are actually strong and capable of carrying out important functions. This article demonstrates that strong ruling parties are much rarer than is typically assumed. Using a global sample of dictatorships from 1946–2008, the author shows that most ruling parties are unable to survive the death or departure of the founding leader. This is true even of many ruling parties that have been coded as leading single-party regimes. While strong parties may be key to durable authoritarianism, relatively few parties are truly strong.
Does culture have a causal effect on economic development? The data on European regions suggest that it does. Culture is measured by indicators of individual values and beliefs, such as trust and ...respect for others, and confidence in individual self determination. To isolate the exogenous variation in culture, we rely on two historical variables used as instruments: the literacy rate at the end of the 19th century, and the political institutions in place over the past several centuries. The political and social history of Europe provides a rich source of variation in these two variables at a regional level. The exogenous component of culture due to history is strongly correlated with current regional economic development, after controlling for contemporaneous education, urbanization rates around 1850, and national effects.
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