Why do some countries emerge from civil war more democratic than when they entered into it, while others remain staunchly autocratic? Observers widely depict internal conflict as a pathway to ...autocracy or state failure, but in fact there is variation in post-civil war regimes. Conventional accounts focus on war outcomes and international peacebuilding, but Huang suggests that postwar regimes have wartime origins, notably in how rebel groups interact with ordinary people as part of war-making. War can have mobilizing effects when rebels engage extensively with civilian populations, catalyzing a bottom-up force for change toward greater political rights. Politics after civil war does not emerge from a blank slate, but reflects the war's institutional and social legacies. The Wartime Origins of Democratization explores these ideas through an original dataset of rebel governance and rigorous comparative case analysis. The findings have far-reaching implications for understanding wartime political orders, statebuilding, and international peacebuilding.
Researchers seeking to establish causal relationships frequently control for variables on the purported causal pathway, checking whether the original treatment effect then disappears. Unfortunately, ...this common approach may lead to biased estimates. In this article, we show that the bias can be avoided by focusing on a quantity of interest called the controlled direct effect. Under certain conditions, the controlled direct effect enables researchers to rule out competing explanations—an important objective for political scientists. To estimate the controlled direct effect without bias, we describe an easy-to-implement estimation strategy from the biostatistics literature. We extend this approach by deriving a consistent variance estimator and demonstrating how to conduct a sensitivity analysis. Two examples—one on ethnic fractionalization’s effect on civil war and one on the impact of historical plough use on contemporary female political participation—illustrate the framework and methodology.
Retrospective voting studies typically examine policies where the public has common interests. By contrast, climate policy has broad public support but concentrated opposition in communities where ...costs are imposed. This spatial distribution of weak supporters and strong local opponents mirrors opposition to other policies with diffuse public benefits and concentrated local costs. I use a natural experiment to investigate whether citizens living in proximity to wind energy projects retrospectively punished an incumbent government because of its climate policy. Using both fixed effects and instrumental variable estimators, I identify electoral losses for the incumbent party ranging from 4 to 10%, with the effect persisting 3 km from wind turbines. There is also evidence that voters are informed, only punishing the government responsible for the policy. I conclude that the spatial distribution of citizens' policy preferences can affect democratic accountability through 'spatially distorted signalling', which can exacerbate political barriers to addressing climate change.
This study seeks to determine whether subjects in two dynamic process tracing experiments react differently to information related to a candidate’s competence when that candidate is a woman, vs. when ...he is a man. I find that subjects evaluate a candidate whose competence is in doubt less favorably, and are less likely to vote for the candidate, when she is a woman. In general, evaluations of women seem to be influenced much more by information related to their competence than are evaluations of men. I also find that competence as portrayed by the composition of a candidate’s facial features does not alter this relationship. My findings suggest that gender-based stereotypes may have an indirect effect on candidate evaluations and vote choice by influencing how voters react to information about them.
The study of international relations (IR) has paid increasing attention over the last decade or so to the politics of memory, trauma, shame, but to a less extent to the political instrumentalization ...of positive experiences of the past. Indeed, IR theory rarely engaged the concept of nostalgia and its place within foreign policy making despite its potential for providing a powerful theoretical lens to explain hegemonic power dynamics. Sitting at the intersection of time and space, of time and affect, and of past and present, political nostalgia enables state leaders to move back and forth in time bringing back the past not for the past's sake but for the promise of a prosperous future. This article examines Chinese government's nostalgic borrowings from the Ancient Silk Road in order to associate Xi Jinping's new grand strategy, the New Silk Road to notions of inclusivity and prosperity. Reviving stories about fifteenth-century Chinese admiral Zheng He and reconstructing the history of his maritime navigations through stories and images of camel caravans crossing sand dunes are illustrations of political nostalgia.
In this book, Kevin M. Cherry compares the views of Plato and Aristotle about the practice, study and, above all, the purpose of politics. The first scholar to place Aristotle's Politics in sustained ...dialogue with Plato's Statesman, Cherry argues that Aristotle rejects the view of politics advanced by Plato's Eleatic Stranger, contrasting them on topics such as the proper categorization of regimes, the usefulness and limitations of the rule of law, and the proper understanding of phronēsis. The various differences between their respective political philosophies, however, reflect a more fundamental difference in how they view the relationship of human beings to the natural world around them. Reading the Politics in light of the Statesman sheds new light on Aristotle's political theory and provides a better understanding of Aristotle's criticism of Socrates. Most importantly, it highlights an enduring and important question: should politics have as its primary purpose the preservation of life, or should it pursue the higher good of living well?
The recent increase in partisan media has generated interest in whether such outlets polarize viewers. I draw on theories of motivated reasoning to explain why partisan media polarize viewers, why ...these programs affect some viewers much more strongly than others, and how long these effects endure. Using a series of original experiments, I find strong support for my theoretical expectations, including the argument that these effects can still be detected several days postexposure. My results demonstrate that partisan media polarize the electorate by taking relatively extreme citizens and making them even more extreme. Though only a narrow segment of the public watches partisan media programs, partisan media's effects extend much more broadly throughout the political arena.
Does every increase in the power of government entail a loss of liberty for the people? James H. Read examines how four key Founders--James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and Thomas ...Jefferson--wrestled with this question during the first two decades of the American Republic.
Power versus Liberty reconstructs a four-way conversation--sometimes respectful, sometimes shrill--that touched on the most important issues facing the new nation: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, federal authority versus states' rights, freedom of the press, the controversial Bank of the United States, the relation between nationalism and democracy, and the elusive meaning of "the consent of the governed."
Each of the men whose thought Read considers differed on these key questions. Jefferson believed that every increase in the power of government came at the expense of liberty: energetic governments, he insisted, are always oppressive. Madison believed that this view was too simple, that liberty can be threatened either by too much or too little governmental power. Hamilton and Wilson likewise rejected the Jeffersonian view of power and liberty but disagreed with Madison and with each other.
The question of how to reconcile energetic government with the liberty of citizens is as timely today as it was in the first decades of the Republic. It pervades our political discourse and colors our readings of events from the confrontation at Waco to the Oklahoma City bombing to Congressional debate over how to spend the government surplus. While the rhetoric of both major political parties seems to posit a direct relationship between the size of our government and the scope of our political freedoms, the debates of Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson confound such simple dichotomies. As Read concludes, the relation between power and liberty is inherently complex.
Higher education is a central institution in U.S. democracy. In the 2010s, however, many states that spent previous decades building up their higher education systems began to tear them down. Growing ...hostility toward higher education reflected changing social forces that remade the politics of U.S. higher education. The political Right became increasingly reliant on angry white voters as higher education became more racially diverse. The Republican party became more closely connected to extremely wealthy donors as higher education became more costly. In Wrecked , Barrett J. Taylor shows how these social changes set a collision course for the Right and higher education. These attacks fed a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization, which encompassed stark divestment from higher education but was primarily characterized by an attack on the institution’s social foundation of public trust. In response to these attacks, higher education officials have offered a series of partial defenses that helped higher education to cope in the short-term but did nothing to defend the institution itself against the long-term threat of declining public trust. The failure to address underlying issues of mistrust allowed conflict to escalate to the point at which many states are now wrecking their public higher education systems. Wrecked offers a unique and compelling perspective linking higher education policymaking to broader social and political forces acting in the twenty-first century.
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