Elites face a daunting coordination problem when contemplating a coup. Citizens, who desire political reform, face a similar coordination problem when contemplating protest. Since elites and citizens ...interact with the same leadership, these coordination problems are invariably linked. We develop a model which exploits this link to isolate an informational mechanism connecting popular protests and coups. Protests aggregate citizen information and provide elites with a public signal which helps them coordinate in a coup. We show that elites “overreact” to protest as a consequence of its publicity, and we provide a microfounded explanation as to why elites use protests to facilitate coordination. Our model also suggests that protests in countries with media freedom better facilitate elite coordination. To test this, we examine how media freedom affects the relationship between protests and coups. The empirical analysis shows the effect of protests on coups is exacerbated in countries where media is free.
State repression is a common tool used by autocrats, and to understand how the implementation of repression unfolds, I develop a theory with two key features. First, uncertainty resulting from ...political instability creates an important agency problem between a leader and members of the repressive apparatus. As a consequence of this agency problem, leaders must compensate the repressive apparatus for conducting repression, thus affecting leaders’ net benefit of retaining power. Second, political instability and the use of repression comprise an endogenous process that depends on a coordination dynamic between civilians. I show that the agency relationship I highlight implies that political institutions designed to alleviate problems associated with political instability can actually lead to higher levels of repression. Finally, I establish that leaders wanting to implement repression prefer to target civilians who are concentrated (geographically, economically, or socially) and that the relationship with the capacity to resist is more nuanced due to novel selection effects.
The potential breakdown of political order stresses the importance of strategic challenges that surface during transitions of power. To understand these challenges, I take a social contract ...perspective, developing a theoretical framework that highlights the strategic incentives underlying political sovereignty. I show that the stability of political order essentially requires a ruler to consent to her own removal, giving rise to a key incentive condition—the sovereignty constraint. Analysis of the sovereignty constraint uncovers a trade-off between political order and economic inequality and identifies the socioeconomic conditions that are necessary for stable political order. The analysis identifies two necessary forces, the threat of rebellion and economic subversion, which together curb a ruler’s predatory temptations. By extending the model, I show how transitional justice effects both necessary conditions, leading to deterrent and strategic effects, which illustrate how interventions aiming to improve stability may work in some instances but backfire in others.
External Validity and Meta‐Analysis Slough, Tara; Tyson, Scott A.
American journal of political science,
April 2023, 2023-04-00, 20230401, Letnik:
67, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Meta‐analysis is a method that combines estimates from studies conducted on different samples, in different contexts, or at different times. Social scientists increasingly use meta‐analyses to ...aggregate evidence and learn about general substantive phenomena. We develop a framework to examine the theoretical foundations of meta‐analysis, with emphasis on clarifying the role of external validity. We identify the conditions under which multiple studies are target‐equivalent, meaning they identify the same empirical target. Our main result shows that external validity and harmonization, in comparisons made and how outcomes are measured, are necessary and sufficient for target‐equivalence. We examine common formulations of meta‐analysis—fixed‐ and random‐effects models—developing the theoretical assumptions that underpin them and providing design‐based identification results for these models. We then provide practical guidance based on our framework and results. Our results reveal limits to agnostic approaches to the combination of causal evidence from multiple studies.
Maintaining order is perhaps the most important problem confronting society, and establishing a sovereign ruler with monopoly control over the execution of violence creates two distinct security ...problems: one between private citizens (the horizontal dimension) and the other between the ruler and private citizens (the vertical dimension). I develop a framework to study these dual security problems and the incentives created in solving them together. I show that self-enforcing political sovereignty presents a problem of reciprocal agency, where every individual is simultaneously a principal and an agent and that a ruler will extort rents in exchange for upholding the social contract—the social contract tax—which crucially relies on balancing two distinct incentives, the desire to predate and the opportunity cost of political order. I consider the problem of selecting a ruler and show that the citizen who extorts the least is either the richest or the poorest, depending on the level of economic inequality.
We study coordination dynamics in the context of two groups under the shadow of political instability. One group (regime opponents) prefers a change in regime and can participate in an attack, which ...if sufficiently large, causes regime change. The other group (regime adherents) prefers the status quo and can support the regime, making it more resistant to attack. We derive and analyze the endogenously determined strength of the regime and isolate the strategic feedback between opponent coordination and adherent coordination. Because of this interrelated coordination dynamic we find that repression and co-optation are substitutes. In addition, we show that coordination frictions between regime adherents intensify the already disproportionate impact of public information. Moreover, public information affects individual actions in each group identically, regardless of disparities in the quality of private information available to members of each group. This implies that it is the least well-informed that determine the influence of public information.
Coercive Leadership Landa, Dimitri; Tyson, Scott A.
American journal of political science,
07/2017, Letnik:
61, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: ...dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through "binding" agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice becomes more informative to the agents about the leader's privately held information as her coercive capacity increases. By adjusting her policy choice in response to available private and public information, the coercive leader achieves her preferred average of agents' actions, and in so doing, neutralizes the possibly deleterious coordinating influence of public information. We develop implications of our analysis for understanding autocratic leadership in different political and organizational contexts.
Do radicalized individuals with no logistical assistance from opposition groups generate liabilities or advantages for opposition leaders? To address this question, we develop a theory that ...articulates a novel strategic channel connecting radicalization, defined as self-motivation to dissent, to repression targeting an opposition group's operational capacity or its leadership. Our main result shows that targeted repression is strictly decreasing in the proportion of radicalized citizens. We endogenize opposition leaders' decision to radicalize citizens and show that opposition leaders, even absent any direct benefit to radicalize, nevertheless invest effort into radicalization. Thus, radicalization is a political tool to deter repression by decreasing its usefulness. To better understand this strategic consequence, we analyze two common policy interventions—economic and psychological—and show that improving economic conditions reduces both radicalization efforts and dissent, while making individuals psychologically less susceptible to radicalization can sometimes backfire and increase dissent because it increases leaders' radicalization efforts.
I develop a theory of strategic voting that captures an endogenous link between the costly decision to vote and the costly decision to become politically informed. I then use the theoretical model to ...study the effects of different public policy instruments on the incentives of voters to cast informed votes. I show that policies that directly target the cost of political engagement, by influencing either the cost of information acquisition or the cost associated with casting a vote, have an ambiguous effect on the overall level of informed voting, and thus have unclear welfare implications. I also show that compulsory voting provides an incentive for voters to acquire political information so as to ensure that the vote they are compelled to cast actually benefits them, which overall, increases the level of informed voting.
To study the conceptual foundations of deterrence, we develop a model of an international crisis between a country seeking to maintain a peaceful status quo (Defender), and a potential aggressor ...(Attacker). Attacker’s leader is politically insecure and may be unseated by domestic elites. Leaders and elites can each be hawkish, benefiting from conflict, or dovish and prefer peace. We show that the ability to maintain peace through deterrence crucially depends on ideological cohesiveness within Attacker countries. When there is ideological disagreement, we identify two novel mechanisms that cause the conventional logic of deterrence to fail. First, political instability breaks the link between a leader’s aggressive actions and Defender’s retaliatory response. Second, political instability creates a commitment problem leading doves to initiate crises to quell domestic conflicts. Asymmetric information exacerbates these problems so severely that Defender is better off committing to complete inaction.
