Volume 46, Number 1, October 2013

Rafaela Dancygier, "The Left and Minority Representation: The Labour Party, Muslim Candidates, and Inclusion Tradeoffs"

As ethnic diversity increases across Europe, the Left faces a trade-off between incorporating new minorities and retaining support from settled, working-class voters. An examination of the Labour Party’s selection of Muslims, employing a dataset containing over 42,000 local election candidates in England, indicates that inclusion is less likely where core voters are most concerned about the representation of Muslims’ material and religious interests, in economically deprived areas with sizable Muslim populations. In these areas Muslim candidates underperform at the polls, and labor parties are less likely to choose Muslim candidates as a result. Selection thus varies based on the economic and cultural threats that Muslim representation poses to the Left’s core constituency. These findings contribute to understanding the forces that shape ethnic minority political incorporation across contexts.

Kerstin Hamann, Alison Johnston, and John Kelly, "Striking Concessions from Governments: The Success of General Strikes in Western Europe, 1980–2009"

Since the early 1980s, Western European labor unions in eleven of sixteen West European countries have mobilized protesters in a rising number of general strikes, opposing policy reforms by national governments. In over 40 percent of the cases, governments ceded concessions in response. The variation in government responses to general strikes can be explained by examining properties of governments, such as type of government and party family. Based on an original dataset using logistic regression, analysis of the outcomes of seventy-five general strikes indicates that concessions to unions are more likely when governments rule in coalition, and are led by center or Christian Democratic parties, compared to social democratic and conservative governments. A tentative explanation for this ?nding is based on shifting ideological alliances in multi-party systems.

Natasha Borges Sugiyama and Wendy Hunter, "Whither Clientelism? Good Governance and Brazil's Bolsa Família Program"

A clear development goal is to provide the poor with the benefits essential to human dignity without rendering them vulnerable to patronage politics. This is difficult to accomplish, especially in large federal countries where public policy requires cooperation between national and local authorities. Brazil’s Bolsa Família (Family Grant) confronts such a challenge. Have federal authorities managed to administer this complex and large-scale anti-poverty program while avoiding local “politics as usual?” The findings, based on survey data and focus group evidence from Northeast Brazil, a regional bastion of clientelism, suggest that municipal politicians do not use the Bolsa Familia for vote buying. The success of the Bolsa Familia in remaining insulated from clientelistic networks yields lessons that go well beyond Brazil.

Michael Buehler, "Subnational Islamization through Secular Parties: Comparing Shari'a Politics in Two Indonesian Provinces"

The Arab Spring has reinvigorated debate about the impact of Islamist groups on policy-making, particularly the adoption and implementation of Islamic law (shari’a), in democratizing, Muslim-majority countries. Most studies emphasize the causal primacy of Islamist parties in shari’a policymaking. Yet, determining policy agendas is almost never under the absolute control of one group. This is especially true for democratizing, Muslim-majority countries where decades of authoritarian rule have allowed secular elites to become deeply entrenched in state institutions. Field research in Indonesia shows that shari’a policymaking is politically mediated between secular elites and a broad range of Islamist forces situated both inside and outside the formal political arena.

Jaroslav Tir and Shane P. Singh, "Is It the Economy or Foreign Policy, Stupid? The Impact of Foreign Crises on Leader Support"

The public support literature maintains that leader popularity is driven by the state of the economy. Yet, according to the diversionary theory of war, foreign crisis participation may help an unpopular leader bolster his or her political fortunes through a rally-around-the-flag effect. Utilizing CSES Module II surveys covering twenty-six countries, 2001-2006, comparative investigation that links countries’ foreign crises participation with individual-level data on subsequent support for their leaders is useful. Multi-level analyses reveal that foreign crisis participation draws attention to foreign policy issues, increases support for the leader, and comes close to offsetting the negative impact of unemployment. While employed and unemployed individuals respond to crises nearly equally, the crises help the leader less among citizens concerned about foreign policy.

Review Article: Julie Hollar, "Human Rights Instruments and Impacts"

Human rights research has begun to shift from questions of why and under what conditions repression happens to analyzing and theorizing the impact of human rights instruments like treaties and trials. Recent works still use aggregated macro-level data and gloss over important struggles over the meaning and deployment of the concept of human rights. By questioning and taking apart both the concept of human rights and the presumed unity of the actors who struggle over them, scholars could begin to provide a more satisfying account of who gains and who loses through manipulation of human rights instruments, through what mechanisms, and how these processes and outcomes differ across time and place.

Volume 45, Number 4, July 2013

Aníbal Pérez-Liñán and Scott Mainwaring, "Regime Legacies and Levels of Democracy: Evidence from Latin America"

During the third wave of democratization, all Latin American countries except Cuba have had competitive political regimes, but the quality or level of democracy has varied significantly across countries and over time. One of the best predictors of this variance across countries and time is each country’s experience with competitive politics before 1978. Even controlling for a wide range of other explanations, countries with more democratic heritages before 1978 have higher levels of democracy in the contemporary period. This finding, in turn, raises another question: what accounts for the effects of past levels of democracy on the post-1978 period? A hybrid fixed-effects model shows that democratic trajectories are institutionalized through political parties and judicial institutions. Countries that had institutionalized parties under democracy and supreme court justices who served under democracy in the pre-1978 period have been more able to build high-level democracy in the contemporary period.

Kathleen Bruhn, "Electing Extremists? Party Primaries and Legislative Candidates in Mexico"

When parties adopt internal elections to choose candidates, power shifts from party leaders to party activists. Some authors suggest that this results in more ideologically extreme candidates and helps party outsiders. However, based on surveys of legislative candidates in Mexico’s 2006 national elections, two findings are evident. First, candidates chosen via internal elections were significantly more moderate and more likely to be party insiders than candidates chosen by party leaders. Second, organizational dynamics explain these outcomes. Because in Mexico legislative primary elections get little media attention, candidates rely on factional networks to mobilize support. Successful candidates appeal across factional divisions, resulting in winners who are more moderate, but not less connected to the party.

Matthew S. Winters and Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, "Lacking Information or Condoning Corruption? When Will Voters Support Corrupt Politicians?"

Why are citizens willing to cast ballots for corrupt politicians? On the one hand, voters may simply lack information about corruption. On the other hand, voters may knowingly overlook corruption when politicians otherwise perform well in office, delivering public goods to their constituents. Citizen responses to a nationwide survey in Brazil indicate that the vast majority of voters express a willingness to punish corrupt politicians, regardless of politician performance. High income voters form a partial exception to this overall rejection of corruption; they react less negatively to information about corruption and more strongly to information about competence than the general population. These findings imply that specific, credible, and accessible information will lead most voters to punish corrupt politicians at the polls.

Wouter Veenendaal, "Political Representation in Microstates: The Cases of St. Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, and Palau"

Recent research on political representation in new democracies indicates that the quality of representation in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe is substandard when compared to the older, Western democracies. There are, however, theoretical reasons to presume that microstates form an exception to this rule, especially in light of the natural closeness between citizens and politicians in these states. On the basis of an in-depth, qualitative analysis of the characteristics and quality of political representation in the microstates of St. Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, and Palau, this expectation is rejected. Instead, it is found that the small-scale political dimensions of microstates engender a political environment that is marked by personalistic politics and the pervasiveness of various forms of particularism.

Jae-jin Yang, "Parochial Welfare Politics and the Small Welfare State in South Korea"

Why is the Korean welfare state underdeveloped? From the institutionalist point of view, it is evident that existing institutions influence the policy preferences of key actors of welfare politics: organized labor and employers on the demand side and politicians on the supply side. Distributive demands of organized labor have been satisfied by affluent big business (or chaebol) through an implicit or explicit cross-class alliance with parochial enterprise unions, and the nation’s single-member-district electoral rules have induced politicians to sell geographically targeted benefits rather than promising social welfare for all beyond their district. As a result, despite the nation’s successful economic growth and democratization, neither the supply nor the demand side has been conducive to significant welfare state expansion in Korea.

Erin Hern, "Perspectives on the Power and Persistence of States in Africa and Beyond"

State legitimacy is a concept that is frequently invoked, rarely defined, and notoriously difficult to pin down. The four books under review represent three schools of thought that dominate the scholarship on the legitimacy of the African state. The first approach relies on universal standards of governance to assess state legitimacy. The second attributes legitimacy to culturally specific understandings of appropriate forms of power, and the third uses institutional coherence to evaluate the legitimacy of state rules. While each approach contains insightful and convincing pieces of scholarship, no one provides a satisfying account of legitimacy and the state. A more holistic approach to state legitimacy as a dynamic, interactive process is needed.

Volume 45, Number 3, April 2013

Maya Tudor, "Explaining Democracy's Origins: Lessons from South Asia"

Why, upon the 1947 Partition of British India, was India able to establish a stable democracy while structurally similar Pakistan created an unstable autocracy? The differential strengths of India and Pakistan’s independence movements directly account for their divergent democratization trajectories. These movements were initially constructed to pursue historically conditioned class interests. An examination of these movements leads to a broader theory of democratic origins, which qualifies the prevailing notion that a country’s democratization prospects can be attributed to its levels of economic development or inequality.

Clark C. Gibson and Barak D. Hoffman, "Coalitions not Conflicts: Ethnicity, Political Institutions, and Expenditure in Africa"

Scholars blame high levels of ethnic heterogeneity for many social and political ills, including poor economic growth, corruption, and policy gridlock. But it can be argued that, in seeking reelection, politicians will join multiethnic coalitions to pass policies in this endeavor. Further, government expenditure increases with coalition size, as each politician seeks policies that benefit his or her own constituents. Subnational data from Zambia, the use of which helps control for country-level factors hindering standard cross-national studies of fiscal politics, indicate that government spending increases with ethnic heterogeneity. This evidence challenges studies which ignore the incentives generated by political institutions and claim that ethnicity leads directly to undesirable outcomes.

Brandon Kendhammer, "The Sharia Controversy in Northern Nigeria and the Politics of Islamic Law in New and Uncertain Democracies"

In recent years, scholars have struggled to explain high levels of support for both state-sponsored Islamic law (sharia) and democracy in many new Muslim-majority democracies. The origins of popular support for Islamic law in uncertain democratic environments can be considered using the case of Northern Nigeria, where twelve states implemented sharia through democratic institutions during the early 2000s. Sharia implementation movements gain popular support by framing problems common to new democracies (corruption, inequality, poor governance) as moral concerns to be addressed by the state’s enforcement of ethical conduct. While sharia implementation has had a dubious effect on democratic governance in Nigeria and elsewhere, support for Islamic law is likely to endure within Muslim communities where governance remains poor.

Maren Milligan, "Fighting for the Right to Exist: Institutions, Identity, and Conflict in Jos, Nigeria"

Power sharing, or the predetermined allocation of state resources to putative groups, is an increasingly popular conflict resolution mechanism throughout the globe. However, critics argue it rests on ill-founded assumptions of group fixity, deepening divides it seeks to overcome. Proponents respond that liberal consociationalism reduces conflict by allowing for self-determined groups. In order to evaluate these claims, a model of power sharing explains the incidence of conflict in Jos, Nigeria. The findings refute the claims of liberal consociationalism regarding the conflict-mitigating potential of self-determination of groups. National conflagration of localized conflict resulting from power sharing suggests that ethno-federal power sharing does not quarantine conflict.

Anne Mariel Zimmermann, "State as Chimera: Aid, Parallel Institutions, and State Power"

Foreign donors use a variety of mechanisms to effect public goods in aid recipients. The two most common mechanisms, traditional aid and conditionality, are implemented through the domestic institutions of the recipient state. Yet a third mechanism, the “parallel institution,” bypasses domestic institutions to provide public goods within well-defined sectors or territories. Parallel institutions are distinct from other forms of aid. The autonomy and core capabilities of parallel institutions allow them to produce higher levels of public goods, but simultaneously hinder the infrastructural power of the recipient state.

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, "Gestalt Switch in Russian Federalism? The Decline in Regional Power under Putin"

Why did Russian governors unexpectedly acquiesce to centralizing reforms undertaken by Vladimir Putin? Interviews with regional and central politicians and an analysis of speeches during 1990–2009 reveal that interests alone cannot account for the presence or absence of governors’ political action. Understanding governors’ (in)action requires uncovering the grounds for its justification and legitimation. The enabling role of the discourse, fusing the ideas of democracy and federalism, propelled autonomous behavior on the part of regional elites. The shift in the dominant discursive frame that occurred in Russia under the leadership of Putin brought to prominence the idea of strengthening state power, thus making defiant and autonomy-seeking behavior by regional elites untenable.

Volume 45, Number 2, January 2013

Barak D. Hoffman and James D. Long, "Parties, Ethnicity, and Voting in African Elections"

Standard theories about elections in Africa suggest that they are little more than ethnic headcounts. Data from an exit poll conducted on Election Day in Ghana’s 2008 election challenges this view. The two main parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), drew support from many ethnic groups; and there was little evidence of ethnic block voting. Rather, voters’ beliefs about the parties and incumbent performance were the main determinants of vote choice. Evaluations of the attributes of the NDC and NPP shaped the outcome of Ghana’s 2008 election far more than the ethnic identity of the candidates. These results hold important implications for understanding voting, parties, and government performance in multiethnic democracies.

Leonardo Arriola, "Protesting and Policing in a Multiethnic Authoritarian State: Evidence from Ethiopia"

The antigovernment protests that erupted in one ethnic region of Ethiopia can be attributed to the group’s historical grievances or to its access to mobilizing resources. However, conventional explanations are insufficient in accounting for protest patterns in terms of their geographic distribution or varying levels of violence. The likelihood of protest onset was inversely related to local heterogeneity, intraethnic as well as interethnic. Protest violence spiraled through the interaction between ethnic homogeneity and the government’s policing strategy. Woundings were less likely to occur in localities where protesters were repressed by police forces staffed by their own co-ethnics.

Matthew M. Singer, "Economic Voting in an Era of Non-Crisis: The Changing Electoral Agenda in Latin America, 1982-2010"

Latin America’s political economy has shifted in the three decades since the return to democratization, with the inflationary crises of the 1980s fading into the past. One consequence of this change is a reduction in the electoral salience of inflation. While electoral support for the incumbent in the 1980s and 1990s was strongly tied to his or her ability to prevent increases in prices, in the 2000–2010 period there was no significant association between inflation rates and election outcomes. Instead, incumbents who presided over a growing economy in the last decade reaped electoral benefits. The importance of the economy for electoral outcomes varies over time and even across economic indicators.

Lee Demetrius Walker and Genevieve Kehoe, "Regime Transition and Attitude toward Regime: The Latin American Gender Gap in Support for Democracy"

Latin American women are less likely than Latin American men to express a preference for democracy. This gender gap in support for democracy is partly a function of the level of attachment that women as a group have for the democratic regime, and this level of attachment is determined by the mode in which democratic transition occurs. Four models examining the gendered attitude-toward-regime decision in seventeen countries over four time periods show that when women are involved as significant political actors at the time of the democratic transition, their support for democracy varies in ways similar to their male counterparts. When women have lesser roles, gender specific behaviors emerge.

Timothy Hicks, "Partisan Strategy and Path Dependence: The Post-War Emergence of Health Systems in the UK and Sweden"

Why did a highly redistributive, nationalized health care system emerge in the UK, where the Left was comparatively weak, while a more redistributively neutral, cash-centric, insurance-based system was pursued in Sweden, where the Left was strong? The explanation is two fold. First, in contrast to the Swedish Social Democrats, the weakness of the British Labour Party constrained it to pursue redistribution via health policy. Second, given the redistributive goals of the National Health Service, it became imperative for the Labour Party to construct a system that would be difficult for future Conservative governments to retrench. More generally, this formulation posits rational actors operating in the kinds of processes typically studied by historical institutionalists. The result is a tendency for a type of path dependence by design.

Patrick Emmenegger and Robert Klemmensen, "What Motivates You? The Relationship between Preferences for Redistribution and Attitudes toward Immigration"

The tension between immigration and redistribution has attracted increased attention in recent years. Many authors argue, based on economic self-interest theory, that there is a negative relationship between support for redistribution and preferred levels of immigration. Notwithstanding the role of economic self-interest, there is in fact a multitude of motivations that moderate the relationship between preferences for redistribution and attitudes toward immigration. A model of preferences for immigration shows that self-interested and strongly reciprocal individuals experience a tension between immigration and redistribution, while egalitarians do not experience this tension. Humanitarians express a general willingness to help those who are worse off, immigrants included, but this motivation does not affect their preferences for redistribution.

Volume 45, Number 1, October 2012

Evan S. Lieberman and Prerna Singh, "The Institutional Origins of Ethnic Violence"

Scholars have made substantial progress toward understanding the connections between ethnic relations and civil war, but important theoretical and empirical gaps remain. Existing explanations often ignore the constructivist origins of ethnic group formation, or are too proximate to the outcome under investigation, so that the link between ethnic political competition and ethnic violence is difficult to pick apart. An alternative approach is an explanation of ethnic violence rooted in the microfoundations of social identity theory (SIT). When states consistently employ ethnic categories across institutions, they lay the foundation for conflicts over status and power, facilitating recruitment and mobilization on the basis of emotion-laden intergroup comparisons and competition. The strength of these claims is demonstrated through a comparative-historical analysis of ethnic violence in eleven Southern African countries.

Kurt Weyland, "Diffusion Waves in European Democratization: The Impact of Organizational Development"

Surprisingly, waves of political regime contention in Europe have slowed down through history but have achieved more success in triggering advances toward democracy, as a comparison of the revolutions of 1848 and 1917—1919 shows. Major organizational developments account for these inverse trends. Before political mass organizations arose, ordinary people decided whether to emulate foreign challenges to established autocrats. Short on information, citizens relied heavily on inferential shortcuts and acted rashly, with little success. After the rise of mass organizations, common people took cues from their representative leaders, who had more information and greater processing capacity. Before emulating an external precedent and challenging their ruler, leaders waited for propitious circumstances. Therefore, twentieth century regime contention diffused more slowly yet with greater success.

Roger Karapin, "Explaining Success and Failure in Climate Policies: Developing Theory through German Case Studies"

Theories of environmental outcomes have been developed mostly through large-N cross-national studies, which have a structuralist bias and rely heavily on correlations. Structured, focused case studies can help overcome those limitations by incorporating political processes and identifying causal mechanisms. Climate policy outcomes in Germany vary greatly across policy areas such as emissions target setting, the economic transformation of eastern Germany, renewable energy, ecological tax reform, voluntary agreements with industry, emissions trading, and unregulated increases in the consumption of household heating, transportation, and electricity. Comparative analysis of nine case studies indicates that environmental outcome theories should more fully include external focusing events, advocacy coalition formation, multiple paths of influence for green parties, and the negative effects of neocorporatism and unregulated technological change and consumption.

Adam Ziegfeld, "Coalition Government and Party System Change: Explaining the Rise of Regional Political Parties in India"

Why do party systems in longstanding democracies sometimes experience sudden change? Neither sociological nor institutional explanations can account for the swift increase in support for regional political parties in India in the 1990s. Instead, the shift from single-party majority to coalition government explains the rise of regional parties. The advent of coalition government increased the incentives associated with joining and establishing regional parties, prompting many already popular politicians to leave their national parties and take their supporters with them as they formed new regional parties in the 1990s. This finding reverses the causal arrow that usually links party systems and coalition government and illustrates how noninstitutional elements of the political context can determine elite incentives and thereby shape party systems.

Mariela Szwarcberg, "Uncertainty, Political Clientelism, and Voter Turnout in Latin America: Why Parties Conduct Rallies in Argentina"

Party brokers have information about voters’ political preferences and likelihood of turning out to vote, and are able to target clientelistic inducements and monitor voter participation in exchange for voters’ electoral support. However, brokers may also use the clientelistic inducements they receive from bosses to pursue their personal enrichment, at the cost of lost votes for their party. An original dataset tracing the political careers of 137 municipal candidates in Argentina shows how bosses combine information from voter turnout at rallies and elections. By comparing a broker’s ability to mobilize voters, bosses are able to make inferences about reliable brokers who will distribute party goods to voters, and unreliable brokers who will use party goods to pad their own pockets.

Review Article: Evgeny Finkel, "Mass Killing and Local Context"

Until recently the mass murder and civil war scholarships developed alongside each other without engaging in fruitful dialogue or building on one another’s insights and findings. However, as the reviewed books demonstrate, following the “micropolitical turn” in the study of civil war, and with the genocide scholarship moving away from the state-centered approach, there is a convergence between the two literatures. The new wave of research on mass violence builds on the findings and theories of the civil conflict literature, proposes ways in which each field can contribute to its counterpart, and puts forward new questions and research agendas for further research on mass violence.