The life, death and diversity of pro-government militias: The fully revised pro-government militias database version 2.0

This article presents version 2.0 of the Pro-Government Militias Database (PGMD). It is increasingly clear that it is untenable to assume a unified security sector, as states often rely on militias to carry out security tasks. The PGMD 2.0 provides new opportunities for studying questions such as when states rely on militias, how they chose among different types and the consequences for stability and peace. We detail how the PGMD 2.0 provides new information on the characteristics, behaviour, life cycle and organization of 504 pro-government militias across the globe between 1981 and 2014.

Democracy, external threat, and military spending

A number of studies find that democracies spend less on their military than non-democracies. Yet there are well known counter-examples, including but not limited to the United States and Israel. We contend that these counter-examples are part of a larger pattern. The relationship between regime type and military spending is conditional on external threat. Among countries that do not perceive a significant external threat to their interests, democracies allocate considerably less to the military than non-democracies. However, democracies with a significant external threat do not allocate less to the military than non-democracies. The reason prior research consistently finds that democracies, on average, spend less on the military, even while controlling for external threat, is that democracies are much less likely to have a high external threat. For example, autocracies are nearly twice as likely as democracies to have a significant external threat in our sample. An empirical analysis of military spending from 1952–2000 is consistent with these expectations.

Do people want smarter ballots?

We ascertain whether citizens want to have smart ballots, that is, whether they appreciate having the possibility to express some support for more than one option (expression across options) and to indicate different levels of support for these options (expression within options). We conducted two independent yet complementary survey experiments at the time of the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries to examine which voting method citizens prefer, one with the real candidates in the states holding Democratic primaries and one with fictitious candidates in the whole country. In both surveys, respondents were asked to vote using four different voting rules: single, approval, rank, and point (score). After they cast their vote, respondents were asked how satisfied they were using each voting method. The findings are consistent in both studies: the single vote is the most preferred voting method. We show that this is a reflection of a status quo bias, as citizens’ views are strongly correlated with age.

Linking individual and group motives for violent conflict

Research on the role of grievances in civil conflict is surprisingly inconclusive, with well-cited studies disagreeing on the relationship between perceived deprivation and violence. I argue that the role of grievances depends on an interaction between individual and group-level incentives. Individuals who perceive themselves as personally deprived are more likely to support or participate in anti-regime violence, but only if a successful rebellion would enhance their group’s power relative to the status quo. I test this argument in the context of Iraq’s sectarian civil war using data from a 2016 survey of 800 Baghdad residents. Using a list experiment to measure individuals’ willingness to consider violence against a government they feel is ignoring their needs, I find that minority Sunnis who are economically dissatisfied are significantly more willing to consider violence than similarly aggrieved Shias. However, as economic satisfaction increases, Sunnis’ propensity for violence decreases until it becomes indistinguishable from Shias’ propensity. These results clarify the joint impacts of vertical and horizontal grievances. Group inequality and individual deprivation are each necessary but not sufficient to fully explain individuals’ propensities for anti-state violence.

Turning discontent into votes: Economic inequality and ethnic outbidding

Ethnic outbidding, where parties adopt ever more extreme positions to capture electoral advantage, has become an increasingly common practice among ethnic parties. As economic issues have often served as a catalyst for ethnic tension, increasing levels of economic inequality should lead parties to adopt more extreme positions in an attempt to outbid one another. Furthermore, as their economic and ethnic platforms will appeal to the same ethnically defined constituency, ethnic outbidding should be more effective where inequality is high. Using a sample of over 150 ethnonational parties in Europe between 2011 and 2017, this paper finds that inequality is linked to increasing ideological extremism along a number of policy dimensions. Employing local-level voting data for Romania and Slovakia, we show that higher inequality makes adopting a more ideological extreme position a more successful electoral strategy, especially where economic issues are ethnically salient.

Do TJ policies cause backlash? Evidence from street name changes in Spain

Memories of old conflicts often shape domestic politics long after these conflicts end. Contemporary debates about past civil wars and/or repressive regimes in different parts of the world suggest that these are sensitive topics that might increase political polarization, particularly when transitional justice policies are implemented and political parties mobilize discontentment with such policies. One such policy recently debated in Spain is removing public symbols linked to a past civil war and subsequent authoritarian regime (i.e., Francoism). However, the empirical evidence on its impact is still limited. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the political consequences of street renaming. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that the removal of Francoist street names has contributed to an increase of electoral support for a new far-right party, Vox, mainly at the expense of a traditional right-wing conservative party, PP. Our results suggest that revisiting the past can cause a backlash among those ideologically aligned with the perpetrator, and that some political parties can capitalize on this.

Visiting the hegemon: Explaining diplomatic visits to the United States

Diplomacy is a chief instrument of foreign policy. Through high-level diplomatic visits, governments can facilitate cooperation and signal the quality of their relations with other states. Because host countries cannot receive an indefinite number of visits, they must make strategic decisions, prioritizing some countries over others. This reveals information about their foreign policy priorities as well as diplomatic hierarchies and practices in the system as a whole. But what determines high-level diplomatic visits? Existing scholarship disagrees. In this research note, we assess the determinants of high-level diplomatic visits to the U.S. Theoretically, we draw on previous studies and formulate structural, domestic, and practice-oriented accounts of high-level visits as tools of foreign policy. Empirically, we gather original data on diplomatic visits to the U.S. by foreign leaders from 1946 to 2012. Our main results are two-fold. First, high-level diplomatic visits to the U.S. are primarily determined by structural factors such as economic relations. Second, we find clear differences in invited country profiles during and after the Cold War, demonstrating that high-level visits are used strategically to promote shifting foreign policy priorities.

When a conspiracy theory goes mainstream, people feel more positive toward conspiracy theorists

This paper uses an experiment and a follow-up survey immediately before and after the publicly revealed results of the Department of Defense’s 2021 report on unidentified flying object (UFO) origins to test how public opinion changes when government leaders across the political spectrum take an issue that had been on the margins of respectability seriously. In both studies, I find that when politicians acknowledge the possibility that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, people report more positive attitudes toward those who believe in conspiracies in general. Implications are that when government leaders publicly walk back a long-held consensus that a particular issue is not worth serious consideration, they may cause people to feel more favorable toward those perceived to hold other fringe views.

Chinese views on nuclear weapons: Evidence from an online survey

What are Chinese public attitudes regarding nuclear weapons? Although scholars have studied Chinese elites’ views on nuclear weapons, surprisingly little is known about the views of China’s public. To understand Chinese public views on nuclear weapons, we conduct an online survey ( N = 1066) of Chinese respondents. This is, to our knowledge, the first survey of Chinese public attitudes towards nuclear weapons. We find that although Chinese citizens view the possession of nuclear weapons as important for their country’s security, they strongly oppose the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances. We also provide respondents an opportunity to describe their views on nuclear weapons in their own words. Using computer-assisted text analysis, we assess patterns in these open-ended responses and compare across age groups. We find that younger respondents emphasize non-material factors such as having a greater voice internationally, whereas older respondents emphasize self-defense. Overall, this analysis sheds light on the public attitudes that may shape China’s evolving approach to nuclear weapons.

Self-coding: A method to assess semantic validity and bias when coding open-ended responses

Open-ended survey questions can provide researchers with nuanced and rich data, but content analysis is subject to misinterpretation and can introduce bias into subsequent analysis. We present a simple method to improve the semantic validity of a codebook and test for bias: a “self-coding” method where respondents first provide open-ended responses and then self-code those responses into categories. We demonstrated this method by comparing respondents’ self-coding to researcher-based coding using an established codebook. Our analysis showed significant disagreement between the codebook’s assigned categorizations of responses and respondents’ self-codes. Moreover, this technique uncovered instances where researcher-based coding disproportionately misrepresented the views of certain demographic groups. We propose using the self-coding method to iteratively improve codebooks, identify bad-faith respondents, and, perhaps, to replace researcher-based content analysis.