Social Media and Press Freedom

As internet penetration rapidly expanded throughout the world, press freedom and government accountability improved in some countries but backslid in others. We propose a formal model that provides a mechanism that explains the observed divergent paths of countries. We argue that increased access to social media makes partial capture, where governments allow limited freedom of the press, an untenable strategy. By amplifying the influence of small traditional media outlets, higher internet access increases both the costs of capture and the risk that a critical mass of citizens will become informed and overturn the incumbent. Depending on the incentives to retain office, greater internet access thus either forces an incumbent to extend capture to small outlets, further undermining press freedom; or relieve pressure from others. We relate our findings to the cases of Turkey and Tunisia.

Language, Ethnicity, and Separatism: Survey Results from Two Post-Soviet Regions

Scholars often use language to proxy ethnic identity in studies of conflict and separatism. This conflation of language and ethnicity is misleading: language can cut across ethnic divides and itself has a strong link to identity and social mobility. Language can therefore influence political preferences independently of ethnicity. Results from an original survey of two post-Soviet regions support these claims. Statistical analyses demonstrate that individuals fluent in a peripheral lingua franca are more likely to support separatism than those who are not, while individuals fluent in the language of the central state are less likely to support separatist outcomes. Moreover, linguistic fluency shows a stronger relationship with support for separatism than ethnic identification. These results provide strong evidence that scholars should disaggregate language and ethnic identity in their analyses: language can be more salient for political preferences than ethnicity, and the most salient languages may not even be ethnic.

From Chatter to Action: How Social Networks Inform and Motivate in Rural Uganda

From public health to political campaigns, numerous attempts to encourage behavior begin with the spread of information. Of course, seeding new information does not guarantee action, especially when it is difficult for receivers to verify this information. We use a novel design that introduced valuable, actionable information in rural Uganda and reveals the intermediate process that led many in the village to hear the information but only some to act on it. We find that the seeded information spread easily through word of mouth via a simple contagion process. However, acting on the information spread less easily; this process relied instead on endogenously created social information that served to vet, verify, and pass judgment. Our results highlight an important wedge between information that a policy intervention can best control and the behavior that ultimately results.

Phantom Pains: The Effect of Police Killings of Black Americans on Black British Attitudes

What effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

Commodity Shocks and Incumbency Effects

Why do incumbents enjoy an electoral advantage in some political settings but suffer from a disadvantage in others? We propose a novel explanation linking variation in incumbency effects with exogenous commodity shocks. While voters attempt to sanction incumbents for economic performance, changes in commodity prices affect their evaluations and condition the electoral fortunes of incumbents vis-à-vis challengers. We test our argument in Brazilian municipalities, combining a plausibly exogenous measure of variation in commodity prices with a close election regression discontinuity design. Our results show that increases in the price of agricultural commodities greatly enhance the prospects of incumbents, while negative shocks exacerbate their incumbency disadvantage, especially in rural municipalities. Further investigation suggests that commodity shocks do not operate via voter learning about candidate quality, changes in the pool of candidates, shifts in voter preferences, or strategic elite investments. Instead, we find suggestive evidence that commodity shocks affect voters' evaluations through their effect on local economic growth.

How Open Lists Undermine the Electoral Support of Cohesive Parties

How does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally divided Christian Democrats gain votes at the expense of the cohesive Alternative for Germany when open lists are used and candidate positions are known. For individuals who are equally attracted to both parties, switching is most likely if their immigration preferences lie near the midpoint between the two parties. Overall, our analysis establishes conditions under which ballot structure can affect the electoral performance of parties in general, and that of the populist right in particular.

To Purge or Not to Purge? An Individual-Level Quantitative Analysis of Elite Purges in Dictatorships

Why do dictators purge specific elites but not others? And why do dictators purge these elites in certain ways? Examining these related questions helps us understand not only how dictators retain sufficient competence in their regimes to alleviate popular and foreign threats, but also how dictators nullify elite threats. Dictators are more likely to purge first-generation elites, who are more powerful because they can negotiate their role from a position of strength and possess valuable vertical and horizontal linkages with other elites. Further, dictators tend to imprison purged first-generation elites – rather than execute, exile or simply remove them – to avoid retaliation from other elites or the purged elite continuing to sow discord. We find empirical support for our predictions from novel data on autocratic elites in 16 regimes from 1922 to 2020.

Constrained Citizens? Ideological Structure and Conflict Extension in the US Electorate, 1980–2016

Past the half-century mark of Converse's (1964) field-defining essay, the nature of political ideology in the mass public and how it has changed in response to partisan polarization remains enigmatic. To test the ideological structure of US public opinion, I develop and implement a Bayesian dynamic ordinal item response theory model. In contrast to static scaling procedures, this method allows for changes in the mappings between issue attitudes and the underlying ideological dimension over time. The results indicate that over the last forty years, mass attitudes on a range of long-standing policy controversies better fit a unidimensional ideological structure. As among elites, the left–right dimension has come to encompass a wide range of policy, partisan, and value divides in the mass public. Further, these trends hold for voters at all levels of political sophistication. Widespread conflict extension appears to be a defining feature of mass polarization in contemporary US politics.