Scope Conditions Podcast – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In democracies all around the world, criminal organizations are involved in electoral politics. Notable examples include the Sicilian mafia and Pablo Escobar's drug cartel in Colombia. We sometimes think of these criminal groups as having politicians in their pockets or as directing politicians to do their bidding at the barrel of a gun.

But our guest today, Jessie Trudeau, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, has spent years studying a different kind of relationship that can evolve between politicians and criminal gangs: candidates for office sometimes hire criminal organizations to be their brokers at election time -- essentially, paying gangs to help them corner the electoral market and mobilize votes. In an award-winning working paper and current book project, Jessie asks why it is that politicians in some parts of the world bring outlaws into their campaigns for office.

We talk with Jessie about the particular qualities of certain criminal organizations that make them especially well suited to scaring up votes, like their control over territory and the relationships they've built with residents. Drawing on extensive interviews she conducted with politicians and gang members in Brazil, Jessie tells us in striking detail about the different forms that these politician-criminal collaborations can take -- from one-off deals to long-term partnerships -- and about the tactics that criminal organizations use -- how they keep competing politicians out and how they induce voters to show up and cast their ballot the "right" way.

Jessie also walks us through the natural experiment that she designed to estimate the electoral bonus that a candidate gets from working with a neighborhood gang. She talks about how she built an unusual over-time dataset tracking criminal group control over each of Rio de Janeiro's 1500 favelas and how she exploited the random assignment of voters to ballot boxes to help her identify the impact of criminal gangs on election outcomes.

Finally, we talk more broadly about the role of criminality in politics and its implications for policy and democratic accountability. What happens when criminal groups get involved in electoral politics not just to earn some extra cash as brokers but to get the kinds of policies they want? Why do criminals sometimes work with politicians as partners but in other places run for office themselves? And what happens to democratic accountability when criminal groups become so good at corralling votes that politicians no longer have to directly appeal to voters' hearts and minds?

Works cited in this episode

Barnes, Nicholas. "Criminal politics: An integrated approach to the study of organized crime, politics, and violence." Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 4 (2017): 967-987.

Magaloni, Beatriz, Edgar Franco-Vivanco, and Vanessa Melo. "Killing in the slums: Social order, criminal governance, and police violence in Rio de Janeiro." American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2020): 552-572.

Today on Scope Conditions: college dorms shed light on where group culture comes from and how it molds us.

At Harry Potter’s alma mater, each new student is assigned to a House that aligns with their true character. The mystical Sorting Hat takes the courageous ones and sorts them into House Gryffindor, while the studious know-it-alls go to Ravenclaw. The Sorting Hat may be fiction, but it’s actually a lot like life. Much of the social world works this way: whether by assignment or by self-selection, people often end up in social environments that already fit with their pre-existing beliefs and traits.

For social scientists, what’s often called homophily – this tendency for like to attract like – can make it difficult to study the impact of social context itself. Do people tend to believe and act like those around them because they’re influenced by their surroundings, or because they’re drawn to places that already fit their pre-existing characteristics?

Our guest today, Dr. Joan Ricart-Huguet, found a real-world social setting that helps him untangle these possibilities. At East Africa’s oldest institution of higher education, Makerere University in Uganda, incoming students have for decades been allocated to their residence halls by lottery, rather than by personality type. For Joan, Makerere’s randomly assigned dorms have been the perfect laboratory for studying how the cultural characteristics of a social organization arise, endure, and shape people’s beliefs and habits over time. 

Joan is an assistant professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland, and we talk with him about a pair of recent articles he wrote on cultural emergence, persistence, and transmission. Joan tells us about the months of in-depth interviews and immersive fieldwork he conducted on the Makerere campus as well as the natural experiment afforded by random residential assignment that allowed him to test alternative theories of cultural differentiation, reproduction, and impact.

For example, Joan tells us the stories of how distinct hall cultures emerged historically at Makerere – how Livingston Hall came to be known as the residence of respectful gentlemen while Lumumba Hall earned a reputation for rowdy activism. And we learn about the short- and long-term causal effects of these distinct hall cultures on the young adults assigned by chance to live within them.

Works cited in this episode:
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.

Guiso, L., P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales. 2006. "Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?’" The Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(2): 23-48.

Henrich, J. P. 2017. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press.

Mead, M. 1956. New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation – Manus, 1928-1953. William Morrow and Company.

Paller, J. W. 2020. Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Ricart-Huguet, J. 2022. "Why Do Different Cultures Form and Persist? Learning from the Case of Makerere University." The Journal of Modern African Studies, 60(4): 429-456.

Ricart-Huguet, J. and E. L. Paluck. 2023. "When the Sorting Hat Sorts Randomly: A Natural Experiment on Culture." Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 18(1): 39-73.

Ross, M.H. 2000. “Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis”. In Culture and Politics: A Reader, edited by Lane Crothers and Charles Lockhart. Palgrave Macmillan.

Sewell Jr., W. H. 1999. “The Concept(s) of Culture”. In Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, edited by V. E. Bonnell and L. Hunt. University of California Press.

Can autocrats fight online dissent with offline repression?

In the world’s most authoritarian regimes, on-the-ground forms of protest or expressions of dissent are quickly quashed. So the online world – especially social media – has emerged as a critical venue for activists and reformers to express opposition and sustain their movements. 

Given its more diffuse and elusive nature, online activism presents dictators with a new challenge of social control. One possible response is to try to censor online dissent, though it takes a high level of technological sophistication and state capacity to shut down social media opposition completely. Another option is to use physical repression to deal with digital dissent: to throw anti-regime Twitter users in jail. So what happens when autocrats bring old coercive weapons to this new battleground?

This is the question we put to our guest, Dr. Alexandra Siegel, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Alex has been working for years on understanding how political conflict plays out in the online sphere, especially in non-democratic settings. The paper we discuss with Alex – an article, coauthored with Jennifer Pan, that appeared in the American Political Science Review – investigates what happens when the Saudi regime imprisons or tortures activists, religious leaders, and journalists for voicing critical views on social media. Does throwing online critics in jail actually silence them? Does it deter other activists? And how do their legions of online followers react? 

This is a fascinating conversation about the limits to authoritarian coercive capacities in the information age. But it’s also a conversation about the exciting new world of social media-based research. Alex’s work is an elegant example of how scholars can use social-media data not just to capture expression and mobilization in the increasingly vibrant digital public square, but also to tap into mass political cognition more broadly – for instance, using search engine data to track the public’s interest in political events. 

We also ask Alex to reflect on the perils that may lurk in this brave new world of text-as-data and social-media research. Does the sheer vastness of the available troves of data create new opportunities to fish for results – to dig up statistically significant patterns that aren’t actually substantively meaningful? Can we do anything to guard against this risk? And how should we think about the ethical implications of using publicly available data to study the targets of violent repression? How should scholars of online political behavior in autocracies strike a balance between principles of open science and the avoidance of harm to the activists they’re studying?

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about the origins of supranational power.

The European Union has no army. It levies no taxes. Covering a population of 450 million, its administrative bureaucracy is on par with that of a moderate-sized city. And yet the EU’s treaties, directives, and regulations – 50,000 pages worth – are enforced daily across Europe, covering domains from labor relations to financial markets to immigration, consumer protection, and pharmaceuticals. 

What’s more, EU law trumps national law. Judges – national judges – strike down actions by their own governments when those actions contravene EU rules. 

So how did Europe get here? How did European law – which didn’t even exist 70 years ago – become supreme, in a very concrete sense, across 27 independent states?

As our guest argues, it wasn’t overzealous, activist judges who made European law supreme. In fact, in the early decades of European law, most judges knew little about it and preferred not to go near it, let alone overrule their own country’s policies in its name. Dr. Tommaso Pavone, an assistant professor of Law and Politics at the University of Arizona, tells us that the real architects of EU ascendancy were a ragtag band of entrepreneurial lawyers – lawyers who worked behind the scenes to coax reluctant judges into referring cases up to the European Court of Justice – even to the point of writing the judges’ referrals for them. 

We have a fantastic conversation with Tom about his forthcoming book, The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe. In the book, Tom tells the story of a scattered set of actors whom he calls the “Euro-lawyers”: a group of attorneys who had survived the calamity of World War II and believed in the liberal project of European integration. The Euro-lawyers saw that – by crafting the right test cases, educating judges in European law, and sometimes literally ghostwriting their referrals and judgments – they could set in motion a juridical logic that would turn ordinary national courts into street-level enforcers of EU law. 

This is a conversation about how on-the-ground actors – who have little formal authority of their own – can bring about massive macro-institutional change by identifying and exploiting ambiguities in the rules of the game. 

We also talk with Tom about how the argument of his book took shape. He tells us about the moment when the whole direction of the project shifted, from a study of the judges who signed the referrals to an examination of the lawyers who put them up to it. We talk about how he reconstructed the behind-the-scenes work of 12 teams of attorneys who, in the key period, solicited almost half of all referrals to the European Court of Justice. 

And we press Tom on what all of this Euro-lawyering means for democracy. How should we feel about the fact that the European project emerged, in part, from the stratagems of these unelected elites operating by stealth? And what about today’s Euro-lawyers? In an era of mounting Euroskepticism and rising populism, is there scope for them to leverage the European legal order to protect liberal institutions from the predations of would-be authoritarians?

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we ask: what happens when your favorite candidate isn’t even running?

We often think about the quality of democratic representation in terms of the outcomes that citizens get. For instance, we compare the policies a government enacts to what citizens say they want in surveys. Alternatively, we might compare the demographic characteristics of the candidates who make it into office with the demographic makeup of their constituents. 

Our guest today, Dr. Sergio Montero, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester, argues that, if we want to understand representation, it’s helpful to take a step back from the outcomes voters get and to start thinking about the alternatives available to them. If many voters don’t get what they want out of politics, is that because their preferred candidates are losing elections – or because the candidates they’d like to see aren’t even running? After all, if the option you want isn’t even on the menu, there’s a good chance you won’t be happy with the outcome. 

We talk with Sergio about a new paper he has written with Matias Iaryczower and Galileu Kim that develops a novel approach to measuring representation failures in terms of what’s missing from the menu of options. Their approach involves comparing what voters want to the range of candidates available. A big part of the challenge here is figuring out what it is voters want in the first place. This isn’t just a problem of knowing which policies voters prefer, but also identifying what individual characteristics – like gender or level of education – they look for in a legislator. And, crucially, Sergio and his coauthors need a way of assessing how voters trade off between the two: how much voters care about policy positions compared to personal qualities.

We talk with Sergio about how he and his coauthors uncover voter preferences as well as how they place candidates in an ideological space. And we hear what they find when they use their approach to assess the quality of representation in Brazil. We also get into some interesting conceptual questions around what the normative representational standard ought to be: for instance, if it turns out that voters prefer male candidates with business backgrounds, should we call it a representation failure if the slate of options is more female and more working class? And should we call it a democratic deficiency if more extreme voters don’t see their ideal candidates on the ballot?

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re speaking with Dr. Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond, about her recent book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. In this book, Dana seeks to unravel a puzzle of Palestinian political development. With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, Palestinians gained the prospect of democratic self-government, with the establishment of an elected Palestinian National Authority and a process intended to culminate in the creation of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian people entered Oslo with a highly mobilized and well-organized civil society — conditions that should, in theory, have set the stage for vibrant civic engagement and the development of responsive institutions.

What Dana observes, however, in the period after Oslo is just the opposite. Not only did Palestinian institutions evolve in an increasingly authoritarian direction, but Palestinian society ended up far less mobilized and much more polarized than it had been under direct Israeli rule. “How,” Dana asks in her new book, “did the [Palestinian Authority] demobilize society, when years of Israeli occupation had failed to do the same thing?” Her argument is that international interference distorted the process of political development, leading the PA to practice a form of “indigenous” autocracy that proved highly effective at dis-organizing and deactivating civil society.

We hear about how Dana brought together interviews with Palestinian officials, protest data, survey experiments and lab experiments to trace out the dynamics of demobilization. We also ask her to reflect on how her argument travels: Does international involvement generally serve to undercut democracy? Is political polarization always demobilizing? Lastly, Dana reflects on her experiences as a Palestinian researcher studying Palestine: both the access that her identity gives her in the field and the ways in which her work is challenged due to her identity.

Today’s episode is Part 2 of our conversation about metaketas with Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, who co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS; and Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, who co-led a metaketa with Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the effects of community policing. The main paper from that project was just published last month in Science.

In Part 1, we learned what a metaketa is, how it’s typically organized, and what the benefits are of having coordinated teams experimentally test the same (or very similar) interventions across multiple contexts. We also talked about each of the two EGAP metaketas that Tara and Graeme co-led – the first on natural resource governance and the second on community policing. 

In today’s episode, we talk with Tara and Graeme about deeper conceptual issues, practical constraints, and equity considerations around metaketas. It’s fairly simple to interpret the results if we find the same effect across settings -- but what do we conclude if we see different treatment effects across the different sites? We also ask how far metaketas can get us toward generalizability: it’s one thing to compare results across 6 test sites, but can we extrapolate to other contexts outside of the metaketa?

And while metaketas are a powerful tool, we also learn from Tara and Graeme about their challenges and limitations. What was it like coordinating across six research teams, all with their own local constraints, timelines, and publication incentives? What are the equity concerns that come up when so many resources are allocated to a single question? And we talk about the professional considerations that scholars, particularly junior scholars, should keep in mind when signing up to participate in a metaketa.

As a reminder, we left off in Part 1 discussing how to pool estimates across study sites to get an average treatment effect. This is where we pick up the conversation. 

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-24-randomizing-together-part-2-with-tara-slough-and-graeme-blair

The last two decades have seen an explosion of field experimentation in political science and economics. Field experiments are often seen as the gold standard for policy evaluation. If you want to know if an intervention will work, run a randomized controlled trial, and do it in a natural setting. Field experiments offer up a powerful mix of credible causal identification and real-world relevance.

But there’s a catch: if you’ve seen one field experiment, you’ve seen one field experiment. A field experiment is essentially a case study with strong causal evidence. So you now know something about the effects of foreign aid or canvassing or social contact in one corner of the real world – but will those interventions have the same effect in other contexts? 

And if someone else runs their own experiment on the same intervention in some other setting, they’ll probably do it in their own way, shaped by their own pet theory, the demands of their funder, or the interests of their local partner. So, at the end of the day, how will we combine or compare the results? How can learning cumulate if everyone’s doing their own thing?

One promising answer to these questions is the metaketa framework, pioneered by EGAP, the Evidence in Governance and Politics research network. In a metaketa, several teams of researchers coordinate on a harmonized cluster of randomized trials carried out across disparate contexts. So far, EGAP teams have run or planned metaketas on topics such as the role of information in democratic accountability, taxation, and women’s participation in public service advocacy. The idea is that, by running parallel experiments across diverse settings, we’ll learn something about the generalizability of effects.

Our guests today have just finished running two metaketas and join us to reflect on the promise and challenges of learning from coordinated field experiments. Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS. Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, co-led a metaketa with Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the effects of community policing. The main paper from that project was just published last month in Science. 

We had such a wonderful, in-depth conversation with Tara and Graeme that we’re dividing it into two parts. In today’s episode, we hear about the projects themselves: the interventions they were evaluating, how they were set up, and what they found. We also talk about the difficulties of choosing and designing a treatment that can be implemented across radically different contexts, and about the analytical subtleties of aggregating estimates across those studies. In Part 2, we’ll get into a set of broader issues surrounding the metaketa strategy, including what coordinated trials can tell us about external validity and the practical challenges of running simultaneous experiments around the world.

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-23-randomizing-together-part-1-with-tara-slough-and-graeme-blair 

Today on Scope Conditions: how the paper-pushers of Empires reshaped colonialism in Southeast Asia. 

Our guest is Dr. Diana Kim, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Hans Kohn member (2021-22) at the Institute for Advanced Studies’ School of Historical Studies. In her award-winning book, Empires of Vice, Diana unpacks the puzzle of opium prohibition in the French and British colonies of Southeast Asia. As she traces out the twists and turns of colonial drug policies, Diana asks how states define the problems they need to solve, and how policymakers come to see crisis in the things they once took for granted. 

For decades, opium was a cornerstone of European colonialism in places like Burma, Malaya, and French Indochina. At their peak, opium taxes made up more than half of all colonial revenues. At the same time, levying a surcharge on what they deemed a peculiarly Asian vice gave the colonizers a sense of moral superiority over their subjects. But over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonial governments across Southeast Asia made a sharp reversal toward opium prohibition. 

Why did the French and British choose to crack down on what they had once seen as a fiscal bedrock of empire? How did empires that had grown up so tightly entangled with the opium trade come to see the drug as so deeply troubling? As Diana contends, this dramatic about-face was driven less by dictates from London and Paris and more by the evolving understandings of low-level bureaucrats on the ground in the colonies. Through the day-to-day work of administering policies and keeping records, these minor functionaries developed pet theories, drew casual causal inferences, and constructed new official realities that filtered up to the highest reaches of government – shaping perceptions, issue frames, and policy debates in the metropoles.

We talk with Diana about how imperial drug policies across the region were recast from the bottom-up as rank-and-file bureaucrats puzzled, and often bungled, their way through the everyday challenges of running an empire. We also discuss how Diana pieced together these stories: how she turned troves of archival paperwork, strewn across three continents, into coherent narratives. She tells us how she reconstructed colonial administrators’ interpretive struggles and how she connected the dots from ideas developed on the ground to political debates and decisions back in Europe. 

We also talk with Diana about the unusual portrait she paints of colonial governance: one in which the colonizers assume power before they’ve really figured out what to do with it. Rather than a confident empire imposing its will on its subjects, we see decision-making processes shot through with misperception, unintended consequences, and inner anxieties. We get Diana to reflect on how her account squares with common understandings of imperialism and of the state itself.

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-22-why-empires-declared-a-war-on-drugs-with-diana-kim 

Today we are talking about the problem of maintaining social order. In particular, what happens when citizens see the police as ineffective and, in turn, decide to take the law into their own hands? And once mob justice becomes commonplace in a society, what can be done?

In places where the state is weak, citizens often have to take it upon themselves to provide basic public services, such as building schools or collecting the garbage. And, as our guest today tells us, it can also include policing. In parts of the world where the police are seen as corrupt or inept, ordinary citizens often turn to what’s known as mob vigilantism. Groups will form spontaneously to apprehend and inflict violence – sometimes extreme violence – upon those they suspect of committing crimes. In some places, mob justice is exceedingly common: in South Africa, for instance, the police registered two mob vigilante murders per day in 2018 (and that is likely an undercount). 

Mob vigilantism represents a deep breakdown in citizen trust in the state’s ability to maintain social order. Is there anything that governments or civil society can do to boost confidence in the state and, in turn, head off mob violence? Our guest, Dr. Anna Wilke, has recently completed a novel field experiment to address this question in the context of South Africa. Currently a postdoctoral fellow with Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) at the University of California, Berkeley, Anna will be joining the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor next fall.

For the experiment, Anna partnered with a local non-profit to test the effects of a simple intervention: the installation of a home-based alarm system. When a resident or intruder triggers the alarm, it directly texts the local police precinct with the geolocation of the household – in principle, allowing the police to find and respond to criminal incidents more quickly. The question Anna asks is: Does enhancing the responsiveness of local law enforcement lead citizens to see the police as more effective and to resort less to mob violence?

In addition to hearing about her findings, we have a great conversation with Anna about the practical and inferential challenges she encountered in implementing and analyzing her experiment. For instance, it turns out that some of the things that make it hard for the state to effectively manage social problems – like the lack of street addresses in informally settled neighborhoods – also make it hard to sample and survey in these places.
 
Anna also had to deal with all the messiness of running an experiment in the real world, rather than in a controlled setting. This includes the possibility that she was not just treating the people she gave the alarm to, but also their neighbors, who might have also perceived themselves as having quicker access to the police.

Finally, we bring Anna’s research into the larger conversation around policing and racial bias, and ask: what does it mean to increase police presence and public reliance on the police when there is also systemic police abuse?

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode2-1.