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.

By their very nature, autocracies are political systems in which power is highly concentrated; dictators can do pretty much as they please. So dictatorships might seem an unusual place to go looking for institutions: the rules and structures that limit discretion and set bounds on who can do what.

Yet over the last two decades, political scientists studying autocracies have done exactly that. The field has witnessed what Tom Pepinsky has called “an institutional turn” in the study of authoritarianism, with scholars such as Barbara Geddes, Jason Brownlee, and Jennifer Gandhi analyzing how institutions like dominant parties and elected legislatures order political life in autocracies and help ensure the survival of these regimes.

<a href='http://www.annemeng.com/'><em>Dr. Anne Meng</em></a>, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, began her own research on autocratic institutions with a focus on ruling parties. She eventually came to believe, however, that parties and legislatures were mostly a sideshow, and that she and other scholars of autocratic institutions had been getting something fundamentally wrong. They were too focused on de jure rules that appear constraining and insufficiently focused on de facto power: on whether institutions have any impact on the distribution of actual leverage within the political system.

Anne’s recent book, Constraining Dictatorship, is an analysis of how and why autocrats use institutions to share real power with their rivals, and of how these institutions shape the regime’s long-run trajectory. Anne also argues that the institutions that matter most are devices that we usually overlook, such as succession rules and cabinet appointments.

In our conversation with Anne, we probe the logic of her innovative argument and hear about how she confronted the difficulties of testing it empirically, like how to measure the elusive concept of leader strength. We also talk about the formal model she developed and how it helped her clarify the tradeoffs that leaders confront as they choose between short-term material gains and long-run survival in office.

More broadly, this is a conversation about what it is, fundamentally, that allows institutions to lend order to political life, and about how we can identify meaningful institutional and political change when we see it. You will also want to stay tuned to hear how Anne wrote the bulk of this book in a single semester.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Our guest today is Dr. Mai Hassan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mai is the author of a recent book, Regime Threats and State Solutions, about how leaders manipulate the bureaucracy to maintain their hold on power.

Imagine a political system in which the president has the power to hire, fire, and shuffle bureaucrats in the most important state agencies. How would the leader strategically choose to wield this authority? Perhaps she would decide to pack the state with her own supporters -- for example, with members of her ethnic group -- to ensure loyalty and to maximize the chances that presidential edicts will be faithfully carried out.

However, holding power often means striking bargains with rival elites. Usually the best way to do that is to give those rival elites a foothold in the state and to hand out jobs to their supporters. A leader who packs the state has fewer spoils to share.

Mai’s book delves into this core dilemma of power-maintenance: how can leaders keep their friends close and their enemies closer? When do executives opt to share power, and when do they choose to hoard it by staffing the state with loyalists?

In today’s episode, we talk with Mai about her theory of bureaucratic control. It’s an argument in which leaders don’t merely choose bureaucrats based on their loyalties; they also manipulate civil servants’ loyalties and attachments, by strategically placing them and shuffling them across regions of the country.

We also talk about how Mai tests her argument by using a vast original dataset on decades of Kenyan administrative appointments, spanning both the country’s autocratic and democratic periods. And Mai tells us how she stumbled onto the puzzle of bureaucratic manipulation while digging through archival data for an altogether different project.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Most governments around the world – whether democracies or autocracies – face at least some pressure to respond to citizen concerns on some social problems. But the issues that capture public attention — the ones on which states have incentives to be responsive – aren’t always the issues on which bureaucracies, agents of the state, have the ability to solve problems. What do these public agencies do when citizens’ demands don’t line up with either the supply of state capacity or the incentives of the central state?

Our guest, Dr. Iza Ding, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, examines one way in which bureaucrats try to square this circle. In her recent book The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, Iza argues that state actors who need to respond but lack substantive capacity can instead choose to perform governance for public audiences. 

Iza explores the puzzling case of China’s Environmental Protection Bureau or the EPB, a bureaucratic agency set up to regulate polluting companies. This issue of polluted air became a national crisis during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics when athletes were struggling to breathe let alone compete. Since then, Chinese citizens have been directing their pollution-related complaints to the EPB, which Iza found, has been given little power by the state to impose fines or shut down polluting factories.
But that doesn’t mean the civil servants working in this agency do nothing. Instead, Iza documents how and why they routinely deploy symbols, language, and theatrical gestures of good governance to give the appearance of dynamic action – all while leaving many environmental problems utterly unaddressed.

We talk with Iza about how she uncovered these performative dynamics through months of ethnographic research in which she was embedded within a Chinese environmental protection agency. She also tells us about how she tested her claims using original media and public opinion data. Finally, we talk about how her findings about performative governance in the environmental space translates to China’s COVID-19 response.


Works cited in this episode:

Beraja, Martin, et al. "AI-Tocracy." The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 138, No. 3, 2023, pp. 1349-1402.

Dimitrov, Martin K. Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Fukuyama, Francis. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. London: Profile Books, 2017.

Goffman, Erving. “On Face-Work.” In Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behav­ior, edited by Erving Goffman, pp. 5–45. Chicago: Aldine Transaction, 1967.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Jeffrey C. Isaac. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations [Book IV-V]. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Penguin 2010.

Walder, Andrew G. Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Weber, Max. “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings, edited by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.

This is a conversation about the politics of voting from abroad: in particular, about how governments manipulate emigrants’ access to the ballot in order to protect their own hold on power.

For the most part, elections are events that happen inside a country, as resident citizens cast ballots at local polling stations. However, around the world, about 281 million people live outside the country in which they were born, and a majority of countries give their emigrant citizens the legal right to vote.

The numbers here are not trivial. While exact figures are hard to come by, there are 80 countries around the world that both recognize voting rights for citizens abroad and have emigrant populations that add up to 5% or more of the national population. For countries with competitive elections, emigrant citizens represent a potentially critical voting bloc living outside the country.

Potentially is the key word here, though. For many of these citizens, the right to vote is only hypothetical because their governments often do little to make it practically feasible for them to cast a ballot. While a country like Senegal sets up 750 polling stations around the world, Kenya sets up only 5.

Our guest today, Dr. Elizabeth Iams Wellman, contends that that is no accident. She argues that incumbents strategically suppress -- or expand -- the vote from abroad to suit their electoral needs. A Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Beth has recently published two articles on the topic, in the American Political Science Review and African Affairs, and is at work on a book project titled The Diaspora Vote Dilemma.

We talk with Beth about the often-hidden politics of emigrant enfranchisement. She tells us about the places where the vote from abroad has decided elections, such as Italy, Moldova, Romania, and Cape Verde. But we also discuss the tools that governments use to make sure that emigrant voters can’t sway elections -- tools such as limiting polling locations and enforcing strict voter ID laws.

Beth also tells us about her research process, including how she addressed a set of interesting measurement challenges -- such as, how to capture the electoral threat posed by the vote from abroad -- so that she could test her argument statistically for a large set of elections in sub-Saharan Africa. But she also highlights how her qualitative analysis of individual cases revealed competitive dynamics and strategic mechanisms that she could never have extracted from a regression model. And at a time in which most comparativists have found themselves unable to travel for fieldwork, we were intrigued by the remote interviewing that Beth did alongside months of on-the-ground research, and we ask her about her experience with conducting research interviews via video call.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we talk about how civilians seek to survive civil war. Our guest is Dr. Justin Schon, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Virginia’s Democratic Statecraft Lab. In his new book, Surviving the War in Syria, Justin examines the repertoires of strategies that civilians choose from as they seek to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe.

In the West, we often think of migration as the key survival strategy for those threatened by civil violence, probably because migration as the strategy we in the West most readily observe. However, Justin argues that migration, while a common response, is only one of the multiple ways in which civilians seek to survive civil war. Moreover, it is a response that requires money, social connections, and other resources that not all civilians have. Justin highlights an alternative survival strategy, which he calls “community support”: staying in the conflict zone to help friends, family, and neighbors survive.

In this episode, we talk with Justin about how civilians choose among survival strategies. We discuss the nature of the risks that civilians face during civil war; how they seek to manage those risks; and the experiences that shape their choices. More broadly, this is a conversation about how our perspective on conflict and migration shifts as we come to think of civilians in civil war as agents -- making difficult, high-stakes decisions under constraints -- rather than as passive victims of circumstance. We also talk with Justin about his fieldwork, asking him about the practical, inferential, and ethical complexities of the 10 months of interviews that he conducted with refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Kenya, and the U.S.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

We are talking today about the politics of redistribution in an age of rising inequality.

Our guest is Dr. Charlotte Cavaillé, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School. We discuss with Charlotte her book project, Fair Enough: Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality, which seeks to explain how citizens reason about taxing the rich and spending on social benefits for the middle-class and poor.

The book’s starting point is a thorny puzzle of political economy: why do governments in advanced democracies do so little to counteract rising inequality? In countries like the United States and Britain -- where income and wealth have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the very rich while living standards have stagnated for most households -- why don’t we see governments playing Robin Hood, taking more from those at the top and distributing more generous social benefits to the rest of the population?

A large literature has established that part of the answer lies in political inequality: in the ways the rich convert their economic resources into political influence. The middle class and poor may want redistribution but they cannot get it, because they lack political influence.

What Charlotte does is to take a step back to ask: how popular is Robin Hood anyway? A substantial part of the reason why we don’t see more redistribution, Charlotte argues, is because most citizens in places like the U.S. and the U.K. are not demanding it -- that is, even they would benefit from it. Charlotte wants to know why.

Drawing on insights from behavioral economics, she argues that, if we want to understand the mass politics of redistribution, we have to stop thinking about people as purely self-interested income-maximizers. We need to start thinking of people as social beings who place a fundamental value on principles of fairness. When citizens think about redistribution, they start by asking themselves fairness-oriented questions about whether everyone is getting what they deserve, who is contributing to the common good, and who is free-riding, taking advantage of the generosity of others.

In this conversation, Charlotte traces out the logic of redistribution as fairness and talks to us about how this logic can explain weak support for redistribution, even as inequality skyrockets. We also talk with Charlotte about other puzzling empirical patterns, such as why the affluent often support more generous social spending than the poor. And we discuss the prospects for progressive reform, including why the COVID pandemic might -- and, just as well, might not -- generate the political conditions for expansionary social policy in advanced democracies.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

 In this episode, we ask: when a state doesn’t enforce the rules, is it because they don’t have the capacity to do so, or because they’ve chosen not to? Put differently, when is indifference a deliberate policy strategy?

We talk with Dr. Kelsey Norman about her new book, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration, and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa. Kelsey is a Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, where she directs the Women’s Rights, Human Rights & Refugees program.

In Reluctant Reception, Kelsey seeks to explain how states choose to engage with forced migrants (including refugees and asylum-seekers) living within their borders. Focused on the cases of Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco, this is an innovative study in a number of important ways. There’s a vast literature analyzing how rich democracies respond to immigration from the Global South and immigrants living within their borders. Yet Kelsey is interested in understanding the politics of migration within the Global South -- in how Global South states engage with migrants within their own borders.

Scholars have often thought of countries like Egypt or Morocco as mere migration stopovers -- as places that migrants from other parts of the Middle East or Africa pass through on their way to Europe. Kelsey’s investigation launches from the often neglected fact that a large share of migrants never make it to the Global North, and that the stopover often becomes the de facto destination, a place where millions of migrants and refugees end up making their lives.

So how do reluctant Global South host states respond to these large, uninvited, semi-permanent populations of migrants? In some cases, host states repress and exclude: they restrict access to labor markets and services, detain migrants and refugees, and deport them. In other cases, states seek to integrate migrants, granting them basic rights, assistance, and access to work.

But often, Kelsey argues, states choose neither to repress nor to integrate. Instead, they adopt a policy approach that Kelsey calls “strategic indifference.” Under strategic indifference, states deliberately choose not to formally grant residency permits, access to employment, or services; but they tolerate informal labor-market participation, while declining to enforce residency rules and allowing NGOs and international agencies to provide basic services.

We talk with Kelsey about why states construct deliberately ambiguous policy responses -- what’s in it for them -- and about how a regime of strategic indifference shapes the day to day lives of migrants and refugees.

Kelsey also talks to us about her two years of intensive fieldwork in the three countries: about how a policy pattern that had been little-noted in the literature came into focus as she watched developments on the ground; how an ethnographic sensibility shaped the way she attended to the world around her; and how she’s grappled with the ethical quandaries of conducting research with vulnerable populations in the Global South as a citizen of the affluent North.

As always, you can find references to all of the academic works that we discuss in the episode on the episode page on our website.

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi, an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Zürich, about how far-right parties have reshaped politics in advanced democracies.

Consider the dilemma faced by mainstream political parties of right and the left in much of Europe. Center-right, conservative and social democratic parties dominated European politics for most of the postwar era, consistently winning large proportions of the vote at election time. Over the last two decades, however, far-right parties running on nationalist, anti-immigration platforms have expanded their appeal to become formidable electoral competitors, steadily taking votes and parliamentary seats from mainstream parties and complicating the task of forming traditional governing coalitions. (The same is true of Green and far left parties, but that’s a topic for another episode.)

Center-right and center-left parties face a strategic dilemma in deciding how to respond to the threat posed by the far right. One strategy available to mainstream parties is to maintain their more moderate positions on issues like immigration while making a case against the xenophobia and nativism that the far right is peddling or trying to change the subject to other issues. Alternatively, mainstream parties can try to coopt the far right’s policy stance, taking more nationalist, anti-immigrant positions themselves in an attempt to take the wind out of the far right’s sails. Which of these strategies have most mainstream European parties adopted? And do those strategies work?

Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi is among those currently doing the most interesting and sophisticated research on the politics of the far right. We talk with Tarik about two of his recent papers: a 2020 article with Werner Krause in the British Journal of Political Science on the causal effect of radical-right party success on mainstream parties’ issues positions; and a working paper with Krause and Denis Cohen evaluating the success of mainstream parties’ efforts to accommodate far-right policy stances. Together, these two papers paint a picture of how mainstream parties respond to the challenge posed by the far right and of the limits of trying to beat the far right at its own game.

On the whole, this is a conversation about how the radical right has shifted the terms of political debate across Europe, and about how the far right can achieve its policy goals, such as clamp-downs on immigration, without even entering government. We also talk with Tarik about the empirical strategies that he and his coauthors use to address difficult challenges of causal inference: in particular, the regression-discontinuity design (RDD) that they employ. We discuss the logic and benefits of the RDD strategy as well as some of its limits in allowing us to draw generalizable inferences.

Be sure to  check out Tarik’s terrific podcast, Transformation of European Politics, including his interviews with authors discussed in this episode: Rafaela Dancygier, Tamar Mitts and Cas Mudde.

The scholarly works discussed in this episode can be found on the episode page on our

In this episode, we talk about how strong legislatures emerge. When we think about what makes a political system a democracy, we usually think of one key ingredient as being an elected legislature that can constrain the executive: an elected assembly that serves as a check on executive whim and has the ultimate say on core matters of public policy. But where do strong legislatures come from?

As political scientists, we commonly tell ourselves an origin story -- first set out by Douglass North and Barry Weingast -- about the emergence of parliamentary strength in 17th century England that goes something like this: the monarchy needed to borrow money. But before wealthy elites were willing to lend to the Crown, they wanted to make sure that they would be paid back. Thus, parliamentary prominence arose as a way for the Crown to credibly tie its own hands and for elites to hold the executive to its commitments. A strong parliament emerged from the underlying balance of bargaining power between the sovereign and elites.

Our guest today, Dr. Ken Opalo, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, argues that this paradigmatic origin story does not travel very well beyond Europe. In his 2019 book, Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies, Ken examines how strong and weak legislatures emerged as African nations transitioned from autocracy to multi-party democracy. The book centers on the comparison of Kenya and Zambia, two countries that democratized in the early 1990s, shifting from single-party to multi-party rule. Both countries had had open legislatures during the postcolonial, authoritarian period, legislatures that are now elected through multi-party competition. But while multi-party elections turned Kenya’s legislature into a strong assembly that frequently bucks the president, Zambia’s democratic legislature follows the president’s lead about as frequently as it did during the authoritarian period.

We talk with Ken about why democracy generated a strong legislature in one country but continued executive dominance in the other. This is, fundamentally, a conversation about how to theorize and study institutional development as democracy emerges in postcolonial settings. Ken explains what is distinctive about such contexts and why models of the rise of executive constraint derived from the European experience do such a poor job of explaining outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. We also talk about why scholars have missed key institutional variation across African autocracies: variation that is not picked up in standard cross-national datasets but that has crucial implications for legislative development once democracy takes hold.

The scholarly works discussed in this episode can be found on our website.

In this conversation, we talk with Dr. Agustina Paglayan, an assistant professor of political science at UC San Diego, about her project “The Dark Side of Education,” an examination of the spread of mass primary schooling around the world. Paglayan recently published an article on the topic in the American Political Science Review and has a larger book project underway expanding on this research.

In this project, Paglayan seeks to challenge a great deal of what we think we know about the spread of primary education around the world. Common understandings of the expansion of public education take a pretty benign view of its origins. Previous scholarship has tended to argue that states expanded primary schooling to invest in human capital, to redistribute to the poor, or to promote economic development. Scholars have also contended that the spread of education was largely a democratic project, as a response to popular demands following democratization.

Paglayan has quite a different story to tell about how primary schooling became broadly available around the world. Drawing on a wealth of historical evidence, she argues that it wasn’t democrats but dictators who extended primary education to the masses. Moreover, in most cases, she contends, governments expanded primary schooling not as a concession to the poor, but as a tool for silencing dissent, undermining rebellion, and reinforcing their hold on power.

In our conversation, Paglayan advances these arguments by tying together rich knowledge of the cases she studies (such as 19th-century Prussia, Chile, and the Jim Crow American South), an original comparative-historical dataset on the expansion of education around the world, and careful thinking about drawing causal inferences from cross-national, time-series data. This was a fascinating discussion that changed the way we think about the politics of education.

A figure from Paglayan's APSR article and the scholarly works discussed in this episode can be found on our website.

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Bryn Rosenfeld, an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University, about her new book, The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy (Princeton University Press).

This book’s starting point is a puzzling observation that Rosenfeld made during years conducting research in the post-Soviet region. She noticed that, in places like Russia and Kazakstan, the rising middle class was not a commercial bourgeosie or a growing cohort of private-sector white-collar professionals. Rather, in much of the post-Soviet world, the middle class was composed largely of public sector employees. In other words, as compared to what we see in most established democracies, where much of the middle class is deeply embedded in the market, the post-Soviet middle class was much more heavily reliant on the state for its livelihood.

In her book, Rosenfeld explores the implications of a state-dependent middle class for the prospects for democracy in a region dominated by autocrats. A long research tradition in comparative politics casts a large, educated middle class as a key constituency for democracy -- as a group that demands political reform and the protection of individual rights.

But what happens when authoritarian governments pursue top-down strategies of economic modernization, leaving the rising professional class dependent on the regime for its continued prosperity? How democratic is a middle class that prospers in a dictator’s employ? And, more broadly, how do the prospects for democratization of authoritarian regimes depend on the basic structure of the economy?

These are the questions Rosenfeld’s work grapples with. In this conversation, Rosenfeld outlines the puzzle motivating her work, the argument at the center of the book, and the research design she uses to test that argument. One particular area we focus on is the empirical challenge of determining how a person’s political beliefs are shaped by the nature of their employment, given that individuals “select into” occupations for reasons that may be related to their political views. Rosenfeld explains how she tackles this inferential problem. We also explore the implications of Rosenfeld’s findings for paths out of autocracy: if the state-dependency of the middle class is the problem, can privatization pave the road to democracy?

You can find references to scholarly work discussed in the episode on our website, here.

In this episode,  we talk with Dr. Nikhar Gaikwad, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, about his book project on what happens when identity politics and the economy collide.

Many debates in political science revolve around the question of what matters more: identity or economics. For instance, debates about the drivers of populism often revolve around the questions of whether populism emerges from nativist, ethnocentric attitudes or from the economic anxieties generated by globalization.

A distinctive feature of Gaikwad’s project is that it examines how identities and material interests interact and shape political strategies jointly. He takes as his starting point the fact that parties and candidates in diverse societies will often choose to play the "identity card” to boost their support among a religious, ethnic, caste or other group that’s in the majority. In India, for instance, certain politicians and parties have come to power in part through strident appeals to Hindu nationalism and the vilification of Muslims.

However, these “identity entrepreneurs,” Gaikwad argues, find that identity politics is not by itself sufficient to guarantee electoral success. Rather, parties running on ethnocentrism find that they simultaneously need to use economic policy to build winning electoral coalitions. Gaikwad’s analysis centers on figuring out how ethnocentric parties allocate economic benefits: perhaps surprisingly, Gaikwad finds, those parties that use identity-based appeals to flatter cultural majorities often direct economic benefits to the cultural minority.

An important takeaway of this conversation is the importance of analyzing cultural and material politics jointly. If we want to make sense of identity politics in culturally divided societies, then we need to understand economic policy -- and vice versa.

In this conversation, Gaikwad explains to us the logic of his argument, and we take in the sweep of the evidence that he brings to bear on it, including a series of case studies, survey experiments, and statistical analyses in the contexts of India, Brazil, and the United States. Among the interesting implications that we explore are how building electoral coalitions in divided societies hinges on tactics of visibility -- on combining brazen cultural appeals with under-the-radar economic policy -- and how the stealth targeting of material benefits can help explain the electoral success of rightwing populists, including India’s Narendra Modi and the U.S.’s Donald Trump. We also talk with Gaikwad about what his argument has to tell us about an apparent reversal of globalization, with the raising of barriers to trade and investment in some parts of the world.

You can find references to scholarly work discussed in the episode on our website, here.

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Aram Hur, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri, about her book project Narratives of Duty: How National Stories Shape Civic Duty in Asia.

Narratives of Duty is a study about the social good that, under the right conditions, can emerge from nationalism. We often think about nationalism today as an exclusionary and pernicious force in politics -- as, for instance, a driver of anti-immigrant sentiment and of conflict between groups or states. Hur’s project examines a potential “upside” to nationalism: the role that nationalism can play in creating a sense of citizen duty and, in turn, in inducing people to contribute to collective social goods. She examines how nationalism can motivate citizens to take costly action in support of the state, such as volunteering to serve in the army, paying their taxes, or contributing to a fiscal rescue during a financial crisis.

To be clear, Hur does not argue that nationalism always and everywhere generates a willingness to contribute to the common good. Rather, she is interested in understanding the conditions under which it does so. She contends that whether nationalism boosts civic duty depends, in particular, on the relationship between national identities and states: in particular, on whether or not national groups see the state as representing their nation.

Hur is especially interested in what nationalism can do for democracies. Unlike autocracies, which can readily turn to hard-edged forms of coercion, democracies rely heavily on voluntary compliance, making a sense of civic duty an especially valuable source of resilience.

In our conversation with Hur, we trace out the logic of her argument, think through its implications for democratic stability, and talk through the diverse range of research designs that the project brings together. Centered on a comparison between South Korea and Taiwan, the study combines evidence from in-depth qualitative interviews, field and survey experiments, and observational survey data, including an extension to the settings of eastern and western Germany. We also discuss what Hur’s argument can tell us about South Korea’s success in combating COVID-19, as well as how the country’s tight nation-state linkage creates new challenges in an era of falling fertility and increasing immigration.

You can find references to scholarly work discussed in the episode on our website, here.

Today on Scope Conditions, what’s the secret to successful peacekeeping?

We often think of civil conflict as being driven by organized, armed groups – like rebel militias and state armies. But as our guest today reminds us, a leading cause of conflict around the world is communal violence – fights that break out between civilians over land, cattle, water, and other scarce resources.  When the United Nations sends peacekeepers in to manage a conflict, one of their most important jobs is defusing tensions among neighbors – preventing local disputes from spiraling into widespread violence and derailing a larger peace process. 

Dr. William Nomikos is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara. In his forthcoming book, Local Peace, International Builders: How the UN Builds Peace from the Bottom Up, Will asks why peacekeepers sometimes manage, but other times fail, to keep a lid on communal violence. As he explains to us, the key to successful peacekeeping is being perceived by local populations as an impartial mediator among contending groups. 

But the thing is, a reputation for impartiality isn’t something that a peacekeeping force can manufacture overnight. Whether or not peacekeepers are seen as unbiased in a communal dispute is often shaped by experiences that long predate the contemporary conflict, such as the legacies of colonialism. It turns out that deployments by former colonizers – like French peacekeepers sent to Mali – have a pretty hard time tamping down local conflicts.

Will walks us through the micro-level logic of his theory of impartial peacekeeping, grounded in the psychology of group conflict. We then discuss his multi-pronged empirical strategy for testing the theory – using a novel, highly granular dataset on peacekeeping deployments; in-depth interviews with communal leaders; and lab-in-the-field experiments in Mali. 

And we talk about the policy implications of his findings: is the UN uniquely capable of generating perceptions of fairness and managing communal violence, or can NGOs or regional bodies also get the job done? 

How do revelations of abusive and exploitative behavior by some UN peacekeepers complicate the impartiality picture? 

And if the presence of neutral arbiters is crucial for keeping a lid on violence, then what’s the peacekeeper’s exit strategy?

Works cited in this episode:

Baldwin, Kate. The paradox of traditional chiefs in democratic Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Blair, Robert A., Sabrina M. Karim, and Benjamin S. Morse. "Establishing the rule of law in weak and war-torn states: Evidence from a field experiment with the Liberian National Police." American Political Science Review 113, no. 3 (2019): 641-657.

Hunnicutt, Patrick and William G. Nomikos. 2020. “Nationality, Gender, and Deployments at the Local Level: Introducing the RADPKO Dataset.” International Peacekeeping 27(4):645–672

Russell, Kevin, and Nicholas Sambanis. "Stopping the violence but blocking the peace: dilemmas of foreign-imposed nation building after ethnic war." International Organization 76, no. 1 (2022): 126-163.

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Elizabeth Nugent, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about her new book, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press).

Nugent is interested in authoritarian regimes that have collapsed in the face of popular uprising -- and specifically with what comes next. The demise of a dictatorship does not necessarily lmean the start of a democracy: one autocratic regime can fall only to replaced by another dictatorship. It is in fact relatively rare that autocratic collapse results in the establishment of a stable democracy.

In her new book, Nugent is interested in figuring out what makes the difference. When a dictatorship falls, why do we sometimes get democracy and sometimes more autocracy? She focuses specifically on the aftermath of the Arab Spring: the string of popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2010s. In particular, the book examines the toppling of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the collapse of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia.

The Egypt-Tunisia comparison is a striking one. Before and during the Arab Spring, these two countries looked similar in many respects. Both were ruled by dictators who had been in power for decades; both regimes were unseated by weeks of sustained mass protest; and both were replaced at first by members of the democratic opposition. Moreover, the politics of both countries revolved around the divide between Islamism and secularism.

After the Arab Spring, however, the political systems’ paths diverged dramatically. After a brief flirtation with democracy, Egypt quickly descended back into strongman rule while Tunisians set up a quite vibrant multiparty democracy that still survives today.

So what was it that allowed Tunisian society -- but not Egyptian society -- to support democratic norms and institutions? Nugent argues that the answer lies in how the old regime in each country wielded repressive power and the mark that repression left on identities and organizations among the two countries’ democratic oppositions.

In this episode, we unpack Nugent’s argument about the legacies of repression and about the evidence that she brings to bear on that argument, including comparative-historical analysis, in-depth interviews with opposition members, and inventive lab experiments. We discuss elements of the research process including how she decided to bring social psychology into the study of democratization and how she engaged with her research participants about highly sensitive and traumatic experiences. We also talk about what historical analysis brings to her explanation: why understanding British and French colonialism can help make sense of regime change in the 2010s. And we touch on possible parallels between coercive institutions in autocracies and repressive state practices in democracies.

You can find references to Elizabeth Nugent's work and other relevant material on our website, here.

In this episode, we talk about improving relations between social groups. For decades, social scientists and policymakers have been examining whether meaningful social interaction between groups can help reduce prejudice and conflict,  or what’s been known as the “contact hypothesis.”

Whether social interaction breeds tolerance has implications, of course, for a huge range of political outcomes: for instance, for the risks of violence, civil war, and genocide; patterns of discrimination; and how societies respond to increased flows of immigration. It’s only recently, however, that social scientists have been experimentally testing the contact hypothesis in real-world, high-stakes settings.

Our guest is Dr. Salma Mousa, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Immigration Policy Lab. Mousa's research uses field and natural experiments to examine the possibility that contact between groups can foster both more positive attitudes and more positive behaviors across group lines.

We talk with Mousa about two recent papers of hers that delve into real-world settings to examine how and under what conditions intergroup contact can help. The first paper, recently published as the cover article in the journal Science, tests the contact hypothesis under especially tough conditions: in the context of Christian-Muslim tensions in post-conflict Iraq. Working among communities displaced by the war with ISIS, Mousa conducted an innovative field experiment in which she randomly assigned Christian soccer teams to either receive additional Christian players or additional Muslim players for a season — and then she observed whether this changed the Christian team members’ attitudes and behaviors towards Muslims.

In the second paper, Mousa examines the effects of virtual contact -- between school children of different ethnicities and nationalities -- to see whether the benefits of contact can be achieved online.

We discuss the substance of Mousa's findings, the research designs she deploys, and, more generally, how to make sense of and draw policy lessons from findings in the field of group conflict. Among the issues we discuss are the difference between generating cross-group tolerance among individuals who directly interact with one another and producing generalized tolerance toward an entire social group; why it may be easier to change behaviors toward outgroups than to change attitudes; and the challenge of scaling up carefully designed experimental treatments into society-wide policies that breed more positive intergroup relations.

For references to all academic works mentioned in this episode, please visit our website at scopeconditionspodcast.com.

Introducing Scope Conditions, a podcast about cutting-edge research in comparative politics.

Today on Scope Conditions: when is racial status a unifying force in politics?

Shared experiences of prejudice and discrimination can sometimes help create shared political identities within and across racial minority groups and strong incentives for collective mobilization. But as our guest today points out, neither race nor racial-minority status maps neatly onto patterns of political coalition-building. Consider, for instance, the lack of an enduring political alliance between African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities in places like New York City or the absence before the 1970s of a Latino political identity encompassing Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans.

Dr. Jae Yeon Kim, a senior data scientist at Code for America, has been thinking a lot about the conditions under which groups with shared experiences of racialization and discrimination join forces politically, and when political action is organized instead around other social markers like class and ethnicity. In his article “Racism Is Not Enough: Minority Coalition Building in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver,” published in Studies in American Political Development, Jae unpacks a revealing comparison in patterns of mobilization and alliance-formation across the Chinatowns in these three cities. 

These cities all shared a long history of pervasive and violent anti-Asian racism – which one might have thought would generate a collective race-based political identity. But while Asian coalitions formed to fend off the gentrification of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Vancouver’s ethnic-Chinese population allied with their southern European neighbors, rather than fellow Asian-Canadians, in their fight for affordable housing.

Jae tells us why that is by comparing patterns of residential segregation versus integration that shaped the logic of coalition-building in these three sites. We discuss how he gained analytical leverage for this comparison by looking at different exogenous shocks – natural disasters and duration of Japanese internment – that generated different patterns of settlement.

We also talk with Jae about his broader work on how the experience of racism affects political identities and behaviors. We discuss a study he conducted with Nathan Chan and Vivien Leung that shows how Donald Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric affected Asian-Americans’ partisan leanings. Jae also tells us about a paper with Reuel Rogers that problematizes the concept of “linked fate” and that analyzes the formation of race-based political identities as contingent processes that hinge heavily on elite strategies and historical dynamics.

Works discussed in the episode:

Chan, N., Kim, J., & Leung, V. (2022). COVID-19 and Asian Americans: How Elite Messaging and Social Exclusion Shape Partisan Attitudes. Perspectives on Politics, 20(2), 618-634. doi:10.1017/S1537592721003091

Dawson, Michael. A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics. Public Culture 1 January 1994; 7 (1): 195–223

Dawson, Michael. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton 1994).

Kim, Jae Yeon. "Racism is not enough: Minority coalition building in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver." Studies in American Political Development (2020): 195-215.

Today on Scope Conditions, can we teach voters how to tell truth from lies?

Around the world, governments and political parties wield misinformation as a powerful political weapon – a weapon that is massively amplified by social media. A large and growing literature has investigated how misinformation spreads and ways of combating it – from corrections and warning-labels to educational programs designed to inoculate citizens against untruths. Yet most of what we know about misinformation and its antidotes comes from the US and other Western contexts – places with notably high rates of formal education and internet exposure, where most of the misinformation is on public platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But these are contexts that, to put it simply, don’t look like most of the world.

Our guest today – Dr. Sumitra Badrinathan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at American University’s School of International Service – turns our attention to India – the world’s largest democracy. As in much of the Global South, internet access in India is expanding in leaps and bounds, and misinformation travels more on encrypted chat services like WhatsApp than on Facebook. Over the last few years, Sumitra has been running innovative field experiments testing the effectiveness of misinformation antidotes tailored to the Indian context.

We talk with Sumitra about one of these studies, recently published in the American Political Science Review. As Sumitra explains to us, citizens in India were awash in misinformation during the crucial 2019 election battle, a dynamic exacerbated by increased partisanship in the era of Modi’s BJP and Hindu nationalism. Carried out during the election, Sumitra’s study examines whether Indian citizens can get better at telling truth from lies if you teach them how to do their own online fact-checking.

We find out whether the treatment actually worked – which turns out to be a complicated story. We also dig into Sumitra’s research process – how she was able to get 95% uptake from participants (spoiler: it involved lots of tea) and how she had to change parts of the study on the fly when bringing tablets into the field turned out to be unsafe. And we talk with Sumitra about how her own identity made some parts of the fieldwork more challenging, brought down some barriers, and most of all was something that she had to constantly be aware of as she navigated the complex terrain of running a field experiment.

By the way, this conversation is about just one of the many misinformation antidotes Sumitra has been investigating. If you want to learn about her work on the effects of religious messaging or of peer corrections in combating deception, check out the links to her other papers on the episode webpage.

Today on Scope Conditions: why the judge’s gavel is sometimes mightier than the sword.

Political trials – or show trials – are a well-known mode of repression in authoritarian settings. We often think of a show trial as a sham version of the real thing: the autocrat affords his enemy a semblance of due process to give off the appearance of fairness, even though in reality, the fix is in. On this view, the show trial helps to legitimize arbitrary rule.

Our guest today, Dr. Fiona Shen-Bayh, an assistant professor of Government at the College of William and Mary, tells us that this common understanding of political trials gets things only half right. Sure, the outcome of a show trial is pretty much pre-ordained. But political trials aren’t concessions to norms of legal fairness. Rather, Fiona argues, the trial – the ritual, storytelling, and publicness of a judicial process – is itself a key tool of repression and power-maintenance, especially for rulers facing threats that they can’t see.

We have a terrific conversation with Fiona about her new book, Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts, an analysis of the political logic of show trials in post-independence Anglophone Africa. Fiona explains to us how the pomp and ceremony of the courtroom helps undermine coordination among the dictator’s enemies. We also talk about how autocrats choose between assassinating their opponents and putting them on trial, and about how African dictators find judges who are both competent enough to run a good trial and compliant enough to rig the outcome.

Fiona also tells us how she painstakingly dug through archives to construct an original dataset of coup plots and repressive responses.  We learn how Fiona dealt with the challenge of identifying unsuccessful coup plots and what happened to the plotters – over many decades in seven African countries. Records inside these countries were sparse, so she immersed herself instead in the shadow archives. And if you don’t know what a shadow archive is, you’ll want to listen to find out. We also talk with Fiona about how she managed the inevitable uncertainties of deep archival work – of not knowing whether your months of digging through the files will turn up anything useful.

This is a conversation about courts as political institutions. And we close it out by asking Fiona to reflect on whether this is just an autocratic dynamic, or one that afflicts democracies too. At the end of the day, what is it that keeps courts in liberal democracies from merely serving political ends?

Today on Scope Conditions: what drives discrimination against immigrants – and what can be done about it?

When social scientists have sought to explain anti-immigrant bias, they’ve tended to focus on one of two possible causes: the perceived economic threat that migrants might pose to the native born or the cultural threat driven by differences in race, ethnicity, or religion.

In a new book with Mathias Poertner and Nicholas Sambanis, our guest Donghyun Danny Choi, an assistant professor of political science at Brown, uses an innovative set of field experiments to test an alternative possibility: that the native-born perceive migrants as a threat to longstanding civic norms.

Could anti-immigrant bias be shaped by fears – often unjustified – that newcomers don’t share the same ideas about the meaning and practice of citizenship? Can misperceptions about norm-divergence be corrected? And are there interventions that can actually lead native-born citizens to adopt more cooperative behaviors across ethnic and cultural divides?

In their book Native Bias, Danny and his coauthors try to get at these questions using a wonderfully creative set of experiments, carried out across Germany shortly after the arrival of over a million Syrian refugees. You’ll have to listen to find out how the experiments worked – but for now we’ll just say that they involved dropping thousands of lemons on train platforms. 

We talk with Danny about how the team came up with their experimental designs, how they carried them out, and what they found. One of their most interesting findings is that native German women tend to be more accepting of Muslim female migrants who signal that they hold progressive gender norms. But we also push Danny on the implications of the book’s findings. The treatments in the experiments involve immigrants demonstrably signaling their adherence to dominant German values. Even if this signaling works to dampen discrimination, we wondered how exactly this kind of intervention can be scaled up to the societal level. We also talk with Danny about who the book is saying bears the onus of reducing discrimination: is it up to immigrants to “fit in” better or up to natives to examine their own prejudices?

A little over two years ago, mass protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, focused public attention on the dramatically higher rates at which the police use force against Black and Latinx people. More broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement has put a spotlight on deep-seated systemic racism in the criminal justice system in the U.S. and beyond. Against this backdrop, many reform advocates have called for a fundamental reorientation of priorities and resources with calls to “defund the police”: to shift money away from armed law enforcement and toward unarmed first responders and investments in communities. 

The phrase “defund the police” has been a powerful rallying cry for millions of Americans seeking to reimagine the relationship between the state and communities of color. However, some critics, including leaders within the Democratic Party, have argued that calls to cut police budgets might undermine support for change by allowing opponents to equate police reform with leaving neighborhoods unpatrolled and unprotected. It’s possible that the slogan “defund the police,” while mobilizing core supporters, turns away other people who actually support the substance of reform.

Our guest today, Dr. Genevieve Bates, is interested in how the way we talk about racial justice in policing shapes public support for reform. Gen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science here with us at UBC, and has to date mostly worked in the fields of international relations and comparative politics, studying transitional justice mechanisms in the wake of civil war. But recently, Gen has teamed up with coauthor Geneva Cole – who studies racial politics in the US – to examine the effect of alternative framings of police reform on public attitudes. 

What they’ve been especially interested in are the ways in which efforts to root out systemic racism in policing look a lot like post-conflict, or post-authoritarian, transitional justice initiatives. This suggests an intriguing possibility: what if, instead of talking about criminal justice reform as defunding the police, advocates framed reform as part of a larger international movement to redress past state abuses and defend human rights? This is the question that Gen and Geneva tackle through a novel survey experiment that they recently carried out in the US.

In this episode, we talk with Gen about the broad criminal-justice reform landscape, about how she and Geneva drew the connection between transitional justice and police reform, how they designed their experimental treatments, and why it’s important to study not just generic support for reform but support for implementing concrete, real-world reforms in people’s own communities.

This episode puts the study of American politics into dialogue with the study of international relations and comparative politics in an unconventional way: by seeing what happens if we ask Americans, who often view their political system as exceptional, to place their own societal conflicts and challenges in a comparative perspective. We also talk with Gen about why and how the study of international relations itself ought to be grappling with issues of race.

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about rising partisan animosity and what can be done about it.

When we think about partisan polarization, we’re often thinking about the United States – and about how the policy attitudes or ideological positions of Republicans and Democrats have moved further and further apart in recent decades. But partisan polarization is far from a uniquely American phenomenon. And it isn’t just about policy attitudes.

Increasingly, political scientists have been attending to the sociological and emotional features of partisan differentiation – to the ways partisanship can become a social identity, with party adherents developing warm feelings toward members of the same political camp – and deep hostility toward citizens on the opposing team. This is known as affective polarization. Moreover, recent studies have shown that affective polarization has been on the rise well beyond the U.S., in places like Switzerland, France, Denmark and – as we learn from our guest today – in Israel. 

Chagai Weiss is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and co-founder of the Intergroup Relations Workshop. He’s interested in how institutions and interpersonal interactions can shape conflict between social groups. While much of his work has focused on tensions between Jews and Palestinians, we’re talking to Chagai today about the social divide between left and right voters – who often view each other with deep distrust and enmity. In an article just published in Comparative Political Studies, Chagai and coauthor Lotem Bassan-Nygate use a set of natural and survey experiments in Israel to understand the drivers of affective polarization and shed light on potential institutional solutions.

In particular, they’re interested in how elite behavior can exacerbate or mitigate social divisions within the electorate. Does the cut-and-thrust of electoral competition contribute to mutual dislike between the voters of opposing parties? And can elites’ decisions to cooperate across party lines encourage their supporters to better get along? These are the questions Chagai and Lotem are interested in, and they’re especially salient ones right now in Israel – which is currently being governed by an unlikely and unwieldy coalition of left, right, and center parties. But they’re also tricky questions to answer. After all, when we observe elite competition or cooperation, they may be as much consequences of intergroup relations as they are drivers of those relations. 

We talk with Chagai about how he and Lotem gained leverage on these causal relationships by exploiting naturally occurring features of Israeli politics – including how they spotted a research design opportunity in the messy, indeterminate outcome of the fall 2019 Knesset elections.

Chagai also talks to us about the limits to using surveys and survey experiments to learn about the effects of elite behavior and institutions. Because they couldn’t manipulate institutions themselves, Chagai and Lotem manipulate information about elite behavior within institutions. But then it’s not straightforward to map from this light-touch informational treatment to conclusions about the real-world effects of macro-level political arrangements. Ultimately, Chagai suggests that studying institutional effects requires a multi-pronged research program that combines carefully crafted experiments with cross-national comparisons. 

When we think of weak democracies around the world, we often think of their inability to maintain a monopoly on violence because of challenges outside the state – like militias, rebel groups, criminal gangs, and other external, violent organizations. But sometimes it’s actors deeply intertwined with the state – like political parties – who are engaging in the violence. Sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house.

Our guest today, Niloufer Siddiqui, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany - State University of New York, shares with us insights from her award-winning book Under the Gun: Political Parties and Violence in Pakistan. Exploiting subnational variation within the country, Niloufer asks why Pakistani political parties use violence to achieve their goals in some political contexts but not in others. And when they do strategically decide to use violence, when do they take care of things “in house,” having party cadres carry out violent actions and when do they outsource their “dirty work” to other groups, like gangs and militias?

Examining the behavior of several political parties across multiple provinces, Niloufer explains how electoral and economic incentives, the structure of ethnic cleavages, and organizational strength factor into parties’ decisions about whether to use violence – and, if so, whether to outsource it or do it themselves. 

We talk with Niloufer about how she gets at these dynamics by triangulating among survey experiments conducted with voters and elected politicians; about 150 interviews with party officials, journalists, civil society, and police and intelligence officers; and focus groups with party members and voters. Niloufer also tells us how, in doing this work, her own identity as a Muhajir woman gave her special access to one of the major parties she writes about, the MQM party, particularly the female members of the party. 

Lastly, we take a step back and talk with Niloufer about the ethical implications of her study. We ask her whether, in a fragile democracy like Pakistan, there’s some risk in exposing and calling attention to the violent nature of political parties. Might doing so serve to undermine public confidence in the democratic project? Could one unintended consequence of research on democracy’s shortcomings be to give actors like the military a convenient excuse to sweep in and push elected politicians aside? 

Works cited in this episode

Brass, Paul R. The production of Hindu-Muslim violence in contemporary India. University of Washington Press, 2011.

Brubaker, Rogers, and David D. Laitin. “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 423-452

Graham, Matthew H., and Milan W. Svolik. "Democracy in America? Partisanship, polarization, and the robustness of support for democracy in the United States." American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2020): 392-409.

Kalyvas, Stathis N. "The ontology of “political violence”: action and identity in civil wars." Perspectives on politics 1, no. 3 (2003): 475-494.

Milan W. Svolik (2020), "When Polarization Trumps Civic Virtue: Partisan Conflict and the Subversion of Democracy by Incumbents", Quarterly Journal of Political Science: Vol. 15: No. 1, pp 3-31

Wilkinson, Steven. Votes and violence: Electoral competition and ethnic riots in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Political analysts are thinking a lot these days about the rule of law: where it comes from, what sustains it, how it can break down. Those are hard enough questions in themselves. And, yet — they simplify away an important complexity. They assume that there is only one law that rules. 

As our guest today, Dr. Egor Lazarev – assistant professor of political science at Yale – points out to us, in many parts of the world, the question is not just whether the law will rule – it’s also which of many legal orders will prevail. In his recent book State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya, Egor studies a setting in which different legal systems have evolved over time and coexist side by side – with matters like marriage, divorce, and murder sometimes being adjudicated by state judges, sometimes by religious courts, and sometimes under customary rules.

Egor first gives us a helpful primer on the Chechnyan civil wars and their central role in the making of Putin’s Russia. We then talk with him about how customary law, Sharia law, and state law operate alongside each other in Chechnya and how those seeking the protection of the law decide which legal order to turn to. As Egor explains, Chechnya is far from unique in displaying what he calls “legal pluralism.” Scholars estimate, for instance, that over 60 countries formally recognize some form of customary or traditional law alongside state law.

For the most part, this is a conversation about two things. First, we might expect that government actors would do all they can to suppress competing legal systems and ensure the primacy of state law. Why, then, do we sometimes see state leaders doing exactly the opposite? Egor tells us about the strategic conditions under which government officials will choose to intentionally strengthen customary or religious law relative to state law – and why a strategy that looks like it would diminish the power of state actors can actually enhance their legitimacy and authority.

This is also a conversation about gender and the law. In his book, Egor argues that the core social divide at the center of legal pluralism is a gender cleavage. Many struggles over social control often revolve around the regulation of female sexuality, around marriage and divorce, property inheritance, and honor and shame – and the different legal orders handle these issues very differently. We talk with Egor about the gendered impacts of state, customary, and Sharia law and about why Chechen women – particularly in the wake of two brutal, socially disruptive civil wars – have been turning to the state judiciary far more than Chechen men.

We hope you enjoy this conversation. To stay informed about future episodes, follow us on Bluesky @scopeconditions and check out our website, scopeconditionspodcast.com, where you can also find references to all the academic works we discuss. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Now, here’s our conversation with Egor Lazarev.

Works cited in this episode

Desmond, M. (2012). Eviction and the reproduction of urban poverty. The American Journal of Sociology, 118(1), 88-133. 

Gibson, E. L. (2013). Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Pachirat, T. (2011). Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

Wedeen, L. (2010). Reflections on ethnographic work in political science. Annual Review of Political Science, 13(1), 255-272.