Browsing by Author "Wibbels, Erik"
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Item Embargo Aiding or Failing the Bureaucracy? Foreign Aid in Uganda's Central Government(2024) Nagawa, MariaHow does foreign aid shape bureaucratic incentives and impact bureaucrats' performance? Despite the large amounts of development assistance directed towards the public sectors of developing countries across the world, this question has gone largely unanswered in the literature. This is a critical gap since bureaucrats are key to the implementation of development programs and undergird state capacity. In this dissertation, I argue that aid alters bureaucrats' incentives and drives them to make tradeoffs between their regular government duties and aid projects. As a result, performance on aid projects is boosted at the expense of government programming and organizational coherence.
I test my argument using a combination of qualitative, survey experimental, and observational panel data. My qualitative data consists of interviews of 39 bureaucrats across various ministries and agencies in Uganda's central government. My survey experimental data comprises responses from 559 mid-level bureaucrats across 6 ministries and approximately 70 departments, also in Uganda's central government. As one of the top recipients of aid in Africa, Uganda provides an ideal context for understanding how development aid impacts recipient governments. For my panel, I draw on data that runs across 161 countries over a period of 17 years.
Evidence from the panel data suggests that increased dependency on project aid lowers a country's bureaucratic quality. The qualitative and experimental findings demonstrate the mechanisms that drive these findings. The qualitative results show that aid projects disrupt bureaucratic hierarchies, distort bureaucrats' incentives, and undermine government programming. These findings are supported by the experimental results, which show that bureaucrats are willing to allocate effort away from their regular government duties and towards aid projects as financial incentives on aid projects increase. Taken together, the results highlight that in endeavouring to ensure the success of relatively short term aid programs, donors compromise bureaucratic capacity.
This comprehensive analysis, building upon rich descriptive insights to link individual-level to state-level effects, provides a critical lens into the mechanisms underlying how aid works and the possible implications for both aid effectiveness and state capacity. The findings challenge donors' reliance on project aid as a disbursement modality and underscore a need to reevaluate the role of aid in the bureaucracies of developing countries.
Item Open Access Connecting the Nodes. How Social Capital Enhances Local Public Goods' Provision in Shantytowns.(2017) Rojo, GuadalupeThe literature on clientelism has extensively covered the direct exchange of private goods for political support between voters and politicians. Yet, patronage does not end with the distribution of food, medicine or public employment. In poor informal settlements, access to a sanitation system or clean drinking water is often mediated by local politicians.Therefore, the interaction between slum politics and the provision of Local Public Goods (LPG) is quite relevant and requires further study.
This dissertation explains the variation in infrastructure and public services in shantytowns as a function of social capital. Well-connected communities --with stronger ties among its members-- solve collective action problems, improving slum dwellers' quality of life. The linking mechanism between social capital and LPG is electoral coordination (bloc-voting). Neighbors agree for a common electoral strategy at the slum-level, which translates into an effective mechanism to demand for improvements in their locality (``good-type partisan homogeneity'').
Alternatively, isolation among slum dwellers deteriorate their access to and quality of LPG. Under the absence of social capital, when slum-level electoral behavior appears to be homogenous, it is likely signaling political clientelism and not community-led coordination. Ultimately the ``bad-type partisan homogeneity'' represents the inability of slum dwellers to enforce electoral accountability and sanction unresponsive governments. I test my hypotheses with survey data from Udaipur (India) and eight provinces in Argentina.
Item Open Access Connections and Privileged Access: Essays on The Political Economy of Corruption(2022) Mejia Romero, Diego Jose LeonelActs of corruption at all levels have serious negative consequences for governments' finances and citizens' standards of living. Yet, corruption is largely sustained by norms and behavior (e.g., favoring one's family, reciprocity) that would be considered pro-social, were it not for the fact that they involve the misuse of public funds and the abuse of public office. In this dissertation I explore two themes that underpin this contradiction. First, citizen-bureaucrat relations, and how individuals, in their roles as ordinary citizens or managers of firms, use connections to elected officials and bureaucrats to obtain privileged access to public services or public procurement contracts. Second, the link between bureaucratic capacity and corruption. Chapter 2 proposes a novel explanation for citizen engagement in collusive forms of petty corruption. It is rooted in the social context in which citizen-bureaucrat interactions take place. I argue that social proximity and network centrality provide the two key enforcement mechanisms that sustain favor exchanges among socially connected individuals. Bribery, as a collusive arrangement between a citizen and a public official, relies on the same enforcement mechanisms. Using an original dataset from a household survey conducted in Guatemala, the analysis shows that social proximity and centrality allow citizens to obtain privileges through implicit favor exchanges and illicit payments. These effects go beyond simply increasing the frequency of contact with public officials and are not driven by better access to information about the bribery market. Chapter 3 examines how exposure to, or engagement in different forms of petty corruption transforms into overall assessments of state capacity. In it, I argue that two components of corrupt transactions, namely whether a payment is required and whether an illegal advantage is granted, affect citizen’s perceptions of state capacity in different ways. The act of paying a street-level bureaucrat informs a citizen of the state’s inability to prevent its workers from engaging in corruption. In contrast, the experience of obtaining illicit advantages informs a citizen of the state’s ability to provide expedited service delivery. To test the implications of this argument I rely, once again, on survey data from Guatemala, and find that exposure to extortion by street-level bureaucrats has a negative effect on individuals’ perceptions of the government’s capacity to provide services. Furthermore, obtaining illicit advantages through favor exchanges positively impacts perceptions of state capacity, but engaging in bribery has no effect on such perceptions since the effect of making a payment offsets that of receiving an advantage. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the dynamics of political favoritism in public procurement. In this chapter, I draw a sharp distinction between the extent to which a bureaucracy is politically controlled and its technical capacity. I argue that in politically controlled bureaucracies, stronger technical capacity facilitates corruption. In such contexts, more capable bureaucrats utilize their skills to shield favored firms from competition using complex strategies that minimize the risk of detection. I test the argument on a novel dataset of 54,623 municipal contracts in Guatemala and 21,631 firm-politician ties. In line with the argument, I find that more capable bureaucracies increase the likelihood of well-connected firms winning contracts through less competitive processes, even after controlling for a firm’s experience, size and previous business with the municipality. Furthermore, my analysis suggest that high-skilled bureaucrats rely on tender manipulation to favor connected firms.
Item Open Access Context and Preference Formation: The Social and Political Origins of Support for Redistribution(2012) Freeze, KentWhen do individuals feel that economic inequality needs to be corrected through redistributive government policy, such as progressive taxes or social spending? Using a cross-national data set of public opinion across both developing and developed countries, this dissertation finds that political context plays a key role in determining how individuals view economic inequality and their support for redistributive social policy. An overarching theme throughout the dissertation is that political elites are key in making inequality a prominent issue for the public. This is done by framing individual attributes such as income, ethnic identity or geographic local (urban vs. rural) in a way that will either maximize or minimize support for redistribution. When political elites lack incentives to mobilize public opinion on the issue, it becomes unlikely that individual attributes such as income or ethnicity will predict support for redistribution.
Item Open Access Democracy and Labor Market Outsiders: The Political Consequences of Economic Informality(2015) Altamirano Hernandez, MelinaThis dissertation addresses the effect of informality on three key dimensions: social policy
preferences, partisan attachments, and citizen-politician linkages. Many Latin American
labor markets have large informal sectors where workers are not covered by formal labor
arrangements and earn meager wages, as well as truncated social security systems that
target benefits to the well-off at the expense of the poor.
I first analyze how economic informality conditions voters preferences regarding the redistributive role of the state (Chapter 3). I examine the effect of labor informality on individual preferences over contribution-based programs (such as social security and public health insurance) and means-tested programs (such as CCTs). The analysis of micro-level data for both Latin America and Mexico suggests that, counterintuitively, voters in the informal sector are no more likely to support increased spending in social security and welfare institutions. On the contrary, labor market outsiders tend to favor only social programs with no eligibility requirements.
In the second part of the project, I study patterns of party identication among citizens
in the informal sector (Chapter 4). I argue that the low utility derived from social policies
and the obstacles to class identity formation contribute to depress partisan attachments.
The findings indicate that economic informality weakens ideological attachments between
voters and political parties. Results also show that outsiders trust less in political parties.
Finally, I analyze how economic informality conditions linkages between citizens and
politicians (Chapter 5). I theorize that given the characteristics of the members in the
informal sector, political parties will have incentives to approach them using
clientelistic offers and vote-buying strategies. I find that voters in the informal sector are particularly sensitive to some types of clientelistic offers. Furthermore, labor market outsiders seem to be more likely to switch their vote toward candidates offering private benefits.
Item Open Access Economic Channels for Influence Over Governments(2022) McDade, TimothyThis dissertation focuses on how economic markets provide channels for influence over government policy. Specifically, I examine three levels of analysis: the household, the financial security, and the foreign state. Economic constraints on government policy are particularly salient in today's financialized economy. Understanding these dynamics helps us forecast what will happen in the future. Getting these forecasts right is important because taxpayers, governments, and investors all have skin in the game of effective use of government resources. To paint a picture of these constraints, my dissertation contains three papers. The first argues that individuals with access to economic insurance are less likely to protest than those without. Using macroeconomic and survey data, I find evidence supporting my theoretical expectations. The second paper turns from household economics to the financial markets for government debt securities. Although the literature shows how governments make certain choices in debt issuance and the pricing dynamics of government bonds, it remains unclear how the ownership structure of debt affects yields. I argue that government bonds with more concentrated ownership structures have higher price volatility, which should incur volatility risk premium as a result. I find evidence supporting my theoretical expectations. This paper speaks to the relationship between debt ownership and power; it matters because governments with more concentrated debt ownership could see higher debt service payments over time. The third paper considers how state actors can use foreign investment as a policy tool. I argue that Chinese actors increase investment in target countries when future policy is more uncertain because investments act as a hedge against the possibility of unfavorable future policy. This runs counter to the traditional narrative, which suggests that foreign investment is more likely when policy is stable. Using a novel cross-national, high-frequency, machine-coded event data set, I find evidence supporting my expectations. My dissertation paints a picture of the breadth of ways that economic markets influence government policy. Governments contend with the economic interests of constituents who can demonstrate publicly, investors who can affect the price of their debt, and other states that can use investment to secure influence over future policy.
Item Embargo Electoral Markets on the Move: Essays about the Political Economy of Migration in Latin America(2025) Villamizar Chaparro, Santiago MateoHow do local politicians in the developing world respond to inflows of migrants into their constituencies? Unlike their counterparts in the developing world, most local politicians in the Global South tend to have very binding budgetary restrictions that constrain the set of possibilities and policies they can enact. With the inflow of new individuals into their municipalities, the question of how to deal with this increased demand for social services becomes key, as does the economic and social integration of migrants. In this dissertation, I draw on research from political inequality, migration, and political economy to understand how local politicians use the arrival of migrants strategically for their own gain. I argue that local politicians try to include or exclude migrant populations within their municipalities through the manipulation of a series of tools. Particularly local spending, regulation, and party platforms or through their choice of political rhetoric. I test this argument by studying three different migratory movements across two Latin American countries. First, focusing on the Brazilian case, I study how historical migration flows from Europeans determine the contemporary geography of support for affirmative action that cues politicians about the types of political regulations they should support. This chapter also shows how the historical choices of migration policy can have effects that expand for decades. Second, I analyze under what circumstances local Colombian politicians include internally displaced people in their informal networks of good distribution and vote-buying. Lastly, focusing on the arrival of millions of Venezuelans into Colombia, I analyze the conditions under which mayoral candidates use xenophobic rhetoric for electoral gain. The empirical sections of this study combine qualitative and quantitative methods with a series of original data collection exercises like surveys, the digitization of historical archives, and social media scrapping along with pre-existing public opinion and administrative data to test the argument. Overall, I find that exposure to European migrant settlements correlates with lower support for affirmative action, that local politicians will only incorporate internal migrants in clientelistic schemes in noncompetitive environments, and that politicians will engage in xenophobic rhetoric as a result of labor market competition between natives and migrants. Understanding these results presents an important step in understanding migrant political, economic, and social incorporation in the Global South.
Item Open Access Elite Politics and Inequality: The Development of Fiscal Capacity in Authoritarian Regimes(2015) Hollenbach, Florian Max BenjaminThe ability to raise revenue is one of the most fundamental requirements for state- hood. Without revenues, states are unable to perform even the most basic tasks. In this dissertation I aim to answer the question: When do authoritarian elites in- vest in fiscal capacity? First, I develop a theoretical argument using computational modeling techniques. I contend that inequality increases the costs associated with higher fiscal capacity due to a possible regime change in the future. On the other hand, elite demand for government spending can raise the incentives for autocrats to increase the tax capacity of the state. Complimentarity between elite-owned capital and government investment can lead to a demand for higher taxation. Based on their personal utility associated with government spending, elites weigh the current benefit of higher tax capacity with possible future costs.
I then test the overarching theoretical argument across two different datasets. First, I empirically investigate the question on a sample of over 90 authoritarian regimes from 1980 to 2006. Estimating a number of different models and including a variety of controls, I find that inequality has a strong negative long term effect on fiscal capacity. On the other hand, more industrial countries have higher levels of capacity. In the second empirical chapter, I investigate the theoretical argument on newly collected data on tax revenue and administrative spending in local Prussian counties in the 19th century. Again, I find that local inequality has strong negative effects, while more industrial areas are associated with higher levels of fiscal capacity.
Item Open Access Essays on the Political Economy of Media and Information Manipulation(2022) Adiguzel, Fatih SerkantThe last two decades have seen an emergence of a new regime type, called mixed regimes, whose democratically elected leaders have slowly eroded institutions of accountability. Unlike democratic breakdowns, such erosions take place in incremental steps, which create uncertainties about what the cumulative effects of these steps will lead to in the future. This dissertation focuses on media and information manipulation to understand how unconstrained leaders use media to sustain popular support and how they leverage such uncertainties for their benefit. I first analyze how governments in mixed regimes manipulate the informational environment in an era of conglomerate-owned media. I argue that state contracts in non-media sectors represent an essential tool for influencing media coverage. I use machine learning to construct a media bias measure and analyze the universe of all state contracts and a vast corpus of newspaper articles from Turkey. I show that conglomerate-owned newspapers are more pro-government than other newspapers. More importantly, this bias grows with the government’s discretion. In return, these conglomerates secure state contracts on favorable terms. Chapter 3 takes the analysis further and analyzes specific information manipulation strategies in captured media. In particular, I answer the following question: how do governments in mixed regimes manipulate economic news in times of economic crisis? Although economic crises may cause regimes to collapse, we see that unconstrained leaders in mixed regimes are resilient even in times of crisis. Using the 2021 currency crisis from Turkey and analyzing the entire corpora of three media outlets, this chapter examines the prevalence of different information manipulation strategies using various machine learning and dictionary methods. While these two chapters focus on media, Chapter 4 instead focuses on how such information manipulation strategies affect citizens in critical junctures, e.g., when asked about institutional changes that pave the way for unconstrained executives. In this chapter, I argue that aspiring unconstrained leaders are more likely to gain popular support when they present checks and balances as obstacles to getting things done. In doing so, these leaders exploit a critical tension between the possibility of gridlock and the abuse of power, which is inherent in democratic institutions. Using cross-national data and leveraging an original survey experiment from Turkey, I show that effective checks and balances decrease democracy satisfaction and that aspiring unconstrained leaders are more likely to gain popular support when they present these institutions as obstacles to getting things done. More interestingly, respondents perceive their gridlock justification to dismantle checks and balances as a pro-democratic attempt to remove the barriers to a policy-responsive regime. Overall, this dissertation project helps us understand how information manipulation in mixed regimes sustains popular support for unconstrained leaders.
Item Open Access Fool’s Gold: An Examination of Liberalization and Extractive Mining and in Ghana(2018-04) Gundersen, ConnorThis thesis assesses the spatial distribution of mines in Ghana and its effect on residents in nearby communities. Large-scale mines are largely concentrated in the country’s “Golden Triangle,” a gold-rich area in southwest Ghana that has seen increased conflict, displacement, and poverty due to the expansion of large-scale mines, a key part of development policy in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Testing the relationship between the independent variable of a resident’s distance to the nearest large-scale mine and the dependent variables of their household 1) wellbeing and 2) attitudes towards government, as measured through a robust set of survey responses, this analysis is designed to assess the role of large-scale mining in the everyday lives and political perspectives of rural Ghanaians. Undertaken with an interdisciplinary approach, this research question possesses relevance to greater development scholarship, as large-scale mining aptly represents the logics behind the last several decades of structural adjustment and its successors. The data analysis finds no statistically-significant relationship between household wellbeing and distance to the nearest mine, with little evidence of any effect. However, in testing the relationship between household attitudes towards government and distance to the nearest mine, there is a significant relationship found that poses further questions. The influence of control variables is also discussed.Item Open Access Globalization and the Political Economy of Educational Inequality(2015) Gift, Thomas CI claim that globalization increases demands for education the most in less productive economies by fueling competition that both expands skill-intensive employment opportunities at an accelerated rate and funnels in relatively skilled jobs from overseas through offshoring. These dynamics most incentivize low-income citizens to vote and lobby for education because the poor—who face limited resources and exigent present needs—only prioritize schooling over short-term government provisions when they perceive education as a gateway for improving children's long-run earnings. I test my theory with multiple analyses: 1) a large-N, cross-country procedure that shows that globalization reduces educational inequality the most in less productive economies; 2) a micro-level study of approximately 100,000 parents demonstrating that demands for education among the poor are greatest in open, less productive economies; 3) an investigation of diachronic shocks to globalization exposure in Costa Rica and Zambia that heightened demand for education among low-income residents; and 4) in-depth, qualitative case studies that link exposure to globalization to pro-poor schooling in Ireland and Vietnam.
Item Open Access IDENTITIES, PROXIMITY, AND MOBILIZATION IN INDIAN SLUM NEIGHBORHOODS(2019) Spater, JeremyUrbanization in the global south has made the relationship between ethnic proximity and politics increasingly important. The literature mainly studies either the social or the political effects of proximity, without distinguishing between them or exploring their relationship to one another. I reconcile the two sides of this literature by developing a theory about the relationship between the social and the political consequences of ethnic proximity. To measure heterogeneity and proximity in dynamic and data-poor urban environments, I develop novel measurements of individual outgroup exposure and neighborhood-level segregation. To test my theory, I apply the exposure metric to original data from slums in three Indian cities, and find support for my claim that proximity has distinct effects on social and political relations between groups. I then explore the relationship between neighborhood-level collective action and social mobility. I find that collective political mobilization has a substantial impact on lived outcomes, through the mechanism of services.
Item Open Access 'It is So Ordered'? The Judicial Enforcement of Land Restitution Rulings and the Politics of Compliance in Colombia (2011-2021)(2022) Montoya, Ana MaríaThis dissertation explains how land courts enforce their rulings in Colombia’s ongoing land restitution program, and, in turn, why politicians and bureaucrats comply with these judicial decisions protecting property rights, while others do not. Our current understanding of enforcement is mostly derived from analyses focused on the political actors involved and the electoral incentives following a rational choice approach. Instead, the argument developed here proposes that to explain variation in compliance with judicial decisions, it is necessary to jointly examine the interaction between different levels of state capacity and the political will to comply with those decisions.
Based on this interaction, I propose a typology of patterns of compliance. On one hand, two ideal types, full and noncompliance, are observed when politicians are either committed to comply with those decisions in municipalities with higher state capacity where infrastructural conditions, as other presence of state institutions, allowed to fully comply with rulings protecting property rights; whereas noncompliance occurs when low state capacity conditions become the perfect excuse for those politicians who do not have any willingness to comply. On the other hand, they differ from patterns of partial compliance where external constraints condition the relative strength either of the levels of state capacity or the political will of elected officials. I expect that under high state capacity, low compliance will occur when politicians without political will, will lack the incentives to fully comply and will partly comply with judicial decisions as they are pressured by societal groups, namely, groups in favor of the victims. Finally, medium compliance will result when politicians, with political will, face constraints under low state capacity contexts that impede the full compliance with judicial decisions in favor of victims’ property rights.
In the first part, I further developed the mechanisms that explain the relevance of the interaction between state capacity and political will to explain both enforcement and compliance with judicial decisions. Chapter 1 offers an alternative conceptualization and measure of state capacity by bringing a neglected dimension of it: the legal capacity. I argued that the role of legal capacity, -observed as the presence of judges, attorneys, inspectors, watchdog agencies-, is a crucial constrain to politicians’ noncompliance. Chapter 2 instead puts politics front and center. Using a regression discontinuity design in close mayoral elections, the chapter causally identifies the role of political will in the implementation of the land restitution rulings.
After testing the empirical implications of the macro-level theory of compliance, the second part of the dissertation focuses on how land restitution judges achieve compliance with their rulings. Leveraging the institutional innovation by which land restitution courts preserve the competence over their rulings, I explain the effect of the oversight mechanisms on the compliance with these decisions. By exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges, I find that a ruling is more likely to be comply with if the case was assigned to a judge who is more active in taking post-rulings actions to ensure enforcement.
The final chapter assesses this gap between the legal definition of property rights and their actual enforcement on the ground at the household level. By using a conjoint experiment embedded in a rural household survey, I find strong support for the strength of prior property rights before the dispossession, and to lesser extent, the individual’s expectation of enforcement matter when deciding to bring a case.
To empirical evaluate this enforcement gap, I wield a broad variety of empirical tools, including computational methods to build original datasets, experimental and quasi-experimental research designs, original surveys, extensive fieldwork, and a close collaboration with state agencies over compliance outcomes.
Item Open Access Protecting Capital: Economic Elites, Asset Portfolio Diversification, and the Politics of Distribution(2018) Paniagua, VictoriaThis dissertation explores why, how, and to what extent economic elites influence distributive outcomes. In answering these questions, it challenges standard political economy approaches built on the assumption that economic elites' interests can be traced to a single sector or asset.
Building on the literatures on business and financial economics, the history of elites, and the latest contributions to the political economy literature, it proposes that the structure of economic elites' asset portfolio is crucial to explain their role in shaping distribution. This work thus develops a theory that explains how asset portfolio diversification shapes economic elites' preferred policies to protect their capital, how such preferences shape the political strategies they use to advance their interests and, ultimately their capacity to influence distributive outcomes.
In the first part, it shows that diversified members of the economic elite tend to pursue policies that have a multiplier effect on the overall economy, whereas specialized elites prioritize policies that narrowly target their sector alone. Furthermore, to achieve their preferred policy outcome, the former type is likely to embed in the state structure by directly participating in the state administration and electoral politics, and the latter is more prone to lobby in favor of their interests from the outside, relying on sectoral business associations.
In the second part, it demonstrates that diversification was a risk hedging strategy pursued by landed elites that faced a high risk of expropriation during the transition from a traditional to a modern economy. Where this process of early diversification took place, rates of development where higher both in the short and the long run. Furthermore, areas where landed elites remained specialized became economic laggards.
The evidence to sustain these claims comes from a combination of historical narratives from Argentina and Chile and the use of multiple statistical techniques drawing on original individual- and subnational-level data from previously untapped historical archives that altogether spans between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries.
Item Open Access Risks and Rewards: Three Essays on Political Economy of Indian Democracy During Crises(2022) Downs-Tepper, HarlanThis dissertation investigates how politically-expedient decisions and resource constraints create winners and losers on the path toward development, focusing on slum evictions, public recordkeeping, and public health crisis response. This manuscript extends findings from prior scholarship on the politics and consequences of redistribution to understand decision-making in the context of urban informality and Covid-19 crisis response in India. I combine survey data with webscraping and remote sensing techniques to study why some urban slums were evicted while others were left intact; which areas experienced underreporting of Covid-19 mortality; and where government directed limited Covid-19 vaccine stocks. I find evidence that greater local economic activity was associated with evictions, that Covid-19 mortality counts were lower in areas aligned with the ruling coalition, and that Covid-19 vaccination supplies were strategically directed to areas of electoral importance to the ruling coalition. Taken together, these findings show that, even during crises, electoral incentives shape policy.
Item Open Access The Geography of Accountability(2017) Schultz, Anna ElisabethHow does geographic location affect citizens' abilities to hold leaders responsible? This dissertation addresses this question in three papers in the context of sub-Saharan Africa. In the first, it investigates the relationship between traditional governance and vote buying. In the second, it investigates the role of distance to sub-national capitals in local governments' responsiveness to citizens' needs. In the third, it examines how voter responsiveness declines in distance from national capitals across sixteen african countries. What emerges is a geographically-nuanced representation of the impediments to government responsiveness.
Item Open Access The Justice Dilemma: International Criminal Accountability, Mass Atrocities, and Civil Conflict(2015) Krcmaric, DanielI argue that the justice cascade--the recent trend toward holding leaders accountable for massive human rights violations--produces both positive and negative effects by influencing the post-tenure fates of leaders. On the negative side, the justice cascade exacerbates conflict. By undermining the possibility of a safe exile for culpable leaders, the pursuit of international justice incentivizes such leaders to cling to power and gamble for resurrection during conflicts when they would otherwise flee abroad. On the positive side, the justice cascade deters atrocities. Precisely because leaders know that committing gross human rights violations will decrease their exit options if they need to flee abroad, international justice effectively increases the cost of atrocities. Taken together, these predictions form the justice dilemma: ex ante deterrence and ex post gambling for resurrection are two sides of the same coin.
To test my argument, I exploit remarkable variation over time in the threat international justice poses to leaders. Specifically, I examine the arrest of former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet in the United Kingdom in 1998--the first time a leader was arrested in a foreign state for international crimes--as the watershed moment in the push for international accountability for culpable leaders. Before 1998, leaders lived in an impunity era where the expected probability of international punishment for atrocities was virtually zero. Starting in 1998, the world shifted toward an accountability era in which a slew of culpable leaders have been arrested and transferred to international courts, causing other leaders to update their beliefs on the likelihood of facing international justice.
Three main empirical results provide compelling support for the theory. I show that the decision of leaders to flee into exile is conditional on their expectations of post-tenure international punishment. Whereas culpable leaders are no more or less likely to flee abroad than nonculpable leaders before 1998, culpable leaders are about six times less likely to go into exile than nonculpable leaders after 1998. Rather than flee abroad, culpable leaders now have incentives to fight until the bitter end. Indeed, while there is no evidence of a relationship between leader culpability and conflict duration before 1998, I demonstrate that civil conflicts last significantly longer when culpable leaders are in power during the post-1998 period. This dark side of justice, however, creates a benefit: deterrence. Since leaders want to keep the exile option open in the event they need it, leaders are about five times less likely to commit mass atrocities after 1998 than they were previously.
Item Open Access The Political Economy of Decline(2014) Barber IV, Benjamin ScholesDeclining industries are privileged at the expense of new innovative ones in some cities but not others. In order to understand why, I develop an argument about how politics aggregates the demand for industrial rents across space. Geographically concentrated industries produce electorates with homogenous preferences in favor of supporting established local firms. In electoral systems where politicians are beholden to voters in a narrow geographic constituency, politicians will support efforts to prop up these industries even as these measures stymie innovation. Conversely, in electoral systems where politicians are beholden to broad party interests, politicians will support nationally important and geographically dispersed industries. Concentrated industries, by contrast, are more likely to die a rapid death and leave public resources available for new pioneering firms. Thus, the intersection between electoral and political geography provides insight into the Schumpeterian creative destruction needed to transform a city into a post-industrial economy. I formalize my argument in two models: one analyzing the demand of subsidies over public goods by voters and another exploring the tradeoff between rent-seeking and innovation by firms. I test the resulting hypotheses through cross-country statistical regressions and two in-depth case studies. Using firm-level data across many countries I show that political geography conditions the provision of subsidies to declining firms, and that electorally important firms are less likely to innovate. Then, using original field data I investigate the causal impact of political institutions and economic geography on the provision of subsidies by utilizing exogenous shocks in Thailand and India.
Item Open Access Three Essays on the Dynamics of Conflict in Civil Wars(2019) Tellez, Juan FernandoCivil wars in the last three decades have produced staggering death tolls, unleashed huge waves of human migration through refugee flows, and generated incalculable human suffering. Understanding the dynamics of civil conflicts -- how they are fought, how they end, and their legacies on the societies that survive them -- is of critical importance, perhaps now more than ever. In this dissertation I explore three central dimensions of civil war dynamics, using the case study of the Colombian civil war as an empirical context with which to evaluate my theory-building. Chapter 2 analyzes how the electoral process shapes patterns of violence in countries experiencing conflict. I combine statistical models with fine-grained data on the timing of local elections and the prevalence of violence during three decades of Colombian history to show that insurgents respond to the electoral process and wield violence to achieve electoral goals. The results raise caution about the prospect of democratization as a palliative to conflict. Chapter 3 explores how attempts to mitigate conflict by promoting economic growth can backfire. I argue that in contexts where the state is weak, the expansion of land-intensive industries can incentivize land-grabbing and the displacement of civilians. I collect original data on the rapid expansion of the palm-oil industry in early 21st century Colombia to show that growth in this industry was associated with mass civilian displacement. The findings warn against intuition that economic growth necessarily reduces violence and instead suggests that actors can take advantage of ongoing conflict for private gain. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on the challenge of generating public support for conflict-termination in deeply divided societies. I conceptualize the broad points over which state and insurgent actors have to agree to reach settlement, and draw testable hypotheses for how different kinds of settlements will move public opinion. I use novel survey experiments fielded during the 2016 Colombian peace process to demonstrate that normative questions bearing on punishment deeply divided citizens. I derive implications for policymakers seeking to construct peace agreements with broad bases of public support.