Browsing by Subject "Protest"
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Item Open Access Citizens in Fear: Political Participation and Voting Behavior in the Midst of Violence(2014) Ley Gutierrez, Sandra JessicaHow does violence affect political participation and voting behavior? Why does a violent context push some to be politically active, while others decide to stay at home? Our current understanding of political behavior is mostly derived from analyses conducted in a peaceful and democratic context, or in post-conflict periods. However, citizens in many developing countries make their political decisions in the midst of violence.
The dissertation's central argument is that political participation and voting behavior largely depend on the context surrounding the individual. In particular, the level of criminal violence greatly impacts 1) citizens' decision to participate politically, 2) their forms of participation, and 3) the logic of their vote choice. Faced with violence, voters are generally pushed away from electoral politics. I argue that those that do decide to take part of the electoral process will consider their evaluations of security when deciding to punish or reward the incumbent government. While some may be inclined to take further action and demand peace through non-electoral participation, such a decision carries certain risks that are not easily overcome. I contend that social networks can encourage participation by shaping the understanding of crime, as well as the perception of costs and benefits associated with participation amid violence.
To evaluate this argument, I draw on a rich array of sources. I designed an original post-electoral survey that took place in Mexico a few days after the 2012 presidential election. I also created a novel newspaper databank of protests against crime in Mexico during the 2006-2012 period. In addition, together with Guillermo Trejo, I developed a unique dataset on criminal violence in Mexico. My statistical evidence is complemented with participant observation in marches for peace and qualitative in-depth interviews with victims and non-victims of crime in four Mexican cities.
Statistical evidence shows that violent criminal activity depresses electoral turnout. Voters living in violent contexts are less likely to participate in elections. Victims of crime are significantly less likely to participate in elections. However, faced with rising violence, active voters are able to consider both economic and insecurity evaluations in their assessments of government performance and voting decisions. Overall, as a voter's evaluation of national security worsens, her likelihood of supporting the incumbent national party and government diminishes. At the same time, while institutional channels are not attractive to victims of crime, societal accountability mechanisms are also available to citizens affected by insecurity. Victims of crime and those connected to mobilizing networks are more likely to participate in protests against insecurity than non-victims and "socially disconnected" individuals.
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 Open Access Elections, Information, and Political Survival in Autocracies(2012) Rozenas, ArturasChapter 1: Forcing Consent: Information and Power in Non-Democratic Elections. Why do governments hold elections that lack credibility? What explains variation in repression levels across non-democratic elections? While the literature has suggested many explanations for elections in autocracies, it has not yet provided a theory that would explain both the incidence of non-democratic elections and the variation in their degree of competitiveness. In this paper, we build an informational model of non-democratic elections explaining when elections may stabilize an autocrat's rule and when they may fail to do so. We argue that to achieve stability, elections must yield a sufficiently high vote-share for the incumbent and be optimally repressive. The degree of optimal repression is shown to increase with the incumbent's expected popularity. The model is then applied to explain some stylized facts about non-democratic elections and to derive a set of novel research hypotheses about the effects of non-democratic elections, variation in electoral repression, and fraud technology. We test the chief implication of the model using an original dataset on political arrests in the Soviet Union. We find that even if elections present no choice, they reduce the expression of anti-government sentiments.
Chapter 2: A Ballot Under the Sword: Political Security and the Quality of Elections in Autocracies. What explains the democratic quality of elections outside established democracies? We argue that when a government does not have to convince the opposition of its wide support in the society, it holds repressive elections. Conversely, when a government needs to send a strong signal about its popularity, it takes a riskier strategy of holding more competitive, and hence more informative elections. Using cross-national panel data, we find that the incumbents facing political insecurity -- measured through the incidence of economic crises and coup threats -- tend to hold higher quality elections than their more secure counterparts. In addition, via structural equation modeling, we find evidence that economic crises affect the quality of elections only indirectly through increased political insecurity. These findings reject the conventional view that autocrats use electoral repression when they are afraid of losing due to low expected support. This analysis has important implications for modernization theory and for understanding the role of political and economic instability in the democratization process.
Chapter 3: The Calculus of Dissent: Rigged Elections, Information, and Post-Election Stability. Why do some elections result in concession speeches while others spiral into protests, riots, and conflicts? This paper draws attention to the informational content of the electoral process and its outcome. We argue that elections induce stability when they communicate that the winners are truly popular and derive several novel predictions as to when such communication can succeed or fail. First, unfair elections lead to instability only if they are won by slim margins. Second, excessively large victory margins increase instability \emph{irrespective} of the unfairness of elections. The theory is then applied to explain the incidence of post-election protests across the world and the patterns of mandate denial in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that structural conditions (e.g., poverty and ethnic diversity) contribute little to post-election instability. Instead, the quality of elections and their results affect post-election politics in an interactive and non-linear fashion as predicted by the model.
Chapter 4: An Experimental Study of Fraudulent Elections and the Post-Election Protests. How can a winner of elections marred by fraud and voter intimidation convince the loser that he has large support in the society? Using an experimental setting, this paper studies how the information about election results and the competitiveness of the electoral process affect citizens' beliefs about the true popularity of the government and, subsequently, the success of a protest. We theoretically derive and evaluate the following hypotheses: (1) There will be no information update if elections are sufficiently manipulative and are won with great margins; (2) There will be positive updating in elections with medium levels of manipulation and high vote margin for the government; (3) There will be negative information updating if elections are highly manipulative but do not yield high margin for the government. We find relatively strong support for the first two hypotheses but none for the last one. The study also points to difficulties in studying rigged elections experimentally. The first difficulty has to do with the heterogeneity of the experimental population and the second one with the operationalization of electoral manipulation in a laboratory environment.
Item Open Access Guns and Roses: A Study of Violent and Nonviolent Resistance Movements(2017) Lee, Sophie JiseonMy research is driven by two questions: Why do some dissident groups choose nonviolence over violence while others prefer violence over nonviolence? Why do political movements, even those using the same tactics, unfold and evolve divergently? To answer the first question, I argue that nonviolent dissidents are dependent on human resources and violent dissidents are dependent on physical resources. Further, either strategy could be more costly, depending on the strategic environment in which the resistance movement takes place. For the second question, I contend that the opposition which poses a level of threat greater than the cost of policy change gains concession in a prolonged movement. Oppositions that are unable to sustain their activities do not constitute a credible threat and therefore are defeated rather swiftly. Finally, every process requires time and therefore a movement's duration should explain the outcome of significant progress. By analyzing 250 political movements of various types around the world, I provide empirical evidence to support my theory. To complement the large-N empirical analysis, an in-depth analysis of two movements (one violent and one nonviolent) in India is provided.
Item Open Access The Street Must Be Defended: Towards a Theory of Assembly on Hong Kong’s Avenida de la Revolución(2020) Tran, Andrew ChiFrom North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, the social movements of the past decade have, without being in explicit dialogue with one another, resembled the same march into the public street. Despite the breadth of the cultural, political, and topographical variations in the spaces and places that these movements cover, even in a city like Hong Kong, where the development of urban space has taken a trajectory and assumed a quality of unique status, protest seems to march to the beat of the same drum in Hong Kong’s tropical, urban financial center as it does in St. Louis’ suburban neighborhoods. Why, despite the obvious differences from city-to- city and street-to-street, does protest seem to look the same across societies, cultures, and regimes?
This paper explores the theoretical matrix by which discourses of the street have emerged alongside the imperialisms of the nineteenth century to take inventory of the ways in which the street speaks and is spoken about in the city, in politics, in poetry and literature. While these discourses illuminate the coordinates and mediations in the implicit conception of the street, they only complement the very real emergence and mutations of urban space in Hong Kong in the twentieth century driven by finance capital. I chart the contours of the history of the street in Hong Kong and the ways of capturing the assemblies that have always taken place on it in a step towards understanding how social movement and political assembly can be made effective in contemporary urban space.