Browsing by Subject "Revolution"
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Crafting an Egyptian Evangelicalism: Revolution, Revival, and Reform(2020) Dowell, Anna JeannineThis dissertation research explores the practices and aspirations to national belonging among Evangelical Egyptians, converts to a distinctively Euro-American form of Protestant Christianity through the proselytizing efforts of European and American missionaries between the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although Evangelical Egyptians have historically been known as politically quietist, in the wake of the January 25 Revolution, leading Evangelicals began to adjust their practices of public engagement with the revolution, civil society, and political activism. Through participant observation, in-depth person centered interviews, and archival research, this dissertation argues that far from severing Evangelical Egyptian imaginations, desires for, and practices of national belonging, conversion from the historic Coptic Orthodox church and to a more internationally connected form of Christian community, in fact provides Evangelicals with some of their most potent tools for articulating their historical and contemporary place in the nation-state of Egypt. This dissertation aims to bring timely and productive debates on the anthropology of religion to bear on the shape of global evangelicalism in the global south as a key shape of politics and sociality. Indeed, this dissertation argues that it is precisely the ‘will to the global’ as the future imagined community of ‘God’s kingdom’ that paradoxically roots Evangelical Egyptians in a robust nationalistic articulation of their faith.
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 Making History or Celebrating Change? The Role of Twitter in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution(2012-08-30) Chartoff, HannahThe Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and the popular protest movement that led to its success represent a significant departure from recent Egyptian history. Plagued by an authoritarian government and weak civil society, the Egyptian population as a whole had little incentive to risk openly opposing the government and demanding change. This paper forwards a model of how such an unexpected revolution might occur, then demonstrates how social media outlets like Twitter can assist in drawing protesters to the streets. The paper then examines the flow of information posted to Twitter during the Egyptian revolution by tracing the number of times key protesters were “retweeted” over time. Though social media is shown to have the potential to facilitate revolution, the data from January and February 2011 in Egypt suggest that Twitter in this case served as an expression of protesters’ sentiments as the revolution occurred, rather than as a force motivating the revolution; that is, the 2011 Egyptian protesters used Twitter to celebrate and document their success, not to make history or plan protests.Item Open Access War, Revolution, and Chinese Protestant Intellectuals: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey(2022) Sun, ZexiIn keeping with the recent paradigm shift, this dissertation approaches the indigenization of Christianity in China from a different perspective. Rather than conceiving indigenization as the devolution of missionary power to indigenous leaders, the study focuses on the emergence of Chinese Protestant intellectuals and their ability to engage the public space—how they have historically engaged their religious tradition to address the broader public during crises. It does so by examining the lives and works of several Chinese Christian intellectuals as they negotiated with the most transformative events in twentieth-century Chinese history: modernizing reforms in the 1910s and 1920s, prolonged resistance against the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and 1940s, and ideological domestication after 1950. With transnational and indigenous resources, these people created a captivating vision of national salvation for their country.
The first three chapters of this work reconstruct the intellectual development among mainstream Chinese Protestants in Republican China by tracing the rise and unraveling of the liberal consensus that integrated three spheres of emphasis in Christianity to lead China in progress. Such endeavor offered an inspiring message of national salvation by individual moral improvement, social implementation of reformist ministries, and transcendence of national boundaries for world solidarity. However, starting in the 1930s, a group of Christian intellectuals’ continued exploration led to increasing ideological affinity to socialism and organizational closeness to the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, another group turned to conservative theology and began to advocate for a national as well as spiritual deliverance that could not be reduced to morality and social service.
The last three chapters document these Christian intellectuals’ response to an unprecedented challenge: a centralized and ideologically charged state. During the Civil War, the Christian socialists saw the Communist triumph as an eschatological victory of “light” over “darkness,” while the conservative group struggled to create Christianity’s continuing relevance in China. Despite their adaptability and courage in the early 1950s, the totalitarian regime soon engulfed public space, and these intellectuals found themselves marginalized through either bureaucratization or exile, thwarting their nation-saving longings. Failing to achieve the public intellectual mission haunted them in their last years. It also prompted many to return to the Christian faith as they tried to reorient themselves to China’s unfinished quest for modernization, which seemed yet to reveal its hidden directions.
Overall, English monographs on Chinese Protestant intellectuals are few. This dissertation aims to narrate a story of the intellectual odyssey of Chinese Protestantism in the twentieth century, from the birth of Republican China in 1911 through the height of ideological fanaticism in the Cultural Revolution. Using case studies, the dissertation shows that the evolving perspectives of these Christian intellectuals have never escaped the gravitational pull of the grand narrative of national salvation, for which they infused highly transnational influences into active public engagement. Eventually, despite seemingly within the seekers’ grasp, the vision of deliverance proved fleeting as it became co-opted by the power of the state, yet without failing to throw subsequent followers into new cycles of hope and violence propelled by the ever-present pressures for change.