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| 1 |
ID:
159543
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| Summary/Abstract |
Unrest in the Xinjiang region of China currently poses the most imminent threat to the internal security of China and to central government control over peripheral regions. Instability in Xinjiang, furthermore, has ramifications for the wider security environment in Central Asia as the conflict becomes linked with jihadist groups in other security hotspots, like Pakistan and Syria. However, our understanding of important potential factors affecting political instability in Xinjiang is limited by the lack of systematically collected event data of ethnic violence. In this article, we introduce the first effort to fill this gap in data collection, that is, the Ethnic Violence in China (EVC) Database: the Xinjiang Region. This is a geocoded database of yearly incidents of ethnic violence at the county level in Xinjiang from 1990 to 2005. Using the EVC database, we demonstrate some initial results modeling ethnic violence in Xinjiang. We find that ethnic violence is positively associated with interethnic inequality; resources such as oil and cotton, on the other hand, are unrelated to the likelihood of ethnic violence.
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| 2 |
ID:
186848
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| Summary/Abstract |
This study examines the discursive practice of mourning and commenting by netizens on the final social media post made by Dr Li Wenliang, regarding it as a form of political participation and competitive discursive politics enacted in cyberspace. Discourse theory is applied to conduct discourse analysis on 4000 comments. We identified two strategies that netizens used to establish an alternative space for discourse. The first involved hidden protests expressed through multi-semantic mourning, avoiding suppression by indirectly challenging official authorities. Second, through engagement with microblogs, netizens applied personalized narratives to form a collective memory and a counter-memory space that departed from the official normative narrative. Discursive activities enacted by netizens stimulated the political agenda of resilient adjustment on the part of the authorities, leading the government to accept and incorporate public demands into policies through strategic rectification. These findings help to better understand the significant power of disorganized connective action that is reliant on affective citizens and the further development of regime resilience on the part of the Chinese political system in response to digital activities.
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| 3 |
ID:
184058
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| Summary/Abstract |
Water charities and the UN development goals consider access to clean water and sanitation as transformative: improving personal dignity, quality of life and economic opportunities for individuals and the economic resilience of communities to climate stress. Can the provision of services also mitigate the conflict potential arising from climate change? If so, how broad must access be to become effective? We test how household access to improved water, sanitation, and electricity affects the probability of local conflict in nine drought-prone African countries. We use annual PRIO-GRID cells as the unit of analysis and model the probability of a grid-cell experiencing fatal armed conflict during local or proximate drought conditions. DHS data are used to calculate the percentage of households with access to specific services. We show that even relatively modest investments in reliable sanitation and water infrastructures enhance communities’ ability to avoid getting drawn into violent conflict in response to rainfall shocks.
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| 4 |
ID:
114495
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
National economies are embedded in complex networks such as trade, capital flows, and intergovernmental organizations (igos). These globalization forces impose differential impacts on national economies depending on a country's network positions. This article addresses the policy convergence-divergence debate by focusing on how networks at the international level affect domestic fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies. The author presents two hypotheses: first, similarity in network positions induces convergence in domestic economic policies as a result of peer competitive pressure. Second, proximity in network positions facilitates policy learning and emulation, which result in policy convergence. The empirical analysis applies a latent-space model for relational/dyadic data and indicates that position similarity in the network of exports induces convergence in fiscal and regulatory policies; position similarity in the network of transnational portfolio investments induces convergence in fiscal policies; and position proximity in igo networks is consistently associated with policy convergence in fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies.
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| 5 |
ID:
163273
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article studies how local religious institutions mediate the effect of interethnic inequality on local violence. Focusing on the case of Xinjiang, China, we argue that local religious institutions decrease violence caused by local grievances. They do so in two ways: first, they provide local public goods; second, they provide an “information bridge” between the local population and the government, allowing for nonviolent management of potential discontent. We evaluate our claims with a county-level database of incidents of ethnic violence in Xinjiang, China. We measure local interethnic inequalities using education indicators from census data and the strength of religious institutions using local mosque density. We find a conflict-dampening effect of religious institutions: a higher level of interethnic inequality is associated with increased ethnic violence only in areas with low and medium levels of mosque density. This article contributes to the literature of civil conflict, ethnic violence, and political and social unrest by revealing how local institutions mediate the effect of grievances on violence.
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| 6 |
ID:
099118
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2010.
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This paper studies policy changes in capital taxation by focusing on policy interdependence induced by network dynamics at the international level. The empirical findings indicate that the competition mechanism induced by network position similarity in the network of portfolio investment and that of exports causes policy diffusion in corporate taxation; the socialization mechanism (policy learning and emulation) induced by network position proximity in the IGO networks also drives policy changes, and the evidence is much stronger in the IGO networks that facilitate policy learning than in those that facilitate emulation. The paper also discusses explicitly empirical challenges to incorporate network characteristics into connectivity matrices in spatial lag models often used to study policy diffusion. It suggests that students of policy diffusion should discuss as explicitly as possible the assumptions and procedures to construct connectivity matrices and present results from alternative specifications: our conclusion on the strength of policy diffusion is often sensitive to the choice of connectivity matrices.
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| 7 |
ID:
092343
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
We studied three potential causal mechanisms through which network dynamics of intergovernmental organizations (IGO) might cause convergence in domestic economic policies. First, IGO networks facilitate policy learning by providing relevant information. Second, they encourage policy emulation by creating a sense of affinity among countries that are closely connected by IGO networks. Finally, some powerful IGOs ''coerce'' their member states to adopt certain policies. We used causal modeling to test the relationships between different types of IGOs (and the causal mechanisms to which they mostly correspond) and policy convergence. The findings demonstrate the important roles played by salient IGOs such as the WTO, the EU, and the OECD, with each of them having a strong converging effect on their member states' domestic economic policies. More interestingly, we find that the cumulative effects of multiple layers of even the weakest types of IGOs have strong causal effects on states' domestic policies. Indeed, the shared memberships in IGOs with economic functions and with the minimal level of institutional capacity are not only statistically associated with, but also have converging causal effects on, countries' domestic policies. This supports the information-driven policy learning mechanism. The emulation mechanism in which IGO networks create a sense of affinity and therefore facilitate policy diffusion and convergence, on the other hand, is not supported by empirical analysis.
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| 8 |
ID:
078285
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The relationship between economic openness and welfare policies has become increasingly important to policy makers. While scholars have tended to examine conditions under which budgets for social welfare programs ebb and flow along with countries' exposure to trade, they have overlooked how governments may compensate domestic labor by subsidizing their employers. To explicitly address the issue of instrument choice, we examine the relative salience of social welfare expenditures to industrial subsidies in a panel of 16 OECD countries from 1980 to 1995. Our results suggest that the relative budgetary salience of social welfare to industrial subsidies is influenced by the interplay between governmental partisan gravity and changes in imports. Unlike Right governments, Left governments tend to favor indirect compensation via industrial subsidies in the wake of negative, zero or moderate increases in imports. Faced with sharp increases in imports, Left governments switch their preferences to compensating workers via more direct and visible policies, namely social welfare
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| 9 |
ID:
178684
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United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 highlights the distinct needs of women in security and well-being. Few studies explore how peacekeeping affects women’s access to health and education. Yet, women’s access to public services such as health is a form of gender inequality in post-conflict countries leading to unbalanced distribution of resources. We argue that peacekeeping operations (PKOs) have both a direct and an important indirect impact on maternal health and women’s well-being. First, peacekeeping can have a direct effect by providing medical and training facilities. Second, peacekeeping has an indirect effect as improvement in the overall level of security facilitates women’s access to medical services and education. We evaluate our argument by combining evidence from different levels of analysis. First, we use a difference-in-difference analysis of 45 African countries with data between 1990 and 2013, comparing the changes in maternal mortality rates (MMR) for countries with and without PKOs. Second, we look at within-country variations across areas with and without UN peacekeeping deployment in three countries with integrative PKOs, combining geo-coded peacekeeping data with individual data on maternal health and education from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte D’Ivoire, and Liberia. We find strong empirical support for a positive relationship between peacekeeping presence and maternal health outcomes and access to services.
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| 10 |
ID:
086960
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines attitudinal differences and similarities among ethnic groups in conflict-affected societies. Conventional wisdom tells us that societies that have experienced violent struggles in which individuals of different ethnic groups have (been) mobilized against each other are likely to become polarized along ethnic lines. Indeed, both policy-makers and scholars often assume that such divisions are some of the main challenges that must be overcome to restore peace after war. We comparatively examine this conventional wisdom by mapping dimensions of social distance among 4,000 survey respondents in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the North Caucasus region of Russia. The surveys were carried out in December 2005. Using multidimensional scaling methods, we do not find patterns of clear attitudinal cleavages among members of different ethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nor do we find patterns of clear ethnic division in the North Caucasus, although our social distance matrices reveal a difference between Russians and ethnic minority groups.
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| 11 |
ID:
097722
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This research note examines whether trade competition abets regulatory races in the environmental area. To analyze trade competition, we develop a new measure, structural equivalence, which assesses competitive threats that a country faces from other countries whose firms export the same products to the same destination countries. Employing this new measure, we analyze air pollution intensity (sulfur dioxide or SO2) and water pollution intensity (biochemical oxygen demand or BOD) for a panel of 140 countries for the time period 1980-2003. We find that trade competition is a significant predictor of water pollution intensity among structurally equivalent countries. We then test separately whether trade competition abets upward and downward regulatory races. We find that in the case of water pollution, countries respond symmetrically to downward and upward races, that is, they follow their structurally equivalent competitor countries both when they ratchet down their regulations and when they ratchet up regulations. In the case of air pollution, however, countries are responsive to downward policy changes only in competitor countries.
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| 12 |
ID:
149940
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| Summary/Abstract |
We study wind development at the provincial level in China, modelling installed wind capacities as a function of both economics and politics. We assume that the top provincial officials desire to maximize their chances of promotion under the Chinese cadre evaluation system. We expect that those with the strongest incentives to perform in order to achieve promotion would work harder to comply with the central government’s policy agenda to promote renewable energy. Collecting and testing data on provincial leaders’ characteristics, we find that provinces governed by party secretaries who were approaching the age of 65 are associated with significantly higher level of wind installed capacities. This result supports the political tournaments theory of Chinese politics. We also find that better educated party secretaries are likely to be more supportive of renewable energy, implying that education acts to encourage provincial leaders to support the central government’s policy.
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| 13 |
ID:
139528
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| Summary/Abstract |
Selectorate theory proposes that authoritarian regimes supply fewer public goods than democracies. Smaller winning coalitions make it less costly for autocracies to maintain support among critical groups by providing private goods. Democracies, with large winning coalitions, find it cheaper to provide public goods. In contrast, we argue for a conditional effect of winning coalition size on public good provisions: Many public goods require considerable state capacity to plan, legislate, and implement. Moreover, leaders with short-term horizons are unlikely to invest in public goods that take considerable time to provide. Therefore, our modified selectorate theory suggests that governments will provide public goods if the size of the winning coalition is large enough, state capacity is great enough, and a priori regime durability is long enough. We test our theory on air pollution. While selectorate theory receives little empirical support, our findings cohere with modified selectorate theory. In particular, core democracies—defined as those with large winning coalitions, considerable state capacity, and high regime stability—perform better than autocracies in controlling air pollution.
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