| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
158697
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Scholars and policymakers argue that donors can pursue development goals without bolstering autocratic regimes by bypassing recipient governments and channeling aid through intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations. However, I argue that bypass aid can subsidize government transfers to citizens and thus reduce popular resistance to autocrats. By providing goods and services that benefit individuals under the status quo, bypass aid may affect citizens’ willingness to challenge an incumbent regime. In particular, aid may lower the concessions that an autocrat needs to make to, on the one hand, deter unrest or, on the other hand, increase the opportunity costs of political resistance. As such, aid may have political effects regardless of whether or not recipient governments have managerial control over aid. Statistical tests show that bypass aid is associated with less frequent domestic unrest in autocracies. To address potential endogeneity, I use an original data set that records instances in which governments are suspected of, or actually caught, misusing aid to proxy for the distribution of aid across channels.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
160532
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Uncertainty about resolve is a well-established rationalist explanation for war. In addition to estimating the resolve of immediate rivals, leaders choose their actions in a crisis based on expectations about how third parties will respond. We argue that leaders will become more likely to develop inconsistent estimates of rivals’ relative capabilities and resolve – and thus will become more likely to fight – when domestic political changes occur in states that are allied with an opponent. We also consider how the relationship between conflict in rivalries and third-party domestic change depends on domestic political institutions in the third party. We argue that this effect should only hold when a challenger does not also share an alliance with the third party, and that the effect should be strongest when the third party is a non-democratic state. We test our theory using a dataset of changes in leaders’ domestic supporting coalitions and data on militarized interstate disputes from 1920 to 2001. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that the likelihood of conflict increases in rivalries only when domestic coalition changes occur in states that share an alliance with only one member of a rivalry, and that this effect is strongest and most consistent for non-democratic third parties.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|