Cost of Capitals
Is Secessionism Mostly About Income or Identity? A Global Analysis of 3,153 Subnational Regions
Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuño Ortín & Ömer Özak
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper analyses whether the propensity to secede by subnational regions responds mostly to differences in income per capita or to distinct ethnolinguistic identities. We explore this question in a quantitative political economy model where people’s willingness to finance a public good depends on their income and identity. Using high-resolution economic and linguistic data for the entire globe, we predict the propensity to secede of 3,153 subnational regions in 177 countries. We validate the model-based predictions with data on secessionist movements, state fragility, regional autonomy, and conflict, as well as with an application to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Counterfactual analysis shows that removing ethnolinguistic identity differences reduces the average support for secession from 10.1% to 0.2% of the population, while removing income differences has no major quantitative impact. Although both forces affect secessionism, identity trumps income in determining a region’s propensity to secede.
Trapped Between Anger and Apathy: On the Problem of Instability in Confucian Meritocracy
Baldwin Wong
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recently, several political theorists have claimed that Confucian meritocracy offers a desirable alternative to democracy. This article argues that Confucian meritocracy is implausible because of its instability. Confucian meritocracy assumes an objective standard for good governance that enables the government to distinguish elites, who are more capable of achieving good governance, from ordinary people. However, in modern societies, there are hardly any objective standards of good governance that are commonly accepted among people in a society. Thus, Confucian meritocratic government more or less assumes a biased standard for the selection of elites, creating a sense of estrangement among ordinary people. People feel distanced from the ruling direction of the government, but they are unlikely to change it. Eventually, they fall into a cycle of apathy and anger, either becoming politically disinterested or aggressively expressing their resentment. In short, Confucian meritocracy veers between collective cynicism and violent protests.
Anarchy and Empire: World-Conquerors and International Systems
Andrew Phillips & Jason Sharman
International Studies Quarterly, December 2024
Abstract:
Why are some international systems characterized by stable multipolarity while elsewhere conquest produces universal empires? We explain this variation through contrasting the conventional story of the consolidation of multipolar anarchy in Europe against the Ottoman conquest of the Near East and the Manchu conquest of greater China. Both the Ottomans and the Manchus developed the capacity for systemic conquest via hybridizing steppe and sedentary military techniques. Furthermore, both surmounted the legitimation gradient of conquest. The Ottomans and Manchus used cultural statecraft to prevent balancing coalitions and encourage bandwagoning and collaboration. Cultural statecraft comprised strategies of co-opting preexisting symbols of imperial rule and employing multivocal legitimacy strategies to sequentially appeal to multiple segmented audiences. In Europe, both military obstacles and religious confessional ideational divisions frustrated would-be conquerors. Multipolar anarchy is thus a contingent outcome in international politics rather than a constant, which can be extinguished by militarily powerful and culturally agile “world conquerors.”
Warfare, Fiscal Gridlock, and State Formation during Europe’s Military Revolution
Mark Dincecco, Gary Cox & Massimiliano Onorato
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We introduce a political scope condition for the classic argument that war motivates expansions in the state’s fiscal capacity. All major medieval European monarchies separated the power to tax from the power to spend. We argue that this fiscal separation of powers engendered gridlock, which became increasingly intolerable after 1500 due to the military revolution and the greater role of money in battlefield victory. European states thus reformed toward one of two stable equilibria -- fiscal absolutism or parliamentarism. Elsewhere in Eurasia, states were already fiscally absolutist, and thus war pressures did not provoke similar reform efforts. Exploiting new panel data on 101 European territorial units, we document how external war pressures promoted reforms in a majority of units toward fiscal absolutism (which took a distinctive decentralized form), with a minority of units adopting fiscal parliamentarism (either centralized or decentralized), and peripheral units retaining fiscal separations of power (and hence gridlock).
Xs we share: Context similarity, culture, and the diffusion of populism
Nina Wiesehomeier, Nils Düpont & Saskia Ruth-Lovell
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do populist ideas travel across borders? Anecdotal evidence suggests as much, yet so far we lack a systematic assessment of whether diffusion takes place, and if so under which conditions. We argue that context similarity enables the diffusion of populism among parties as it eases the adaption of populist framing of perceived grievances into the local context. Using a dyadic approach, we analyze diffusion effects among 923 parties in 67 countries from 1970 to 2018. We find that similar levels of political and economic exclusion foster learning from and emulating other parties abroad. We also uncover conditional effects for learning from other parties facing similar levels of income inequality or public sector corruption that hinge on a cultural prescreening. Combined, our results have important implications for a better understanding of diffusion processes in general and the spread of populist ideas around the globe in particular.
Political Life Cycles
Justin Melnick, Alastair Smith & Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop and test a formal model of leader political life cycle effects within a selectorate framework. The model leads to novel hypotheses about the provision of public goods, private goods, and freedoms over a leader’s tenure in power. The analyses show, as hypothesized, that the total provision of benefits, as well as the provision of public goods and freedoms decrease significantly the longer a leader is in power while the proportion of rewards in the form of private goods (such as corruption opportunities) increases.
Nationalist Erosion after Protest and Repression
Scott Desposato, Cal Zurich & Jason Wu
Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 2024, Pages 886-908
Abstract:
The leaders of authoritarian regimes often invoke nationalist themes to garner support from their populations. However, negative experiences with the regime may effectively inoculate individuals against nationalist campaigns, reducing the ability of the regime to sway public opinion. In this paper, we study the long-term effects of mobilization and repression on nationalist attitudes. We exploit a discontinuity in exposure to a student movement, by comparing alumni who were in college and on campus during the movement with alumni who only enrolled after the movement was suppressed. We find that alumni who were in college during the movement are substantially less nationalistic than those who enrolled shortly thereafter. Our findings are consistent across a range of specifications and show that exposure to mass mobilization and state repression is associated with lower support for nationalism. These differences are observable more than twenty-five years later, despite sustained state censorship.