Politics by Other Means
Charles Kurzman & Ijlal Naqvi
Journal of Democracy, April 2010, Pages 50-63
Abstract:
Islamic parties have won parliamentary elections in several countries in recent years, leading some observers to speculate that Muslims vote Islamic whenever they are given the chance. However, a review of every parliamentary election in Muslim societies over the past 40 years shows that Islamic parties often compete and rarely win-and the freer the election, the worse these parties perform. In addition, an unprecedented collection of Islamic party platforms shows that Islamic parties have transformed since the 1980s, publicly endorsing democracy and women's rights and de-emphasizing shari'a and jihad. This record suggests that Islamic parties have embraced elections more than engulfing them.
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Lisa Blaydes & Drew Linzer
Stanford Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
The battle for public opinion in the Islamic world has been described as a new front for the U.S. in its war on terror. The current debate over why many Muslims hold anti-American views centers around whether individuals dislike "who Americans are" with respect to fundamental aspects of culture and government, or "what Americans do" policy-wise in international affairs. This paper proposes, instead, that Muslim anti-Americanism is predominantly a domestic, elite-led phenomenon that intensifies when there is greater competition between Islamist and secular-nationalist political factions within a given country. While more observant Muslims tend to be more anti-American, paradoxically the most anti-American countries are those with Muslim populations that are less religious and thus more divided on the religious-secular issue dimension. We test our hypothesis using a multilevel statistical model applied to the opinions of over 12,000 Muslim respondents in 21 countries collected in 2007 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.
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Commercial Imperialism? Political Influence and Trade During the Cold War
Daniel Berger, William Easterly, Nathan Nunn & Shanker Satyanath
NYU Working Paper, February 2010
Abstract:
We exploit the recent declassification of CIA documents and examine whether there is evidence of US power and influence being used to influence countries' decisions regarding trade and trade policy. To measure US influence we use a newly constructed annual panel of CIA interventions aimed at installing and supporting leaders during the Cold War. Our presumption is that the US had greater control over foreign leaders that were installed and backed by the CIA. We show that US interventions were followed by an increased flow of US goods into the intervened country. There was no similar increase in the shipment of goods from intervened countries to the US. We find that the increase in imports only occurred in autocratic regimes, where, because leaders are less accountable to their citizens, we expect US influence to have been the most effective. Testing for alternative explanations, we find that the increase in US imports did not arise from a decrease in trading costs with the intervened country. The increase in imports was in industries in which the US had a comparative disadvantage. We also test whether the increase in US imports arose because of the political ideology of the newly installed regime, or from an increase in the supply of grants and loans by the US. We show that these alternative explanations do not account for the surge in US imports. Examining specific mechanisms, we provide evidence that government purchases of US products play a central role.
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Mohsen Mehrara, Majid Maki & Hossein Tavakolian
OPEC Energy Review, March 2010, Pages 1-14
Abstract:
In this paper, we study the non-linear relationship between oil revenues and real output growth of the Iranian economy during 1959-2007 using a threshold error correction model. The estimation results show that the response of economic growth to oil revenue growth in low regimes of oil revenues is greater than in high regimes of oil revenues. The threshold of oil revenues in Iran is about 37 per cent, in a way that increasing the oil revenues over this threshold results in aborting its positive impact on the gross domestic product and its significant effect. In addition, the impact of capital stock on economic growth in low oil revenues is also much more than that in high oil revenues. These results confirm the resource curse, higher rent-seeking activities and lower productivity hypothesis, especially during boom periods for oil revenues.
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Max Hantke & Mark Spoerer
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Weimar's politicians used to attribute the continuous budget crises after the currency stabilization of 1923-4 to the burden put on the German economy by the Treaty of Versailles, in particular the reparation payments. This argument, which is still popular, neglects the fact that the restriction of the German military to 115,000 men relieved the German central budget considerably. In a counterfactual analysis we assess the savings in additional military costs and compare them to the reparation payments. Depending on the character of the foreign policy pursued by an unrestricted Germany, we find that the net effect of the Treaty's stipulations on the German central budgets was either much lower than hitherto thought or even positive. This finding gives support to the argument that Germany suffered from home-made political failure even in the relatively stable period from 1924 to 1929.
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Arch Puddington
Journal of Democracy, April 2010, Pages 136-150
Abstract:
In a year of intensified repression against human-rights defenders and democratic activists by many of the world's most powerful authoritarian regimes, Freedom House found a continued erosion of freedom worldwide, with setbacks in Latin America, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. For the fourth consecutive year, declines trumped gains, creating the longest continuous period of deterioration in the nearly forty-year history of Freedom in the World, Freedom House's annual assessment of the state of political rights and civil liberties in every country in the world.
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Small investment and large returns: Terrorism, media and the economy
Rafi Melnick & Rafi Eldor
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The study investigates the role of the media in the impact of terrorism on the economy. A unique data set of the newspaper articles that reported terrorist attacks during 2002 is used to evaluate their impact on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. An econometric analysis is performed in order to understand how a newspaper decides to cover a terrorist attack, i.e. the number of articles, positioning of articles, whether to include photos and the size of headlines. It was found that media coverage is an important channel through which terrorism produces economic damage. The findings also showed that the economic damage caused by terrorist attacks increases monotonically with the amount of media coverage. It was also found that the economic impact of the media coverage diminishes over time.
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Territorial expansion and primary state formation
Charles Spencer
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 20 April 2010, Pages 7119-7126
Abstract:
A major research problem in anthropology is the origin of the state and its bureaucratic form of governance. Of particular importance for evaluating theories of state origins are cases of primary state formation, whereby a first-generation state evolves without contact with any preexisting states. A general model of this process, the territorial-expansion model, is presented and assessed with archaeological data from six areas where primary states emerged in antiquity: Mesoamerica, Peru, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China. In each case, the evidence shows a close correspondence in time between the first appearance of state institutions and the earliest expansion of the state's political-economic control to regions lying more than a day's round-trip from the capital. Although additional research will add detail and clarity to the empirical record, the results to date are consistent with the territorial-expansion model, which argues that the success of such long-distance expansion not only demanded the bureaucratization of central authority but also helped provide the resources necessary to underwrite this administrative transformation.
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D-Minus Elections: The Politics and Norms of International Election Observation
Judith Kelley
International Organization, October 2009, Pages 765-787
Abstract:
As international election monitors have grown active worldwide, their announcements have gained influence. Sometimes, however, they endorse highly flawed elections. Because their leverage rests largely on their credibility, this is puzzling. Understanding the behavior of election monitors is important because they help the international community to evaluate the legitimacy of governments and because their assessments inform the data used by scholars to study democracy. Furthermore, election monitors are also particularly instructive to study because the variety of both intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations that observe elections makes it possible to compare them across many countries and political contexts. This study uses a new dataset of 591 international election-monitoring missions. It shows that despite their official mandate to focus on election norms, monitors do not only consider the elections' quality; their assessments also reflect the interests of their member states or donors as well as other tangential organizational norms. Thus, even when accounting as best as possible for the nature and level of irregularities in an election, monitors' concerns about democracy promotion, violent instability, and organizational politics and preferences are associated with election endorsement. The study also reveals differences in the behavior of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations and explains why neither can pursue their core objectives single-mindedly.
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Legal Systems and Peaceful Attempts to Resolve Territorial Disputes
Emilia Justyna Powell & Krista Wiegand
Conflict Management and Peace Science, April 2010, Pages 129-151
Abstract:
This paper focuses on how domestic legal systems influence states' choices of peaceful dispute resolution methods. In order to increase familiarity with rules of peaceful resolution of disputes, states use their domestic legal systems to provide them with clues about the most trustworthy ways to settle disputes. States tend to choose methods of dispute resolution that are similar to those embedded in their domestic legal systems. Empirical analyses support the conjecture of a linkage between domestic law and interstate conflict management methods, showing that civil law dyads prefer more legalized dispute resolution methods compared to common law dyads. Islamic law dyads are most likely to use nonbinding third party methods, while common law dyads tend to resolve their territorial disputes through bilateral negotiations.