Abstract:

Do economic sanctions destabilize thhe governments they target? A form of foreign pressure, sanctions are typically meant to alter the policies of other countries. There is much pessimism on whether they ever work. This paper shows that economic pressure works in at least one respect: it destabilizes the leaders it targets. I present a theoretical argument that explains why destabilization is a necessary condition for successful coercion. I find evidence that pressure destabilizes in a large panel of cross-country time-series data. The destabilization finding indicates that sanctions may be more ef- fective at altering policies than we think. I conclude by noting that greater optimism regarding the effectiveness of sanctions should be balanced by a careful consideration of the policy’s real and sizeable costs for those caught in the middle.

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Under review.

We conducted a series of survey experiments in the wake of the Lebanese Parliamentary elections in June 2009 to understand the reaction of voters to two different types of electoral interventions from the outside: a one-sided message of support for a particular  partisan slate vs a message of support for the democratic process.  This is the first paper to come out of that project.

Abstract:

What do voters think when outside powers become de facto participants in a coun- try’s election? We conceptualize two types of foreign intervention: a partisan stance, where the outsider roots for a particular candidate slate, and a process stance, where outsiders support the democratic process. We theorize that a partisan outside message will polarize partisan actors domestically on the issue of appropriate relations with the outsiders: partisans who are supported will want closer relations with the outside power, and partisans who are opposed will favor more distant relations. A process message, in contrast, will have a moderating effect on voters’ attitudes. We present evidence of partisan polarization along those lines from a survey experiment we con- ducted in Lebanon in the wake of the 2009 Parliamentary elections. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies of how outsiders can encourage moderate electoral outcomes in democratizing states.

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We thank ISPS at Yale University, the MacMillan Center at Yale and the University of Maryland for generous financial support.  We thank Information International in Beirut, Lebanon, and specifically Alicia Jammal for dedicated service to the project.

When foreign powers undertake actions to subvert a country’s democratic systems, some citizens are more likely to be alienated than others. Who stands to lose when democracy is subverted, and why? In this paper, we identify characteristics of the voters most likely to lose utility should democracy fail.  We present a theoretical argument to defend the voter profile we identify.  We use a survey we conducted in Lebanon to illustrate and support our argument.

Note: this project may be co-authored

Abstract

While some scholars have argued that Western aid has helped countries democra- tize, there are many who doubt that aid is good for anything. Much of the debate in the cross-national literature stems from the difficulty of identifying the true effects of foreign aid given its non-random allocation with respect to unobservable country-level characteristics. This paper considers the case of European Union (EU) aid, and pro- poses the use of the rotating Presidency of the European Council as an instrument to help identify the true effect of aid on democratization. EU members are assigned to the Presidency in a manner exogenous to the process of democratization in the devel- oping world: what counts for assignment is the position in the alphabet of the first letter of the country’s name. EU Presidencies enjoy significant agenda-setting power which gives them influence over aid allocations. Using characteristics of the presiding country as instruments to predict aid provides leverage over the problem of estimating the effect of assistance on democratization. The instrumented effect of foreign aid on democratization indicates that, at least for the case of the EU as an actor, foreign aid has been good for democracy.

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It is often argued that because human rights treaties and conventions entail no explicit enforcement mechanism, they do not lead to better human rights records among signatory states. While the ineffectiveness of treaties is widely accepted, a key as- sumption – that there are no international costs to committing to a treaty and then violating it – has gone untested. In this paper, we put this assumption to the test. We ask whether signing key international treaties, such as the convention against torture and the covenant on civil and political rights, reduces or increases the subsequent risk that a human rights violator will be subject to economic sanctions by the European Union or the United States. The results speak to the existence of an alternative mecha- nism for enforcing international commitments to weak international regimes, and have implications for the design of such treaties in the future.

Under review.

Abstract:

The logic of audience costs suggests that electoral accountability should increase the credibility of threats in international crisis bargaining. In empirical research, scholars equate electoral accountability with democracy. This overlooks the possibility that elections may pose a threat to incumbents even in non-democratic states, as they presumably do in electoral authoritarian states. We hypothesize that audience costs vary in accord with the competitiveness of elections, such that leaders in electoral authoritarian regimes are more constrained than autocratic leaders but less constrained than democratic leaders. We test our hypothesis using data on target reciprocation rates in militarized interstate disputes. Our analysis shows that militarized challenges from electoral authoritarian leaders are reciprocated much less frequently than chal-lenges from autocratic leaders. Thus, even where democracy is flawed, competitive elections help countries credibly signal their intentions and avoid crisis escalation.

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Under review.

Abstract:

In some authoritarian regimes, election outcomes are determined with certainty. In others, established autocrats allow limited electoral competition, and a non-trivial number of incumbents have been surprised by election results, including the defeat of their own parties. Existing research makes clear that democracy does not necessarily precede contested elections, nor does democracy inevitably follow the introduction of electoral competition. The increase in “hybrid regimes” has produced a growing body of research on the determinants of electoral competition and its consequences in political, economic, and military affairs. Given that opposition parties can sometimes overcome election fraud, violence, and otherwise autocratic political institutions in order to win biased elections, how can researchers determine, ex ante,  which elections can be lost? Which institutional  characteristics divide non-competitive elections from those in which an opposition upset is possible?  We argue that if opposition is allowed, multiple parties are permitted, and more than one candidate appears on the ballot, the minimal structural conditions for competition are present. We formalize this argument and introduce a new dataset that distinguishes elections that can be lost from those that cannot. We then outline the pitfalls of other methods used by scholars to define the potential for electoral competition, and show why such methods are likely to lead to biased findings regarding the causes and consequences of electoral competition.

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Abstract:

In this paper, we use new data on coup d’etats and elections to uncover a striking change in what happens after the coup. Whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1990 installed their leaders durably in power, between 1991 and 2001 the picture reverses, with the majority of coups leading to competitive elections in 5 years or less. We argue that with the end of the Cold War, outside pressure has produced a devel- opment we characterize as the “electoral norm” – a requirement that binds successful coup-entrepreneurs to hold reasonably prompt and competitive elections upon gaining power. Consistent with our explanation, we find that post-Cold War those countries that are most dependent on Western aid have been the first the embrace competitive elections after the coup. Our theory is also able to account for the pronounced decline in the non-constitutional seizure of executive power since the early 1990s. While the coup d’etat has been and still is the single most important factor leading to the down- fall of democratic government, our findings indicate that the new generation of coups have been considerably less nefarious for democracy than their historical predecessors.

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